Introduction – Is this Enough?

Researchers are routinely asked to legitimate their claims to knowing, knowing more, or knowing differently, and this demand is particularly acute in the current climate of research audits.1 How do artistic and practice based researchers address themselves to this injunction, and what material and conceptual resources do they mobilize? Is it enough to follow the maxim that ‘‘‘getting smarter about theory/practice issues valorizes practice’’’?2

It seems to us that such questions are of pressing importance, and that practice based research projects can and do offer new ways of conceptualising legitimacy, sufficiency and adequacy. However, for a student beginning a doctoral practice based research project, there is no clear body of work which deals with validity in interesting and inventive ways, with the consequence that researchers may feel answerable to criteria developed to serve other disciplines. In some fields, criteria to ensure robustness of research are translated into seemingly straightforward anxieties about quantity. For example, ‘have I done enough interviews?’ has long been a question asked by qualitative social researchers unsure of the adequacy of their claims in terms of their fieldwork encounters. In this case, the way in which a researcher tackles the question of sample size reveals the extent to which their epistemological and methodological concerns are entwined, and how their project can be assessed on these grounds according to the norms of the discipline. Issues of quantity cast a shadow over research in the humanities, too. Although not expressed in the language of sampling, the robustness of research is hardly indifferent to, for example, the number of cases/artworks/archival records which have been engaged in a project. Another form of validation which has permeated many fields in both the humanities and the social sciences is that offered by the foregrounding of forms of reflexivity. The question in this case might be ‘how reflexive must my research be?’, or ‘when and how should I acknowledge my position relative to my subject matter?’. This has been partially taken up as reflective practice in some research fields, such as anthropology. With this in mind, we ask how are artistic and practice based researchers forging their own claims to legitimacy, to whom, and with what (possibly transformed) outcomes? Can practice based research offer inventive possibilities for broader debates or new terminologies, protocols, and methods?

In thematising this issue around the term ‘validity’, we intend to launch a discussion around these issues, rather than promoting any specific formula which would provide a comprehensive response to the justificatory culture within which much research is now embedded. Readers seeking anything approaching guidance on the equivalent of sample size will be disappointed. Rather, following the title of the article by Patti Lather which stimulated our first editorial discussion and the call for papers, we wish to pose the term validity as a ‘fertile obsession’ which acts as an ‘incitement to discourse’.3 In this sense, validity is one of a whole set of terms around which theories, opinions and affects of legitimacy may productively gather and be compared. Lather herself suggests an active redirection of the word validity, seeking to prise it from the grip of ‘doing the police in different voices’ by coming up with a schema which is not itself given total authority. Thus, her ‘Transgressive Validity Check List’ is qualified by the subtitle ‘A Simulacrum’.4 It includes ‘ironic validity’, ‘paralogical validity’, ‘rhizomatic validity’, and ‘voluptuous validity’ – with the last of these characterising research which ‘goes too far towards disruptive excess, leaky, runaway, risky practice’.5

As they wrangle with how and why to speak about their own claims of knowing and feeling through research, many of the contributors here take up Lather’s proposals. However what emerges from this set of textual, visual and multimedia offerings is the sheer complexity of the task of finding the correct terms (and, indeed, people and places) to validate a wide range of undertakings, as well as the temporal contingencies of justification (i.e. when can and/or must legitimation take place?). The cover itself has been designed by an artist who tackles the validation mechanisms of historical classification systems through artistic practice. The contributions which follow have been grouped very broadly along the following lines.

In our first grouping (1–4), we gather a set of pieces which address who may be granted a voice or agency to validate, and the non-standard actors who might exist – or, indeed, be imagined – to challenge the norms of this validation. We begin, therefore, with an article which reflects on the role of students who are given the responsibility for art acquisitions in two university museums. Next, the translator is offered as a persona with the agency to transform the validation of the conventional encounter with a text, followed by an encounter with the multiple voices which may (or may not) be claiming authority as a photographer attempts to construct autobiography from scraps of contradictory evidence found in abandoned buildings in Beirut. A contribution presented as the response to an exchange between a group of Expressionist architects begins here (4), with its crystalline manifestation scattered in between the remaining articles in this issue (and in this way, perhaps, also questions our editorial authority to impose systematic order).

Attempts to forge interdisciplinary encounters and to use them as a way of making claims for research frame our second set of contributions (5–7), beginning with a proposal which involves bringing together engineering and artistic practice in the service of music visualization. Topology and fiction in the work of Pierre Huyghe is explored in the next contribution, which asks to what extent speculative renditions of knowledge help resist disciplinary conventions, and to what extent they signify a reluctance to synthesize information. Lastly, we are presented with a project which seeks to produce empathy between human and non-human forms, resulting in an artwork whose legitimacy is presented here as grounded in its interdisciplinary engagements.

The third group (8–13) of contributors all confront, in one way or another, the status of knowledge including the repercussions of being caught up in various affective atmospheres of knowing. How can old sketchbooks, which far precede current research problems, and are replete with attunements, and which are more about feeling than thinking, be granted an epistemologically credible status? Can bricolage be used as a way of unsettling colonial ways of knowing and their translations in ethnographic displays? What makes a painting a valid means of public expression? Questions of how we are embodied by knowledge, or embody it, are addressed in various modes by contributors. These articles also consider how knowledge can be undone, communicated and shared with others – beyond individual bodies, for example, through entanglements with the discipline of linguistics. Another article thinks through naming as a way of knowing and omitting, using the work of artist Fari Shams as a resource for thinking through the adequacy of description. The section ends with a case for new criteria by which a form of practice – community theatre – might be evaluated, recognising the value of intervening in protocols for assessing the benefits of research.

Many of our contributors work within institutional contexts which have a major impact on the work produced. We can think immediately of those working in the university sector where validity of research may be mediated by publication in peer reviewed journals, and the debates about the adequacy of this form for practice based work. However, for the next set of contributions (14–16) organizational constraints or opportunities are crucial to understanding the way in which research has unfolded. This might be a relationship to an educational framework or university, or a gallery which enables connections to be forged in new systems of classification, or a fictional museum which yields itself up for a sonic investigation to be experienced aurally, as an audio guide.

One of the conventions of art education is to invoke the idea (whether devotedly, critically, ambivalently) of ‘truth to materials’. Our final section (17–19) returns to the idea of the affordances of materials in making claims to knowing and specifically a connection with the time of making/researching/legitimating. First, we are offered an experience which unfolds over time and space in a moving image work that reflects on the learning process of making shoes with salmon skin. The steady unfolding of time also plays a part in a contribution which addresses vagueness and indeterminacy by presenting a set of fragments of text and image, which will be augmented by other videos to be posted to the platform between this issue and the launch of Issue 3. Material fragments are matched by textual episodes in another contribution in the form of a letter. This was written to one of the editors as a continuation of a doctoral project on dialogue, but it further asks how validity criteria might be forged of materials (for instance that of cider) within which we might have ‘microbial kin’.

To close, in an audio recording in which she narrates her professional and intellectual journey, Patti Lather herself offers some thoughts on how ‘validity has been very very good to me’ over her career. ‘Our best friend is the field’, she conjectures, because faced with a responsibility to respondants, as she was in her project on women and AIDS, she had to move from ‘stumbling and bumbling’ to figuring out ways of making their stories and experiences count. The recording begins with a manifesto like formulation which Lather proposes as a jumping off point for current investigations of validity.

We wish to displace any assumption that investigating claims to validity, and legitimation practices more generally, should render anything we might do in artistic and practice based research as closed forms of ‘information’. Rather, we notice the ways in which indeterminacy, unpredictability and contingency have so often been generative to the projects and outputs published here. Beyond these qualities, many of the contributions published in this issue of OAR both formulate and rigorously defend new forms of knowing, doing, and arguing, such that the aforementioned doctoral student embarking on a research project might be able to find in these very pages the beginning of that body of work, one that deals with validity in inventive ways consistent with practice based research.

1. Marilyn Strathern, Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy (London: Routledge, 2001).
2. Patti Lather, ‘Fertile Obsession: Validity After Poststructuralism’ The Sociological Quarterly. 34: 4 (1993): 674.
3. Idem, 673.
4. Idem, 686.
5. Idem, 685-6.