voi Cesresearch actions to the research act? While i have provided a paradigmatic instance of
this progress in the relationship of lacan and dalí, this does not necessarily provide the
means to build a specifically psychoanalytic address to the problem of pseudo- research
actions. Rather than add another layer of interpretation, a properly psychoanalytic
approach to these actions, and thus a progress towards the act, might begin with an
observation of the signifying system in which they are comfortably embedded, and look
for anomalies in this system indicating the emergence of unconscious knowledge. in an
anteroom to mark leckey’s Turner prize exhibition at Tate Britain in 2008, reserved for
information, education and public comment, were hundreds of scrawled notes pinned
to the wall. among the notes was a scrawled and ungrammatical text, which asked a
question and called for a response: ‘i have had a question. What is the function of artist
in society? i still don’t know after this exhibition. do you and artists know? do curator
know? [sic]’
in this note, the issue of unconscious knowledge is raised in the inarticulate demand
for a real act of knowledge and research, rather than a pseudo action. it is important
to see that the writer of the note at Tate modern, this person who, in the terms set by
museum education, is also a member of the fictional forms of an audience, a community
or a ‘public’, has named three people who are responsible for providing an answer to
this question – the first of these is ‘you’, that is, any reader of the note, the second
is an artist, the third is a curator. in this way, the writer of the note has provided us
with a clue as to how ‘you’ might begin to answer the question, that is by assuming an
individual responsibility for knowledge pertaining to a difficult issue, bearing upon the
relationship of art and the world in which it is received and comprehended. Yet the
knowledge in question is not new knowledge, but a pre- existing knowledge – the artist
is assumed have some kind of social function that is not being disclosed by artists and
curators themselves. This requires an investigator who will assume responsibility for
this undisclosed knowledge.
The note indicates that artists and curators, the acknowledged experts in answering
this kind of question, have not provided an adequate or rigorous account of what
they already know, and that what is required is a direct address to an entire body of
knowledge and a signifying structure. it is at this juncture that an arts- based researcher
might feel able to progress to the act, and move beyond what they already know to
what artists and curators as a profession do not know that they know. The demand
framed in this note has a specific equivalent in the address of the hysteric to the master
in lacanian psychoanalysis. The hysteric addresses the master, and demands that he
or she produce something serious by way of knowledge. The hysteric’s demand is what
makes knowledge go further, and progress from research actions to research acts.
if arts- based research, as it is defined in the ahRC report i quoted at the
beginning of this chapter, is used to place limitations on to research activity that do
not undermine the identity of the creative practitioner, then it cannot easily progress
from the accumulation of research ‘actions’ in the form of projects, methodologies
and texts, to the status of the research act. psychoanalysis is useful to arts- based
research because it offers a thorough and reasoned argument for the primacy of the
investigative act that delivers both the rigour of the researcher and a change in the
subjects and objects of art and design. psychoanalysis can also offer lessons for those
engaged in attempts to transcend intra- and inter- institutional ‘battles of identity’