Researching, questioning artistic practice, probing the unique process of development that it embodies, searching for its highs and lows—for those thresholds that lead to the next lofty height or open up on the next gaping chasm that lies ahead. Understanding the process and the outcome … the latter both in its synergy and also, in a certain way, in its conditionality. Understanding the conditionalities of one’s own biography that open or block off this or that avenue of artistic expression. Who may, who can be an artist? What moments in one’s own biography give rise to a specific form, to a specific expression, to a possible way of understanding the world, questioning systems, birthing visions of and for things to come? How does who generate the sort of reception that moves a society, or perhaps also create, process, explain, transfigure, or archive some future reception or a past one retrospectively?
Artistic research requires the openness and trust needed to allow people to perceive one’s own intimate creative process and the backdrop against which it takes place. As well as the confidence that the observation of this process will not end up changing it or perhaps even falsifying it—although: Is that even possible? Isn’t all artistic expression to a certain extent a witness to its times, to its location, to its conditionality in relation to the corporeality of the spirit from which it comes? Can we escape this body that was born into a specific place at a specific time? Isn’t all artistic expression a mirror on, reflection of, view from a body? Can we liberate ourselves from this? Do we even want to?
The boundaries of artistic research are as yet diffuse, vaguely established, and fragmentary in the sense that a whole has yet to be defined and needs to be explored—a project that will perhaps never be complete. Just like an artistic expression will never be complete or done. Just like human society will—happily—never be done.
