transformationaL Pra Cti CeConclusionThe question posed at the beginning of this chapter was, ‘What is the relationship
between the research and art?’ The answer given here is that if we are to talk about
a relationship, then it is one of inclusion: art subsumes research, if we accept that art
that changes art can be understood as contributing to knowledge of what art was,
is, or might become. in developing an account of how art changes art, we began by
drawing on Rancière’s essay, Painting in the Text, in which he argues that art depends on
a bond between ways of making, seeing, saying and thinking. as emphasized above, for
Rancière, ‘The surface [of a painting] is not wordless, is not without “interpretations”
that pictorialize it.’ each bond between a way of making and seeing, saying and
thinking defines an aesthetic regime or regime of art that enables ‘another subject
to appear under the representative subject’ (2007: 76). in the case of painting, up
until the Romantic era, the bond was between painting and poetry, thereafter between
painting and criticism. The making of a new bond between image and text involves
undoing the existing bond and the retying it anew. Rancière (2007: 78–9) assigns to
the critical writer the highly creative task, not simply of adding retrospective discourse
to the ‘nakedness of forms’, but of constructing, through de- figuration, the visibility
necessary for seeing a new bond between image and text. in short, he offers a way of
thinking about art that denies the autonomy of the art from words – the birth of a
regime of art is their bonding and its death is their separation. art that changes art
is art that modifies the bond between image and ideas. if we choose to work with his
theory, then we cannot talk about the works of art as if they are simply material: we
cannot talk about a painting that changed painting and mean that the painting entirely
speaks for itself.
although Rancière provides us with an account of how the critical writer contributes
to change in art, namely the act of de- figuration, he has very little to say about the
artist’s contribution to the making and remaking of a regime of art, notwithstanding
that the historical reception of novel works of art is often accompanied by individual
and collective uncertainty. it was then argued that cognitive surprise is the primary
mechanism underlying the response to material novelty, which arises when the
application of existing schemata and semantic networks governing the reception and
interpretation of art fail to accommodate the presented forms. Cognitive surprise
provides an impetus for meta- cognition and exploration and explanation of the
unexpected event, which, as illustrated in Rilke’s encounter with the art of Cézanne,
resembles de- figuration in that the cognitive process initiated through surprise leads
to a new visibility, ‘and suddenly one has the right eyes’. To explore the genesis of the
surprising work of art we then considered in some depth the art of John Constable.
The first exploratory move examined the nature of Constable’s artistic project, arguing
that it sought to combine poetry and science. it is not claimed that it was Constable’s
intention to produce art that would change art. in contrast, it is argued that Constable
was not at war with the past and, in fact, saw in it the grounds and reasons for his own
project. The second move argued that although Constable’s art, as epitomized in his
six- foot landscapes, can now be appreciated as the attainment of his ambition, in its
initial reception it could not be understood as such because his project could satisfy
neither the existing, nor the emergent, but as yet invisible new regime of art that would