In late February, I had the chance to discuss my artist practice as part of the PSL-Harvard workshop “Inquiry through Practice.” For me, what remains from the two-day workshop is the exchange of ideas and newfound friendship not only with the visiting cohort from PSL––Joseph Minster, Leandre Bernard-Brunel, and Geoffrey Rouge-Carrassat ––but also with fellow graduate students at Harvard––Amanda Gann and Seiyoung Jang (not to mention the ongoing collaboration between everyone who formally and informally participated: researchers, faculty, administrators, and students).
Everyone’s presentation took a different form: Seiyoung performed electronic sound, highlighting its relation to the body; Amanda took us through an emotional history of death in the theatre, acting out the role of death herself; Geoffrey led us through his practice as a director, blurring the line between game and play; Leandre screened his documentary, an ethnographic search for ghosts; Joseph showed his films as variations on the reality of the Alps; I showed my personal image and writing archive. Xavier Nueno presented his paper “On Independent Investigations in the Age of the University-Corporation” as a way to tie our practices together, and other audience members, including Critical Media Practice students, participated in lively discussions on how to define and frame “research” “practice” “archive” “experience” “institution.”
Though each of our projects differ in medium and in focus, the two days made it clear that we each engage in some form of research: theoretical, historical, practical, embodied. While I can’t say that we were able to definitively pin down any of the terms in question, we were able to agree, for the most part, that where the artist project is concerned, doing, making, performing, filming, and writing operate as both research and practice; and that, using the terms art-based research or research-based practice depend mostly on the artist’s relation to the institutional frame.
Now, months later, it occurs to me to look up “practice” and “research,” two terms that we often think we know from everyday use. Practice is the “actual application or use of an idea, belief or method” whereas research is to “investigate or study closely, to search again.” I would suggest that we might think of practice as the application of searching again, and research as the study of that application. Is this not what we mean when we say “inquiry through practice” or rather “artist practice” or even “workshop”?
Students and attendees at the Harvard-PSL Workshop “Inquiry Through Practice”
