In my initial thinking about a theme to examine, I want to continue my focus on sociopolitically discursive work, with a predication for the earthy. Previously, construction, decolonisation, religion and physical labour were major themes I explored.
I wished I had had the opportunity to go deeper discussing the ethical, political and social relations that I mined in construction, with sound as the operative, transliterating tool. But, also I’m concerned about repeating myself too much, digging over old ground. I’ve consciously sensed a recurring interest not in harnessing properties of sound itself, but in external cultural themes or issues, then coming to sound to comment, replicate or transfigure. My audio paper, for instance, acted as a critical bridge between Christian colonisation and the church organ. Without being (too) snarky, I’ve been wanting to avoid the ‘science fair’ vibes that sound art can stray into, in my subjective view. Physically manifesting aural phenomena in that engineered way has yet to capture me. I wonder why?
A blog post I wrote for Element 1 of Specialising & Exhibiting resurfaced, striking me as a potential avenue for exploration. In it, I detailed walking 13 miles home from an abortive train journey. Walking is something I find deep meaning and purpose in, a physically-engaged practice, drawing connection between the feared “other” places and home, reaching beyond inhibition and exhaustion.
I think walking can create a healthy balance between physically-inhabited work that I am stimulated by, and the practice-based research approach required by this unit. Projects heavily weighted in the favour of practice-based research also place higher stakes on the veracity of the artwork produced. There’s been many lectures where the clouds of references, conceptual ideas and assertions part to reveal “experiment with beer can”, forty stark minutes of a can rattling around, bald and amateurishly recorded. I’m being facetious, and more than a little hyperbolic, but I can’t be the only person to cringe reading samey Eraserhead analyses. The institutional expectation of an evidentiary dossier that comes with an artwork, designed to quantify it, I find both practically realistic and spiritually perverse.
By chance, I read a new Tim Hecker (2025) interview that struck a similar chord: ‘But I was always against even someone like Brian Eno. In his new work, the question is, like, “what art does?” It’s such a British empiricist, pragmatic question. I’m not interested in the function that art’s serving in our society. I’m more interested in how it overflows and can’t be explained by pragmatism, empiricism and scientism. I don’t know if I’m a mystic, but I go against a lot of that stuff.’
I think I have half the brain of a mystic, and the other half a ‘British empiricist’. They seem to be in constant conflict. This dully myopic view of art, maybe humanity’s only ineffable, transcendental pursuit, to have literate, binary function is depressing. Reflexively bending it back on itself just to talk about human systems and structures, implying verifiable conclusions.
Maybe I’m taking the wrong tack. Research is the undeniable web within which we locate and align ourselves, it’s unavoidable and normal. Critical debate has certainly made me more articulate and dimensional in my thinking, plus it’s fun! Contradictions, everywhere. Yet, perhaps practice-based research attempts to annihilate contradiction, to even out ambiguity. I also don’t wish to assume an anti-intellectualist posture here, I do like research, and thinking I like even more. But I softly reject the institutional turning-over of the mystery at the centre of artmaking, and then do it myself anyway. What a mess, artmaking is a mess. In the spirit of Polyani (2009, pp. 4), ‘I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell.’
Hecker, T. (2025) ‘Tim Hecker Isn’t Afraid To Slow Down’. Interviewed by Ted Davis for Stereogum, 20 February. Available at: https://www.stereogum.com/2297752/tim-hecker-shards/interviews/ (Accessed: 22 February 2025).
Polyani, M. (2009) ‘The Tacit Dimension’. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.