South Africa is not a country you often read about in geographical overviews of AR practices, or, for that matter, in any publication on the status of our beloved new discipline. But they have AR, and Mareli Stolp is advocating it there, all the while building a reputation for asking pertinent questions in the European conference circuit. Currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of South Africa, and the chair of the South African Society for Research in Music, she is now on this side of the equator as visiting researcher at the Orpheus Institute, and after a stimulating chat with her, Mareli accepted my request to write a guest post on a topic that she is busy developing: reflexivity.
Subjectivity and Reflexivity in Artistic Research
Mareli Stolp
Artistic
research (AR) is concerned with questions of how knowledge can be generated
about and through artistic experiences and artistic practices. A central
premise is that an exploration of an artist’s own practice can lead to new
insights and understandings. The idea of ‘own practice’ presupposes a level of
subjectivity, which comes from an artist’s individual consciousness of that
which occurs while engaged in practice. In order to distinguish AR from ‘pure
practice’ it is necessary to discover ways to translate such subjective
experience from tacit, embodied and intrinsic into some form of discursive
medium that can be accessed and shared beyond the realm of the personal.
There
are many possible ways to approach the subjective, tacit knowledge embedded in
practice. Using the tenets of phenomenology and techniques of phenomenological
reduction could be one such method; applying formats such as critical
reflection during and upon conclusion of artistic research projects could be
another. A third option, which connects to an extent to both phenomenological
reduction and critical reflection, is the paradigm of self-reflexivity. This
term is used in divergent ways in several disciplines, including psychology,
sociology, economics and anthropology. My
understanding of self-reflexivity is indebted to the work of the Reflexivity
Forum and specifically the contributions of Margaret Archer (2010). I use the
term self-reflexivity to denote a process whereby self-referential thinking is
used to explicate artistic processes and products. Self-reflexivity is understood as innately different
from ‘self-reflectivity’: Archer describes the latter as an action of a subject
towards an object, a unidirectional engagement between an event or entity and
the one who is engaged with that entity (Archer 2010, 2). Self-reflexivity, on
the other hand, presupposes a continued, self-referential activity. Self-reflexive thinking does not
have to assume introspection per se (in which case the subject/object
dichotomy may complicate the possibilities for reaching viable insights), but
rather retrospection: accepting that there may exist a time gap between
subjective experience and objective engagement with the implications of that
experience allows for subjective and objective understandings to function
together in the articulation of new knowledge.
Michal
Pagis (2009), writing from the perspective of psychology, raises the point that
reflexivity can be discursive as well as embodied; these modes need not however
be considered mutually exclusive or exhaustive. In terms of AR, I would argue
that a self-reflexive process of inquiry ideally needs to move beyond the realm
of the subjective and embodied in order to lead to a viable research result.
Language may not be the only medium through which self-reflexivity takes place;
however, I would posit that it is an ideal medium through which the outcomes of
reflexive processes may be articulated, uttered and shared (although the format
of such articulations need not be confined to traditional modes of exegesis,
such as writing). Artistic practices result in embodied experiences; embodied
experience, however, can perhaps best be viewed as distinct from
self-reflexivity (Pagis 2009, 266), for sensual experience is generally considered
to precede intellectual consideration: reflexive internal dialogue is required
to translate embodied experience into a discursive and shareable medium (Pagis
2009). It is possible then to view self-reflexivity as the facilitator of a
dialogue (Pagis 2009, 266); in artistic research, such ‘dialogue’ could be
interpreted as interactions between embodied experience (generated through
artistic practices), and processes of thinking through these experiences.
My
approach to AR is focused on music performance, and I will therefore attempt to
(briefly) explain my approach to self-reflexivity by means of an example from
my own performance activities. In 2014, I presented a site-specific performance
in the Central Business District of Cape Town, South Africa. For this
performance, the piano was positioned outside, on a busy street; the ‘audience’
observed the performance from a rooftop seven storeys above my own position,
with the music relayed to them by means of microphones and a speaker system;
the performance was directly accessible to anyone walking past on the street.
This project was primarily meant to engage with the social divisiveness
characteristic of Western Art Music concert practice in contemporary South
Africa. Access to concert halls remain the purview of the wealthy (and mostly
white) population; in this performance, however, primary access was the purview
of the ‘man on the street’, and the ‘audience’ was forced to experience the
performance from a significant physical remove (see Stolp 2015). The project
was part of a public art festival called Infecting
the City.
Voyeur - a shortfilm by MJ Lourens
performed by Mareli Stolp, composed by Clare Loveday
edited by Floyed de Vaal
The
first phase of this project was mainly theoretical: the concept was developed
under the influence of writings by Michel de Certeau on ‘spatial practices’ and
experiential engagements with the City (writ large), as well as sociological
critiques of contemporary concert practice of particularly Western Art Music.
The thinking part of the project lead
to the doing, the performance itself.
However, by applying techniques of self-reflexivity, I am able to also allow
theory to emerge from the practice itself, thus resisting a unidirectional
configuration. Upon conclusion of this project, I was able to ‘think through’
the performance (or ‘bend back’ on the experience, as Archer describes it), and
articulate insights on public art; artistic intervention; and site-specific
performance generated from the performance itself. A further step is then
enabled: these insights, once articulated, may have an impact on my own future
site-specific projects, and ideally also on these discourses (site-specificity,
interventionism, public art) in general.
AR
projects are exemplified by an intertwinement of thinking and doing. This does
not necessarily have to mean that these modes must function simultaneously; one
or the other may dominate to a degree at any given moment. Theoretical
perspectives need not fulfil primarily an external, analytical function; they
may be seen as emergent from the practice itself. Applying strategies of
self-reflexivity in artistic research allows for a negotiation of the ‘thinking
and doing modes’, in that it allows for a continuing flow between them, a
recurrent bending back that keeps the research process dynamic, and does not
privilege one of the modes over the other.
This
way of understanding AR presupposes that a research process begins with
subjective understandings, generated by a practitioner herself through her own
practice; these are translated, developed, probed, perhaps made to resonate
with other models of thinking (borrowed from philosophy or psychology,
perhaps); ultimately these translations lead to articulations of these
understandings generated from practice. Central in this understanding is that
artistic practice is considered as potentially both the genesis of the research process, as well as the result.
Works
cited:
Archer,
Margaret S. 2003. Structure, Agency, and the Internal Conversation. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
---------------------.
2010. Introduction: The reflexive re-turn. Conversations
about Reflexivity. Edited
by Margaret S. Archer. New York: Routledge.
Pagis,
Michal. 2009. Embodied Self-reflexivity. Social Psychology Quarterly, 72 (3),
pp. 265–283.
Stolp, Mareli. 2015. ‘Thinking
Through’ Voyeur Piano: Strategies and Outcomes for
an Artistic Research
Project. Forthcoming.
