The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

insight and rigour

been the vanguard institution, remains latent but largely foreclosed to this day, in the
current education programmes of museums, art-based research and government policy
units.
in this chapter, i have shown that establishing the rigour of the researcher within a
psychoanalytic framework, requires an address to the difference between interpretation
and analysis, and the status of the object in research. all of these elements are
themselves predicated on the crucial shift in subject position that was exemplified
in the difference between, on the one hand, the quasi- research ‘actions’ of salvador
dalí’s paranoiac- critical method, and on the other, and the research ‘act’ of Jacques
lacan, who used dalí’s thought to step outside the circle of existential psychology
and establish his ‘return to Freud’. The lure of what i have called ‘quasi- research
actions’ is still very much at work in contemporary art practice. one example of this
was provided in the work of mark leckey, winner of last year’s Turner prize. leckey
has been accounted for as part of a group of artists labelled ‘subjective anthropologists’,
who ‘amass information almost as a phd researcher might, and yet they are not cool
observers, they are eccentric participants’ (Jones 2008). leckey himself has said:

i like the idea that you let culture use you as its instrument. What gets in the

way is being too clever, or worrying about how something is going to function

... i am an autodidact – that’s why i use bigger words than i should. it’s a

classic sign.

(higgins 2008)

one response to such a statement is simply to say that claiming the position of
the cultural automaton or autodidact, while using the methods of the researcher and
scholar, is simply a contingent ruse. however, it has to be recognized as a position of
speech that artists and designers now assume as a matter of course. This position of
speech was described by Claire Bishop, in a response to Thomas hirschorn’s autodidact
festival, ‘24 hour Foucault’ at the palais de Tokyo in 2004, an event in which hirschorn
was careful to declare his position as that of a Foucault fan, not a Foucault scholar.
Bishop said:

Both hirschorn and pask represent an approach that differs distinctly from

typical contemporary university pedagogy. professional teaching is steered

towards the production and measurement of successful results ... Whatever

we think of the success of pask’s and hirschorn’s projects as art, their freedom

of operation represents an unthinkable autonomy and an unencumbered

passion for knowledge.

(Bishop 2007: 88)

Rather than demonstrating an ‘unencumbered passion for knowledge’, i would
claim that leckey and hirschorn’s lectures and symposia contribute to a situation in
which the mere appearance of arts- based research is deemed sufficient, and a collusion
between theoretical interpretation and quasi- research actions is now encouraged. a
question that remains is how, outside the structures of theoretical interpretation offered
by Claire Bishop, could a psychoanalytic orientation chart a progress from pseudo-