Priska Gisler
Imagine an interdisciplinary research presentation setting: a curator of a well-known museum in a European capital gives an introductory talk on the occasion of the opening of a new exhibition. The work of art she comments upon has been produced in the context of a mixed-methods artistic and social-scientific research project. In her talk the curator describes the work on display as part of an ongoing research project and, in addition to the artist, she credits next the research team. She then goes through a whole range of aspects that make the artwork socially meaningful and artistically valuable. As a kind of explanatory overlay to the video-installations of the research-artist presented in the exhibition, the curator relates her interpretations of some of the broader social, historical and cultural debates underlying the project. Also, she ties them elegantly to the production-process of this work as well as to some points about the position of the artist within the art-scene.
The sociologist, a member of the same research team, is astonished. How is it that the artist herself remains silent about her own findings, and refrains from talking back to the curator who is elucidating research results without having produced them? The sociologist remembers the various moments during the research process when the team was discussing vividly their object of study, adding to each other’s thoughts, mutually crafting relevant propositions. One particular contentious situation comes to her mind. She had asked – after the artist had already shown a work based on the project in a show – to discuss the display to find together some answers to questions that the work had raised for the sociologist.
Attending the opening of the show, the reaction of the artist lingers in her mind. She recalls her artist colleague declaring, back then, that she was never going to explain her own work. The sociologist was astonished, not so much because she expected the artist to come down with a causal explanation of the work, but because she had expected some elucidation of what the work meant or how one might develop it further. This moment still bothers her while she listens to the introductory talk of the curator: the then refusal of the artist to account for her work, to contribute to a discussion about the results she had produced. If the exhibited work was the product of artistic research, if it could be treated – as they had decided – as a publication, then surely it needed, in some way or the other, to be part of the effort to derive a deeper understanding of ideas, actions, social realities? She is sure the artist would not oppose this goal – but why had she refused to ‘explain’ then? How was the artistic research work in the show contributing to knowledge production, and what was the role of the curator in delivering a series of interpretations?
In this interdisciplinary situation, the sociologist starts to reconsider her own notions of describing, interpreting, accounting and – especially – explaining and understanding. She is reminded of the sociology she was taught during her university studies, a sociology relying on a Weberian notion of a science ‘concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences’ (Weber 1978: S. 3). Definitely, she now feels the need to reconsider the role and status of (an) explanation in the context of a collaborative, interdisciplinary artistic–social-scientific research project, and to rethink the differences among the team concerning the idea and practice of ‘explaining’. This is why she re-reads Max Weber and finds quite revealingly that ‘(t)hus for a science which is concerned with the subjective meaning of action, explanation requires a grasp of the complex of meaning in which an actual course of understandable action thus interpreted belongs’ (Weber 1978: 9).1
The refusal of the artist poses a problem for the sociologist, not least insofar as their research project has ‘worked’ as common endeavour. How, she reflects, is explaining and understanding – or better in Max Weber’s terms: an ‘explanatory understanding’ – going to happen if not in and through the video-installation, which both of them, the sociologist and the artist, regard as a publication of their research results? But, the artwork does not do what a classical social sciences research paper does: a scientific article already contains explanation. The grasping of an actual course of understandable action does not necessarily happen in a strict rationalistic sense in which reasons for, or causes of, social facts are neatly laid bare. Much more importantly, explanatory understanding seems to be done in the way publications are structured (observation, theoretical approach, hypothesis or assumptions, modes of operationalization, presentation of the empirical data, acceptance or not of the outcomes, discussion of the results). And any claims about a contribution to understanding are tested against criteria of validation.
Nolens volens, the interdisciplinary research process had, then, found itself engaged in a debate about how to grasp the complex of meanings. Perhaps the artist’s refusal to explain the work, the sociologist now thinks, can be comprehended better by following how the artistic field organizes explanatory understanding in ways different to what is found in social scientific traditions. Indeed, after a while, the sociologist becomes aware that the art-field more generally takes on the task of ‘explaining’ the complex meaning of a work of art. A video-installation as research publication thus gains its value and validity through particular forms of circulation within the art-field.
That it is not the artist explicating her own work is not unusual in the field of the fine arts. On the contrary, the framing and contextualizing of artworks in galleries or museums is usually done by others, be they curators, art critics or collectors. Framing is delicate work. While many artists tend, as they say, to offer a series of possibilities or to provoke a debate, they usually try to avoid closure for their work.
Although the interdisciplinary research team is used to discussing the research project in a confidential setting, this openness of discussion is, as it were, externalized once the (artistic) results are publicized. This reflects the fact that from the artistic point of view there is not one ‘actual’ insight, conclusion or even explanation that serves as a starting point for debate through which to gain connectivity to others. On the contrary, to offer a limited account would be to risk narrowing down the debate about the artist’s work and thus limit its circulation. In fact, it would make it rather difficult for the artwork subsequently to be questioned by different art critics or, later, to be bought by collectors. The curator is allowed to try out many sorts of interpretative explications; indeed, curators are experts in coming up with multiple explications, though the expectation is that they do so in a ‘laudable’ manner, pointing to artistic skills and deeds done, and highlighting the insights that can be gained. Crucially, as soon as the curator has spoken, the explication ‘inhabits’ the artwork. Every following comment, question, remark will do the same: they each enrich the work and allow it to take on a life of itself. The artist – by claiming to hold back her own explanation – effectively obliges others to do the talking. By directing most of the attention towards the work itself, ironically, she enables its mobility. It is the broader art-field that, through the production of written material (e.g. the catalogue, the flyer in the exhibition, press articles by critics, etc.), demonstrates – validates – how well the piece fits in an exhibition, in a museum, and evaluates the suitability of the work to be positioned in a wider social and artistic context. In the accumulation of views from the curator, the critic, the collector or buyer, the museum and the ‘art world’, a distributed network of explanatory understanding emerges.
To summarize: after exploring the nature of artistic and social-scientific disciplinary practices that have been brought together in the interdisciplinary context, the sociologist becomes aware that the division of labour applied (in the production of artistic or social-scientific knowledge) plays a role in the ways the explanatory understanding of research outcomes is organized. An artist might generate material (not data, as the sociologist would tend to say) by observation, interviews, dreams, memories, etc. The material is at some point condensed in an artistic work that, hopefully, then will be invited to a show and presented to an audience. The curator offers framing: interpretations, analyses, and additional information. The positioning she suggests, subsequently, will be continued by art critics, buyers, collectors and on and on and, hence, will play part and parcel into the transformation of knowledge and the circulation of meaning.
Comparing the artistic work in the exhibition – as a result, a research publication – to a social scientific publication, some commonalities and differences emerge. Social scientists tend to collect and interpret data, they seek to narrow down the significance of the material and work out an analysis as well as some conclusions before they present their results at conferences and in papers. In journals or in public the aim is to withstand – with one’s own explications – a critical interrogation by the community. Intrinsic to this process, the social sciences have developed a system that integrates a question, a theoretical approach, a methodology and an interpretation in one (paper, presentation, etc.). This involves a chain of reference, as described by Bruno Latour (1999) that allows the reader to trace step by step the movement from empirical engagement to final textual account, that is, to bridge the distance between the word and the world.
Seen through the lens of the interdisciplinary setting, though, for the arts a different mechanism becomes evident. The video-installation in the exhibition is – as in sociological work – a result of structuring procedures. However, unlike in sociological work, these remain largely invisible, locked within ‘the actual practices which generate accounts’ (Smith 1974: 262). Instead, other ‘external’ structuring procedures are available, not least evidenced in the museum event in which the curator finds, more or less successfully, the words to communicate ‘explanatory understandings’ to the public. More broadly, an array of interested others – among them most prominently collectors, gallery owners, museum directors – function like a scientific community, whose ‘boundary work’ serves to stabilize the value and ‘validity’ of the artwork (Gieryn 1999). Thus, it is only together and cumulatively that this ‘community’ contributes to an explanatory understanding. In this distributed manner, Weber’s ‘grasp of the complex of meaning’ is possible and gives some background insight into what might be at stake, what are the ‘matters of concern’ (Latour 2004).
The preceding account allows us to delve deeper into the term ‘explaining’ in relation to valuing and validating. So far we have depicted a curator doing the talking for the research work produced by an artist-researcher who refrains from explaining her artistic research result, while leaving the sociologist in this interdisciplinary setting confused. The sociologist contrasts against this her own practice, according to which a publication should offer its own explanatory understanding. Clearly, the voices of colleagues, friends, fiends in the same scientific field, will evaluate her scientific contribution. Step by step they interrogate the research process: Is the research question relevant? Was the method adequate? Do the results seem reasonable? Such validating procedures will point to numerous shortcomings, and propose amendments and alternative ideas about how better to treat, or understand the subject. Accordingly, the social scientific author will react and respond. By comparison, the artist will remain silent, inhibiting herself from giving ‘explanatory understandings’ of what can be seen, while the curator proliferates ‘explanatory understandings’ not least because drawing attention to, and sustaining interest in, the artistic work is linked to the standing and status of the exhibition, or even her museum. She continues with her own account, mediating the work on display: ‘The mediation procedures directly enter into the constitution of the object as it becomes known’, writes Dorothy Smith (1974: 264). The curator does not only provide a complex of meaning. By carefully selecting certain aspects and not others, she contributes to its composition (Michael 2004: 10). She co-constitutes it as well and, through enabling circulation, she adds to its valuation and validation.
What are the implications for the valuing and validating of interdisciplinary research methods? It is certainly a tricky task for an interdisciplinary research team to find ways of circulating their material, and the ‘explanatory understandings’, across or trans artistic and social-scientific disciplinary fields. In this case, for example, the research team has to bear in mind the differences in social science and art worlds in which there is, respectively, critique, debate and closure versus silence, distribution and proliferation. Put differently, how can artistic researchers ‘attempt to attain clarity and certainty’ and how can sociologists accept that ‘no matter how clear an interpretation as such appears to be from the point of view of meaning, it cannot on this account claim to be the causally valid interpretation’ (Weber 1978: 9)?
Ideas of ways to mediate between the two fields of the social sciences and the arts are still in a formative state, although developments seem to be increasingly evident. When scientists give tours and present their work in art exhibitions, when artists and social scientists ‘mirror’ each other in self-reflective interviews, or where members of interdisciplinary teams reveal some of their practices and articulate their heterodox experience in mixed (artistic research and scientific) publications (e.g. Dombois, Gisler, Kretschmann and Schwander 2012), formerly well-defined fields might suddenly yield a terrain for new assemblages.
At the opening of the show, the sociologist and the artist stand next to each other. The mediation of explanatory understanding will continue for them as long as they are bound in their common, interdisciplinary research context, personally and institution-wise. Arguably, today’s valuation of projects by funding institutions (with their variegated interest for research ‘output’ and ‘impact’) increasingly encourages a bricolage of research activities. Indeed, there seems to be a growing expectation that different genres of output are necessary for the successful completion of a research project. This strategic refocusing suggests a shift in relation to what is validated as a result. In an ideal world this might imply an interest in broadening modes of enquiry to develop multifaceted ways of seeing – but as yet it is difficult to judge.
1 In the German original: ‘“Erklären” bedeutet also für eine mit dem Sinn des Handelns befasste Wissenschaft soviel wie: Erfassung des Sinnzusammenhangs, in den, seinem subjektiv gemeinten Sinn nach, ein aktuell verständliches Handeln hineingehört” (Weber 1972 (German version), p. 4).
Dombois, F., Gisler, P., Kretschmann, S., Schwander, M. (2013). Präparat Bergsturz. Band 2, edizioni periferia, Luzern und Poschiavo.
Gieryn, T. (1999). Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press.
Latour, B. (1999). Circulating reference: sampling the soil in the Amazonian forest. In Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (pp. 24–79). Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. (2004). Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Enquiry, 39 (Winter): 225–248. Retrieved from www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/89-CRITICAL-INQUIRY-GB.pdf
Michael, M. (2004). On making data social: heterogeneity in sociological practice. Qualitative Research, 4(1): 5–23.
Smith, D. E. (1974). The social construction of documentary reality. Sociological Inquiry, 44(4): 257–268.
Weber, M. (1972). Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
Weber, M. (1978). Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.