4.2.3: “Practicing Critique"

An overstuffed exhibit, Terminal Imaginaries tried to do too much. By collapsing the history of medicine into oblong chunks the critique becomes visible, but it is too indebted to the secondary literature. Anatomy, dermatology, grave robbing, are interlinked but not dependent, in a kind of lenticularity which juxtaposition does little to square, address, or contradict.

I write of the issues in this work, partly to point to the future need for iteration (4.2.3;4.2.4), but also because at the heart of my creative endeavors is an attempt to short-circuit the radical potential of the arts practitioner. In a blog post for the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, I wrote about these concerns:

As I finish this essay, I want to describe arts-based practice as I am trying to conceive it, and shelve for the moment the term “artist” for the term “practitioner”. Partly I want to sidestep the immense cultural baggage associated with the term ‘art’ in favor of thinking of reimagining aesthetic labor. Arts-based practice is a knowledge practice in and of itself.¹

My aesthetic handwringing in this section is an admission of issues which became more clear because I was interested in a too broad inquiry into medical history, but it also signals a kind of work that is interested more in attempted articulation than successful implementation. As I argued in the blog post, it was tactical—Michel De Certeau’s term that describes politically ineffective, but deeply important actions of the everyday (4.1.3; 4.5.1). Again, I wrote,

While seemingly unimportant, tactics creates the grounds for epistemic play: it is messy, chaotic, and its products cannot be delimited by hypothetical experimentation. Arts-based practice exists in a mutable discourse, and functions not as a static object, but as a process where aesthetics is but a single (albeit essential) interlocutor. Further, in opposition to other forms of knowledge which rely (explicitly or implicitly) on the technology of hypothesis, arts-based practice does not need to predict its outcomes, so much as examine its aftereffects.²

As a knowledge practice, arts-based research is less about completed projects than about the ways different methods and approaches enable different relationships between objects. The success or failure of the individual project is less important than the ways it can help articulate further intervention, be it in future aesthetic work or more traditional knowledge work. Practice comes to mean closer to a definition of repetitive action by which an individual learns to sharpen a particular skill. Arts-based research practices are a means of articulating and activating the knowledge work that is always present in the creation of art as a way to work through problems. In the case of my work, iteration forms in cycles of arts-based work and written work made possible by that reflection.