Art as Research
The way you look at things and make them is a whole methodology.... and it matters.
When I was just starting graduate school, I attended a talk by artist Petah Coyne. I don’t remember a particular piece of wisdom or insight that she offered (it was a long time ago), but I remember a luminous presentation, full of ideas and experiences, full of material wisdom—she described an installation made from dead fish, which I remember so viscerally, though I never saw the actual piece in real life. It was one of the best talks I had seen up to that point, and it remains a touchstone in my understanding of artist research. It was a brilliant presentation, not just because I found her work compelling and her processes remarkable, but because she was so self-aware, so thoughtful about explaining the ways she made work, the ways she understood the world, the ways she formed her research questions, the mistakes she had made and what she had gleaned from them. Unlike most of the artist talks I have heard—in which an artist describes a chronological series of their projects in soporific detail—this was a presentation that dug into the ways artists’ research methods are unique to the field, the ways projects coalesce around happenstance, curiosity, and materials. It was almost 20 years ago and I still remember being stunned by Coyne’s generosity and confidence in sharing her methods of thinking—a formative moment in how I see the world.
A few days ago, I accompanied two students to the studio of painter Sam Reveles. Born in El Paso, Reveles attended UTEP (the university where I work) before completing his MFA at Yale and then participating in the 1995 Whitney Biennial. He’s had a significant career. What I mean by this is: Sam has made a life as an artist for more than 30 years—no small feat in a world like ours. He lives mostly in Ireland now, but has been in El Paso this year, making the paintings that we will show in his solo exhibition at the Rubin Center, opening later this summer.
As I watched Camila and Dilan interview Sam, I saw the ways they responded to his process, his ideas, his handling of paint, his sensitive use of line and color. He described the first times he saw paintings by Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, the tremendous ways their works spoke to him. My students pushed Sam to think of himself in the context of this place, too. They asked about color and abstraction in the context of the border region. They wanted to know where his colors came from, and how the landscape of these cities (El Paso and Juárez) connected to his changing palette. For maybe the first time in a while, Sam had to think about how his work speaks to the place he is from. They asked him for advice to young artists, and they peered into his tin cans of mixed color, absorbing the details of his studio life as if it held a certain magic.
Sam’s El Paso studio is in the same place it was when he was my students’ age: in the back of a mechanic shop owned by his father. As we arrived, we walked past a 1965 Mustang that he drove when he lived in L.A. and a 1950-something truck being restored by his sister. The studio is on busy Alameda street: Camila had bought her own car here, along the 13-mile stretch of road that connects downtown with the city’s historic missions on the west side. Spotted with used car lots, taco trucks, and small businesses, the street provides significant context for Sam’s work, which has struggled to find a viewership here. His large abstract canvases and drawings on paper resist the figurative impulse of much artistic production in the region: his last museum show in El Paso was 20 years ago. I’ve tasked my students with making a series of short videos from their conversation with Sam, a way of opening up a local conversation about an artist from here, whose work is emphatically of a different visual language than the ones mostly spoken in the area. I was glowing with pride as they prepared over the course of a month, watching all of his previous interviews, reading about him, and writing and revising their questions for weeks in advance of our meeting. “I think this is going to be the best video about Sam and his work that has ever been made,” Dilan told me as we walked out. I liked that swagger.
Last week, I wrote to you about neighbors, thinking particularly about the literal points of connection between our differences. I’ve been thinking about that because I find myself nudging some beloved and introverted artists to share their work outward, and I am insistent on finding points to open up conversations about the unique ways that artists make knowledge, for audiences that don’t understand creative work as a form of research.
Next week, the development team at the university will come to the gallery, and I’ve been asked to give a ten-minute presentation about art-as-research, during their three hours with us. Helping money people understand creative work as part of a research university’s mission is challenging: they are much more confident in fund-raising for the sciences and technology. And, honestly, that makes sense: the science and technology fields are much better at expressing the ways their research contributes to the world than we are in the arts.
But I’m still in this under-funded, widely misunderstood, stressful little field of ours because I still—despite myself—think that artistic research is so important to the functioning (and improving) of our societal systems. I mean: the ways that artists think, question, experiment, touch, write, imagine, break things and start again—the specific ways that artistic research is truly unique and unlike research in any other field—are worth fighting for, funding, and giving space to.
That morning, I watched as my students suddenly understood something previously unfathomable about the connections between Sam’s abstractions and the thrumming street life of west El Paso. I watched as they figured out how color could make their own communities visible, in ways that figurative drawing was doing so differently. I watched as Sam demonstrated how he traces lines from the bodies of his family members, drawing out the intimacies of daily life in the dynamism of his layered compositions. His references are intentionally opaque, but full of idiosyncratic methods of understanding and reflecting the world. He talked about Dutch still life, about climate change, about family, about Juárez and color, about geometry, and about how he read every art publication he could find before he moved to New York—artist research in a place with few places to see contemporary art…
I hope that my artist readers out there know that you, too, can show people the ways your research works. Your process and materials, what you read and listen to, the ways you move through your day, the ways you connect to your communities, the ways you clip out articles and save postcards and go to museums: these are methods for seeing the world; you are collecting information to organize into visual thoughts. Your methods are relevant to people who aren’t artists, too: these research methods matter, in part, because they push against historic determinations of what is important, and whose worldviews will be recorded. They thicken scientific data with lived experiences, they challenge the normativities that are based on exclusions and denials, on -isms and violence. We need more ways of thinking through what we see, how we see, what we touch, how we know something through structures of feeling. We need a fundamental dismantling of the ways things have been before. We are hungry for new methods of measure, of connection, of description, of preservation, new systems of value and the recording of previously ignored truths.
I look at things differently, hear things more carefully, touch things with more sensitivity because of what I learn from artists and how they research the worlds around them. And, if the word research feels off-putting or surprising to you, I think we should talk about that. What you do in your studio—in some ways much like what scientists do in their labs and tech nerds do in their Googleplexes or Apple Parks—is able to guide us as we the world more fully, with a depth and care that no other discipline can touch.
Laura August, PhD makes essays and exhibitions, lumpy pots and wild gardens. She has curated more than 20 exhibitions as an independent curator working between the U.S. and Central America. In 2021, she was named an inaugural Mellon Arts + Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, and her writing about contemporary art in Guatemala City has been recognized with an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Alongside her consulting practice for artists and writers, she teaches a process, practice, and professional strategies class for artists at the Glassell School of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She currently makes her home on the edge of the Chihuahua Desert, and she is the first full-time Curator at the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at The University of Texas at El Paso.
My little experiments! Never occurred to me someone else might find them interesting or worthwhile for a curious number of reasons. I see stories in my day unfolding.
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