Editorial

Issue […3]

2019-20 Embodied Methodologies: Creative Research in the Global South

Editorial by Issue III Editor: Mareli Stolp

Artistic Research accepts as fundamental the idea that the traditional separation in Western thought between theoretical and practical knowledge (episteme and phronesis) can and should be challenged. In Artistic Research approaches, theory and practice are seen as integrated and mutually informative. A central question in Artistic Research relates to the representation of research results: knowledge generated through material processes that are innate to art-making, and within which Artistic Research methodologies are often embedded, usually remain part of the personal realm of the art-maker and are not revealed beyond the artworks that result from these processes. Artistic Research seeks to expose the research processes that accompany art-making; it strives to reveal the tacit, embodied knowledges that are generated through creative processes, and to make these insights accessible in a shareable medium beyond the personal experience of the art maker.  

It seems clear that such a medium should not be limited to traditional, textual representations of research results or outcomes. Much of artistic meaning is lost when the medium through which research results are communicated does not allow for the inclusion of entities beyond the limits of textual reportage: when, in other words, the textual presentation of theoretical concepts is privileged above that of artistic traces. One proposition to address this issue has been to create platforms that allow for textual as well as non-textual elements to constitute artistic research output. By now several examples of such platforms exist, including for example the Journal for Artistic Research, Ruukku, IMPAR and the Journal of Sonic Studies. Since 2016, Ellipses […] has offered an additional opportunity to explore the dissemination of artistic research through a digital platform that allows for such inclusive submissions. 

The making of a submission for a platform such as […] requires authors to engage the myriad possibilities that digital media can offer to create a new ‘object’: an entity that integrates demonstrations or manifestations of art and art-making processes, and textually articulated research results, ultimately making a claim to new knowledge which exceeds the limits of propositional language. The articles presented in this third edition of […] respond to this imperative in different ways, while simultaneously portraying a strong focus on the theme of this volume, Embodied Methodologies. The situatedness of the artistic practitioner within a creation process and the discursive rendering of personal experience and tacit knowledge embedded in such a process are central to the methodology of much of artistic research output. This third volume of […] offers six presentations in which embodied and tacit knowledges are positioned as primary areas of investigation – projects where, in different ways, bodily and/or experiential knowledge is seen as central to the research methodology. Each submission approaches the rendering of the artistic research undertaken into a new object – the online submission – in creative ways meant to underscore, enhance and support the results of the individual research projects.  

 In Improvising Khoin’npsalms, Francois Blom, Garth Erasmus and Marietjie Pauw reflect on a series of performances completed in 2018 in Stellenbosch. For these performances, the three musicians – Blom on organ; Erasmus on recreations of indigenous instruments he constructed as well as saxophone; and Pauw on Western transverse flute – improvised over sections of 16th century Genevan psalm melodies played on the organ by Blom. Presented in five locations (different churches in the Stellenbosch area) over the course of five days, the project highlights issues related to South African decolonial history, using Walter Mignolo’s theories of ‘Decolonial Aesthesis’ as part of the methodological framework. Bev Butkow uses her art practice of weaving as a vehicle to explore embodiment of experiences of gendered life; shared labour; relationships to materials; the bodily act of weaving; and the entanglement of multiple roles of woman, artist, mother, researcher that encompass her artistic practice and artistic research engagement with that practice. Her submission Embodied entanglements/Entangled embodiments uses representations of the act of weaving and close-up images of the textiles to underscore these theoretical positions. You wouldn’t know god if he spat in your eye is an artistic research project by Sven Christian that engages the eponymous scroll by Dumile Feni from a curator position. By curating different authors’ perspectives of and responses to the Feni scroll, Christian provides access to the scroll in a way that circumvents the impossibility of exhibiting the scroll itself; an innovative approach to curation and the archive is thus offered and explored. Dance scholars and performers Kristina Johnstone and Thalia Laric use Michel Foucault’s proposition of ‘monsters and fossils’ to create a frame for a dance work that pushes at the boundaries of essentialised notions of identity, and explores representations of the body in dance as fossils: distant, approximate form of identity; and monsters: denoting ‘the emergence of difference’. Through photography, video and interactive text, Monsters and Fossils creates a sense of movement by means of interactive digital media, which accentuates the framework in which the dance work was made. Building My Internet Universe by Natalie Paneng invites the reader into an ‘internet universe’ created by Paneng, where she utilises the digital online space to create personae that communicate different messages relating to gender, ethnicity, culture, language and society. Connecting to other artists working in this domain, including Tabitha Rezaire and Bogosi Sekhukhuni, Paneng resists the limitations of contemporary digital art by working in the internet micro genre ‘vaporwave’, which relies on the use of digital aesthetics from times past to convey contemporary messages. Also working in the internet and digital domain, Carly Whitaker’s project Networked Embodiment traverses the margins of art-making and curatorial practice. Reporting on the project Floating Reverie, an online residency programme, her submission uses an interactive ‘map’ of participants in the residency, their work and interactions to create a rhizomic presentation of the residency and its organic growth. Whitaker engages the notion of embodiment by exploring the idea of an art world connected through many links and attachments often difficult to observe or discover.

These projects each explore the concept of embodiment as part of a methodology for artistic research, searching for ways to make tangible or accessible the ideas, feelings or expressive qualities that are intrinsic to each author’s art-making. The authors were encouraged to think of these submissions as forms of ‘art objects’ in their own right: the ways in which research processes and results are presented on this platform use all the possibilities offered by a digital space to support, enhance and enrich the content of each project. The authors were greatly assisted in this part of the endeavour by Digital Editor Tegan Bristow and her assistants Andrea Hayes, Benjamin Crooks and Glen Mudau.