voi Cesidentity is at once ‘made ordinary’ and yet preserved by being contextualized within
a life- nexus, Freud discusses the genius of dostoyevsky and leonardo da Vinci, while
explicitly showing how his investigation places identity in question. in the leonardo
essay there are two versions of the subject of the investigation and two practices,
leonardo the artist and leonardo the researcher.
The possibilities and problems of research that Freud discusses in the leonardo
essay, are taken forward in this chapter in relation to salvador dalí’s essay ‘l’Âne pourri’
(The Rotten donkey) which was published in the first issue of Surréalisme au service
de la Révolution (dalí 1930). dalí’s essay is significant because it isolates a possibility
for arts- based research that uses a psychoanalytic framework, while simultaneously
showing how research agency is hampered by the problem of identity and the artistic
personality. This divide is most clearly shown in the manner in which dalí’s account
of paranoiac-critical method helped the psychoanalyst Jacques lacan to accomplish
his ‘return to Freud’ on the basis of a distinction between identity and utterance, while
dalí himself became increasingly obsessed with the public spectacle of his own artistic
celebrity. The significance of this is not that there was a plagiarism of dalí by lacan,
but rather that there was an effective demonstration of the limits of knowledge within
dalí’s project. dalí’s paranoiac- critical method had offered the potential for the agency
of the researcher to emerge within the process of making art, through a specific shift in
the status of the creative practitioner. Yet the potential for research agency developed
in surrealism was assumed by Jacques lacan rather than by dalí himself, and as the
example of the ahRC report quoted above shows, nearly eighty years later, creativity
as such is still identified with the creative practitioner in a way that limits the possibility
of arts- based research.
The contrasting position introduced by a Freudo- lacanian approach to arts- based
research, is that before research in art and design can assume a particular content
(i.e. what the research is ‘about’) it must first of all be seen as something that has
the potential to change the subjective structure and position of the designer or the
artist, and consequently the meaning of art and design activity and its patterns of social
recognition. The shift from the uniqueness of genius to the generality of the creative
practitioner, does not accomplish the kind of structural change that inaugurates a new
kind of subject that can rightly be called an ‘artist- researcher’. in the latter part of this
chapter, i offer a model of how the problematic inauguration of the artist- researcher
can be addressed using a psychoanalytic framework. i cite the work of the 2008 Turner
prize winner mark leckey as a demonstration of the vicissitudes of the artist researcher,
insofar as leckey adopts the practices and formats of pedagogy and research such as the
public lecture, while avowing an autodidactic position and a disavowal of knowledge.
The adoption of the position of the researcher or the position of knowledge would
require a shift in leckey’s subject position that he does not take up. While one can
simply attribute that refusal to his status as an artist rather than an arts- based researcher,
leckey’s oscillation between what Jonathan Jones (2008), refers to as leckey’s phd-
style ‘subjective anthropology’ on the one hand, and a disavowal of knowledge on the
other, illustrates some of the problems involved in assuming a research mandate from
within the terms of a practice. Furthermore, the conclusions of the ahRC Research
Review show that this overt or covert refusal of the position of knowledge and research
is a common problem for arts- based research in art schools and universities. i shall