An Exploration of Affect as a Methodology for Examining Experience and Writing as a Practice in the Context of Fine Art

This thesis is submitted as a practice-based PhD with writing as the practice. I intend the term `writing as the practice' to mean, that, such writing might occupy a similar space to other modes of art practice such as drawing, painting, sculpture, or lens-based work. The submission is text based, and comprises in equal measure practice and theory. I do not intend the `practice' and the `theory' writing to be considered as two distinctly different approaches to PhD research, as one of the primary aims of this submission is to complicate the difference between the two. I have therefore attempted to produce a thesis that has integral to its construction the proposition that writing as a practice can be as critically and analytically motivated as more conventional academic writing; and, vice versa, that an engaged critical theory might be advised to employ the strategies of affect and reader/viewer participation more synonymous with similar tendencies in contemporary art practice. The overarching conceptual aim of this thesis is to examine the concept of experience for any inconsistencies and/or aporia that might delimit its efficacy as both content and as interpretative register in the context of Fine Art. That is, to explore the reasons why experience, as opposed to other modes of consciousness, (understanding, knowing, perceiving, recognising) is much more likely to be run together with the notion of actuality and therefore often thought of in terms of the `immutably given'. The thesis seeks to undermine such a view and rather to provide a more fluid interpretation of experience. In so doing it explores the following questions: `why does the reading of experience as self-presence predominate', `what does it mean to say you have had an actual experience', `what is the status and value of experience as evidence' and `how is it written and seen'? As I discovered during the process of this research, it did not make sense to write about experience if I did not, at the same time, also write with the experience of writing on experience. Therefore, I have decided (or rather the text decided for me) to let myself be taken by a moment of experience and write to `meet' the affect of that experience with critical interpretation. In this way the research finds that the analytical study of experience can be driven by the affect of experience, itself, and that employing such a method enables the disassemblance of the supposed creative/analytic opposition much more organically