Artist Iris Haeussler
Guest speaker, conceptual artist, Toronto.
30/09/20 1:00 PM start time
http://www.wagenbach.org/landing.shtml
https://www.instagram.com/iris.Haeussler/
Additional:
Sketching in a Blink at Toronto School of Art
IH Interview 2000 v03 – bedding, lingering warmth after waking in the morning, rediscover warmth in the wax, wax used to protect objects (conserving), conserve halts movement, wax will always need caretaker to protect from heat, ideas about wax and death are frightening “no i don’t want to lead people there, i am there.” vagueness.
Who is Sophie La Rosière? Interview with Iris Haeussler by Shelley Hornstein
QUESTIONS
maybe for questions i should think of myself as a journalist.
Why is Iris one of our presenters, what does her work have to do with contemporary research methods?
What am I most excited about?
Iris uses wax in her work, in my own research I’m trying to figure out why I’m so drawn to this material (translucency, painterly and sculptural, can embed things in it, atmosphere of nostalgia, elements fall away in imperfections) why does she choose wax?
What kind of research methods / methodologies does Iris use?
What does she read?
NOTES
- textiles embedded in wax – receding, hidden, faint
- characters – “reclusive, survivalists,” longing of human touch
- 2 inches of wax trapping everything in hotel room, 1993, “separation from the world”
- “works neither stored away nor seen, just being amongst themselves”
- “vulnerable (and intimate) materials,” memories, conservation, archiving
- vignette / still life / installations
- “experimental processes can lead to new bodies of work […] later speak back to me and ask for assessment, conceptualization and further research[…]”
- research: for museum, interested in location’s history social communities audience, interested in developing something with museum, connect w/ local historians and community people who introduce to artefacts stories research. begin to carry on “inner conversation” with a character that develops from these exposures. (link)
- influenced by artist Joseph Beuys, legacy projects/ ficticious characters, underdogs underprivileged creativity and resilience, vulnerability, resilience, creativity, obsession
30/09/20 2:22 PM
im hungry and need to go outside and be in the sunlight i haven’t left my apartment in almost a week i bet the leaves have changed so much
POST-READ
i went for a walk to process this but could only think about the presidential debate, back pain, and whats behind that black castle wall i’ve never noticed before in my neighbourhood. iris haeusslar sounds very cool. how do you have time for all these? what have you sacrificed to create rooms full of gore and wax? what do your children when the wax hands touch their long stored faces? when you boil up old candles in the wash basin, shouldn’t you be wearing a mask? i find i do the reading and then have no energy to respond in a way that’s coherent or appropriate, even when there is no reading. where does this come from, for you?
The Intimacies of Doing Research-Creation
The following roundtable conversation, initiated by Sarah E. Truman, activates a discussion on research-creation’s potential and limitations as a research method/methodology, complicates cursory references to it, and demonstrates the already robust and nuanced theorizations of research-creation within Canada.
Sarah E. Truman, Natalie Loveless, Erin Manning, Natasha Myers, Stephanie Springgay.
Loveless, Natalie. “The Intimacies of Doing Research-Creation.” Knowing and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation. University of Alberta Press, Edmonton, 2020. pp 221.
03/10/20 2:22 PM start time
Questions
What are the conventions of reseearch-creation method/methodology?
What is the difference between a method/methodology?
What does ecologies have to do with it?
Where is this round table taking place?
How do these people know each other?
What does this have to do with Iris’s work?
Notes
- Canada’s leading research-creation scholars
- Manning: Concordia, Fine Arts, “modes of artistic practice”/ process philosophy. SenseLab. Textiles. Synesthetic, neurodiversity, movement, perception, value, political.
- Springgay: UofT, artist/curator. Walking, affect, “feminist new materialisms, posthumanism, queer theory, contemp art, pedagogy. WalkingLab. Disrupt tropes of “flaneur/derive.” The Pedagogical Impulse.
- Loveless: University of Alberta, contemp art history/theory, artist/curator. Art/ecology, “Sensing the Anthropocene: Aesthetic Attunement in an Age of Urgency,” investigate practices eg walking practice, listening practice, instruction, durational. “Speculative Energy Futures.”
- Myers: York University, anthropology. Dancer background. “Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter,” vegetal sensing and sentience, restoration ecology+colonial violence in High Park’s oak savannahs. Becoming Sensor.
- How we do / what we do in the academy and for who? Distinction between “research based art” (Mary Kelly, Hans Haacke) and “research-creation,” academic discourse and production.
- “Research-creation names a set of methodological and epistemological innovations into what counts as scholarly research […] experimental and … transforms the ways we do and disseminate our research as academics”. (Loveless)
- “Research creation is a way of doing theory/thinking that is bodily, experimental, and considers research (knowledge making) as a (speculative) event emerging from a practice, rather than performed or predetermined.” (Springgay).
- “consider other ways of being in relation” (Springgay)
- “research-creation is a mode of inquiry—a way of getting interested and involved in the world—that takes seriously embodied knowledge, craft, creativity, aesthetics, and practices of making as immanent to the processes of making knowledge and telling stories about both what is known and what remains unknown.” (Myers)
- “Making matter come to matter” (Myers)
- Make positioning research-creation in world of creative-capital/industry a problem. Difference between making and thinking in art and philosophy. Using Moten and Harney concept of “study” to move away from institutionalization. (Manning)
- Research-creation does not mean using theory to explain/describe an artistic practice. Push/pull knowledge, considering what moves linguistically. Not a “method” but mode of inquiry. How does thinking happen? “How does that which does not register directly as thought (or productivity) make a difference (Gregory Bateson).” (Manning)
- form and content central to research-creation. “not seeing the content of our research (what we are bringing attention to) as divisible from its form (from how we are doing so).” (Loveless)
- Lucero – intimacy, presence, collaboration. Unfamiliar and frictional, pedagogy as intimacy, touching encounter.(Springgay)
- “research-creation as an event, a speculative middle, and a practice.” Not data-collection, focus on events, affective and bodily, not prodceduralism. No neutrality in research. (Springgay)
- Different forms of publishing (making matter of public record) ex. daily-practice website, curated exhibitions and catalogues, symposium, edited volume, “get at a different aspect of the research” (ex work that starts from the same question of “why does there seem to be a resurgence of interest in the maternal as a site of political and artistic debate in these first few years of the twenty-first century”) (Loveless)
- actionaday, adanceaday, “what is a relation? And how am I participating in relations as I document them?”
- Rigour, false problems versus generative problems
- polydisciplinamorous “to think through “poly” requires that we honour emergent libidinal drives, attachments, and loves in ways that resist the logics of mononormativity, whether that “mono” is about disciplines or people.” (Loveless)
- feminist riguor as co-produced, incremental, partial, diffuse series of changes, tangible and felt across dif. registers, experimentation/ecology of practice.(springgay)
- “if research-creation is about engaging with does not ordinarily register as value (as knowledge, as productive, etc), the work is necessarily political” (Manning)
- “each dance, drawing, and text serve as data in an archive, as scribbles in an ethnographer’s notebook, not as artworks in a gallery” (Myer)
- issue with data being taken in one form and then being remade into another form (data points into sewing/performance/etc). in this focus is on form, focus needs to be on event.
- Nested questions from forward of Knowings and Knots
- How do the politics of research-creation play out in the arts, humanities and social sciences?
- What do research-creation practices look like in these fields?
- How might research-creation unsettle existing relations of power and knowledge? Alternatively, how might some forms of research-creation entrench inherited relations of power and knowledge?
- How might these questions matter to the future of interdisciplinary research in the twenty-first-century academy?
Definitions and Citations
Fluxus Movement
Material Semiosis (Donna Haraway)
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (The Undercommons)
Gregory Bateson (Making a difference)
Owen Chapman and Kim Sawchuk, “Research-Creation: Intervention, Analysis, and ‘Family Resemblances'”
Kathrin Busch “Artistic Research and the Poetics of Knowledge”
Jorge Lucero (artist/scholar)
George Marcus (Para-sites)
methodology: theoretical basis for research, theories about how and why and what to research
methods: procedure for doing research, protocols, techniques, practices for doing research.
empirical research: experiment/experience research
“research-for-creation” (the production of an art or design object as the outcome of an extensive research process);
“research-from-creation” (a written text that relies upon artistic methodological experiments);
“creative presentations of research” (a monograph or essay, in text or hypertext, that plays signifcantly and poetically with linguistic form—think Barthes);
“creation-as-research.” creation process at the heart of the research strategy, and understanding artistic form as capable of being a legitimate mode of research dissemination (via a performance, exhibition, etc.)
Post-Read
I’m always excited to see myself in readings. I’m also always rushing off to do something else when I’m done.
The participants in this dialogue are the most prominant research-creation scholars in Canada. They are discussing what research-creation is, how they came to use it as a practice, what that looks like, and what problems and challenges remain. It is a scholarly practice of doing, with rigour, focus, and honouring of the disciplines they’re working within, and careful pushing at the tensions of limits of conventions, witnessing and responding to reactions in knowledge. It is a resistance to institution and industry although it necessitates working within what it is resisting. It is not concrete and in place but emergent and event, it is not artefacts but experiences. Adjusting attunement and register. Sensations and experiences of time are stretching and sticky.