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