Method / Geist nr. 11,12,14.

On the 10th of May 2007 an institution which in many aspects is similar to a governmental body, but still without a concrete and distinct shape, acquiring its tentative form by exposing itself to different complexes of problems, decided to put together a working group with the purpose of inquiring about the meaning and status of the method within artistic practices and in artistic research, a domain which is sometimes referred to as practice-based research. The inquiry has two main goals: to propose different ways of posing the question of method, and to investigate the possible forms of a methodological discussion within the domain of art from the following three aspects: field, method, practice. By submitting the question of method for consideration to a number of authorities, the group will gather data and perspectives which will serve as a basis for a report. It is in this matter that we now turn to you, asking you to comment on the following questions at issue:

*How do you relate to the artistic field as a field of knowledge production?
*What forms can a methodological discussion take within the field of art to be productive?
*What are the possibilities pertaining to methodology where practice rather than theoretical reflection is the point of departure? What kind of practices can stage, or be staged by, such a methodology?
*How is knowledge mediated?

The intention is to give the inquiry a broad approach; the question of method also incorporates questions concerning the position of artistic practice on the whole, i.e., it connects to socio-political questions about economy, institution, didactic strategies and more, and to questions concerning the specific materialities of artworks. Through artistic practice the question of method is also activated in relation to semiotic and hermeneutic dimensions of art as well as in relation to the context of art institutions and art discourses. The following pages outline some issues relevant to the project.

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Without letting etymology become too significant, it would still be possible to take the word method to mean something along the lines of a way that you take to discern the relation between that road and yourself.* A method is about orienting yourself in relation to one or several goals. It can involve a high degree of formalization in reaching a very specific goal, as well as a continuous reformulation of goals and approaches. From this perspective, method seems to involve points of orientation that goes back to the intentions, regularities and repetitions a practice puts into play. It can also be a possibility of a dynamic relationship where practice recurrently restructures its own conditions. In this sense it would indeed be meaningless to claim that a complete absence of method is possible in artistic practice.

Such a wide definition of method can be contrasted with a more modern understanding of the word: as a specific procedure and a specific set of rules that guarantee the reliability of the outcome of a research. Science is in this case exemplary, since it presupposes that its knowledge production can be possible only as a systematic application of a systematically constructed and well-defined method. In contrast, artistic practice has often been maintained by, and served as a more intuitive comprehension of the world, and subsequently the field of aesthetics has been understood as open and void of any rational criteria defining its truth. According to this understanding, art has had two main functions: on the one hand its transgression of the determinable has been thought of as a pollution of the rational gaze (e.g. when one talks about aestheticization within politics or science), on the other hand this same transgression has been understood as the establishment and enforcement of a domain of truth or, at least, of a privileged relation to it. In other words, the artistic field has either been defined as being occupied by practices, the implicit methods of which can establish a transcendence of truth, or it has been defined as a capacity to break down, soil and challenge the claim of transcendence in other domains. Whether these dialectics have ever had any significance outside the range of certain theoretical discourses is open to doubt, but it is clear that the definitions generated by the dialectics develop into important parts of a framework giving legitimacy and authority to the art institutions. However, to engage in such definitions is counterproductive to a methodological discussion within the artistic field, as it would imply choosing the ideality of a theoretical description rather than the expression of the artistic practice as a basis for the understanding of the artistic field. In that case, the methodological discussion would run the risk of becoming only a theorizing process with no real impact on artistic practices.

Alternatively, one can understand every possible signifying relation in terms of immanence and return to the scientific definition of method as a set of systematically interconnected rules. By meticulously concentrating on what is distinguished clearly, by collecting data and by putting the accuracy of different theoretical models to the test, science sets up ways dealing with experience that are to a high degree naturalistic. This method does not in any immediate manner elaborate on its own concepts and their relation to a transcendental field of truth, and it acts and works without further questioning the relation of the investigation to the investigated. In other words, the relation to the perception as well as to the concepts and the overall methodological model in which they are used, is kept constant and is not called into question. Rather, the method is taken for granted in that it falls back on certain logical rules and, in accordance with these, is understood as inherently coherent. Questions dealing with the production of knowledge and its dependence on perspective, language and context, put aside. Above all, this means that scientific statements are understood and brought into use as unambiguously separated and free from social, psychological and ontological domains and problems, something that in the end implies that the validity of a statement becomes equal to the degree of statistic correlation between concepts and phenomena. The empirical gaze is thus controlled by mathematics and logic, and its reports, which are usually presented as facts, become confused with the logical and mathematical rules of operation.

This would be the place to ask whether the framework of scientific method nonetheless recreates transcendence. To unravel that would however lead the discussion too far away from the questions at stake here, which would find themselves closer to their answers if one returns to the artistic practice and asks how a methodological discussion within the artistic field would appear with the scientific method as background. Approaching the question, it is necessary to direct the attention toward some obvious circumstances. First, one has to keep in mind that the methodology of artistic research is not, even initially, directed toward scientific method. When swiftly examining the artistic practices that are defined in terms of research and knowledge production, one notices that they are often closer related to the hermeneutical and critical methods of the humanities, than to the method of natural science. In the humanities it is usually the field that defines the method, and not, as in science, the method that defines the field. Consequently, the methodology of the humanities is utterly heterogeneous, and a corresponding heterogeneity is presumably to be found in artistic research and the practices which borrow their method from the humanities. More-over, it seems reasonable to assume that the artistic practice initiates and recreates certain qualitative preconditions that are specific to its field, separating it from the domain of the humanities and that of science. Even if these qualitative preconditions are merely institutional conventions that cannot possibly be construed as being in possession of a general and formalized validity, they will nonetheless re-establish themselves as specific forms of perception and knowledge. Here, the question is how these preconditions should be described, and if it is necessary also to assume the possibility, existence, need or necessity of a qualitatively different method.

Within the field of art, the forms of production are often confused with method, research and result. This confusion is neither due to an ambiguity in perspective, nor to an over-emphasizing of the importance of the logical rules inherent in artistic practice. Instead, the confusion emerges in the interplay between the practice and something that can be called imageability, a form of perception or knowledge which may have its analogy in the picture (photography, painting, etc.) but which nevertheless – through a kind of auto-formative expression in every social context (sensible, technological, political) – is reproduced also within practices that don’t produce or present images. In other words, production and interpretation of for example a relational or a conceptual artwork will partly or completely be determined by imageability. A clear sign of this determination is the fact that almost all attempts to radically break with the authoritative regime of the image have in time appeared as a play with the premises of perception in artistic practice. These attempts always seem to inscribe themselves into the platonic dialectic relation between image and reality, where the image is either in conflict or in compact with a truth about the world. Concerning the manner in which a practice relating to a certain field encompasses the imageable as an inseparable part of the complex which is the world – irrespective of whether the world is framed as discourse, landscape, body or even topology –, imageability describes something else than the dialectic relation between image and reality. Neither is it the case that imageability is in conflict with for example a conceptual regime: it cannot be understood as determined by a negative relation mediating the conflicts of dialectics. Without placing imageability on a par with the world as a concrete fact or reducing it to the conceptual or the material, imageability must be comprehended as the virtual scene where the world takes place and folds back on itself, making it possible to grasp the world in images and in terms of images.

Nor can imageability be disconnected from contexts or from the determinations concerning the position or function of the image in various discourses of art. Relative to history, imageability is not a transhistorical condition that brings to the fore a teleological structure which can be framed only within art history. Quite the opposite, imageability is exactly that virtual scene where it becomes possible to open for and grasp a difference between artistic research and art history without letting one dominate the other. To avoid slipping into a hierarchical relation between image, language and matter, it is important to keep in mind that imageability is not something specific to any type of media, and even if the artistic practices form a domain where presentation and investigation appear as image, they can nevertheless be both significative and discursive. This double binding between imageability and language is an integral part of the elements which together constitute the artistic field. Therefore, it is not surprising that the attempts to separate image from language, and to systematize them, are set in a fixed mould, confirming the presupposition of the separation as an a priori truth. To extract methodology from such a position would imply establishing a descriptive language which would be assumed to objectively and correctly describe artistic processes. The question is if these methods, rather than providing an accurate analysis, result in securing an inner coherence and a functionality of descriptive language. Isn’t it primarily a difference from and a distance to artistic practices that methods like these preserve by translating the artistic processes to discursive functions? In short, every attempt to rigorously and accurately separate method from field seems to end in a confusion that presents itself as a one-sided description of the field, regulated by method. The position and role of method within the artistic field and artistic research are perhaps not so much a question of whether method can precede or encompass these processes, as it is a question of how method is a working and active aspect of the field and its practices. One possibility would be to describe method as a mode of action, a way of doing which must include both imageability and linguistic relations to the world. But one cannot escape the fact that most artistic practices are formally bound to certain contexts, institutions, economies, technologies. Nevertheless, it seems as though the most adequate starting-point for a discussion about method would be individual practices and the way in which these incorporate the question of method, rather than to begin by defining a methodology and a field from an objective level.

*Greek methodos, from (the prefix) meta (among, with, after) and hodos (way, journey).

Publicerad: 2008-09-11


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