Staking the Claim

The danger factors uppermost in mind at the moment as regards my research are those of, on the one hand, the Reader's Digest History of the World syndrome, and the danger that I'll promise the earth and deliver a thin scraping of nothing much on the other. Both problems arise from my natural curiosity and equally natural lack of focus on individual issues.

There is a certain amount of artificiality involved in trying to focus down onto a few specific topics within a field, especially in a fine art milieu, where every possible locus of study is a kaleidoscope of subject and object, and where literally everything is a cultural artifact. Staking out the ground is going to be one of the most difficult things I do, it seems. The staking-a-claim metaphor seems oddly apt: I have some idea that the general region I want to excavate holds some promise, but the material matter of the work is still essentially subterranean.

The exercises I'm going through just now are intended as aids to
giving shape to my own interests in artistic practice, and as such
should allow me to examine the scope of exemplars I pull into my field.
Although this will definitely produce an area of general interest too
large for any one study to comprehend, it will hopefully pitch up
enough for me to conduct a broad analysis of the common tropes I could
use to delimit the terms of my interests and hence the terms of
comparison my practical output could be measured against- in the sense
of an explicit critical analysis.

My impression just now is that this is an area of
knowledge-production that will be more useful in terms of
problem-finding than solution-finding. The "solution" is artistic
practice: a notoriously infinite progression of gestures whose
lifeblood is the continuing search for solutions rather than
the solution itself. There are areas of research in art colleges that
deal with materials and media in more amenable and more technical ways.
I seem to be working with:

a critical background

the history of a medium

the integration of both with artistic practice

the transferability of these structures to digital media.

Now, this is an enormous framework, but narrowing it down, though
necessary, carries the largely aesthetic problem of long-title
syndrome. I could quite feasibly end up with a title that set
boundaries so prescriptive, so defined, that it would look absurd, and
might reasonably be of almost no use to anyone. I'd rather not.

What's to be done?

What have I got? Well, I will have a vocabulary of exemplars for the
tropes that interest me; those artists will belong to categorisable
groups I can start to define and start to narrow things down there.
This will also give me a timeframe.

I'll be choosing a few key critical texts that I will either pay
tribute to or attempt to argue with. Although there are bound to be a
few cases where footnotes will have a tendency to spread off into the
ether, this choice of a limited canon (or organum?) will probably help
me hedge my topics in a bit, too. There is a fear in me that, because I
haven't read literally everything, this is at root arbitrary,
literature search or no.

I'll be working with real artifacts. There will be books I make and
other projects (films, digital projects) that will become my evidence.
The conversation between the artworks themselves and the methodology I
try to establish to "commission" them under will produce a dialectic I
can study in and of itself. My suspicion is that the comparison of what
actually gets produced with what I formulate as my methodology will
constitute an important part of what I do: that my exposition of how I
am interpreting the results will be as important, and as revealing as
the other parts.

The other parts, while I'm thinking this way, would be:

The articulation of a field (the exemplars, the medium, the present critical situation)

The articulation of method/approach (the background to the critical
situation, the identification of problems to be examined, the things I
hope to find out and how)

The body of work, commissioned by the method

The description (ekphrasis) of the work. (I just mean the
recording of the artwork. This would also be by exhibition or
photography or print. I just mean the presence of the work's
appearance, so that we can see in as objective a way as can be managed,
what's being talked about.)

The interpretation of the work by way of the method: an analysis of
the work with reference to artistic and critical exemplars identified
earlier. An assessment of the work's success in achieving an example of
work produced by the methods laid down, and value in the light of the
critical framework given.

The articulation of the differences between the method and the
interpreted results: the interesting ways in which the work refuses to
conform to the critical framework (or attempts to frustrate it); the
interpretation of the results in terms of significant divergence from
the existing critical background.

The conclusions drawn from the results, and their significance to the field: what the work says is happening; what happened.

The more I write about this, the more I feel the need of a wider
vocabulary of analysis. For example, the clarity of expression needed
to separate the interpretation of a work of art by way of its success
in fulfilling the brief of a particular methodology, and on the other
hand, the articulation of the map of accumulated differences
encountered in that interpretation is no simple matter, and in fact
deserves tabulation in simplistic forms:

1: how the
work fulfilled the brief 2: what the ways in which it failed are and
what that seems to tell me about how making the work differs from the
way i imagined it when I constructed the original methodology

Then, this is followed by:

3:
What the difference between the methodology and the results of my
interpretation of the artwork have to say to the field at large
(remembering that I have defined the field with reference to its
history, exemplars, literature and key critical texts.

Actually,
this seems to make some sense, even if there probably are better ways
to put it, and probably cleaner lines of organisation available. What
symbols are the dials on the dashboard of this machine going to show,
though? What and who are these exemplars, these key texts? How do I
analyse the work? How do I construct commissions as experiments having
decided who these "clients" are?

Nonetheless, this seems to be a set of tasks that call for some balance, but which are tasks, and can be performed to achieve the aim without recourse to magic.