Theory and Practice: a Pair?

NB The diagrams referred to in the text below are not reproduced here.

Introduction

Rationale

• Why look at these terms?
• Staples of the CFAP discourse

1. though only one of the terms appears in the course-title
2. the other is brought back in via the ‘Critical Theoretical Practice’aspect of the course.

• You might find it useful to bear these two titles in mind in the next ten or so minutes
• But the real reason I want to look at these is because I want to re-evaluate their role in the CFAP course.  If they are ‘staples’ this means we take them for granted.  And maybe this being CFAP, this is a contradiction in terms; our very foundations should be up for grabs as much as the things that those foundations also problematise.  The way I’m going to do this today – the only way – there are many others – is to ask a very simple question:

The enquiry

Are ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ a pair?

1. Start with structural investigation
What I am not doing today – but have done in the past – is to look at what ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ are (or only as it’s necessary to answer the main question).  I’m not going to go into detailed discussions of different ways of understanding ‘theory’ (which are fascinating) and if you’re interested the reading provides ways of following up on this.  So this isn't about the ‘identity’ per se of ‘theory’ and ‘practice’.  Rather, it’s about their relationality.

exercise:

Any given term can be ‘paired’ with more than one thing(?)

Slide 2 ‘Theory and ………….’ Complete the pair

Slide 3 ‘Practice and ……………’ Complete the pair

We may have to ask another question:

‘What is a pair?’

Slide 4:

The answer to this question may not be so obvious… for other reasons.  (But discuss dictionary definition – quote – about usage = functional definition of identity.)

Hear what Derrida has to say about Van Gogh’s ‘boots.’  Or, rather Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of boots, for they may not be Van Gogh’s (as it were).   The title of this painting is ‘Old Shoes with Laces’. 

Slide 5: Old Shoes with Laces

Derrida is interested in the question of ‘attribution’ and how one knows what belongs with what – and he takes Van Gogh’s boots as a way of starting to talk about this.

Writing about a ‘correspondence’ (!) between the art-historian Meyer Schapiro and the philosopher Martin Heidegger, regarding the subject of ‘Old Shoes with Laces’, Derrida notes:

‘One of them says in 1935: that the pair comes back to / belongs to / amounts to the peasant, and even the peasant woman’. 

Note that in writing of this ‘correspondence’, Derrida does not say who says this – so the problem of attribution returns to the level of his ‘own’ text.  He then goes onto ask:

‘ – what makes him to sure that they are a pair of shoes?  What is a pair?’

and a little later, Derrida repeats this interjection

‘ – what makes him to sure that it’s a pair of shoes?  What is a pair, in this case?’

What may be important here, among much else, is the shift in the grammar of the subject.  It’s very subtle so you might not hear it, but in the first instance he asks if ‘they are a pair of shoes’ and in the second, if ‘it’s a pair of shoes’.  So a ‘pair’ is both plural and singular. A pair is divided in terms of how we think ‘a pair’s’ duality.  The attribution of meaning to the term ‘a pair’ isn’t unequivocal.

Or to put this another way: you could think about a pair of pears…

Slide 6:

And in asking this question of the ‘pairn-ess’ of Van Gogh’s boots, Derrida continues this theme.  By implication, this difficulty with attribution returns to haunt the boots,  the attribution of one boot to the other.  And a whole host of other things pertaining to the painting. 

Slide 7: Old Shoes with Laces (as above)

[And by the way – because it’s relevant to this discussion – the reproduction in the Guardian – reversed the reproduction in The Truth in Painting.]

Why this concern with a pair of old boots?  How does this relate to ‘theory and practice’?  Well, the boots and ‘T&P’ may comprise a pair of sorts, that actually enables us to question / undo the laces between theory and practice.

The responses that you’ve proposed via the exercise have foreseen this…

(Are ‘pairs’ simply conventionalised couplings?)

However, before we pursue this theme of uncoupling (and its implications), I want to look at how there may be a way of re-organising ‘theory and practice’ – questioning their ‘pair-ness’ that is implied by their habitual terms of engagement and this is immanent to the CFAP course.

For ‘theory and practice’ imply a pairing with another pair of terms…

‘Writing and art’. 

And we might want to describe their conventional pairing with the following diagram:

Slide 8: Diagram 1.

On CFAP this pair of couplings takes place in various ways:

When we use the term ‘practice’ we’re commonly referring to what’s done in the studio – in the name of ‘art’. However, the relatively recent renaming of the theory strands as ‘CTP’ – nicely refuses this conventional alignment – which is precisely why we named the stand of the course in this way.

When we think of ‘writing’ we tend to associate it more with ‘theory’ than ‘practice’.

I’m making broad statements that are, happily belied by the detail of the facts.  For instance, there’s a long tradition of artists using text - ‘writing’ of sorts – in their work.  See Simon Morley’s book on text in art.  Concrete poetry – writing as art – The Art-Lectures are engaging with this issue…

This means that we might want to re-draw the diagram to give us

Slide 9: Diagram 2

And we should talk a little bit about ‘art’ as ‘theory’ – which is what Terry Atkinson is getting at when, in ‘Phantoms of the Studio’ he writes: ‘No matter how much theory is disguised or repressed, there is no practice without theory.  The theory that practice has nothing to do with theory is a theory, a disingenuous and naive one, but none the less a theory.’  (Practice as art-practice.)

That said, we might also want to think about the way in which ‘theory’ might be ‘art’ – which might not be the same thing as art as theory.  This might be, say, the idea of philosophy as art – think back to the 1st Art-Lecture – Nietzsche, Plato…

We can also configure this diagram as the following:

Slide 10: Diagram 3

Which as you might see, is almost the same as Diagram no. 1 except ‘Writing’ and ‘Art’ have changed places.

What do you think this implies for relations between the horizontal pairs?

Well, it might mean we have to come up with the next diagram:

Slide 11: Diagram 4.

What this has done is to propose different ways of coupling the key terms under scrutiny, today.  In a way that’s immanent to their common usage, but looks at permutations within that logic that are less utilised than others…  If you like this is CFAP’s ‘expanded’ field – conceptually speaking.  And if that term takes you to Rosalind Krauss’ seminal essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ – all well and good, because the diagram I’ve been working with – its conceptual structure – is known as a ‘Klein Group’ and she uses it to expand the field of modernist sculpture.

2. The history of ‘Theory and Practice’

My preoccupation this the ‘rhyming’ of Theory and Practice, has been largely in terms of the logic of combination.  But not entirely.  For a long while, I’ve been aware of the historical dimensions to this coupling – the fact that it’s specific to a particular moment / set of decades in UK art-education.  (CFAP is not unique in this respect, though courses such as ‘Alternative Practice’ as CFAP was back in the 70s may well take credit for encouraging history on its way in this regard.)

Or to put it another way, ‘theory’ did not always ‘supplement’ practice.   In the past the ‘necessary supplement’ has taken the form of ‘Art History’, ‘Contextual Studies’ and ‘Life-drawing’.

Slide 12: art and its supplements

However the issue of when ‘theory’ began – as a supplement to art – may be seen in different ways. Because one of the writers - Malcolm Quinn - who work has encouraged me to re-think this relationship between theory and practice  to re-think the relationship between theory and practice - would argue that art-education has been preoccupied with the theoretical supplement ever since its inauguration as a publicly funded entity in 1835.

Here I want to précis Quinn’s argument – for its value in helping us to understand why we ‘rhyme’ / couple ‘theory and practice’ and how we might prise them apart, and what might follow in the wake of that.

Quinn notes that:

Prior to the institution of the art-school, art-education took place in the ‘Academies’. 

Slides 13 etc.

The Royal Academy would be one such example, and its continued segregation from the UK HE sector is a part of this legacy. The Academies, he contends were places that offered the ‘cultivation of sensation’ and, at the time of the inauguration of the first UK art-schools, were attacked by the Select Committee for Arts and Manufactures on the basis that they were ‘associated with privilege, power and the prevention of free trade’.  Another way of phrasing this would be to say that the Academies cultivated the practice of connoisseurship.

But if the Academies provided a point of distinction for the institution of the Art-school system, so too did the notion of the University such that we could draw another diagram:

Last slide: The art-school, etc.

In this scheme of things the University is defined via Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the skholè, identified with ‘the scholastic disposition which inclines its possessors to suspend the demands of the situation, the constraints of economic and social necessity, and the urgencies it imposes or the ends it proposes.’

In the middle of this – perhaps a triangle is the wrong figure – the art-school combines the ‘practical reason’ of the Academy and the ‘pure reason’ of the University (not that Quinn puts it quite like this – I’m extrapolating via Kantian distinctions).  That it does is ‘of its time’; as Quinn contends, the response of the bourgeoisie to the cultural impact of mass production.  Quinn writes:

'The art school can be said to have been founded on the wish for a new, specifically bourgeois form of pedagogy that would supersede existing forms of education. One of the radical possibilities introduced by this wish was the potential for a specific form of art school critique. [The shift from aristocratic cultural "sensibility" to a bourgeois cultural language is a specific form of critical positioning that nonetheless places this new language of culture squarely within a social scene linking "art, trade and commerce".'

And it did this by seeking to use the Art School for ‘the education of the eyes of the people’, in order to counter the deleterious affects of mass production.

Key to this project was Henry Cole’s ‘Chamber of Horrors’ exhibition which sought to instruct the public on matters of bad (and good) taste in the realm of contemporary commodity culture.  However, rather than successfully define a set of bourgeois values, this backfired – spectacularly – becoming the subject of public ridicule. 

And in this ‘event’, Quinn sees not only

• The art school’s institution of a critique of practice via theory but at the same time, its emptiness.  And he refers to the insistent refrain of ‘theory and practice’ that has haunted art-schools ever since as ‘the barbarousness’ of art-school speech.  In the wake of Cole’s atrocity exhibition, theory and practice’ continue make an ‘incomprehensible sound’.

Of course, Quinn’s argument implicitly, but not explicitly, raises the question as to what sort of discourse would sound less barbarous in the art-school.  And it brings me back to the issue of how these two approaches to ‘theory and practice’ – one ‘structural’ and the other ‘historical’ merge.

Let’s just step back a bit.  And ask: what is the question that drives this enquiry regarding whether or not ‘theory and practice’ are a pair?

I would like to think it’s something like ‘What does an art-practice need, beyond itself?’

The structural approach suggests the field of possibilities – or rather, enables the supplement of ‘practice’ beyond (just) ‘theory’.   I would want to flag the idea that ‘practice’ may not simply pair, but join up with a multitude.  The more historical approach reminds us that these moves are grounded in material conditions and that at some points in history, some pairings may be more permissible than others.  All this is to say: that if we want to rethink the pairing of ‘theory and practice’ we may have to toggle between the ideal and the real, the structural potential and the material reality, making more and less sense (in every sense).

Reading

Atkinson, T. ‘Phantoms of the Studio’ (Oxford Art Journal: 1990)

Derrida, J. ‘Restitutions’ in The Truth in Painting (University of Chicago: 1987)

Eagleton, T. ‘The Significance of Theory’ in The Significance of Theory (Blackwell: 1990)

Feyerabend, P. Against Method  (Verso: 1988)

Foucault, M. The Order of Things – see especially chapter ‘On Representing’ (Routledge: 1989)

Francis M. A. ‘A theory of critique… in practice: practice as critique’ forthcoming in Journal of Visual Arts Practice  Vol 7.3 (Intellect: 2009)

Kavanagh, T. M. (ed.) The Limits of Theory  (Stanford UP: 1989)

http://www.maryannefrancis.org/Theory.html

Morley, S. Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art (Thames and Hudson: 2007)

Quinn, M. ‘Critique conscious and unconscious: listening to the barbarous language of art and design’ forthcoming in Journal of Visual Arts Practice Vol 7.3  (Intellect: 2009)

Scrivener, S. ‘The artwork does not embody a form of knowledge’ Link

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