Feelings are still facts
And other ways that artist research is rigorous and expansive (an ongoing manifesto)
Last week, I wrote to you about artist research. I wanted to think about ways that artists work: particularly how practices informed by conversation, close listening, taste and touch, shared space, magpie-like collecting, long walks, and interdisciplinary deep-dives into archives, libraries, visual collections, and miscellaneous piles of things might be understood as a rigorous process of investigation. Several of you responded to that newsletter: thank you so much for sending your own experiences and observations (keep ‘em coming!).
Among the resources that have been helpful for my thinking about artist research practices is a book by science writer Annie Murphy Paul, published last year. In The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain, Paul writes, “Our culture insists that the brain is the sole locus of thinking, a cordoned-off space where cognition happens… Much less attention has been paid to the ways in which people use the world to think: the gestures of the hands, the space of a sketchbook, the act of listening to someone tell a story or the task of teaching someone else. These ‘extra-neural’ inputs change the way we think; it could even be said that they constitute a part of the thinking process itself.”
Paul is writing about the ways in which what we call thinking is so often connected to a cultural binary between body and mind, or between the mind and the world around it. In this binary, thinking happens in the mind, feeling happens in the body, and experiences of the world are not to be trusted until proven systematically. But if we honor dancer Yvonne Rainer’s assertion that Feelings are Facts, we might also imagine the body has its own methods of thought. Movement can be thought; sitting next to another person can be thought; being in nature can be thought. That is: not only do these things inform what the brain is able to do, but they are, in fact, doing the thing culture tells us only our brains can do.
To be clear: Paul’s subtitle, The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain, should not lead us down the path of argument that suggests artists only think outside their brains, relying only on feelings and experiences and not on analysis. Nothing could be further from the truth. (Or perhaps this is the secret sauce for how bad art is made). Instead, artists hold a social role in which they are the connectors between and across different modalities of thought, observation, and analysis. They have the luxurious mission of finding the rich and loamy soil between different disciplines, while also connecting points of research with points of experience, feeling, and close looking/listening/smelling/touching/tasting/dreaming/collecting/experimenting. Unlike most other disciplines, the field of art can move across fields—from fields of study to fields of corn, if the artist wants to. From this fertile modality of research, the task becomes a visual translation of the expansive ideas that happen when we think with our whole selves and in our fullest worlds. And, I would say, nothing is more capable of translating that breadth of thought than art is.
The other hesitation I have is this: we live in a society that is incessantly inundated with images. Think about how many things you see as you move through your day. From social media, to news imagery, to television, to the landscapes you pass by, the billboards you notice, the museums you visit: we are wildly overwhelmed with the visual. And yet, visual literacy—how to read and think critically about the images that surround us—is not taught in most primary schools, and is only taught in specialized classes in higher education. In part because of how many images we are shown in a day and in part because of a certain national hubris, people in the U.S. have a widely-shared belief that their individualized interpretations of images are immediately correct. I see an image, have a resulting set of sensations or feelings, and therefore my experience must be the most accurate interpretation of what is before me, the argument goes. How many times have I heard artists and museum visitors reinforce this cultural belief by saying: any way you interpret the work is correct, any feeling you have is a valid way to see an image, any hypothesis you make from an encounter with a visual text is solid. While I want any person’s encounter with art to be one in which they feel welcome and able to have a significant experience, I also bristle at the belief that all ways of interpreting what we see are equally strong, even when they are entirely ungrounded in the work’s specific context and material attributes. If all readings of visual culture are equally true, then what are we doing spending our lives improving our studio skills, studying visual culture and works of art, and talking about what we see? If all readings of visual culture are valid, then chaos wins and individual opinion trumps (pun intended, sorrryyyy) the artistic research behind any work. Looking at things is a practice, not an inherent skill. Looking at things is also thought, is also experiential, but as artists know: looking at things requires careful attention, contextual information, repeated looking, and study (in Moten & Harney’s formulation of study). Thinking outside the brain is also rigorous and collaborative and contextual, and not just all noodly and impulsive.
And if you’re still with me, I’m going to take one step further. The ways in which we—culturally speaking—presume that the abundance of images means that everyone knows how to interpret them is detrimental to artists in every possible way. Not only does it contribute to popular misconceptions about the role of art in society (i.e. how can something be valuable to society if it’s so easily understood by anyone who can experience it?), but by extension, it also leads to the popular exploitation of artistic labor. That is: why should we pay artists for their work, when they’re just making something for their own enjoyment, and anyone can see it and understand it in a glance before moving on to consume a million other images? How many times has someone brushed off your worries about financial survival, healthcare, political catastrophes, and the difficulty of a studio life by saying, ‘well, at least you love what you do!’ If we value only brain-work (like science and technology), then what Paul describes as outside-of-the-brain thinking remains in the realm of pleasurable pursuits rather than social necessities and world-changing contributions, worthy of being valued, supported, and studied. A shared idea of what artist research is, how it looks, what it offers, and how it manifests in the world, is an important step toward removing some of these biases against artistic models for thinking.
Artist research matters because it expands the sites from which we learn, incorporating a wild abundance of experience, encounters, feelings, and physical sensations into other existing disciplines and ways of thinking. Artist research matters because it helps other disciplines think more expansively, beyond the imposed boundaries of their fields. Artist research matters because it invites a wild cacophony of voices and expertise into specialized conversations, toward experimental and specific proposals for new models for thinking a thing through, often in community and/or collaboration. And it matters because it decenters the exclusive sites of knowledge, allowing other forms of knowing to—literally—come into the picture (I’m very punny today).
Send me notes (or sketches) of how you research. I’m here for it.
Laura August, PhD makes essays and exhibitions, grows roses in hostile terrain, and is an exceptional cat photographer. 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.