Welcome to Art as Research/Research As Art
Proceedings of the Artists' Literacies Institute
This is a journal of the proceedings of the Artists’ Literacies Institute (ALI).
“ALI” is a couple of things. They are:
1.) an organization that functions as a research office for artists, supplementing artists’ educations by reframing their practice as knowledge-producing research, and an agency that facilitates artists’ research engagements with non-arts institutions and organizations, and
2.) an artistic practice in itself, an exercise in instituting, where my own creative labor looks and acts for all intents and purposes like a ‘real’ business/organization, but is the product of an artist’s individual creative practice.
This embedded art practice exists in both of these states at once, like a kind of organizational Schroedinger’s cat. And like the theoretical living/dead cat, whose superposed states collapse into one or the other when the lid is lifted, the Artists’ Literacies Institute only collapses into one of its forms when subjected to an inquiry from an outsider: if it’s a denizen of the artworld, ALI is a quirky experimental art project; if the peek comes from someone outside the so-called artworld, then we are a full blown organization, professional in all (most?) regards.
ALI, in this multiple state, is the form and object of my artistic research.
Let me put it another way.
This is a journal for and about artists and those who love them. That could be other artists, or curators, collectors, friends of artists, scientists who like art, other people who like art, aspiring artists, the administrators of cultural institutions, art educators, parents of artists, and people who have very little contact with artists but wish they had more.
This isn’t a journal about how wonderful art is. In some important regards, I’m not actually particularly interested in art. Art, as modernity has come to know it, seems to me like capitalism’s clever way of shifting the focus away from artists themselves, who are useful and brilliant and funny and interesting people, while art is more often than not a sometimes-salable commodity of questionable value, and an activity that keeps artists too busy to actually realize their social, civic, political, or ecological potential. Artists, in my humble opinion, are largely a wasted resource in contemporary society, and in many ways we artists ourselves are complicit in this waste.
So - this is an attempt at a fairly unwieldy synthesis of many fields (and in some sense an attempt to undo some ideas of fields entirely); begun out of a desire to unify diverse forms of knowledge, and to do so urgently. Urgently, because the way we have been knowing for the past few centuries has driven us to the brink of utterly wrecking our own planetary habitat, and we are in desperate need of other ways of knowing.
I will explore social forms of art as well as their overlap with other social practices, like activism, advocacy, media making, and politics. I will try and lash these ideas to studies of knowledge and philosophies of mind, and I will involve other unavoidable cultural streams like technology and economics because they cannot be neatly disentangled. While things might get pretty academic at times, ultimately I am aiming to figure out something that is immediately and apparently useful on a day to day basis. Artists, I argue, are essential, even as art itself may not be. At the same time, I am concerned about how this unrealized usefulness will be (and already is) being coopted by neoliberal capitalism. Even at its most useless, art is being made useful to something.
This whole project is a place for drafting, revising, refining, and discovering a dissertation that I am composing as part of my PhD study of artists’ knowledge and applications of it, within the Transart Institute and Liverpool John Moore’s University. Therefore, again, it will often get academic. However here on substack I will work a little fast and loose before I have to go in and organize it, neaten it, and set it up for digestion by the academic cloaca. I have been advised to keep the dissertation itself simple, and so this journal is a necessary (to me) exercise in doing the opposite.
Because it is living research, it will also be full of citations and quotations, and it may be that some of the folks who are inclined to read this stuff (welcome!) will also find themselves referenced. I hope to bring together all the thinkers and practitioners who are motivating me in this work, and hope that if you find your ideas put to work here, you’ll find them used well and in good company. Perhaps they will be next to ideas you like, or perhaps I will have seated them at a table with weird companions. In both cases, I hope you’ll bear with me as I shuffle all these pieces around and see how they combine, in pursuit of a view of artistic knowledge that we can agree is needed to achieve a long lost balance in our relationship with one another and the planet on which we live.
I’m a believer in Donna Haraway’s concept of knowledge being a collection of string figures - patterns of knowing that are never formed wholly by any given individual, but handed to us by other fingers for us to consider and rearrange, and then to hand off to another. I am grateful to all those whose hands I have taken on string figures from, and I will do my best to name you when I remember to; I also acknowledge that some of the patterns will have come to me from knowledge-ancestors that I’m oblivious to, and so I’m grateful for reminders or illumination when I’ve shared something without knowing from whose hands it was borrowed.
My goal is to update this space with substantial new material every month. I am using this space, and my reader’s kind attention, as a tool for accountability to keep me on schedule with an admittedly ambitious project. I will also, possibly, jump in and share few other irregular entries, as ideas crop up or demand they be aired out.
I am also someone who is terrible at asking for help, and that includes asking for any kind of money when it comes to my own work. And so this is also a place where I’m experimenting with a model that’s new for me - a subscription to this growing journal, as a means of helping defray the cost of time and labor entered into it. I ask myself every day how can we realize a society where knowledge is valued and depth and breadth of knowing can both be pursued without being punished by a productivity culture that values only quantity of content and superficiality of thought? This is a thing I’m trying.
So - if you click this button below and subscribe (for just $8/month) you’re providing meaningful support this intellectual habit, and participating in the construction of this project. But more than that, I hope that you will also find it a source of useful ideas, or at least a good target for your occasional invective. Thanks a bunch for clicking…