Archives du mot-clé artistic research

Clare Lesser

6 décembre 2020research articlearchitecture, art/music/theatre, artistic research, authorship, Bernard Tschumi, domain heterogeneity, folies, indeterminacy, Jacques Derrida, John Cage, Parc de la Vilette, performance practice, pharmakon, score, time brackets, traces, wallspaalabres-adm

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INTER MUROS

A deconstructive approach to performance practice in John Cage’s Four⁶, focusing on undecidability, viral interpenetration and the merging of domains.

Clare Lesser

Summary

Murus
John Cage – Four⁶
Four⁶ – ART: Abu Dhabi, April, 2018
Pharmakoi
…begin and end at particuLar/points in timE…

References

Murus

Murus, maceria, moerus, mauer, mur…

Immured, mural, rim….

…cell wall, prison wall, curtain wall, city wall…

…retaining wall, harbour wall, dividing wall, connecting wall…

…enclosure, partition, screen, divider, party wall, panel, bulkhead…

…shelter, guard, garden wall, dam, fortification…

…load-bearing wall, decorative skin, Four Walls…

…off the wall…

…mûre, mûr…

…undermining…

…with/out foundations…

Complicated things walls, and if we step into this stream of thought, who knows where we’ll end up? Maybe we’ll be washed off our feet and land on our heads…or crash into a wall?

Rather than immediately breaking down any walls, consider what it could mean, instead, to be between or within walls, to question them, to pick at the mortar, to make their foundations tremble a little, perhaps. But how to go about this process? Deconstruction seems a good place to start; examining the joins, quoins…penetrating the fabric, initiating the process of interrogation, of weakening, of the ‘perhaps’. So, let’s attempt to open our eyes and ears to the unfolding of deconstruction within and across domains, drawn from the work of Jacques Derrida and Bernard Tschumi (I could equally bring in Simon Hantaï and Valerio Adami), focusing on two main areas of concern: the pharmakon (and undecidability) and the virus.

There are a number of apparent contradictions or oppositions in the opening list (shelter/prison, connecting wall/dividing wall, load-bearing wall/decorative skin). Walls can seemingly occupy two or more apparently opposing states simultaneously, and as such, could be seen as pharmakoi. So, let’s consider a work of ‘music’ where these walls, these pharmakoi, these possibilities for foundation shaking and boundary dissolving, these apparent contradictions and blurred edges, these instances of aporia (or perplexity), are integral to the performance, and where the performer/creator (the ‘wild card’) can strive to deconstruct, or push, the ‘rules’ (walls) of the ‘game’ to breaking point.

John Cage – Four⁶

Four⁶ (1992) for four performers, rather than ‘musicians’ or ‘players’ specifically, or rather, it is for four ‘performers’ on the front cover and four ‘players’ on the parts (does this play at games, at the theatre, does it play with play?) is one of John Cage’s time-bracket works, so named because during performance each player should

Play within the flexible time brackets given. When the time brackets are connected by a diagonal line they are relatively close together. (Cage 1992, p2)

Thus, player one opens with:

0’00” ↔ 1’15” 0’55” ↔ 2’05”

Cage also gives us two pieces of information about the types of sound he has in mind, I should mention here that there is no given ‘filling’ for the time brackets, that is for the performers to provide, because the work is

for any way of producing sounds (vocalization, singing, playing an instrument or instruments, electronics, etc.) … (Cage 1992, p1)

And Cage further tells us to

Choose twelve different sounds with fixed characteristics (amplitude, overtone structure, etc.) (Cage 1992, p2)

So, within the walls of the ‘rules’, within the boundaries of the work, we have creative contradictions or opportunities in the work from the outset. Cage offers us a less obvious pharmakon in that the sounds are apparently both fixed and free. We assume that Cage intended that each of the twelve sounds should have fixed characteristics, but why the first sentence in that case? It is redundant, it opens up the possibility of aporia. Why not just say ‘produce twelve sounds with fixed characteristics (amplitude etc.)’? That would make perfect sense to a musician.

He also gives the performers complete agency regarding where, i.e. from what domain (if any), they come[1], as well as a certain amount of flexibility within the overall ‘structure’, in-as-much as the time brackets (containing walls) allow for variability in start and stop times for each ‘event’. Those time brackets are empty shells of course – waiting to be filled, waiting to be inhabited by events (what Derrida calls ‘the emergence of a disparate multiplicity’ [Tschumi 1996, p257]). In other words, their ‘programme’ is unfixed. The composer/performer relationship or hierarchy is completely unsettled (another pharmakon), for who is actually ‘composing’ the performance here: composer, performer(s), both, neither? Oh yes, and there’s no ‘master’ score either, only parts. Each player is independent, in a sense walled off from the others…perhaps?

Could the pharmakon be useful in overcoming boundaries, changing (challenging) the wall’s structure and function? If a binary opposition (included/excluded, free/trapped, etc.) can be overturned, i.e. have its function cast into doubt, then walls can become thresholds, conduits, zones of connectivity, not barriers. The pharmakon is one of the key concepts to be found in Plato’s Phaedrus, so let’s consider Derrida’s explication of the pharmakon, as found in Dissemination, “Plato’s Pharmacy”.

This pharmakon, this “medicine”, this philtre, which acts as both remedy and poison… (Derrida 2004, p75)

and

This charm, this spellbinding virtue, this power of fascination, can be – alternately or simultaneously – beneficent or maleficent. (Derrida 2004, p75)

and

If the pharmakon is “ambivalent”, it is because it constitutes the medium in which opposites are opposed, the movement and the play that links them among themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross over into the other (soul/body, good/evil, inside/outside, memory/forgetfulness, speech/writing, etc.). (Derrida 2004, p130)

So, the pharmakon is a space where oppositions can be overturned; a passage or movement of conjoining and interpenetration, the either/or, neither/nor, the ‘and’. The overturning of oppositions is not solely confined to speech and writing (although that is what Derrida is referring to here): it is equally relevant to other fields, e.g. architecture, the field par excellence of walls, the bastion of apparent solidity and structure, and yet also an important area of collaboration for Derrida with Peter Eisenmann and Bernard Tschumi during the 1980s[2]. Derrida was somewhat dubious about such a collaboration initially, telling Tschumi “But how could an architect be interested in deconstruction? After all, deconstruction is anti-form, anti-hierarchy, anti-structure, the opposite of all that architecture stands for.” ‘“Precisely for this reason,” I replied.’ (Tschumi 1996, p250). Tschumi also remarks that deconstructive strategies in architecture were developing momentum throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, when architects began to

…confront the binary oppositions of traditional architecture: namely, form versus function, or abstraction versus figuration. However, they also wanted to challenge the implied hierarchies hidden in these dualities, such as “form follows function” and “ornament is subservient to structure”. (Tschumi 1996, p251)

And Tschumi’s ‘radical’ pedagogical practice at the Architectural Association and at Princeton in the mid-1970s exploited the merging of domains (e.g. architecture and literature) from the outset:

I would give my students texts by Kafka, Calvino, Hegel, Poe, Joyce and other authors as programs for architectural projects. The point grid of Joyce’s Garden (1977)…done with my AA students at the time as an architectural project based on Finnegan’s Wake, was consciously re-used as the organising strategy for the Parc de la Villette five years later. (Tschumi, 1997, p125)

So Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette project (1982-98), the redesign and development of a large urban space (the former abattoir complex in north-eastern Paris), exploited cross-programming, a reappraisal of the ‘event’, the play of the ‘trace’, and various other deconstructive strategies in its composition of lines, points and surfaces. It is probably best known for Tschumi’s iconic bright red folies (multi-programme or programme-less structures within the park): one of the folies could be either a restaurant or a music venue, neither a restaurant nor a music venue, or, a restaurant and a music venue. So, the folies are pharmakoi, they are undecidable; they reject the ‘walls’, the containment, of pre-determined ‘programme’. They are empty shells – time brackets.

How does this plurality of undecidables play out in Four⁶? What is undecidable in the work, and what implications might this have for overturning walls in pedagogy and praxis? To explore further, let’s turn to a recent performance of Four⁶ which I instigated.

A partial list of the undecidables in Four⁶ could include:

Forces – who can perform the work?
Content – what will inhabit the time brackets?
Hierarchy – who is the composer?
Score – who is in control?

Four⁶ – ART: Abu Dhabi, April, 2018

The art version was conceived as a way of stepping away from music, while still acknowledging its trace within the work (figure 1). Each performer was asked to individually design twelve art related actions. Time bracket execution could be either pre-planned and notated on the score, or chosen/performed ‘live’. I asked the performers to interpret ‘art’ in any way they liked, which resulted in a mixture of performance art, sound art, fine art, theatre, performance-poetry, etc; and I also asked the performers to devise their ‘events’ in isolation, so that the live performance would be unrehearsed and all reactions would be spontaneous, potentially surprising to executors, co-performers, and the audience ̶ (a nod towards Cage’s definition of the ‘experimental action’ as ‘one the outcome of which is not foreseen’, Cage, 1961, p39).

A 6X3 foot canvas sheet was used, mounted on a wooden frame and supported on blocks (to allow space for cutting) on a large table. The following items were available to all the performers to use if they so chose: tubes of paint (acrylic) in white, black and blue, tubs of paint in the same colours, chalk, charcoal, knives, glasses of water, glass bottles, pencils, screw drivers, paint brushes (varied sizes), knife sharpeners (steel), rags (for erasing/painting, etc.,). One performer also brought a light -sabre to paint with. Performers were free to use any part of the body during the work’s realisation. The choices made by players 2 and 3 were:

Player 2 – Sounds (Actions)Speak,

1. Speak, 2. Pencil, 3. Overpaint, 4. Wood blocks, 5. White, 6. Knife, 7. Black, 8. Screwdriver, 9. Blue, 10. Silence, 11. Sing, 12. Cough.

Player 3 – Sounds (Actions)

1. Tacet, 2. Shred score & add to canvas, 3. Rattle brushes, 4. Splatter with brush, 5. Paint tube thrown squirt, 6. Charcoal writing, 7. Water splatter, 8. Bottle & jar percussion, 9. Erase, 10. Knife sharpen, 11. Shove other performers, 12. Slash canvas.

Figure 1: portion of the canvas immediately after the performance (April 2018),
showing wet paint and shredded performance part (centre).

Pharmakoi

The first pharmakon concerns the forces involved: who can perform this work? Does the work have walls that prevent participation and access? No, the boundaries of performance are very open. In other words, anyone can perform Four⁶; no classical or formal music training from any tradition is required. Four⁶ is music and is not music; it will accommodate performers from any artistic domain, from anywhere in fact, who are perfectly at liberty to stay within their own domain (although these domains will bleed into one another): artists, musicians, scientists, actors, historians, philosophers, vets…the list goes on. The wall regarding discipline ̶ the ‘who?’ is the work for ̶ is unstable and weakened; the performance can be a hybrid, a mixture of domains, a two (or four) way viral infection in every moment of performance. There are social and political implications here; there are no barriers (walls) to access, no hierarchy, and no pedagogical foregrounding is required.

If the players can come from anywhere, any domain, then the ‘content’ or ‘programme’ of the time brackets will be equally open. That is: the programme does not have to be ‘music’. The version I have outlined above has a rough focus, but no ‘theme’ is actually necessary, it is a container for events to take place in. The performers were drawn from the fields of music, visual arts, psychology, and classical Arabic, so we have a work that is music and is not music. The time brackets are like Tschumi’s programme-less folies, described by Derrida as ‘a writing of space, a mode of spacing which makes a place for the event’ (Tschumi, 2014, p115). The folies have a number of shared traits with the time brackets: a time bracket is a mode of spacing in time, and it can be filled with anything, with any ‘event’ that creates sound, drawn from each player’s lexicon of twelve, just like a folie has an undefined and open ‘programme’ with a variable lexicon of possible events[3]. The combination of the time-bracket events (programmes) allows the individual domains to merge, to infect, to overwrite, to hybridise, like our earlier example of a folie, which interbred a performance space and restaurant. In the ‘art’ version, the domains of music, art, theatre and philosophy all occupy the same time space.

Events have afterlives too, cinders, if you like. As the canvas dries out, the art version continues to change long after the performance is finished; it is not confined within those 30-minute temporal ‘walls’. It continues to evolve through changes of colour and texture (figure 2). The drying process both reveals and conceals writing (on the canvas and the additional shreds of the parts) and the modes of application and addition (charcoal pieces below). As the paint cracks and falls off, yet more traces of the performance’s own history appear, while the pages of the individual parts can become art objects in their own right (figure 3): an archaeology of performance. The cinders are carried along in the flux.

20180508_190209

Figure 2: portion of the canvas one month after the performance (May 2018),
showing changes of colour and texture,
small shreds of parts (bottom left) and charcoal (centre right).

20210311_120558

Figure 3: player 4, part with paint additions
acquired during the 30 minutes of ‘performance’.

…begin and end at particuLar/points in timE…[4]

Cage explains variable structure very succinctly, in the form of a mesostic:

These time-brackets / are Used / in paRts / parts for which thEre is no score no fixed relationship / … / music the parts of which can moVe with respect to / eAch / otheR / It is not entirely / structurAl / But it is at the same time not / entireLy / frEe (Cage, 1993, p35-6).

Note that Cage says the ‘parts of which can move with respect to each other’ (my italic), not that they must or should. And what could respect mean here? Literally that they respect each other’s space, each other’s boundaries (walls), that they do not interfere, overwrite, erase, infect or cross-programme; or the opposite, that they can move because the others allow free passage, permit themselves to be infected, erased, grafted, hybridised or overwritten, that they allow interpenetration because there is ‘no score, no fixed relationship’, no controlling hand?[5] Again, the wall is weakened, it’s function is heterogeneous, open to change, but its trace, its ghost, is still there.

If there is no score, only parts in a timed dance drawn from a variable lexicon of forty-eight moves, then who is the composer? Who has overall control? Who holds the key that allows passage through the walls (if they exist) of this work’s creation, of its direction? It is another pharmakon; John Cage is the acknowledged author (his name is on the front cover), but is he really the author, the author of the content? We only have parts, no score, and our parts have no substance; as yet they are unformed, except in terms of variable lengths and their order, e.g. player 1 starts with sound event 2. It’s like a drama without a unified script, with characters who do not know their relationships to the other characters (back to actions with unforeseen outcomes), and dialogue that is both secret and disordered. In Four⁶ we have ‘stage directions’ (instructions), and we have a variable temporal ‘choreography’ which tells us approximately when to put the things that we, as performers, have found. But wait a minute, aren’t the fillings of the time brackets ours? We found them, after all, we devised the sounds, and we decided precisely when and where we were going to put them, we decided that sound event 12 was going to be coughing or canvas slashing and we decided when we were going to cough or slash the canvas within that time bracket – so perhaps it would be better to say that John Cage is an author of Four⁶ rather than John Cage is the author of Four⁶?

So, the hierarchy is undecided, there is no single controlling presence in the performance, there is no ‘master’score. The performers have a very considerable amount of agency as long as they play by the ‘rules’ (for Cage was never one for a free-for-all). Even so, it’s a very generous and egalitarian way of composing, always remembering that rules can be outmanoeuvred (whilst still remaining within them), interpreted in new ways[6]. All those hierarchical ‘walls’ that can block (or at least make it one way only) the passage of communication between performer and composer are open; the walls are porous (are they even walls anymore?), so neither the composer/performer interface nor the performer/performer interface is fixed. In the art version, the audience/performer interface is also more open – paint can fly everywhere. The performer is a composer/performer hybrid interpreting within a composition, composing within an interpretation; the composer (Cage) has opened himself up to the viral communication of the performer; the performers have opened themselves up to independent/not independent forms of grafted praxis; all interact while retaining their individuality, all can overwrite each other’s work (in sound and/or paint), all can graft gesture and expression, opening themselves to the virus, conversing in many ‘languages’ across domains, allowing themselves to be penetrated at a quasi-cellular level.

As Derrida says

…all I have done, to summarize it very reductively, is dominated by the thought of a virus, what could be called a parasitology, a virology, the virus being many things…The virus is in part a parasite that destroys, that introduces disorder into communication. Even from the biological standpoint, this is what happens with a virus; it derails a mechanism of the communicational type, its coding and decoding (Brunette and Wills, 1994, p12)

The virus unsettles things, makes them tremble, and shakes them up, disorders communication (messages get lost or ‘wrongly’ delivered, they are open to a multiplicity of interpretations), makes a space for unpredictable interventions, introduces aporia. In Four⁶ we can see the evidence of this virus through its trace, the way it leaves marks (imprints) behind in the dust, in the ashes (charcoal), in the paint, in the sound. So we have a viral melding of actions in performance (altering another’s actions which leaves a mark), of ‘persons’ (performers/audience/composer), and domains (art/music/theatre, etc.): in the art version of Four⁶,art, music and dance are all present, as is theatre[7].

The virus infects the moments when the the surface of the canvas is created, when colours blend to become new colours, are overwritten, are grafted, are erased; it leaves its mark through the accretion and revealing of layers, through writing and overwriting, through deconstruction as the knife slashes through the surface, exposing the underside of the canvas which in turn becomes a new surface, through the intentional alteration of another player’s ‘event’ by physical interventions – shoving, scrubbing, cutting and covering. So, Derrida’s parasite destroys (or should one say it ‘fixes’?); but it only destroys a moment’s possibility, an eye-blink of the painting’s ‘history’ (of this performance’s canvas). It forces a change, a mutation, and who knows where that will lead?

There are other traces in the ashes too; ‘il y a là cendre’ (Derrida, 2014, p3), intertextual traces, hypertextual traces, of other works (in multiple senses: the current canvas’ own history, its possible history that could have been, the history that is yet to come, and the histories of the domains to which it now aligns itself). The lexicon of 48 sound events is a net of traces; of the Greco-Roman muralists, of baroque religious painted interiors (whose collective endeavour will always raise questions of authorship[8]), of Fontana, Kiefer, and Hantaï, the Situationists, Vienna Action Art, early Fluxus, Heiner Goebbels, Robert Wilson, Heiner Müller, the traces of post-dramatic theatre, of the dance-theatre of Lindsay Kemp, and other works by Cage of course. These traces refer to other traces, in chains of infinite resonance. The traces of our own experiences will always be present in any endeavour as well – how could they not be? Walls are omnipresent, for good, for ill, make of them what you will, but they are not merely barriers. Perhaps it is better to acknowledge their functional heterogeneity than to attempt to break them; to strive for weakened versions (as nets), to allow their transfiguration, to embrace their undecidability, for then walls can be barely perceptible, almost transparent, they can be s[wall]owed.

1. This is equally applicable to the sounds themselves.

2. Cage found a new appreciation for the city and new ways of looking at its constructions, its traces, its interactions, after taking a walk through Seattle with the painter Mark Tobey. (Cage & Charles, 1981, p158)

3. In one sense they could be considered heterotopias.

4. Cage, 1993, p34.

5. Derrida’s use of ‘Animadversions’ in texts such as Glas, Cinders and Tympan (Margins of Philosophy) are another way of looking at the presentation of, and commentary (sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, sometimes silent) on, simultaneous, parallel and sequential actions across the same surface, i.e. the canvas.

6. As Cage said: ‘We are not free. We live in a partitioned society. We certainly must take those partitionings into consideration. But why repeat them?’ (Cage & Charles, 1981, p90)

7. Regarding theatre, one of my co-performers almost cut the canvas in half at one point during the performance, and I was quite shocked – wondering if there was both enough surface left to work on, and whether the whole thing would unravel-, but on the other hand, I thought it was very funny and had to stifle my desire to laugh for the rest of the performance, and that brings another trace into play, that of the theatre’s tradition of making co-performers ‘corpse’.

8. As early as 1934 Cage found the group endeavour of what he termed medieval or gothic art appealing. (Kostelanetz, 1993, p.16)

References

Brunette, P., & Wills, D., Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Cage, J., Silence, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961.
Cage, J., Four⁶, New York, NY: Edition Peters, 1992.
Cage, J., Counterpoint (1934) in Kostelanetz, R. (ed), Writings about John Cage, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
Cage, J., Composition in Retrospect, Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1993.
Cage, J., & Charles, D., For the Birds, New York, NY: Marion Boyars, 1981.
Derrida, J., ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ in Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson, London: Continuum, 2004.
Derrida, J., Cinders, trans N. Lukacher, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Derrida, J., ‘Points de Folie – Maintenant l’architecture’ in Tschumi, B., Tschumi Park De La Villette, London: Artifice Books, 2014.
Kostelanetz, R. (ed), Writings about John Cage, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
Tschumi, B. Architecture and Disjunction, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
Tschumi, B., ‘Introduction’, in J. Kipnis and T. Leeser (eds.), Chora L Works, New York: Monacelli Press, 1997.
Tschumi, B., Tschumi Park De La Villette, London: Artifice Books, 2014.

Debate (English version)

15 avril 2016artistic practicesartistic research, collective actions, disciplinary fields, European reform LMD, évaluation, expérimentation, higher education, reflexive practitioner, research places, theory/practicepaalabres-adm

Return to the French text

Debate on Artistic Research
Cefedem Rhône-Alpes & PAALabRes Collective
November 2, 2015

Foreword

On November 2, 2015, the Study Center of the Cefedem Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes[1] and the Collective PaaLabRes[2] organized a discussion session on questions related to artistic research. The theme of the imaginative and dynamic evening, was based on two questions: how to define, conceive, develop artistic research? And why?

Two texts were proposed to the participants before the debate: a) a summary in French of the book by Kathleen Coessens, Darla Crispin and Anne Douglas, The Artistic Turn, A Manifesto (CRCIM, Orpheus Institute, Ghent, Belgium, distributed by Leuven University Press, 2000); b) Jean-Charles François, “La question de la recherché artistique dans le cadre de l’enseignement supérieur musical” (“The Question of Artistic Research in Higher Music Education”), November 2014 (unpublished).

Were present in the debate:

Jean-Louis Baillard, writer, director of research at the School of Architecture in Saint-Etienne.
Sophie Blandeau, collective Polycarpe.
Samuel Chagnard, musician, teaches at the Cefedem AuRA, member of PaaLabRes.
Marion Chavet, visual artist.
Dominique Clément, clarinetist, composer, adjunct director of the Cefedem AuRA.
Jean-Charles François, percussionist, composer, retired director of the Cefedem AuRA and member of PaaLabRes.
Hélène Gonon, lecturer in Educational Sciences at the Cefedem AuRA.
Laurent Grappe, electro-acoustic musician, member of PaaLabRes.
Aurélien Joly,jazz musician and improvisator.
François Journet, administrator of the Cefedem AuRA.
Gilles Laval, musician, director of the Rock department at the ENM of Villeurbanne and member of PaaLabRes.
Noémi Lefebvre, in charge of the Study Center at the Cefedem AuRA, writer and researcher in Political Sciences, member ofe PaaLabRes.
Valérie Louis, lecturer in Educational Sciences at the CNSMD of Lyon, formerly Freinet primary teacher.
Ralph Marcon, in charge of the Documentation Center at the Cefedem AuRA.
Jacques Moreau, pianist, Director of the Cefedem AuRA.
Pascal Pariaud, musician, clarinet teacher at the ENM of Villeurbanne and member of PaaLabRes.
Didier Renard, professor at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques of Lyon, director of a laboratory at the CNRS.
Eddy Schepens, researcher in Educational Sciences, formerly adjunct director of Cefedem AuRA, chief editor of Enseigner la Musique.
Nicolas Sidoroff, musician, teaches at the Cefedem AuRA and member of PaaLaBbRes
Gérald Venturi, musician, saxophone teacher at the ENM of Villeurbanne, member of PaaLabRes.

Introduction

The concert that serves only to concert, who does it concern? Concentrate! Because one centers the concert on the works served “in concert”, They have to be conserved in served concerts, they are serried in severe terms and serve only for the purpose of concerts. To serve works in concerts in front of consorts, serves to conserve, and to converse, but the conversation is already a concerted activity for those concerned, a concerting concern. The concerting concern serves to concentrate oneself on the concerts served to consorts, the concerting concern is the raison d’être of the concert, it serves in gathering consorts in concert of concepts more or less disconcerting. The concerting and disconcerting concern concentrates action and reflection. The concerting and disconcerting concern is the research on action and reflection. The concerting and disconcerting concern is the research on action and reflection about the concerting concert and object of concerting actions. The research is not concerned in conserving converts, but it conserves, it converses on the health of concerts served as concerting concern. The research without which there is no higher education, the research concerns us.[3]

In order to open up the debate, a certain number of questions were formulated by Noémi Lefebvre in the name of the Study Center of the Cefedem AuRA, and by Jean-Charles François in the name of PaaLabRes:

Even if the European reform of higher education “LMD” gives a strong institutional framework, with injunctions made to conservatories and art schools to develop some research, the intention of this debate is to formulate the problems as if we were starting from nothing. Thus, two aspects of artistic research need to be distinguished: a) the real content of actions, what is happening within the given different groups and b) where can it be happening, to what extent are these actions allowed and recognized by institutions.
It is therefore important in this debate to put forward the following questions: a) “who speaks” about artistic research today? b) “from where does one speak”, from which institutional context or from outside the institutions? And c) “in what circumstances does one speak” about it? Who has something to say about it? Artists? Political representatives?
Another dimension of artistic research concerns the fact that many people who carry out artistic research do not speak about it, either because they do not feel the need to, or because they deliberately refuse to. Who are they exactly? Where do they work, these anonymous researchers? What are their objects? What are the ideas linked to their research acts?

In this first series of questions, a strong tension appears between on the one hand the institutional frameworks, what they allow and do not allow, and on the other hand the real topography of the actions realized here and there claiming the term of research, or also the more frequent number of actions that do not pretend to deserve such qualification:

Is there then an obligation to develop artistic research as an answer to the requirements imposed by the European or national instances? Nothing would be more absurd than to simply obey the injunctions to conform to a single model of higher education, if the conditions are not fulfilled in a given discipline to create a meaningful context.
The question of the different disciplinary fields is complicated by the fact that they are not stable entities, they constantly evolve. There is a tendency to consider the disciplinary fields as fixed objects. In these conditions of instability how does one contemplate the question of the signification? If it is possible to envision research as seeking to find sense in actions, the question arises of how to create meaning? How to highlight the meaning of the actions?
There is no higher education in a determined field without the presence of a definition of research linked to that domain. Is it really the case? Is it necessary in the artistic domains? Symmetrical question: is it possible to contemplate research outside university study programs that lead to it?
Artistic research is considered as concerning in the first instance the elaboration of artistic practices. The still dominant thought is that practice is separated from theory: practitioners do very well what they are doing, they do not have to think about what they do. Higher education is still divided in the mind between professional training on the one hand, and theoretical tracks on the other hand. Are the artists capable of a specific thought when they practice their art?
Another strong representation maintains that only those who are placed as onlookers from outside a practice are able to analyze what is at stake in it. The practitioners tend to be blinded by their own objects. In what conditions could the arts practitioners have access to reflection on their own actions?
Is artistic research an internal necessity for today’s artistic practices? Does the situation of the artist in society impose on whoever is practicing the arts a capacity to carry out systematic reflection?
The question of temporality seems essential. During the 1970s, it is striking to note, musicians had time at hand: the public grants allowed the development of long term projects, the fundamental research was at the center of university activities. Do we have time today? Without a reasonable amount of time, has artistic research any sense?
The question of the usefulness of research should be considered in an artistic context that strongly refuses to carry particular utilitarian purposes. What is the purpose of art? But above all what should be the purpose of artistic research? Here there is a subsidiary question: isn’t it a fact that the very notion of research is linked to the concepts of progress and modernity? Would artistic research be yet another way to measure the degree of innovation of a given practice?

In the text that follows, the totality of the persons present participates in the debate. The selected option is to not mention in the text the name of the speakers, and to classify what was said in well-identified chapters. The contradictions that are expressed from time to time in the text reflect a constructive debate respecting the point of view of each participant. The text has been established on the basis of the excellent note-taking by Jacques Moreau in collaboration with Nicolas Sidoroff and François Journet.

Definition of Research

To define the term research is difficult, and consequently even more difficult to define artistic research. Is it a question of any manifestation of a cerebral activity, or of what is well delineated by the framework determined by universities? In the course of elaborating curricula, it is easy to create education cells that can be qualified as “research”. Facing certain courses you think: “in this case it has definitively something to do with research”. We could refer to the doctoral program at the Lyon CNSMD (Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse), exclusively modeled on the existing university model. Yet, it is possible to begin to reflect on the notion of research specific to the arts outside the higher education institutions. It is a matter of defining, in the framework of the internal aspects of artistic creation and of its transmission:

What is artistic research?
Who is concerned by it?
How can this type of research exist in social environments?
The places in which it makes sense.
The ways by which it may succeed.

In summary, it is a matter of defining on what basis artistic research is capable of developing larger paradigms, which would justify its legitimacy within higher education. What is the breeding ground on which this legitimacy can be built? And incidentally what is happening in the universities?

The term “research” is perhaps too much loaded with precise references, linked to the professional status of researchers. It can be considered as a false nose for a posture that can be qualified as “reflexive”. The idea of the “reflective practitioner” seems to offer more democratic perspectives, allowing a great number of persons to find in it a framework less imposing than the one implied by the term “research”. This is a posture that anybody can assume as part of his/her activities. This idea is inspired from the work of the American philosopher John Dewey, around the practice of the enquiry that any citizen should be able to carry out in order to develop an awareness of the stakes inherent to a particular field of investigation. The reflexive posture would allow consideration of all the contributive approaches of the diverse artistic practices.

But there is something much more important than a precise definition of what exactly the terms of research or of reflexivity entail: it is the indispensable presence of places, of circumstances, of structures that gather people together, and the presence of production tools the nature of which is necessarily composite, hybrid. The criteria for defining the reflexive or research activities have to be determined after the fact. To start with the very meaning of what research could be seems an inauspicious way to give any result. The most important task is the capacity to assemble – cf. the winemakers’ assemblage or blending – people who are in a reflexive posture, but who work often in a great solitude. How to assemble them together?

Some years ago the French Ministry of Culture organized a conference on artistic research, inviting above all some philosophers, and a few art practitioners, scrupulously avoiding posing the question of teaching and learning the artistic things.[4] What were the criteria developed by these philosophers? It was above all question of confronting the ideas of one chapel in connection with those of other chapels. It did not give us viable tools to proceed further.

It is established that in order to find a place in the actual system of research, there is no other choice than to tackle questions, which in advance have already been resolved. This phenomenon should not be underestimated. To counter this, we should propose the idea of something existing, which is determined in the course of its elaboration. And it is also perhaps for this reason that, with the term of research – taken now in the sense of combat – it becomes important to affirm alternatives to practices that are instituted in some too peremptory manner.

The Research Institutions, the Institution of Research

Should we completely refuse to be situated outside the arbitrary impositions of the LMD process (Europe imposing Licence-Master-Doctorate on all Higher Education) and of its normative institutional injunctions, or on the contrary consider that it is an ideal occasion to tackle the issues of research in order to invent new situations? The Ministry of Culture tends to launch some watchwords without defining what they imply as possible directions to take. This gives an opportunity to take up the ideas in order to adapt them to situations going in a different direction than the intended one.

Two debates should be distinguished: on the one hand the institutional debate that concerns acknowledging activities as legitimate research, allowing to access grants. All institutions have to face the problems of recognition of research. Such debate has nothing to do with the one, on the other hand, which poses the question of the reflexive attitudes that one can have starting from one’s own practices. In the first case, in order for a research activity to be recognized, we are in presence of more and more violent criteria, over which the teachers-researchers have absolutely no control. In the second case, we find pockets of resistance that refuse the arbitrary injunctions of non-pertinent criteria, and then go on to seek alternative processes of gaining legitimacy. To stress the difference between these two debates seems absolutely essential. A book like the Artistic Turn, for example, is written by artists fighting to find a legitimate place in the university while preserving the specificities of their art. This book, however, is very preoccupied with the institutional rationalities for evaluating artistic research, and not enough with an intellectual content, which would be completely independent from them. When we read this book, it is necessary to make a keen distinction between these two positions.

One of the preoccupations of The Artistic Turn is to attempt to position artistic research in relation to the dominant model, which automatically assimilates research to hard sciences and to their criteria of truth. This reduces the reflection to a prebuilt modality, since artistic research has always to be placed within criteria that are elaborated elsewhere. It should be noted that a part of scientific research tries to be inspired by artistic experimental situations.[5] Bringing artistic research closer to that of social sciences, which also has to deal with subjective elements difficult to stabilize, seems a more propitious way to develop the understanding of many things in the domains proper to artistic activities.

Some despair is apparent today among those who work in French higher education. They deplore the recent development of savage evaluation rationales, centered perversely on research in quantitative terms (publications, participation in conferences, quotes in books, etc.), which does not at all go in the direction of an opening of research to the instability of results that cannot be predicted. Research, devoid of its intellectual qualitative content, becomes solely an instrument of normalization, in order to align universities on a single conception and above all in order to hierarchically compare them. The notion of excellence turns into submission to a certain number of injunctions dictated by centralizing policies. This is what allows funding appropriations to take place. Another important injunction concerns the requirement for research to be only occupied with what is considered as useful to society, notably in encouraging establishing privileged relationships with industry and the market place.

These approaches announce the programmed disappearance of Social Sciences and Humanities departments. A certain number of disciplines in the social sciences, literature and arts find themselves caught between the necessity to conform to criteria that are external to their essence and to constantly justify their usefulness to society, which considerably weakens them and directly threatens their existence. Consequently, there is a tendency today in universities to align research on the lowest intellectual educational level. The researchers are therefore strongly encouraged to turn their attention towards practical domains, but this has nothing to do evidently with artistic concerns.

The race for quantitative recognition in research produces also the recourse to “ready-made thinking” and to “ready-made evaluation”, which soon become the obliged pathways to which everybody has to conform and in which many participants find reassuring and comfortable situations. The association of domains that are deemed subjective, such as the arts, with scientific domains that are deemed objective, such as for example the neurosciences, suggests at the same time that research envisioned in this way contributes to the progress of humanity and that it allows the access to undeniable proofs. The scientific method falsely applied to the arts becomes an obligation without which nobody can pretend to claim legitimacy in research.

The injunctions coming from European instances carry with them many constraints, but they have also the merit to open new spaces. In architecture, the doctorate has been put in place only very recently, one does not know yet what it exactly entails. A Canadian attempted to describe what is a thesis in architecture. He studied forty theses and mapped them out according to the elements that orientated the research. This is the kind of approach that creates some openings towards the spaces of creation: how to create your own great book on architecture. On the condition to not fall into the elaboration of a between ourselves sub-culture, as it is often the case when the methods and the language have primacy over the contents. On the condition also to respect the small objects of research, as much as the ones with larger perspectives.

All the same, one has the impression that the race for control could well collapse on itself: with the increase in criterization rationales and a society going ever faster and faster in combining things and matters, have we not arrived at a point of rupture, at the end of a system? By definition, it will be more and more difficult to continue in the same register of normalization and controls, because the system in itself generates a capacity to get out from the boxes, to surpass the imposed frameworks. For reasons of efficiency, and the social issues raised by the system, it is difficult to imagine that the university can continue for a very long time in this way. Even if the technocratic imagination can make these absurd systems last for a very long time, it is conceivable that some dynamic reassessments are about to emerge inside and outside the institutions.

The Models of Research in Tension

1. Relationships to other Disciplinary Fields

Artistic research seems to make sense only in the perspectives in which art is not considered any more as autonomous in relation to the banality of its ordinary environment. To continue to consider art as preserved from the conditions in which it is produced (art for art’s sake), is an ideal that research cannot fulfill. In this posture, the artist does not need to devote attention to research, since this could threaten the purity of the creative act, research in this context should be considered as external to art, it should content itself with the contemplation of its high achievements. Only in perspectives opening enquiries about the way to practice art can one approach in an internal manner the field of artistic research: how do artists and other (human or non-human) beings or entities contributing to artistic practice interact to obtain their results. This central idea of interaction opens the field of artistic reflection to fields such as sociology, psychology, educational sciences, technologies, cultural policies, mingling artistic domains, literature, philosophy, etc. Artistic research seems to make sense if – within artistic practice itself – other elements are contributing, coming from other fields of practice (outside the arts). But in the case in which a disciplinary field outside the arts comes to influence research, it is not normal that the artistic research should conform in all aspects to the rules that apply to the imported discipline.

There is one positive aspect of the process linked to the obligation to develop research in sectors of higher education that until now were oblivious to it: collaborations with other research groups or entities become absolutely necessary. For example, concerning the Schools of Architecture, the corollary of research is a partnership in the framework of the creation of the UMR (Unité Mixte de Recherche, Mixt Unity of Research). A Mixt Unity of Research is a federation of laboratories. The objective is, in order to remedy the difficulty of being confined to ones’ own questions, to look for issues aroused by others, and to build collaborations. The projects involve the presence of funding and partners. For the Schools of Architecture it offers very interesting questions: who should we turn to? Towards the Schools of Architecture? Or towards the researchers who exist in close vicinity, but who are very different, that is Schools of Engineering, University Schools, Schools of the Arts? These partnerships lead to interesting fields. In the Schools of Architecture, the architectural project remains at the center of the study program and is nourished by four domains: engineering science, imagery, arts’ history, and philosophy/ethnology/sociology. This program of study lacks a course on writing. Architecture and writing have things to develop in common, for in research the capacity to write is indispensable.[6] All these issues lead to alterity, within domains that until now were confined to a certain insularity.

2. Theory and Practice

The separation between theory and practice remains a dominant representation in the arts.

Artistic research is thought as being primarily concerned with reflection on practices. In this context, the still dominant idea is that the practice (tacit) domain reserved to artists, remains separated from the theoretical (explicit). The theoretic thought is considered as an analysis realized after the fact, made preferably by outside observers. In the Schools of Architecture, for at least twenty years, the separation between practice and theory was dominant: separation between the architects and the engineers, separation between professional practitioners and teachers. Today, because of the State’s injunction, this separation is called into question in the requirement of a double competency to which research has to be also added. However the status of teacher/researcher still does not exist. Since last year the Schools of Architecture have a double tutelage, one from the Ministry of Culture and Communication, and one from the Ministry of Higher Education and Research.

In the case of the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Lyon, up to now there was no training for practitioners. Here, the violent injunction of the State is that it is now necessary to train some practitioners, that is to give the students some perspectives of professionalization. For example, some courses on entrepreneurship are now organized during the first year at the Lyon II University. We are facing a delicious paradox linked to research: at the University, a stronghold of theoretical studies, there is the injunction to train practitioners, and in the Schools of Architecture and Arts, strongholds of practices, theoreticians should be trained. In the two cases it is a matter to start doing what one was not used to doing, and what one does not know how to do.

3. The Status of the Written Text

There is an astonishing uncertainty in the fact that the transposition into words, the writing of a text, is a practice that can be either creative, or be content with being an explanation tool. Is the transposition into words directly an integral part of the research processes or of artistic production, or is it only the tool for a descriptive or speculative presentation of this research or artistic production content? In the usual conceptions of university research, the transposition into words of the results tends to be exclusively considered as a process that is separated from the content and from any creative elaboration. The mechanical application of the concepts borrowed from scientific research, in order to justify the existence of artistic research, creates a strange state of mind: the artistic act is innovative, creating something new that will be directly injected into intellectual circles. What cannot be explicated by words creates some forms of distance, of exclusion, certain modes of innovation becoming in this way excluded from the field of research. The discourses around the conditions of artistic practices, notably with Bruno Latour, overshadow innovation forms that cannot be articulated with words; the words come after and outside the fact. In this scheme of thought, if someone does some research grounded on artistic practices, the language (putting into words, taking up a pencil, or using a computer) comes after, and in this way does not take part in the research process, but only in its restitution.

This separation between creative research processes and their communication by means of a text has to be questioned in two ways. On the one hand the creative transposition into words can become a tool inserted into the heart of the research process: one thinks of John Cage’s lectures,[7] which textually did not explicit much, but which described in their form in itself the processes of elaboration of the author’s musical compositions. Through these lectures, one has a direct access to the author’s experimental procedures, his modes of thinking, but without having to go through a narrative telling us how they could be explained. On the other hand, the communication of the research contents can use different medias other than text: films, videos, recorded speech, graphisms, sounds, images.

Behind the term research, there are many words that come to complicate its effective implementation: “innovation”, “scientific aspects”, “discourses”, etc. Is there a loss of sense when the discourse comes after the fact? The Cage lectures are no less, nor more research than his musical works. The criteria “discourse” is not sufficient to define research, nor the one of “science”, because a whole number of things should be summoned. One cannot therefore proceed with a single entry. What is complicated is to intertwine all the elements with each other.

Artistic Research – Avenues to Reflect

1. Research through the Elaboration of the Artistic Act

The principal enigma that needs to be resolved has to do with the situation of the artist in today’s society: is research an inherent obligation for the artistic act today? And, if the answer is positive, how can research be distinguished from the artistic act? In the perspectives of a coexistence of historical times, which is an important aspect of our society of electronic communication, it is quite possible to continue to consider that autonomous art – the one exclusively devoted to the production of works outside any circumstantial or contingent consideration – still plays an important part in the field of practices. But the possibilities offered by the new media fundamentally change the deal of artistic practices in considerably facilitating their access and in allowing amateurs to create their own means of production. These amateurs have time at hand – that professionals often have difficulty to find – for thinking through their own practice or for getting in a position favoring experimentation. The stakes of the obligation to present the work on stage – the living spectacle – are modified: processes limited to small groups, devoid of the objective to produce definitive works of art, devoid of the obligatory presence of a contemplative external public, become possible. In this type of context, it is possible to envision research as an integral part of practice, because the practice addresses at once the rationales of the production, of the interactivity between participants, and between the participants with the materials to be used.

Several factors contribute to identify artistic research to practical processes. The research linked to artistic education leads directly to practical artistic acts.: there is no pedagogical action without a direct effect on artistic practice, on ways to envisage the material production of the artistic objects, and consequently on their plasticity itself; and vice-versa, a given practice leading to particular artistic results always implies some methods of knowledge transmission in order to attain it. As soon as one is preoccupied by education, one realizes how until now effective practices have failed to concern researchers, that is the processes leading to artistic productions, everything that occurs before the emergence of the work.

2. Alternative Research Models

Other models should be considered that do not correspond to what is done in the world of the university, notably those already elaborated by personalities such as Bruno Latour, Antoine Hennion and Isabelle Stengers. In spite of the fact that since about twenty years, we have been facing a movement, over the medium to long term, of normalization of research, other models can be envisioned if we limit ourselves to an independent intellectual content. But it is not evident how to adopt these models in order to realize, at the margins of the institutions, something different while using the same terms. There are no other alternatives than to create some pockets of resistance using a diversity of models. The pockets of resistance become necessary in face of the great complexity of globalization and the challenges it poses to the great democratic models. Deindustrialization has risen to unbelievable proportions, the working class movement disappeared in less than twenty years. There should be some places and circumstances that allow people to maintain a spirit of resistance for at least a certain time. It is necessary to have some kaïros, some reaction to opportune time, in seizing all the occasions that can occur.

The question of markets and their role in the control of artistic production is increasingly disturbing. At the same time, the markets succeeded in liberating and disseminating the techniques that allow alternative inventions, something the musicians from the elite could not achieve. It is important to be able to develop a reflective approach to the tools of dissemination, to software, to the issues raised by business markets, in order to develop possible rationales for alternative public policies.

An institution like the Cefedem AuRA remains determined by the professional context in which it develops its actions. In general, musicians are less preoccupied by research issues than the actors of the other artistic domains. We can see that musicians have a strong tendency to return to an outdated corporatism. Concerning the norms of the definition of a musician and her/his activities in the professional milieu, the development of the Cefedem AuRA as a place of questioning these norms was completely improbable. This pocket of resistance allowed many people to invent their own line of action. Today, a possible focus of resistance is not to limit the Cefedem’s program of study to teacher’s training, but to turn to the education of practicing musicians at the heart of their practices both of transmission and of elaboration of their art: a reflexive thinking on music and art, on accompanying amateur practices, on the double social and artistic rationale that underlies the actual role of musicians in society. One can assert a singular approach.

3. Administrative Obstacles

There is an astonishing paradox between the reality of the institutions of artistic education and the injunction to develop research and intellectual thinking. All the schools of the arts have to face budget reductions; all the sectors of practices have made great efforts. The incitation to research is developed in an environment that remains very rigid and without the means to provide adequate responses. As soon as new pedagogical projects are proposed, even if they are neither exceptional nor experimental, but that are near the realities of what it is possible to do, many obstacles and roadblocks appear. The arts schools lag behind in the use of new technologies (video, image rights, diffusion issues), and the few tools they are capable of developing are not available to students and teachers. In the domain of popular music (officially called in France musiques actuelles amplifiées, amplified actual music), there exists in Copenhagen an “incredible” department: spaces full of the newest technologies available to users. However, the department collaborates directly with the record labels that impose their criteria, this does not correspond to the role of public institutions. In the public service of music education, the participants are not there to obey the demands of the market place, to produce groups conforming to its rules and to release commercial products. The public service has to bring its own independent vision. People are encouraged to do new things, but as soon as a proposition is formulated, it comes up against the rigidity of the system. The only thing that we do not know how to do, it is to change the system.

4. The question of Research Spaces and Publications

One can see the importance of the existence of research spaces, precisely in order to change the rigid systems just mentioned. It is very important for a research group to have an adequate place and to be able to make it function: this is linked to the available time of the participants and their ability to attract some funding. In order for artistic research to be viable, militant approaches are not enough. It is also necessary to have the capacity to develop some forms of visibility associated with the public expression of the practices (the stage, education). How should we proceed so that what has been discovered, updated, can be heard somewhere as an element that cannot be ignored. In order for this research-resistance to exist, the conditions that would move the constraints imposed by the institutions have to be determined. How can we make sure that this research would be promoted and could cross the threshold of confidentiality, of self-confinement?

What is important is to build some traces. Resistance should be conducted through some existent things, through the “bringing to life”, it implies therefore publications that give full account of the different aspects of the place one occupies. The absence in the musicians’ world of an association that would be capable of defending something other than traditional (if not reactionary) objects is sorely evident. Why is it so difficult to federate the points of view that are not along those lines? How to get out of isolation? Making the path in life by walking would be a good start.

Those who exist in an institutional place often think that the things that are possible have to be envisaged outside the institutions. But those who are outside suffer from isolation and anonymity, from the plethora of information. A public place, whatever it might be, has the merit to exist, it gives a margin of possibilities. The Cefedem has had the good fortune to have been able to develop independently from the conservatories and the universities. The PaaLabRes collective hopes that the digital space paalabres.org being developed will be to some extent the equivalent of a place that seems up to now unavailable. Enseigner la Musique has been the essential tool for disseminating the practices developed at the Cefedem AuRA and other associated places.

Widening Research

1. Research Before the Doctorate

In the world of universities, real research starts at the doctorate level. Nevertheless, the idea that one can carry some research project from the very start of higher education, or even before that, is perfectly viable. Several places in Europe and in the world have been able to experiment this idea with success.[8] To introduce research from undergraduate level onwards is a way to refuse that the laws of the market place should define what could be expected of students at the end of their studies. The Rector of the Lille University said recently[9] that today the social sciences and the arts are no longer just tools to be acquired to shine in society, but are becoming completely indispensable to surpass the fact that machines in the hard sciences are going to be able to do all possible things replacing the humans. In music, the historical definitions of professional occupation are collapsing: we do not know to what we should train the students. The issue is not to train musicians to acquire a pre-established technique, but to do research would give them a more distanced point of view on their actions. They will be able in that way to continually reinvent their practices, rather than to reproduce fixed models. This creates another rationale for resistance: to imagine what will be the nature of the professional occupation tomorrow is not possible anymore, but it is also necessary to realize that the “professional occupation invented by contemporaries never existed”, it is invented along the way throughout history.

In the process of widening the concept of research to contexts fairly different from the one limited to doctoral studies and accredited laboratories, three levels can be observed in the education framework: a) the formal research of university doctoral studies and laboratories; b) preparation to research that concerns higher education as a whole; and c) learning through research that can be done at any level, including at that of children beginners. Moreover, it must be realized that these three levels are themselves distinct from experimental postures that are in operation today in many domains. Numerous approaches of this type exist at the same time in education institutions, in working places, in everyday life and in artistic practices that can be qualified as “reflective practices”.

2. Research Before and Outside Higher Education

Within the music schools (specialized music education at primary and secondary levels) there is a surprising presence of high-level groups whose members do not particularly demand rehearsal spaces, or supports for technical production or advertising. They come to these public institutions specifically to develop research projects, outside any consideration for acquiring a professional trade. These projects are very often centered on meeting other aesthetics and different ways to practice music.

Today, in music schools, there are many study programs (in the process of experimentation) in which the students are solicited in collective situations to learn specific things in an active manner by trial and error, in a different temporality than the one traditionally used and by varying in diverse ways the learning situations.[10] In these programs, research is inextricably a corollary to learning, not only on the side of the leadership of the teachers who have to continually redefine their actions in relation to the contexts given by the students, but also on the side of the students putting themselves in research situations. The idea of research is a posture that is assumed on an everyday basis, it is not a pretentious access to formalism, and it changes completely the sense of artistic studies. The goal is to develop enlightened practitioners, capable of carrying out inventive actions in an autonomous manner.

Performers are often the butt of caricatures, incapable of carrying research on their own, but, to take an example, a model exists today in the revitalization of old music in which there is a collective work on interpretation, which can be qualified as a research in acts. It is then possible to start with an affirmative that what one is doing is research.

It is very important, even necessary, to be able to document these numerous new manners to envision teaching in music schools, the practitioners should be encouraged to write texts, producing videos, using all the possible media so that a collective knowledge can be developed, which would nourish the reflection on practices.

This documentation would help to see more precisely what constitutes artistic research; there is by the way a strong demand in the artistic world for the diffusion of such documents.

3. Research Outside the Norms

Many activities of research are carried out by people who never speak about it, who never write a single line about it. It does not prevent them from inventing things that do not inevitably correspond to the sense of innovation promoted by the governmental instances. How can we give full account of what remains a blind spot? To make these practices known would be a way to restore the meaning that one can give to democracy. In effect, there is an obvious unfairness in the large number of closures instituted to control access to research: in music, perfect pitch, dictation, standard sound, etc. It does not function in this way in reality, as there are many people whose practice does not correspond to these norms. The ones who feel they can legitimately speak about their practices, and who are willing to do it, do not do it for clearly argued reasons. They are willing to speak about them, and do it because they have some ideas in their mind. Behind their initiatives, some social strategies are in process. It is necessary to determine why one does things, to recognize what strategies are in place, to fully assume them, to make them known to the public. There is the need to break down some walls, of not thinking all this out of the blue, outside a context, without the presence of strategic objectives, to explicit what one is ready to defend.

Report realized and translated by Jean-Charles François – 2015-18.

English translation realized in collaboration with Nancy François.

Post-scriptum to the debate:
Exchange Forum PAALabRes “Artistic Research”

Following the debate organized on Novermber 2, 2015 on artistic research several questions remain to be clarified or discussed. We propose an exchange forum on the following questions:

To what extent do artistic practices today necessitate processes of research inherent to their acts, yet remaining distinct from them?
The issue of methods and criteria specific to research carried out by the practitioners themselves in relationship to their own artistic practices.
The issue of a strong representation in people’s minds of a dichotomy between theory and practice. Is it the case that the distinction between fundamental, intellectual or formal research (considered as theoretical) and professional training (considered as practical) introduces more confusion in this debate between practice and theory (practicing theory and theorizing implicitly the practices)? Is the questioning on artistic practices – professional or other – of the domain of theory? Can it be done without some references to practical examples?
Issues concerning the usefulness of research: the distance between the usefulness of a research activity for a given group of humans and the fact that if things are defined as useful from the beginning of a fundamental or artistic research, one refuses to accept that the results might be unpredictable. Is there the necessity to make a distinction between “usefulness” and “utilitarianism”?
Issues concerned with the status of written texts in relation to artistic research and creation: to what extent are they part of the research in itself? To what extent are they only tools for communicating the research results?
The contradictions between study tracks that are very often orientated towards individual work and the collective actions of laboratories.

Stories chronicling experiences would be welcome in connection with this notion of artistic research. The description of contexts in which disciplinary fields are in interaction, notably in the confrontation between arts and sciences, would be of great interest for this forum.

PaaLabRes accepts to consider for this debate very short contributions (6 lines for example) as well as more developed texts (one page). The research articles would be considered as potential contributions outside this “debate forum”.

PaaLabRes is in charge of the processes of presentation and of edition of the contributions in a spirit of exchange. Different types of encounters and interactions will be organized in order to continue working on these issues.

[1] The Cefedem AuRA, Centre de Formation des Enseignants de la Musique was created in 1990 by the Ministry of Culture in order to organize a study program leading to the State Diploma for Teaching Music within specialized music education (schools of music and conservatories). The Cefedem Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes based in Lyon developed a research publication, Enseigner la Musique, and created a Study Center on teaching artistic practices and their cultural mediations. See the site: cefedem-aura.org

[2] The collective PaaLabRes, Pratiques Artistiques en Actes, Laboratoire de Recherches, was created in 2011 by ten musicians working in the Lyon region, with the objective to reflect on their own practices,including both the logics of artistic production and of transmission, the logics of research and free reflection.

[3] Informal text by Jean-Charles François, 2012 (unpublished).

[4] Voir La Recherche en art(s), ed. Jehanne Dautrey, Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Paris : Editions MF, 2010.

[5] Voir Experimental Systems, Future Knowledge in Artistic Research, Michael Schwab (ed.), Ghent, Belgium : Orpheus Institute, distributed by Leuwen University Press, 2013. This series of articles is centered on the research of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Director at the Max-Planck Institute of the history of sciences department, on the epristemology of experimentation.

[6] For example, the School of Architecture of Saint-Etienne is now developing a track with the Lyon ENS (Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon), mixing architecture and writing.

[7] See John Cage, Silence, Cambridge, Mass. And London, England: The M.I.T. Press, 1966; see also John Cage, Empty Words, Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981.

[8] See notably The Reflexive Conservatoire, Studies in Music Education Eds. George Odam and Nicholas Bannan, London : Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Aldershot, England : Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2005. The Cefedem AuRA in its program leading to the Diplôme d’Etat centered the curriculum on students’ projects in the domain of artistic practices, pedagogy and reflection (writing an essay); Jean-Charles François, Eddy Schepens, Karine Hahn, Dominique Clément, « Processus contractuels dans les projets de réalisation musicale des étudiants au Cefedem Rhône-Alpes », Enseigner la Musique N° 9/10, Cefedem Rhône-Alpes, pp. 173-94.

[9] Private conversation with Jacques Moreau, director of the Cefedem AuRA, 2015.

[10] The ENM (Ecole Nationale de Musique) of Villeurbanne is one of the very active places working in this direction, notably in the program EPO (Ecole Par l’Orchestre, Learning through Orchestra) developed by Philippe Genet, Pascal Pariaud and Gérald Venturi, and the one from the Rock department with Gilles Laval.

Ecology of practices

15 avril 2016conceptsartistic practices, artistic research, co-existence, collective actions, confrontation, disqualification, ecology, interactivity, predators, preyspaalabres-adm

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itinerary-song
towards…

What do we mean by “ecology of practices”? The term ecology affirms that living beings have some relations to their environment, in configurations of interdependence. Life and above all the survival of living beings depend on other beings, whether live or inert, in particular situations. Ecology has become an important preoccupation because of the threats to the survival of the whole planet today, precisely in relation to human actions. The ecological questions more and more pertain to important cultural domains and to the relationships between human beings; in going beyond a purely scientific preoccupation, they intrude on the political sphere.

In the arts, ecological concerns centered recently on awareness of natural phenomena, the disappearance of certain species, or on heightened attention to our urban environment in the perspective of a moralization of excessive uses and of a desire to create reasoned practices respecting the spaces of others and the environment in general. In the cultural domain, ecology is considered as the influence that the environment exerts on behaviors and mentalities of individuals immerged in it.

For the PaaLabRes collective, the utilization of the term of “ecology” has another meaning in its relation to practices. The term “practice” refers to concrete situations involving actions inscribed in some duration. Practice most often implies relationships between human beings in a collective, and also interactions of these same beings with objects, all this happening within a well-defined material, cultural and institutional environment. It is this particular agency of all the interactive unstable elements in duration that constitutes a “practice”. In artistic domains, the practices are defined at the same time by:

Some hierarchic relationships between qualified persons. The idea of hierarchy implies that there are more or less qualified people and that the qualifications might vary according to defined roles, certain roles having the reputation of being more prestigious than others. Hierarchies can be more or less affirmed and more or less controlled by democratic rules.
Relationships between persons and objects resulting in particular actions. The objects influence the actions of people as much as people exert their craft on the objects. Some technical gestures are developed according to how tools of production behave.
Usages that are more or less fixed by rules. The rules come from established traditions, or can be invented for determined contexts. They are more or less explicit, and when they are implicit, there is often the impression that they do not exist. In order to create the absence of rules, one has to invent mechanisms, which in order to be efficient have to be organized like sheet music.
Relationships with the external world, notably with the public through particular media. But also the relationships with other neighboring practices, in order to be different from them, to be influenced by them, or in order to disqualify them.

Practices can then be thought of as beings, as living entities in themselves, which interact in various ways with other practices. The interaction between practices is precisely what is interesting for the PaaLabRes collective as a fundamental concept to be developed.

The concept of “ecology of practices” has been developed by the philosopher of sciences Isabelle Stengers, in the Tome 1 of Cosmopolitics.¹ In an interview published in the magazine Recherche², Stengers, talking about ecology in terms of relations between individuals and between populations, describes them as offering three possible options, which vary according to circumstances: a) the individuals can be preys; b) they can be predators; c) they can be considered as resources. One of the favorite examples for Stengers, inspired by the practices introduced by Tobie Nathan, gravitates around traditional pre-modern or non-modern psychotherapy practices. Most of the time these practices have some difficulty to coexist with scientific approaches that disqualify all the others in the name of rationality, and that tolerate them only reluctantly as part of a museum-based survival of cultures. However, the keys to success of therapies can often be found in the belief systems and cultural environment of the concerned individuals:

In ecological terms, the way in which a human practice chooses to present itself to the outside world, and notably when it proposes to enter in relationship with the general public, is part of its identity. At present, the identity of physics is at the same time made up of all the beings that it has created, the neutrino among others, and of its incapacity to present itself to the general public. For me, to try to create new links of interest around physics and other practices means making a proposition, not of radical change but of a mutation of identity. (…) The physicist would no longer be this being who, suddenly, intervenes in the name of rationality disqualifying all the others. (…) In my speculation, this physicist could become an ally if we would decide, for example, to take seriously the traditional psychotherapeutic practices that bring into play djinns and ancestors. He would know that in saying that, one does not pretend that the djinn is of the same nature as the neutrino: he would know that one is going to be interested in the risk of these practices, in what they are able to achieve. In this world in which the practices are present through their risks and their requirements, the physicist can coexist with the traditional therapist.³.

In the arts, in particular in musical art, because it is so much linked to identity problems, the disqualification of the practices of others is the rule rather than the exception. The genres or styles are more often preys or predators, rarely resources. The disqualification can be manifest in four different ways and often simultaneously: firstly it can be made on the basis of competences or of technical artistic expertize, either for example that someone would not be able to read musical scores, or that someone could not improvise during a social gathering; secondly the disqualification can be measured according to a presupposed authenticity, either for example by blaming a practice for not respecting a tradition, or on the contrary by accusing a tradition of being the source of a lethal stagnation; thirdly, disqualification is induced in relation to a public success, either in accusing the artistic form of being commercial to the point of not belonging any more to a legitimate art, or in blaming it for being too far removed from public understanding to the point of being completely marginalized; and fourthly disqualification can manifest itself in relation to official learning institutions, either when a given practice would be excluded from them, or on the contrary when this same practice strongly asserts its existence by staying outside any institutions, considered in this case as the source of too confortable existences.

The issue of attempting to get rid of the infernal logics behind the disqualification of the practices of others, in order to replace it by a pacified ecology of practices, is far from simple. The solutions lie not in putting an end to conflicts or in forcing cultures into an idealized “melting pot”, but in seeking rather to organize the confrontation of practices on the principle of mutual recognition and equal rights. The main difficulty of this political program lies in that it is not sufficient to let cultures coexist in a given space, even if it seems pacific at first: the multiples enclaves in a shared institution (or a common territory) remaining in mutual ignorance of their respective raison d’être and simply limiting their relationships to their juxtaposition, or even to their superimposition, do not create the conditions of a viable democratic contract likely to pacify fundamentalist antagonisms. The effective confrontation of practices in mechanisms that have to be invented, which oblige them to interact while respecting their own existence, without compromise, becomes a necessity in order to face (at least partially) the difficulties in which our societies tend to sink. Only the existence of public institutions dedicated to this effect could arguably avoid the permanent danger of more or less violent civil wars.

The ecology of practices takes the form of the continuous emergence of new practices stemming from the already existing ones and continuous disappearance of other practices. This phenomenon seems to have been strongly reinforced since the advent of electronic media’s instantaneous communication. The onset of these numerous practices implies in each case, as noted by Isabelle Stengers, the “production of values, (…) the proposal of new modes of evaluation, of new meanings ».⁴In the perspectives of the ecology of practices, the issue is not to think anymore that these values, evaluations and meanings should replace the old ones in the name of a truth that one would have finally discovered, but that they “are about the production of new relations that are added to a situation already produced by a multiplicity of relations ».⁵ The extraordinary multiplicity of practices that emerge and disappear, through the very varied content of the meanings they express, results in a calling into question of normalization processes that led to universally recognized truths imposed on all. To ideas, the source of imposed “undeniable facts”, is opposed the resistance of practices that confront the instability of realities, and their values relative to contexts.

Consequently, the idea of ecology of practices is not only about the contents of the works or of artistic approaches in relation to sound ecology: that is on the one hand the issues relative to sound pollution in our societies, and on the other hand the enhancement of diversified sound environments. The ecology of practices involves a complex ensemble that gravitates around notions of interaction between human beings, and between human and non-human beings, in particular with inert objects and technologies. In this context artistic practices are confronted, like any other practices, with difficult dilemmas having to do for example with issues such as data hacking, respect of author’s rights, advertising power of the media, cultural industries economy and the funding of alternative practices, free or paid access to information, facilitated access to learning (notably about specialized techniques) and to critical thought, access to employment, in short anything that contributes to influence the environment, its unstable and uncertain future, and the beings living in it.

Jean-Charles François – 2015

Translation Kerrie Szuch and Nancy François

1. Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, Bononno, R (trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2010).

2. Isabelle Stengers : « Inventer une écologie des pratiques » www.larecherche.fr/savoirs/autre/isabelle-stengers-inventer-ecologie-pratiques-01-04-1997-69210

3. Ibid., p. 59.

4. Cosmopolitics I, op. cit., p. 32.

For an itinerary-song towards…

Orality

15 avril 2016artistic research, concepts, improvisationartistic education, artistic practices, artistic research, collective practices, learning by ear, reproduction, sensory, variation, writingpaalabres-adm

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Sensory Body and Learned Models

For an
itinerary-song
towards…

In musical discourse, orality is often summarized in two assertions: to “learn by rote” and “without score”. Yet orality, and the term seems an over-simplification, refers in fact to a sensorial involvement in sonic practice. This mobilizes conjointly the ear listening, the eye sighting, the voice singing, the body dancing, the feet stomping, the hands playing, the word arising, in the service of a project built on experiences, trial and error and individual and collective constructions.

This sensoricity, a globalizing term taken up by Alain Savouret, plays a part in the ineffable side that any human action has, because it cannot be modeled (or escapes any definitive all-embracing modelization). It is constantly redefined by the permanent absorption of new experiences in the audible, vocal, tactile, gustative, visual, body motion domains… of the being in action – in reaction to the environment. Moreover, it integrates elements of traditions relative to the socio-cultural milieu of each and everyone.

Every human being has this ineffable part, which can be observed in his/her most diverse actions. It constantly interacts with the model-based part relative to the undertaken action, more or less mastered by the actor (manual techniques, theoretical knowledge, historical culture, …) and it leads to unique productions because carried by her/his global being.

Henceforth, the question is not about developing or refusing orality as defined in this way (it is there!) but rather about evaluating as closely as possible the existing models, symbolized by the relationship to the written in practice. This dosage, unconscious in nature, (the unconscious domain), can be questioned, be brought to light by the confrontation with others. Collective open practices can thus be the place where these individual equilibriums are elucidated. Greater mobility of boundaries, more porosity, can be found there. Interpersonal tinkering about becomes possible, each person bringing his/her stock of objects with a view to creating some assemblages that can become, or not, definitive realizations.

Orality questions our relation to writing and to the model to reproduce. There is orality in all societies; it is the degree of the presence and usage of writing, which introduces differences between, on the one hand, reproduction of the model, analytical discourses, and on the other hand variability of the objects in the time of their production, analogical discourses.

This point of view on orality allows one to consider musical practice from the sensorial perspective of the human body as a variable to the learned models.

Michel Lebreton – avril 2014

Translation Jean-Charles and Nancy François

Cultural Operations

15 avril 2016concepts, politicartistic practices, artistic research, collective creation, cultural operations, dictionary definitions, process, trajectoriespaalabres-adm

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Episode 1 : operation, cultural operation

For an
itinerary-song
towards…

This is not an embezzlement of definition.

Cultural operations are already, to begin with, an operation…

The choice of a feminist Latin etymology

Operation comes from the Latin word “operatio” (adding to it an “n” of love), meaning to work and a work.
A first origin can be found in “opus, operis”, a work and to work, but also as in work of art, a finished product. Or we could have the opos-opus of sap and juice, of sweat or sesterce, which one can get from working… PaaLabRes relies on a second origin, taken from the antique feminization (in the tactical feminist-action) of the first opus, operis: “opera”, to work and a work, but also activity; that is of a production in progress. In the framework of certain customs, an idea of providing service, with application and attention, with taking care and trouble, is associated with this word.

The verb operor (to work and making something, but also to practice, to exercise, to produce, to achieve) adds the meaning of to have some effect. It appears that the operative roots of the construction of all these words are:

ops, for power, strength, means, force including the idea of help, support and assistance.
op, radical that indicates the eye or the sight (as in optical matters for example), and by extension, analysis (as in biopsy, analysis of a living tissue), and also the prefix indicating “opposite” and “against” (to oppose, to be in opposition).

The “op” of hip hop, and the hype and the hop, of the oopsy daisy!
And the hit and the pot, of the horsy’s hops and of the seal’s seashore
Let’s stop our ding dongs
A p o s t a l s t a m p
No hip and no hope, no more dis-hope or sur-hope?
Suripo and syrup’s la la my don dingbat
[song in the process of being recorded]

Some previous (not yet cultural?) uses of operations ?)

An operation, “action done by some power, some force, which produces a physical or moral effect” [Cnrtl, A], is mysterious and magical. In the first traces of written texts we have, RELigion was not far: with the Holy Operation, old lips pear eat also in its operations.

As “action carried out according to some method, through the combination of an ensemble of means” [« action faite selon un méthode, par la combinaison d’un ensemble de moyens », Larousse French dictionary, opérer 1-opération 2], another religion grabs this term: l’ECONomics and BUSiness carry out speculative, financial, and monetary operations.
Les MATHématics themselves contributed by specifying an operation as “a process of a determinate nature that, starting with known elements, engenders a new one” [« processus de nature déterminée qui, à partir d’éléments connus, permet d’en engendrer un nouveau », Robert French dictionary, 3]. It is interesting to pay a short visit to “logic”: “examples of logical operations: identity, negation, conjunction, either exclusive or inclusive, non-disjunction, inclusion, non-conjunction” [« Les opérations logiques sont : l’identité, la négation, la conjonction, ou exclusif, ou inclusif, la non disjonction, l’inclusion, la non conjonction », Cnrtl B2b, Guilh. 1969].

And the MILITary (it is strange that, in dictionaries, “milit.” means military and not militant)… Look! They have not shown the tip of their nose under gasmasks. They annexed operation as an “ensemble of strategic movements or of tactical manœuvres of a deployed army, executed in order to attain a given objective” [Cntrl, C1]

Movement, manœuvre… strategy, tactic… all this evokes something… no, not in this context, actually mostly against this military / police context… the “lightning-raid operation” by Alpha Bondy of the Brigadier Sabari: the police violence (already more than 30 years ago!). And also another book with a revolutionary content… even an introduction? Ah yes: The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau (translated by Steven Rendall, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1984)… which has “the purpose (…) to make explicit the systems of operational combination [les combinatoires d’opérations] which also compose a ‘culture’ and to bring to light the models of action characteristic of users whose status as the dominated element in society (a status that does not mean that they are either passive or docile) is concealed by the euphemistic term “consumers.” Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.” (p. xi-xii) And here you are: “operation” in its plural form, is not very far from the word “culture”. We will come back to it.

Another big domain of the use of the term is MEDicine. An operation is here a surgical procedure performed on “some part of the living body for the purpose of modifying it, of cutting it, of taking it out” [Robert dictionary, 4], “for therapeutic, preventive, aesthetic or experimental purposes.” [Cnrtl D]. A certain number, even indeed a considerable number, are undoubtedly necessary after a military operation…

The takatak and tikitik of the machine guns
tactic of gunners,
that’s a lot of deaths, that’s a lot of deaths!
The clataclak and clatterlet of shears,
catheters and curettes,
repair bodies, repair bodies!
[song in the process of being recorded (bis)]

It is worth noting that the relative frequency of the term (in the corpus of the Trésor de la Langue Française) more than doubles between the first part and the second part of the 2Oth Century: from 5103 to 11520 occurrences (applied to a 100 thousand words [Cntrl, Fréq. Rel. litter.]). Is it thanks to the progresses in medicine? Is it the fault of the multiplication of military deployments? Actually, it’s both, thank you captain (in an operetta)? Or else is it due to the fast pace of financialisation? It is certainly not the appearance of the phrase “cultural operation” in the conclusion of Culture in the Plural by Michel de Certeau [(trans. Tom Conley, Minneapolis, London: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997) p.133-147] that was the cause of an “operation” runaway…

A cultural operation?

At first, it is necessary to clarify the words culture and cultural. We could multiply the definitions that do not limit the so-called cultural field to the arts and artists. They are numerous, and it is fundamental to constantly recall them in order to fight against the confiscation of the process of conceptualizations by recognized artists. Michel de Certeau writes in Culture in the Plural:

“Surely if it is true that any human activity can be cultural, it is not necessarily the case or is not yet inevitably recognized as such. If culture is really going to exist, it is not enough to be the author of social practices; these social practices need to have meaning for those who effectuate them.” [p. 67]

And in this framework, what can be an operation?

For Michel de Certeau, “the cultural expression is foremost an operation”. Concerning this idea, he indicates three instances: “(1) To do something with something; (2) to do something with someone; (3) to change everyday reality and modify one’s life style to the point of risking existence itself.” [Ibid. p. 143] For him the operation is the meeting point of a particular trajectory that goes across a place, a “practice of a space that is already constructed”. Here, the spaces are “determined and differentiated places” organized by the economic system, social hierarchies, the manners of expressing oneself, the traditions, etc. [p. 145] The trajectory modifies through particular actions the conditions of the instituted places:

“Thus, cultural operations are movements. They inscribe creations in coherences that are both legal and contractual. They stipple and trace them with trajectories that are not indeterminate but that are unsuspected, that deform, erode and slowly change the equilibrium of social constellations.” [p. 145-146]

A zebra [“They stipple and trace them” is used here as a translation for “Elles les zèbrent”, and the verb “zèbrer” comes from the animal “zèbre”] is “the wild donkey” [“l’âne sauvage”, Larousse French Dictionary] “with a very fast gallop” [“au gallop très rapide”, Robert French Dictionary], it is an “ordinary individual” [“individu quelconque”, Cnrtl], a “strange individual” [“individu bizarre”, Robert]… Striped like a zebra, a walker makes the cars listen to reason… To streak like a zebra is to scratch and jam the system, is to striate and “to mark with sinuous lines” [Larousse], with the signature “Zorro”…

For all the zebras who zig and zag
social constellations, star-type societies
For all the other Zadigs and other Zidanes
who dance with no ceremonial and fly in the nets
with zazou’s zedoary of zipped zany
And some hot pepper! Some erosions, movements, alterations,
And some hot pepper! Some collusions, changes, transformations.
[song in the process of being recorded (ter)]

In addition to all this, let’s keep in mind a few ideas from the early definitions above: production as process rather than as finished product, attention and application, strength with help and support, facing up to something, engendering something new, intervention (to come in between, to emerge during something, to stand in-between, to interrupt, to mingle with, etc., a term that the military and medicine use also a lot!); likewise the notion of actions done together, or series of actions.

In the next episode, we will continue to work with the elements developed by Michel de Certeau. His book, The Practice of Everyday Life (op.cit.) begins with: “This essay is part of a continuing investigation of the operations, the ways in which users – commonly assumed to be passive and guided by established rules – operate.” (p. xi). This is the first phrase: the plural is there and the expressions linked to “operation” are very present in this general introduction….

An affair to be followed!

Nicolas Sidoroff – February 2016

Translation Jean-Charles and Nancy François

List of the dictionaries used…

Listed in the order of edition.

[Larousse] : Dictionnaire de la langue française, Lexis. (1992). Jean Dubois. Paris : ed. Larousse. (original edition, 1979).
[Robert] : Le nouveau Petit Robert (dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française). Text by Paul Robert, revised et amplified under the direction of Josette Rey-Debove and Alain Rey. (2008). Paris : Dictionnaires Le Robert (new ed. millesime, first edition of Petit Robert, 1967, of nouveau Petite Robert in 1993).
[Cnrtl] : Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales. [consulted on line: cnrtl.fr/definition/op%ération , February 11, 2016]

For the etymology:

Dictionnaire Latin-Français. Félix Gaffiot. (1934). Paris : Hachette [consulted on line: lexilogos.com/latin/gaffiot.php, February 11, 2016]
Les racines latines du vocabulaire français. Jacques Cellard. (2007). Bruxelles : De Boeck, ed. Duculot 4e édition.
Dictionnaire étymologique et historique du français. Jean Dubois, Henri Mitterand, Albert Dauzat. (2011). Paris : Larousse, ‘Les grands dictionnaires’.
Dictionnaire d’étymologie du français. Jacqueline Picoche, with the collaboration of Jean-Claude Rolland. (2015). Paris : Le Robert, coll. ‘Les usuels’. (new ed., first ed., 1992)

For an itinerary-song towards…

Music to be made

15 avril 2016conceptsartistic education, artistic research, listening, music making, music to be played, musical practice, publicpaalabres-adm

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For an
itinerary-song
towards…

There are two musics (at least so I have always thought): the music one listens to, the music one plays. These two musics are two totally different arts, each with its own history, its own sociology, its own aesthetics, its own erotic; the same composer can be minor if you listen to him, tremendous if you play him (even badly). (Barthes, 1992, p.231)

The dichotomy presented by Barthes is interesting for PaaLabRes because it places music in an activity to be done whereas it is often only presented as a product to listen to. We will try to understand how important this distinction is for the diversity of music practices.

The music to be listened to is not very difficult to define: it is what we generally call « Music ». This is the implicit definition found in the (many) aphorisms on music:

« Music drives out hate in those who are without love. » Pablo Casals

« Without music, life would be a mistake. » Friedrich Nietzsche

Music is here no more than a pure sound product with which we are confronted, which could only exist for the ear. As a product, music is adorned with extra-ordinary virtues, even with magical powers that can go as far as saving man (it works even better with « the poor fellows » generally considered as cultural sinners). Even in the attempted distinction proposed by Duke Ellington – « There are only two kinds of music: the good and the bad » – music is still conjugated in the singular, because reduced to the one function: to be listened to.

But the consequence of this is that to be listened to, the music must be well played. Music to be listened to – and I do not speak here only of classical music – has to be made by specialists, played by specialists who have learned to do it with specialists, thereby excluding, without realizing it, a common practice of music.

Even if one thinks of the multiplicity of music in as many different musics as there are styles (rock, jazz, classical, variety, experimental, etc.), these musics always have in common the fact of being well played.

Yet, in Barthes’ quote, the most important point lies in the parenthesis “(even badly)”! The difference between music to be played and music to be listened to is contained entirely in this parenthesis. Barthes defines it as « the music that you or I can play, alone or with friends, with no other audience than its’ participants (that is to say, safely removed from any risk of theatricality, any hysterical temptation) ».

For us, we prefer to use the term « music to be made » instead of « music to play », it retains the sense that Barthes attributes to it in the last sentence of his article: “What is the point of composing, if it means confining the product to the concert hall or the loneliness of radio reception? To compose, at least by propensity, is to give to be made, not to give to hear but to give to write.” “To make” seems to us less symbolically weighty than “to play” (obviously, music is always played!) and than “to write”. Although it points to the idea of a fabrication, the verb “to make” implies above all the idea of an ordinary, banal, or common act.

In order to exist, the music to be listened to, however, must be produced in extra-ordinary and spectacular conditions: the concert. The systematization and sacralization of concert practice in the nineteenth century made us conceive all music as a music to be listened to, by putting the communication relationship between a producer and a receiver at the center of the device. The room and the moment of the concert were exclusively turned towards the activity of listening. The advent of recording has further amplified – in both senses of the word – this relationship to music. The only difference between the concert and the recording lies in the temporal and spatial separation of the places of production (concert hall, recording studio, etc.) and reception (living room, car, etc.). Recording, thought of as fixing the playing and affording a possibility of infinite re-listening, has made the ear even more demanding of a product well played, even « perfect » which eliminates possible imperfections of the playing (just notice the time spent and efforts made in re-recording, editing and mixing a recording to polish the sound product). But what one gains in musical « purity » or « quality », one could well lose in the diversity of practices…

In the media, music is currently often presented as a recorded/listened to music. For example, a widely published article, ‘French people ready to sacrifice their TV rather than music’, resuming a recent survey, presents music as a product whose consumption, that is to say by listening, is essential to the proper functioning of a home. d’un foyer. However, it’s not just about « music to listen to » in this article. The last sentence quotes with astonishment, practices that can fall into our category of « music to do »:

More fun, 10% of respondents admit to being surprised by their loved ones dancing naked, 23% indulging in » air guitar « , or 30% training in front of a mirror.

But the way of presenting these practices marks them directly with the stigma of a certain inadmissibility…

If music to listen to is above all a product, whose focus on the quality to be achieved hides the social, ecological and political conditions of its production, music to be made is primarily a social activity whose end can not justify the means. Mistaking one for the other, to assume they are the same, means the musical death of the latter.

Singing in the shower, playing in your room, singing loudly over a radio, scratching a guitar by the fire with friends, playing a piece of Bach badly, playing a quartet with only three instruments, and so on, are all invisible practices because « unspeakable » – we can not call them « music » – especially where musicians who produce music to listen to are taught: the conservatory. We should therefore be able at least to specify the circumstances of the production of « music », even more so in the places where it is taught, in order to avoid any « misunderstanding »,^[1] so as not to take one practice for another. It is certainly this that gives rise to the misunderstanding of what « making music » means: the use of the substantive « music » without explicitly attaching the circumstances of its production.

To illustrate explicitly the circumstances of production of the object « music », let us try to finish by clarifying what is generally implied in the expression « to learn music » in the conservatory:

Learning music,
Is to learn classical music

that is to say, learning classical music in a classical way
that is to say, learning with others to read a score written in the Western language stabilized in the nineteenth century with a music theory teacher and learning to play alone a modern musical instrument of equal temperament with a teacher of the same instrument of modern music of equal temperament to be able to then rehearse with other musicians who received the same training, but on another modern musical instrument of equal temperament with a teacher of this modern instrument of equal temperament, to form the set that corresponds to the nomenclature of the piece of Western art music composed by a genius between 1685 and 1937 in order to interpret this under the direction of a conductor as correctly as possible on the raised stage of a concert hall adapted to receive a public also adapted.

If this definition has at least the merit of being clear, perhaps allowing one to avoid some misunderstanding, it could nevertheless in the long run prevent any practice of classical music by displaying too crudely its conditions of production, today implicit but nevertheless very real, as a director of one Conservatory says: “A musician who comes here to simply play in his room, ultimately has no place here.” So we may be interested in maintaining the misunderstanding and in being not too explicit about what is expected so as not to discourage those who play in their room … and who do not particularly want out. However, and without going as far as an impossible description of the specific conditions of each practice, one could nevertheless wonder a little more about the different models of practice that exist and thus not limit oneself to using only the categories of practice provided by the institutions and their actors. By developing practices centered as much on the music « to be made » as on the musical product « to listen to », or to put it differently on music as a social activity, as much as on an artistic practice separated from everyday life, one could give the possibility of a legitimate existence to practices other than those aimed at an endless perfection induced by the practice of performance on stage, even if these other practices remain in their room.

Samuel Chagnard – 2016

Translation Samuel Chagnard, Jean-Charles and Nancy François

For further reading:

Barthes, R., « Musica practica », L’obvie et l’obtus, Essais critiques, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1992, p. 231-235.

Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J.-C. (1965). Language and relationship to language in pedagigical situations, in Rapport pédagogique et communication, Bourdieu, P., Passeron, J.-C., & Saint Martin, M. de., Paris La Haye Mouton.

Bozon, M., Vie quotidienne et rapports sociaux dans une petite ville de province : la mise en scène des différences, Lyon, Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1984.

Chagnard, S., (2012) Modèle de pratique et pratique du modèle en conservatoire – Un musicien, c’est fait pour jouer. Master’s research essay under the direction of G. Combaz – Institut des Sciences et des Pratiques de l’Education et de la Formation – Université Lumière Lyon 2.

Lahire, B., « Logiques pratiques : le “faire” et le “dire sur le faire” », in L’esprit sociologique, Textes à l’appui, Paris, Éditions La Découverte, 2005, p.141-160.

Levine, L. W. (2010). Culture d’en haut, culture d’en bas : l’émergence des hiérarchies culturelles aux États-Unis. Paris: Éditions la Découverte.

[1]. ”The gravity of the linguistic misunderstanding in the pedagogical report stems from the fact that it has to do with the code. (…..) Learning means acquiring knowledge and inextricably, acquiring a knowledge of the code by which this knowledge is likely to be acquired. In other words, the code can only be learned here through the less and less clumsy décryption of the messages. No doubt this is the logic of all real learning either in the case of diffuse socialization or acculturation, but is not pedagogical communication entrusted precisely to technicians of learning whose specific function is to work continually and methodically at minimizing misunderstanding about the code? » [Bourdieu & Passeron, 1965, p. 15]

For an itinerary-song towards…

Praxis (English version)

15 avril 2016concepts, politicartistic practices, artistic research, collective actions, electronic technologies, poïesis, politics, praxispaalabres-adm

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Today political discourse articulates between the opposing concepts of poiêsis, which refers to the production of an object or a work, and praxis, which entails an action with no other purpose than itself.
According to H. Arendt, modernism is dominated by the created work or object, particularly through an infinite manufacturing of items and tools, where the concealed processes of elaboration are considered a means to an end, the final product taking precedence:

The implements and tools of homo faber, from which the most fundamental experience of instrumentality arises, determine all work and fabrication. Here it is indeed true that the end justifies the means; it does more, it produces and organizes them. (…) During the work process, everything is judged in terms of suitability and usefulness for the desired end, and for nothing else.¹

Meanwhile, all practices today have, in one way or another, to confront forms of storage of information provided by electronic technologies, which come to subtly change everything: recordings, disks, electronic memory… the fixity of electronic storage of information has the tendency to create a general reification of both works written on scores and ritualized actions fixed in the collective memory of the participants. A recording definitively fixes a particular moment, but in this very process of solidification of real life, less now than ever before may it pretend to represent the authentic tradition: at a certain moment certain individuals have done this, it is just one example among others of a type of practice. Moreover, the digitalization of memory allows very easily to pirate them and to modify them for one’s own benefit. Recordings fix real events, but they are precarious in their virtuality. In order to escape commoditization, there is no other choice than to use some cunning in making sure that each event would not be the simple exact repetition of a preceding version.

However these technologies also seriously undermine the claim to the exclusivity of traditions and, hence, their aura. They favor the differentiation of practices in all fields, and therefore return to the forefront the processing and collective nature of the praxis.

For Hannah Arendt, the term praxis is replaced by “action” most often related to “speech”. For her, the condition of the action depends upon a cooperative of at once equal and different human beings. In this sense, action and speech characterize political action in its highest form: acting together whilst recognizing our differences:

Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.²

H. Arendt compares the Greek and Roman systems of political interaction. In ancient Greece the laws have the function to allow the subsequent actions of the citizens, “not Athens, but the Athenians, were the polis. »³.

Modern society, more influenced by Rome than by Athens, has completely degraded action. And Arendt notes:

It was precisely these occupations – healing, flute-playing, play-acting – which furnished ancient thinking with examples for the highest and greatest activities of man.⁴

Rehabilitation of the praxis in the era of electronic globality returns the flutist to his place as actor of his own practice,⁵ , at play with the irresolute relations with others, the ephemeral character of actions, and unpredictable outcomes.⁶

Jean-Charles François – 2015

Translation by the author and Nancy François

1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago, London : The University of Chicago Press, 1958, p. 153. Even though few references are made by the author to the terms poiêsis and praxis, her exposition, supporting three essential elements of the human condition, namely of work, created works and action, provides important keys to the understanding of what is at play in today’s world.

2. Hannah Arendt, op. cit., chapter V, « Action », p. 188.

3. Ibid., p.195.

4. Ibid., p.207.

5. See Marc’O, Théâtralité et Musique, Paris : Association S.T.A.R., 1994: “We have stated that, in a broad sense, the word actor relates more to a produced activity than to a social status (an identity). Ideally, the actor, author of his actions, is an author who verifies and acts. Through his actions, whether it be on the scene of work, social, family or otherwise – he tries to understand what he is lacking. Only action can bring him to understand this lack. And it is that upon which life is founded which he is lacking. All that he needs is to have aims in life and so fix goals. In this way he has a destiny, he contributes to cultural development. He makes history.” (page 86)

6. See Jean-Charles François, “Le Bèlè Martiniquais face aux héritiers de l’art autonome”, Les Périphériques vous parlent, N°36 Web, Paris, 2012. The practice of dance, poetry and traditional Bèlè music in Martinique is a living example of the idea of Praxis as it is defined in this text.

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Discipline (English version)

15 avril 2016conceptsartistic practices, artistic research, cultural operations, digital technologies, discipline, field of knowledge, multi-disciplinarity, obedience, technical skillspaalabres-adm

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The notion of discipline seems at first sight foreign to concepts used by PaaLabRes. In our collective, the emphasis is on the concepts of nomad and transversal. In what way is discipline pertinent to our approach?

In the founding text of PaalabRes, the term “discipline” is employed in the two most commonly used definitions, the first one as domain or field of knowledge and practice, separated from other domains, the second one as personal mastery or obedience:

“Our society is characterized in all domains by the instability, the precarity and the erasure of the limits between disciplines.” “Technologies are at the centers of transverse approaches linking disciplines that were until now far apart.” “This does not exclude, in fact, the presence of external observers and the collaboration with non artistic disciplines (notably social sciences and humanities).”
“This book is ‘a questioning on the operations of users, supposedly destined to passivity and discipline’ ”. [quote from Michel de Certeau L’invention du quotidien, I. Arts de faire, Paris, Union Générale d’Éditions, Coll. 10/18, 1980]

These two uses of “discipline” are most often distinct from one another in common language (an “artistic discipline” versus an “iron discipline”), even when this double use appears in the same domain: a teacher should impose discipline in her/his class – rules of conduct and of obedience – in order to teach his/her discipline – ensemble of knowledge of a specific subject matter. If the use of the one thus does not call spontaneously for the use of the other, we can nevertheless think that the two meanings in this last case are perhaps not very far apart.

The origin of the word discipline can be found in effect in discipulus, which means “pupil” in Latin, thus relating discipline to the idea of learning. The history of the word reveals also a kinship between the two definitions and the proximity of a link to the body:

“The ancient meaning of “massacre, carnage, havoc, calamity”, proper to old French, is to be understood as an extension of the idea of “punishment”, an accepted sense during the 12th Century (ca. 1170), especially applied to a cleric’s corporal mortification (1174) and giving way, by metonymy, to the concrete meaning of “instrument used for flogging” (before 1549) in religious circles. However, as soon as mid-12th century, the word is also employed with the modern definitions of “rule of life, of conduct” (ca. 1120) and “education, teaching”. By metonymy, a discipline refers to a subject matter being taught, a branch of knowledge.” [“Discipline” Le Robert – Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, Alain Rey (dir.) p. 1095]

Discipline as working on the body, was described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish. He showed the development during the 18th century of discipline in different institutions through an ensemble of meticulous techniques, methods and practices, which aims, through the corporal inscription, at the fabrication of docile bodies combining usefulness and obedience. Discipline as working on the body through specific practices, evidently constitutes the explicit techniques and goals of an institution like the army, but the “body techniques”, as Marcel Mauss calls them, are equally operational in any teaching practice, including those which are the most “theoretical”. A discipline, by its teaching, constitutes an ensemble of regulated knowledge, techniques and practices, which are inscribed indiscriminately in body and mind. One could say then that discipline is, in the same movement, matter and manner. There is no “matter” (knowledge, understanding, etc.) without “manner” (rules, procedures, etc.).

A discipline, considered as “branch of knowledge”, is only, as indicated by the wording, part of a tree which would represent world knowledge. Following this definition, it is an element of a global knowledge, with a possible doubt as to its effective existence in itself, and which would certainly be only situated historically, culturally, etc., a discipline is thus necessarily partial and excluding. It delimits a perimeter of validity of a culture, that is some ways of thinking and of acting, outside which what it defines no longer applies and is no longer valid. A discipline is obliged to turn inward on itself in order to exist in relation with other disciplines and carries in this way an exclusive logic. However it is because a discipline elaborates its own instruments of contemplating and measuring the world, fragmented but specific instruments, that it can often produce unique knowledge capable of enlightening the world in new ways. Nevertheless, knowledge cannot be unlinked from power, there is a great temptation to preserve in the teaching of a discipline only an ensemble of techniques with no relationships to the knowledge intended to be conveyed, and therefore to the power that this knowledge secures. Michel Foucault showed that the functional role to which a body is subjected, was inversely proportional to the political role it was able to play.

Finally, defined in this way, discipline is thus what at the same time allows and impedes a practice.

For us, reflection on the notion of discipline does not aim to suppress discipline or to multiply the inter-, multi- and trans-disciplinary rationales, nor to harden it in repositioning it on exclusive “fundamentals”. What is at stake is rather to try not to dissociate, within one discipline, the entwined rationales often presented in the form of disjointed elements, as for example “theoretical” and “practical” levels. This supposes that one should imagine a “whole” dimension of discipline, which contains its epistemological, historical, cultural, social (etc.) conditions of construction. However, this position goes against the economic model of division of labor elaborated in the 19th century, that Western art music represents through the hyper-specialization of diverging points of view on music: that of the composer, musicologist, audience, performer, teacher, etc., not to mention the instrumental “enforced discipline” [disciplinarisation] of these last two.

Between a call for a mandatory mixing of disciplines, softening their specific concepts in which everything would be in everything, and the extreme fragmentation of one discipline causing it to explode in as many tightly closed specialties as there are practitioners/researchers, we advocate the importation of foreign elements that shake up and introduce other considerations, allowing a provisional reconfiguration of space and of disciplinary practices.

Samuel Chagnard — 2016

Translation Samuel Chagnard, Jean-Charles and Nancy François

For further studies:

Astolfi, J.-P. (2010). La saveur des savoirs disciplines et plaisir d’apprendre. Issy-les-Moulineaux : ESF.

Chervel, A. (1998). « L’histoire des disciplines scolaires », in La culture scolaire une approche historique. Paris : Belin.

Forquin, J. C., (2005) « Disciplines scolaires », in Dictionnaire encyclopédique de l’éducation et de la formation (sous la direction de Philippe Champy et Christiane Étévé), 3^e édition, Paris, Retz, p. 275-279.

Foucault, M. (1993). Surveiller et punir : naissance de la prison. Paris : Gallimard.

Lahire, B. (2012) « Des effets délétères de la division scientifique du travail sur l’évolution de la sociologie », SociologieS [On line], Débats, La situation actuelle de la sociologie, on line, January 27, 2012, consultation on February 10, 2016.

URL : http://sociologies.revues.org.bibliotheque-nomade2.univ-lyon2.fr/3799

Mauss, M. (1934) Les techniques du corps, http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/mauss_marcel/socio_et_anthropo/6_Techniques_corps/Techniques_corps.html, consultation on February 11, 2016.

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Experimental (English version)

15 avril 2016conceptsartistic practices, artistic research, Expérimental, experimental music, experimental systems, modernity, scientific modelspaalabres-adm

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The term “experimental” remains difficult to define in artistic contexts, and concerning PaaLabRes’ particular issues, it poses a certain number of problems. A first definition seemingly suitable to artistic practices goes towards the idea of trying out things in link with experience. Any sound production practice implies a degree of trial and error, of experimentation in order to achieve a desired outcome. One carries out a series of trials in order to arrive at a solution that is satisfying to the practitioner’s ear or to the external listeners’ ones. Through reference to experience, one implies that the trials are carried out in the framework of an interaction between a human being and some concrete material. This first determination of the meaning of the word is situated far from the definition of experimental in the sense of scientific research, which, according to the Petit Robert dictionary, can be described in the following manner: “Empirical experience which consists in observing, classifying, making hypotheses and verifying through appropriate experiences”.

However, for some years practicing musicians (instrumentalists, singers,…) have been present in the university, and this implied the necessity to contemplate the question of research in a manner appropriate to their situation. If the very act of interpretation can be considered as constituting, under certain conditions, an original creation in itself, it is then possible to propose the notion of experimental as being the best way to provide a framework for a research process: it would not only be a question of playing, but of defining a project similar to the empiric experience described above.

The definition of experimental is made more complicated by the fact that this term has been used to describe particular aesthetic movements inscribed in a singular historical context. On the one hand, John Cage and his circle have been very often described as typical of what we call “experimental music ».¹ The well-known definition by Cage of the term experimental conditions its utilization on not considering it as the description of an act that can be after the fact judged successful or failed, but rather on considering it as an act the result of which one cannot know in advance.² He emphasizes here an elaboration process in which the will of the composer creator should be absent, in which the agency and the nature of the sounds are not determined from the beginning, and which does not predict the way listeners might experience them. The term experimental has also been used to describe 20th Century composers – most of them Americans, inspired by pragmatism (Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Edgar Varèse, Harry Partch, Robert Erickson, etc.) – who refused to found their music on conceptual theories, and who turned their attention to the materiality of sound production. It is also on this idea of more direct production of sound matter, that electroacoustic music has been qualified as “experimental music”: electronic and concrete music studios had taken on the aspect of scientific laboratories. The label “experimental music” is applied today to an infinite number of practices, especially when they are difficult to categorize in a specific traditional genre.

This multiplicity of meanings, in certain cases very vague, results often in misunderstandings, and the role of “experimental” in the collection of concepts within the PaaLabRes collective remains particularly uncertain and unstable. We will limit its use to the perspective of a definition of what could constitute research in artistic domains. In this context, the Orpheus Institute in Ghent (Belgium) has recently published a book (Experimental Systems, Future Knowledge in Artistic Research, Michael Schwab (ed.), Orpheus Institute, Leuwen (Belgium): Leuwen University Press, 2013). This publication is centered on the work of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger³, director of the Max Planck Institute for the history of sciences, which is based notably on experimental systems, with some perspectives on eventual applications to artistic domains. For this author, experimental systems are articulated around four categories:

There should be an intimate, interactive relation between scientific objects and their conditions of technical production, in an inseparable manner. This relation is at the same time local, individual, social, institutional, technical, instrumental and above all epistemic. He emphasizes the hybrid character of experimental systems and because of this, their impure nature.
Experimental systems have to be able to produce surprises constituting new forms of knowledge. They have to be conceived in ways producing differential results that are not predictable. They have a certain autonomy, a life of their own.
They should be able to produce epistemic traces (what the author describes under the term of “graphematicity”), which show and incarnate their signifying products and which can be represented in writing.
Experimental systems should be able to enter networks that include other experimental groups, by means of conjunctures and bifurcations, forming thus experimental cultures.⁴.

Rheinberger speaks of “experimental spirit”. For him on the one hand, at the core of this concept lies the interaction between the experimental investigator and the material, which implies that, in order to create new situations, the investigator is immersed in the material. Here, as with Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, the material exists in itself and the interaction implies a relation that goes in two-ways. On the other hand, this experimental spirit proceeds from a particular attention to the fact that science is a practice rather than a theoretical system, he therefore advocates assuming inductive rather than deductive attitudes.⁵ It is here question of getting rid of the idea that a theory of knowledge is centered on an ego, a subject trying to apply a network of theories on an object. The experimental situations have to correspond to two requirements: a) a precision in elaborating a context; and b) a sufficient complexity in order to leave the door open for surprises.⁶

For Rheinberger, an “experimental system” can only be understood as a play of interactions between machines, ingredients, techniques, rudimentary concepts, vague objects, protocols, research notes, social and institutional conditions. The experiments are not just methodological vehicles to test (to be confirmed or rejected) some already theoretically established or hypothetically postulated knowledge, as philosophy of sciences usually claims. Knowledge is generated by experiments – of which no one had any idea beforehand.⁷

At the core of scientific processes of experimentation, according to Rheinberger, epistemic things and technical objects exist in dialectical interrelations. The epistemic things are defined as entities “ ‘whose unknown characteristics are the target of an experimental inquiry’, paradoxically, embodying what one does not yet know. »⁸ The technical objects are defined as sedimentations of old epistemic things, they are scientific objects that incarnate instituted knowledge in a determined field of research, at a given time; they can be instruments, apparatus, mechanisms that delimitate and confine the evaluation of epistemic things. The epistemic things are necessarily under determinate, the technical objects on the contrary are determined in characteristic manner. Rheinberger states:

In Towards a History of Epistemic Things I wanted to convey the idea that the experimental process plays out a dialectic between epistemic things and technical objects, and that there exists a functional relationship between them rather than a substantial one. Epistemic things that have reached a certain point of clarification can be transformed into technical objects – and vice versa: technical objects can become epistemically problematic again. The technologies with which one works are normally used as black boxes; they can, however, be reopened and become things of epistemic interest.⁹

Michael Schwab, in his introduction to the book, interprets the idea of experimental cultures as fit to bear on research in artistic domains, providing that one would have a more supple approach than the ones used in science:

During my conversation with Rheinberger (chapter 15 of the book), it became clear that a particular type of work ethic, experience, and sensibility is required in experimental systems that can also be found in artistic practice: dedication to a limited sets of materials, attention to detail, continuous iterations, and the inclusion of contingent events and traces in the artistic process, allowing the material substrata to come to the fore as a site where traces are assembled.¹⁰.

Schwab raises three issues that are at the heart of PaalabRes’ questioning relative to research in artistic domains:

All artistic practices, to the extent that they confront materials to ways of treating them, can pretend to be experimental systems. In what way can one distinguish artistic research from any artistic practice production?
The question of newness, of originality, of future, of progress, inscribed in the requirements specification of scientific research, as well as in the artistic modernity called “experimental music”, became in a subtle manner in the course of the 20th Century an idea that belongs probably to the past.
There is a general crisis of representation, which leads us to wonder if the academic forms of research publication are appropriate for the artistic domains, and if other alternative forms of representation more suitable to practices can be used.

Moreover, one can ponder with Henk Bordgorff:

What is the epistemological status of art in artistic research? Are artworks or art practices capable of creating, articulating, and embodying knnowledge and understanding? And, if so, what kinds of artworks and practices do this (what is the ontological status of art here?) and how they do it (the methodological status)?¹¹.

The notion of experimental remains a necessary term when contemplating the specificities of research in artistic domains, but its manipulation remains very problematic because of the multiplicity of references it generates, notably by the fact that it is often claimed as the exclusive territory of modernity in the European high art tradition.

In conclusion, we will refer to Paolo de Assis, a composer and researcher at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent, who proposes a pathway for thinking about artistic research on a basis somewhat different from the ones proposed by musical analysis, music theory and musicology turned as they are towards the interpretation of works from the past:

However, there might be a different mode of problematising things, a mode that, rather than aiming to retrieve what thingsare, searches for new ways of productively exposing them. That is to say, a mode that, instead of critically looking into the past, creatively projects things into the future. Such is the final proposal of this chapter: to reverse the perspective from « looking into the past » to creatively designing the future of past musical works. In my view this is precisely what artistic research could be about – a creative mode that brings together the past and the future of things in ways that non-artistic modes cannot do. In doing this, artistic research must be able to include archaeology, problematisation, and experimentation in its inner fabric. The making of artistic expérimentation through Rheingerger’s experimental systems becomes a creative form of problematisation, whereby through differential repetition new assemblages of things are materially handcrafted and constructed.¹²

In PaaLabRes perspectives, it would be necessary to widen the notion of works or things of the past to the practices themselves as they are present in tradition and as they adapt continuously to new contexts.

Jean-Charles François – 2015

Translation by the author and Nancy François

1. See Michael Nyman, Experimental Music : Cage and Beyond, New York : Schirmer Books, 1974, second edition, Cambridge and New York : Cambridge Univesrity Press, 1999.

2. John Cage, Silence, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: M.I.T. Press, 1966, p. 13.

3. « Hans-Jörg Rheinberger taught molecular biology and history of sciences at the Universities of Salzburg, Innsbrück, Zürich, Berlin, and Standford, and he is the director of the MaxPlanck-Institut in Berlin since 1997. Influenced by Jacques Derrida’s thought, he co-translated Grammatology, he argue for a historical epistemology, principally centered on experimental systems » (www.diaphane.fr)

4. See Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, « Experimental Systems : Entry Encyclopedia for the History of the Life Sciences » The Visual Laboratory : Essays and Ressources on the Experimentalization of Life, Max Planck Institut for the History of Science, Berlin. http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/essays/data/enc19?p=1
A chart is presented in Paulo de Assis « Epistemic Complexity and Experimental Systems », Experimental Systems, Future Knowledge in Artistic Research, Michael Schwab (ed.), Orpheus Institute, Leuwen, Belgique : Leuwen University Press, 2013, p. 158.

5. See « Hans-Jörg Rheinberger in conversation with Michael Schwab », Experimental Systems,…, op. cit., p. 198.

6. Ibid., p. 200.

7. See Henk Borgdorff, « Artistic Practices and Epistemic Things », in Experimental Systems, Future Knowledge in Artistic Research, op. cit., p.114.

8. See Paulo de Assis, op. cit., p. 159. He quotes Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things, Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube, Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2004, p.238.

9. Ibid.

10. Michael Schwab, « Introduction », Experimental Systems…, op. cit., p. 7.

11 Henk Borgdorff, op. cit., p. 113.

12. Paulo de Assis, op. cit., p. 162.

For an itinerary-song towards…

Transversal (English version)

15 avril 2016concepts, practices reportartistic practices, artistic research, collage, collective production, créolisation, culture in the plural, hybrid, transversalitypaalabres-adm

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The station « Transversal » is composed, on the one hand, of a collective text written by the members of PAALabRes in the form of an “exquisite corpse” game, each contribution being visually presented in different manners, and, on the other hand, by three transversal escapes: a) a text on the notion of hybrid and on related artistic forms; b) a text with references to the “créolisation” of the world according to Edouard Glissant; and c) a text with references to the idea of plural culture, according to, among others, Michel de Certeau.

Transversal – Paalabres Collective

This is a spineless concept difficult to grasp.
If one replaces “v” par “p”, one would get something that would transpierce, that would have a phallocentric impact. But a transversal line only traverses and one has difficulties to stop it in its trajectory, and to reflect upon it.

To pierce the clouds, to traverse them. To transgress.

If one replaces “v” by “f”, one would get transfer (of stocks?), transition to the inflexibility of fer-ruginous matter. But the idea of transport (travel, love-making?) imbedded in “trans” is to go in “verses” towards indeterminacy, in a peregrination of diverse perverse fevers. One would be carried away by the trans-fair.

In ball games, “transversal” means a long passing shot across the width of the field that would reverse the game. Then, one has to be clever, skillful in sending and receiving the ball. This implies not only the receiver of this pass, but also all the participants. One never sufficiently considers the things and the people that make the actions possible. We should not forget that all penalty shots at 3 points in the net are welcome, and please not on the post!

And if one starts by taking out the “n”… The noises, the images, the odors, the tastes, the contacts and the senses traverse, in reverse also, and then diverge, and do the inverse too, whether going into a trance or not.

— You said trans, transverse and salsa, vestal, transversal?

Beware, above all to not replace the “v” by a “grrrr” of aggressive transgression.

— My transversal, but what’s the matter with my transversal?

The “it” of intestinal transit should be avoided, of sonata transition, of transitory elements in sound envelopes in the acoustical domain.

Is transversal anything that cuts across perpendicularly the longitudinal axis of an elongated form. And this is very important! For example, in modern differential topology, the study of which, it should be remembered, was started by René Thom on ideas by Poincaré (Henri, the cousin of Raymond) and which is based on the notion of transverse sub-varieties. Good night.

Certain persons go as far as saying that the dislocations of the earth’s crust are transversal faults, according to cnrtl!

To go directly to something.

In musical practices “in acts”, do not believe that financial transactions are part of them.

See the synonyms of “transversal”, there is no antonym?

The notion of instability refers to something unsteady, fragile, wavering between two ideas. Should we rather understand it as “never having the expected form”; “going towards”, etc?
The idea of transversal consists in having all the terms like fragility, stammering, attempts, round trips, displacements, migrations, transfers, etc., converge in a logic of an absolutely inexorable evolution, proper to the life of practices.

To what is it opposed?
It is opposed to, say: root, race, origin, purity, original sin, DNA …

Dog – Reality is not below the animal, even if political. It is not around, it is not to be seized, it is not a framework, not a finality. Reality is something you traverse. Writing, living in general, it is always something to be traversed.

Vestal trance, vesperal tramp, Enter the versed ballad

According to who says it, it is a real travelling across, or the use of an institutional language that does not change anything.

“One arrives somewhere, one comes out again, then it continues, one does not know where it leads; I like this idea of a music that is there, that one grasps at a given moment, it opens out, and then it closes, and in fact the music continues, it continues to leave some traces.”

Situated across something

Everything would be fairly clear if within each large category of practice we were in presence of a unity of comportments and of aesthetics. Now, the diversity of modes of functioning is not organized in borders defining genres, but is expressed within each genre in itself. For example, in the jazz world, some people want to work only with written scores, and others, on the contrary, like to insist on the conditions of an oral transmission. In the contemporary music world, almost no relationships exist between those who write scores, those who improvise, and those who have chosen to express themselves with electroacoustic means. In traditional world music one can find those who are aiming to recreate the authenticity of a disappearing social practice, and those who want to adapt their practice to the conditions of our own social life. In amplified music, there are only few common points in the ways of doing things between techno, hip-hop, rock, and those who are influenced by other types of music. One could say that every day, in all domains, a new genre emerges.

Transversal is always a transfer salve,
it obliges to anoint ones own practices with improper elements.
You can’t traverse, go across, without getting wet.
The traverse stains.
Traverse mucks up (traverse yuk!).

It does not always happen as expected, sometimes it slips… through the net,
it falls in the trap set…, sometimes it travels not straight.

The traversion, it is the aversion of the traverse: it has to go straight

some think that they are not transversable, the damn fools!

A music of the present time can be envisioned, as time unfolding in the making that in a way would oblige us to break with the habits of classifying in trends, aesthetics, genres, cultural influences, so as really refusing any identification to already known consensual frameworks that tend to place the artists before a paradox: one should invent in continuity, search for ideas, without exceeding the limits, create a new thread, some newness but without escaping the context organized by designations, as if these designations were there for ever, whereas they themselves appeared at a given moment, in order to get rid of other paradigms, to qualify something that the old classifications were not able to grasp.

“When a group is formed, one knows that it is composed by individualities. Each person is able to develop her/his projects alone. The equilibrium is found in co-construction, in which whoever pretends to be the leader [chef] is nothing more than a liar [menteur]: each person is at his/her place and the detail is discussed more and more. These are musical discussions in the course of elaborating propositions, each one speaks and may intervene. The decisions are always based on common choices.

In transverse, of transvermeil, through transverb, to the transvair.

Decompartmentalize

“One arrives somewhere, one comes out again, then it continues, one does not know where it leads, I like this idea of some cooking that is grasped at a given moment, it opens and it closes, and in fact, the cooking continues, it still leaves some traces.”

In the conception of transversal, it would be as inappropriate to say that such or such creation mixes influences from diverse origins, as to say it comes from somewhere or from nowhere; it is best not to search for a provenance nor for an affiliation, it is even necessary to renounce contemplating a multicultural origin, or an expression of world music. The origin of a music of transversality is here, there and everywhere: its origin is a project, and the origin of the project a desire for a project shared with musicians who bring to it their personality, their energy and their imagination.

If one utilizes it to keep the compartmentalization and the silos on the pretext of the qualifying value of some sprinkling of actions…

Contributions of the PaaLabRes collective— 2015

Three transversal escapes

Hybrid
« Créolisation »
Culture in the Plural

Accéder à la traduction en français : Français

INTER MUROS

A deconstructive approach to performance practice in John Cage’s Four⁶, focusing on undecidability, viral interpenetration and the merging of domains.

Clare Lesser

Summary

Murus

John Cage – Four⁶

Four⁶ – ART: Abu Dhabi, April, 2018

Pharmakoi

…begin and end at particuLar/points in timE…[4]

References

Debate on Artistic Research Cefedem Rhône-Alpes & PAALabRes Collective November 2, 2015

Contents:

Foreword

Introduction

Definition of Research

The Research Institutions, the Institution of Research

The Models of Research in Tension

1. Relationships to other Disciplinary Fields

2. Theory and Practice

3. The Status of the Written Text

Artistic Research – Avenues to Reflect

1. Research through the Elaboration of the Artistic Act

2. Alternative Research Models

3. Administrative Obstacles

4. The question of Research Spaces and Publications

Widening Research

1. Research Before the Doctorate

2. Research Before and Outside Higher Education

3. Research Outside the Norms

Post-scriptum to the debate: Exchange Forum PAALabRes “Artistic Research”

For an itinerary-song towards…

Sensory Body and Learned Models

Episode 1 : operation, cultural operation

List of the dictionaries used…

For an itinerary-song towards…

For an itinerary-song towards…

For an itinerary-song towards…

For an itinerary-song towards…

For an itinerary-song towards…

Contents:

Transversal – Paalabres Collective

Three transversal escapes

For an itinerary-song, towards…

Accéder à la traduction en français :
Français

Debate on Artistic Research
Cefedem Rhône-Alpes & PAALabRes Collective
November 2, 2015

Post-scriptum to the debate:
Exchange Forum PAALabRes “Artistic Research”