Untimely findings: Art-research and the Extra-disciplinary

This paper identifies new modes of writing as practice in art-research. It asks how such work can be evaluated and in what ways the new work helps determine the contribution of art-research. The paper considers how we might teach related forms of writing encountered increasingly in studio practice. It is a common experience in research to find work’s stable unfolding confounded. In the particular case considered here, something that appears to be a conclusion arrives at the wrong moment, too early. In one sense this event of research practice is trivial in its familiarity. But its more significant and less easily graspable quality becomes evident when the untimely finding resists being held in reserve, as might normally be the case, to be added rhetorically at the end; instead it insists on being exposed at the moment it appears in the working process, thus affecting the ordered development of research in a peculiar way such that research is made to differ from itself. Perhaps in the majority of cases, art-research progresses with the use of preconceived methodologies reproduced with minimal self-reflexivity. This paper identifies a different, strategic engagement with such reproduction, which, it is proposed, gives art-research a new and important determination. In this sense the paper engages with the conference theme of ‘mimesis’. An example is found in the work of Georges Perec—whose writing is useful in discussions of art-research due to its ambivalence towards literary discipline. In his novel Life A User’s Manual (1978) an unexpected and strategic mimesis comes to break the ordered temporality of the writer’s work, introducing an event or ‘crisis’ with significant consequences. When measured alongside others from art-research, this case begins to expose a kind of research writing with extra-disciplinary relevance, pointing to an as-yet unthought future for art