Art of Science (2021)

Poetry installation, performance

Graphite on paper, chair, ladder, 12’ x 4’ x 4’

This piece tells the story of how my art practice thematically matured from a coping mechanism for my anxiety to an exploration of queer joy.

A 15 foot-long paper scroll with handwritten text is pasted onto the wall and the floor with masking tape. The top of the scroll is about 12 feet high so that the scroll is too long for the wall and thus extends onto the floor. The shift in direction happens exactly at the climax of the poem. To the right of the scroll there is a ladder, which must be climbed in order to read the beginning of the poem. To the left of the scroll there is a chair. If performed, due to the wall, the reader stands with their back to the audience while reading. The chair is the only place where another audience member can experience more intimacy with the reader. This is the only viewpoint from which the reader’s face can be perceived, and there is only space for one person to sit there at a time. 

I have always been very passionate about mental health awareness. At the beginning of college, I found myself using interactive and immersive art as a tool to work through and communicate my experience of anxiety. I particularly wanted to create solutions for social anxiety— I loved how immersive and embodied media reflected the consuming nature of the illness and the playful and oftentimes collaborative spaces that interactivity affords.

While journaling in preparation for this piece, I made the sensitive discovery that my social anxiety was actually rooted in the internalized homophobia I had developed in my childhood. A history of suppressing my desire to explore non-conforming gender expression and social behavior led me to become very hyperaware and calculating in social spaces. Before this realization, I viewed my art practice as an outlet for my negative emotions. In actuality, my practice was not only a safe space to explore my feelings, but also the only channel through which I was expressing my genuine identity — performative, melodramatic, metaphorical, subversive, queer.

This realization almost felt like the resolution to a story. The role I was playing in anxiety advocacy felt complete. I also noticed this sort of work was very self-centered, lacked a bit of conceptual rigor, and allowed me no privacy. I was my art. I needed a new direction.

As an artful and anxious person, I have always felt that I communicate better through text and image than words. Poetry-based visual art is not the most normal — one might call it queer. This piece is a statement declaring my growth into my true identity and a dedication to exploring queer forms of art.

Read the full poem here.

Annotated Bibliography

Andersson, Erik. “Fine Science and Social Arts – on Common Grounds and Necessary Boundaries of Two Ways to Produce Meaning.” Art&Research, vol. 2, no. 2, 2009, is.muni.cz/el/1423/podzim2015/SAN263/um/Andersson_Fine_Science_and_Social_Arts_2009.pdf?lang=cs.

The short-lived online journal Art&Research is a great resource for material about how knowledge creation (research) may be possible with art-making. I think it could provide a bunch of readings for the next iteration of this class. This specific article was an incredibly interesting and smart reflection on the relationship between artistic and scientific practices. First, the author (?) conducted an experiment in which various people who identified as either artists or scientists were asked to conduct research and present their findings. Their processes were then analyzed for similarities and differences in research methods and modes of presentation. The main conclusion of the study was that the two types of people have research practices that are mostly identical except for the final mode of presentation. Thus there is a necessity to design a new institutional system in which artworks, given that their processes adhere to the same standard of reliability and validity as scientific data collection (there is methodological transparency, theoretical positioning, and critical and self-assessment), can be accepted as knowledge (the research product) as seriously as scientific papers are. This paper has paved a new path for me in my career: I want to create these systems, one in which there is not a binary of art or science.

Busch, Kathrin. “Artistic Research and the Poetics of Knowledge.” Art&Research, vol. 2, no. 2, 2009, laboratory.culturalinquiry.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/art-and-research.

This is another article from the Art&Research journal, which talks about different identities within art and research. Contemporary art making and discussion has become intimately entangled with theory in a way that seeks to create new knowledge and blur the lines between art and theory. This is because there is a difference between art with research, art about research, art as research, and art as science. Typically we think of research as measurable and factual using the scientific method, but art cannot necessarily exist within this framework; the author proposes a hybridization of art and research methods for the future creation of knowledge from art. This reading was another important step in helping me understand that my art practice does not need to be binary. I’ve been very caught up in trying to figure out whether I should pursue art or science in my career, and this also opened my eyes to the fact that art-based research is a field that exists — and that there is even an undefined niche within the field (designing an artistic/queer scientific method) in which I would have complete freedom because there is no precedent system.

Collins, Kathryn S., et al. “Poetry Therapy as a Tool of Cognitively Based Practice.” The Arts in Psychotherapy, vol. 33, no. 3, 2006, pp. 180–87. Crossref, doi:10.1016/j.aip.2005.11.002.

This paper is about the potential uses of poetry therapy in cognitively based psychotherapy practices. Cognitive therapy is a type of psychotherapy that assumes our understanding of ourselves and our experiences dictates how we think and behave, as opposed to our past experiences being the cause. Past experiences can shape how we feel about life in the present, but ultimately it is the conscious awareness of life that shapes our evolution. Poetry therapy encourages individuals with mental distress to use writing to change the negative understanding of life: it can help people think more realistically, improve problem solving skills and self-esteem, develop creativity, strengthen communication, and find new meaning. I found that the writings I did for this project, both the poem itself and the journal, were very therapeutic for me. Writing is a place where I am free to be as dramatic and excessive as I want, going off on tangents, making strange connections, and milking the metaphors. I wanted to understand more deeply why this is.

Foucault, Michel, and Jay Miskowiec. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, 1986, p. 22. Crossref, doi:10.2307/464648.

In this essay, Michel Foucault outlines his theory of heterotopias. Utopias are fundamentally unreal, so heterotopias are the closest we become to utopias. They are places where any kind of otherness is accepted. As you know from reading my poem, I use the motif of a garden. Interestingly, I came up with the garden metaphor in that first “note” I wrote to my partner much earlier than I read this essay, but I have discovered from this reading that the garden is a historic symbol for heterotopia. Foucault says the garden is a contradictory site which juxtaposes several spaces at once, creating diversity, fluidity, and acceptance. Once I learned this I made sure to emphasize the importance of the garden symbol in my poem. In my poem, the garden of Sometimes Always is a metaphysical space that attracts all the potential and past growth, chaos or entropy, in my life.

Gerber, Nancy, et al. “Arts-Based Research Approaches to Studying Mechanisms of Change in the Creative Arts Therapies.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 9, 2018. Crossref, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02076.

This contribution explores how a hybridity of art and research can be used to create mechanisms of change. In scientific research, mechanisms of change are scientifically-proven successful healing methods: the “causal and measurable variables that statistically account for the relationship between a particular therapeutic intervention and outcome”. This is the concept I have been searching for in the last few months to describe how I want to frame my art/research practice. I want to develop new mechanisms of change for identity work with immersive creative experiences. 

GoodTherapy Editor Team. “Poetry Therapy.” GoodTherapy, 5 Nov. 2016, www.goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/types/poetry-therapy.

Good Therapy is an informative therapy website which can help a person find a therapist and learn more about different therapy practices. This article gives a general overview of poetry therapy and describes a popular framework for poetry therapy which contextualizes the exercises that are explored in the paper from The Arts in Psychotherapy journal. There are three components to poetry therapy: prescriptive, in which a client is encouraged to react to a piece of writing presented by the therapist; creative, in which a client is encouraged to write their own pieces, guided by the therapist; and symbolic, in which the therapist helps the client explore how metaphor and storytelling can be used to describe the complexity of their reality. Reading this actually gave me a greater appreciation for my own therapist. We had a conversation the other day exploring how my queerness presents itself symbolically in other parts of my life, and I really appreciate that type of creative guidance. I’ve become a very abstract person as I’ve become more passionate about art making, and it’s very exciting to me when I can connect with another person in that sort of performative and excessive way.

Jones, Angela. “Queer Heterotopias: Homonormativity and the Future of Queerness.” Interalia: A Journal of Queer Studies, 2009. Crossref, doi:10.51897/interalia/pqbf4543.

This paper is the most important one I read for this project, and honestly probably my favorite paper I’ve ever read. It is so rich. Jones uses Foucault’s theory of heterotopia, Gilles Deleuze’s theory of nomadology, Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, and Donna Haraway’s theory of the cyborg to criticize how contemporary queer politics are creating a sort of homonormativity that is contradictory to the entire point of queerness. She explains how there cannot be a definition for queerness because the chaos of the queer body subverts the concept of definition, and that queer heterotopias are places of post-humanity. This paper helped me understand that the chaotic intensity of my existence and my feelings of post-humanity are not symptoms of my anxiety and something I have to work on, but manifestations of my queerness and something I should be confident about.

Lesage, Dieter. “Tegen Het Supplement - Enkele Beschouwingen over Artistiek Onderzoek.” Forum+, vol. 24, no. 1, 2017, pp. 4–11. Crossref, doi:10.5117/forum2017.1.lesa.

This is a very interesting argument by a Dutch philosophy professor about the role of writing in creative research practices. He particularly criticizes the expectation that in order to obtain a research degree in art, artists must still write a textual thesis alongside their creative contribution to bridge potential gaps between their own and their audience’s knowledge — as if the art doesn’t exist as an impressive enough form of expression. He believes that this expectation for artist “supplementality” is a “form of bureaucratic conformism” because it invalidates the artist’s identity as an artist by imposing a medium on them and perpetuates the capitalist scheme that art must be consumable or understandable to be valuable. Moreover, art as research is not a popular endeavor in general because research requires a lot of time, reflection, and questioning, and the popular understanding of art is that it is spontaneous and intuitive. 

It’s kind of ironic that I’m using this article as research for my project because I’m doing exactly what Lesage criticizes right now, contextualizing my work with text — but actually this argument is very relevant to these identity-related realizations I’ve been having. The way I see it, he’s describing the artist as researcher as queer. Requiring an artist to make sure their work is understood through text and to adhere to the timeline of institutionalized capitalism is exactly what queer people are conditioned to do within cishet society. We have learned to explain our existences and follow straight time to survive, often even subconsciously. But our queerness shouldn’t be dictated by how much cishets can understand us, nor should artists owe their audiences any explanation beyond their work itself. It helped me learn that needing more time is not a sign of weakness, and I don’t owe explanation about my choices to anyone.