transformationaL Pra Cti Ceconsistent with Constable’s self- declared project. We can only speculate on the course
of art history had Constable used his lectures to prepare his contemporaries for his art.
perhaps Brockedon’s prediction would have come about with an art that more closely
followed Constable’s interests. or perhaps, given the historical moment, the outcome
would have been pretty much the same. nevertheless, Constable’s images and words
provide a model for thinking about how the material innovator can perform a function
similar to the critical writer’s de- figuration, which conjoins text and image so as to
construct a visibility appropriate to his or her work’s ambition.
arts- based research as art that changes artearlier it was argued that art that changes art should be understood as making a
contribution to understanding, since it requires an adjustment to cognitive schemata and
semantic networks relevant to the appreciation of art. although both interpretational
and material innovation have been shown to be constitutive of such change, our interest
here is focused on material innovation, since this is most closely associated with the
creativity of the artist and the mode of innovation that is most difficult for many to see
as being consistent with the acquisition of new knowledge and understanding, namely
as being understandable as a research function. notwithstanding the above, it might be
argued that neither material disjunction nor critical de- figuration, even when it can be
seen in the unfolding of history to have been constitutive of change in understanding of
art, should be understood as research, i.e. the acquisition of new knowledge, as neither
is unambiguously interpretable nor self- justifies its contribution to new understanding.
let us begin to examine these objections by recalling that Rancière’s articulation
of artistic change does not demand a causal connection between the innovation of
painters and the de- figuration of the critic, even though the goncourts’ critique of
Chardin followed the appearance in the salon des Refusés of 1863 of the paintings
that were later to be labelled impressionist; and even though it is highly likely that the
goncourts, who were prominent figures in the cultural life of paris at the time, visited
the exhibition. perhaps an affect exerted on the goncourts by the material presence of
the impressionist paintings was transferred into an appreciation of Chardin’s art, but
Rancière’s point is that the novelty of de- figuration does not depend on prior novelty in
painting. similarly, it is not claimed that aurier’s de- figuring of pictorial visibility caused
the re- figurations presented ‘by Cubist or dadaist collages, the appropriations of pop
art ... or the plain writing of Conceptual art’ (Rancière 2007: 87). We are reminded,
then, that at the moment of origination the innovative de- configured conceptual space
of critic and material space of the artist are free floating – disconnected.
The forward propagation of both modes of invention can be seen as arising in
moments of reception between image and observer, or text and reader, in which
interests are clarified and activated. For example, after cognizing the surprising work of
art, an artist might employ the understanding acquired in the production of new works
of art, as was recorded when some artists immediately adopted some of Constable’s
tenets when his work was shown in paris. alternatively, the critical writer might
employ the understanding obtained in the engagement with material innovation in
the interpretation or reinterpretation of other works of art, and so on. given that the
cognition of each beholder is brought into and modified by artistic or critical invention,