Katy Macleod

Whose memory? Perhaps an open question as memory is shared here in the sense that as I look back at these 15 books which have in some way influenced my thinking on the subject of art-research my thoughts gather in all the authors I knew, all the colleagues I’ve worked with, held endless discussions with, all the PhD students whose work has informed –sometimes changed- my thinking –all of them are drawn into this memoire.

The memoire might also be an expiation of guilt from the educator who finds an endless ambivalence about the relationship between the research rules and accepted norms of research, particularly at PhD level and what actually happens when an artist begins to tackle a subject of enquiry because the rules can obviously obtain: research questions; subject of enquiry & field; research methods; findings; summary; recommendations to the field, all accepted and worked through by several generations of artist researchers. It is as so often a question of precise interpretation: that is the specificities of the methodology; the ways in which the subject of enquiry might remain elusive; the understanding that the research findings might be in a constant state of flux, even post submission; do the recommendations to the field come in the same guise as those in any other discipline? Etc, etc..

I have always over-analysed, made things too complicated. This rolling out, recorded text is an attempt simply to stick to what I find in these fairly arbitrarily selected 15 books. I have avoided too much interpretation, tried to stick to what has been published. Most books are the result of several years of accumulated material and requisite evidence and often much of the material has already been published, is well known to the relevant networks of interest. This means that it is well worn, maybe even out-dated. Old hat. Passé. What now? Those artists taking PhDs now, those designing and organising this W-A-P exhibition at the Stanley Picker Gallery- maybe other artists, film makers, designers or whoever -are all producing different kinds of publication, much more vital and energetic. Exciting. I shall begin this endgame memoire -of sorts.

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is at this point, a close reading of 15 books, 13 of which are research into art-research. a conundrum right away. the author is confused. she is writing from each book straight onto the screen in front of her. this is not how she writes. when she writes it is always a re-writing, writing and writing and re-writing until what she has written sounds as if to make sense, which is maybe why the one book of philosophy is included; this as if, this signal towards as-if-it-were, as if it were otherwise or as-if-it-were true comes from the book of philosophy but has already marked her work, up-lifted what maybe had been hidden as words like imagination take flight before they are written as their loading is too heavy …... as she types the screen keeps correcting the capital letters. correction, keeping to the right path of research scores through the thinking in these 15 books. the author of the notes from this close reading is astonished by how closely she has followed the texts in these books as this is not to pay tribute to them but to truthfully begin to understand what each of them, or the texts selected in each of them, means at the time of reading. it is an attempt at accuracy where any quotation remains within the notes on each book; none is used for any other purpose. investment in this task is the labour of endlessly taking notes from these objects, open on my desk, a large commercial sewing desk on which no-one has ever sewn. there is always the chance of doing something other than habits might predict. this is an end game from which i do not remember a start point but if there is one it would be with artist researchers and it would be experimental along the lines of as-if-it-were to be different: different authors and different hands on these keys and different voices sounding through the notes. the typing has slowed right down when for the last six weeks it has been super- fast. now it is snail paced, a sluggish trail across the page as the note taker tries to think what it is that the notes might say, when it is not so straightforward a task as the reader might think; it is a letting go through a close and solitary attention to a few books whose meanings are losing what they once held but held only in the sense of sources to be used for the author’s own quite distinct purposes. here she has tried to avoid such use, has laboured to write differently. until she considered the last book. a small booklet kind of book whose five memos cannot be read as if they do not matter intimately, or should i say it is the first of these memos on lightness which retains its intimacy, its intimate, intrusive casting of raking light into how words/art shape thought. how such thought seeks both flight and reflexive insight, the endless reflection on what could be and what is; it signals release and endless return, the dance with Duchamp’s rendezvous or was it otherwise? The note taker stops typing as she invites others to begin to sound a response…..

1 Why books? These books have been touched, handled, marked, carried about, lent out and brought back; they have inhabited book shelves, been seen on a daily basis, endured. They have been physically selected, by hand. They are an arbitrary choice, in the end, a tiny proportion of what has been read, assimilated, understood or barely taken in, drawn from, deployed or scrupulously ignored. These are books I have read many times and now hope to read differently.

2 Writing: these notes are not how I write: when I write for any kind of public context, I write by hand, using a pen and clean A4 paper. I never write once; I always write and re-write and re-write, over and over again until I can square the sense I need to make with the words I use as they almost seem to write themselves through the sounds they make. My writing, whether it is for a conference, a research seminar or to explain things to myself is always a re-writing. Here, it is different.

3 The screen and the text on the page: here, I have been writing directly onto my computer screen, with the book under consideration just to the left on my huge sewing desk (on which I have never ever sewn). I have at times felt fraudulent as I pay intense attention to each writer’s concerns rather than to what I am writing. These notes are un-edited, written once, directly onto the screen.

4 Truth: the troubling situation which is never redeemed is that I want to somehow relay what each author has written in essays and books of thousands of words and hundreds of pages using a few thousand words for each book. Simultaneously I want to convey how I have and am now responding to what these authors have written; I cast a critical eye but retain a seemingly neutral tone.

5 Subjectivity: as each book is considered, through the on-going and laborious notes, my neutral tone of writing begins to fracture. I begin to demonstrate how I now have strong reservations about many of the writings under consideration, including my own and those with my collaborator, Lin Holdridge, because they seem to miss some vital capacity that research cultures in the arts must take for granted.

6 Knowledge: this is knowledge of what is actually involved in the practices of the art/s when placed under the duress of say, a PhD frame. What does this do to already acquired knowledge and what is the impact on the ensuing work which, in this case, is art, art as research?

7 Art/Artistic research: 13 of these 15 books are devoted to guiding the reader into a better understanding of research through the practice of art/arts. All of them have been useful to my developing knowledge of such research. Looking back, looking back differently, most useful now are the two books which do not do this, which, as Emily Dickinson might have written, ‘tell it slant’.

8 Thought: the 2 books which elicit this ‘slant’ of writing are works of philosophical thought. They are depth charged through a breadth of precise knowledge and understanding equal to the task, which they do not consider, of understanding the thought of art.

9 Vitality: it is, in the end, a question of the capacity of art thinking which needs to be carefully considered; its capacity to bring complex matters into the present, to make them vital in ways which the conventions of research, argument and research proof, cannot or do not recognise.

10 Absence: One cannot ask what is an artist, without also asking, what is a theorist? Irit Rogoff wrote almost this sentence in 2008, (“What is a Theorist?” in On Knowledge Production: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art, BAK). In the cultures of academic research, such questions are largely absent.

I wrote this at the time of their selection. I am unsure if the rationale for their selection still obtains: