Design
Like many people, I
respond best to deadlines: not desperate night-before bursts of creative energy
but deadlines that prompt slow percolations of possibilities. Such deadlines
are only one of the useful prompts which prop up my research activities, the
other is demand. However, I am not at the point where demands often arrive
unsolicited, so there is a stage of the research process which involves seeking
out possibilities, whether through talking to others or more often responding
to calls for papers. Since entering academia the phenomenon of calls for papers
– whether for conferences, articles, chapters or exhibition contributions – is
a strangely enticing process. I enjoy the loss of control and the process of
being sorted, selected and jumbled into an event which I would perhaps otherwise
hesitate at becoming involved in. There is something mysterious about the blurb
soliciting initial responses which I find challenges me to refigure my own
interests into a form which will somehow anticipate their desires – suggesting
not what they expect, and thereby running the risk of duplicating others, but
something sufficiently intriguing to get me through the door. Of course, it
doesn’t always work and I try to avoid attending events from which I have been
rejected – bitterness is not a receptive frame of mind.
Most conference papers
and articles undertaken during my PhD allowed parts of my thesis to be aired
and since its completion I’ve continued to mine it for further dissemination - it
is a reserve that seems reasonable to draw on for a while, provided that it
remains flexible and with the hope that it will also suggest new points of
departure for further study. But here’s the rub: I am a visual artist, but this
was not a practice-based PhD, it was in Art History in a traditional department
requiring the conventional 80 000 word thesis. I soon gave up any attempts to
make the presentation of the thesis challenging in a visual sense, as I’d
attempted with my MA dissertation at Goldsmiths’ ten years earlier, but
promised myself that the three years concentrating on writing would be balanced
by a return to visual practise in its aftermath. And that is now where I am,
sitting at the intersection between theory and practice but as yet without a
triumphal tale of their happy co-existence. It is early days and I have always
know that my practice might change as a result of the PhD – it could be that
writing becomes the dominant form of my practice, but not conventional academic
writing.
One of the richest of
my recent experiences has been coasting between different discipline areas in
order to act as interloper. I know that a raised voice, song or minimal
physical intervention during the delivery of a conference paper will provoke a
reaction which could never be created in a (more demanding) artistic setting. I
like pulling at the seams of what is expected, but this has a limited
shelf-life: there are only so many times I can crawl under a table before a
more dramatic outburst is expected. Does this approach fit into my wider
research remit? Well, yes: the French philosopher whose work has been driving
much of my thought for several years – Jean-François Lyotard -- has no
methodological approach to divest but rather what I have come to term a
‘manner’, one which urges both the reader, writer and artist to continually
question presuppositions. Easily said, more difficult to enact or return
to. However, it is this sense of
continual struggle that I find exciting about Lyotard’s own writings – their demand
to think a-new, write again, write differently. The task is not only to question
the presuppositions of others, but to question ones own presuppositions.
The general reaction
to Lyotard as subject of study is itself full of presumptions and
presuppositions. In the Anglophone world this attitude is often tied to tired
discussions of postmodernism, and in art circles Lyotard is now largely
overlooked in favour of the more fashionable French names of Derrida, Deleuze
and Rancière. As a result I have found
myself making grand claims for the importance, or at least the usefulness, of
Lyotard’s writings in thinking about performance art. Banging the drum to make
myself heard is no bad thing: I am forced to justify my research interests and
to argue for that which I consider necessary, rather than being accepted with a
sagely nod from a circle of self-interested confidents. Within performance
studies the reaction is not dissimilar–I have to justify what it is that I am
researching and why the ‘manner’ of Lyotard’s approach ‘feels’ close to
performance art. Reading Lyotard is performative: it can be difficult,
frustrating and exhilarating. Thinking performance with Lyotard results in an
exciting precipitation: it has a foaming crust and a lingering smell.
