An engaged contribution to thinking about interpretation in research in/into practice Griselda Pollock University of Leeds, UK g.f.s.pollock@leeds.ac.uk

I: Statement of Position

I am deeply wary of starting from the premise that there is an inherent difference between methods of evaluation of research in the scientific model and those modes typical of the arts and humanities.  Such a distinction often works hierarchically to validate the scientific model and to disqualify that which is used in the arts and humanities. The scientific model is taken as the norm against which the soft-edged and evaluatively subjective arts and humanities have to defend themselves like indulged or patronised children.  The typical scientist will suggest that it is relatively easy to establish research value in her/his community by means of such criteria as size and regularity of research grants (peer reviewed, networked), numbers of PhD students per researcher, and publication in a small number of community-acknowledged leading journals.  Perplexed, and possibly ignorant of or indifferent to other modes of research practice, the scientist will ask the artist how her/his research is to be adjudged as significant. This situation, which regularly occurs in interviews in research-led universities when artists apply for lectureships, is a result of the insulation of most practising scientists from any sociology of professional practices or anthropology of institutions, belief systems and knowledge as a social production.  Keeping the insights arising in the social sciences, arts and humanities at bay by means of simplistic caricatures of the touchy-feely nature of our research and its interpretation/evaluation, and thus keeping themselves uncritically within their own, invisibly postitivist models of research practice, the ordinary, scientifically-oriented researcher feels complacently secure in undermining as research the social and cultural analysis typical of the arts and humanities because the notion of knowledge of ourselves as thinking, sentient and affected beings is relegated to the non-scientific in favour of a model of knowledge in which the desires, interests and competences of the researching subject become invisible before the apparently passive world awaiting investigation. Feminist theory, let alone our old friend Sigmund Freud, has much to say about the factors determining this model of research. 1  Arts and Humanities have established that there is a  history, a sociology and a philosophy of science which easily demonstrate the presence of paradigms and their operation in defining the collectively-agreed criteria for what can be considered legitimate knowledge and relevant methods of seeking and verifying it. 2 Analysts of the history and practice of science ( and the scientific models in other non-science disciplines) increasingly underline the power of belief as well as the role of imagination and even

aesthetics in the creation and acceptance of its theories and conjectures.  A fine contemporary example of this is the enquiry into the understanding of the conditions of 'proof' proposed by scientist and thinker John Brockman, editor of Edge (itself a project of science intellectuals dealing with speculative research questions). Brockman posed the question: 'What do you believe to be true even though you cannot prove it?' to a range of  scientists and thinkers. It unleashed a storm of debate, unsettling precisely the classic distinctions between knowledge and belief, truth and thought, and exposing the role of imagination and even the aesthetic in all forms of creative thinking, including that undertaken by scientists. 3

Thus are we really convinced that there is a clear difference between the so-called scientific model which is unambiguous and collectively endorsed against which the pluralistic and less defensible modes of interpretation prevailing in the arts and humanities are to assessed, judged and perhaps found wanting? To fall prey to such a distinction would be not only to misrepresent the creativity, conjectural riskiness of the great moments of scientific advance, but also to fail to bring to bear on all areas of research the insights of social and cultural research about the social production of knowledge, and its psychological determinations. The irony of the positivist is s/he is unaware that s/he is a positivist; s/he is unaware that there are any '-ists' to be, that is, that every practice has already inbuilt assumptions that underpin modes of research and knowledge production and determine hence the evaluative and interpretative modes.   What constitutes knowledge or is accepted as truth cannot be claimed alone by those whose disavowed but still ideological position is a wilful misrecognition of the history and politics of its knowledge claims and the elasticity and interested nature of its practices of scientific research.

Such disturbances to crass positivism do not, however, deny that an epistemic shift did occur in the history of human investigation and search for understanding with the so-called scientific revolution (17th-18th centuries) that, displacing the hitherto theologically deductive explanation of phenomena and prime causes, has introduced a range of observational research and inductional interpretation of  collected data.  I would argue, however, that even this body of newly self-conscious scientific modes of research is susceptible to beliefs and to unprovable leaps of intuitive logic. Perhaps the most famous theorists of science, Karl Popper argued that the fundamental principle of science research is disprovability  or falsifiability rather than verifiability and provable certainty. 4 Moreover, we can plot out the ways in which scientific research has followed fashion, been implicated in military-political interests that fund certain research and discourage others, shape research priorities according to gender, class, race and monetary variables.  There is also plenty of evidence of an aesthetics in scientific research, the work of imaginative leaps and the appeal of beautiful explanations.  Without rejecting the Kantian call for us to be adults, to think for ourselves, testing the world against our capacity for critical judgement, evaluation and self-reflection, it is vital not to miss the vital distinction between the Enlightenment understood as reasoned critique and a reductive, instrumentalised Gradgrindism typical of bourgeois utilitarianism.  Fact! Fact! Fact!

Thus, out of stubbornness or folly, I have, therefore, never found the question of qualifying research in arts and humanities, and especially in the creative arts, a problem by virtue of the field rather than the problem of research itself. Perhaps this is the result of an engagement precisely with critiques of ideology, discourse theory, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, and the methods in the arts and humanities which at once dethrone the man-centred delusions inherent in the positivist scientific ideology: the subject /object relation, the unreflective hierarchy of knowing consciousness and the passively observed and directly known world. The moment one steps off the self-blinding

track of positivism and begins to recognise the social formations of knowledge production, while seeking to minimise ideological self-blinkering and acting in responsible awareness of the problems of all social production of knowledge, it becomes clear that there are a range of methods for producing and evaluating different kinds of activity as research while also excluding others. But this does occur on a science/arts binary.  Furthermore it is not fixed but dynamically conditioned in changing processes of history.

At the same time, we can perhaps agree on some fundamental issues.  In my own thinking and teaching about research, I identify a double axis: validity and significance.  All research must meet the test of validity which references the context, community and state of play of thinking and research in the field of subject area in which one is working.  Thus the researcher is obligated to look to the left and the right, to evaluate the state of research in the area, around the problem, in the field into which s/he wishes to intervene. It is only in relation to this sense of the lateral extent of the current field  and its vertical histories that the researcher can both perform and be adjudged for  making a significant contribution/intervention, that marks itself off as making a difference, extending knowledge while still belonging to what currently 'makes sense'. In analysing how artistic practice developed from the later 19th century, I proposed the model of reference, deference and difference as paradigmatic of this structure. 5 Within this formulation lie further common practices formulaically contained in the prescriptions for applications for research funding: key research questions addressed to and justified in relation to the validity test, research methods by means of which these questions can be explored, an archive of some material found, created or existing to which the questions can be posed and by which they can be explored.  Artistic practice as much as work in any other arts/humanities field can understand itself in these terms of validity and significance. In so far as the art practices behave as research in this mode of working with questions, methods and evaluability in relation to validity and significance, we can draw a useful distinction between creative activity and research in creative practices. Clearly not all artistic practice is oriented to research. Professional art making does not pose questions purposively. It does not see its methods as modes by which new and useful questions can be posed and explored. It does not situate itself in a context of such questioning. It does not aim to have as its outcome something which can be contextually validated as a contribution to knowledge/understanding. Thus the creative has several meanings, which will need to be distinguished. We can furthermore  thereby displace the mythology of individuated, spontaneous and eccentrically private artistic creativity which becomes subject to reflective and analytical discourse only once it has left the privacy of the studio and encountered the alien world of gallery, market and discourse, a mythology symptomatic of the privatised conditions of modern entrepreneurial capitalist cultural production.  None the less, the space of such private, self-defined pursuits has also produced some amazing results in terms of what we can retrospectively, as art historians or other kinds of cultural analysts, understand as context-shattering events of genuine creative transformation in culture. This is a paradox we shall need to explore so as to understand better how doctorates or research grants in the creative arts can be supported through the academic system. Novel writing  or musical composition per se are not research.  Yet such forms could be a research method or even an research output.  It is the self-critical and contextually referencing framing of a project that is involved in understanding the practice as the communal, culturally referential creation of knowledge by this means or that.

Thus, just as blue skies scientific research is restricted by the current conditions under which funding is allocated for research in these highly administered times, so the risks we face now in the arts and humanities are associated with a system of grant-based criteria for research activity and evaluation which makes every researcher, including the

increasingly professionalized and institutionalised artist-as-academic answerable to a mode of peer evaluation and institutional responsibility to the non-research community who oversees the funding councils. Here the troublesome issue comes with the specification of the difference between an output and an outcome, the specification of which is now demanded by the funding bodies.  Outcomes are the effect  produced by the research and its outputs. Achieving an outcome that can be recognised requires a degree of political nous and cunning self-reflexivity on the part of the researcher to know and be able to justify in advance the desirable nature of the outcome of a project whose whole purpose is to be creatively productive of new knowledge by means of the adventure of research.  Can failure be a legitimate outcome?  Can a negative finding be valued in this atmosphere?  In such a climate is the discussion about the criteria for valuation and interpretation a sign not so much of  fundamental difference between arts and science research, as  of the further instrumentalisation and administration of the hitherto less corporate modes of creative thought and imaginative research in arts and humanities, which created their own communities through the book  and the gallery?  Or is it a site of critical resistance to the trends towards such things as 'research management'?

Herein lies the contradiction which those of us involved with research in the creative arts and humanities confront.  Funding bodies specify the nature of the outcome desired: currently this is specified as  being of economic benefit to the community from whom the funding, as public money, is requested.  It is the narrowness of the imagination in which economic return on the investment-utilitarianism again- is deemed the only criterion by which such 'useless knowledge' production as  artistic or imaginative speculation is adjuged, that is to be contested.

In my paper I articulate some of my own impatience with the culture of research management and examine what the debates about research methods are doing to the practices of creative thought and the problem of interpretation.  Working from my own experience as a researcher in contest with the dominant values of the society in which I have worked, I shall explore the politics of interpretation made possible by inverting the current hierarchy and insisting on the necessity for the critical terms of analysis offered in the arts and humanities to contest the assumption that there is a scientific model to which the arts and humanities are other. 

II  A Practice of Interpretation

I think I do interpretation for a living.  That is to say, as an art historian become a cultural analyst who engages constantly with the challenge posed by art that has just been made, or is being made as part of a continuing practice, I am not merely researching the past to tell the stories typical of Art History.  Even when working with art from previous eras and moments, I am still asking myself: What is going on here? What am I looking at? Sometimes, as the historian, I want to know what made this work possible at its own moment. But the immediate questions concern the event, what is happening, in the work I must confront  not for the purposes of evaluation in the old sense of judgement, but in order to  speak, in the cultural place of expanded discourse, that which the work, in its own forms of practice, is introducing into culture.  So let me practice a bit with an extract from a longer study of the Italian-born Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino.  In 1999, Maiolino writes of a stage, circa 1990, in her practice which began in the later 1960s:

My first encounter with clay in 1989 provoked a storm inside me. Putting my hand in that wet mass of earth-dirt, matter-immediately a whole cosmos, a vision, presented itself. As material, clay is the perfect prototype. It carries within itself multi-form possibilities. Thus in

the realm of creation, we are placed before a paradox: form limits the life force, imprisons it, but none the less permits it to organize itself. As the embodiment of discipline, form is at the same time the beginning of death. I was seduced by these reveries and ended up literally planting my feet on the ground and my head in matter, giving rise to a new series of works that considered these vital questions while putting process first. 6

With her devastating lucidity, Italian-born Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino here identifies in the becoming of form the meeting of life and death. Maiolino thus  but without abandoning its necessity in any consideration of later twentieth century art practice. The artist insists on the philosophical profundity  that was made possible after, as well as because of, modernism's formalist self-consciousness, that is, its sense that serious art is made through a non-representational engagement with form-making as the thoughtful shaping of matter/medium. Through an aesthetic practice that is furthermore socially grounded and deeply political in its relation to the world, Maiolino's work participates in a major shift in twentieth century philosophy as well as post-formalist aesthetics inspired by the Henri Bergson's idea of what makes for time, namely thought induced by memory as opposed to matter which maybe organic but has no time, and thus no becoming. This understanding of creativity at the intersection of thought and matter has been  re-articulated by philosopher Gilles Deleuze in terms of difference and repetition, to which I shall return in due course.

My first encounter with the work of Anna Maria Maiolino was in 1996. This took place during the exhibition Inside the Visible: an elliptical traverse of the twentieth century in, of and from the feminine curated by Cathérine de Zegher. 7 Piles of moulded clay shapes occupied the gallery space in repetitions that generated endless difference. Simple, almost primal, forms provoked both sensuous, childish pleasure and art historical perplexity.  How to make sense of serial, modelled, clay sculptures, that had been made in the 1990s, a decade so dominated by  artwork created with new media,  referencing the cinematic, and, above all, addressed to the gaze, the visual rather than the tychic, the virtual rather than the material?  

In the retrospective of Maiolino organised in New York in  2002, titled, Vida Afora: Life Line, that linked life, line, drawing, language and an ethico-political project in art, Cathérine de Zegher identified in Maiolino's oeuvre a 'rigrous and congruent development that flows as a spiralling life line.' 8  Vida Afora is also the title of photographic poems by Anna Maria Maiolino which place a single egg or eggs in a variety of urban and often uncanny encounters. How, I am forced to ask, is line (drawing) linked to the clay works and  photographic installations of eggs?

The Modelled Earth series, begun at the end of the 1980s, was first formed an installation at the Kanaal Art Foundation, Kortrijk, Belgium in 1995, about whose 'intimate minimalism', Paulo Venancio Filho has written under the title 'The Doing Hand.' Filho saw in these works in unfired, newly modelled clay repetitions, a relation to food and language,  to body and thought. He identified Maiolino's investigation into community, proximity and togetherness, arguing that the artist's practice creates a humanised counter-point to the scale and alienation typical of  labour and its conditions of work  in modern industrial, urban society. 9

Anna Maria Maiolino is an articulate writer about her own work and its sources in memory. 

From a tender age I yearned for death.  Finding myself in the world was painful to me. (6 July 1986)

This is an affecting testimony both to a childhood memory and to a child susceptible to both an intensity of affect and a primordial sense of dislocation.  The artist describes tenderly the persistent struggle for life in her Italian family, in the impoverished, Southern region of her desolated countryin the wake of the devastation of World War II.  As the final, surviving child of a large family, the baby was often overlooked in the daily battle against immediate want.  Anna Maria Maiolino evokes her always distracted, active mother: 

Vivid in my memory are her hands, always white with flour, ever busy kneading bread dough for us, her children who were never properly sated. I was by her side as she worked, watching her closely with the hope that once she had washed her hands, she would take me in her arms, caress me. I waited in vain, for immediately her hands would be busy again, either sewing or washing clothes.  My mother's hands were never free from work. 10 

This is not simply an explanatory, autobiographical memory. Lyrically, the passage evokes a primal scene that becomes allegorical. We enter a vividly recalled scene of the child, who would become the artist, hungry for love and physical affection, staying close, watching, with attentive and yearning eyes, the work of maternal hands that shape the dough for bread and bind or repair the clothes to shield the family's bodies.  Moulding and binding will become hallmarks of Maiolino's later practice. Hands are the instruments by which the caring mother moulds from the earth's product necessary nourishment.  They promise an equally necessary embrace, sustenance for emotional needs.  Economic reality makes the working hands intimate with the struggle for what Walter Benjamin named bare life - blo&sslig;e Leben (zoë as opposed to bios). 11  Yet we must retain the image of the child watching the movements of the maternal hand that forges an invisible thread in space that might touch and bind, and become the string of connection as well as the passage for longed-for, missed affection.

  In a poem titled Of Thee + Me, written in 1995, at the time of Moulded Earth clay installations, Anna Maria Maiolino claims these working hands for herself, binding past and present, labour and art, care and creation.

My hands work I weave with the threads of hopeIn my shriek together dwell pleasurePainThe call of the children...

...My hands workThey washThey cookThey knead breadI mould clayAnd with my eyes I read philosophyI like poetry...Minhas mãos trabalhan Teço com os fios da esperançaConvivem no meu grito o prazera doro chamado dos filhos...

...minhas mãos trabalhanlavamlimpamcozinhamamasso pãomodelo argilae com meus olhos leio filosofiagusto de poesia...

1995 12

In a passage about 1990s, the artist further writes about:

...the emphasis on the EXPERIENCE OF MEMORY that approximates my work, particularly that of the 90s, to arte povera even more than to minimalist art, I think.  For the povera revalues the processes and aspects of man's labor in his culture linked to the fields and to manual work.  In addition to this feature, there are other issues shared in common, such as those of conceptual art, performance art; the utilization of worthless materials; the shunning of marketable art ( here I refer particularly to the clay installations, which are perishable). 13

I want to distinguish a human, generic mode of man's labor, from the specific modes of woman's labor that are here invoked. This difference stresses the deep personal and powerful cultural memories of time and place remembered through maternal hands as the embodiment of work,  of a kind of daily work as the struggle to maintain a life that, as a woman, she has also created, hands watched and remembered by an anxious daughter, with equal measures of anguished longing and creative identification.  The combination of a personal recollection, recreating a childhood scene, with a measured reflection on late twentieth century artistic allegiances to socially oriented arte povera rather than a distanciating minimalism, further linked with the deeper thoughts about form as both the realization of life but also its inevitably deadly limitation, deliver us into the challenging complexity of the world, the cosmos, the vision, created by  the work  of Anna Maria Maiolino as a language she had to create.

My dedication to the formation of a language demanded a great deal of time, patience and work. At the beginning of my work as an artist, I believed that the formation of a language would come about only through the organization of my sensibility. It took years for me to discover that, besides sensibility, the formation of a language is also the result of a practice of interrelation with the things of the world. 14

'Organization of sensibility' is perhaps a fundamental mode of training for the artist who must become aware of, and take ownership of a specific and singular way of seeing and feeling which is offered to the world as but one of many sensibilities that can enlighten us, each from its own singularity, as to what it is to be, to be human and to feel, look, see and think. Organizing sensibility would result in choices about the materials to be used in making artworks, the scale, the aesthetics of mark-making, gestures. Intensity and anguish are contained because, I suggest, Anna Maria Maiolino has created for herself a language that registers through the gesture of the mobile hand the creative difference of the repeating becoming of form. 

After 1989, Anna Maria Maiolino worked  with the earth-clay. In Biblical Hebrew,  earth/clay is adamah.  This gives rise to the concept of Ha-Adamah, the primordial, generic,

ungendered, living human creature, who was modelled- the verb used in the original Hebrew text invokes the work of the potter-from the earth. His later proper name Adam will come from this origin. In repeating the originary gesture of primal forming, the human hand shapes material which then, as the poem suggests, elaborates itself into daily tasks that become freighted with social and gendered meanings: caring, relationship, washing, cooking, kneading bread.  Her poem says that 'my hands work' 'Minhas mãos trabalhan' - the verb in Portuguese links across the Latin languages to deliver in English the word travail, which is archaically used to refer to women's work/labour in childbirth.  Making and bringing forth, these words in the Bible register the creative genesis appropriated by the paternal-masculinized God of the Abrahamic tradition in Genesis while secreting within it the other kind of labour/travail: making, creation, life in, of and from the feminine.  Her hands working remembered her mother's hands working. They link a personal, localised family history of the Italian-born migrant artist with the mythologies of creation across a Bachelardian phenomenology of elemental matter: clay/earth/adamah.

The poem, furthermore, produces an imaginary human body that connects the ever-working hands with the reading eye.  While the hands work, to make things, to make continue  life, eyes consume: ideas and thoughts variously articulated as philosophy and poetry.  The poem offers an integrated vision of the manual and the intellectual, binding the active and the contemplative life that is also enacted in the making of the clay installations.

The clay works were specially for each exhibition. Being unfired, raw, uncooked in the Levi-Straussian sense, they would be remade for each of the future venues, taking time and energy. Their existence testifies to a performative dimension, but more importantly, to duration and becoming. The presence of the artist, the time taken to make, the evidence of  the repetition of a human gesture, each time different, because each moment and each movement registers a distinctly human process and registers humanly-lived time which is never repeatable, all this is 'documented'  by the objects as traces the viewer confronts in the 'exhibition'.  Multitudes and variations of the basic forms of clay have been manipulated by the 'doing hand' and the remembering eye, bringing past and present together. Yet, they are not formed into anything, into things.  The moulded forms exist to register the work of the hand: in their physical and material forms, they, therefore, embody gesture, isolating its work from the living body and remembering mind in a physical and visible form. This makes the gesture more than the fact of manual labour,  which has been reduced to mindless repetition by the industrial system. During the industrial revolution the once skilled human worker was often reduced to the attribute of the mighty machine. In English, workers were known merely as 'hands.'  

Coils that might be built up into a great pot remain coils, snakes, ropes, strings and dampened, hand moulded earth. Lumps that could be gouged to form a basic hollow and container- the bowl-wait, still lumpen and solid. Tiny balls of clay, thickened loaves of clay, circular biscuits of clay sliced from a thick sausage or rolled clay, lie in cupboards or pile up on the floor.  They have become nothing. They are, none the less, eloquent of the becoming of form through the freighted human gesture. They can convey sensation, movement and affect. The objects are indexical, not metaphorical, of the gestures of the doing hand. They register the primordial action of making-the first human intervention in the material world-that the artist suggests can be understood as the beginnings of the human movement towards language and culture. These non-objects insist on that history of human making which involves both skill and labour, contact and energy, work and invention, but also memory as the presence of consciousness in what we do.  They remind us of time, of duration, which is the interval for both memory and thought.  They await

language and are its beginnings.  But they are also pregnant, pregnancy being the image for such a becoming in time.

In the clay installation, as in the sculpture/installations, neither the symbolic nor the allegorical is utilized  The intent is that of being in a real, not illusory space for it is what it is. LABOR:  productions of the hands' first actions in the ordering of the clay-basic forms, an accumulation of expended energy.'... There is here an IMMANENT YEARNING FOR TOTALITY, reinforced by the obsessive reuniting of parts and extending of the process in time. In the space the process traverses, a potency of life, which is transformed in the course of time, is articulated. We could speak of the symbolic in these works if we can then view them as concretions of parts of an unattainable and incomprehensible whole and not as representations of a concept. 15

Here Anna Maria Maiolino invokes her philosophical reflections on time, memory, matter and totality, fully articulated from Spinoza to Bergson, Levinas and Deleuze. Anna Maria Maiolino reports that after she made a clay work bearing the Pirandellian title,  Um, Nenhum, Cem Mil in 1993, her son suggested that she buy Difference and Repetition  by  Gilles Deleuze, 

...for the question I was raising in my work happened to be in line with the author's thinking. When I finished reading it, which was only recently (1999), I felt deeply moved.  In some of the passages, I fully identified with what was expounded.  Curiously, in my written reflections about my work, out of pure intuition and complete hon 16esty, I had been timidly dealing with the same question...'

Deleuzian thinker Brian Massumi opens his book  on  Movement, Affect, Sensation:

When I think of my body and ask what it does to earn that name, two things stand out. It  moves.  It feels. In fact, it does both at the same time. It moves as it feels and it feels itself moving.... If you start from an intrinsic connection between movement and sensation, the slightest, the most literal displacement convokes a qualitative difference, because as directly as it conducts itself, it beckons a feeling, and feelings have a way of folding into each other, resonating together, interfering with each other, mutually intensifying...Qualitative difference: immediately the issue is change. Felt and unforeseen. 17  

Challenging the dominance of the linguistic models in semiotics and post-structuralism which have had such impact on both art and art theory since the 1960s, Massumi invites us to reconsider the body through the Deleuzian reading of art in relation to memory, movement, sensation and affect. In Thought beyond Representation 18, Simon O'Sullivan quotes Deleuze's  Difference and Repetition 'Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.' 19  (My emphasis) The point of the distinction is to invite us to understand the creativity of change brought about by difference and to think about certain practices in art as generating encounters rather than [Kantian] objects. In the chapter to which Anna Maria Maiolino herself specifically refers in her writing, Deleuze thus explains difference.

Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given, that by which the given is given as diverse. Difference is not the phenomenon but the noumenon closest to the phenomenon. It is, therefore, true that God makes the world by calculating, but his calculations never work out exactly (juste), and this inexactitude or injustice in the result, this irreducible inequality, forms the condition of the world. The world

'happens' while God calculates; if this calculation were correct, there would be no world.  The world can be regarded as the 'remainder', and the real in the world understood in terms of fractional or even incommensurable numbers.  Every phenomenon refers to an inequality by which it is conditioned. Every diversity, and every change refers to a difference which is its sufficient reason.  Everything which happens and everything which appears is correlated with orders of differences:  differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential difference of intensity. 20

It is precisely here that we can link the creative processes and thought in Maiolino's work to the Deleuzian concept of difference, marking the difference therein between modernist seriality which may serve a fantasy of control and order and creative repetition as a poetic gesture opening up the space for the otherness of the world so that a joint -self/world, mind/material, hand/memory, past/present- planned but unforeseen creation occurs.

I experience encounter  as creative in Anna Maria Maiolino's work. I sense the memory-freighted hand working with the fundamental materiality of the earth to form repeatedly the beginnings of forms that collectively bear witness to the process by which the new is produced, by which the creativity that is difference happens. This passage also echoes Anna Maria Maiolino's distinction between a calculated, mathematical seriality associated with some more rigid forms of minimalism and the creative, unpredictably varying repetitions she undertakes as the actions of the human body at work on the material of the world that cannot rigidly be repeated precisely because, in every repeated action, time has intervened, memory has played a role, humanising consciousness and unconscious determinations have been mobilised. The deep distinction we are seeking is between what I shall name the aesthetics of the death-drive (which involves a compulsion to repeat) involved in the twentieth century's exploration of form which is repetition without difference:  seeking law, order, the grid, system, anti-body, rationalistic and, on the other hand, the aesthetics of life, of a genesis, which is repetition with/as difference, repetition that delivers difference as an unpredictable virtuality. 21 

Virtuality, understood philosophically rather than cybernetically, is, according to the philosophy of Henri Bergson, what gives rise to both a future, namely change, and to affects rather than only statements. The virtual may be actualized, and this is radically different from the possible becoming real.  To be possible, it must always already be within the real in which it will be realized.  But while the virtual may be actualized, the actual will always be heterogeneous vis-à-vis the virtual.  The latter does not predict or limit the former. Thus the virtual, beyond the existing real with its unrealized possible, thus marks the creative break, that which is not predicted, or pre-determined. Thus virtuality in/as art becomes a force for the truly creative, which has no predictable mode of actualization: that is always discovery by experiment.  This is the meaning of difference as creativity which may serve us in thinking about the project of interpretation and evaluation of what constitutes a creative activity as a research activity.  But if creativity may be considered thought it is not necessarily, critical, reflective and other-oriented thought. So how can we think about art as thought, as capable of producing knowledge rather than its own vital, creative and significant event.

III   Another Theory of Encounter

A quotation:

Thinking with art, thinking through art, thinking about art, thinking art historically, thinking historically through art, art as thinking, thinking as art, theorizing with/in/through the

encounter with or the process of the artwork: these are possibilities that now find a rich resource in the  work of Eva Hessse and others of that particularly interesting in the generation of the 1960s in Europe, Asia and America. This kind of thinking is embodied and subjectivizing, drawing on elements of subjective processes that the encounter between psychoanalysis and aesthetics is slowly finding ways to address.

When I was invited to participate in a conference on Research into Practice 2008 on 31 October 2008 at the Royal Society of Arts, London to explore the problem of interpretation in research in the visual and performing arts, the organizers suggested that I might like to expand on the above paragraph written in 2006 in an introduction to a collection of papers created around the retrospective exhibition devoted to the work of Eva Hesse in San Francisco, Wiesbaden and the Tate Gallery in 2004. 22  The striking fact about the collection of essays is that they were mostly written by artists who had themselves expanded their own practices into theoretical and art historical domains without foregoing their foundation in the world of practice, thinking about art through the experience of making art.  This gave the book a distinctive quality which was intended to challenge the predominant art historical project which, ever revisiting the astonishing oeuvre of Eva Hesse (1936-1970) sought to establish, in  each different curatorial sweep (major retrospectives occurred in 1972, 1979, 1986, 1992, and 2004) a new and possibly definitive interpretation of the origins, purposes, importance of the works and the artist's place in art  history.

Encountering Eva Hesse based its deployment of the term encounter from Bracha Ettinger's post-Lacanian and feminist psychoanalytical-aesthetic reworking of  the concept of encounter-event, whose philosophical genealogy can be traced back through Deleuze to Spinoza and his attempt to theorize what makes us begin to think: the encounter with the world. 23 Two key points about approaching art through the model of encounter could be summarised as: A refusal to confine art within the art historical model of being the product of a historical moment that can only then be interpreted as its expression, index or embodiment.A refusal to confine the art-work to a historical time zone: and thus, in contrast,Raising the paradox of how it is that work that clearly does emerge at a specific time, bearing the marks of that moment as the conditions of its existence, but, none the less, exceeds the limitations of such conditions of emergence to sustain the possibility of  renewed presentness, presenting itself each time it is encountered in a creative present of unharvested possibilities and unexhausted interpretations.What, therefore, is the time of art and how does it complex temporalities inflect our question of interpretation?  This relates to two other propositions I want to introduce. 

The first is that the art work, if it is truly creative, exists in a double space in which it can be recognized by its own contemporaries. The first space is its i relation to an existing framework through which it can be validated. The communities can be large or very small: Picasso, Braque, Gertrude Stein and Kahnweiler at the emergence of Cubism,  Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner as each other's interlocutors in the daily making of abstract painting  at East Hampton - just to name two examples of conversational rather than institutionalised communities typical of the process in avant-garde modernism. At the same time, it will be adjudged significant in so far as it transgresses/ transcends the already existing validations.  Thus, while being affectively  registered as creative, the aesthetic event is not exactly knowable in its entirety at the first point of emergence in terms of the critical appraisal or cultural institutions that consolidate art as part of cultural memory.  Its moment of novelty is precisely traumatic. It cannot be entirely known. Following on from the insights of Isabelle Wallace, presented initially at a CAA session in Toronto in 1999, on

trauma and representation, I would want to suggest that certain kinds of important art are to be understood as traumatic vis-à-vis their moment of emergence: that is to say, that the terms available at that moment for the interpretation of the event of the new art work are inadequate to what, as art work, the work has expanded, or breached or changed. 24  Thus critical language, and especially art historical interpretative language, risks being always somewhat anachronistic, only able to recognize what has already been accommodated, or become familiarized and thus struggling to 'see' the new.  This accommodation or familialiarization is a belated registration of the input or disturbance to culture initiated by the earlier traumatic interruption of the new, of the work of art as work of art as poetic.

Thus the art work as event, which must be grounded in certain relations of possibility and realizability, is also, on another different register, virtual. It is thus not a repetition, but a difference/differencing, that will set in motion the processes by which, eventually, the necessary terms of critical interpretation may emerge which can then, retrospectively, make sense of the event that initiated the process: what has happened.  Thus thinking about the traumatising inruption of the new in the painting by Edouard Manet, Olympia (1863-5) and the failure of the work to be readable in 1865 in any terms available to its contemporary critics, or even to the artists in his own community, Isabelle Wallace traces a moment of a reading of Manet's gesture in the much later work of  twentieth century American painter, Jasper Johns, seemingly placed at the 'moribund end' of the very 'tradition' initiated by Manet's indecipherably inaugurating gesture: Modernism.  Thus Wallace writes:

Revisiting the notion that Modernism began with  Olympia, I reiterate that art historical commonplace with the following difference; rather than perpetuate the notion that Olympia gave birth to Modernism in the sense that what followed was the natural elaboration of Manet's project (here the standard language of genesis and renewal), I will instead suggest that what followed within the trajectory now called Modernism, was with few exceptions, the willful represssion of the trauma occasioned by Olympia's initial display.  Arguing that the trauma found its most acute (though by no means only) articulation in the deferred context of an abstract painting by Jasper Johns, I claim that it is only in Modernism's collapse that Manet achieves his full inheritance. 25

There are many things we could discuss from this rather shocking but to me convincing proposition: one is that the traumatic structure of event-delay-repression-return of the repressed-the classic structure of the traumatic according to Freud-is worked out through the practices which are the only site of this relay. That is,  it is only between what Wallace identifies as the bookends  between modernism's initiation and demise that a new interpretation of modernism's perplexing emergence and demise can be plotted in this artistic enactment of Nachträglichkeit: deferred action or in Jean Laplanche's more effective translation of Freud's German concept: afterwardness. 26  Johns' practice might thus stand up to both art historical analysis and the kind of evaluation of its work as research!

I have introduced this all too brief and cryptic foray into a complex territory of the temporalities of artworking-its out of time-ness, its afterwardness, its unexhausted capacity for generating effects untamed by even accumulations of interpretative texts, which themselves may attempt to master, and thus confine, the work's creative-traumatic-event-ness to the already known modes of appropriation, in order to create a space from which to start my deviant thoughts.

The moment in which I wrote the text about encountering art, in a book on Eva Hesse, was at the 'end' of a project linking Feminism and the Visual Arts that had been established as an interdisciplinary MA/PhD  programme in the School of Fine Art at Leeds in 1992. It was only at that moment, twenty years into the new wave of late 20th century feminism, that it had become possible to create a dedicated feminist art/art history MA/PhD programme. But it was a programme that had, of necessity, to defy the existing and well-entrenched divisions between fine art and art history, and between art practice and theory, between theory and history.  Thus my programme was triangulated: creating encounters between theory, practice and history, and between artists, art historians and cultural theorists.  The participants could enter from any one of the points of the triangle, but would have to work with the others. The outcomes might be a fine art exhibition, an art historical thesis, a curatorial project.   Onto this project came a range of artists, art historians and would be critics and curators, seeking a way beyond certain confining disciplinary limits they had encountered in the organisation of knowledge and advanced study in fine art, art history, curatorial practice or critical theory. They shared the interdisciplinary goal of working with feminist-inflected visual  theory and visual arts, without losing the real respect for disciplinary specificities: the art would not be any less rigorously art for its expanded critical relation to text and thought, and the art historical writing would not be less rigorously interrogative of historical conditions and genealogies for coming to a deeper understanding of making and of cultural theory while critical theory would itself be rethought through encounters with practices of art thinking. The theoretical writing would not lose its tough pressure on concepts yet the triangulation placed the three points of the triangle in endless dialogue and mutual criticism of what each excluded in their 'takes' on the other areas: theory, history, practice. New forms of thinking, making and writing were produced at these intersections and translations.

The programme in Feminism and the Visual Arts was a realized dream that lasted about ten years, before it was brutally ended through a combination of new economic imperatives and a deep failure of academic imagination as the restoration of  old divisions between domains was reasserted. The programme in Feminism and the Visual Arts was a serious institutional intervention to breach the theory/practice divide, and to create the conditions for interactive, interlocking and yet distinct practices of thinking about and with and through art to take place and generate new kinds of both art writing and art practice with a set of means for validating significance within the boundary-transgressing creativity.  It produced about 12 PhDs, a third of which were in practice as well as over 45 MA dissertations and art exhibitions. The project was a resolution to a contradiction that many of us have painfully lived through, and even caused: the culture wars and border wars of the 1970s when the dominant notions of studio practice tried to withstand, or felt themselves violated by, the intrusion of a highly critical calls for new political and ethical responsibilities in art education. Translated:  in the name of new social movements by women, lesbian and gay people, postcolonial and ethnic minorities, demands were made by artists and historians seeking the means to articulate more complex subjectivities and positionalities than those recognised by hegemonic theories of the artist, the studio, art itself as some kind of unmarked universal creative individualism.  

I recall a major moment in Leeds history in the later 1980s, when Lawrence Gowing, former Chair of Fine Art at Leeds and a practitioner of the most extraordinarily fine art writing as an artist about other artists (I am thinking of his book on Vermeer) was called upon as an external examiner in fine art to assess the degree show of Sutapa Biswas, a show that included her remarkable monumental work Housewives with Steakknives (now in the collection of the Bradford Museums and Galleries) and politically ironic appropriation of Jasper Johns' Flag, reread through the difficulties of Indian immigrants to locate

themselves in relation to British legal identities signified by the flag. Her work was rich in references to Terry Atkinson's work, to Fred Orton's lectures on Jasper Johns and American modernism and my work on feminist re-readings of women in the visual arts especially with regard to the invisibility of Indian culture for instance in feminist art histories.  Gowing did not, could not see Biswas's work, and any of its visually articulated conversations with American modernism, British conceptualism, feminist art histories. His criterion for assessing all art was: 'Did it move me?' The trauma of Biswas's artistically articulate and critically conceptual painting practice left Gowing not only unmoved ( without the usual identificatory erotics offered to the white heterosexual man believing himself to be  the  artist) . On the contrary,  Gowing was as it were left rivetted to the ground,  blinded-castrated perhaps-by what he could not allow himself to encounter and thus to see in the work of a young Indian woman artist taking her place and staking her well-grounded and knowing claim for a place in contemporary art practice and debate.  After some hours of argument about the case, Gowing acknowledged, at the assessment table, that he had no memory of the paintings to which I was referring. Thus in neurotic defence, he appeared to have had no memory of  seeing the huge and unforgettable paintings in Biswas's show: an invisibility and amnesia of vast impressive canvases that occurred not at the level of physical presence but of the psycho-social intelligibility sustained by the complex of both languages of art reading/writing available to Gowing, a Euston Road painter formed ca 1950, and to Gowing the heterosexual Englishman confronting the undoubtedly angry postcolonial irony of a knowing student of Atkinson, Orton and Pollock at Leeds.

It was a question of gender.  But gender is not to be understood as the synomym for sex and thus the attribute of men versus women as men versus women. According to historian Joan Scott, gender is to be understood as one of the most potent forms for the expression of power. I now can re-read the Gowing-Biswas scenario as the embodiment of this power relation. 27 Gender as power works through both the social proscription, by the privileged subject, of other meanings from other places, positions and centres of subjective experience, and the psychic defence against the threat posed by the discovery that there are such differences, and othernesses through which the postion of the I - the One - the subject - is relativised and shifted.  Intepretation in this case? Without self-acknowledgement of our own investments and defences, we will simply enact comforting prejudices that inhibit the changing/ differencing encounter with the otherness of the creative and otherness of the creator.

The feminist, post-colonial and queer movements are, therefore, not a matter of polite requests for tolerance and tolerated minority status within an unchanged hegemony: they are themselves displacers and deconstructors of the fundamental relations of power that have been articulated symbolically by terms such as master/slave, self/other and man/woman which continue to haunt the evaluative and interpretative process.

Introducing these philosophical terms, reminds us of another contemporary challenge to the Gowing position that was already an agonising/agonistic part of the studio experience of the 1970s and early 1980s. It was represented at Leeds by the presence of Terry Atkinson, an artist representing not only the emergence of interrogative and self-critical practices  that art history and the museum wishes to frame as Conceptual Art, but its specific British intellectually urgent and political astute moment in the group called Art Language.  This group rejected the Gowing approach: 'does art move me?' in favour of a much tougher and more intellectually demanding art education in Wittginsteinian and Austinian language theory and in linguistic philosophies coupled with other sociological/philosophical assaults on the deepest of studio and art education ideologies: the self-

possessing individual, anatomised by Canadian political philosopher, C. B. Macpherson as 'Possessive individualism'. 28 If  Art Language roundly trashed the idea of the self-possessing individual was epitomised by the artist in his studio making his work in self-determining and self-realizing autonomy, at the same time, the delusion that language can be private and personal (central to the old idea of the artist creating his version of the truth) was eviscerated by Art Language's intense theoretical deconstructions. Then came Victor Burgin and others to identify the utterly social conditions under which what art is, is produced in conditions and relations of social and ideological production. For Burgin, art is the effect of all the discourses and institutions that name it, speak it, interpret it. Discourse creates its object.

The exceedingly painful struggle in and over art in the studios that I witnessed and to which I also contributed in my own university, between an emergent conceptual art and the residue of Euston Road mid-century post Fry/ sub-Greenberg formalism, was evidently heightened by the concurrent culture wars in art history.  Not only was the classic museal art historical model of modernism represented by Alfred Barr's great Wolfflinian schema - movement-style-master-generator-influence-descent being challenged by a revindicated Marxism seeking to bring history into a picture otherwise plotted purely chronologically, but even the intellectual brilliance of Greenberg's Kantianism - the aesthetically autonomous conditions of judgement -was subjected to critical examination by feminists and postcolonial critics. Let me give you another  example.  On the Rothko Wikipedia site, I found this statement made by Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko in the June 13, 1943 edition of The New York Times

1. To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks. 2. This world of imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense. 3. It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way. 4. We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth. 5. It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted.

There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing.

We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.

Silence is so accurate.

How about that as a statement of research questions and objectives for an AHRC grant application. Everything about this statement already speaks of the radically different conditions in which it was possible for the artists to imagine their practice in terms which invoke adventure-space exploration was still to come-framed by the notion of the frontier so vital to American national imagination with the open plains traversed manfully by the lone white explorer. The statement instantiates the fundamental notion of self-possessive individualism,  coupled with the engine of the avant-garde: transgression.  The key relations are between art and society, between the fixed and the settled, the bourgeois patron and the vanguard heroic artist whose art is untrammelled, explorative and transgressive. Yet,at the same time, according to this trio of American frontiersmen, the art

they make is entirely validated by two absolutes. It must be good painting and engage with timeless, tragic subject matter.

I introduce this almost iconic moment, text and image to remind us of the critical historical disjuncture that now exists between the conditions of articulation of artistic postures and relations between the cultural institutions of artistic validation and cultural memory and the practitioners and their apologists, the critics within the still utopian and even residually Trotskyist concepts of the avant-garde. What we need now, as we consider the conditions of PhDs  and grant applications and RAE/Fs in art practice, is another kind of historical work: a history of art education in Britain.   The Coldstream Report in 1960 recommended the abolition of a Diploma in Art for the National Diploma in Art and Design which was to be of degree standard and provide a liberal education in art. I suspect we should see our deliberations today as a the historical extension of this  originating event and the debates and challenges it posed by the attempt to formalise a mode of aspirant university-based education in lieu of the art school model of craft training and studio-based apprenticeship with its informal modes of the accumulation of relevant knowledges through an extended relation to cultural sites, practices and resources. The impulse encoded in the Rothko/Gottlieb/Newman statement falls into direct conflict with the Coldstream project. The former is sustained by a free-market dealer-critic system backed up by institutional legitimating patronage. The other is the legacy of British attempts to harness art education and design training to the economic and symbolic demands of the industrial nation. By the 20th century, this project was to be state-funded and thus administered according to a criterion of the larger social good and economic outcome.

The introduction of art into the university, first passing through the polytechnic era which allowed for a vocational practice model supplemented by the most rudimentary of liberal-critical and contextual studies rumbled along for  thirty years or so until the 1992 merger when the incorporation of art schools into research-funding driven universities and the submission of all universities to a research agenda which is only partially about the intellectual project and increasingly about funding models, has created the institutional situation in which we now find ourselves.  The concept of research and the attempt to align art with research, which also involves the redefinition of research in relation of policies of research management and planning, runs into two difficulties. The first is the hegemony of the science model with its twin aspects of validation by income generation and highly selective peer review ( limited journals, old boy network science councils allocating monies in conjunction with industry and government imperatives). The other is the equally contestable relation between methods of evaluation of research between the arts and humanities and the performance or practice-based areas.    For it is possible to generate some models for assessing arts and humanities research in terms of peer-reviewed journals, university presses, grants and PhD student numbers, mimicking the science model, and depending to a still dangerous degree on the political dominance of certain disciplinary norms which pass as quality judgements.

In the still uncertain conditions of attempting to align artistic practice with its own complex and contested histories of residual avant-gardisms and possessive individualisms on the one hand, and the more distempered conceptual self-criticality, institutional critique and art inflected by feminist, post-colonial and queer problematics with the uncertain and fragile conditions of research evaluation and research modelling of the post 1992 universities, we confront some pretty fundamental difficulties. The most primary of these is the notion of a research requirement which is subject to monitoring, management and evaluation.  It seems to make sense that people in universities will do research.  But what it is we do that is called research is not what it was that was done as such before the apparatus which

now governs its practice was institutionalised uncritically. So now I need to swerve away once more into another frame.

IV Anthropology and Sociology

In 2000 Marilyn Strathern edited a collection of anthropological essays reflecting on the very conditions for the production of that knowledge, in the university, under the aegis of a new culture of accountability that she names Audit Culture. 29  Audit culture links management, performance indicators, financial constraints and rewards in ways which fundamentally alter the very conditions for the production of and the nature of academic knowledge. It not only commodifies it further but renders its production the very ground for the penetration into independent thinking by a new structure of management.  We have lived for more than a decade under this new regime, which the anthropologists, reflecting, of necessity, on their own conditions of work as indicative of the culture of their practices as thinkers, researchers and knowledge producers, identify as a culture. They argue, that audit culture is a culture whose purpose is to stop us doing what we used to consider as production of knowledge.  Regulated, monitored, pre-assessed, outcome-oriented, peer-reviewed, these practices of accountability not only produce the determining conditions in which it is possible to access funds to do research, but it changes the relations of the creative scholar to creativity and innovation, marking those who succeed in getting grants as exemplary as against those who pursue individual, long-term, non-monitored, unaccountable dedication to research and scholarship as an act of creative freedom.  To get grants involves a degree of subjection to the peer review that prescribes the framing of research in relation to that which is by definition can be recognized and will gain valorization in the open and unpredictable free-for all that is ostensibly responsible peer-review

A second text of specific relevance is sociological and marks one of the many recent publications by the leading sociological thinker, Zygmunt Bauman, who has designated the character of our current epoch, that is no longer simply post-modernity; in a new turn,  he names it liquid modernity. 30 The modern that is now liquid is as the subtitle suggests a society of permanent and self-generating uncertainty, whose effects are liquid fear, liquid life, and well as liquid modernity. This means that there is no longer the fantasy of a telos, however, deluded post-modern melancholy subsequently found modernism's belief in progress to be.  There is no longer a solid world against which avant-garde transgression can productively and critically pit itself. Now modernization, that is to say instant obsolescence and constant novelty defined as only that which replaces what has temporarily become fashionable, modernizes for the sake of modernization,  changes for the sake of change, which means for the sake of allowing new investments to realize new profits, utterly subject to the demands of endless production and consumption, commodity circulation.  Fashion goes beyond even the Baudelairean valuation of the transitory and contingent versus some consensually agreed eternal beauty or value. It becomes a powerful imperative that renders everything already outmoded by the moment of its appearance, knocking out in the same blow any notion of accumulation of wisdom, delayed understanding, or long-term analysis, or even the afterwardness of that which takes even a century to work itself through resistance to acknowledgement.

 I was recently giving a lecture in Bristol, at which a student interested in the question of non-representation and trauma, blithely declared that Resnais and Lanzmann were old-fashioned and she wanted to find out what were the new ways that the Holocaust could be represented.  Certainly, dethroning the strangulating power of iconic works of art that might block the path to the exploration of further dimensions of a major issue is part of the

necessary iconoclasm of innovative thinking. But what deeply disturbed me was the notion that simply by being a little old, these works were by definition to be overthrown because of being old-fashioned. The idea that the long and painful struggle of major artistic minds with the challenge of such extremity could be so casually demoded quite literally horrified me. It is emblematic of what Frederic Jameson already identified in the 1980s as symptomatic of a loss of historical depth, the creation of postmodern depthlessness whose cultural identity emerges in pastiche rather than critical archaeology of the past, reduced to its  replicable and retro-infused styles rather than questions, arguments, methods, engagements.

But it is upon the subtitle of Bauman's  2007 publication Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty book that I want to insist. 31  It fascinates me and links back to the problematic of audit culture.  Living in an Age of Uncertainty. It seems to me that it is the very uncertainty of liquid modernity that has generated the  almost paranoid cultures of accountability, the compulsion to subject that which most seems to escape its managed logics to the most alien and alienating of schemes of measurement.  For be assured, the project of audit culture is not to manage/foster creative thought, but to diminish risk. Audit culture symptomatically attempts to stabilise an hitherto tolerated, and even fostered otherness and riskiness of creative thought, independent and individual artistic or intellectual activity which was deemed necessary to a certain progressive concept of modernity's forward advance. Indeed Popper's theorization of falsifiability in scientific thought was a condition for maintaining what he considered the open society.

If we are going nowhere (the fate of a liquid modernity that has no goal but novelty) but must appear to produce the new, other logics and ideologies will fashion modes of our existence.  Accountability now determines the modes of evaluation and interpretation because they insinuate the criteria upon which the latter must be founded. Accountable for what, to whom by what criteria? So I am arguing that we must situate our current debates about 'research in practice' and  its terms of interpretation in such larger frameworks in order to become recognise of what forces, tendencies and repressions we are becoming the willing and articulate performers.

What the anthropologists in Audit Culture note is  the proliferation of measures of accounting and auditing, but also their application, or rather their gross misapplication to improbable and improper areas. What the sociologist notes is:

...the collapse of long-term thinking planning and acting, and the disappearance or weakening of social structures in which thinking, planning and acting could be inscribed for a long time to come, leads to a splicing of both political history and individual lives into a series of short-term projects and episodes which are in principle finite, and so not combine into the kinds of sequences to which concepts like development, maturation, career or progress could be meaningfully inscribed.

I hope you can recognise within Bauman's prescient statement the ways in which audit cultures as the defensive mode of  knowledge production in liquid modernity are framing our practices to the specific project, the outcome or even the output.  Let me place before the phrasing of the terms for this conference itself:

It is characteristic of research outputs, reports and theses in traditional disciplines that they are expressed in unambiguous language.

One reason for this is to establish the grounds and argument from which the conclusions derive. 

Another reason is to be quite clear and explicit about what is being claimed as original by the author for the research. 

This characteristic has the effect of reinforcing the dominant knowledge models such as "the scientific method", "empirical methods", etc. However these models come from disciplines whose aims and objectives may differ from those in the arts and humanities. There has been much discussion about the suitability of such models for the visual and performing arts, which seem to rely on a more pluralistic approach to interpretation which values the fact that different generations and different cultures find their own value in the artefact. 

Does this difference of explicitness between traditional disciplines and the arts mean that their research outputs cannot be compared? 

What is the status of the outcomes of research in the visual and performing arts in terms of what is known or discovered? Is research in these areas actually trying to achieve something quite different, and if so what? Is the value of research something constructed by the receiver, and if so what would that mean for knowledge-models in the arts? Are its outcomes more contingent than those in other disciplines because of this difference in the role of interpretation by the reader/viewer? 

Does the scientific method really result in unambiguous interpretation, or conversely is interpretation really so subjective in the arts? 

The conference will focus on the theory of interpretation in research in traditional disciplines and on the emerging theory of interpretation in research in the visual and performing arts. 

Conference topics that might be considered include, but are not restricted to:

are unambiguous research outputs in the arts possible or desirable?are the problems of interpretation in the arts different from other disciplines?do the interpretational problems in arts stem from its media or from its aims?can anything be learned from studies in interpretation in other humanities subjects?in the historical past were issues of interpretation viewed differently?do the arts have special advantages that compensate for any perceived disadvantages with respect to interpretation of outcomes?how does the author/reader problem affect research?

The existence of this conference or project with its working papers marks the creation of a  level of metacommentary on the problem. It already invests the field with theoretical and critical currencies as well as professional and career opportunities of giving papers, creating journals,  classifying tendencies, bodies, building centres and I would thus argue it is a development which is an effect of both the audit culture and attempts to negotiate it within the expanded academy.

I am deeply wary of the acceptance and elaboration of this metalevel of professional, academic, research and publication about an area that is itself an index of a series of historical problematics around the intersections of art and education,  art and its histories,

institutionalisation and elaboration of accommodating cultures and the changes within the financial organisation of universities which require their employees to generate income for their institutions by means of competitive research grants.  Thus to accommodate to this model, every university academic, artists included, must reconstrue themselves according to a model aimed at sustaining the classic hierarchical and semi-imperial science laboratory.

Wherever you go these days, the twin questions of evaluating creative arts for such instruments as the RAE and evaluating creative research under the rubric of a PhD  sets off lively and largely unprofitable debates. I cannot pretend to have anything new to contribute, except my impatience with what can easily become a self-constructed dead-end because as my great intellectual mentor, Karl Marx suggested, we will get nowhere if we begin with too chaotic a general conception of the object of analysis.  We are already inside a problem as we speak it, performatively lending credibility in practice to a project that may well be aimed, unconsciously, at preventing us from doing what we think we are intending to achieve. The right question, the right concept, the right method alone will pierce the veil of opacity that represents as real events and causes what are in effect appearances that disguise the really determining processes.

I was involved in creating and documenting as well as working on the first PhD in Fine Art project at the University of Leeds which was launched in 1994.  I wrote the academic case and documents and supervised the first candidate, Nichola Bird, a graduate from the MA programme in Feminism and the Visual Arts which advocated and practised a creative triangulation of theory, practice, and history in terms of both the students on the programme and the topics of study and the modes of assessment. This early form of the PhD in Fine Art was introduced during the Headship of our School by Adrian Rifkin, an art historian who had spent many years at Portsmouth Polytechnic, working between fine art studios and the History Department.  As with the studios at the University of Leeds during the 1970s and 1980s, a bitter struggle was taking place in British art education about the curriculum as well as the methods for teaching fine art under the pressures of post-Coldstream developments which shifted from the DipAD into the new format of a BA.  The incorporation of fine art into the scheme of university education required a minimal input of at least 20% art history or what was better known as critical or contextual studies which ensured a minimum degree of literacy and some semblance of a formally inculcated sense of art as taking place in  history and in cultural contexts.  The battle in the 1970s in the art schools was over something chaotically called Theory.  This itself was clearly indexical of a wider struggle within the arts and humanities over the challenge to complacent humanisms by the cutting edge of a combined intervention what  we now lump together as structuralism and then post-structuralism.

Why did this happen? What did it mean in larger cultural terms that such a struggle over the very terms of making meaning and understanding meaning?  How and why did the process of knowing become subject to such intense critical examination?  Why were new forms of art practice, notably conceptual art, so inextricably bound up with this linguistic, psychoanalytical and political turn?  The studios at the Leeds were the intense battleground in which art historians, themselves revolting against the intellectual morbidity of their own turgid discipline, and artists battled against other art historians and artists formed in and defensive of the preceding models of studio practice which had found themselves smuggled into a university setting under the guidance of several remarkable figures,  Maurice de Saumaurez, Quentin Bell and Lawrence Gowing.  These names each bring into view one of the mid-20th century's several lines of English thought about art, the values of its ancient and contemporary histories, and aesthetics. Thus the emergence of

the possibility of thinking  about a PhD in Fine Art in the early 1990s seemed to me, at that moment to be a logical extension of an already existing series of developments in contemporary art and debates in terms of a continuous process shifting of British art education away from the workshop model towards one more comparable with American art education where it was normal for an artist to go to university, take a combination of studio and liberal arts academic courses.

Given that it was considered reasonable to offer those intending to become researchers in moat academic  fields the chance to spend four years at least in advanced research training and practice, it did seem reasonable to suggest that artists were being limited if the highest degree they could study for was at only masters level.  What makes a brilliant and gifted MA student a long-term academic? It is the additional and challenging process of effectively researching and writing their first book at the end of which they are, we hope, independent, self-critical scholars, capable to pursuing other new projects on this supported foundation. Translated into artistic practice, how does someone capapble of a single exhibition-the MA show-move onto the next level to become a critical, self-sustaining artist, critically self-aware in the larger world of art and thought.  It takes times to experiment, challenge means and methods, abandon comfort zones, test  particularity of purpose and interests against the larger field of  contemporary critical practices and related critical thought which provide the axis of validity against which a thoughtful, self-critical intervention can be mounted. It requires the development of the awareness of how to pose a relevant question and how to seek a methodology by which to explore possible answers that can legitimately constitute a contribution to knowledge.

The PhD in Fine Art model takes us beyond two frequently made mistakes:  'I want to explore x, y or z', says a prospective student.  Wanting to look at something is not a grounds for undertaking a PhD. It may enable a practice, allowing the artist to dictate the directions she wants to take by following her own compulsions or fascinations and hoping that they will be met with recognition by those who will critically and financially support the ongoing work.  Entering into the formal world of research means submitting to the twin tests of validity and significance, which fundamentally articulates a relationship to a community of thinkers and creators (scholarship) and an intervention made intelligible as such by the internalisation of such relations, of referencing, deferencing and differencing that constitute the intelligibly public face of contemporary art practice  at its interface with criticism, museum practice, curatorial currents, magazine and journal culture and obliquely a new form that I call instant art history.

Swiftly, therefore, the idea of offering brilliant art students the space, materials and supervisory support to make the transition from gifted graduate to a critical, self-determining practice as a thoughtful artist operating in a complexly expanded art world becomes immensely difficult.  In the case of my first two fine art PhD students, the decisive moment when I could see the point of the doctoral model of research was noting the process between the difficulty of finding a path beyond success at MA level and the emergence of what I can only call an economy: that is to say a series of actions and works in which the material and media experimentation, the  regular critical discussions with supervisors and peers, the internalisation of a range of critical and art historical/ art theoretical concepts and arguments, the exposure to the challenge of relevant practices in art history and contemporary practice, led to a distillation into an economy of art making where the viewer knew they were in the presence of a) a radical transformation of project into practice and b) were in an encounter with an event that made something happen, disclosed the unforeseen, trapped something into this form or space whose unpacking was solicited and would solicit another parallel, critical journey.  Art was the occasion for a

possible event that at least some, with the indicators of the artist's own critical apparatus, might be able to recognise and develop. My concept of the emergence of an art practice with its own aesthetic economy is not about subjectivity versus some mirage of objectivity. This is about the necessary unpredictability that is, none the less, critically expoundable in relation to certain verifiable axes, positions, debates, resources, and effects. Here we are dealing with assessing the ability of the artist to generate the conditions for this event, to trap the happening, into occurrence (Spinoza),  to condense so as to demand, on the other side of the making, an unpacking of its thin line of condensed gestures, that would never extinguish the moment and its density but would enable the work to become effective in the world, to be, in the Freudian sense,  genuine Work/ Arbeit,  and not a thing, but a working on, working through, artworking that necessitates acknowledgement of the double axis of validity - a relation to a past/present and a significance - a breach, break, or opening to a future, in the Deleuzian sense it would be a moment of virtuality.

Let me move towards a conclusion by briefly introducing another model for this economy  that can be named artworking which identifies a creative covenant between art and theory, between the poeietic work and the interpretative activity sometimes undertaken by the same person sometimes at two different moments - that is  concerned with learning about what is creative and culturally effective rather than tied to judgement, evaluation and hence an instrumentalisation. 

In 1992 Bracha Ettinger, a painter explains how art is creative through being generators of new meanings. Art expands the range of meaning, the Symbolic:

Artists continually introduce into culture all kinds of Trojan horses from the margins of their consciousness; in that way the limits of the Symbolic are continually transgressed by art. It is quite possible that many work-products carry subjective traces of their creators, but the specificity of works of art is that their materiality cannot be detached from ideas, perceptions, emotions, consciousness, cultural meaning etc., and that being interpreted and reinterpreted is their cultural destiny.  This is one of the reasons why works of art are symbologenic.

Artists inscribe traces of subjectivity, Oedipal or not in 'external' cultural/symbolic territories (i.e. artworks) and, by analyzing these inscriptions, it is possible to create and forge concepts which indicate and elaborate traces of an-other Real and to change aspects of Symbolic representation ( and non-representation) of the feminine within culture.  From time to time the artist's gaze is suddenly split and we find ourselves also in the position of the observer-interpreter. 32

In the catalogue of her exhibition in Oxford in 1993, Bracha Ettinger, who is also a major psychoanalytical theorist as a result of transferring that which emerged in her reflections on her painting practice into another theoretical territory, in her case psychoanalytical theory.

The work of art does not illustrate or establish theory; theory can only partly cover-uncover-the work of art. Sometimes a work of art produces seeds of theory from which upon elaboration, art slips away. These seeds should be sewn elsewhere.

The most grateful moments of the covenant between art and theory occur when theoretical elements, only indirectly or partly intended for particular works of art, and visual elements which refuse theory, collide. In doing so they transform the borderline between the two

domains so that art is momentarily touched by theory while theory takes on a new meaning. 33

These phrasings radically displace the dichotomous models proposed to us by the university system. They centre us instead in other, necessary conversations between art and theory while understanding the possible, productive, but distinctive relations between art making and the terms of its analysis or translation into formal, articulated theoretical ways of understanding.  The artist who aims to produce research,  submitting a PhD or other forms of practice, must understand the difference between practice as practice, and practice as research. That involves being an intellectual, eschewing the false dichotomies that  form the fault lines, or even battles lines of what should be a defunct conflict played out in the last decades of the 20th century.  For what is at stake is the very possibility of our understanding ourselves as intellectuals, thinkers, creators,  posing critical challenges to ourselves and our societies by asking deep questions and pursuing them with all means available to us. The terms with which I work: event-encounter,  economy, differencing have emerged at important intersections between aesthetic activity and thought, thought and historical understanding, critical activity and cultural responsibility.  I do not want to add to a new sub-discipline, fostering another meta-commentary on the dilemmas posed to us as artists/thinkers by the anxiety and risk-avoidance generated in the age of uncertainty and manifested as audit culture.  But I am glad of the space to offer some thoughts about what I have seen and experienced in working in the borderspaces between art, thought, history and the ethics of being an intellectual at this moment.

Endnotes

 1 For an analysis not only of the problems of this model of knowledge but its additional gender-structure, see Adrienne Rich, 'Towards a Woman-Centred University', [1973-74] in  Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (London: Virago Books, 1984), pp. 125-156. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge, 1991)

 2 Thomas S. Kuhn,  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). Mary B Hesse,  The Structure of Scientific Inference (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1974); Alan Megill et al,  Rethinking Objectivity (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1994). 

 3 John Brockman, ed.,  What We Believe but Cannot Prove (London: Free Press, 2005).

 4 Karl Popper, Logick der Forschung (Vienna, 1934); translated as  The Logic of Scientific Discovery, (New York: Basic Books, 1959)

 5 Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits: Gender and the Colour of Art History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993)

 6 Cathérine de Zegher, ed., Anna Maria Maiolino: Vida Afora/Life Line (New York: The Drawing Centre, 2002), p. 353.

 7 Cathérine de Zegher,  Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of twentieth century art in, of and from the feminine (Cambridge,MA. : MIT Press, 1996).

 8 Cathérine de Zegher, ed., Anna Maria Maiolino: Vida Afora/Life Line (New York: The Drawing Centre, 2002), p. 103

 9 Paulo  Venancio Filho, 'The Doing Hand',   Catherine de Zegher, ed.,  Anna Maria Maiolino: Vida Afora/Life Line (New York: The Drawing Centre, 2002)  284-285.

 10 Anna Maria Maiolino cited in Catherine de Zegher, ed.  Anna Maria Maiolino, 2002, p. 1999

 11 Walter Benjamin's concept of Bloße Leben, recently elaborated by Giorgio Agamben, inspired Roger Buerger and  Ruth Noack in Documenta 12, Kassel, 2007.

 12 Anna Maria Maiolino cited in Catherine de Zegher, ed.  Anna Maria Maiolino, 2002 p. 260.

 13 Anna Maria Maiolino,  1990 Sculpture (in-process, casts and molds) Clay Installations Drawings 1995-1999, writings provided by the artist, p.2, paragraph 5.  14 />14 Anna Maria Maiolino, Vir a "Ser", Coming to "Be", reprinted in Catherine de Zegher, Anna Maria Maiolino , 2002, p. 281.

 15 Anna Maria Maiolino 1990 Sculpture (in-process, casts and molds) CLAY INSTALLATIONS DRAWINGS 1995-1999,.p.1 paragraph 2.

 16 Anna Maria Maiolino 1990 Sculpture (in-process, casts and molds) CLAY INSTALLATIONS DRAWINGS 1995-1999,  p. 3, paragraph 6.

 17 Brian Massumi,  Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation ( Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), p.3.

 18 Simon O'Sullivan Art Encounters: Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation,  Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006).

 19 Gilles Deleuze Difference and Repetition, [1968] trans. Paul Patton, (New York; Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 139 , cited O'Sullivan, p. 1.

 20 Gilles Deleuze Difference and Repetition, [1968] trans. Paul Patton,  (London: Continuum Books,  2004), p. 280

 21 On the death drive as compulsion to repeat, see Sigmund Freud, 'Jenseits des Lustprinzips/Beyond the Pleasure Principle' [1920] Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 18 (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 1-64.  See also Esther Sanchez-Pardo.  Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003).

 22 Griselda Pollock and Vanessa Corby,  Encountering Eva Hesse (Munich and London: Prestel, 2006)

 23 On a feminist psychoanalytical theorization of event-encounter, see Bracha Ettinger.  Matrixial Borderspace, introduced by Brian Massumi with a preface by Judith Butler (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). I have found the following transcript of a Lecture by Gilles Deleuze  On Spinoza's Concept of Affect to be found at http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/csisp/papers/deleuze_spinoza_affect.pdf (© Emilie and Julien

Deleuze http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/sommaire.html) accessed 21/12/2008 especially instructive. 

 24 Isabelle Wallace, 'Trauma as Representation: a Meditation on Manet and Johns' in  Trauma, Visuality and Modernity, edited by Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg ( Hannover and London: University Press of New England, 2006), pp 3-27.

 25 Isabelle Wallace, 'Trauma as Representation: a Meditation on Manet and Johns', p. 7

 26 Jean Laplanche, 'Notes on Afterwardness' in Essays on Otherness (London: Routlege, 1999), pp. 260-265. For the history of the concept in  Freud's thought, see the entry 'Deffered Action' in J.Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London:Karnac Books, 1988), pp. 111-114.

 27 Joan Scott, 'Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,'  The American Historical Review 91:5 (1986) pp. 1056-1075.

 28 C.B.Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: From Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962)

 29 Marilyn Strathern, ed. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy (London: Routledge, 2000)

 30 Zygmunt Bauman,  Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). On Liquid Modernity and Culture see a series of essays by Bauman, Bryant, Metzger and Pollock in  Theory, Culture and Society 24:1 (2007).

 31 Zygmunt Bauman Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007)

 32 Bracha Ettinger, 'Matrix and Metramorphosis', Differences 4:1(1992), 195-6. For an extended introduction of her painting and her theory see Griselda Pollock, 'Thinking the Feminine: Aesthetic Practice as Introduction to Bracha Ettinger and the Concepts of Matrix and Metramorphosis.' In: Theory, Culture and Society, Vol 21 (2004), pp. 5-64.

 33 Bracha Ettinger, 'Woman-Other-Thing: A Matrixial Touch', Matrix-Borderlines (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1993) p 11.

    to cite this journal article:Pollock, G. (2008) An engaged contribution to thinking about interpretation in research in/into practice. Working Papers in Art and Design 5

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