Non-Syllabus

Why this is not quite a syllabus

A syllabus is a promise made in advance about what will hopefully have happened during and after the course. It lists objectives and outcomes, and those are the part of teaching that assumes we already know where you are going. For most work, this is fine and even kind. For this work on apophatic art practice and research, it is the first thing we have to set down. It does not mean we begin with nothing, and it does also not mean, we won’t be providing guidance. We will, and this document is one of the starting points.

This document tells you what conditions we are making, what we will be moving through, and how we intend to treat one another when the making gets difficult. It does not tell you what you will learn, because we do not know, and because deciding in advance would foreclose most of what is interesting.

Think of it less as a contract and more as a weather report for a coastline you have not visited. Here is what the light usually does in June. Here is where it gets slippery. Bring boots.

What we are not going to do

• We are not going to define apophatic thought and then apply it. We will circle it for two days and you will leave with a felt sense of it, which is more useful and less portable.
• We are not going to ask what your work means. Meaning-questions pull the work back into the ontological, and apophatic thought works before that — pre-ontologically and pre-linguistically, in the region where sense is still gathering.
• We are not going to critique. Nobody defends anything. There will be care. There will be a form for response that will be as caring and kind as it can be.
• We are not going to assess you. There is no grade, no rubric, no pass/fail system. There is your exposition, and it will be as unfinished on the second evening or later on, if you decide to continue joining us online, as it deserves to be. If you’ve put in genuine care, you have passed the course.
• We are not going to finish. The intensive is two days inside a longer practice (for most, by Google Meet in the weeks after). If it ends tidily, something has gone wrong.

Four orientations, held loosely

These stand in for what a syllabus would call objectives. They are orientations: directions of attention. You will not arrive at all four.

Toward apophatic thought

A tradition that reaches back through comparative literature, philosophy and theology, and that has shaped creative work (art, writing, movement, and more) for centuries without often being named in artistic research. It approaches what cannot be directly said through negation, indirection, silence, withholding. Cy Twombly worked this way. So did Donald Judd. So, probably, do you — the orientation here is toward recognizing the practice you already have and giving it a lineage.

Toward artistic research

Not art illustrating research, and not research about art. The claim that processes of making produce 'lived understandings' that are different from, and complementary to, what the sciences produce — and the difficult institutional question of what that costs artists. We will hold Henk Borgdorff's argument for knowledge production next to Barbara Bolt's argument for performative force next to Anke Haarmann's warning about regulatory methodology, and we will not reconcile them. It's for you to find your place in the middle of those and other views on what inquiry is and can be.

Toward aesthetic inquiry

Aesthetics here has nothing to do with beauty. It refers to our lived, bodily, sensorial relationships with the world, with people and with things — and to the fact that this relationality is itself creative (Liora Bresler's article in central here). Aesthetic thinking, in the sense Arteaga, Cocker and Wendel give it, is a form of thinking that specific practices enable. Much of the two days is spent practicing the practices rather than discussing them.

Toward your own project

The one you brought, or the one you have submitted to apophatic.art and are now reopening. By the second day it should be visibly further along and considerably less certain than it was. Both of those at once. That is the shape of progress here.

Five noncepts

Not concepts. Concepts are too general and too attached to form — to the idea that reality is grasped once it has been given a clear contour, the way a diagnosis grasps a body. Apophatic thought is interested in process, and so it works with something looser: clusters of material, bodily, mental and generative encounter that accumulate over time rather than fixing anything by definition.

Ruth Millikan's unitrackers and unicepts are useful here, and so are Michael Bakhtin's chronotopes: knots rather than categories. Pathways that are embodied, generative and pre-linguistic, and that lead you through a landscape rather than pinning it down. We call the five below noncepts, half in earnest. We’ll explore them together, but here is a preliminary list:

Living intimacy — from being to living

What it is like to live alongside the work.

Propensity — from regulation to receiving

The purpose is not to produce knowledge. It is a pre-ontological preparation of you, the researcher, to become available to be addressed: to be appropriated by the phenomenon and the work. You prepare the space, gather the materials, set the constraints, and then let what wants to happen, happen. Receptivity becomes as important as agency. Agency alone assumes you are in control, and you are never fully in control.

Refusal and hiddenness — from frontality to obliquity

An aesthetic politics. Restraining, resisting, interrupting the threshold. Deliberate erasure, silencing, omission, withholding, subtraction, negative space, perceptual restraint, stripping away. Not shyness — force. Negation is not a passive tool but an active thing that shapes.

Indirectness — from method to indirectness

Apophatic work does not describe a threshold from the outside. It performs one. Meandering paths, delays, returns, in-betweenness become the content rather than obstacles on the way to content. A video does not explain nausea or delirium. Its duration, its transitions, its disorientation are the experience, in form.

Losing ground — from initiative to potential

The deepest insight does not often come from mastering. Sometimes it comes from the edge where the medium itself breaks down, where what you know stops being enough. This asks two things at once: careful preparation, and a willingness to relinquish it. Can you let go of the work altogether?

Six movements

The two days are designed as a movement through the six movements of aesthetic–apophatic inquiry set out in ‘Sometimes, Indirect Is More Direct’ (Visse 2024). They are movements, not steps. They overlap, repeat and reverse, and the program is built to let them do that.

1. Being perplexed. Enter through a grand-tour question or, better, through a felt concern. What are you perplexed by in your practice? The question must be open, ready to change, and not answerable with yes or no.
2. Choosing a noncept. Not applying one deductively — establishing a relationship with one. Read it, summarize it in your own words, write a poem from it, draw it. It will work heuristically while the inquiry unfolds, moving you away from what you first see.
3. Reflection through making. Begin with anything. Let your hands and body guide it. Then ask what unfolded — how it relates to where you started, to your concept, and to what is called for now. Listen to the materials as you would listen to another person. The work carries its own knowledge and it will speak in its own way.
4. Indirect dwelling. While you work, detour. Do not look directly at what you think is unfolding. Imagine standing on a ball, keeping your balance: you cannot look down at the ball without losing it. Look away, meander, notice what happens. This intricate play is also at the heart of the apophatic approach.
5. Reflecting on qualities. Not good and bad, not beautiful and ugly — perceptual awareness of lines, shapes, textures, colors, hues, tones. And then the apophatic qualities: blandness, purity, spiritedness, vital energy, naturalness. Roam. Do not let the eye rest on the prominent object.
6. Exhibiting findings. When the practice reaches something you might frame as findings, make them enterable rather than reported. Not a representational act — a way of giving others a vicarious experience of your unfolding process. This is what your Researchcatalogue exposition is for.

Three modes of being in touch

When we as participants and facilitators make in the same room and sometimes even on the same screen (for example, when we draw together on draw.chat) at the same time, the question is not only what each of you is doing. It is how the practices are in touch with one another. Art researchers Arteaga, Cocker and Wendel distinguish three modes, and we will name which one is running at the start of each making block.

• Separation, or autonomy — practicing in intended isolation from the others, not affected by or in touch with their practice, absorbed in your own.
• Parallel, open, in touch — practicing with awareness of and openness to the others' practices, but not interacting with them directly.
• Interwoven, or interaction — influenced by and interacting with the others, open to affecting and being affected.

None is better. Learning the difference between them, in the body, is one of the real things you can take away from two days.

Conditions

• Speak before you know what you want to say. Thinking through speaking is permitted here and often necessary. Single words, partial phrases, half sentences, thought fragments, vague hunches: all necessary and welcome.
• Allow for vulnerability and embarrassment; for stumbling and falling over one's words. Nobody in this room has it worked out.
• When the quality of your attention fades, pause. Begin again when refreshed. This is not slacking; it is the practice.
• Silence is a contribution. A long pause in a shared session is not a failure of facilitation. We'll take all the time we need.
• You may step back at any point — stop your practice, but do not stop acting aesthetically. Turn your attention to the practices that are still running and let them resonate in your body. There is a formal score for this and we will use it.
• What is made in the intensive belongs to its maker. Nothing goes onto apophatic.art or into a public exposition without its maker's explicit yes.
• Illness, pain, delirium, grief and disability run close to the surface of this material. Say what you need. Leave when you need to. Rejoin without explaining.
• For those online: cameras on when you can, but a black square with a voice in it is a full participant. If you are working with your hands, show us your hands rather than your face.

How we respond

At some point, we will share and present. Every presenter receives ten minutes to share, and ten minutes to receive. It is not critique and it is not encouragement. It is a form, and it has four parts, because leaving response unstructured tends to produce either politeness or ambush. Our shared response to the presentations will take this form:

One · Voicing observation (three minutes)

Sensory description only. What did you see, hear, sense? Let the experience of observing find a linguistic but non-propositional form. No evaluation, no interpretation, no ‘I liked’.

Two · Weather (three minutes)

What is the climate of this work? Pressure building, stillness, a particular quality of light, something moving too fast or failing to move at all. Imprecise words are correct words here.

Three · One question, unanswered (three minutes)

Each responder who wishes may offer the presenter one question. The presenter does not answer it. It is written down and carried away. Some of them will still be open in a year.

Four · Notation (one minute)

Silence. The presenter writes or draws. Everyone else does nothing.

On findings, and on quality

Somebody always asks, usually on the second morning, how you would know if any of this were any good.

The usual standards of objectivity and empirical adequacy do not apply, and it is not enough to say so and move on. What does apply is discernment and the quality of reflection: whether the practice increased what you could perceive, whether the work developed a propensity of its own, whether you were able to stay with something unresolved long enough for it to shape you. Evidence grounded in process and meaning rather than measurement. Human living as an unfolding narrative in which meaning, not measurement, is the appropriate currency of understanding.

That is a real standard, and it is harder than a rubric. It is also the thing your exposition has to make available to someone who was not in the room.

So: there is no assessment. And there is a question that will follow you out of the door. Did the work become more available to be addressed than it was on the first morning? We do not know. And by the second evening, you often do.

Where the work lives

• Researchcatalogue — researchcatalogue.net. Your exposition. Private until you decide otherwise. We upload at the end of each day, in the last block, together.
• apophatic.art — the shared space for those who are already part of it, and those who want to become part.
• Soft Data/Base — softdatabase.art. A curatorial project that creates or confabulates data for invisible, illegible or otherwise data-avoidant experience.

Readings 

All texts are recommended. You can find them here.