Reflection on artistic practice, research and methods
In order to provide a comprehensive understanding of my work and research approach, it is essential to first examine three central aspects of my artistic practice, which lay the groundwork for what will be discussed later: the ontological incompatibility between writing and artwork, and their forms of knowledge production; the recognition of artistic practice as a space inhabited by research; the situatedness of artistic practice despite the inherently subjective nature of artistic reflection.
Ontological incompatibility between writing and artwork
The invention of alphabetical writing, around 2500 B.C., marked an extraordinary rupture in Western cultural history and the beginning of that historical process which the philosopher Massimo Cacciari, in a lecture in 1995 at the Teatro Duomo Vecchio of Arezzo (Fondazione Archivio Luigi Nono ONLUS 2021), defines the de-somatization of the voice.
Cacciari narrates how, with the invention of alphabetical writing, the fundamental phonetic units of the human voice become visible. However, he argues that writing does not serve as an empirical representation of the voice; instead, it functions as an ideal classification. No phonetic system, he suggests, can fully encapsulate the intricacies of the voice – one that can represent all its nuances, all its gestures.
Before writing, understanding required listening. Afterward, this was no longer necessary. I can read a text, comprehend its meaning, and presume that another person, familiar with the same language, reading the same text would understand the same meaning. As trivial as it may sound, this forms the foundation of our culture; one can understand something only by seeing it, reading it. Our cultures are marked by the primacy of writing, of vision, over listening. This process, which gradually leads to the elimination of a relationship with the speaker, also leads to the elimination of non-conceptual values, deeming them insignificant and superfluous. This is because conceptual values are the ones that can most appropriately be contained within written text.
The loss of a living connection with the living voice, with the speaker, which might be set aside in some artistic practices, certainly cannot be forgotten in musical practice, which existence relies on listening. Every time we listen, the text itself changes, and this mutability is the inherent content of living sound, this is what constitutes that form of tacit knowledge exclusive to music, ontologically incompatible with writing, which can only be developed through performative and listening practices.
In these terms, music interpretation is not a mere representation of a written score, but the presentation of a pre-linguistic dimension prior to the score. Reducing music to a conceptual, discursive dimension, and therefore admitting that its content is decouplable from its phenomenological manifestation, would mean accepting the death of the living function of listening, of music itself.
In my practice, interpreting the musical score is the attempt to embody a pre-linguistic dimension by stripping away the ‘other’ meanings. An act that finds its only meaning and truth in being embodied, in being a living voice, in the saying. An act that exists only as a process, in the intentional unveiling, a quest towards the not yet said, the unheard, which is therefore new. That new knowledge, contained in the artwork, presents itself only in the bodily experience of listening, and the concert is the sole means through which it can be disseminated.
Artistic practice as a space inhabited by research
In my young venture into the world of artistic research, I immediately encountered a vast theoretical literature that diligently attempts to define its ontological, methodological, contextual, and epistemological dimensions a priori, so that art can find a living within the academic paradigms of natural science, humanities, and social science. In other words, defining artistic research as an academic discipline, in order to offer a space for art within traditional research.
I consider it essential for the survival of my practice to distance myself from this perspective and rather attempt to perform the opposite operation: defining artistic practice in order to offer a space inhabitable by research. An operation already suggested by Borgdorff, in affirming:
Artistic research seeks not so much to make explicit the knowledge that art is said to produce, but rather to provide a specific articulation of the pre-reflective, non-conceptual content of art. It thereby invites unfinished thinking. Hence, it is not formal knowledge that is the subject matter of artistic research, but thinking in, through, and with art. […] Artistic research therefore does not really involve theory building or knowledge production in the usual sense of those terms. Its primary importance lies not in explicating the implicit or non-implicit knowledge enclosed in art. It is more directed at a not-knowing, or a not-yet-knowing. It creates room for that which is unthought, that which is unexpected – the idea that all things could be different.
(Borgdorff 2012, pp. 143/173)
Asserting that artistic research is “research in and through art practice” implies that it is the artistic practice itself defining the framework of the research. The research is therefore defined a posteriori of the art: it is the artistic practice that delimits the ontological, methodological, contextual, and epistemological area of the research. A personal and mutable area, just as indisputably personal and mutable are the ways in which artists relate to their own practices. And it is this inherent plurality in the nature of artistic research that, in my opinion, legitimizes its existence; because it is radically different from research in other areas of knowledge, in the type of knowledge generated, and in the ways in which it is generated and disseminated.
This does not mean excluding the possible convergence, overlap, or coincidence with the methods of other disciplines; on the contrary, it means admitting, for example, the possibility of a crossroads between art and science as much as the total independency of the two disciplines. It means opening up to the infinite ways in which an artist relates to their practice, even if it is necessarily immersed in a specific social and cultural context and located within a certain historical trajectory.
Situatedness of artistic practice
Artistic creativity is, by definition, situated in relation to a complex set of factors, including the material processes and formal properties of an artform, the context in which its artworks are disseminated and received, the history of its canon, and so on. By extension, artistic research and the artistic researcher are correspondingly situated.
(Coessens et al., 2009, p. 66)
Artistic practice is defined as such because it is necessarily situated within what I would define as a historical trajectory, in dialectical relationship with it, even as it negates it. This situatedness is what allows us to trace the historical evolutionary process of art, despite the fact that the individual points composing it are based on inherently subjective artistic reflections.
Luigi Nono, in his lecture given at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in 1959, openly criticizes Joseph Schillinger and John Cage as examples of the widespread creative tendency to reject their own placement within history or to identify in their determining forces constructive limits for a so-called “spontaneous freedom” of human creation. On one hand, Schillinger, who in his work “The Mathematical Basis of the Arts” (1948), advocates for scientific synthesis as the only possibility for artistic creation free from historical, geographical, and social contingencies of belonging. On the other hand, John Cage, whose timeless conception, influenced by his proximity to a certain Eastern philosophy, sees in the renunciation of individual will a possibility for creative freedom. Both perspectives are sharply criticized by Nono:
Art could never have existed if this [Schillinger’s] beliefs were valid. For, in so far as the artist gives expression to his conscience and experience (and in so doing he joins the liberating forces of history), art and freedom are synonymous. […] The introduction of superficial ideas of liberty and constraint into the creative process is nothing but a childish attempt to terrify others. It is intended to cast doubt on the very existence of spiritual order, creative discipline and clarity of thought. […] For these people [Cage and his group] ‘liberty’ is the oppression which the instinct exerts on the mind; their liberty is a spiritual suicide. [..] Our ‘Aesthetes of Freedom’ know nothing of real creative liberty, which presupposes a consciously acquired ability to know what decisions must be taken and how to carry them out.
(Nono 1959, pp. 2/4)
Despite my total alignment with the Nono’s artistic ideal, history has proven it wrong in asserting the following:
We need not wait for history to judge because fraud is immediately obvious. [..] Music will always be an historical reality to men who face the process of history and who at every moment make their decisions intuitively and logically.
(Nono 1959, p. 4).
Yes, music will always be a historical reality, but so it is also for composers like Schillinger and Cage who, even rejecting this perspective, have been historicized as much as Nono. Highly personal and diametrically opposed positions are dialectically situated within a common historical trajectory that benefits precisely from such divergences. The devotion to one’s own artistic truth, of which every author rightly becomes a defender, does not imply in any way the shareability of such a perspective as a collective truth. On the contrary, the scientific objectivity on which Schillinger’s creative method should have been based is precisely what has been least rewarded by history.
The evolutionary process of art, therefore, has nothing to do with the evolutionary process of other disciplines of knowledge. The ‘clarity of thought’ does not imply the truthfulness of the ideas, and the ‘creative discipline’ does not imply methodological rigor. Validity and reliability, typical categories in traditional research, do not apply to art, and by extension, artistic research. Objectivity is not a measure of the seriousness of intellectual inquiry into one’s practice or its contribution to a specific artistic discipline or socio-cultural-political context.
The dual and seemingly contradictory nature of artistic practice, as a subjective and personal inquiry, yet necessarily situated, allows for the dissolution of the apparent barrier between the public and private spheres. It is the private, personal experience, the manifestation of the author-individual’s consciousness, which, by leaving a trace of its subjectivity ‘in the singularity of his absence’(Foucault 1969), becomes the engine of the historical evolutionary process of art.
A subjectivity is produced where the living being, encountering language and putting itself into play in language without reserve, exhibits in a gesture the impossibility of its being reduced to this gesture.
(Agamben 2007, p. 72)
Trying to explain a painting is a bit like explaining your whole life, and that just become impossible at some point. […] It’s a record, a recording in the heart of the world, of my world.
(Emilio Vedova; Pessina 2020)
Method
The representational issues that emerge from the encounter between performative practice and writing, the desire to distance myself from traditional research methods, and to leave space for the method to emerge from artistic practice itself, the centrality of personal experience, subjectivity, and individual consciousness in artistic expression as the driving force of the historical evolutionary process of art, are the reasons that lead me to see autoethnography as the most effective qualitative research methodology for my work.
Autoethnography relies on the researcher’s life experience as a primary data source. In this way, the foundations of artistic creative processes, such as embodied sensations, emotional reactions, and critical reflections, become the basis for inquiry and sense-making (Adams et al., 2015).
Writing does not assume the task of explicating the content of the work or describing its constructive processes, but rather sheds light on the inner, emotional, and intellectual depth from which the work emerges. If much of traditional research methodology attempts to bypass the symbolic resonance of language (Brown, 1990), autoethnography opens up space for the use of poetic language, which, precisely because of its symbolic charge, becomes an ideal tool for probing such subjectivity.
I believe that autoethnographic writing could also address the artistic world with much more strength than traditional academic writing is capable of. In my personal experience in the field of contemporary music interpretation, the sources I tend to refer to, which guide my reflections when dealing with a score or the work of a composer, are, in the vast majority of cases, biographical and autobiographical materials, anecdotes and third-party testimonies, personal diaries, interviews, and poetic texts. These materials, by depicting the artist’s subjectivity, inner world, and relationship with their socio-cultural surroundings, better allow for emotional involvement in the reader and internalization of the intellectual and artistic reflection that arises from it.
The performative practice continues to have a central role in my research, which finds its only meaning in the bodily experience of listening, and sees the concert experience as both its method and outcome. Therefore, it is essential for me to recognize the autonomy of writing from practice, but also to accept the inseparable link between the contents that the two forms are able to convey. The critical written reflection on my practice will thus be a parallel track, composed of personal reflections, interviews with significant figures in my artistic journey and for their contribution to common aesthetic reflections, case studies of specific works and/or performances, and diary entries. A body of texts that will develop in terms of form and content parallel to my professional artistic activity, drawing from daily experiences of encounter and exchange with artists, spaces, and audiences.
Basel, 14/09/2024
References
Agamben, G. (2007). Profanations. Zone Books.
Adams, T., Jones, H., & Ellis, C. (2015). Autoethnography. Oxford University press.
Borgdorff, H. (2012). The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia. Leiden University Press.
Brown, R. H. (1990). Social science and the poetics of public truth. In Sociological Forum (Vol. 5, pp. 55-74). Kluwer Academic Publishers-Plenum Publishers.
Coessens, K., Crispin, D., & Douglas, A. (2009). The Artistic Turn: A Manifesto.
Fondazione Archivio Luigi Nono ONLUS (Director). (2021, April 19). Massimo Cacciari. Silenzio e ascolto nella musica di Luigi Nono.
Foucault, M. (2019). What is an Author? (1969). In Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984. Penguin UK.
Nono, L. (1959). The historical reality of music today.
Pessina, T. (Director). (2020, June 11). Emilio Vedova. Dalla parte del naufragio [Documentary]. Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova, Twin Studio.
Schillinger, J. (1948). The mathematical basis of the arts. University of Michigan.