Initiating Change
Interrogating Agency: Participatory Art as Action Research among Carpet-weavers in Northern Iran
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Golnesa Rezanezhad Pishkhani
This paper will build on the ongoing participatory art practice and the ethnography conducted among female carpet weavers in Northern Iran. In the first part of the paper, the agency of artisans and carpets will be examined by considering the intersection of age, gender and class. But not restricted to it: under certain criteria, the state is facilitating artisans, with loans and insurances, in order to persuade them to weave and preserve their weaving methods and motifs. The state project of preservation of carpet-weaving as a "national cultural heritage" will be scrutinized to address the question of how are the agency of persons and things considered or shaped behind a certain kind of intentionality (Gell 1998)? In the second part, I will explain the method of participatory art as an action research to situate the project in contemporary art’s contextual, situational and communal nature. Thus, the project’s processes brings the matter of agency into open, stimulate discussion and reinterpretation among artist, artisans and third parties (like carpet dealers, customers and visitors in national and international spaces). Subsequently, it raises the important ethical dimension of the participatory art with the intervention in the aesthetic forms of the female artisans. Where should the boundaries between the artist as a creator, and the artist as a participant be established?
Visualization of Mistake in Creative Process: Learning through Failure in Artistic Education
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Carmen González
The social image of the artist has been constructed through a paradigm of success, decision-making capacity, and creative force. This stereotype is supported by the visualization of the creative process in documentaries about artists like The Mystery Picasso (Henri-Georges Clouzot) or about artists painting in moments of great intensity as the case of Jackson Pollock's images. This construction, so detached from the true creative process full of doubts and failures, limits the resistance to the frustration of art students who begin their studies with the aspiration of great achievements in moments of inspiration. However, other art documentaries are rich in examples that approximate the true nature of creation by understanding the material with which artists work based on trial and error. The visualization and commentary of these examples are important to achieve adequate motivation when facing new and complex techniques that require a long training process and great involvement, such as painting. In my paper, I will comment some moments of audiovisual documents about artists working and failing: Rivers and Tides on the work of Andy Goldsworthy, directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer or El sol del membrillo on Antonio López, directed by Victor Erice.
A Epistemic Foundation for Artistic Research
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Pedro Alegria
Which conception of research can we employ that is not derived from a comparison between art and science? Science is our paradigmatic cognitive endeavor. But this does not have to mean that art is deficient in this respect. And it certainly does not mean that science has exclusive authority over the meaning and use of the term “research”. In this article I will try to defend, first, that there is a sense in which research is not only possible but desirable in art, second, that this desirability is not limited to bureaucratic demands, third, that artistic research is a tool for empowering the artist if it is done within a set of parameters that gives it some epistemic value, and, lastly, the epistemic value of the results is derived from the concept of exemplify ability as a retriever of value in a dense universe of artistic possibilities.
