Inquiring Artlessly: Encounter(ing)s with Monstrous Materialities From/Through the Threshold (Poster 3)

• In Event: Artful Inquiry in Qualitative Research: Philosophies and Enactments

Abstract

Objectives/Purposes
This paper takes up the suggestion of artless inquiry as an extension for artful ways of doing, thinking, and be(com)ing. Specifically, each author/artist used discarded items—materialities we position as monstrous—to visually articulate how/what artless inquiry produces in the context of (post)qualitative research. Drawing inspiration from artists Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Theaster Gates, Yam Chew Oh, and Shani Nottingham, each work of art(less/ful-ness) is then leveraged into three stories that entangle theory, materiality, and spatiality with our own (individual/collective) thoughts and perspectives on how monstrous materialities impact the more-than-human world and those trying to make sense of it through inquiry.

Perspectives
Working from Manning’s (2020) position that “the most difficult concept remains that of being of relation” (p. 48), this work examines, entangles, critiques, and problematizes the disjointed relationships that objects—we authors/artists deem as monstrous—have to/on contexts concerned with art(ful/less) inquiry and ecological precarity. To aid in our efforts of shining a light of the disjointedness of such (discarded) materialities and where they can be located, we lean into Weinstock’s (2020) framing of the monster as a figuration of be(com)ing, “that thing, from a particular perspective in a given context, shouldn’t be, but is” (Weinstock, 2020, p. 3). Thus, this inquiry asks: What might entangling ourselves within the relationship between the monstrous and ecological reveal about art(ful/less-ness) as a mode of be(com)ing in/with the more-than-human world?

Modes of Inquiry
Each author/artist sought out discarded objects and then incorporated them into an art(ful/less) response to our initial inquiry question. Once done, each author/artist story-ed their artwork before the other author/artist would write a response. We conclude with a fusing of voices/perspectives as both authors/artists write as one. These composite story scraps are underpinned by “personal and professional experiences, memories, scholarly research, historical accounts, recent events, and fiction” (Griffin, 2016, p. 367).

Conclusions and Significance
We use this collaborative thinking and doing to imagine the role of (post)qualitative research that requires inversion and/or rupture of ways of thinking and doing that have sedimented into normalcy. We connect noticing to both what is there and what is not available to see. Both art pieces have texture—smooth, hard, rough, and flat spaces. The differences come together differently. The eye is drawn to different things and not others. We make and think together to detach and undo stuck ways of knowing use and therefore re-knowing what is useless, what is artful, and what is artless. However, use is not universal. Universality is not possible, nor is it required for cohabitation (Haraway, 2016). Yet the fiction of universality is foundational to dominant ways of looking and knowing. The noticing is what we are after as scholars, thinkers, and artists interested in a world becoming differently from the one we currently navigate. After all, once you learn to notice the (material) monsters, it is hard not to notice again.



[References omitted here due to word count (form lacks a separate field for references). See submission document.]

Authors

• Bretton A. Varga, California State University - Chico

• Asilia K. Franklin-Phipps, SUNY - College at New Paltz