Traces, a confrontation with exhibitionary conventions. Reflections on a gradual and tentative research-exhibition

Jasper Delbecke

A note to the reader

This second contribution to COLLATERAL deals with assumptions and conventions artists are confronted with when opting for an exhibition to present their artistic research. Whereas my previous contribution to COLLATERAL drew on theoretical discussions to explore seminal examples of art, the present contribution works the other way around. The research-exhibition Traces (BLANCO, Ghent, 2024), initiated and conceptualized by Brussels-based artist Sébastien Conard, serves in the following text as a point of departure to detect potential obstacles, issues and questions when it comes to the exhibition as a medium or tool to conduct and present artistic research.

The following text continues my quest for a novel conceptualization of the exhibition-as-research as a model for artistic research. This endeavour, as explained in “Reimagining the Exhibition-as-Research for Artistic Research. Insights from the Essay Form” (2024), is incited by attempts to assess, value and recognise what is developed through and presented in an exhibition as distinctive and full-fledged forms of knowledge to make this epistemological process more direct and more emphatic. One can discern two fields where these (often scholarly) efforts to acknowledge the exhibition as a form of knowledge have risen to prominence over the last twenty years. Firstly, in the field of visual arts predominantly curators and art scholars with a curatorial practice have been reflecting on diverting exhibition formats questioning assumptions and conventions of standardised exhibitions. In what is often referred to as the “curatorial turn” (O’Neill, 2011), those shaping the discourse on these innovative exhibition-making practices aim to emphasise the value of the collaborative aspects of curatorial work. Secondly, a comparable trend can be observed in academia, as researchers from various disciplines mobilise exhibitions as a form of science communication. Thus, aligned with the so-called curatorial turn, similar desires to employ the ‘exhibition-as-research’ (Bjerregaard, 2020) surface in the context of the university so as to display knowledge-in-the-making instead of resorting to a presentational mode of “just” communicating research results.

This desire to incorporate into an exhibition the tentative and process-oriented character of an epistemic process sheds an interesting light on the meaning and the role of the exhibition as a medium in a more recent but – by now – fairly established field: the field of artistic research. Artists conducting artistic research, typically working towards obtaining a doctoral degree, are confronted with a series of assumptions from the fields of visual arts and academia when it comes to the role and position of the exhibition. My experience of attending Traces on almost a daily basis, witnessing the expansion of this “gradual and tentative research exhibition”, and the conversations I had with Sébastien Conard while collaborating on his exhibition underpin my reflections and arguments below.

Traces – a gradual and tentative research exhibition (2024)

The premise of Traces was an invitation by Sébastien Conard to 29 artists to respond to the notion of “trace” by proposing an artwork to be displayed or doing an artistic intervention in the exhibition space. Over two weeks, each day, three artists brought a work or a series of works to the space to be hung or set up in the lecture hall of the former Faculty of Veterinary Medicine in Ghent. Thus, Traces explores the trace by spreading contributions and interventions throughout the exhibition time, allowing for a continuous build-up.

A trace is a testament to something. A residue – sometimes desired, sometimes unwanted – of an event, action or utterance. Not only time but also (un)conscious interventions change, emphasise or blur traces. Conard’s Traces takes this unruly process of the trace as the starting point for its research exhibition. The idiosyncratic process of the trace is made a structuring part of how the exhibition is constructed and how the notion of the trace is explored. Upon opening, Traces did not present a fixed collection of illustrations or reflections on the trace. Only three works – by Conard, Colette Broeckaert and Veva Leye – were on display on the opening day. Day by day, three artists entered the space and made their contribution by responding to what was present in the lecture hall of the former Faculty of Veterinary Medicine. This accumulation of contributed artworks acts as a method of grasping the trace – never conclusively, only ever for a moment. Traces attempts to transform the exhibition space into a place where the investigation of the trace is carried out with others and where the different stages of this investigation are also displayed. Through the gradual encroachment of visual and textual work and interventions, Traces attempts to grasp the trace in its playfulness, unruliness and complexity.

Traces was initiated in the context of Conard’s ongoing research in the arts titled Timely Traces/Traces of Time: An Anarchaeology of Graphisations. In this project on the graphic trace, Conard draws amongst others on Derrida’s interpretation of the trace as developed in his early works L’écriture et la différence and De la grammatologie, both published in 1967. In his philosophy of deconstruction, Derrida argues that every “sign” (word, concept, idea) carries a “trace” within it that refers to what the sign is not. This logic destabilises the sign’s meaning and shows how meaning always depends on context and difference. Therefore, as Derrida states, the trace cannot be reduced to the sign, nor can it ever be converted back into a sign. Derrida’s notion of the trace informs Conard’s artistic practice of drawing in which, as he writes, “the act of drawing and speaking with images leads to a necessary reinvestigation of the age-old traditions of writing/drawing and the book, and the contemporary conditions of telling, showing, and revealing” (Conard, 2021, n. pag.). In addition to Derrida, the works of Carlo Ginzberg, Sigmund Freud, Giorgio Agamben, Claire Lispector, and Jacques Lacan serve as theoretical coordinates in this ongoing research.

Before the research-exhibition Traces, Conard developed a.o. Seven Sins (2022-2023), a series of painted posters, and Studio Accrochage (2023), a fragmented charcoal ‘frieze’ (try-out frottage), in which Conard experiments with the resizing, découpage, montage, transmediation, decolouring and recolouring of his paintings and drawings. As performed over two days in his studio, Conard responded in Studio Accrochage to the feedback from strangers and acquaintances and implemented their input as part of a methodology to put photocopies, prints, graphite and charcoal drawings in different constellations. Conard formulated the central artistic inquiry of this project as follows: “left without their cause, and stripped of their context of appearance, what kind of treatments can bring these traces (back) to (another) visual ‘life’, i.e., a form of aesthetic quality?” (2023, n. pag.). In retrospect, with its exchange between Conard and the visitors of his atelier, Studio Accrochage foreshadowed the social dynamic and the transformation of the exhibition space that took place in Traces.

At the start of Traces, my role was not clearly defined. While being present in the space, witnessing Conard helping other artists to put their artworks on the walls, and joining in their conversations, my position gradually became clearer (at least for myself). Often pushed to the ridge of the space, due to the practical actions taking place when setting up an exhibition, I found myself in a position I was increasingly familiar and comfortable with, although I had not been in it for several years. When sitting at the table on the old stage of the former lecture hall of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, echoes from my background and former practice as a dramaturg in theatre came to me. As a Fremdkörper amongst these artists skilled in painting, photography, poetry, drawing and installations, I had little to add and contribute when it came to the notion of “trace” (Conard’s field of expertise) or the works put on display (the expertise of the other artists). Finding myself again in the margin of the space where the activity – the gradual building of an exhibition – takes place, I was thrown back to my time as an active theatre dramaturg, sitting and taking notes in the back or on the side of the rehearsal space. This déjà vu clarified and determined how I could read what was taking place: from a dramaturg’s perspective, I could account for those theatrical and performative elements shaping the space and the visitors’ experience of the works shown. Being involved in Traces, I recognized that I engage with the challenges encountered in and by Traces from the perspective and gaze of a theatre scholar and a dramaturg, not as an artist nor as an expert on Derrida or the notion of the trace.

On the issue of “research”

The first question that arose at the start of Traces, announced as a research-exhibition, concerned the meaning and interpretation of “research”. How to understand the descriptor “research” as it informs and takes shape in this “research-exhibition”? Curator and theorist Simon Sheikh (2013) points out how research underpins many contemporary artworks. In response to the ubiquitous use of research in the arts, and more specifically in artistic research, Sheikh distinguishes two notions of research, drawing on the translation of the English word “research” into French and German as either recherché or Forschung. Recherché is connoted to the work of a journalist: checking facts, looking for sources confirming those facts, and finding an angle to tell the story. Applied to the arts, such a form of recherché means a process of looking for material to create and experiment with. As Sheikh stresses, this form of research-as-recherché is “the most widespread form of research” in artistic research, curatorial works and the arts in general, “to the point of being presupposed as an almost unquestioned tradition, which is perhaps precisely why it receives so little attention” (2013: 36).

Opposed to recherché, Sheikh also explores the notion of Forschung, implying a scientific rather than a journalistic research approach. Research-as-Forschung “uses specific methods of investigation”, “operates with hypotheses and propositions to be tested” and proposes a thesis “to be proven, discarded or modified depending on the results of the research” (2013: 37). So, as Sheikh concludes, “unlike recherché, which treats its findings as facts, Forschung treats them as uncertainties and concepts that need to be defined and may contradict the pre-emptive thesis about them” (ibid). Distinguishing these two types of research, Sheikh signals that almost any exhibition employs research-as-recherché to various extents. But not all exhibitions can be thought of as research-as-Forschung. Do exhibitions have a thesis or proposition to be proven or disproven? Radicalising this query and presuming that an exhibition can have a thesis to be examined, Sheikh wonders whether “this [would] lead to the exhibition presenting its own failure? Furthermore, would this lead to a questioning of its research method and the transformation of curatorial process and institutional practices” (2013: 39)?

Following Sheikh’s analysis, Traces can be considered an exhibition in which research takes the form of Forschung. A concrete thesis, to be proven or disproven, was not explicitly communicated by Conard when inviting artists, nor was it made apparent in the exhibition. However, although not conceptualised from a scientific point of view, Traces did have a well-defined method: the directive to the invited artists to relate freely and creatively to the notion of “trace” by responding with and through an artwork (or artworks) of their own. Despite its simplicity, directness and non-academic tone, this invitation determined the scenario through which the exhibition would take shape, the input of the participating artists and the lens through which the space and the artworks would be perceived. Following Sheikh’s notion of research-as-Forschung, we could describe Conard’s choice to have three artists add something new every day for two weeks as a concrete research plan (an aspect of research funding application so damned by researchers, and a term that Conard would resist).

The spatial aspect of Traces adds to considering Conard’s project in terms of research-as-Forschung. The investigative work of research-as-recherché involves enclosing material in archives, books or the internet. As Sheikh points out, the scientific model of research-as-Forschung in contrast implies “the spatial production of specific sites for research” (2013: 38). Laboratories, hospitals, workshops and ateliers aren’t spaces where research is presented but spaces where research is conducted, mediated and enacted. The museum and the gallery space have not traditionally been understood and experienced as spaces where such activities take place. However, these activities do take place in BLANCO. Echoes from the former usage of the lecture hall returned during Traces. The exhibition space became, for two weeks, a site for doing research, more than a mere space for presenting research results. Each work gradually added to the accumulating collection led to conversations between Conard and the contributing artists. Ideas and perspectives were exchanged, discussed and questioned. The works on display became arguments or points of reference on what is at stake in projects such as initiated by Conard. Traces therefore, being proposed as a research-exhibition, corresponds with the interpretation Sheikh gave to the term. The exhibition space is

not only to be thought of as a form of mediation of research but also as a site for carrying out this research, a place for enacted research. Research here is not only that which becomes before realisation but also that which is realised throughout actualisation. […] the research exhibition is not only a vehicle for the presentation of research but also a site for ongoing research around the formats and thematic concerns of the exhibition. (2013: 40)

The research-exhibition, from gallery space to exhibition lab

The investigative nature of Traces resides in the collaborative research with other artists through artworks and artistic interventions at the behest of Conard’s invitation. This experiment quickly provided a confrontation with the assumptions and expectations about what an exhibition is or should be. In its most prevalent form, the exhibition is a public event that seeks to welcome audiences. Visitors expect to find and see a carefully conceived and constructed collection of artworks. What is put on display is assumed to be the summit of a substantial period of research and preparation. Visitors become disciplined bodies, expected to experience and absorb the works in a solitary and contemplative mode. Doing so, one performs what Carol Duncan calls “the civilizing ritual” (1995) of the exhibition visit, in which values and beliefs are conveyed through specific scenarios. However, a visit to a research-exhibition, such as Conard’s Traces, is not consistent with these scenarios.

A collision comes from the purpose and methods underpinning Conard’s project. Those taking the two staircases through the dusty hall of the former Faculty of Veterinary Medicine arrived in a space full of activity (especially in the first week of Traces). The exhibition was still under construction. One found Conard and other artists busy trying to find a location to place their artwork. Others (like me) were drinking coffee or tea and still others were clarifying why they had selected artwork x instead of artwork y in response to Conard’s invitation. As a public space, BLANCO was transformed by Traces into a social space, mostly inhabited by the contributing artists and by friends and acquaintances of Conard (often these categories of visitors overlapped). The artworks proposed by the 29 artists became the subject of conversations amongst those present in BLANCO.

Considering how this social exchange determines Traces, one could argue that the exhibition becomes a semi-public space where everybody is welcome to enter (something a lot of strangers did), but only those involved in the project or who know Conard’s research can grasp what is at stake here (but cynical art critics might argue that that is the case for many contemporary art exhibitions). Even if the semi-public nature of an exhibition goes against the spirit that exhibitions should and can be accessible to everyone, the shift from a public to a semi-public space also offers opportunities, especially within artistic research. For Conard and the participating artists, thinking of such an exhibition project as a semi-public event takes away the pressure of showing a coherent collection of works, in which outsiders from various backgrounds can read and grasp what is shown (in the case of Traces, perspectives on “traces”). In the absence of such a burden, one can accommodate and foster the social moments where ideas and comments are shared and decisions taken earlier can be questioned and, if necessary, altered. For example, after one day participating artist Jelle Martens removed one of his artworks. Veva Leye expressed her scepticism on how Conard repositioned her work after a couple of days. Lore Smolders’ work travelled a couple of times through the exhibition space. This approach corresponds to the semi-public character of a laboratory or a workshop at a university. On the intersection of artistic research and public display, Traces, as a research-exhibition, thus expands the traditional remit of a gallery space.

This potentiality is also recognized by curator and art scholar Joasia Krysa (2020), who introduces the term ‘exhibition lab’ for “a complex site of mediation, where research and practice come together and where phenomena are excavated or constructed for their underlying discursive and non-discursive layers” (2020: 75). In this model of the exhibition lab, “research questions are not necessarily answered but recombined in the very act of curating and making research public, thus emphasising the actualisation of experimental forms” (ibid). The 29 participating artists inscribed themselves in such a project in which their artworks served as an entry point to discuss “traces” as a concept. In this context, the individual artwork no longer has the idealized and romanticized status of an autonomous artwork.

Inferences for Artistic Research

What Conard developed gradually and tentatively – to use Traces’ subtitle – is one possible interpretation of a research-exhibition, in which research does not refer to the mere collecting of source material (research-as-recherché) but to a set of predetermined methods to tackle the “trace” as subject matter through artistic strategies and interventions. The aim of the project was never – just as my writing here – to fix the research-exhibition as productive and successful form of doing and presenting artistic research. However, being an attentive observer in BLANCO, listening to the thoughts and questions posed by visitors, contributing artists and Conard, I found two elements worth considering for and in artistic research.

A first inference results from the social and collaborative features of Traces as a research-exhibition. How this approach destabilized common-sense ideas of the exhibition as form also impacts the way the hosting institutions of artistic research (universities, art schools) support the works-in-development of artists doing a doctorate in the arts. As outlined earlier, the durational and social characteristics of Traces are responsible for making the project fertile and enriching. Doing the act of exhibiting together at a pace that suited Conard and the artists arriving each day was decisive. Stretching the initiative over two weeks ensured that there was enough time for reflection, dialogue, revisions, concerns and doubts. Most host institutions supporting artistic research put exhibition spaces at the disposal of their artistic researchers. However, as in the arts in general, the necessary financial means are (all too) often limited (or wholly lacking) to take the necessary time and space, as Conard did with Traces. If research departments of medicine, engineering or chemistry can apply for funding to finance the material and staff to do experiments in a laboratory or workshop, why is this so difficult for those involved in artistic research? The same space, time and means should be made available by host institutions and external funding organisations for artists to experiment and test their research. And a related issue is the need to recognize and value (financially) the contributions of other artists. The doctoral programs in the arts tend to be centred around the false and romanticized idea of the autonomous artist as the inventor of their unique universe. Recent tendencies and shifts in the arts have illustrated that artistic practices are very often practised in dialogue with those of others. This new reality in the arts necessitates leaving academia’s focus (obsession?) with individual (artistic) research trajectories and looking for ways to support and institutionalize collaborative practices and projects.

A second inference concerns what an artist can or may reveal about their research-as-Forschung. Thinking research in terms of scientific models and methods, as Sheikh did in his discussion of research-as-Forschung, raises the question how to include failures and doubts, as Sheikh posited earlier in this text? And if so, what do you communicate as an artist and to whom? This reservation expressed by Sheikh might seem futile but is essential when it comes to ongoing debates on the academization of the artist and the formatting of artistic research into standardized models of doing research according to “successful” scientific methods. Following Sheikh’s analysis, failure, mistakes, doubts and unforeseen side-effects, inherent to conducting research, urge to revisit earlier assumptions and adapt choices to new situations.  This volatile aspect of the research practice might be something artistic research can incorporate instead of effacing, neglecting or minimizing it as other disciplines might be tempted to do because it does not match with common sense ideas of science.

Here lies the possibility for artistic research to disconnect from the existing assumptions, frustrations and dismissive attitudes revolving around artistic research. The recurrent critiques and debates concern the way the methods, criteria and forms of communication of “real Science” are imposed upon artistic research. Sheikh’s use of research-as-Forschung, and the way I elaborate on his idea in this text, might seem to support these existing assumptions. However, as my exchange of ideas with Conard during and after Traces unfolded, the unruly character of creating, doing and sharing art resists such imposition from traditional science. As Conard attests, beside the social activities going on, there were many moments when he was alone in BLANCO. The peace and calm provided moments of not-knowing. The time and space to wonder at length on what was put up that day often resulted in dwelling and reflecting rather than the quick acquisition of insights (which is expected of a scientific method of enquiry anyway). Contemporary science follows the logic and demand of productivity, inventiveness and the speedy generation of research results to be capitalized. The time and space which was taken in Traces to wait for “things” – ideas, perspectives, constellations – illustrates how claiming such time and space makes artistic research distinct. Safeguarding that space must therefore be preserved and protected.

As I contend, this unpredictability of doing research provides opportunities for artists to find creative ways to embed this in the modes of presenting their research, be it in an exhibition, performance or publication. In the case of Traces, Conard recognized how, when looking back at the project, he could have reflected more carefully on a form to give visitors a more apt glimpse of the conversations accompanying the gradual additions of artworks. I think the semi-public character of such a research-exhibition, freed of the burden of reaching large audiences, might be a productive context to create such new forms. This shift from a public to a semi-public space is interesting to observe when keeping in mind the genealogy of today’s public museums. The latter stems from a museum tradition starting at the end of the nineteenth century rooted in the desire and ambition to grant various demographic layers in society access to nations’ exhaustive art and heritage collections. This “birth of the museum”, to use the title of Tony Bennett’s (1995) seminal study on the history of public museums, was part of the competition between European nations in that era. The self-evidently public character of museums and exhibitions makes us forget though that the exhibition practices that foreshadowed the later museum had a semi-public to private character. The longstanding traditions of the cabinet of curiosity and the Wunderkammer, the historical precedents of the museum, stem from private collections to be shown to closed (and elitist) circles.

How, centuries ago, the owner of these collections could unpack a universe of ideas and images when drawing connections between various objects is, as I argue, seminal to take into account when it comes to opening up personal artistic research to an audience of laymen. Recounting these historical precedents reminds us how subjective views on a constellation of objects were presented to the audience, taking pleasure from being immersed in the owner’s universe. In the context of a modern public museum, such interventions are (all too) often purely didactic and fix meaning to objects. Considering the way contemporary art practices and artistic research are shaking up our twentieth-century ideas of the museum and exhibition space, the history of the museum might serve as a source of inspiration. As illustrated by a project such as Traces, contemporary art practices do instigate not only new conceptions of the exhibition but also new rituals, using Duncan’s phrasing, to visit and experience what is shown.

Coda: Metabolizing knowledge in the research-exhibition

In Disordered Attention. How We Look at Art and Performance Today (2024), Claire Bishop is calling for new ways to engage visitors. Bishop’s call responds to research-based forms of arts that have been gaining prominence and dominance since the turn of the millennium. This popular genre relies on a lot of text material and images and has evolved in tandem with changes in information delivery due to the arrival of the internet, followed by social and digital media platforms. The responsibility to distil meaning from exhibitions showing large amounts of archival material, texts and documentary footage is delegated to the individual visitor. The audience itself has to connect the dots. But in light of the ways in which we skim and scan Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube for information, the artistic strategies this dominant model of art we have relied on for over two decades can, as Bishop argues, be called into question because they overlap with how knowledge today is produced, extracted, disseminated and consumed: in overloads. As Bishop adds, the initial incentives of many of these research-based artworks and projects came from a critical engagement with notions such as “Truth and “Reality”. Archival research put on display was considered a way to expose how marginal voices were suppressed and establish counter-histories and -narratives incited by feminist, queer or decolonial perspectives. However, Bishop warns, these strategies have equally been adopted and used by right-wing groups to develop their own counter-histories and -narratives.

Instead of seeking refuge in academic rigor and political purity, Bishop claims artistic research “can push against the limits of research” to get out of today’s crux which research-based artists might find themselves in by “allowing personal narratives” to challenge “an objective relationship to truth via fiction and fabulation” and to present this “in aesthetic forms that exceed the merely informative” (2024: 68). Inspired by the works of Walid Raad, Anna Boghiguian and Mark Lecky, Bishop sees a potential pathway in “metabolizing knowledge” in and through artworks. As opposed to the growing impact of AI-driven search machines or academic criteria of rigor, artists can make a difference by “asserting and embracing artistic mediation” (74). Metabolized knowledge has gone through the artist’s body, is and has to be lived. It values richly sensorial encounters with all kinds of material and sees the foregrounding of the affective investments in subjects as poetic surplus. Doing so, as Bishop concludes, “artists show that interpretative syntheses need not be incompatible with a decentered subject and that an unforgettable story-image can also be a subversive counter-history – packing all the more punch because artfully and engagingly presented” (ibid).

With an artistic practice rooted in drawing and the history of comics, one would not associate Conard’s work with the examples Bishop built her analyses on. Nonetheless, her call to incorporate how an artist metabolizes the forms of knowledge they have tasted and consumed for and in an artwork is relevant for all types of artistic research. Looking at projects such as Traces through the lens of “metabolized knowledge” can invite artists to reflect on which aspects of the artistic process in preparation for the presentation of their work can be shown and how this could happen. Reflecting on Traces, Conard admits how he underestimated the practicalities such project demanded and the energy that it consumed. As Conard wrote me in one of his long meandering WhatsApp messages: “Basically, you wish for a model where you can do all those things in a smooth, ‘natural’ way without feeling like you are artificially displaying your studio ‘as work’”.

Acknowledgements

A heartfelt thank you to Sébastien Conard for including me in Traces and the stimulating conversations before, during and after the project.

Works cited: