An excerp from a valuable conversation on practice-led research and what that means in relation to process and the notion of an artwork.
Armin: Your notion of research: I think that your notion of what an artist does and what art is, is perhaps a tiny bit regressive. With your EM research you tap into very interesting things but then you still seem to have those separations in mind, between your research and your "art". Many artists have already shown that this distinction is maybe obsolete. The research is the art, the art is the research e.g. http://www.artscatalyst.org/projects/makrolab/MAK_index.html Your practice, swimming in cold waters with a neoprene suit, researching sunken boats and copper coils, walking up to former or still working military installations, this is the action already. You don’t need to make performances in swimming pools to make your point.
Lindsay: I produce artworks all the way along the process, some of which alter the course of the investigation (such as antennae or other makeshift technologies), but I do occasionally have 'outcomes' where I am analysing what I have done in my investigations by way of making an imaginative installation or a theatrical underwater performance (which I loved doing). Whatever this may mean, it is only a stopping point along a road that continues with process. In retrospect, this also provides a point in the research where one can gain essential feedback from an audience, providing valuable data as one would with a peer review.
Armin: The notion of an artwork itself is outdated when nowadays it is all about that process, thinking and methodology. Just documenting the research is in a way enough. You could still make something a little bit more conceptual, but speaking from a theoretic principled point about contemporary art practice to highlight your research in one way or the other, rather than thinking that this is research "only" and now on top of that you also have to produce "the work" or the "project". Perhaps you could explore this more open notion of the relation ship between art=research or practice=research or research=art whereby you could replace the = through various other logical operators.
Lindsay: You are right in pointing out the difficulties in the relationships between research, practice and artwork and I feel that I have come a long way already in understanding how I work myself as an artist. However this is the very reason that I have decided to hang all my research onto a wrecked ship, this way I do not have to continually be generating a framework that could perhaps be perceived as a separate 'artwork'. Also in retrospect I should perhaps be careful about the terms I am using; project for me is much like ‘book’ on TNL, it is simply a container to keep information in to enable it to be presented as a coherent study, or perhaps as a small self-contained narrative section of a bigger picture.
Armin: The next point concerns a notion that you pointed out already in an earlier conversation, the fact that you can only collaborate once you have "my project off the ground, my methodology worked out, my background reading finished and my paper started". But then you are basically done so what would you like to collaborate about? I think it is much more interesting to talk about emerging methodologies than about an already established methodology in retrospect. What is there left to discuss then?
Lindsay: This may indeed be due to differing views on what collaboration actually means, but for me, the collaboration is the process as well as the dissemination of gathered information. For a true collaboration to occur then, a collaborator must be involved in this process. You are, at the moment, not entirely involved in this process; you are only involved in the dissemination of the written notes (in whatever form that may take) online. It is necessary therefore, for me to organise myself and my subject of exploration (the ship) into some sort of coherent state. My transfer paper will be a piece of reflective writing about my process to date and my ways forward. Getting this in motion will enable me to upload my future ideas so that we can draw parallels to work on a combined methodology (book)? We will therefore be collaborating on the methodological process and potential theory generated from information exchange, rather than a single entire project.
