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To cite this article: Ian Sutherland & Sophia Krzys Acord (2007) Thinking with art: from situated
knowledge to experiential knowing, Journal of Visual Art Practice, 6:2, 125-140
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Abstract Keywords
New movements in the creative disciplines have disrupted traditional under- contemporary art
standings of knowledge and knowledge production. Knowledge in creative prac- embodied cognition
tice is increasingly seen through the process of creating, mediating and habitus
encountering art rather than in any perceived final form. Examining recent work music
in the fine arts, this article studies composers and contemporary artists to extract social interaction
the embedded conception of knowledge and its production. tacit knowledge
Focusing on the practice of composer Gayle Young and visual artist Tino
Sehgal, the setting up of conditions for interactive experience illuminates the
ways in which experiential knowledge takes place in a distributed manner. As
Csikszentmihalyi (1996: 23) concluded, ‘creativity does not happen inside people’s
heads, but in the interaction between a person’s thoughts and a sociocultural
context’. Like creativity, experiential knowledge is inseparable from the context of
its production and reception, a fact clarified by recent work in actor network theory.
These artists highlight this phenomenon by challenging audiences to question
existing systems of meaning, and draw upon tacit and embodied tools of interpre-
tation in the encounter with contemporary artistic forms. Ultimately, we claim
that understanding knowledge as action best frames the future of public engage-
ment with creative practice, social structures and cultural forms.1
Individuals in society ‘know’ a lot, or so it would seem. We appear con- 1. The authors wish to
vinced that knowledge exists in finite loci and are assured that any knowl- thank Gayle Young,
Tino Sehgal, Tia
edge not personally ‘possessed’ exists somewhere – hence the popularity of DeNora and Exeter
sources such as Wikipedia2 (Nassehi 2004). Traditionally, musical scores SocArts for their
and artworks have been similarly understood as repositories of knowledge careful reading and
inspiration.
in the fine arts, created by the artist as a unique ‘genius’. However, contem-
porary movements in the creative disciplines are increasingly emphasizing 2. While the Wiki
interface is clearly
the ‘process’ of creating, mediating and encountering art. Building on this an example of
practice, we argue that the pressing question of knowledge situation or con- distributed and
tainment is grossly misguided, relying on a metaphor of ‘location’ influ- linked knowledge
production, the
enced by topical debates over intellectual property and departmentalized numerous
academic disciplines. This metaphor isolates knowledge in the artistic arti- controversies
fact, separated from its production and evolving reception. It is highly posi- concerning its use,
notably that it
tivistic, excluding any consideration of social interactions within knowledge privileges consensus
frameworks, assuming one can build a brick wall to find the ‘truth’ in acts over accuracy,
and objects. demonstrate that the
majority of users do
not think about the Drawing on contemporary work in musical composition and visual arts
source of their we examine how particular composers and artists are engaging in a political
information, reifying
the Wikipedia as project of democratizing systems of knowledge production, freeing knowl-
absolute knowledge. edge from a top-down construct into an interactive, in situ encounter. After
reviewing the sociology of knowledge and the arts and considering twentieth-
century paradigmatic shifts in contemporary art, we consider encounters
with composer Gayle Young’s ‘recipe pieces’ and work by artist Tino Sehgal
as sites of knowing. Here, art creates space to think. We then use these
examples to understand knowledge as a theory of action (in the footsteps
of actor-network theory); art is good to ‘think with’. By manipulating artistic
conventions, these creative practitioners demonstrate that knowledge pro-
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3. Aleatory music a formal space devoid of context […] music listening is deeply influenced by
denotes music whose the individual’s cultural background and by the music’s social function within
outcome, whether
during composition or a specific community.
performance, is (Keller 2000: 55)
unpredictable, due to
chance procedures or
improvisation. The recognition that music requires culturally specific and situated listen-
ing – experience – is a reaction to the absolutist views of the mystical
genius imparting divine knowledge upon the world.
After Second World War, composers engaging in aleatory work3 (e.g.
John Cage, George Crumb and Karl Heinz Stockhausen) toyed with the
‘tacit conventions’ of composition to challenge the very ‘knowledge’ of
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The artist/audience relation can be seen as the testing of the social order by
radical propositions and as the successful absorption of these propositions
[…] In these arenas order (the audience) assays what quotas of disorder it can
stand. Such places are, then, metaphors for consciousness and revolution.
(O’Doherty 1986: 74)
Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs
that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing
the houses into monstrous shadows? […] There may have been fogs for cen-
turies in London […] But no one saw them […] They did not exist till Art had
invented them.
Art indeed alters the way in which one experiences the world, and knowl-
edge production emerges in the connection between oeuvre and daily life.
Artworks develop what Jones (2006) terms ‘new ways of sensing’.
While knowledge production in music and the fine arts has always been
dependent upon experiential encounters, art world conventions have dis-
guised this fact through an attitude of social and economic disinterested-
ness in the work of art. However, contemporary composers and artists such
as Gayle Young and Tino Sehgal actively emphasize the fundamental role of
experiential knowledge through their own practice. This poses a problem to
critics, musicologists and art historians who increasingly describe the artist
as ‘exploring’ or ‘toying with’ something, rather than simply stating what
the artwork means. These examples help one to understand knowledge as
socially and materially organized.
I. Gayle Young
In the Leonardo Music Journal, Canadian composer Gayle Young (1993: 2)
wrote, ‘[t]he contributors to Leonardo Music Journal, in articulating the
intentions of their work in such detail, help us to perceive our experience of
sound art/music in ways that go beyond the familiar and introduce alternative
understandings of music and composition’ (1993: 2). Young – microtonal
composer, instrument inventor and performer – composes through a
mixture of traditional processes, algorithms and graphing techniques
(Young 2004) aware that, ‘it seems many of our commonly understood def-
initions and accompanying boundaries are losing their clarity’ (Young 1993:
1). Much of Young’s work is about changing knowledge through new expe-
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To ‘know’ this piece performers must call upon traditional music conven-
tions such as tuning and pitch notation but must also utilize wider cultural
conventions including language, gastronomy and even consumerism
(Cambell’s and Kraft). Ultimately Young metaphorically highlights the
changeability and experiential nature of music itself; as with a recipe, it
never turns out the same way twice.
Knowledge is no longer located solely in relations of black notes on a
page; it is a wider interaction of varying, individually distinct, socio-cultural
contexts. It exists in the interactions of webs of shared meaning and affor-
dance structures, resulting in various configurations, work created together
by composers, performers and audiences. Young (2007) speculates, ‘per-
haps it is like listening to the poetry of a language you do not understand’.
The knowledge does not reside in any perceived final form, it is interactive
and experiential.
4. The anonymous production, his political agenda revolves around an emphasis on experi-
reviewer proposed ential knowing.
that Sehgal’s previous
engagement with Having decided that parliamentary proceedings are no longer the fore-
political economics most site of politics, Sehgal has moved on to the art exhibition as an alter-
may suggest an nate sphere with increased political efficiency.4 In a reaction to the museum
inclination towards
the left-wing notion of as reified institution of collective memory, Sehgal aims to transplant a ‘body
art as ‘intervention’ to body transmission’ into the museum’s autonomous activity of preserv-
developed post-war ing ideas and values for future consumption (Sgualdini 2005: para. 70).
by the Situationists in
the 1950s–1960s, but Therefore, he refuses material documentation of his work – thereby ensur-
arguably derived from ing the viewer’s experience and memory of that experience constitutes the
Andre Breton’s idea sole record. Of this meaning, Sehgal describes:
of Surrealism as a
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I felt that I had found a form which can produce an experience which has
something to do with the point of the work and not just talk about a certain
point. You have to categorise it somehow, because obviously your eyes are
telling you: ‘I have seen something’, and your brain has to say: ‘what is this
something?’
(Sgualdini 2005: para. 12)
instance, few visitors engaged with the children in London, while many
threw off museological constraints to play with the children in the Austrian
exhibition. Second, the interaction between viewers and artwork does not
follow any particular rules, but rather creates them (Frenzel 2006).
Meaning-making is not merely a point of orienting towards established
conventions, but involves responding to unpredictable encounters in other-
oriented ways.
6. The 10-year rule refers or agency. Thus, the cognitive functions with which the viewer or listener
to findings that many interprets the artwork are not located within the individual or the work, but
creative actors are
active students and are rather distributed throughout the setting. As artworks, environments
practitioners in their and individuals transform, rather than simply filter experience, the arts as
fields for a minimum object-oriented practices are an excellent example of how knowledge can be
of 10 years before they
make any produced through experience, rather than simply replicated.
achievements widely Of course, individuals afford things as well; they are also mediators.
celebrated as Through the example of the 10-year rule, Weisberg (1999) argues that
‘creative’.
creative thinking is related to the knowledge one brings to any situation.6
7. In this context, we are As vom Lehn, Heath and Knoblauch (2001) discovered in their visual study
speaking of
performance in a of museum visitors that visitors’ encounters with artworks are not only
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social, not an artistic shaped by the knowledge they themselves bring to the encounter, but also
sense. Thus, Young by the knowledge and actions of those co-present in the space (both those
and Sehgal provide
room for variability in they came with as well as strangers). Knowing becomes a social activity,
the public-oriented what Jones (2006) terms ‘accumulated discourse’ or Cossi (2004) terms
presentation of their the visitors becoming a ‘container’ for the artwork.
work (as carried out
by musical performers In sum, then, knowledge production is a path towards what Kawatoko
or curators/ (2000) terms ‘mutual visibility’. Knowing takes place within a work group
interpreters), but in that encompasses both human actors and artifacts, and humans may make
the physical encounter
with their work these their work mutually visible to each other through artifacts at hand. Artistic
individuals, as well as appreciation necessitates a ‘practical aesthetic’ (vom Lehn, Heath and
the listeners or Knoblauch 2001: 283) by which people interact with all sorts of objects,
viewers engage in a
habitual other- environments, events and each other.
oriented social However, the question remains as to ‘how’ knowledge emerges experi-
performance entially from relational artistic encounters. Mills (1940) recognized the
(see Goffman 1959).
existence of two separate actions, motor-social and verbal. While verbal
actions involve an appeal to a vocabulary of motives associated with a
norm or established convention, motor-social dimensions of action may be
an attempt to work outside these existing vocabularies. The latter demon-
strates the importance of what Freund (1998) terms body consciousness.
Emotional communication often takes place through the body, which
respond to situations in ways that our minds cannot. As Young (2007)
states, art allows ‘the opening of the imagination beyond the usual pre-
conceived categories into which we fit much of our daily experience’. Our
cognitive ‘findings’ may often emerge only out of our subsequent interac-
tions with the environment (Freund 1998: 279; see also Witkin 1974). Thus,
it is the embodied and relational encounter with aesthetic materials that
creates room for modification of existing understandings, an essential con-
dition for nascent knowing.
Knowledge is process and, as Noë (2006: 4) points out, ‘Experience
isn’t something that happens to us; it’s something we do.’ Cage and Warhol
illuminate this by removing the webs of shared meaning – tonality, harmony,
contrast and framing – leaving us in the darkened hall or gallery to ponder.
Young’s recipe pieces and Sehgal’s This Success/This Failure add another
layer to webs of shared meaning, text and sound. Listeners or viewers have
an unexpected experience within established conventions, just as Young
and Sehgal provide room for ‘performance’ within compositional and artistic
structures.7 Therefore, rather than trying to translate knowledge production
in sociological conventions, further research into experiential knowledge
must allow artistic practice itself to modify vocabularies of knowing.
Conclusion
Knowledge is self-proving within social processes (Nassehi 2004); it is real
when practiced within society. The work of art cannot be interpreted for
what ‘it’ knows. Rather, the listener or viewer may be compelled to engage
in tacit processes of contemplation, reflection and consequent knowledge
production, interwoven with context, aesthetic materials and participating
individuals. This is perhaps why Becker (2006) insists upon the ‘Principle
of the Fundamental Indeterminacy of the Artwork’, in saying that we cannot
speak of the ‘work itself’ because there is no such thing; there are only
occasions when we engage with it in different ways. Knowledge lies in
encountering art, and the artwork itself exists in this knowing.
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Suggested citation
Sutherland, I. and Krzys, S. (2007), ‘Thinking with art: from situated knowl-
edge to experiential knowing’, Journal of Visual Art Practice, 6: 2, pp. 125–140,
doi: 10.1386/jvap.6.2.125/1
Contributor details
Originally from Canada and trained as a pianist and musicologist, Ian Sutherland
works at the intersection of sociology, musicology and music theory. His main inter-
est is in the compositional process as social action; how works of music are socially
influenced or act as affordance structures for social discourse. Currently Ian is work-
ing on aesthetic changes in music from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich
under the supervision of Prof. Tia DeNora.
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E-mail: Ian.Sutherland@ex.ac.uk
Sophia Krzys Acord has arrived to sociology from a background in theatrical design,
musical performance and arts education. Her past research includes an ethnogra-
phy of Parisian artist-squats and the study of artistic censorship in the US and UK.
She is currently working within visual sociology to interrogate tacit knowledge pro-
duction and extra-verbalized practices of aesthetic decision-making among curators
of contemporary art. Contact: Department of Sociology and Philosophy, The
University of Exeter, Amory Building, Rennes Drive, Exeter, Devon, EX4 4RJ, UK.
E-mail: s.k.acord@ex.ac.uk