Dr. Rebecca Duclos
Research Fellow, Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art
Faculty, Art History and Communications Studies, McGill University
I notice that the more I push, the less I will find. The less things will kind of accrue… When you’re researching something, you place constraints upon whatever it is that you are looking for and when you don’t, things tend to amble into view.
- Mark Soo 2009
There’s a certain point when you’re not sure exactly what you’re looking for; you uncover this, you uncover that, you have a bunch of things on the table and you say Oh my god – these things are clearly related. Also, it’s kind of extraordinary, because that is precisely the moment that—if it’s going to happen—you end up finding a different project than the one you thought you were doing.
- David Ross, 2009
This course is designed specifically for contemporary studio practitioners who continue to question and articulate a more complex relationship to the breadth, depth, and invigorating unpredictability of their material and conceptual investigations. As a course, the Compulsive Browse specifically contextualizes practices that challenge traditional notions of “research” by focusing on both historical and contemporary concepts, methods, and theoretical approaches that present and critique indeterminacy and dispersed attention, accrual and accident as potential features of a robust and rigorous practice. In short, through a purposefully broad exposure to a diverse and often seemingly disconnected assemblage of sources and practices, this course looks at forms of “looking away” and “looking awry” as equally viable research models for artistic production.
In The Compulsive Browse, students will be specifically exposed to materials and engagements that hover around key processual concepts such as distraction and apperception; aesthetic systems, kinaesthetic analogies, and involuntary associations; unconscious scanning, de-differentiation, and postures of the peripheral; digressive, dematerialized, indirect, vague, and inattentive vision; ideas of parataxis, synthesis, syncretism, and agglutinatation. From the spatial realm to the discursive arena, notions of chance and contingency, indeterminacy and dissipation have continuously re-appeared within discussions of aesthetic practice and cultural critique. This course aims to provide students with possible vocabularies and methods with which to describe, proscribe, and re-inscribe aspects of their particular research postures within a larger contextual arena. Through collective and individual work, this course attempts to provide access to an array of materials and collegial responses that may usefully and uniquely (to each individual) be used to activate a dynamic and responsive studio practice.
Course
The Compulsive Browse: Field Conditions for Artistic Research
A course for students in the MFA in Studio Arts program at Concordia University
ASEM 644V, Winter 2011
Thursdays 16:00-18:00, VA-433
Dr. Rebecca Duclos
Research Fellow, Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art
Faculty, Art History and Communications Studies, McGill University
This course is designed specifically for contemporary studio practitioners who continue to question and articulate a more complex relationship to the breadth, depth, and invigorating unpredictability of their material and conceptual investigations. As a course, the Compulsive Browse specifically contextualizes practices that challenge traditional notions of “research” by focusing on both historical and contemporary concepts, methods, and theoretical approaches that present and critique indeterminacy and dispersed attention, accrual and accident as potential features of a robust and rigorous practice. In short, through a purposefully broad exposure to a diverse and often seemingly disconnected assemblage of sources and practices, this course looks at forms of “looking away” and “looking awry” as equally viable research models for artistic production.
In The Compulsive Browse, students will be specifically exposed to materials and engagements that hover around key processual concepts such as distraction and apperception; aesthetic systems, kinaesthetic analogies, and involuntary associations; unconscious scanning, de-differentiation, and postures of the peripheral; digressive, dematerialized, indirect, vague, and inattentive vision; ideas of parataxis, synthesis, syncretism, and agglutinatation. From the spatial realm to the discursive arena, notions of chance and contingency, indeterminacy and dissipation have continuously re-appeared within discussions of aesthetic practice and cultural critique. This course aims to provide students with possible vocabularies and methods with which to describe, proscribe, and re-inscribe aspects of their particular research postures within a larger contextual arena. Through collective and individual work, this course attempts to provide access to an array of materials and collegial responses that may usefully and uniquely (to each individual) be used to activate a dynamic and responsive studio practice.