4.1.3: “The Tactical Arts"

In past drafts of this chapter, I have tried to outline my own arts-based method. These drafts were filled with nebulous theory work, which read closer to a polemic than an articulation as to what constitutes an arts-based research project. I found myself writing about two issues of arts-based work: first, it is very difficult to define a creative methodology because it is necessarily bespoke, and second, arts-based research is supposed to do something that other methods and frames cannot do. How should I go about defining a specifically undefinable research practice? How do I articulate this approach to scholarship without bloviating about the problems of knowledge production?

This section serves two purposes. First, I want to foreground where my reticence originates. Second, I want to outline the goals of this chapter. Finally, I feel a need to articulate an aesthetic heuristic in relation to tactical work. Much of this thinking originates from a deep seeded mistrust in the radical possibilities of both academic and artistic practices.

To put what I mean more bluntly: Artists cannot save the academy. They cannot undermine or subvert research practices in any unique or special way. They can only address academic work from a different vantage and different set of methodologies.

Implicit in much of the scholarship about arts-based research (and about the value of the arts in general) is an assumption that the arts can somehow be a better method. These argument seem to say, that the arts are an epistemic savior for disciplines in jeopardy (not unlike the calls in the aughts concerning the potentials of the digital humanities).¹ Forwarding these claims places too much weight on the possibilities of art and it obfuscates the more subtle ways the creative practices can be leveraged for knowledge making. Arts-based research is not a prestine frontier from which new insights may be extracted, nor is it a sledgehammer that can smash through the neo-liberal, late capitalist weights that burden the current university system. Creative workers cannot and should not be held up on the assumption that their supposed new ways of research can undo the myriad systems which maintain the status quo.

Why, then, should the arts be part of academic knowledge work? What good is another imperfect method in a discursive system that only rewards novel research, groundbreaking findings, and paradigm shifting revolutions?

Much of my response in this regard is drawn from my own lived experience: the MFA program in which I shot and edited “The Modern Orpheus” (4.1.1) ground down my artistic idealism. In a past life, I wanted to make important, critical cinematic works (although, I could not articulate at the beginning or end of that program what that actually meant). I make art now because it is a skill in which I have been trained, and because I feel a need to maintain that expertise to reinforce my curriculum vitae. More than just leveraging sunk costs, however, I also make art because I have been trained to be able to use it to understand a concept, set of objects, or discipline.²

With this in mind, this chapter outlines a series of creative works that have helped me think through issues of health, representation, exploitation, and disciplinary systems. There are a few through lines which I will articulate, as each project is dependent on the projects that came before it. I am working mostly chronologically, starting with two linked projector pieces, Terminal Imaginaries and Tuberculous Imaginaries from 2021 and 2022 respectively (4.2.0), going to Dermographic Opacities from January 2022 (4.3.0), finishing with Tuberscopia from 2023 (4.4.0). By reflecting on these projects, I will articulate the specific insights that were made possible through arts-based research, and I will provide a partially delineated framework for how I conceive of arts-based research.

Rather than apply arts-based research as a method, this chapter sees these practices as a tactical heuristic. I use ‘heuristic’ because the term refers to a flexible set of rules which guide decision making. It helps me see my own arts-based research as being guided not by a stringent method, but an overarching set of goals and frameworks.³ Furthermore, I borrow Michel de Certeau’s notion of ‘tactics’, to delineate the contingent, sporadically effective ways the arts can make political interventions. This chapter concludes with a more in depth discussion of the tactical (4.5.1), but most simply arts-based research makes possible interventions in a variety of disciplines, knowing full well that these critiques will most likely be ignored by the discourse at large. Covert and canny, arts-based research is much more about the forms of critical subterfuge made possible with the absence of strict methodological guidelines, disciplinary requirements, and expected outcomes.

What is arts-based research, then? Most simply, it is an open heuristic to apply aesthetic modes of working to more traditionally aligned disciplines or networks of discourse.

This dissertation, for example, is built on a skepticism toward the primary evidence in the history of medicine: not a skepticism toward its provenance or reality, but toward its singular scientific purpose. Arts-based research enabled me to think through the objects, to destroy and recreate them in ways that reframed and reimagined them.⁴

Finally, if there is any value to this method it is in the same critical thread espoused by Tara McPherson regarding the digital humanities,

In extending our critical methodologies, we must have at least a passing familiarity with code languages, operating systems, algorithmic thinking, and systems design. We need database literacies, algorithmic literacies, computational literacies, interface literacies. We need new hybrid practitioners: artist-theorists, programming humanists, activist-scholars; theoretical activists, critical race roders. . . . We have to shake ourselves out of our small, field-based boxes so that we might take seriously the possibility that our own knowledge practices are normalized, modular, and black boxed in much the same way as the code we study in our work.

Arts-based research inverts McPherson’s polemical argument: the disciplinary structures that build the academy’s discursive boxes actively discourage the kinds of scholarship for which McPherson clamors. Interdisciplinarity, while used as a buzzword for progressivist notions of scholarship, is regularly at odds with academia’s dogmatic institutional structure.⁵ The arts, with its methodological and epistemic capricousness, can work in the reverse of McPherson’s logic: what the academy needs is less department formations and more researchers willing to follow threads and imagine methods through whatever discipline within which they find themselves. The work I describe in this chapter is at times a woven braid and at other times a unordered bird’s nest, but what these projects I outline present a kind of arts-based method, which have each contributed in some form to the claims elsewhere in this dissertation.