https://www.researchcatalogue.

net/view/503395/503396

Artistic Research as a Process of

Unfolding

Unfolding the Process – Darla Crispin, Director, Arne Nordheim Centre for Artistic
Research (NMH)

By relating theory concerning ‘the margin’ to that of unfolding, using specific instances
of artistic practice, this exposition aims to offer some ideas as to how the approaches
associated with artistic research might generate both new knowledge and fresh social
and cultural orientations for art-making and reception.

Introduction

As the field of artistic research extends its reach, linking disparate domains through its
emphasis upon interdisciplinarity and expanding its own and their horizons through re-
evaluations of critical reflection, subjectivity and auto-ethnography, its potential to be
grounded in practices based upon community, consciousness of ecology and,
crucially, empathy, becomes more pronounced. By looking at a few simple and specific
examples that are situated in these kinds of practice, I should like to offer an analysis of
the nature and extent of this potential. In a sense, therefore, this exposition will act as a
‘hinge’, a site of folding, between different approaches to artistic research. Following
Gillian Rose[1], Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari[2] and others, it is the idea of the fold that I
should like to explore as an organizational metaphor, with art-making itself acting as the
site of the folding and unfolding - a site of pressure, rupture, fracture, transformation –
and with the fold’s marginal status serving as the potential point of emergence of new
shapes, functions, ideas and even – indeed especially - new knowledge.

Pressure, rupture, fracture – these are all too apparent in contemporary Western
societies and such transformations as we witness generally seem negative rather than
positive. One could be forgiven for sensing that the human follies wrought upon the
planet over the recent generations are returning with a vengeance in the form of
disruption of the natural world. What has become apparent in the wake of such events –
perhaps, in particular, events associated with climate change and the debate around it--
is that, in current geopolitical terms, ideas of the fold as eliciting a change of direction
and even a rupture seem all too apposite. The first point about this is a literal one
concerning the natural world: viewing our planet from space, for example, we see
folding and unfolding: the movement of wind in upon itself, the folding of layers of stone
and strata from seismic activity. This is natural activity – but some of it may well be
affected by our human ‘doing’. And this is where the second point, the crisis of humane
discourse, unfolds, in that the political language and leadership required to deal with
crises seem to have almost vanished – and this in a world that is still trying to come to
terms with things that until recently seemed inconceivable – mass migrations of war-
torn and persecuted populations, tremors in Continental European politics, and the
dystopian political situation in the USA. There seems little in the way of ‘expertise’ that
can remedy these complex situations. Indeed, since the predictions of experts have been
proven wrong so often in the past few years, the very idea of respect for expertise
amongst our global citizenry has been undermined. What can it mean, in such times, to
be engaged in the world of art and ideas and to be fired by an appetite for their
explication – literally, their unfolding? What is ‘expertise’ now and, amongst the fields of
expertise, what kind of value can we claim for that special corner which concerns itself
with artistic understanding?

These upheavals challenge us in more than our political convictions; they force us to
look at what we mean by ‘humanity’, when aspects of the public discourse seem so
inhumane, and to try to do something about protecting it. The idea of holding multiple
points of view, of being convinced that divergent beliefs can all be honoured, if not
agreed, and that these aspects of the human condition will, in turn, generate artwork
that is complex, not ‘black and white’ in its nature, its conception or reception – all this is
challenged by the disintegration of the honest discussion and debate that should
characterize the democratic process. The ‘truths’ of art can seem all-too frail against this
disintegration, which already shows signs of undermining our very sense of truth and
how we define it.

The horrific debasement of language that marred the 2016 U.S. presidential election and
only grows worse in its appalling aftermath is an urgent wake-up call; it challenges us to
protect and create anew our open, courageous and necessarily sophisticated discourses
in-and-through art – and to do so overtly in resistance to trends of over-simplification
and the telling of untruths. This is part of the demanding work of research, but also the
seat of some of its most significant rewards.

Auto-ethnography

The notion of solipsism, with its inherent dangers of false ‘world-creation’, is often
discussed in relation to research – but it is not merely about research: it is really about
the delicate balancing act of becoming a fully-realised human being. The
objective/subjective paradox is particularly acute in artistic research, where
researcher/practitioners must constantly balance the unique and personal with the
shared and replicable; this tension has prompted them to look at ways that personal
reflection, auto-ethnography and self-reflexivity can continue to be developed as viable
approaches to the conducting of musical research.

This new thinking is not confined to artistic research; it sits within a wider shift in
attitudes that has been discernible across musical scholarship for a number of years. For
example, in response to thinking exemplified by Joseph Kerman’s influential
text Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Harvard University Press, 1986),
the once traditional field of historical musicology has witnessed the rise of the self-
styled ‘new musicology’, in which the previously narrow and selective focus of much
musical scholarship was critiqued and counterbalanced by a conscious promoting of
under-represented genres and non-standard ideological perspectives. This initiative
challenged established assumptions in ways that revealed – one might even say
unfolded - the hidden hierarchies driving our sense both of what is most important in
music history and, perhaps more crucially, what constitutes neutrality and objectivity in
our own attitudes and approaches. Significantly, it has introduced into our discourse a
new awareness of the importance of plurality and contingency; we now speak of
‘musics’, not music, and ‘histories’, as opposed to history.

These moves have been part of a wider shift that has gone far beyond the purview of the
arts; for example, soon after its foundation, researchers in the Orpheus Research Centre
in Music (ORCiM) at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent became focused upon the theoretical
writings of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, a biochemist and philosopher working at the Max
Planck Institute for the History of Science.[4] Rheinberger’s work has proven to be of
interest to a wide range of artistic researchers on the continent, especially in the Low
Countries, Germany, Switzerland and Austria, because of his concept of the
‘experimental system’. Crucial to the concept is Rheinberger’s essential notion that the
nature of this system, the apparatus both physical and conceptual within which the
experiment takes place, is not the controlled space of the ‘scientific method’, but a highly
contingent arena in which the subjectivity of the experimenter is part of the desirable
search for the ‘unexpected’ – the ‘new epistemic thing’ – or ‘new knowledge’.
Experimentation, Rheinberger tells us, is an affective, emotive practice, not an
‘objective’, de-personalized following of rules. This legitimising message from a bona
fide scientist has been seized upon enthusiastically – perhaps sometimes too
enthusiastically.

Although we must be very careful when using scientific language and models
metaphorically to describe the making of art, the parallels between Rheinberger’s
experimental system with its ‘future knowledge’[5] and, say, the insight that emerges
from certain kinds of musical performance have an undeniable persuasiveness. The
resemblances they spark apply both in terms of the futurity of the ‘knowing’ in the act of
performance and in relation to the imprint of the practitioner upon that knowing. This
shift in understanding the nature of knowledge-formation has, in turn, transformed
aspects of our music disciplines.

Discipline formation

The process of discipline formation generally follows a predictable trajectory, in which

initially idealistic aspirations become swamped by a plethora of more partisan
considerations as the number of stakeholders proliferates and their vested interests
come into competition with one another. It is the all-too human desire for power,
influence and ownership that largely drives this process, but it is undoubtedly
exacerbated when resources, financial and otherwise, are in scare supply. Cooperation
and complementarity tend to give way to tribalism and a fight for domination. Among
the many hopes for artistic research among its first-adopters was that it might break
down some of the cultural barriers between scholarly work and artistic production,
giving for the first time an authentic voice to those practitioners who were also
thoughtful and inquisitive about their practice. In an academic world where practice and
scholarship were seen as separate, it was not uncommon for those who displayed hybrid
interests and capabilities to be penalised, rather than being rewarded for their
possession of more than one focused skill or talent. Artistic research offered a source of
potentially reunified identity for such individuals and, it was hoped, would give them a
context and vocabulary within which to articulate their questions and share their
knowledge. In doing so, it would not negate musicology, music analysis and the other
established disciplines but add to and enrich them; its questions – and therefore its ways
of addressing them – would not be antithetical, simply different. But the fact that the
term chosen to signify the new discipline not only contained the loaded word ‘research’
but also linked it with the provocative adjective ‘artistic’ – suggesting a dualism between
itself and all other research, where the qualifier ‘scientific’ is sometimes explicitly added
and always implicitly present – inevitably raised all kinds of anxieties. Many of these
were legitimately bound up with a concern for academic standards and the possible
threat to these from an insurgent discipline. But others stemmed from a perceived
challenge to generations of privileged status and to the rights of guardianship
concerning quality criteria. Those who championed artistic research were called upon to
define and justify it and, unsurprisingly, to do so in ways that conformed to the frames of
reference of the status quo. Not only did this constrain the boundaries of the discourse;
critically, it forced that discourse firmly onto the terrain of language, disenfranchising
any explanations that might, for those with the skills to detect them, be found woven
into the practice itself.

Of course, practitioners themselves use language all the time as a tool for refining their
practice. Composers talk to performers, performers to each other, teachers to students
and musicians to audiences. They have vocabularies for all of these interactions but
none of them is the same as that used by musical scholars. Crucially, they share a
readiness to engage with their subjective experience and to talk in the first person – a
practice that is generally shunned in scholarly writing. Engaging with the scientific
research community meant entering a linguistic world of alien conventions and taboos
in which they lacked experience. Conversely, those who had invested years of effort in
mastering the language of research were on ‘home ground’ when it came to demolishing
the arguments of the newcomers. In particular, they could pounce upon any
manifestation of the subjective ‘I’, citing it as evidence of a non-scholarly approach. The
derisive accusation was that such writing was not ‘re-search’ but ‘me-search’ and that,
rather than finding new and intriguing insights within their own experience, those
indulging in it were, like Narcissus, simply being dazzled and enraptured by their own
reflections.

In this polarised terrain of discourse, artistic researchers looked for independent

validation of their ideas and approaches in other disciplines and found some solace in
the writings of certain philosophers and social scientists. References to these began to
proliferate in the pages of books, articles and doctoral theses concerned with artistic
research. But citation is one thing; weaving such ideas into the body of one’s own
writing poses the same challenges of mastering an alien vocabulary but with the added
jeopardy that one is no longer talking about a different musical discipline but about
disciplines entirely outside the musical domain. Meanwhile, philosophers and social
scientists have not been slow to pick up on the interest in their disciplines coming from
artistic researchers and have begun to turn their own attention towards artistic
research from a philosophical and social scientific standpoint. We now see many
keynote speakers at artistic research events who come from these non-musical
disciplines and who, with undeniable eloquence and intellectual flair, lecture artistic
researchers on just what it is that they are engaged in. In this context, the fact that they
have rarely practised that of which they speak seems less damaging to their case than
the corresponding lack of fluency of practitioners when they attempt to verbalise their
critical reflections on the inner workings of their lived practice.
Critical Reflection

It can be seen that subjectivity lurks at the core of many of these tensions and
controversies. Critical reflection as a tool for research is respectable enough when
applied, with ostensible objectivity, to other individuals or phenomena; when directed
inwards upon oneself, it is commonly seen as fatally compromised. And, of course, there
are serious risks in applying critical reflection self-reflexively. Doing so may open up
research to new kinds of conceptualisations but it requires an unswerving rigour. Poor
examples will only reinforce traditional scientific prejudice while even the best
manifestations will face a wall of scepticism. And yet, there are notable exceptions to
this pattern, not least in Norway. Significantly, when an artistic equivalent to scientific
research was being proposed in Norway, the term chosen was a phrase that translates
as ‘artistic development’; freed from the restrictive connotations of the word ‘research’
this activity could embrace wholeheartedly the concept of personal reflection as a tool to
promote artistic development. An ‘artistic fellowship programme’ was developed in
Norway as an equivalent for artistic practitioners working in higher education to the
more traditional PhD. Personal reflection was not merely permitted but was made a
mandatory element of this programme and, as a result, a significant body of experience
concerning such work has been generated.

Then, in January 2018, the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Science passed a
regulation establishing a new doctoral programme based on the performing and
creative arts and specifically named as a PhD in artistic research. As a doctoral degree
based on an artistic-research model, this programme aligns the Norwegian system with
those of other countries that have developed artistic research doctorates but with the
crucial difference that it has grown out of the experience of the artistic fellowship
programme and, especially, out of the emphasis there upon artistic practice and
production and upon the artist’s personal critical reflection on these. The Norwegian
Academy of Music was the first institution to establish its own PhD programme based on
the ministry’s new regulation. Its ‘Ph.d.-program i kunstnerisk utviklingsarbeid’ or, in
English, ‘PhD programme in artistic research’ has been followed by similar programmes
in the other major Norwegian higher arts institutions.

This development is a significant innovation which, nevertheless, continues to reflect

Norway’s emphasis upon individual research programmes that are embedded in
socially-conscious educational philosophies and practices. The PhD programme in
artistic research does not have a thesis; it consists of the making of art, coupled
with personal reflection upon the processes that lead to that art. And, by the way, that
reflection does not have to be articulated in the form of writing, although none in the
music field has yet ventured fully outside the confines of the written document into
exclusive use of multi-media examples.

Although the artistic research fellowship programme has generated a wealth of

experience in handling subjectivity, autobiography and self-reflexivity, this does not
mean that the experience has been uniformly positive and successful. Even outside the
confines of expectations relating to a doctoral programme, the level of sophistication
and maturity with which fellows have engaged with the reflective element of their
submission has frequently failed to match that of their artistic production. As a result,
the issue of reflection has itself become the subject of research enquiry as the national
regulatory body, NARP (the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme) has sought to
identify strengths and weaknesses and to define best practice. A report commissioned
by NARP, authored by Eirik Vassenden in 2013[6], articulated some of the challenges:

These observations and suggestions demonstrate how the Norwegian Artistic Research
Programme has moved to develop a critique of what reflection might be, understanding
that this, in itself, is important research work. But this does not mean that PhD
candidates find this easy to achieve. When we request self-reflexivity, what we are
asking is challenging. It entails a journey toward new kinds of languages, in addition to
the other challenges of method and rigour which it raises. Moreover, the ‘out-and-back’,
‘call-and-response’, ‘question-and-answer’ aspects of self-reflexivity suggest a point of
reversal – a hinge, as it were, which brings us back to the image of the fold.

Unfolding the Process

Inspired by the work of Gillian Rose, and experiencing genuine concern about the
pressure on the arts to instrumentalise their arguments so as to justify the financial
support they need in order to survive, over the past five years or so I have been in a
constant process of revisiting the metaphor of unfolding as a way of understanding the
processes that go on in artistic creation, interpretation and presentation. Its value as a
metaphor in the exploration of self-reflexivity is just one aspect of this. More generally, it
seems to me that its strong and tactile quality (we have all experienced the sensuous
way that paper both yields and is made stronger by the process of folding) make it a
vivid way of characterising the otherwise often abstract and complex way that creativity
interrelates with knowledge-generation. Explaining complexity without feeling the need
to explain it awayseems to me a better way to demonstrate why the world needs the arts
and the particular truths which they hold.

Using the word ‘unfolding’ in the context of knowledge-creation in the arts implies a
different relationship between the states of non-understanding and understanding than
that suggested by the more traditional research-related concepts of ‘discovery’,
‘invention’, and so on. It carries the notion of a knowledge that is always close to us:
within reach and already an intimate part of our everyday experience, yet somehow
enigmatic and wrapped in upon itself until skilfully opened out to our direct gaze. By
contrast, the traditional metaphors of research conjure up images of bold and
pioneering expeditions into uncharted territory from whose alien wastes nuggets of
valuable knowledge can be retrieved and heroically brought back for the benefit of
civilization – with all the post-colonial baggage that such imagery entails.

Of course, this is partly a matter of vocabulary and of how the connotations of words
have evolved - and often diverged. One of the three common (and related) definitions of
unfolding is ‘to remove the covers from’ – so, literally, to dis-cover! Perhaps it is worth
looking at all three definitions and reflecting briefly on their shared and distinct
properties:

• The first is ‘to open or spread out’, with this also carrying the implication of
expansion, in the sense that the folded object is highly compact and, when
unfolded, occupies a greater space than before. Expansion of knowledge, as
 distinct from pushing forward its frontiers, may be a useful idea for artistic
research.
• The second, already referred to, is ‘to remove the covers from and expose to
view’. Although this is etymologically the closest to discovery, it is interesting to
note that it still implies the bringing out into open sight of something already
present, albeit veiled. We may think of the cliché of something being ‘hidden in
plain sight’, in which context, an agency that brings it out of concealment may
certainly be seen as contributing to knowledge and understanding.
• The final definition is, in some ways, the most interesting. It is ‘to reveal gradually
by written or spoken explanation, to make known’. It reminds us that we often
speak of a narrative as something that unfolds – as though it exists in its entirety
ahead of time but tightly coiled and requiring a certain pace, duration – and,
arguably, sequence – for its full revelation and definitive realisation. This is the
definition which most clearly identifies unfolding as a process, - an ongoing
exposition - and one whose articulation is as significant as its end-result of creating
something that has been opened, spread out and exposed to view.

Thinking of this last definition, it is interesting to contrast it with another cliché of

scientific research – the ‘eureka moment’, the flash of inspiration in which revelation
appears to come quasi instantaneously in a convulsive inversion that changes the state
of non-comprehension into that of comprehension. For all that this is indeed a cliché,
and by no means the invariable paradigm for either the manner or the rhythm of
scientific discovery, it is revealing in the way that it once again implies the sudden, and
almost inexplicable, arrival in our conscious experience of something previously absent
and, to all intents and purposes, non-existent. The importance of the criterion of
originality in the evaluation of research owes much to the idea that the researcher’s
contribution to knowledge is something which they, and they alone, were able to reach
out to and seize at a given moment in the linear evolution of knowledge.

It is from this paradigm of originality that we also derive the heroic notion of research as
a kind of colonization of new territories of knowledge, and of the total colonized area
being one that grows incrementally with each original contribution that is added to it.
This, however, is a metaphor that disadvantages arguments wishing to portray artistic
creation as a species of research.

Art is, in part, about making us see more clearly things that lie around us all the time but
which we all too often fail to attend to as we should. It is a call to attention that reminds
us to work actively, and with all our senses, so as to apprehend life in all its richness and
detail. Rather than relating to knowledge as it has generally been perceived in post-
Enlightenment Western thought - as a relentlessly advancing vector - if anything, it
bears greater resemblances to Eastern traditions of knowledge as the expansion of
wisdom through the practice of contemplation. This is a concept that chimes well with
ideas of uncovering, expansion and a gradual, narrative-oriented exegesis - and with
artistic research as making its contributions to knowledge and understanding in these
terms.

Let us consider Artistic Research’s questioning of an enduring and thorny problem

in music - the nature of ‘Werktreue’ - in light of the metaphor of the fold. We can define
‘Werktreue’ very simply here as the imperative that faces those of us who work with
Western Art music and musical reproduction: that we should aim to make our
performances as faithful to the musical score, and therefore, to the composer, as
possible. This imperative can itself be seen either as a quest directed at a forever finitely
elusive goal or as a search for a truth that is seen as immanent in the musical score and
accessible simply through the performer’s unwavering fidelity to that score and every
last instruction contained within it. Of course, even the latter concept contains a seed of
elusiveness in the sense that only a perfect fidelity can yield a perfect truth. Moreover, in
a world in which ‘the truth’ is ever more elusive as an idea, mere obedience to a score,
even if exhaustive, is not really sufficient, even though, inside the walls of music
conservatoires, the practices around Werktreue still hold sway. This is the site of one
crucial fold: that which delineates the schism between the externally imposed demands
of the score and the internal imperatives of the musical artist.

The conundrum of Werktreue with reference to Western Art music and the rise of
Artistic Research can be conceived of in terms of two opposed, or folded-over, notions,
with the former, Werktreue, being associated with the ‘faithful’ rendition of the musical
text and the performer acting in the service of this, and the latter, Artistic Research,
becoming increasingly concerned with breaching the stronghold of the text, so that
performers may remake its materials in new ways, rather than ‘reproducing’ them in
accordance with a series of rules. Seeing the unfolding of a musical performance as the
imparting of knowledge at a specific time and place and through the rhythms and
conventions of narrative encourages us to think beyond the simple equation that the
more literally – and therefore ‘faithfully’ - a performance matches the set of instructions
for it embodied in the score, the ‘better’ it is. It means that there are times when we
might rate a performance more highly precisely in so far as it pushes creatively at the
boundaries of identity that are defined by the musical text.

The Artistic Research movement more generally has an emergent question circulating
within it to do with whether the rupture of the ‘truth-concept’ that characterizes so
many artistic research projects is a near-inevitable corollary of the ‘post-truth’ world: if
we can no longer believe in the ‘truth content’ embedded within the musical text, if we
consider ‘composer’s intentions’ to be impossible to retrieve from the ciphers of the
score, then our rigid adherence to its many markings and codes may belong to an era
other than our own. Indeed, the scholar, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson has gone further in an
address called: ‘Preening Mannerists and the Performance Police’ by proposing an
argument that Werktreue could been considered to be ‘unethical’ because it places the
human beings enmeshed within it into various kinds of physical and psychological
servitude and hazard. He cites the high number of performance injuries within
conservatoires as part of his evidence.

In response to such ideas, many artist-researchers in music are ‘going a different way’,
by using musical texts more as repositories of source material through which they
search for new ways of working, pushing hard at the boundary of what a ‘work’ actually
‘is’ to the extent that its predictable form can disappear, with something unexpected
taking its place. Of course, it is still presumed that the work, in its most essential nature,
survives this rough treatment. But is that necessarily true? And even if one accepts that
the aural and performative milieu is part of what constitutes a work, are these kinds of
machinations necessarily for the better?
Some exponents of the more ‘scientific’ disciplines within music scholarship are pushing
back, suggesting that the unbridled messing about with scores is not all it purports to be.
Some argue that it is merely a symptom of the exaggerated subjectivity and reflexivity of
the post-millennial world in which all is autobiography, reduced to a series of selfies
with blog captions underneath. The question then becomes: what is happening to the
power of the critical voice in the echo chamber of cyberspace? Does this not make us
vulnerable to precisely the doublespeak with which we are inundated in the wider
media space? Is the boundary-testing model an approach full of expressive potentiality,
or an ‘anything goes’ recipe for the flattening of that expression? Might it not, from time
to time, lead us to devastatingly bad choices – artistic, ethical and both?

Perhaps, more productively, we might look at these divergent approaches as two sides
of the same argument, but folded over one another. After all, the empathic
communication of information and experience – and not merely the ‘verbally empathic’
– is a sign of research transferability, a marker for research content. But this, in some
circles, is a heretical point of view. Research, in its more traditional manifestations
mistrusts empathy and the individually-incarnated human experience; the researcher,
although a sentient being in the world, is expected to behave dispassionately in their
actual research, and with a distrust for insights that come quasi-spontaneously from
instinct. For the construction of empathic yet ‘proper’ systems in which to study, and to
research, our structures still need to change. Perhaps it is within art itself that we see
instances of folding that can be read as a meta-language: i.e. that idea of fold allows
music to talk to writing to talk to sculpture – and so on.

Here is a story. It is called:

The Cost of Perfection - by Mr. W[7]

The fold here is the sentence: ‘He knew then it was time to retire from the craft.’ It
creates the hinge whereby the subject of the story moves from its protagonist being
immersed in a virtuosic, aesthetically highly-realised practice – the sensuous experience
of sweeping with the perfect dust brush – to his becoming a curator and experiencing
the loss of his practice in a manner so poignant that he is brought to tears, with the
perfect dust brush becoming a mere object of contemplation. Debating about this, we
might consider it as a critique of curation that echoes many such discourses that are
taking place in the arts. It also brings forward the question of ethics in the arts. An
ethical moment is a moment of choice; here, the choice to retire, seemingly an ethical
one emerging from an insoluble aporia – the high point of aesthetic appreciation of the
dust brush being perceived as a sign to remove it, and its user, from action – simply
leads to yet another aporia. The brush’s dual identity as art object and functional tool
turns into an irreconcilable paradox that paralyses the artist’s capacity for action. Of
course, sincere responses to ethical imperatives do not necessarily lead to happiness.

This example also requires us to consider the nature of story-telling. Narratives require
both a storyteller and either a live audience or, as in this case, a reader. They are not just
about the content to be delivered but also about the event of delivery, the transactional
process, through which the content is transmitted. This process may be predominantly
uni-directional (in general, the storyteller does the speaking/writing, the audience the
listening and the reader the reading) but no decent storyteller unfolds the spoken
narrative in the same way to each audience; subliminal feedback deriving from small
reactions – expressions, postures, small murmurs, audible shuffling, etc. - will all
influence the unfolding and, in the process, re-shape the storyteller’s own relationship
with the content of the story. Similarly, while the storyteller cannot literally be re-
shaped by every eventual reader of the text, they must think about the range and
diversity of their readership when they consider how best to set down in text the
narrative such that it will ‘read itself out’ in the inner voice conjured up by the reader.

As a result, both storyteller and audience are changed by each narrative that is
unfolded. Knowledge is created within the event itself – not merely transmitted one more
time in the self-same way that has occurred in the past and will again in the future. Each
unfolding, while preserving the essential characteristics of the narrative archetype, is
also unique and irreproducible. This offers a more general lesson about the limitations
of trying to understand artistic research in terms of the criteria of its dominant scientific
counterpart.

We have to be clear: hearing a piece of music, or listening to a reading of fiction, does not
communicate a literal truth, but a compelling realisation generates its own sense of
psychological verisimilitude, its own immersive world. Our sense of immersion in the
best of such realisations is a function of the vitality of this kind of world-creation, but it
is a complex thing, full of wonder, but also full of folds, striations and faults. I believe
that this place of the fold is a place of potentially productive creative risk in its
acknowledgement of the impossibility of perfection. Gillian Rose’s term for it, and for
her theoretical system, is ‘the broken middle’:

Expanding the view outward from the philosophical propositions at issue here to the
expression of the problems in the form of practices, ‘the broken middle’ might also be
called ‘the touching middle’, because of the ways that flat planes make contact when
they are folded one over the other. It is a place of work, questions, and sometimes,
differences and disagreements. It is also a locus for recognizing the impossibility of
reconciling different positions, but allowing these positions to exist, mediating between
‘the ethical’, the collective tradition and culture of a particular community and ‘self-
expressive nonconformity’. According to the modelling emergent from this set of ideas,
we need to navigate back and forth in our process of ‘unfolding’. We need to move to and
fro from:

• The personal, ‘my project’, my own world, self-orientation, the place where
material creativity is absolutely unbridled, to the other side of the fold:
• The transpersonal addressing of meta-questions in the world, and with the
intelligent, even empathic understanding of other points of view (which does not
necessarily constitute agreement with those views).

Figure 1: Unfolding the Process modelling

We could think of these extremes of orientation as coming to a near, but never total,
resolution in the middle of the figure, where the fold is shown. We might think of the
act of moving back and forth from the personal realms to the transpersonal realms
as negotiating this tight place of the fold, with its fractures, points of damage and
weakness – but also its potential for reshaping, making three-dimensional, making
 less rigid and reforming: in other words, art-making. The fold, that blue dotted line in
the middle, our place of transition and negotiation, is full of possibilities, and may
even be seen as a site of epistemic possibility, a site for the emergence of new
knowledge. But it is also the weakest place, the most fragile, the place that tears
under pressure. Creativity is especially challenged by intolerance.

I referred to the ‘touching middle’. We could also say that when folded over, these
two planes touch each other. Perhaps it is in those points of contact, of touching, that
the most profound insights take place. In this kind of modelling, perhaps the most
innovative of artistic research must somehow stand with Werktreue, with tradition
and the past, in order for the full nature of both to be exposed. Wilful non-
comprehension is not working well for global politics at the moment; for research, it
is untenable. We need to keep looking.

Consider folding an origami water bomb from a flat square of paper. The processes
of folding can make this raw material into an object that is no longer a flat piece of
paper but which still has its folded planes pressed tightly against one another. It
needs someone to breath into it in order for its context – and potential purpose - to
be fully expressed in three dimensions.

Figure 2: Origami cube, or 'water bomb’

The Origami water bomb is a simple form of the art of paper folding. One really can
fill it with water and throw it at an enemy; the irony of the implied aggression within
the model suits our current global political situation all too well, as if the historicity
of the making is imprinted upon the materiality of the object! But if I unfold the
paper, I get the image of a series of lines, the traces of the art-making, ghosts of the
research process. The past, present and future of the paper – as flat sheet, as inflated
cube and as single-use conveyor of a liquid payload – are all somehow represented in
this matrix of lines and intersections.

Figure 3: Unfolding showing lines of commonality

Art-making is very specific, for all that it contains multitudes. To make the cube, the
folds must be completed in a particular way. Creativity and expertise are fused, not
opposed to one another. Multidimensionality is an aspect of a responsible art-making;
responsible articulation of what that may mean, and what is at stake, is the province of
research. We may see the folding together of art-making and the articulation of the
meaning of art as making a more flexible creative space – one that may be verbally
mediated or one where the art simply speaks for itself. Working to spread this
understanding beyond the small community of the art-form in question introduces the
idea of social responsibility, the notion that art still matters. Given all this, artistic
research could fold further over itself into becoming a more complex, multi-dimensional
and consequential community, so that its discourses become the province of more than
‘the few’.

‘Unfolding’ implies bringing to the visible exterior things normally hidden on the inside,
but it does not require their separation from one another to achieve this; on the
contrary, the unfolded entity is still single and connected – indeed, it is the folds, the
lines of intersection, that are more important in this process than the areas which they
connect. Instead of disassembling (remembering that analysis comes from the Greek to
‘loosen up’) it is about explaining (from the Latin ‘explicare’ to fold out). Perhaps we can
work creatively within this rich seam, allowing ourselves to be unsettled by the way
that, as both ‘self-expressive nonconformists’ and people with collective traditions, we
are forced to challenge our ideas and assumptions in the process of becoming creative
individuals. But for this, we also need a strong community as a reference, and in this
respect, in Norway we are fortunate to work in a country with a National Artistic
Research Programme. This programme allows us to function as a true artistic research
community, with consistent processes through which we exchange ideas, experiences,
new creations, new knowledge, using these processes as ways to develop our expertise
as researchers and to engage others with different world views. To artistically
challenge everythingwhilst also remaining committed to our community, and the
community of artistic researchers in the world, seems something worth doing.

Why? Because global politics continue to remind us of the real danger of the misuse of
certain kinds of power and the plight of many in desperate circumstances who are
forgotten by those who have power – the people for whom we should have the empathy
that we keep speaking about. It is to be hoped that we can unfold a different story,
because the liveliness of working with art and through art is sorely needed in a world
where the deliberate speaking of untruths, with the intention of deceiving populations
and even depriving them of basic human rights, is gripping our politics. If engaging with
art can help us to become better ‘unfolders’, using our feelings and our intellect in
combination as we strive for better understanding, it can also be an increasingly
valuable tool for grappling with the complex and interconnected phenomena that we
encounter in our modern, globalised societies, and for helping to explain these
phenomena to people who feel outcast from life’s progress. With the right kind of
explanation, perhaps they might be empowered to resume true, enlightened
participation.

If art can teach us useful lessons in unfolding it can also offer valuable insights into how
life is governed more by process than outcome. We may yearn for destinations, whether
in our individual lives or collectively, but the reality of our existence is one of constant
flux – sometimes with an apparent upward trajectory, sometimes downward and
always, when the larger perspective is taken, cyclical. Art provides us with metaphors
for this, and helps us to gain satisfaction and enrichment from dynamism as opposed to
stasis. As such, it is again an indispensable tool for understanding the world in which we
live and how, collectively, we can get the most out of it. We should not over-estimate the
power of our discipline to change the world for the better, but nor should we under-sell
its value as a corrective to the narrowing of vision and imagination. Artistic research can
help us to link the concrete, personal experience with a bigger artistic discourse; I would
further maintain that this, in turn, can show a few more traces to our wider society of
the value of working with art and through art.

References:

Davies, Robertson. 1983. The Deptford Trilogy – The Manticore. London: Penguin Books.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. 2008. A Thousand Plateaus – Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi. London: Continuum.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton. London: The Athalone
Press.

Rose Gillian. 1992. The Broken Middle: Out of our Ancient Society. Oxford UK and
Cambridge USA: Blackwell.

Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 1997. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing

Proteins in the Test Tube. Standford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Schwab, Michael. 2013. Experimental Systems: Future Knowledge in Artistic Research.

Leuven: Leuven University Press.

Vassenden, Eirik. 2013. ‘What is critical reflection? A question concerning artistic

research, genre and the exercise of making narratives about one’s own work’, for the
Norwegian Artistic Research Programme, http://artistic-research.no/wp-
content/uploads/2012/09/What-is-critical-reflection.pdf

1. Rose’s critique of modern philosophy, The Broken Middle (1992), is the principal
point of reference here, with Rose’s reading of the diremption of law as a missing
piece of the puzzle of contemporary thought becoming a space in which more recent
critical reflections concerning research in and through the arts might become resonant,
given the temporal conjunction of Rose’s thought with the emergence of the field. ↩
2. See A Thousand Plateaus (1987/2008) especially '1874: Three Novellas, or “What
Happened?” (212-228), and Difference and Repetition (1994). ↩
3. Robertson Davies, The Manticore (1983), 512. ↩
4. See Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. (1997). Toward a History of Epistemic Things:
Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Standford, CA: Stanford University Press. ↩
5. See Schwab, Michael. 2013. Experimental Systems: Future Knowledge in Artistic
Research. Leuven: Leuven University Press. ↩
6. Vassenden, Eirik. 2013. ‘What is critical reflection? A question concerning artistic
research, genre and the exercise of making narratives about one’s own work’, for the
Norwegian Artistic Research Programme, http://artistic-research.no/wp-
content/uploads/2012/09/What-is-critical-reflection.pdf ↩
7. The short story can be found
in https://extremelyshortstories.wordpress.com/2009/04/ ↩
8. Rose Gillian. 1992. The Broken Middle: Out of our Ancient Society. Oxford UK and
Cambridge USA: Blackwell, 310. ↩