What is the place of fieldwork within art? Can fieldwork be placed within art?
Art is a field. The field beyond art is a field.
A field represents an area at once open and delimited.
Can there be a field that is primarily concerned with questioning its delimitation, with insisting upon an openness that is at once true and endlessly compromised?
It seems that art would prefer to be something beyond a field while still maintaining a sense of integral identity – grounded in what? The notion of the aesthetic?
Contemporary ‘social practice’ art, for instance, takes shape precisely in terms of this dilemma. Art is not even mentioned and yet we are not speaking about social practice generally, but instead about a very specific genre of social practice that emerges from debates concerning relational aesthetics, socially-engaged art, etc. ‘Social practice’ imagines a potential for aesthetic action beyond the realm of aesthetics per se and beyond the institutional system of art. Yet at the same there remains a lingering desire to assess works of ‘social practice’ aesthetically/artistically, not simply in terms of their social efficacy and embededdness. The question is posed, how are these works to be judged? What separates them from the wider field of efficacious social action itself? And here is where the difficult problem of conceiving the field of aesthetics and art remains.
We have then a field which insists upon its openness, while equally insisting that there is a distinctly aesthetic field.
Some rough notes from a day or so ago:
Standard distinction between fieldwork and lab work. Malinowski – anthropology and fieldwork – an academic field that includes the apparently wider field as a vital part of its identity. No lab without the field.
And what sense can the aesthetic make of itself without the field? Starting with the senses, the confusion of openings to the world. The aesthetic is not innate but must be developed (Schiller). The Grand Tour as fieldwork and as studio – their necessary intimate relation.
The field is not simply what lies beyond the studio, but what lies beyond the conventional understanding and context of art. Art itself is a field (field as enclosed space of disciplinary operation), but art necessarily reaches beyond its institutional limits and autonomy (Adorno). The field is everything beyond art as well as art itself (Rancierre). Autonomy/Breach is constitutive of art. No art without the field’s encounter with wider fields.