This is the script of a lecture I gave to Chelsea MA students, Research Methods course, May 2008. Not all of the images I used are reproduced here for reasons of change in scale.

1.1 I'm pleased to be invited to contribute to this series of talks about Research Methods – which take as their starting point Stephen Scrivener’s presentation - 'The roles of art and design in research'.

You may remember that Stephen’s paper addressed the conditions that something had to fulfil if it was to be considered to be ‘research’ (with a capital ‘R’).  There were six.  And the last one was ‘the communication’ condition.

Image 1: slide from Stephen Scrivener's presentation

1.2 Today, I’m going to look at the last – but not least – of these: the idea that research is a mode of communication; I’m going to explore the ways in which Research can fulfil this condition (come back to ‘to peers’ later).  And exclusively, with reference to the ‘writing’ component of Research.  This may seem to be perverse, given that the controversies at present are about how practice can be research.   (I think it’s assumed that writing can ‘take care’ of itself…)  But as we’ll soon see, in addressing ‘writing as research’, we soon come back to issues of, and for, practice-as-research. 

1.3 My interest in this topic

While I have a background in Fine Art – a BA, and practice-based PhD, my first degree was in English (language and literature) and, as time passes, I am strangely more and more aware of its indelible affect.  It’s not so much about having read Ulysses five times – but more about wanting to read all those things – mainly novels – that I wasn’t able to read at the time.  It’s about having been left with a passion for words as fictional worlds – if largely European ones… it’s this, I think, that in part explains why I’m starting with ‘writing’…  However, in as much as this presentation deals with the role of writing in an artist's-research, or practice, it’s only recently that I’ve started to try and address this in a sustained, analytical and reflective way.  And as such this an on-going enquiry.

1.4 My own background in Fine Art doesn’t mean however, that this talk excludes ’designers’ – I hope.  I’ve tried to write it to accommodate both artist and designers.  When I use the term ‘artist, it’s in the most generic sense.

2. Before I begin I would like everyone to make 2 lists:

a) properties / attributes / qualities of academic writing – here I’m thinking of adjectives such as ‘analytical’, ‘objective’…
b) a list of feelings that writing an essay – or the thought of writing an essay induces… terms such as ‘joy’(!)

Don’t worry – you won’t have to make these lists public – but I will ask you to refer back to them at the end, however privately.

3. My aim today, is to propose that, on the whole, there is too big a gap between an artist’s practice and their writing  (assuming that the one doesn’t include the other).  And that closing the gap is productive both in terms of the artist’s understanding and pleasure. 

3.1 When I’m talking about the relationship between an artist’s practice and their writing, I’m not referring to the content of the latter. (It’s often assumed that the content of an artist’s writing – certainly a student’s will engage with subject of their practice.) Rather, in advocating this proximity, I’m talking about writing as a form / register / sensibility (1)   In speaking about ‘form’ I’m using the word to refer to the structure of something when ‘structure’ can be both material and conceptual (and always, perhaps, both)…

I’ll come back to this idea of writing as a form shortly.

3.2 At an abstract level, you can say that: if 2 things are (too) far apart, you can bring them closer in one of three topographical ways:
a) move entity 1 towards 2
b) move entity 2 towards 1
c) move both a little towards each other. 

However, since I’m talking about an artist’s writing – which is often construed as having an ancillary role in relation to their practice, I’m going to propose, today, that it’s ‘writing’ that we seek to move towards ‘art’: by re-thinking what it can be.  From an artist’s point of view, the problem is with writing.

3.3 Well, it is if we conceptualise ‘art’ in a certain way, and ‘writing’ in a certain way.  For, given that I’m advocating a relational principle (of proximity) you can see that my claim that this isn’t often observed, depends on the specificity of both ‘art’ and ‘writing’.

When I asked you to think about ‘writing’, I specified ‘academic writing’.  And it’s probably here that the gap between the form of writing and an artist’s practice is widest. Certainly, in my 15 years of teaching in art schools across both studio and theory courses, and slightly longer being a writer and slightly less being an artist, I’ve frequently observed that artists think of ‘writing’ as something alien;  ‘other’ to how they work / think / practice – or simply are.

Not that I want to ‘essentialise’ ‘academic writing’. 

1. there is no ‘one’ thing that ‘is’ academic writing – even when narrowed down to say, writing in art-schools…
2. but that said, there may be a rough consensus about what the key features of academic writing are [list] – even if we define them in terms of ‘negatives’ i.e. not taking the form of a comic-book… [whiteboard?]

Academic writing ‘should’ be:

coherent; rational; analytical; discursive; rigorous; well-argued; well-structured; non-fictional; objective; abstract[?];

3.4 But there are other permutations of ‘art’ and ‘the forms of writing’ that yield gaps (and proximities):

I’ve drawn up a skeletal matrix – and indication of how one could further research this area – a method, if you like for approaching it more thoroughly.  It’s not complete, as a matrix and not filled in (at all)…

Image: a very sketchy idea of how one could start to map the relationships between forms of art and forms of writing:

Gaps: e.g. if one had a ‘conceptual practice’ and yet used a very diaristic mode for writing about it.

Proximities: e.g. academic writing and conceptual practice.

4.  How can we bring an artist’s writing closer to their practice?

4.1 Think of writing as ‘aesthetic practice’

What does it mean to think of writing as an ‘aesthetic’ practice?

It could mean:

• to attend to writing’s material form, when ‘aesthetic’ is having to do with the senses, and what affects the senses first and foremost is a thing’s materiality. This is to use an understanding of ‘aesthetics’ that is rather simply based on its etymology. (2)

[(I am also working on the idea of approaching this question via Kantian aesthetics, which would concentrate on just sight and sound as the proper conduits for aesthetic pleasure i.e. only those that permit ‘contemplation’.  A related but different definition of the key term.   Colour is also problematic as an aspect of ‘aesthetic experience’, for Kant, for reasons that presently escape me… I’m drawing attention to this possibility to foreground the issue of method in defining the term at play here – ‘aesthetics’.)]

4.2.1 What are the material aspects of writing?

The list that follows is not exhaustive but is organised according to different sense-data; data from our senses of sight, sound, and touch (but not, for reasons that I’ll explain, smell and taste.) It is, if you like a sense-based typology of formal aspects of writing.

(System for addressing internal components?)

4.2.2. In the list that follows, some of these ‘aspects’ are often found in ‘conventional’ academic texts, but in as much as they are, and are as such, precisely ‘conventional’ they tend to be naturalised as material forms, rather invisibly supporting the text’s cognitive work.

I’m going to pursue the discussion with reference to my own work in the area – mainly by virtue of its familiarity to me.  And specifically my PhD thesis.  And one of the reasons the list is not exhaustive is because I’ve used my thesis to ‘prompt’ some of its contents – rather than focussing exclusively on a more abstract approach.   This more abstract approach to such a taxonomy is research to be done.

Another thing I need to note is that while I am using material aspects of my thesis to address the issue of writing-as-aesthetic, those material aspects were not just about exploring the formal possibilities of writing.  That is to say: they were deployed to complement the text’s semantic engagement with the textual diversity of practice, and its multifarious origins – I’ll say a bit more about this later. 

Writing has a visual dimension

i) there is the way the text ‘looks’ on the page / screen e.g.

- what sort of ‘shape’ it makes / layout / blocks of writing

Image: a footnote taking up half a page

- the ‘look’ of the font: I used different type-faces to differentiate different registers e.g. helvetica for anedcotal entries, times-roman for more academic discussion.

- you could think about the absence of text on the page!

It can include pictorial, not word-based visual elements e.g.

ii) - pictures as:

- Illustrations

Image: ‘Late Medievalism’

Image: 3D picture of dinosaurs

- this was in the context of writing about my youthful confusion regarding competing foundation myths: could Adam & Eve exist in the same world as the dinosaurs?

Image: inside, back-cover of bound thesis - Vol 1:

- Pictures with other functions e.g. diegetic ‘props:

Image: A diagram on a serviette, drawn by one of the characters in Chapter 2:

images as pauses:

Image: the 'frontispiece' to Chapter 2 - 'In the Café Zola':

iii) Other visual elements e.g. tables:

Image: 1 / 12 tables in Chapter 3

Writing has acoustic properties

- even if read to oneself, words can take on aural qualities (can’t remember examples from my thesis, but know that there were some.) This may be stretching a point as it’s not an immediate sensory aspect but cognitively mediated.

Writing has a tactile dimension

- the feel of paper between one’s fingers: I drew attention to the relation between the 'volume' of paper that the reader could feel between their fingers and their sense of where they were in the thesis' argument.

Writing has extension in space - perhaps as an aspect of its tactility?

Image: fold-out diagrams - Chapter 5:

Image: pop-up (in a passage looking at Freudian notions of the fetish):

and I used different types of paper surface

Image: tracing paper overlay - diagrams in Chapter 5:

• No scratch’n’sniff aspects, nor edible components…  all my excursions from convention kept within the bounds of good taste, so to speak - or not.  But there’s a more serious point here, i.e. that aroma and taste are not conventional features of writing’s material dimension, or only so in the most neutral of ways.  Not so much that smell and taste are ‘neutral’ - invisibles by convention - as ‘not’…[?]

Which brings me to another way of thinking about writing as ‘aesthetic’

4.3 When ‘aesthetic’ doesn’t just relate to the material aspects of a work of art, but the work of art’s capacity to evoke the material / sensuous via cognitive means.

In writing, I would argue that this is primarily effected by the ‘work’ of fiction – in as much as the term ‘fiction’ is used to denote not so much an epistemological condition (which it is) but, rather, for my purposes, the invocation of an imagined, sensuous, material world.  A world we can ‘see’ (even, sometimes, hear, touch, feel and smell) in our mind’s eye.  C.f. The painting in Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece.

In my PhD written thesis, I included a ‘found’ and, apparently, antique story – ‘The Perfect Expressor’ - that ostensibly fell out of a book I was using for my research…

Image: first page of the story 'The Perfect Expressor', Chapter 3:

4.4 And, I would also want to make the somewhat difficult point that any type of writing may take on ‘aesthetic’ properties in certain contexts.  Specifically, if the use of a given register ‘goes against the grain’ of what is expected in a given context, then, as readers, we’ll be more aware of its textual properties: its texture; its materiality per se.  Imagine, for example, the use of a ‘forensic’ rhetoric for writing an essay about the latest work by Rirkit Tiravanija.  ‘On the right hand wall of the room there is a table, measuring 2m x 1m.  The table is made of light-weight aluminum, and is collapsible. A plastic bowl of rice (Basmati variety) is located towards the centre of the horizontal surface.  Five persons, 3 male, 2 female, all of average height …’ and so on.  As you can hear, maybe, it’s not an approach I’ve pursued and I expect that my grasp of forensics is pretty amateurish.  But you get the idea.  (As I’m writing this, I’m reminded of Alan Robbe-Grillet’s ‘nouveau roman’ – Jealousy.  You’ll see why, and as it plays with one of the formal conventions of the novel, it’s remarkable in other very striking ways, too.)

In my thesis, the deployment of a number of registers of discourse including the anecdotal, conversational and even ‘mathematical’, worked, so I hoped, to achieve this result – the accentuation of the formal and therefore, ‘aesthetic’ aspects of all discourse.

4.5 However, as much as I’m wanting to propose and promote the rich array of options for an artist’s writing, there is a caveat. For sure - in the context of the art-school.  There are often regulations concerning - if not what - then how you can and cannot write. While I have not seen the regulations for MA dissertations (I have my suspicions regarding what they might contain), I do know that those for Research Degrees make certain stipulations.

• UAL’s, for instance, comprise many commands concerning the physical conditions of the written thesis.

The writing must use a certain page-format; be on paper of a certain thickness (70 g m2 to 100 g / m2; left hand margin ‘not less than 40mm etc.

A4 - Unless you gain dispensation otherwise.

That said, this is as prescriptive as it gets; UAL’s regulations for research degrees are untypically. unspecific (dare I say) in relation to this aspect of thesis.  And I think you can interpret this in one of two ways:

1. either it’s assumed that a research degree written thesis will ‘naturally’ take a certain form
2. or they’re actively ‘open’ to allow for the sorts of engagement that I’ve indicated above.  The test of this would be, for example, what would happen if one submitted say, yes, a comic-book with 30,000 ‘words’, or a novel as one’s (entire) written thesis.

In other institutions, more is specified regarding the thesis’ written element – perhaps because those institutions are less sanguine about what is taken to be ‘normative’ by the art and design community.  For instance, (from memory and I can’t remember which institution) specifies that theses ‘must be in English’ – which, of course, opens up the idea that (in other institutions) one might use a really exotic language – even an entirely new one – or following a post-structuralist approach to all culture as ‘linguistic’ / ‘like a language’ – a ‘language’ of visual images…

If there’s a moral in all of this it’s something like: ‘wherever you are always check the regulations…’

5.1 Having looked at the means – the basic principle -by which an artist’s writing might be brought closer to their practice, I want, briefly, to discuss the rationale for this. Back at the beginning of this talk, I suggested that the closer an artist’s writing was to their practice, the:

1. more productive it might be, and
2. the more enjoyable

And I meant, for the artist.  I have yet to consider how others benefit from this rapprochement that I’m recommending e.g. the reader and the viewer… (and this is where we need to think back to Stephen Scrivener’s formulation of research as ‘communicable’ to peers.  There’s a lot to be said here about how the art-community may or may not be good readers of ‘aesthetically-disposed’ writing…  But not now).

As writing approaches ‘the condition of art’, I want to argue that this is productive as it has a heuristic value for the artist.  (‘Serving to find out’.)  Here, remember that I’m not referring to the value of the content of the writing. Rather, I’m referring to the value of actively engaging with writing’s ‘form’. In thinking ‘formally’ i.e. about form and moreover, in a way that’s useful to one’s project (I’ll address that as my final point), one is working as an artist with the written word.  Or more strictly speaking, the ‘written’ text.  As such, the artist gains insights that impact (back) on art.  

Writing of course, is not the same as (visual) art – though some writing can be ‘art’.  But the two are close enough in some regards to make the insights gained via one ‘transferable’ – of value to the other.  Thus writing produces, in this way, a double yield.  And the beauty of this scenario is so too does ‘art’ as the insights that one gains from working as an artist are transferable, specificity withstanding, to an artist’s writing.

And as writing approaches ‘the condition of art’, I want to argue that it can be more enjoyable by virtue of the association of ‘between ‘the aesthetic’ and the pleasurable’. If, that is, one follows my use of aesthetic to relate to sensory experience, noting, however, that not all sensory experiences are pleasurable. 

6. Putting the other point of view to my overall proposition
All the while I was writing this, I could hear objections to my line of argument  – possibly the voice of ‘the institution’ in my ear…  indeed, I can remember all too vividly, even though it was ten years ago, colleagues’ responses to my ‘experiment’ that allowed BA students to write stories as ‘essays’ on postmodernism. Their objections nicely anticipated much of the debate concerning ‘art’ as ‘research’ – that art is ‘polyvalent’ (has many meanings) and that research needs a ‘punchline’.  (I’m paraphrasing some of Christopher Frayling’s writing in the area.)  Schematically expressed, fiction is disallowable because as a reader (worse, assessor) you’re not sure what it’s ‘saying’.  Needless to say this ‘position’ has been in turn nicely demolished with reference to various post-structuralist ideas about language and its multivalence. (Linden Rilley’s essay…)

• Returning to the role of ‘method’ in all this: a final point

7. Methods for deploying writing as ‘aesthetic practice’

As writing is an aspect of ‘research’, I have raised the question of ‘method’ in relation to the ‘system’ for conceptualising writing, for an artist.

I now want to turn to look at the method for bringing that sense of writing to bear on art.

Given that an artist’s practice usually drives their writing, this proposes that the latter takes its cue from the former, and yet, there are several ways for thinking the formal relationships between the two  - yes the form of forms…

Here is a start… (4 ways)

• Reflective –
 the form of the writing picks up on the form of the practice: this was the approach that I used for my thesis, when my practice was preoccupied by the idea of a multifarious oeuvre and the thesis took this up as an aesthetic for its textuality.

• Antagonistic –
e.g. via polarity when the form of the writing is very ‘other’ to the practice – forcing the identity of one approach into relief and vice versa.  Turns a given aesthetic into a dialectical problematic.

• Agonistic / interrogative –
the form of the writing is simply ‘different’ from the art-practice, but with meaningful affect.  It’s hard to conceive of a concrete example for this, but it seems to be a logical possibility.

• Complementary –
in contradistinction to what I said above about art-practice anteceding writing, this would be where the ‘practice’ is conceived as taking place across both ‘art’ and ‘writing’ and the two together make a whole.  Here, I can imagine that ‘art’ and ‘writing’ - like any ‘coupling’ entity - are co-dependent, either in a relation of ‘difference’ or possibly, sameness.  This one is difficult to conceptualise – suffice to say that I’m working on it.

8. So in conclusion, what I have done is to
• encourage you to think critically, aesthetically and communicatively about the role of writing in – or in relation to – your work.
• I’ve suggested the rationale for doing so – that it’s a worthwhile activity with demonstrable benefits if some caveats
• and I’ve suggested ways in which you might think more largely about a meaningful relation between your art-practice and writing.

What I'd like you to do now...

Part 4: Discussion (if time)
- Back to your lists:

1. Attributes of academic writing
2. Feelings that the thought of writing brings on

I’d like you to think about:
• how your lists of attributes included – or not – my list of sense-related aspects of writing

• how your feelings about essay-writing might have changed in the light of the presentation – or how you think they might change.

(1) There are lots of other ways of thinking about the relationship between art and artist’s writing e.g. functionality; institutionality; aetiology...

(2) There’s a point here about the transition between the terms ‘material’ and ‘aesthetic’ – an argument perhaps about the aesthetic transcending the material, but nevertheless, depending on it.  There’s also a point about the slippage between ‘the material’ and ‘the formal’; when, it could be argued that the ‘formal’ may have a material aspect, but as the aesthetic to the material, also transcend it.

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See also:

PhD thesis:
The artist as a multifarious agent: an artist's theory of the origin of meaning

journal papers, book articles, edited books, editorial roles, and conference papers

glossary of terms for 'art as research' - in words and pictures