Introduction – Let’s Keep Dancing

Is that all there is, is that all there is
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is

Recording installed in a goods lift at the Henry Moore Institute as part of Katrina Palmer’s The Necropolitan Line, 2015. Lyrics: Leiber & Stoller, 1968.

In this, our third issue of OAR, we bring together contributors who tackle the dilemmas and opportunities, in their artistic and practice based endeavours, of finishings, leavings, endings and remains. Researchers, particularly those doing doctoral work under bureaucratic edicts of time to completion, understandably wince at, or indeed are stalled by, the question ‘When are you planning to finish?’ Often, of course, time just ‘runs out’, or funding ends (or both), while interruptions such as jobs, bodily traumas, or domestic responsibilities intervene. But to what extent do such events equate with finishing? What are the temporalities inhabited by research-related notions such as ‘funding period’, ‘conference paper’ or even the terminology of ‘project’ itself? In art theory, project work has often come to mean a kind of tyrannical open-endedness and the erasure of work and life. The slightly defeated but somehow optimistic ‘that’s all there is’ acts as an invitation to re-imagine modalities of finishing, but without valorising endless deferral (and never ending work).

Through the work of our contributors, in this issue we surface interrogations which (we hope) are less anxiety-provoking than blunt questions about submission dates. At their most optimistic, our contributors offer the failure or disappointment of ending as an injunction to act, now, and perhaps differently. Perhaps we might live with different rhythms of beginnings and endings. Crucially, these contributions form a collective voice to counter the assumption of individual triumph or tragedy embedded in the question ‘When are you planning to finish?’. This collective voice enunciates a set of generative strategies which include revisiting, ‘un’-finishing and – the most notable response to our call for contributions – numerous refusals to let things settle or die without further intervention. Even after the death of Lacan, as Sharon Kivland proposes, one might write him love letters, an opportunity which hijacks any sense of embarrassment with the serious commitment of not letting it be over. Alternatively, when Damian Taylor begins a project on clouds which becomes an encounter with rocks, glitches and all, artworks not only pick up on the interruptions of time and purpose, but thrive on them without being seduced by a sense of conquest. Taylor offers us images of the material remains, as well as a stock greeting ‘Merry Christmas’ to usher us in to his account.

Included in the materials for Issue 3 are imperatives to be more whimsical or playful with remains, and alternative ways of rendering ‘final’ research outputs, including an opening out of the experience of reading a journal contribution. Issue 1 of OAR incorporated an intervention by artist Daniel Litchman, whose sound and moving-image work burst forth as the reader browsed the issue’s contents page, thereby provocatively presenting it as a ‘site’ for artistic research. Similarly intervening into the space of reception, for this issue, philosopher Johnny Golding requests we listen to a track by Nick Cave while reading her text, but also suggests we simultaneously watch Jenny Livingstone’s Paris is Burning (1990). Through this invitation, Golding offers us the opportunity to imagine a form of installation around her article which is only one element in the expanded encounter. What could just have been a journal contribution, already dense with philosophically-inclined forms of argument, has been reconfigured as an elaborate encounter between text, sounds, and image. This seems both a hopeful gesture towards the possibility of multimedia juxtaposition, but it also incorporates the risks of potential distraction and confusion. Unlike the partial encounters expected of mobile viewers of video installation, we still usually assume faithfulness from readers to finish a piece, even in distractive online environments. In suggesting too much to handle, where will a reader or viewer find an ending?

We note that some of the terms of Golding’s methodological framework for encountering and responding – notably that of cannibalisation – are echoed in the Society for Artistic Research’s 2018 conference with its provocation about ingestion. The call for papers asks:

If artistic research eats itself, digests itself and then releases its own waste, does it stink and linger, fertilise new growth or invade new destinations on the bottom of someone’s shoe? If we are to constantly defend and define, are we in danger of having no art left, only the claims for its ability to embody knowledge?1

The danger is that no art remains. When do we finish the meal and make a new one? Cannibalism might seem an extreme tactic, even as a metaphor. However, Golding is boldly optimistic, despite the current context of multiple contemporary crises which frame her argument. Indeed, in general, our contributors here offer a response which challenges writings about the contemporary cultural condition as apocalyptic, such as Slavoj Žižek’s starkly negative image of ‘the end times’.2 Given the ‘end times’ are identified with a form of approaching catastrophe, we might have expected contributions which affectively attuned themselves to forms of reaction, despondence, or despair. Instead, these contributions offer or enact, through critique or invention, what Orit Halpern has called ‘resilient hope’, a concept which she advocates to counter tendencies that present ‘merely a negative speculation on catastrophic futures’.3 The latter are evident in discourses both about the ‘end times’ and (often) the Anthropocene.

Against this background, Sophie Hoyle’s voice in her moving-image contribution is a powerful reminder of the ambivalence in the effort to ‘keep on going, keep speaking, keep keep keep going’, followed by the acknowledgement that ‘there is nothing new’ (a particular, poignant reminder for researchers who are compelled to demonstrate ‘an original and substantial contribution to knowledge’). Has she given up? Or is this a reminder to inhabit a different modality of survival? There is a politics here in the minor gesture in which relatively small or modest interventions become the vehicles to enact re-interrogation and revisiting. Writing of her own engagement with the idea of ‘minor theory’, the geographer Cindy Katz comments:

To do minor theory is to make conscious use of displacement – of not being at home or of being between homes – so that new subjectivities, spatialities, and temporalities might be marked and produced in spaces of betweenness that reveal the limits of the major as it is transformed along with the minor. Working in a minor theoretical mode is to recognize that those subjectivities, spatialities, temporalities are embodied, situated, and fluid; their productions of knowledge inseparable from – if not completely absorbed in – the mess of everyday life.4

This mode of working chimes with Hoyle’s contribution, as with that of Fiona West. Here, the doing of minor theory involves the constant reworking of a surface, as fingers drag beach sand around elements of a painting by Paul Gaugin. Figures are moved around to what appears to be ambient sounds, and a new pattern of sand emerges as Gaugin’s elements are moved out of shot. It is a surface of sand on glass which remains in the final moments, as a dog barks at a distance. Has Gaugin been erased? Is this possible?

Driving our interest in endings was the awareness that disciplines incorporate a wide range of historical and/or scientific routines of periodization and end-points, and that these do not always sit comfortably with artistic and practice based research. Art history has long been organised around terms such as ‘the long 19th century’ which, however expansively, demarcate beginnings and endings. To take another discipline within which some of our contributors locate themselves, anthropology also has a tense tradition of finishing and endings characterised by a sense of ‘the field’ from which one ‘returns’. In thinking back to her participant observation study, Michele Feder-Nadoff suggests that we should think about learning a craft skill as a series of ‘un-finishings’. An ‘un-finishing’ is constituted by posing problems for the next vessel to be forged and decorated. Feder-Nadoff writes:

‘Lo que duele’ – what might bother you – is what you want to improve. This leads to the next piece. What was important was to go on to the subsequent pieces using discontent as inspiration. Making is a continual process; each completed piece is an un-finishing.

The copper pots which she learns to make are material traces of a relationship of master to apprentice. And the terminology of remains can be used to think through other cultural objects, namely the representation of a medieval castle, as undertaken by an extended moving-image work by Evangelia Tsilika. Here, the architectural excavation of a medieval castle in Porto de Mós is taken up through layered narration. The video counters established practices linked to the rehabilitation of historical monuments. Instead, the building’s state of constant historical development is held together by an architectural ‘promenade’ that similarly strives to hold together disparate remains. Through this practice of narration, the castle as both site and historical source is un-finished.

Revisitation can indeed force a space for strong critique and even protest, as demonstrated in Michelle Williams Gamaker’s work. The contribution by Catharine Lord Williams, writing alongside the work of Williams Gamaker, draws on the language of ghosts, a common figure of the unfinished business of life. The 1947 film Black Narcissus, they argue, needs a ghosting which it seems to refuse. New figures, created by Williams Gamaker, reveal the partiality and colonial commitments of the original film. Williams Gamaker creates queer offspring for a work which wanted to languish without future intervention. This is only revealed by the staging of the new project as a series of auditions. In this way, Black Narcissus is given a new beginning, freeing up a different vision of possible endings and futures.

The work of procreation as production of hopeful futures – the ‘next generation’ – is probed in the work of Inbal Strauss, an artist creating a version of ‘design noir’ objects, including the piece pictured on the cover of this issue.5 If what remains are children, what of the parents? Strauss’s work recalls the Phillip Larkin poem ‘This be the verse’ in its wry take on expectations, parenthood, and futurity.6

A different set of tactics is discussed in the interview with Florian Dombois with Michael Hiltbrunner. Dombois was at the forefront of developing the Society of Artistic Research. Yet he found himself at odds with the very ethos of what research might be for/with art, and ended up parting company with this group. In essence, Dombois abandons the dominant form of practice based research. Yet he remains an artist who is entirely committed to research, establishing a wind tunnel experiment, the Venice version of which is explained in the interview. It appears that leaving a dominant forum for artistic research actually frees up Dombois’ commitment to the investigation itself, as opposed to a focus on better representations of research.

In sum, as our contributors indicate, capturing an artwork or research project by the term ‘ending’ is defiantly not ‘all there is’. Although they may not directly advocate dancing or booze, as in the song lyrics above, there is certainly hope, resistance, and refusal to abandon a vision for how things might be otherwise. For Palmer, the endings of the exhibition spoke to a focus on the London Necropolis Railway which once linked London’s Waterloo station to a large cemetery. Here, following a trace of material infrastructure, the train line offers a linear path for remains to pass along, with a clear intended destination. In Issue 3, direct lines and connections are certainly made, and endings often become new beginnings, with problems thrown down for future research. Yet, in finishing our introduction, we also want to remind ourselves of the importance of practices which explore the limits of the phenomenal. Rather than a straightforward accumulation of knowledge, we might concern ourselves rather with ‘initiating a strangely cathected materiality, a wild, bent, frivolous, perhaps even joyful surface economics of not-quite-dead/but-not-quite-alive unsayable somethings.’ (Golding, this issue).

Finally, we…

1. SAR Conference 2018 Call for Papers, accessed 23 November 2018, https://sarconference2018.org/.
2 Slavoj Žižek, Living In The End Times (London: Verso, 2011).
3 Orit Halpern, ‘Hopeful Resilience’, e-flux architecture (2017), accessed December 20, 2018, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/ accumulation/96421/hopeful-resilience/.
4 Cindi Katz, ‘Revisiting Minor Theory,’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 35:4 (2017): 598.
5 Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2001).
6 Phillip Larkin, High Windows (London: Faber & Faber, 1974).