Participant Prep — Apophatic Art Practice and Research

Preparation

I feel vague

I feel vague about words

when they recede far

behind the tongue

– Béatrice Machet

Please begin roughly ten days before we meet

Before anything

Somewhere in the fortnight before we meet you will be doing something ordinary — carrying a cup across a room, waiting for a file to render, resting near a window while the light changes — and a question you have been carrying about your work will surface sideways, unasked for. That is the preparation. Everything below is scaffolding built around that moment so it has somewhere to land.

We are not asking you to arrive informed. We are asking you to arrive already at work, and a little lost inside it.

Three strands follow, based on how we have previously designed our syllabi at Drew, and which appeared to work for many students: making, reading, watching. They are in that order for a reason, but can be interchanged, and of course, there is space for other modalities of living, such as listening or moving. But let's begin here, and let's focus on making. Making is the spine. The reading keeps the making company. The watching is there to show you that others have been here before, in their own rooms, with their own materials, unsure.

There is a fourth strand, and it is administrative, but also a way to work with form, and it matters: you will need a Research Catalogue account. We will be working inside that platform across the course and afterwards. Please try not to leave this until the morning of.

One · Making

Two · Reading, Watching, Listening

Three texts to read closely, four to read the way you would move through a room you may want to come back to. If you have time for only one thing on this list, make it the first.

Read closely (all on Google Drive)

Bolt, Barbara. ‘Artistic Research: A Performative Paradigm?’ PARSE Journal, no. 3, 2016, pp. 129–142.

For the question of what artistic research does rather than what it represents. Bolt returns to Austin on performativity to ask what force a work exerts — its capacity to effect movement in thought, word and deed. Hold this next to the apophatic question of what a work withholds.

Bresler, Liora. ‘Toward Connectedness: Aesthetically Based Research.’ Studies in Art Education, vol. 48, no. 1, 2006, pp. 52–69.

On connection, resonance, and the I–Thou relationship with materials. The quietest of the texts and, for some of you, the one that will matter most.

Visse, Merel. ‘Sometimes, Indirect Is More Direct: An Aesthetic–Apophatic Phenomenological Approach to Self-Reflexivity in Qualitative Inquiry.’ Qualitative Psychology, vol. 11, no. 1, 2024, pp. 110–126. https://doi.org/10.1037/qup0000281

The six movements described here — Being Perplexed, Choosing a Concept, Reflection Through Making, Indirect Dwelling, Reflecting on Qualities, Exhibiting Findings — are the structure of our two days. Read them as movements, not steps. They overlap, repeat, and reverse. There's one important change, which we will clarify at the course: instead of concepts, we decided to work with noncepts. That's all you need to keep in mind.

Read for orientation

Borgdorff, Henk. ‘The Production of Knowledge in Artistic Research.’ The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, edited by Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson, Routledge, 2011, pp. 44–63.

The institutional argument: what it means to claim that art produces knowledge, and what that claim costs.

Haarmann, Anke. ‘The Reflective Methodology of Artistic Spatial Research.’ Handbook of Qualitative and Visual Methods in Spatial Research, edited by Anna Juliane Heinrich, Séverine Marguin, Angela Million and Jörg Stollmann, transcript Verlag, 2023, pp. 55ff.

On the difference between a regulatory methodology, which disciplines the arts in advance, and a reflective methodology, which explains the path afterwards, as a retrospectively plausible route to knowledge. This distinction matters for how we will treat method across the two days — and for what you will eventually write in your Research Catalogue exposition.

Hübner, Falk. Method, Methodology and Research Design in Artistic Research: Between Solid Routes and Emergent Pathways. Routledge, 2024.

Dip into the chapters on research design. Read against the grain: where does design help you, and where would designing in advance have foreclosed what you actually found?

If you want the deep background

Franke, William. On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts. 2 vols., University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.

Optional. Read a fragment, not the whole. The introduction to volume one is enough to feel the tradition standing behind the word ‘apophatic’.

Sullivan, G. (2007). Creativity as research practice in the visual arts. International handbook of research in arts education, 2, 1181-1194.

An artistic research exposition, entered slowly

Arteaga, Alex, Emma Cocker, and Nicole Wendel. ‘Ecologies in Action: An Emergent Framework for Thinking Aesthetic Thinking through Aesthetic Research Practices.’ Journal for Artistic Research, no. 38, 2026. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3935614/3956695

Enter through the Research Journey. Then follow one link out into the project archive and watch — or sit inside — at least one recorded Ecology in Action. Do not watch it at speed. The whole point of these recordings is that they take the time they take.

While you watch, hold one question: what are the three modes of relation the group name — separation, parallel, interwoven — and which one are you watching right now?

van der Vlugt, Marloeke (2026). The Tunnel as Urban Care-scape. Ruukku, (25).https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3006375/3015154

Works that hold what they cannot say

Lucier, Alvin. I Am Sitting in a Room. 1969.

Listen to at least the first ten minutes with headphones. Speech eroding into the resonance of a room: a work that performs its own disappearance.

Woodring, Ryan. Today (and Possibly Tomorrow). 2022. Thirty 3D-printed candies, date labels, air-tight vitrine. https://ryanwoodring.com/today-and-possibly-tomorrow/

Data made of sugar, which advertises its own dissolution in the body it claims to describe.

Youden, Lauryn. Dead Paper. 2022. Performative reading, ritual; paper, invisible ink, fire. https://softdatabase.art/dead-paper

McArthur, Park. Carried & Held. 2012–. Digital print on museum board. https://softdatabase.art/carried-and-held

Pfeiffer, Paul. The Long Count.

Sen, Smita. Feelings Fossilized. 2022-23. Drawings, sculptures .https://softdatabase.art/feelings,-fossilized

Lin, Yo-Yo. Resilience Journal. 2019. Hardbound book. 5.5x8.5 inches. https://softdatabase.art/resilience-journal

F. Simon Jr, John. iClock.

Arnold, Lee. Aphairesis

Visse, Merel. Hidden Kernel of Care. 2025. Single-channel video, 7:40.

Made from white sheets, recorded sounds, and overheard utterances during a hospital delirium — not to explain the delirium, but to let the work hold what could not be resolved.

Browse the Soft Data/Base for twenty minutes without deciding in advance what you are looking for.

And, briefly, a joke

Ninotchka (dir. Ernst Lubitsch, 1939): a customer orders coffee without cream; the waiter replies that there is no cream, only milk — so can it be coffee without milk? Something becomes present through its absence. The coffee exists differently once we know it arrives without cream, and differently again when there is no milk either. Ninety seconds. Watch it.

Three · Set up

Research Catalogue

We will develop work through researchcatalogue.net across both days and after. The account takes ten minutes; the familiarity takes longer, which is why it should not wait.

Go to researchcatalogue.net and create an account. Confirm through the email you receive.
Complete your profile: name, a portrait if you want one, two or three lines of biography.
Create a new exposition under ‘My Research’. You will be offered a choice of editor. Choose the graphical editor if you can bear the open canvas — it lets you place text, image, video and sound anywhere, and for apophatic work that spatial freedom matters. Choose the block editor if you would rather have structure now and freedom later.
Give it your working title and leave it private for the moment. Nothing you make there is public until you decide it is.
Before Day One, upload your three preparatory artefacts as media. Place them on the canvas however you like. Do not caption them yet.
Send your Research Catalogue username to apophaticart@gmail.com at least three days before we meet, so we can connect the group and share expositions across the room and the screen.

If you become stuck, stay stuck for ten minutes and then write to us. The platform has its own logic and it is not always the logic you expect; part of the first morning is spent inside it together.

Materials — in the room, for you to bring

Paper: a stack of A4, and at least a few sheets considerably larger
Charcoal, and two pencils, one for each hand
One material chosen at the scale of your arms and hands — its size, quantity and kind are yours to decide
Scissors, tape, a knife, whatever cuts and joins
Index cards
A timekeeper that is not your phone, if you can manage it
Your phone, for its camera and its microphone
Headphones
Something to carry work in that you do not mind ruining

Materials — on the screen

Everything above, and three more things. A way to angle a camera at your hands and your table, so that what you are making can be in the room with us rather than described to us afterwards — a second device, a phone on a stand, a laptop turned around. Headphones, so that the sound of the room reaches you as sound rather than as noise-suppressed silence. And a surface you can leave undisturbed overnight.

You will not be watching the intensive. You will be in it, from wherever you are. Everything we do across the two days is built so that it can be done alone in a room at a distance, and several of the practices work better that way.

Five · The presentation

Each of you has twenty minutes: ten to present, ten to receive response. Nine of you, across the two days.

Ten minutes is not long enough to explain your project, so do not try. Show us the work, or make a condition we can enter for ten minutes. A score we perform. A recording we sit inside. A thing passed round the room and held up to the camera. Silence, if silence is what the work is doing.

If you must speak, speak from inside the making rather than above it. Tell us what the material did that you did not intend.

The ten minutes of response afterwards is not critique. It follows a form, and the form is described in the non-syllabus. Nobody will be asked to defend anything.

What not to prepare

Do not prepare a position. Do not prepare a summary of your practice to date. Do not decide what the two days will give you, because deciding is precisely the habit we are going to spend two days interrupting.

Do not finish anything. Come with something open — a work with a hole in it, a question you have not managed to phrase, a material that has stopped cooperating. Come with the thing that is not going well.

And do not prepare to be certain. We will spend two days making conditions rather than outcomes, and the first condition is that you arrive able to say: I do not know yet.

Questions before we meet: apophaticart@gmail.com · Merel Visse mvisse@drew.edu · Ryan Woodring rwoodring@drew.edu

This is the center. Not the warm-up for the center — the center.

Choose your ground

Before you begin, choose one of two starting places. Neither is inherently easier or more challenging.

A new individual project. Something you have not begun, or have only circled. Perhaps the thing you keep not making. Choose it because it resists you, not because it is ready.
A submission you have already made to apophatic.art. Return to it. Do not polish it. Treat what you sent us as a first draft of a question rather than an answer you have delivered, and open it back up.

Write your choice in a single sentence and keep that sentence somewhere you will see it. You will be asked for it on the first morning, and you will probably want to change it by the second.

The preparatory score: sittings

Two sittings, spread across the fortnight. Leave days between them. What happens between sittings is part of the score.

Sitting one · The Wait (as long as it takes; no less than thirty minutes)

Choose a material. Sit with it and produce nothing. No notes, no marks, no plan.
You will feel the urge to start — to do something with the time. Let that urge rise and pass, at least three times. Do not act on it.
Move only when something arrives that feels given rather than decided: when the next gesture seems to be asking to happen rather than being chosen by you.
If nothing arrives in the time you set aside, that is the sitting. Do not manufacture an ending.

This score is a practice in receiving rather than deciding. It is meant to be uncomfortable.

Sitting two · Notation (roughly twenty minutes)

Take a blank sheet of paper (the larger the better) and something to mark with.
Notate quickly and spontaneously, in words or drawings or both, in no sequential or geographic order unless it happens by itself.
Notate the landscape of the two previous sittings — landscape meaning everything that took place, including what refused to.
Then, underneath, write five weather-words for where the work stands now. Not what it means. What it feels like climatically. Invite imprecision.

Notation adapted from the Practice of the Nahbereich (Sabine Zahn); weather-words from ‘The Weather’, Visse & Woodring 2024.

What to bring, and what not to

Bring an artefact from each of your sittings. An artefact is anything the practice left behind: a drawing, a recording, a note, a refusal, a sheet of paper you filled and then covered over, a photograph of something you removed. Bring the residue, not the report.
Bring one sentence: the question or felt concern you are living. It should be open, ready to change, and it should not be answerable with yes or no.
Bring one image that has nothing obviously to do with any of it.
Do not bring conclusions. Do not resolve anything in advance so as to have something conclusive to say on the first morning — the first morning is designed to dissolve that anyway, and you will only have wasted the effort.