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The Double Bind of Artistic Research: A Thought Experiment of a Witness

Henryetta Duerschlag

To cite this contribution:

Duerschlag, Henryetta. ‘The Double Bind of Artistic Research: A Thought Experiment of a Witness.’ OAR: The Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform Issue 2 (2017), http://www.oarplatform.com/double-bind-artistic-research-thought-experiment-witness/.


I miss you
but I haven’t met you yet
so special
but it hasn’t happened yet
you are gorgeous
but I haven’t met you yet
I remember
but it hasn’t happened yet

Björk, Miss you (1995)

I remember applying for a loan from the German government to finance my master’s degree in artistic research at the University of Amsterdam. As one of the very few available financing options, this particular loan was advertised as being granted to the majority of applicants, and guaranteed feasible repayment conditions. Having worked in two museums during my Bachelor’s studies for three years, and having been accepted to a research Master’s in the capital of the Netherlands, I was highly optimistic that I would receive this money, which would have spared me needing to work in a call centre next to a fulltime graduate programme. I was rejected for the same reason that the Swiss National Science Foundation recently accepted to fund a research project on which I am currently working for my dissertation: nobody really seems to know how – or if – artistic research generates valid knowledge.

Nevertheless, something haunts the young, mysterious discipline – a ghost or phantom related to Jacques Derrida’s spectre,1 who may not answer, but does speak to us. The drive in practice-based research derives from an inexplicable feeling that there is a truth out there only approachable through alternative or experimental forms of research and presentation. There is a sense, or a sensation, that artistic research is a valid form of knowledge production, and that practice-based research can discover things which other traditional methods cannot. However, as far as I know, there is no definition or argumentation that would equally satisfy many theoreticians in academia, the art world, and the student loan provider I applied to. While the methods, forms of outcome, and quality criteria for work in established, traditional2 disciplines seem clear, artistic research circulates around what constitutes itself. Challenges that theoreticians and artists face are both the impossible-seeming articulation of criteria for validity in artistic research and the task of creating a paradigm for it as a discipline:

How can things that are fundamentally polysemic – that seem to elude every attempt to tie them down, to define them – still function as vehicles of research? That is, how can they function not just as objects of research, but as the entities in which, and through which, the research takes place – and in which and through which our knowledge, our understanding, and our experience can grow.3

Following Henk Borgdorff’s question, I asked myself how one can deal with the feeling that the entire undertaking results in confronting a paradox. How can validity as a necessity for research be rethought in and for artistic practice through the idea of a self-contradictory demand?

Being in love with a fantasy so vivid, however remaining unreachable in reality, Björk’s song reminds me of the tenacious feeling that it must be possible to define validity for artistic research while being aware that every attempt will necessarily fail. I will not arrogate to myself the ability to provide the reader with a satisfactory solution, or even to articulate a formula applicable to the entirety of artistic research practices, but I would like to think that this reflexion on my experiences from both the theoretical and practical dimensions of artistic research can add to thinking about validity in this enfant terrible of a discipline.

INSPIRATION

Having been told by my mother that, when working in the field of arts and culture, one should never be actively involved in politics, I was renowned for having a rather apolitical stance during my Bachelor’s in cultural anthropology and gender studies at the University of Basel. It was not that I was uninterested in, or felt unaffected by, socio-political issues, I was simply overshadowed by my classmates from the sociology department whose thirst for political action did not spare the classroom. However, as the environment always leaves a mark on one’s way of thinking, during my Master’s I found myself the most politically motivated student in my class in Amsterdam.

Along with many others devastated by the result of the 2016 November election in the United States, the prospect of rising right-winged populism kept (and keeps) me in a constant state of worry. Growing up in Germany, I was raised with a historical awareness that constantly reminded me of the devastating force of collective racism, homophobia, ableism, and antisemitism. It seems that until recently, political correctness seemed to be rather common sense than a polemical term, and irrational claims by entertainment celebrities were by far less valuated in the shaping of public opinion than scientific evidence and statistic figures.4 In the dawn of alt-right movements and outrageous statements made by Donald Trump, reading the news in the end of January 2017, I stumbled upon the Orwellian definition of doublethink right underneath a headline concerning the exaggerated crowd size incident shortly after Trump’s inauguration: ‘Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them’.5

Having in mind Gayatri Spivak’s ab-use6 of Gregory Bateson’s notion of the double bind, which derives from his research on childhood schizophrenia, I instantly saw a relation between the psychological concept and the Orwellian notion. While Spivak introduces the notion of the double bind in the context of her revaluation of the legacy of Enlightenment in order to rethink the objectives of aesthetic education, doublethinking resurfaced with the new visibility of right-winged populism. Both concepts deal with the impossible simultaneity of positions and the danger of homogenising language, which I considered productive in the political context I discussed in my master thesis. With this discussion, however, I opened up a Pandora’s box, sensing double binds and doublethinks everywhere.

DOUBLE BIND

Mixed information and seemingly contradictory demands confront most of us on a regular basis – no matter if in the humanities, sciences, arts, design, or everyday life. It was the second or third session of an introduction course when our lecturer asked what we expected to learn in the two upcoming years. Given my rather theoretical background, I answered that I wanted to develop my artistic practice. ‘We don’t need a failed artist in our class’ was the lecturer’s disenchanting response. Great, I thought, now I will have to do artistic practice without aiming to make art, and have to do research while yearning to leave its limiting framework.

Behind the often frustrating feeling of being incapable of positioning myself between (or within) practice and theory, art and research, subjectivity and objectivity, matter and form, I later suspected that my situation derived from what Spivak describes as ‘contradictory instructions’,7 with which we, as scholars, artists, individuals are confronted on a regular basis. Torn between art and research, alleged liberty and habitual unambiguousness, remaining on either one or the other would miss the point of doing artistic research. Having to combine the multi-layeredness of the aesthetic dimension of artistic practice and the underlying necessity of the production of verifiable knowledge in research, artistic research itself meant for me to practice a double bind.

But in order to clarify what is meant by the notion of double bind, I suggest first looking at its definition. According to The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), double bind means: ‘A situation in which a person is confronted with two irreconcilable demands or a choice between two undesirable courses of action’.8 The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the notion as ‘a psychological predicament in which a person receives from a single source conflicting messages that allow no appropriate response to be made; broadly: dilemma’.9 ‘Two irreconcilable demands’ and the reception of ‘conflicting messages’ deriving from one source implies that a double bind’s basic requirement is the communication of a contradiction. Therefore, a double bind situation is based on a dichotomy. However, while the latter means ‘(a) division or contrast between two things that are or are represented as being opposed or entirely different’,10 a double bind’s distressing power derives from its imperative nature – demanded to find a position, no matter what one chooses, one will be caught between a so-called rock and a hard place. In this respect, to withstand a double bind requires a significantly greater force of resistance than simply dealing with a dichotomy. This may account for the exhaustion relatable to Sisyphus’ eternal struggle.

A double bind – as it’s conceptual origin implies – requires an interaction between two (or more) actors who are involved in a given relationship. In Bateson’s research, it was the relationship between mother and child. In my case, it was the conflicting messages derived from the educational framework represented by my lecturers. However, it is crucial to differentiate the experience and the discourse. While in practice, artistic research (in my case) entails the confrontation with a double bind, in theory – or in its indeterminable paradigm – it is rather paradoxical: ‘You have to do research doing artistic practice, but forget about becoming a famous artist’, as opposed to the conception that traditional research with all its methodologies and objectives excludes artistic practice which is characterised by its indefinability. Yet artistic research necessarily means combining both systems of practice.

Theory and practice, however, are two modi operandi not easily separable in discourse and experience, presuming that aesthetic thinking and practice are inseparably entwined. Both a double bind and a paradox imply a mutually exclusive proposition, however, while the first is characterised by a conflicting imperative and thus results in a (personal) predicament, the second states two equally true yet seemingly self-contradicting propositions. A double bind can, but must not necessarily, be based on a paradox.

Dieter Mersch describes the paradox-like condition in artistic practice, as he states that:

Thinking in catachresis, in leaps and chiasms, in catastrophes and discords, and in the chronic disunity of paradoxes and their inherent negativity defines the riskiness and the extraordinary adventure of art, which philosophical thought has always linked to transgression and madness.11

This exhaustive adventure pushing us to the borders of insanity depicts the burden of being confronted with impossible demands. The mad artist is a common trope; the potential societal benefit of this figure has been prominently discussed, and not only since Michel Foucault’s re-evaluation of how history shaped and is being shaped by discourses.12 The cliché of the brilliant yet insane scientist has prevailed as well – one must only think of popular culture, taking Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future (1985) or even the recent animation series Rick and Morty by Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon (2013–) as prominent examples. As Bateson states, ‘within [the double bind’s] terms there is nothing to determine whether a given individual shall become a clown, a poet, a schizophrenic, or some combination of these’,13 the idea seems not far off that, doing artistic research, one will sooner or later affiliate with all of the three characters.

PLAY

Pushed to the border of sanity, the main question arising at this point is how to deal with a double bind situation productively. How could I turn the pressure of working with aesthetic practices to generate valid knowledge into something graspable? Spivak clarifies in her introduction that double binds are not a method one can apply – their potential must be achieved by playing them in imagination.14 In other words, to simply discover them in terms of unveiling them is not enough. If, as aforementioned, artistic research as a practice implies a double bind situation for the actor and Spivak suggests play as a solution for dealing with this predicament, one could conclude that artistic research as a practice means to play. This simplification, however, does not sound appealing at first glance when trying to articulate an epistemic claim for this practice – in the end, I studied artistic research in order to become a professional, not someone who simply likes to play around.

But what does play actually imply?

The father of play theory, Johann Huizinga, defines five necessary characteristics of play: first, since it is being executed voluntarily (excepting rites and ceremonies) and is never a mandatory task, it is a form of freedom. The second characteristic of play is the requirement to step outside of ordinary ‘real’ life and ‘into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own’.15 Therefore, as point three, play differs temporally and spatially from everyday life. It is also being played out in accordance to a specific chronology – it has a starting and ending point, but must be repeatable at any given time.16 Furthermore, it requires a set space: ‘All play moves and has its being within a playground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course’.17 The fourth characteristic of play is that it demands ‘absolute’ and ‘supreme’ order,18 and thus playing requires one to follow rules. An example would be the outrage of football fans when players happen to break any of the game’s meticulously observed rules. The last requirement Huizinga proposes is the aspect of non-profit in play.19 This means that it is specifically not the goal to economically profit from it. The play is being executed for its own sake.

When now applying these characteristics to artistic research as a practice, firstly, given their reflective and examining modus operandi, art and research are both practices which can be thought as taking place inside and outside of everyday life. Indeed, every research project has its starting point (with a research question or interest), and follows a temporality marked by different steps (such as research, reflection and articulation of findings). The aspect of rules crucial for play might be the most interesting one in this context. Unlike traditional research, which demands that the researcher meticulously follow the methodology of her or his discipline, the rules or methods in artistic research have to be formulated for each project anew. It is the researcher her or himself who has to find the most suitable way to approach the knowledge he or she seeks to find.

This liberty, which I now find highly productive, was something I needed to get used to. The issue with traditional research, at least the way I was trained to do it, is that at some point the descriptive mode inhibited me to state my opinions. Even writing a paper in the first person seemed not only odd, but also highly inappropriate – an academic manner (especially in the German tradition) I wished to be able to break with. Artistic research seemed to provide the space in which I could push the boundaries of traditional knowledge representation safely. No longer limited to the methodologies of cultural anthropology, I left my disciplinary comfort zone and engaged in a highly political debate using concepts and theories from the fields of literature, philosophy, and political and science studies.

However, there is something else about play that makes it such a productive concept to approach validity in artistic research: ‘Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play’.20 As Spivak implies,21 it is very much possible to deny a double bind, as has been shown by Huizinga, however, it is not possible to deny play. Following this logic, it does not seem farfetched to argue that if validity can be regarded as a constructed irrefutability, play in itself is always valid. The characteristics of this inherently human (and even non-human if we think of animals) practice – to set a physical or virtual space in which, for a specific duration, one creates an environment outside of ordinary life that follows strict yet self-declared rules – allow the researcher to experiment in order to find something that may not have been discovered otherwise. Thus, play and experimentation share many common denominators. The latter could be even a form of the first. However, remaining in the experimental epistemic practice, one would still miss the aesthetic dimension crucial to approach artistic research as a practice. Compared to other experimental and cross-disciplinary fields, it is the relevance of aesthetics both in the form of expression and as an epistemic approach which in my opinion characterizes artistic research as a discipline.

While Huizinga defines the act of playing, Friedrich Schiller contextualizes play as an instinct inseparably connected to the aesthetic. For him, the sensuous instinct makes physically perceivable matter – or, in his words, Life – its object, while the formal instinct deals with ‘all formal qualities of things and all relations of the same to the thinking powers’.22 The play-instinct can be regarded as the hybrid of the sensuous and the formal instinct whose object is the living form and, thus, beauty.23 He writes:

As the mind in the intuition of the beautiful finds itself in a happy medium between law and necessity, it is, because it divides itself between both, emancipated from the pressure of both.24

The state of mind in the ‘happy medium’ in between form and life, and law and necessity, which Schiller describes, is strongly reminiscent of a characteristic of doublethink, namely the effortless acceptance of an antagonism. To doublethink would indeed mean to divide one’s mind into both positions and not between them. To play a double bind subsequently means what Schiller describes as the act of emancipation of its pressure through the separation of both binds. This process reminds me of the teachings of Taoism, in which pupils learn its philosophy by reacting to paradoxical tasks and riddles, such as the question ‘What was your original face before you were born?’. Since it is impossible to find an analytical, logical answer, the goal of these so-called koans is to find a third option allowing one to free oneself from the distress of an impossible demand in order to strive towards enlightenment. The act of emancipation from the predicament of a double bind must happen in a space like the school of Taoism, in which it can be acquired and expressed without the risk of evoking severe consequences – a safe space, so to speak. Not a philosopher, yet working with its objectives, not an art historian, yet engaging in art theory, not an artist, yet doing artistic practice, an ethnographer, yet stepping outside its methodological framework, operating in the not yet and not anymore, I found that the space in between became my workstation.

BETWIXT

In reality, there will always remain a preponderance of one of these elements over the other, and the highest point to which experience can reach will consist in an oscillation between two principles, when sometimes reality and at others form will have the advantage. Ideal beauty is therefore eternally one and indivisible, because there can only be one single equilibrium; on the contrary, experimental beauty will be eternally double, because in the oscillation the equilibrium may be destroyed in two ways this side and that.25

Between form and matter, experience and perception, the known and unknown, experimental beauty, as Schiller argues, means to eternally oscillate between two at times irreconcilable principles. Reminded of the play of double binds, I wondered how this space in-between could look, how it could be described, and, most importantly, how it could be characterised. Eternally double, it always runs the danger of breaking into a single bind if the oscillation cannot be sustained. As Schiller’s argumentation implies, this aesthetic practice in-between is experimental.

Dealing with the double bind of artistic research as a practice must happen in a specific space that allows a playful approach to its objectives – a playground, if you will. As I realized, the place in which artistic research can be practiced fruitfully and productively prohibits a clear demarcation. Somewhere between or even beyond traditional research and aesthetic practice, this grey zone strongly reminded me of the notion of liminality coined by ethnographer Victor Turner.

Liminality describes a (mostly) temporal space of the not-anymore and the not-yet. In the context of a rite of passage, as examined by Turner, the ritual subject needs to pass from the old state into the new one, as, for example, from unwed to married through the performance of wedding: ‘Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’.26 For a double bind to be successfully played, it needs to maintain this liminal state – there cannot be a starting and ending point, because one would automatically break into a single bind, and end up with a regrettable choice.

Since a ritual requires the actors to follow a set of rules that are different to those of ordinary life, given the specific temporal and spatial framework in conjunction with its performative characteristic, a ritual has many common denominators with play. Hence, I argue that the space in between a double bind – the playground – is a liminal space in which ‘the characteristics of the ritual subject (the ‘passenger’) are ambiguous; he or she passes through a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state’.27 This liminal state of being no longer and not yet is associated with a range of properties such as: transition, totality, homogeneity, equality, anonymity, absence of property, status and rank, humility, unselfishness, suspension of kinship rights and obligations, foolishness, simplicity, heteronomy, and acceptance of pain and suffering – all in binary opposition to norms of the ordinary, social life.28 Regarding these properties as the conditions of the liminal space – and thus the space in between a double bind – they must be understood as the basic game rules of playing a double bind.

Precisely in the combination of indeterminacy, ambiguousness, and responsibility of the actor in the liminal playground lies both the answer to the question of why it was (and still is) impossible for me to articulate a fixed position for my practice and the incredible potential of artistic research to strive for knowledge outside of traditional research. This liminal playground allows one to consider both aesthetic as well as explicit knowledge and, given its indeterminacy, the way that the result of this epistemic play will look is open.

FORM

Years ago, I invented a party game loosely based on the popular Who Am I – a game in which each participant writes down the name of a fictive or actual person on a sticky note, attaches it on the forehead of his or her counterpart who then has to guess who he or she is. Instead of picking random personas for other participants to guess, in what I call Epochs Bingo, the group discusses where and when each participant could have lived. Re-entering the room, the latter then has to guess how the others imagined his or her previous life. More than an icebreaker between strangers, the description of others through a fictive scenario captured how the participants perceived each other strikingly well. I remember, for example, a neatly coiffed young man known for his Ibiza party-boy appearance and passion for long, eloquent discussions on politics, niche documentary filmmaking, and the latest podcasts on German culture radio channels, leaving the room for us to discuss his historic alter-ego. The first association that came up in the discussion was Claus Stauffenberg, who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler while seeming to be a conformist. Even months later my friend told me how moved he was that we managed to pinpoint a side of his personality that not many people saw in him – accounting for the potential of a game to shed light on a fragment of reality that does not reveal itself immediately to the environment. What started out as a game hinted to a research practice based on a purely subjective perception which I would eventually incorporate into my work.

During the past two years, I have had innumerable conversations about the impact of our previous education on our work. Some members of my cohort (who all came from art academies) initially struggled with academic writing, which they perceived as limiting, at times paralyzing, and counterintuitive to their working habits. I tried many times to explain to my peers how much intuition, inspiration, and, bluntly said, gut feeling influences even the most rigid-appearing research papers. In theory, a subjective approach to a topic never felt invalid for me – regardless of the discipline. However, it was me who did not listen closely to what my practice tried to tell me for months, or even years. The methods in Ethnology, as the discipline responsible for the description of cultures, are based on the observation of one’s environment. The difference between an actual ethnography and Epoch Bingo is the dislocation of the factual into the imaginary. Since the very beginning of my bachelors, I was interested in the potential of fiction to approach a reality. I remember watching Transfiction (1994) by Johannes Sjöberg, in which he asked two transsexual sex workers in Sao Paulo to re-enact their everyday lives. By giving themselves pseudonyms and playing (with) their experiences, dreams and aspirations, the film depicted a reality which may have been left in the dark if approached by rather conventional documentation methods.

In summer 2016, I worked in the social department of a small municipality, where I experienced first-hand how people seeking refuge were handled administratively. Following the news about the migration crisis in Europe throughout the last three years, I could have hardly imagined how challenging and frustrating for both sides the large-scaled capture of thousands of identities in an administrative system would be. Transferring data from hundreds of physical files into virtual ones, I noticed that surprisingly many people were listed as being born on the first of January of a given year – a date that was used either when the birth certificate was lost, or when it never issued in the first place. Many of those individuals’ names were almost indistinguishably similar, and were often differently spelled even in various documents of the same file. Not a single line of each basic form could account for the individuality of the person depending on being registered, which made me wonder what information value those forms have in terms of determining individuals. While Epochs Bingo managed to capture the perception of a person through free association, common identity markers such as date and place of birth, legal status, and a photographic snapshot could merely represent fragments of what constitutes an individual. Hence, the game served as the basis for my experimental approach to the question of how to record something as subjective yet important as personality. Similar to official registration papers, I created a form that solely asked about where and when a person could have lived in another life. In a participatory performance, which took place within the framework of a course at the university, those forms were handed out by me as a representative of the fictive Planetary Identification Agency to four volunteers in the audience, who were asked to write down how they perceive the other participants. Two of the participants met each other for the very first time, and were astonished about the accuracy and match of their mutual fictive descriptions.

PIA scan H. Duerslag-page-001
Henryetta Duerschlag, Planetary Identification Agency Registration Form 1.2, 2016, scan of the form filled out by a participant of the performance.

PIA scan H. Duerslag-page-002
Henryetta Duerschlag, Planetary Identification Agency Registration Form 1.2, 2016, scan of the form filled out by a participant of the performance.

It was not until I wrote the conclusion to my research on the notion of double bind and play that I realized that it was all already there in my artistic practice – the Planetary Identification Agency was an undertaking to deconstruct norms by creating normative tools. Based on a game, my work approached truth through a play of thoughts structured by rules displayed on the very form. The power of What if scenarios has been famously demonstrated by many artworks, such as Zoe Leonard’s Fae Richards Photo Archive (1993–96) or Walid Raad’s The Atlas Group (1989–2004), both of which play with the notion of the archive as a tool to approach a truth. By depicting a fictive historical figure, Leonard raises an awareness for all of those who might have been left out by history, and Raad, as the fictive artist collective The Atlas Group which made the documentation of war in Lebanon their objective, sheds light on a brutal reality by blurring facts and fiction. Both artists use documentary aesthetics, evoking the feeling that the shown material is genuine and authentic. The objectives of both projects are not less sincere – Leonard and Raad took a responsibility towards under- or misrepresented groups of people and events, and rendered visible a reality by staging a scenario.

VALIDITY

The creation of a fictive scenario, which necessarily entails the invention of rules it has to follow, can be regarded as a form of play. In this respect, The Fae Richards Photo Archive, The Atlas Group, and my Planetary Identification Agency all illustrate the becoming of matter through intellectual games or thought experiments. Borgdorff describes experiments as ‘the actual generators of…knowledge – knowledge of which we previously had no knowledge at all’.29 Just as in play, the technical environment of a laboratory together with the ‘epistemic thing’30 dictates the rules that are being articulated from within, which requires a flexibility from the researcher to adapt to – and a responsibility towards the desired knowledge. In conjunction with the necessity of a safe space outside of ordinary life, play and experimentation – as I mentioned before – share many common denominators. If experimentation as epistemic play is the driving force of innovation, artistic research as a practice that experiments with matter and explicit knowledge of any discipline has a highly innovative potential.

One of my favourite quotes, which I can highly identify with, comes from Michel Serres, in which he confesses that he prefers

to move forward, even quickly, at the risk of falling, skipping over a few weak points. (Who doesn’t do likewise, at some time, even among the most careful?) I prefer invention accompanied by the danger of error to rigorous verification, which is paralleled by the risk of immobility – in philosophy as in life, in life as in the sciences.31

In two years of doing artistic research at the University of Amsterdam, I learned to emancipate myself from the corset of the methodology of cultural anthropology. I can and do use its concepts and methods, if they fit my research question. However, I feel free to responsibly use whatever I need from other disciplines in order to find what I am looking for – even if the result rarely resembles what I initially imagined. Playing with explicit knowledge and non-verbal articulations such as bodies, images, and other materials, my goal became to find expressions for something I had no words, no images, and no concepts before. According to François Lyotard, it is both the artists’ and the scientists’ objective to find articulations for objects of thought which seem either impossible, or are simply not-yet possible.32

This undertaking seems paradoxical solely because the operators through which those new articulations are sought to be expressed are yet unfamiliar given their innovative nature. This does not mean, however, that those new articulations are impossible or untrue. For example, precisely a century after its creation, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) is considered one of the key artworks of the 21st century compared to its perception as non-sense and non-art when it was presented in front of a public for the first time.

Art and science create articulations of the unknown while as systems eluding clear determination. Yet anything can be found in the indeterminable, ground-breaking knowledge that is hiding in the unknown. Considering the inventive power of experimental freedom, I cannot help but wonder why everyone keeps trying to set a methodology for artistic research when its absence is actually its strength:

They are ghostly non/existences that teeter on the edge of the infinitely thin blade between being and nonbeing. They speak of indeterminacy. Or rather, no determinate words are spoken by the vacuum, only a speaking silence that is neither silence nor speech, but the conditions of im/possibility for non/existence.33

Karan Barad’s description of the nothingness, in which anything can be but nothing must become something, brings me back to Derrida’s spectre. Out of the indeterminacy of artistic research, inventions and innovations are speaking to me, as vague and ungraspable as they may seem at first, luring me into the playground of liminality, where I can emancipate myself from the pressure of positioning myself between art and research. And given this practice’s proximity to play, nobody can deny what I am doing there.

Just as Duchamp’s Fountain is now an icon for postmodern art, inventions and inventive methods need time to sink into the known – just because something is indeterminable now does not mean it is not relevant or groundbreaking. The strength of artistic research lies in this indeterminacy, for it allows one/it to be as inventive as possible – a thought which leaves me satisfied.

 


1. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), 62.
2. For the lack of other terminology, and in order to contrast my experiences in artistic research with my previous academic education, I will use the adjective traditional in relation to disciplines which are characterized by established objectives and often paradigms, being aware that those are object of constant changes as well.
3. Henk Borgdorff, Conflict of the Faculties: Perspective on Artistic Research and Academia (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012), 187.
4. I even remember a tutorial in gender studies on policy making in which our lecturer stressed the argumentative advantage of statistics over theoretical concepts, which seemed opposed to what we learned before. ‘At the end of the day numbers are the only thing that count’ she said, a couple of weeks after a course on the normative, and thus negative, power of statistics.
5. George Orwell, 1984 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1948).
6. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 3–4.
7. Idem, 10.
8. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/double_bind, accessed April 1, 2017.
9. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/double%20bind, accessed April 1, 2017.
10. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/dichotomy, accessed April 1, 2017.
11. Dieter Mersch, Epistemologies of Aesthetics (Zurich-Berlin: diaphanes, 2015), 170.
12. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London: Routledge, 1989).
13. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Chandler, 1972), 272.
14. See: Spivak, Aesthetic Education, IX.
15. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949), 8.
16. See: idem, 9.
17. Idem, 10.
18. Ibidem.
19. See: Idem, 13.
20. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 3.
21. See: Spivak, Aesthetic Education, 18.
22. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 19.
23. See: Ibidem.
24. Ibidem.
25. Idem, 21.
26. Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York: Cornell University Press, 1969), 95.
27. Idem, 94.
28. See: idem, 106–07.
29. Borgdorff, Conflict of the Faculties, 189.
30. Idem, 190.
31. Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1995), 131.
32. See: Jean-François Lyotard, Philosophie und Malerei im Zeitalter ihres Experimentierens (Berlin: Merve-Verlag, 1986), 101.
33. Karen Barad, What is the Measure of Nothingness: Infinity, Virtuality, Justice, 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts: Documenta Series 099 (Kassel: Hatje Cantz, 2012), 12.

About the author:

Based in Basel, Henryetta Duerschlag is a doctoral candidate working on the collaborative project Practices of Aesthetic Thinking by the Swiss National Science Foundation, Sinergia. She holds a Master degree in Artistic Research from the University of Amsterdam and previously studied European Ethnology and Gender Studies at the University of Basel.