What are we doing to RESEARCH…
…normalising its beast?
[para la versión en español oprima aquí]
The word ‘research’ has been held on a pedestal of privilege for many years. But in recent decades, the word has taken a much more amplified position, in the hard sciences, then the social sciences and, even much more recently, in the fine arts. By way of the following text I want to make a summary sample to provoke a deposition – to question how we instrumentalise the ethics and the essence of ‘research’.
On November 28, 2017 the activist group Sea Shepherd fought selflessly to capture and release a video that had been censored by the Australian government. The video is a gruesome example of whaling. The perpetrator is a large Japanese-flagged convoy, hunter trawlers and processing ship, illegally whaling in a protected area near Australia on the Southern Ocean. The ships fashion an enormous sign by its side with the word RESEARCH.
Please let me begin by saying that I never have, nor will I ever eat whale meat. That said, I have blithely enjoyed Japanese food for years, particularly the ways fish is prepared. So I want to be measured and say that I may be part of the problem… as I often am… but this video has finally forced me to be far more careful about how I will eat fish in the future, particularly in Japanese settings.
Without doubt, Japan does absolutely deserve the vast majority of the condemnation it gets, particularly for its whaling practices. But it absolutely must also be made clear that Japan is by no means the only perpetrator. In fact, Norway – despite its government’s promising attitudes towards environment, social cohesion, and migration – is the worst perpetrator when it comes to whaling. Japan comes second, and then also seemingly benevolent Denmark and Iceland follow right behind, with expected accomplices Russia and USA.
But, two things about this video make me literally and viscerally nauseous, if ashamed of being a human being. First, that we allow the horrifyingly brutal process of explosive-charged harpooning (yes, they shoot the harpoon, hits the whale, and then, it explodes, inside, with shrapnel, not to kill the whale, which it does not, but to make the reeling back easiest, assuring a most-horrifically painful way of dying).
Second, it is the shamelessly criminal instrumentalisation of the word RESEARCH.
Now, I am not naive. I know that since the scientific revolution, many horrors have occurred in the name of research, to humans, to forests, to animals. And the ethics of research have, and will continue to be debated for many decades to come. This primarily because, in many cases, the reality is that genuine advancements are made, where a proportionately infinitesimal sacrifice might yield enormous, transformative results, for human, and non-human health.
Unfortunately, we will always be surrounded by some unforgivable scumbags who will misuse that most powerful, if sacred notion, of research to strictly benefit their pockets, or even worse, to falsely promote some backward ‘tradition’ in the name of ‘culture’. In this case what we see is how the Japanese instrumentalise the notion of culture, and then of research, as ways to make viable some sort of bizarre atrocity.
(I interject here… I do appreciate many aspects of the work of Matthew Barney and Bjork. But, my accidental viewing of their collaboration for Drawing Restraint #9 during my visit to Kanazawa in 2004 still makes me cautious about what they have produced ever since. This might be one of the most questionable artworks in this regard, of a dangerously incongruent romanticisation and fetishisation of whaling as an alibi to make it palatable, if to pander to local funding sources to receive enormous amounts of money to purport whaling as ‘cultural heritage’).
As of lately, the usual techno-scientific abuse of research has been taken to new heights by the obvious weaponising of psychological research as method to further get us hooked-on more and more unnecessary products, and to create political and emotional disarray as mechanisms of control.
But luckily, perhaps because of this, the idea of research itself is again being contested in exciting and promising ways. I am referring to ongoing, robust discourses about expanding the idea of research, particularly in the social sciences, and even more recently to art itself.
From the myriad variety of techniques and research theories in the social sciences, for example, we have a practice initiated by Kurt Lewin called ‘action researcher’ (MIT, 1944). ‘Action research’, in principle, is a reflexive type of social research that is integrated into the development process of the specimen itself, or community in question. A little later we also see the practice of Susan Star (UC Irvine, 1989), where she exercises a type of anthropological research shaped through a robust feminist and technological focus on the very objects of research, particularly of indigenous groups and related study institutions. She specifically developed the concept of ‘boundary objects’. She describes that such type of objects [and I paraphrase] may be abstract or concrete — they are plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the limitations of the various groups that may use them, but are robust enough to also maintain a common identity even when they are moved from locality to locality. For me, the practices of Star and Lewin are encouraging examples because we see that investigative and experimental practice does not need to be limited to a passive / objective role of observation, but actively aspire to participate genuinely in the active and collective affects of the community, the subject, or the problem that it is being investigated.
Another slightly more recent dimension is ‘artistic research’. Now the term ‘artistic research’ is itself one that is highly contested. My perspective is that what determines research to be in the realm of (fine, visual, conceptual, performative, or sculptural) art is work that explores common intuition and perception in manners that may constitute in themselves as, or supplement, scientific research while not falling prey to techno-science. I use the word intuition very carefully, specifically as a valuable sense of potentiality that precedes knowledge.
What I mean is that the kind of artistic research that lives-up to its own category is, in its most elegant expression, an exploration of the areas of experience which cannot be instrumentalised for techno-science; and that it may even, unintentionally challenge the bonds of ethical scientific practice itself (as a genuine exploration that does not predispose expected, marketable outcomes).
Now, such requirement might suggest that I expect art to produce knowledge…
I am ardently against such requirement.
No form of art should ever, ever be subjected to such requirement, for it would destroy the very quality that potentialises art to be a genuine experience, one that is not necessarily in the domain of knowledge. I mean that a work of art may produce knowledge, and many artworks do this exceptionally well. But, again, I simply believe that artwork as research must be primarily concerned with generating valuable experiences that need not be quantitatively evaluated within the purview of knowledge production.
Last year I wrote a short essay titled “Normalising the beast: the scary hydra of indeterminacy in research as art” (Dec. 2016) and included a portion of it in the catalogue for my exhibition Impasse Finnesse Neverness at the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology of Bahia in Brasil (2017):
Ultimately, I want to here express that we must continue to push the boundaries of what constitutes research, precisely in order to be mindful of how it is itself instrumentalised: in one extreme how the Japanese hijack its meaning as an alibi for criminal activity; in the other extreme, how research institutions may much more subtly highjack research as a way to validate the recent public-private triumvirate of corporate, state, and academia, as a new type of control over authority, political speech, and freedom of expression.
NOTE
My opinions about artistic research are mostly shaped by the pioneering work of artist and educator Florian Dombois. As one of the first research artists to consciously pursue a PhD through artistic methodologies in the early 1990’s, Dombois coined the idiom “art as research”. In the process of proposing this term as a site itself of contesting research in art, he founded various institutes and publications, such as the Y Transdisciplinary Institute of Research in Bern (2003–2011) and the Journal for Artistic Research (2010-present). For me, through his work he does away with the awful stylisations of art for the sake of fitting preconceived determinations of value. ‘Art as research’ potentialises the indeterminate and often-indiscernible work of art that looks to question research itself as a medium. What I find most important about this type of artistic research is that it may lead to unforeseen methodologies and discursive esotericisms. I also think it may lead to experimental objects of science and art that nurture and broaden our common modes of perception without the often toxic intentionality of producing marketable outcomes, no less as the capitalisation of knowledge.
