Apophatic Art Practice and Research

Connecting with the ineffable in times of flattening

Project / Editorial Team
  • Merel Visse
  • William Franke
  • Ryan Woodring
  • Béatrice Machet
  • Sarah Travis
  • Enaiê Azambuja
  • Sarah Tarkany
  • Peter Kline
  • Kythe Heller
  • Cailtin Gilson
  • Chelle Stearns

Preparation

I feel vague

I feel vague   about   words

when they recede far

behind the tongue
– Béatrice Machet
 Please begin roughly a week before we meet

Before anything

Somewhere in the days 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 asking you to arrive already at work on a project of some sort (which can be anything, really), and a little lost inside it, so there is no requirement to master a syllabus or exhaust the reading list in advance.

You can choose one of two starting places. Neither is inherently easier or more challenging.

  1. 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.
  2. For those who are contributors to apophatic.art: the 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 may want to change it by the second.

Below are four strands, and we begin with an administrative one, but this is 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.

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. 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.

One · Set up

Research Catalogue

We will develop work through researchcatalogue.net across both days and after. Creating the account takes ten minutes; the familiarity takes longer.

  1. Go to researchcatalogue.net and create an account. Confirm through the email you receive.
  2. If needed, upgrade your account by sharing a form of ID with support@researchcatalogue.net. Research Catalog complies with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which has strict requirements around data privacy. More details here: researchcatalogue.net/privacy.
  3. Complete your profile: name, a portrait if you want one, two or three lines of biography.
  4. 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.
  5. Give it your working title and leave it private for the moment. Nothing you make there is public until you decide it is.
  6. 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 as we go.

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 — for in-person participation

Drew will provide most materials, but feel free to to bring anything you’re familiar with.

Also, please bring your phone, laptop, headphones (if you prefer your own).

Materials — for virtual participants

Everything we do across the two days is built so that it can be done alone in a room at a distance. Virtual participants will have ready access to:

  • Paper: a stack of A4, and at least a few sheets considerably larger
  • Charcoal or vine, and two pencils
  • Scissors, tape, a knife, whatever cuts and joins
  • Index cards (any color)
  • Phone
  • Laptop
  • Headphones
  • A surface you can leave undisturbed overnight.
  • If possible, a 2nd device–an external webcam, a phone on a stand, a 2nd laptop– that can be angled at your workspace. Not required, but it might make it easier to share your work in progress.

Two · The presentation

During the Intensive, each of you has twenty minutes to share and present work or thoughts or reflections in progress. Ten to present, ten to receive response. A chance to show us the work in progress, or make a condition we can enter for ten minutes. If there is no work yet, that is not a problem. Bring one of these instead: a question — something you are very curious about; a concern — something that worries you and hasn't resolved;a score, and we perform it together. 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.

Three · Making

Then, try to make something that you will bring to the Intensive. Below are two “Sittings” that provide inspiration for making something. First we ask you to resist making. Only after that do we ask you to open it. It’s not about beautiful or good or bad. It’s simply about how you experience making something. That’s all.

The preparatory score: sittings

A score is a set of instructions for making something happen — written, drawn, or spoken — that is meant to be enacted rather than read. For example, Alison Knowles’ score Make a Salad (1962): make a salad, for an audience. We’re sharing a less radical one: two sittings spread across the days before the start of our Intensive. 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 slightly uncomfortable.

Sitting two · Notation (roughly twenty minutes)
  • Take a blank sheet of paper — the larger the better — and something to mark with.
  • Before anything else: find the urge you refused during the first sitting. Choose the one you can still feel (not all three). Give it the first mark on the page. A word, a shape, a smear, a pressure. Whatever it was going to make you do during Sitting one, let it do now, delayed.
  • Notate outward from that mark. Quickly, spontaneously, in words or drawings or both, in no sequential or geographic order unless the order arrives by itself.
  • Notate the landscape of the previous sitting — landscape meaning everything that took place, including what refused to. If something arrived, put it on the page in relation to the urge you started with: near it, far from it, on top of it. If nothing arrived, notate the shape of the not-arriving. It has one.
  • Then, underneath, write five weather-words for where what you’re looking at on your paper 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.

Four · 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, Franke, William (forthcoming 2027). Apophatic Creative Critique. In: Eds. Camuti, F. et al. Handbook of Artistic Care. Oxford University Press.
    • This draft chapter offers speculative reflections on the creative and the critical, delving into the very landscape of critique as a generative practice, entwined with concepts, contexts, processes of making and reflecting, working through what is absent or denied rather than what is affirmed. Through continuity and gentleness, we are living the questions and critique itself.
  • 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.

Sample artistic research expositions (to be entered slowly)

Works that hold what they cannot say

Browse the Soft Data/Base for more works.

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 here.

What not to prepare

Do not prepare a position or 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

Accessibility Requests and Dietary Needs

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Non-Syllabus

Sometimes, something cannot be expressed, but it can be indicated, mutely.
– William Franke

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.