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2013 Conference Proceedings26 – 28 November 2013Adelaide, South Australia

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The Frontiers of Artistic Research: The challenge of critique, peer review and validation at the outermost limits of location-specificity

Sean LOWRY & Nancy de FREITAS

This paper deals with the complexity of critique in the context of contemporary artistic practice that challenges conventional spatial/temporal notions of exhibition. In an academic context, contemporary artists working in this genre face unique difficulties when it comes to the critique and validation of their work as artistic intervention or as a practice-based research outcome. For example, a public space intervention by an art activist, designed to disrupt the quotidian experience of its viewers, may be reduced through documentation to a skeletal, digitally packaged concept with significant depreciation of its artistic and aesthetic quality. Similarly, works that exist in remote geographical locations, or works that are designed and intended to transcend physical locations or to occupy space for very brief or very long periods of time provide similar challenges for critical and archival access. With specific reference to a new exhibition project space, Project Anywhere, a website devoted to this genre of work, the authors examine the difficulties and possibilities associated with critique in this context. PA has differentiated its core function by replacing the usual role of curator with a peer review model. The significance and potential value of this experimental model will emerge over time as more artworks are submitted, critiqued and archived in this open-access forum where modes of critique, artistic claims and methods of documentation can be reconsidered. The authors consider key areas for further development of this research initiative and suggest that new methods of documentation and combinations of documentation formats could better represent the work and facilitate the process of critique and validation for this rising form of contemporary artistic practice.

Keywords: critique, peer review, artistic research, exhibition

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Introduction

This paper discusses key issues underpinning the conception and development of an exhibition model specifically dedicated to the validation and dissemination of artistic practice situated outside conventional exhibition environments. Given that much contemporary art is relatively ill-suited to the spatial and temporal limitations of traditional exhibition contexts, and given that the idea of the curator as gate-keeper is out of step with forms of peer validation typically used to validate academic research, Project Anywhere was conceived as a potential solution for artist academics whose practice-based research faces this double bind. To this end, Project Anywhere is specifically designed to meet the challenge of defining and implementing a new concept for the critique, peer review and documentation of artistic practices that fall outside of the forms and structures accommodated by conventional exhibition and publishing modes. Far from being an online gallery, the Project Anywhere website1 is instead a contextualizing framework for a project space that potentially encompasses the entire globe, and in which the role of curator is replaced with an adaptation of the type of peer review model typically associated with a refereed journal. Significantly, Project Anywhere endorses a rigorous two-step peer review process to address lingering bias toward the journal-based paradigm for assessing the quality of research outcomes. This paper will assert the value of peer validation as an alternative model of critique to curatorial selection, and also discuss difficulties that arise when the material or experiential conditions of an artwork are translated into documentation in the form of text, image, links or video.

Background context: Changing practices, disciplinary disobedience

Various iterations and combinations of site specific, nomadic, social, participatory, virtual, ephemeral, performative, interventionist and expanded installation-based artistic practices, many of which unfold outside of conventional exhibition circuits, have become more common during the last few decades. Much of this often dematerialised2 and post-object practice is specifically concerned with critiquing traditional exhibition systems. In particular, such practices challenge the idea that art only functions through its reification into an object such as a painting or sculpture. Accordingly, discrete paintings on walls, films screened in theatres, and conventionally staged theatrical performances are no longer necessarily a primary focus for many artists, critics, curators and institutions. As a consequence of this rethinking of artistic practice, many artists have attempted to transcend the discrete exhibited and distributable object by producing ephemeral works, or using their bodies, or by framing networks of social and political relations as sites for artistic expression. Such practices have also restructured relationships between spectator and artist. The spectator is no longer a passive and detached but rather an intrinsic element, and by extension, a whole aesthetic experience that attempts to experientially consider such things as relationships between conditions of production and networks of reception is implicated. This radical reorientation of art’s perceived purpose has had a profound (and still unfolding) impact on modes of critique. This impact has extended to academic research culture.

1 ‘Project Anywhere: a global peer reviewed space for art at the outermost limits of location-specificity,’ accessed October 12 2013, http://projectanywhere.net/.

2 See Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, ‘The Dematerialization of Art,’ Art International (February 1968): 31–6. 10.

The roots of these developments can be traced back to the 1960s, when movements such as the Situationist International (SI)3 and Fluxus4 began to challenge conceptions of the way in which viewers are involved in the process or ‘situation’ of artistic production. Drawing upon ideas that had originated in early twentieth century avant-garde movements such as Dada, this ‘second horizon’5 of post war ‘neo-avant-garde’6 tendencies was however far more explicitly concerned with the creation of art experiences that offered active viewer participation. The outcomes of these interventions were not objects but rather experiences, and resulted in a blurring of boundaries between art and life. With aesthetic experience transformed from passive to active, both art and the conditions of its production and dissemination became a subject of critique. Such developments would open the way for even more radical challenges to the idea of place and spatial location. This tendency is perhaps most explicitly demonstrated in the institutional critique performed by artists such as Hans Haacke, Marcel Broodthaers and Andrea Fraser. For Miwon Kwon, one the best reasons for expanding the idea of site specificity is ‘the epistemological challenge to relocate meaning from within the art object to the contingencies of its context; the radical restructuring of the subject from an old Cartesian model to a phenomenological one of lived bodily experience; and the self conscious desire to resist the forces of the capitalist market economy.’7 Accordingly, many recent forms of art are relatively unbounded by the physical limitations of conventional exhibition contexts, and can include work in remote geographical locations, technically specialized contexts, and even imagined spaces. Project Anywhere, the subject of this paper, is specifically dedicated to the validation and dissemination of art at the outermost limits of location-specificity.

During the 1990s participatory practice was famously reframed by Nicolas Bourriaud (1998), who argued that audience involvement made work political, since the space of interaction created fleeting communities whose inter-subjective relations and concrete communications could be politically affective. The political, he suggested, could emerge within and through the aesthetic experience without the art or the artist engaging directly with politics. Laying claim to the term relational art to describe ‘a set of practices which takes as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context’8 Bourriaud’s influential ideas were also roundly criticized. Claire Bishop, in particular, has critiqued the lack of critical antagonism, loss of aesthetic criteria, and assumption of democracy she sees evidenced throughout much the work and ideas championed by Bourriaud. For Bishop, the aesthetic antagonisms presented in the work of artists such as Santiago Sierra and Artur Żmijewski contain more critical potential. Bourriaud’s ideas have also been critiqued by Owen Hatherley9 for their alleged ignorance of the persistent political ramifications of advancing neoliberalism, declining socialism, and an expanding mass media, and Adam Geczy for being a sanitized10 Situationism. At any rate, in the academic/research environment in which many artists are working today, this contested terrain and its inherent defiance of traditional location-specificity is presenting a new series of challenges. Here, it could again be argued that a political dynamic is inherent, since this kind of work sets up a distinctive ambiguity, particularly in terms of academic expectations for peer review and critique. Responses are often remarkably similar to the skepticism that earlier artists faced when they abandoned medium specificity.

3 The power of mass media was the target of Guy Debord and the Situationist International. In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Debord characterises the reified ‘spectacular’ image as symptomatic of capitalistic alienation and, moreover, that the spectacle actually conceals this estrangement. (Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), § 10). For a comprehensive introduction to SI, see Tom McDonough, ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004).

4 In the late 1960s, George Maciunas’s insistence upon ‘concretism’ (materiality) in fluxworks and his criticism of ‘illusionism’ (representation) aimed to problematise the spectacular reification of reality. For Maciunas, the irreproducibility of material contextual conditions marks out all representation as inexorably illusory. For an introduction to Fluxus, see Ken Friedman, ed., The Fluxus Reader (Chichester, West Sussex and New York: Academy Editions, 1998).

5 See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

6 See Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cam`bridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996), xi.

7 Miwon Kwon, ‘One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity,’ October, 80 (1997): 91.

8 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Presses du reel, 2002), 113.

9 See Owen Hatherley, ‘Post-Postmodernism?’, New Left Review 59 (Sep/Oct 2009): 160.

10 See Adam Geczy, ‘Sanitised Situationism,’ Broadsheet: Contemporary Art + Culture 37:2 (2006): 127-127.

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New circuits

Within this expanded approach to art, it is no longer realistic to expect all art and artistic research to fit within the physical and material constraints of established public art institutions or other public viewing spaces such as theatres, libraries, community centers, universities and art academies. Clearly, some contemporary artists are positioned to critique the institutional spaces in which they are expected to present their work and ideas. Others, however, are simply unable to fit their concepts into such spaces. In widely divergent ways, many artists eschew such spaces in favour of dynamic exhibition environments, ever expanding in their physical and temporal parameters. An exhibition can now be anything from a ‘Silent Dinner Party’11 to the performative ascent of a mountain12 to a modular eco structure in the Kalahari Desert.13 Significantly, such practices invariably disrupt established critical processes of review insofar as they make direct access to the artwork difficult. Established models of critique and review typically require direct, physical access and a comprehension underpinned by full sensual experience of the physical work. Consequently, the challenge for artists who create work in defiance of location-specificity is that their works are often situated outside of quality assurance processes that define value within the academy. Critical peer validation of practice-led research output is of course fundamental for artist academics. But if the direct experience of an artwork is potentially inaccessible to a reviewer or critic, what kind of assessment can be made? What purpose is served by a critical review of artwork based upon selected documentation?

In the 1960s, when Michael Fried and Clement Greenberg famously argued for medium specificity, they were arguing from within a modernist position that emphasised disciplinary integrity and the purity of the medium. The situation is very different today. Rosalind Krauss has more recently described a post-medium condition that re-presents the idea of the ‘medium as an aggregative ‘network’ or ‘complex’ of media.’14 At any rate, although purity and disciplinary integrity are no longer critical priorities, peer assessment certainly is.

One counter argument to the presumption that the morphological instantiation or physical performance necessarily constitutes the primary text (and therefore the only means by which to adequately access full comprehension) is found in the idea of the aesthetic object as something expanded and unfolding within a network of relations that includes both sensory and non-sensory information. This idea of a creative work as something inhabiting a network of both material and immaterial elements (such as historical and social context, multiple forms of documentation, critiques and interpretations) can accommodate the possibility that the thing that is critiqued, discussed and experienced via its mediated dissemination is still an aesthetic object insofar as it can still be distinguished from other forms of human cultural and intellectual expression and activity by virtue of its dependence upon the structural idiosyncrasies of the art condition. Moreover, with physical spaces and materials now inextricably intertwined with expanded structural conceptions of what constitutes a creative work, it no longer makes sense to pinpoint a single fixed and immovable location or moment for a creative work. Given that we cannot simply behold a work without bearing in mind

11 See Honi Ryan, ‘Silent Dinner Party’ (from Project Anywhere’s pilot program, 2012), accessed 12 October 12, 2013, http://projectanywhere.net/archived/silent-dinner-party.

12 See Mark Shorter, ‘Schleimgurgeln: Song For Glover’, (from Project Anywhere’s pilot program, 2012), accessed October 12, http://projectanywhere.net/archived/schleimgurgeln-song-for-glover.

13 See Hans Kalliwoda, ‘WiaS (The World in a Shell)’ (from Project Anywhere’s inaugural peer-reviewed program, 2013), accessed June 30, 2013, http://projectanywhere.net/project/wias.

14 Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 56.

the surrounding historical, subjective and cultural contextualizing information bound up in its structural determination as art, an aesthetic object can potentially be anything that directs aesthetic contemplation and interpretation toward this idea of network. For David Davies, the physical model accompanying a conceptual work of art should be considered its vehicular medium in the sense that: ‘the product of an artist’s manipulation of a vehicular medium will ... be the vehicle whereby a particular artistic statement is articulated’.15 Thus, the morphological instantiation or physical performance of a creative work makes no exclusive claim to an art condition in itself, but is instead designed to symbolically represent the aesthetic experience as network.

Once we regard the supporting apparatus of art history and the political, social and economic contexts that underpin the production and reception of art as artistic elements, it soon becomes possible to argue that the art condition (a cultural projection) is something that is always dematerialised. This art condition, i.e. the structure that hosts aesthetic comprehension (as distinct from other languages of comprehension) can therefore be understood as something potentially built in the mind of the interpreter via both direct experience and documentation, and moreover, that it is problematic to separate these elements. Most of us, for example, did not directly experience the seminal performance works of the 1960s and 1970s that continue to inform our understanding of contemporary art. Although our understanding of the ideas carried within these works is dependent upon documentation, they are nonetheless interpreted aesthetically; that is in a manner fundamentally distinct to other forms of knowledge.

Much contemporary art is deliberately framed to implicate structural relationships within the spaces (both physical and social) in which it is situated. Working within the systems and symbolic languages of the host context, such work invariably produces meaning and experience contingent upon that host context (again both physical and social). A creative work is a dynamic collection of signs, concepts, myths, traces, objects, sensations and contradictions all intertwined with its surrounding contextualising apparatus of documentation, versions and network of interpretations. Thus, fuller comprehension of a creative work often demands a combination of aesthetic experience and contextualising information. The central question at play within this paper is whether this relationship can be adequately extended across time and space via documentation, facilitating authentic access to both aesthetic experience and critical comprehension. This, as we will discuss later, is Project Anywhere’s raison d’être.

Distinctions between art and artistic research

It is important to remain mindful that communicating a research hypothesis through art is not the same activity as creating art. Given the possibility that a research topic may reflect a focus other than art as aesthetic experience, it is finally the originality of the research claims rather than the art that are at stake. Because research typically demands that the implicit be made explicit, in the case of art, that which is implicit is not necessarily clear to reasoning. As Adam Geczy puts it, ‘art is not research’.16 Art can, however, in concert with other paratextual and exegetical information, provide a

15 David Davies, Art as Performance (Oxford: Blackwells, 2004), 59.

16 Adam Geczy, ‘Art Is Not Research,’ Broadsheet: Contemporary Art + Culture, 38:3 (2009): 207-9.

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means of experiencing new knowledge. What is at stake is finding an appropriate way to validate the way in which art can communicate new forms of knowledge. Irrespective as to how dry and theoretically based an artistic concept might be, art is dependent upon aesthetics. For Elizabeth Schellekens, even conceptual artists ‘instantiate’ ideas by turning a dry theoretical proposition into something experiential, or as Schellekens describes it, ‘experiencing the idea.’17

Just as distinctions between artistic outcomes and documentation are often (and sometimes deliberately) blurred, and given that exegetical elements are sometimes included alongside or within creative works, approaches toward the framing of artistic research can also vary enormously, especially given the potential for reflexive recursion in projects that emphasise dynamic, participatory, or unfolding outcomes. Generally speaking, although an accompanying text need not literally explain a creative work, it can in a limited sense provide a form of explanation or analysis typically designed to work in concert with the aesthetic experience itself. In the words of Robin Nelson, a champion of practice-based research, perhaps ‘it is time to speak less of practice-as-research and to speak instead of arts research (a significant methodology of which just happens to be based in practices)’.18 In this sense, an aesthetic experience can be regarded as something that can assist in unlocking insight and understanding that is potentially elusive in a theoretical proposition. For David Pears, ‘practice nearly always comes first’ in knowledge production, for a discriminatory response typically precedes an ability to codify that response.19 Despite the seemingly defensible nature of this argument, the validation of thinking through making still finds itself on shaky ground, especially with university research increasingly measured against economically determinable key performance indicators. Notwithstanding the challenge that embodied forms of knowledge pose to the locus of knowledge and power, we are still drawn back to a perceived need to justify the value of practice in words.

Not surprisingly, there are widely differing conceptions as to what constitutes research quality in the arts. It is generally regarded as important to reflect upon whether the researcher is communicating the intent and realisation of the project effectively. Although some argue that peer reviewers should be able to ‘read’ the art alone, context is usually manifestly unclear without well-articulated supplementary materials. Given that aesthetic judgment is already a subjective union of sensory, emotional and intellectual responses, it is clear that the position of using sense perception (such as visuality) as the only criterion for forming an aesthetic judgement is potentially problematic. One option is to employ functional analysis—i.e. to look at how the work functions to convey meaning—as an additional criterion for judging success. Another is to consider the artist’s apparent awareness of the social and cultural contexts of the work’s production and reception. Yet once we introduce such forms of evaluation, we are already looking outside of the work and back toward the domains of speaking and writing. At any rate, without a good contextualising argument, it can be very difficult to determine a specific context and contribution to knowledge. Although artistic context is often fuzzily determined, a suitable context within which to frame a specific research question is usually more sufficiently limited. Underpinning the value of artistic research within the academy is the value of the artist as consciously informed through the feedback loop of thinking through

17 Elisabeth Schellekens, ‘The Aesthetic Value of Ideas,’ in Philosophy & Conceptual Art, ed. Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens (Oxford University Press, 2009), 80–81.

18 Robin Nelson, ‘Practice-as-research and the Problem of Knowledge,’ Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 11:4 (2006): 105-116.

making. For Richard Shiff, the artistic process of thinking through making (in which the artist affects the work and in turn the work affects the artist) can reveal itself through hitherto unexpected turns.20 To lose sight of the generative value of this process within the demands of academic validation is to lose sight of the potential for art to exercise a point of difference within the academy.

Academic context: Institutional influence/documentation/validation

There is currently much debate across university sectors surrounding non-traditional outputs; i.e. anything that is not a book, chapter, journal or paper, and which uses time, sound, image, space or gesture as part of its presentation of new knowledge. The issue is often not the creative work per se but an ability to somehow explain, validate and transfer its findings in a manner that is institutionally acceptable. Many institutions now employ tenuous metrics such as attributes based on venue, duration etc. Many universities in Australia attribute 1 HERDC point for a major creative work as opposed to 5 HERDC points for a peer reviewed book. Addressing this imbalance is a difficult battle that many artist academics consider worth waging. Explanation, critique and credibility are crucial in the university context and moreover, they are essential to the task of nominating a creative work as research. Project Anywhere is designed to play an active role in meeting this challenge.

Despite the radical transformations that have occurred over the last century of artistic practice, institutional agendas continue to have a disproportionate, conformist influence on artist academics, many of whom are dependent upon university and residency programs for financial support to produce work. Some of these conditions and requirements have contributed to an environment in which particular, assumed limits are set on artistic processes and outcomes. Consider for example, the typical requirement for artistic research to include: documentation and analysis as research evidence; quality assurance through academic peer review; public programme collateral for institutional use (museum or public gallery); media and social network friendly publications as well as public funding justifications.

The documentation and reproduction of artworks can duplicate many recognisable characteristics of an original aesthetic experience except for the essential reality of a particular presence in time and space. Typical documentation that consists of a series of reproduced stills or moving images of a complex site-specific artwork, for example, or one that changes over time or entails audience interaction is unquestionably an ineffective substitute for the unique material existence of the artwork in the designated place in which it is designed to be experienced. What is communicated through legitimate or informal traces of documentation comprises a different kind of experience altogether. For reasons already discussed, this secondary experience can often contribute, alongside or instead of the original, to the whole aesthetic experience as network. Accepting that the knowledge and comprehension gained from a direct experiential encounter with artwork is not the same as the knowledge gained via artistic documentation, the important point to stress within the context of the academy is that new knowledge can be communicated

19 David Pears, What is knowledge? (London: Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1972, 29.

20 Richard Shiff, ‘Every shiny object wants an infant who will love it,’ Art Journal 70:1 (2011): 7-33.

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Fig. 1. A conceptual live art performance event across the London Underground & Disused Eurostar Terminal at Waterloo Mainline (Remembrance Day Sunday, November 11, 2012)

http://www.no-mans-land.me/#!charing-cross-under-ground-tube/c1dfy

Fig. 2. Sculptures, musicians, poets and filmmakers converging at Waterloo Eurostar entrance.

http://www.natashareid.co.uk/no-mans-land---london-underground----november-2012.php

Fig. 4. This Progress (January to March, 2010) Tino Sehgal, Guggenheim New York

http://www.terminartors.com/artworkprofile/Sehgal_Tino-This_Progress

Fig. 3. I Wanted to See All of the News From Today (2007) An online artwork by Martin Callanan, which continuously collects the front pages of over 600 newspapers from around the world, as and when they are published.

http://greyisgood.eu/allnews/.

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and extended through both art and its documentation.

Ultimately, the fact that contemporary artists are increasingly engaged in the making of works that are designed and intended to transcend physical locations or evolve over long periods of time increases the likelihood that many audiences will only experience the work as a form of documentation. In the extreme, some artistic interventions are impossible to distinguish as art without a designed, corresponding presence on the Internet, as a website, in a blog or perhaps as an on-going e-mail network. We are now less likely to expect artworks and their documentation to exist in a singular destination, but rather, to be situated and understood within an unfolding process of formation. Consequently, adequate artistic documentation for the task of communicating new knowledge also needs to be able to incorporate the kinds of open-endedness and contradiction that art itself can experientially manifest. Otherwise, any understanding produced between the complexities of the creative work (which cannot be other than itself) and parallel, contextualizing elements (i.e. documentation, reflection, analysis, interpretation etc.) will never hold.

These contemporary developments demand new ways of introducing, curating, linking, recording, documenting and connecting audiences with the work. The following examples of artistic interventions illustrate the growing complexity associated with this genre in relation to the documentation, critique and validation of interconnected material, conceptual, temporal and virtual components where formal and informal traces of the work exist in parallel.

One example of the way in which artistic documentation can play a role in the development of new knowledge is found in the example of a project that inspired the initial concept for Project Anywhere. This work, Invisible-5 (2006), is a self-guided audio tour located on Interstate 5 (I-5) between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Invisible-5 combines traces of natural, social, and economic history associated with the route. The collaborative partners made use of a typical museum audio tour format to guide listeners along the highway at their own pace. It includes analytical stories of people and communities in the area who were fighting for environmental justice along the I-5 corridor. The listener experience includes recorded music, oral histories, field recordings, local sounds and archival audio documents accessed online at a website or downloaded for iPhone or Android apps for GPS-enabled mobile listening.

The elements that make up this work all exist within a network of relations that together constitute the entirety of the cultural object that is Invisible-5. It is unlikely that anyone involved in making or encountering the work will have experienced its entirety and it is impossible to determine the extent of the aesthetic impact on any local or global audience since there is no evidence available. Nor is it possible to measure the quality of the new knowledge produced by this intervention. Despite this, the Invisible-5 project was an inspirational model for Project Anywhere. The rich layers of documentation, interpretation and other web-based contextualizing that exist around the concept are regarded as a strong indication that ‘new knowledge’ was nonetheless communicated. Project Anywhere has been set up as an experimental platform that can develop and test new forms of

documentation and critique and new approaches to the validation of new knowledge.

No man’s land, (Figs. 1, 2) was an artwork/event conceived and curated by John McKiernan with live performances, sculpture and installations across 10 London Underground stations. Described as deliberately complex and bureaucratic, with the involvement of nearly 200 people, the project adapted and adjusted as new people joined and left. Circumstances changed and each person affected the project direction. Consequently, to declare that any single direct experience of this work is directly comparable to any other direct experience is absurd. Meanwhile, the project’s website went through several different phases as the event evolved from a planning site to a live documentation of events and finally into an archive that the organisers hope will ‘prove a rich source of information for researchers and makers of live performance and any major (or minor) event involving many people who do not know each other.’21 The complex site remains as a multi-media testimony to the event; a collection of explanatory texts, recordings, analysis and links with a connection still open for donations.

In another example, Martin Callanan’s online continuous collection of newspaper front pages (Fig. 3) is a work that accumulates data in constant on-going relationship to the international press. Presenting an example of the hyperreal as famously described by Baudrillard, Callanan’s digital collection and replication process collapses the reality of world news into a dislocated and impoverished duplication of the reported, duplicated ‘real’, and breaks down the concept of information from one reproduced medium into another, downgraded reproductive medium. Baudrillard’s theory of destruction through simulation, from one medium to another is the destruction of the real; no longer an object of representation, but only ritual extermination: the hyperreal. Documentation, critique and peer review of this genre of work is difficult unless the work itself is reduced to the core conceptual idea that instigated the making of the work. Yet the work, in its live and evolving form creates ever more complex intersections with world events.

A third example points to the way in which artistic documentation or technical reproduction can become problematic for some artists, particularly when a copy or part copy is made available at times and in locations unimagined by the artist and therefore potentially beyond direct control. For many different reasons, some artists distrust and even oppose the documentation or recording of their work. For example, a workplace or public space intervention by an art activist that disrupts the quotidian experience of its viewers is reduced in documentation to a skeletal, digitally packaged concept with visuals. Significant artistic and aesthetic qualities are inevitably depreciated.

Anyone who experienced Tino Sehgal’s 2010 work, This Progress at the Guggenheim in New York (Fig. 4.) will understand the impossibility that any documentation can communicate the core experience of a participatory, social work of this type. Although it was a shared experience between the ‘interpreters’ working for the artist and the visitors to the museum, it remained, for each person, a unique distillation of prior knowledge, expectation and personal engagement. Visitors were ushered up the vast empty spiral ramp of the museum by a series of guides, first a child, then a teenager, then an adult and finally an older person each of which ‘disappeared’ without trace as the transition

21 ‘no man’s land, November 2012,’ accessed August 4, 2013, http://www.no-mans-land.me/#!how-the-event-has-unfolded/c5eo.

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took place leaving the visitor and the new guide in command of a unique, embryonic and ongoing conversation related to the idea of progress. Although this work appeared to have a physical location, it was unquestionably without specific place or form—a quality that Sehgal understood implicitly.

New and strangely expanded forms of symbolic territory, can, in some contexts, be implied by the artistic object that questions the boundaries of the institution that contains it. Such art no longer adheres to any particular content that is necessarily distinctive from ordinary, everyday experience. What changes the commonplace into art is context and the internalisation of the experience. This requires an inclination to be affected on the part of the audience; a willing appreciation of something experienced. Art’s alterity from non-art has been rejected in this process and the critique of these new distributed, networked forms is also in a state of adaptation.

The challenge of new practices: Project Anywhere is born

Project Anywhere was conceived and developed as one possible solution to some of the challenges presented in this paper. As Project Anywhere prepares for a second round of peer review toward the selection of its 2014 program, Nancy de Freitas and Sean Lowry (the authors of this paper) have looked to the parallel task of documenting and philosophically contextualising the evolution of its unique peer validation system. Prior to the development of this system, and based initially upon the founding concept of Sean Lowry in 2011, Project Anywhere’s Steering Committee (2012)22 was formed with a view to developing appropriate policy for the task of validating artistic research at the outermost limits of location-specificity. After much consultation and debate, a unique two-stage peer review process was developed. Accordingly, it was decided that a blind peer review of project proposals would be used to determine which projects would be hosted, whilst an open peer review of project outcomes would better suit the task of deciding which projects would be finally archived as ‘validated research outcomes’. In concert with this task, a comprehensive set of evaluation criteria was developed. It was also emphasised that Project Anywhere should retain verification materials to demonstrate that all evaluation criteria are met (these materials are archived for external auditing). Once this two-stage peer-review policy was formulated, an Editorial Committee23 was formed to review all proposals that had successfully navigated the peer-review process and select the final four projects for the 2013 program. Meanwhile, an Advisory Committee24 was formed in order to oversee the overall strategic direction of Project Anywhere.

The first review and critique round resulted in a selection of works to be hosted on the site. With four projects and a live web presence, the site and its conceptual framework was finally open to the scrutiny of the Project Anywhere committees. The digital conditions of each art project’s web presence (text descriptions, image quality and links) became the focus of the committees’ attentions and evaluative discussions are continuing on the value of: (1) higher quality visual and textual information on hosted works; (2) more comprehensive artist statements; (3) supportive texts by invited writers and/or comments from external critics; and (4) advice for artists on quality documentation (good

22 Project Anywhere Steering Committee (2012): Professor Brad Buckley, Associate Dean (Research), Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney, Australia; Professor Su Baker, Director, Victorian College of the Arts, Faculty of the VCA & Music, University of Melbourne, Australia; Professor Richard Vella, Head of School, Drama, Fine Art & Music, University of Newcastle, Australia; Dr. Sean Lowry, School of Drama, Fine Arts & Music, The University of Newcastle, Australia; Associate Professor Nancy de Freitas, School of Art and Design, AUT University, Auckland, New Zealand; Mr. Ilmar Taimre, Executive Consultant, Independent Researcher/Virtual Musician, Brisbane, Australia. Dr. Jocelyn McKinnon, School of Drama, Fine Arts & Music, The University of Newcastle, Australia; Dr. Andre Brodyk, School of Drama, Fine Arts & Music, The University of Newcastle, Australia; Dr. Angela Philp, Deputy Head of School—Research, Drama, Fine Arts & Music, The University of Newcastle, Australia; Dr. Tony Schwensen, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, U.S.A.

23 Project Anywhere Editorial Committee (2013): Professor Brad Buckley, Professor of Contemporary Art and Culture, Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney; Professor Bruce Barber, Director MFA, School of Graduate Studies, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; Associate Professor, Simone Douglas, Director, MFA Fine Arts, Parsons The New School for Design, New York; Dr. Adam Geczy, Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney; Dr. Sean Lowry, School of Creative Arts, The University of Newcastle, Australia; Dr. Les Joynes Visiting Associate Professor of Art, Renmin University of China, Beijing.

writing style, web format, image choice and quality).

Artistic research practice and exhibition practice are the two interconnected frameworks under examination here. Project Anywhere is a critical response to both of these problematic contemporary issues—art AS research (artistic research) and the notion of the exhibit or exhibition as the primary product of artistic practice. Many practical and theoretical questions have arisen in the process of designing and managing the launch of the project, which has opened up a valuable site for research and experimental methods to be tested in the future as the project is consolidated.

Moving forward

Three lines of enquiry in particular will be drivers of research and development associated with the site. The first relates to the concept of distributed project documentation. This is the relationship between official and informal material and the opening out of archival and documentary environments and structures accessible as part of the aesthetic experience of contemporary work. There are implications for the maintenance of any digital archive that is expected to be true to the form and complexity of the work being produced. The second line of enquiry will focus on the quality of documentation produced by and for artists working in the new genre. Project Anywhere is poised to play a significant, forward-looking and experimental role in the development of new approaches to visual/textual documentation of contemporary practice. The third line of inquiry, and perhaps the most far-reaching, is reconsideration of the function and impact of critique in this new environment.

In recent years, tertiary art education and the artwork associated with higher education programmes (and graduates) has become a ‘product’ dominated by research paradigms and objectives with quantifiable, verifiable end results. The institutional requirement for documentation and evidence of research, and scientific models of peer validation, has undoubtedly introduced a political dimension and a homogenizing effect on artistic activity. Distinctive parallels emerge with marketing attitudes and productivity agendas as we witness the loss of unfettered, open-minded, value seeking creative action. Socially oriented, critical processes and work towards self-enlightenment or pure experimental, speculative thinking may be in decline. In 2012, an interesting examination of this phenomenon took place at the 1st Tbilisi Triennial, Offside Effect,25 which was focused on the conceptual development of educational platforms that challenge the current prescriptive influence of the Bologna process in Europe. Artists and lecturers, collaborating with groups of students from several selected experimental academies, attempted to open a window on their creative orientations and strategies for making work. Much of the visitor experience of these works entailed: encounters of a discursive, critical or archival nature; interpretations of artistic freedom; collective, experimental, bohemian and squatter action, and the idea of an exhibition functioning as a school in turn framed as a work of art.26

In asserting that the art itself is not directly presented on the Project Anywhere website, the idea that the art is to be somehow apprehended as existing elsewhere in space and

24 Project Anywhere Advisory Committee (2013): Professor Su Baker, Director, Victorian College of the Arts, Faculty of the VCA & Music, University of Melbourne; Mr. Ilmar Taimre, Executive Consultant, Independent Researcher/Virtual Musician; Dr. Jocelyn McKinnon, School of Creative Arts, The University of Newcastle; Associate Professor Nancy de Freitas, School of Art and Design, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand; Dr. Sean Lowry, School of Creative Arts, The University of Newcastle, Australia; Professor Brad Buckley, Professor of Contemporary Art and Culture, Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney, Australia.

25 1st Tbilisi Triennial, Offside Effect, curated by Henk Slager and Wato Tsereteli, Center of Contemporary Art, 10 Dodo Abashidze Street, 0102 Tbilisi, Georgia, October19 –November 20, 2012. Contact: tbilisitriennial2012@gmail.com.

26 The Triennial exhibition included documentation from Unitednationsplaza, by Anton Vidokle and Martha Rosler, an ‘exhibition as school’ project intended to start as a biennial (Manifesta 6, 2006), but eventually realised as an independent temporary school in Berlin (October, 2006). The work had a later reincarnation under the name Night School at the New Museum in New York, 2008-9.

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time is implicated. To this end, the indexical information made available via the website functions to direct attention to a work existing somewhere else in space and time. The potential remoteness or transience of some hosted projects will invariably mean that it is difficult, and in some cases impossible, for all subjects in the intended audience to directly apprehend the work. This raises the question of whether mediated apprehension is somehow a second-best experience. Given the ‘post retinal’ nature of much contemporary practice, philosophical questions have arisen in a range of institutional contexts. In some cases, these theoretical uncertainties have been developed into an artistic or curatorial premise. To cite one recent example, the artistic director of Documenta XIII (2012) Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev directly addressed the necessity of the relationship between aesthetic and sense perception: ‘What does it mean to know things that are not physically perceivable to us through our senses? What is the meaning of the exercise of orienting in thought toward these locations?’27 Accordingly, some Documenta XIII sites included in the Kassel catalogue were actually located elsewhere on the globe.

Other social experiences reinforce this notion that it is possible to build an aesthetic experience in the mind of an interpreter who does not directly sense a creative work. We sense many things vicariously, without direct experience. For example, many humans who have not experienced life in the wilderness may still hold strong political opinions about the value of an unvisited wilderness and have a personal attachment to the idea of it. In this sense, simply knowing that it is there offers an experience profoundly different to a theoretical proposition. Consider, for example, the description of the six hundred thousand hectares of wilderness that constitute Southwest National Park (part of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area) provided on the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife website:

The park, the largest in Tasmania, epitomises the grandeur and spirit of wilderness in its truest sense. Much of the park is remote and far removed from the hustle and bustle of the modern world. For many, just the fact that such a place still exists brings solace.28

There are of course many other lived examples of things that we can potentially sense without resorting to direct experience. We do not, for example, necessarily need to directly witness events ranging from sexual impropriety to genocide in order to be reasonably convinced of their existence. Extra sensory information in the form of substantial documentation can provide forms of validation that come close to (and in some cases supercede) direct sense experience. Continuing with this train of thought, one of the reasons that Tehching Hsieh’s work arguably remains compelling is the way in which systematic documentation has enabled interpreters who did not directly witness his five One Year Performances in New York between 1978 and 1986 to build his works aesthetically in the mind. Hsieh’s Time Clock Piece, for example, is validated by 366 time cards, 366 filmstrips, signed witness statements, a record of missed punches, and a 16mm time-lapse film. Consequently, Hsieh’s performances arguably provide a profoundly different kind of comprehension of concepts central to the mechanics of capitalism, surveillance, production, control, discipline and submission than might be possible within a more traditional theoretical or philosophical argument.

27 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, ‘Introduction’, The Guidebook, dOCUMENTA (13), Catalogue 3/3 (Kassel: Hatje Cantz, 2012), 7.

28 ‘Southwest National Park: Introduction’, Tasmania Parks and Wildlife, accessed November 14, 2012, .http://www.parks.tas.gov.au/index.aspx?base=3801.

In conclusion

The conditions under which Project Anywhere was conceived are underpinned by a series of now long standing debates concerning the paradoxical conditions of artistic production, display and consumption. From the historical avant-gardes through conceptualism and institutional critique, to new modes of exhibition, display and performance across the global contemporary art spectrum, artistic researchers are increasingly aware of what Sabine Folie recently described as ‘the paradoxical insight that total comprehension is impossible.’29 Engaging with this notion of incomprehensibility has become a defining characteristic in the framing of artistic research. Moreover, the difficulty of adequately determining the edges of a creative work has meant that exegetical and paratextual elements are increasingly considered as necessary parts of a creative work’s orbit. Expanded forms of symbolic territory are in many cases implied by artistic objects and strategies that aim to problematise the boundaries that contain them. The ongoing challenge that faces Project Anywhere is the question of how the veracity of artistic documentation might accommodate these paradoxes in a way that is sympathetic to the contradictions characterizing much contemporary artistic practice, whilst also somehow being accountable to the institutional expectations of university-based research culture. Ultimately, perhaps what we are really proposing here is an institutional acknowledgement that more and more contemporary artworks now appear to function as a conduit for connecting the beholder to extra-perceptual networks of textures, events, meanings and associations—as opposed to simply evoking the more specific phenomenological relationships that more orthodox forms of modernism once claimed to instantiate.

Within an expanded conception of art, it no longer necessarily makes sense to pinpoint a single fixed and immovable location or artefact as constituting the primary text underpinning a creative work. It is within these expanded conceptions of artistic practice that Project Anywhere seeks to offer a point of difference by simultaneously encouraging artist researchers to push against the edges of artistic practice and the specificities of exhibition location whilst maintaining the specificities of ‘art as research’ via the process of peer validation. Project Anywhere enacts this point of difference using a website that directs attention toward an expanded conception of exhibition space that effectively encapsulates the entire globe and beyond,30 whilst at the same time maintaining an appropriately rigorous contextualizing framework for validating artistic practice as research though a unique two-step peer validation model.31 As a new exhibition model, Project Anywhere attempts to connect the phenomenological and aesthetic experience of apprehending art with the communication of new knowledge that comes from artistic activity framed as research. As a research platform, it promotes new and experimental methods and combinations of documentation with a view to accommodating better representations of artworks. As an academic publication, it facilitates the process of critique and validation for this rising form of artistic practice. How this experimental project serves the artistic/research community of the future will depend on the openness of the researchers involved and the care taken to manage the development of the project within a robust and ethical framework.

29 Sabine Folie, ‘unExhibit-Display and the Paradoxes of Showing by Concealing’, unExhibit, exhibition catalogue, trans. Gerrit Jackson (Wien: Generali Foundation, 2011), 169. Folie concludes this catalogue essay with a claim toward art that restitutes ‘imaginative space by a concealment that paradoxically ‘shows’ while leaving behind a vestige that cannot be differentiated, that is neither entirely transparent and comprehensible nor utterly opaque and comprehensible.’, 173.

30 In 2013, Project Anywhere received its first proposal for a project designed to take place in space (in this case in lower earth orbit). This proposal is currently awaiting peer evaluation.

31 Project Anywhere ‘Peer Evaluation Policy,’ accessed 12 October 12, 2013, http://projectanywhere.net/peer-review.