Investigating the Art Encounter With Deleuzean Concepts: Tailoring Research as a Desiring-Assemblage

• In Event: 75.052 - Research De/sign: Theory as a Thimble for Tailoring Methodological Excess

Abstract

Purpose
In order to investigate the art encounter in a museum setting, this paper examines the crafting of a research methodology as Deleuzian desiring-assemblage.

Context and Theoretical Framework
There is an extensive body of quantitative and qualitative research studying the motivations and perceptions of adult public experiencing art (see Csikszentmihalyi & Robinson, 1990; Dufresne & Lefebvre, 1994; Emond, 2008; Falk, 2009; Falk & Dierking, 1992, 2000; Falk et al., 1998; Pitman & Hirzy, 2010). Grounded in the social sciences and educational psychology, these studies provide significant knowledge, nevertheless I contend these studies persist to represent the art encounter within psychological motivations and socio-cognitive processes. Differently, this research investigates the art encounter with the philosophical concept of desire from Deleuze and Guattari (1983/1972). For Deleuze, “desire only exists when assembled or machined. You cannot grasp or conceive of a desire outside a determinate assemblage, on a plane which is not pre-existent but which must itself be constructed” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987/1977, p.86). Since desire is a productive force rather than an object that can be isolated, this research considers the art encounter beyond the binary viewer(s)/art object(s) to think the complex material agency (Ellsworth, 2005) of the artwork/exhibition, art discourses, embodied experiences as intertwined in a non-hierarchical rhizomatic network of relations. [Thread 1]

Modes of Inquiry
This research brings into play discourse analysis (art theory and curatorial), post-intentional phenomenological study (Vagle, 2014), fieldnotes and journaling of the researcher’s own art encounters as a mode of inquiry (Richardson, 2000). For Deleuze, desire is a productive force and a drive to create assemblages in which desire circulates (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). As a theoretical thimble, desire calls for a post-qualitative research crafted as a complex assemblage weaving the researcher’s embodied experiences implicated in mapping the complex and fluid art encounter; not in order to find an essence of the art encounter, but to articulate what it produces in/for viewers (new subjectivities, becomings, knowing). [Thread 2 and 3]

Generation of Data
This research generates data from forty hours spend in three contemporary art exhibitions. The field notes, journaling and informal interviews with other viewers interacting in the gallery spaces are further placed in relation with other discursive texts framing the art encounter such as art museum theory and curatorial display. Informed by Alecia Jackson (2013), the field notes and narrative journaling become part of a complex desiring-assemblage, a productive rhizome of multiple connections with space, ideas, people, objects; hence de-centering my voice as researcher. Rethinking traditional observational methods and the concept of data, the field notes are not considered as representing the art encounter but as part of the desiring encounter in itself. [Thread 3]

Scholarly Significance
In its methodological investigation and theoretical frame, this research marks a departure from current research on the art encounter in museum settings. The intertwined effects of crafting a methodology with a Deleuzian concept provide a new vocabulary for museum education and a more complex, non-hierarchical and fluid mode of thinking the art encounter. [Thread 4]

Author

• Marie France Berard, The University of British Columbia