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Journal of Visual Art Practice Volume 6 Number 2 2007 Intellect Ltd

Article. English Language. doi: 10.1386/jvap.6.2.125/1

Thinking with art: from situated

knowledge to experiential knowing
Ian Sutherland and Sophia Krzys Acord The University
of Exeter

Abstract

Keywords

New movements in the creative disciplines have disrupted traditional understandings of knowledge and knowledge production. Knowledge in creative practice is increasingly seen through the process of creating, mediating and
encountering art rather than in any perceived final form. Examining recent work
in the fine arts, this article studies composers and contemporary artists to extract
the embedded conception of knowledge and its production.
Focusing on the practice of composer Gayle Young and visual artist Tino
Sehgal, the setting up of conditions for interactive experience illuminates the
ways in which experiential knowledge takes place in a distributed manner. As
Csikszentmihalyi (1996: 23) concluded, creativity does not happen inside peoples
heads, but in the interaction between a persons thoughts and a sociocultural
context. Like creativity, experiential knowledge is inseparable from the context of
its production and reception, a fact clarified by recent work in actor network theory.
These artists highlight this phenomenon by challenging audiences to question
existing systems of meaning, and draw upon tacit and embodied tools of interpretation in the encounter with contemporary artistic forms. Ultimately, we claim
that understanding knowledge as action best frames the future of public engagement with creative practice, social structures and cultural forms.1

contemporary art
embodied cognition
habitus
music
social interaction
tacit knowledge

Individuals in society know a lot, or so it would seem. We appear convinced that knowledge exists in finite loci and are assured that any knowledge not personally possessed exists somewhere hence the popularity of
sources such as Wikipedia2 (Nassehi 2004). Traditionally, musical scores
and artworks have been similarly understood as repositories of knowledge
in the fine arts, created by the artist as a unique genius. However, contemporary movements in the creative disciplines are increasingly emphasizing
the process of creating, mediating and encountering art. Building on this
practice, we argue that the pressing question of knowledge situation or containment is grossly misguided, relying on a metaphor of location influenced by topical debates over intellectual property and departmentalized
academic disciplines. This metaphor isolates knowledge in the artistic artifact, separated from its production and evolving reception. It is highly positivistic, excluding any consideration of social interactions within knowledge
frameworks, assuming one can build a brick wall to find the truth in acts
and objects.

1.

The authors wish to

thank Gayle Young,
Tino Sehgal, Tia
DeNora and Exeter
SocArts for their
careful reading and
inspiration.

2.

While the Wiki

interface is clearly
an example of
distributed and
linked knowledge
production, the
numerous
controversies
concerning its use,
notably that it
privileges consensus
over accuracy,
demonstrate that the
majority of users do

JVAP 6 (2) 125140 Intellect Ltd 2007

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not think about the

source of their
information, reifying
the Wikipedia as
absolute knowledge.

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Drawing on contemporary work in musical composition and visual arts

we examine how particular composers and artists are engaging in a political
project of democratizing systems of knowledge production, freeing knowledge from a top-down construct into an interactive, in situ encounter. After
reviewing the sociology of knowledge and the arts and considering twentiethcentury paradigmatic shifts in contemporary art, we consider encounters
with composer Gayle Youngs recipe pieces and work by artist Tino Sehgal
as sites of knowing. Here, art creates space to think. We then use these
examples to understand knowledge as a theory of action (in the footsteps
of actor-network theory); art is good to think with. By manipulating artistic
conventions, these creative practitioners demonstrate that knowledge production happens as a combined effort of creators, technology, mediators,
artistic works, contexts and recipients permeable and material art worlds.
Knowledge is, therefore, best understood as an embodied, tacit and contextual phenomenon, varied and subjective: a verb rather than a noun.
Experiential knowledge means to speak not of knowledge or its possession,
but rather of knowing (see Dewey and Bentley 1949) a praxical activity.
The arts have a unique ability vis--vis innovative knowledge in society.
As Zerubavel states, although cultural classification and interpretive practices are constrained by the conventions of particular social groups and
domains, art is a specifically fuzzy-minded domain: art promotes mental
promiscuity by essentially defying the conventional partitioning of reality
into discrete, mutually exclusive mental compartments (1997: 59). As a
result, contemporary artistic practice questions both how sociology makes
its object, as well as prefigures a reconceptualization of knowledge from a
passive to active ingredient in social life.

From transmitting to constructing knowledge: a brief

literature review
Research in sociology of knowledge takes a largely constructionist approach,
looking at broad social discourses of knowledge production and the individuals who produce ideas in particular settings. Knowledge is manifested
through many social institutions, including the media (Finnegan 1988;
McLuhan 1964; Ong 1982), collective memory (Griffin 2004; Olick 1999;
Spillman 1998), identities and borders (Bennett 2000; Bourdieu 1984,
1988; Stets and Burke 2000), power (Demerath 1993; Foucault 1977;
Nassehi 2004) and science (Barnes, Bloor and Henry 1996; Collins 1975,
1983, 1985; Halfpenny 1991; Knorr Cetina 1999; Latour 1987; Latour and
Woolgar 1986; Pickering 1984). These studies identify knowledge in a highly
Weberian language, as subjective, socially constructed and complex systems
or webs of meaning emerging from scrupulous situated interactions
(see also Goffman 1974).
In particular, ethnomethodological studies in the sociology of science
(notably Garfinkel, Lynch and Livingstone 1981) describe the extraordinarily
complex situated work required to produce knowledge about material
objects. Pre-existing knowledge does not merely emerge from material
objects to be discovered by scientists, but rather scientists (along with
technicians, funding bodies and administrators) actively work to emerge
this knowledge through social interactions. As Latour and Woolgar (1986: 105)
point out, a laboratory is roughly a system of literary inscription, an outcome
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of which is the occasional conviction of others that something is a fact,

which occurs when an object sheds its own history. Thus, the final step in
knowledge production is self-negation; knowledge is only created when all
traces of work are erased. Through this production of belief in the fact writ
large, the fundamental experiential foundation of knowledge is denied.
Similarly, sociology of the arts sees artistic work as enabled through
mediating conventions, feedback loops and internalized dialogues within
art worlds (Becker 1982; Bourdieu 1993; Crane 1987; Peterson 1976; White
and White 1965). Thus, rather than have unique encounters with works of
art, individuals respond as they imagine others might respond (Becker
1982: 200), and construct their imaginings following others responses in
concrete situations. Consequently, knowledge production in art is reduced
to the outcome of two figures speaking the same language: a pre-encoded
viewer meeting a pre-encoded artwork (Acord 2006b). While this necessitates a situated interaction between artwork and viewer, it understands
knowledge as a static entity, transferred and transmitted, but never produced.
Thus, we urgently need a focus on knowledge as practical consciousness, focusing on the work of art and its situational relationship with the
viewer (as argued by Eyerman and McCormick 2006; Hennion 1995; Witkin
1997). In music, progress has been made by Smalls (1998) redefinition of
music as action not contained in a static artifact, and Cooks (2003) consideration of the musical artifact as a script for enacting practical consciousness. Through examination of the socially interactive aspect of
musicking, Small and Cook give importance to the artifact as germinal
point for knowledge production, but extend their gaze to its experiencing
and knowing. As DeNora (1995) points out, a return to the musical object
in social theory requires examining how people do things to music, not with
it. Understanding the experiential nature of artistic knowledge production
does not require abandoning the artistic object, but simply seeing it in action.
Recent movements in the fine arts have brought this issue to the fore.

Changing paradigms in music and visual art

Traditionally, the western arts, sonic and visual, were founded upon a belief
in absolute knowledge, manifest laws contained within the loci scores, oeuvres and practitioners. From the late eighteenth century, artifacts became
divorced from social contexts through an illusion, both of music and the
individuals involved in its practice from wider social and cultural processes
(Shepherd 1992: 128; see also Bourdieu 1993). Art was the product of select
mystical individuals whose masterworks became ideal objects with an
immutable and unshifting real meaning (C. Dalhaus, quoted from
Hamm 1997: 280). Drawing upon the romantic genius discourse (see
DeNora 1995; Heinich 1996; Toynbee 2003), art worlds situated knowledge
in the object and accustomed audiences to passivity purportedly experiencing what the creator intended.
Since the early twentieth century music has undergone several paradigmatic shifts, as new movements disrupted traditional notions of the
absolute:
[T]he development of computer and electroacoustic music during the second
half of the twentieth century has shown that sonic parameters cannot exist in

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3.

Aleatory music
denotes music whose
outcome, whether
during composition or
performance, is
unpredictable, due to
chance procedures or
improvisation.

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a formal space devoid of context [] music listening is deeply influenced by

the individuals cultural background and by the musics social function within
a specific community.
(Keller 2000: 55)

The recognition that music requires culturally specific and situated listening experience is a reaction to the absolutist views of the mystical
genius imparting divine knowledge upon the world.
After Second World War, composers engaging in aleatory work3 (e.g.
John Cage, George Crumb and Karl Heinz Stockhausen) toyed with the
tacit conventions of composition to challenge the very knowledge of
musics performance. Cages silent piece 433 (1952) is devoid of intentional sound, leaving the audience to construct the music from the ambient
soundscape. Desiring an end to aesthetic determinism (Joseph 1997) Cage
proposed, a mode of being within the world based on listening, through
hearing the sounds of the world as music (Kahn 1997: 556; see also
Schmitt 1982: 99).
By questioning and removing conventional webs of meaning shared by
performers and audiences, Cage and his colleagues highlighted the fallacy
that knowledge resided in the score, in the minds of the performers or in
performance. Knowledge of and about music is not located in our thinking,
but rather in our hearing (Shultis 1995), our bodily engagement to sound. It
is holistic experiencing. Some composers began consciously constructing
parameters for experience, inviting performers and audience to actively participate in creativity the activity of knowing.
Similarly, the visual arts have experienced a dramatic move towards the
reunification of art and life, beginning with the constitution of canonical
deviation as a value (Heinich 1996). These new movements initiated an
important role for the viewer:
The artist/audience relation can be seen as the testing of the social order by
radical propositions and as the successful absorption of these propositions
[] In these arenas order (the audience) assays what quotas of disorder it can
stand. Such places are, then, metaphors for consciousness and revolution.
(ODoherty 1986: 74)

The artists inclusion of the viewer as part of the art-making system in an

experiential context is a decided reaction against the perceived elitism of
the gallery space among many post-1960s artists.
As art became increasingly subject-centred with the advent of
Minimalism, its referent was emancipated from the frame, re-locating
processes of perception and interpretation between the oeuvre and viewer
rather than within the work itself (Witkin 2006). Yet, as Fried (1998) notes,
Minimalisms obsession with its own materiality created an atmosphere of
theatricality, alienating the viewer from his or her ordinary world by denying them a proper aesthetic experience. As described in Jones and Galison
(1999), artists such as Andy Warhol reacted against this by exploring the
dispersal of knowledge as the grounds for shifting notions of meaningmaking. Warhols Brillo Boxes are beautiful in emphasizing their inutility.
They demonstrate the liberation of art from material boundaries, yet

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reclaim the aesthetic experience for the visitor through a recognizable

materiality (similar to Pop Art). By mass-producing his works in The
Factory, Warhol also questioned the traditional process of artistic concretization.
As with Cage, Warhol refused to speak about how his work ought to be
read. This artistic strategy corresponds, as detailed by Witkin (2005), to
new social modes of understanding and experiencing values. In the postMinimalist world of Warhol, Pop Art and happenings, transformation
increasingly became the spectators role, in parameters established by the
artist (ODoherty 1986). As Danto (1981) observes, the material composition of an artwork is irrelevant; what is relevant is the ability of this particular material composition to speak. Hence, the viewer or listener becomes
indispensable in deciding what, how and where it speaks.
According to Jones (2006), this understanding of knowledge production
is a new informatics, in which culture itself creates the conditions of its
dispersal. When discussing the compositional process in music, Ames
(1995) expressed concern with distributions speaking to listeners, and
Tanzi (1999: 103) called for composers to reflect on the communicative
strategies they adopt toward their audiences. In visual arts, Lucie-Smith
(1970) described arts transition from a good to a service, while Olafur
Eliasson wanted the visitor to see yourself sensing his works (referring to
The Weather Project, 2003, Tate Modern). These examples point to a weakened relationship between production and reception, a complex freedom
devoid of autonomous knowledge. It is therefore unsurprising that art
worlds are developing public venues to debate artistic knowledge (Acord
2006a), extending contemporary practice.

Encounters with art work, catalysts for knowing

In a recent article from The Independent entitled Thats Really Surreal,
Lubbock (2007: 3) quotes Oscar Wilde:
Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs
that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing
the houses into monstrous shadows? [] There may have been fogs for centuries in London [] But no one saw them [] They did not exist till Art had
invented them.

Art indeed alters the way in which one experiences the world, and knowledge production emerges in the connection between oeuvre and daily life.
Artworks develop what Jones (2006) terms new ways of sensing.
While knowledge production in music and the fine arts has always been
dependent upon experiential encounters, art world conventions have disguised this fact through an attitude of social and economic disinterestedness in the work of art. However, contemporary composers and artists such
as Gayle Young and Tino Sehgal actively emphasize the fundamental role of
experiential knowledge through their own practice. This poses a problem to
critics, musicologists and art historians who increasingly describe the artist
as exploring or toying with something, rather than simply stating what
the artwork means. These examples help one to understand knowledge as
socially and materially organized.
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I. Gayle Young
In the Leonardo Music Journal, Canadian composer Gayle Young (1993: 2)
wrote, [t]he contributors to Leonardo Music Journal, in articulating the
intentions of their work in such detail, help us to perceive our experience of
sound art/music in ways that go beyond the familiar and introduce alternative
understandings of music and composition (1993: 2). Young microtonal
composer, instrument inventor and performer composes through a
mixture of traditional processes, algorithms and graphing techniques
(Young 2004) aware that, it seems many of our commonly understood definitions and accompanying boundaries are losing their clarity (Young 1993:
1). Much of Youngs work is about changing knowledge through new experiences. Beyond expanding sonic parameters microtonally she develops
new notational practices. Several of her recent compositions create structure through the use of text the recipe pieces. As Young points out below,
the text affords performers a great deal of freedom functioning as rhythmic,
phrasing, timbre and dynamic generators.
My recipe pieces provide alternative ways of making use of classical training,
on one hand, and alternatives to the usual composer/performer roles, on the
other. The concept/method expands the levels of creativity that performers
can bring to their playing, and they become co-creators in bringing their versions of the pieces into being. Many different approaches are possible as so
few details (tempo, for example) are pre-established.
(Young 2007)

Young challenges the knowledge of music as embodied in a final product

and the relational roles of composer and performer. Musicians approaching
these works cannot rely on familiarity with institutionalized symbols and
cues. Performers must step outside this, drawing upon wider contexts. The
essence of these works is in webs of complex interactions between sound,
meaning, and imagination not in any defined set of final form or prescriptive set of directives emanating from the composers ear (Young 2007).
Rather the composer constructs a framework for interaction a situation
for knowing.
Black Bean Soup (1994), an early example of the recipe pieces, is exemplary of the challenges and changes to conventional knowledge. It is scored
for 19-tone and 12-tone equal temperament instruments and non-pitched
sounds. In her performance guidelines Young writes, All of these parts are
optional: where possible a musician can move from one system to another,
or play two parts simultaneously. The piece can be played by any number of
players, in any instrumentation While this aleatory style has been briefly
discussed above, what is new here is the use of textual algorithms for musical parameters (rhythm, phrasing, timbre, dynamics, etc.). Within the
score, performers find pitch groupings over text a recipe for black bean
soup. The performers create rhythm and phrasing based upon that of the
text itself:
One thing for sure: start with water;
add the black beans and cook them
for a long time.

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After that, anything goes.

As Campbells and Kraft Corp know,
salt and sugar taste good together.
For sweetness, add some yams, already baked
to make the syrup sweeter.
And add some simple salt,
and maybe some soy sauce,
maybe some toasted garlic slices,
fried in olive oil;
hot pepper poser and black peppercorns
then add vegetables:
exotic tropical root crops like galangal,
and southern slimey okra,
with coriander leaves and seeds.
Or potatoes, carrots, and onions with marjoram
or tomatoes with basil and oregano
its all a matter of taste.
Soup never turns out the same way twice.

To know this piece performers must call upon traditional music conventions such as tuning and pitch notation but must also utilize wider cultural
conventions including language, gastronomy and even consumerism
(Cambells and Kraft). Ultimately Young metaphorically highlights the
changeability and experiential nature of music itself; as with a recipe, it
never turns out the same way twice.
Knowledge is no longer located solely in relations of black notes on a
page; it is a wider interaction of varying, individually distinct, socio-cultural
contexts. It exists in the interactions of webs of shared meaning and affordance structures, resulting in various configurations, work created together
by composers, performers and audiences. Young (2007) speculates, perhaps it is like listening to the poetry of a language you do not understand.
The knowledge does not reside in any perceived final form, it is interactive
and experiential.

II. Tino Sehgal

With a background in dance and political economics, Berlin-based artist
Tino Sehgal works with human interpreters who execute his work whenever a visitor enters during an exhibitions entire opening hours. In taking
the 1960s/70s conceptual emphasis on artwork as social encounter to the
extreme, Sehgal creates situations for the visitor to encounter in the
gallery space. As with Youngs recipe pieces, these interpreters are free to
improvise within the established structure of each piece, and the artwork
is experienced differently based on the attributes and actions of interpreter
and visitor. Whereas Warhol and contemporaries broke with the ideology
of the genius creator via methods of mass production, Sehgal does so
before his public: My works remain unrealized until the viewer enters
the gallery, and the subsequent interaction is out of my control its
experimental (Sehgal 2007). The roles of viewer and performer become
blurred, as do questions about where meaning resides and who interprets
it. Although Sehgal has never himself made a claim to knowledge

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4.

The anonymous
reviewer proposed
that Sehgals previous
engagement with
political economics
may suggest an
inclination towards
the left-wing notion of
art as intervention
developed post-war
by the Situationists in
the 1950s1960s, but
arguably derived from
Andre Bretons idea
of Surrealism as a
means to alert the
viewer to the
unconscious
operation of ideology.
Similarly, there are
also clear links
between Sehgals work
and the political
interventions of the
1960s, then known as
happenings. While
we do not dispute this
to be the case, we will
focus primarily on
how Sehgals work
allows one to think
about how experiential
knowledge is produced
and disseminated,
rather than any explicit
study of political
intention in the work
itself.

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production, his political agenda revolves around an emphasis on experiential knowing.

Having decided that parliamentary proceedings are no longer the foremost site of politics, Sehgal has moved on to the art exhibition as an alternate sphere with increased political efficiency.4 In a reaction to the museum
as reified institution of collective memory, Sehgal aims to transplant a body
to body transmission into the museums autonomous activity of preserving ideas and values for future consumption (Sgualdini 2005: para. 70).
Therefore, he refuses material documentation of his work thereby ensuring the viewers experience and memory of that experience constitutes the
sole record. Of this meaning, Sehgal describes:
[] somehow it exists in my mind, in my body and the bodies of the people
who know how to do it, and it also exists in their memories and of those of
the people who saw it. Maybe it does only become actual when its staged in
a museum.
(Obrist 2002)

A clear outcome of this is viewer empowerment: The viewer in my work is

always confronted with him or herself, with his or her own presence in the
situation, as something that matters, as something that influences and
shapes the situation (Sehgal in Griffin 2005: para. 26). Viewers report selfconscious experiences and heightened awareness of physical space and
audience presence. While these impressions do not exclusively constitute
the work, they are vital pretexts for a meditation on dissemination and
interpretation (Bishop 2005). The viewers experience injects a node into
the informatics of knowledge production.
Through this embodied relationship to the artwork, the visitor exits the
traditional activity of trying to figure out what the artwork means, and
instead wonders if they have encountered the work correctly. As Sehgal
notes,
I felt that I had found a form which can produce an experience which has
something to do with the point of the work and not just talk about a certain
point. You have to categorise it somehow, because obviously your eyes are
telling you: I have seen something, and your brain has to say: what is this
something?
(Sgualdini 2005: para. 12)

It is through self-examination that the artwork unlocks a subjective process

of knowledge production, extending from the space between the viewer and
work.
Sehgals most recent exhibition at Londons Institute of Contemporary
Arts (29 January 20074 March 2007) (curated by Jens Hoffmann), featured the work This Success/This Failure, earlier shown in Austrias
Kunsthaus Bregenz. Sehgal invites schoolchildren to play in the empty
gallery, but forbids them to use objects. Upon entering, the visitor is
approached by children who introduce themselves and state: The title of
the work is either This Success or This Failure, depending on whether
or not they are having fun.
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As is expected with unconventional artworks, many visitors either

praised Sehgals innovation or complained bitterly about its consecration
as art. However, many additional responses fell into a third category. One
Norwegian blogger stated, I dont know if it is a performance, sculpture or
something else, but it sure was interesting.5 Another visitor noted in the
comment book that Its quite provoking having a bunch of kids coming up
to you screaming all at the same time [] you dont know what they mean.
Other visitors made detailed observations on the children playing, describing their self-selected sex groupings.
These responses tell us two things. First, visitors encounters with the
artwork are coloured by their own assumptions and experiences. For
instance, few visitors engaged with the children in London, while many
threw off museological constraints to play with the children in the Austrian
exhibition. Second, the interaction between viewers and artwork does not
follow any particular rules, but rather creates them (Frenzel 2006).
Meaning-making is not merely a point of orienting towards established
conventions, but involves responding to unpredictable encounters in otheroriented ways.

Thinking with art: knowledge as action

In physically emphasizing the fundamentally experiential foundation of
knowledge, Young and Sehgal imply a more accurate question for debate:
What are the roles of the artistic form, context, audience and experience in
the process of knowledge production? In response to this question, the
authors contend that rather than metaphors of location, creative practice
demonstrates the need to use metaphors of embodiment and tacit knowledge in order to understand the nature of experiential knowledge. In particular, this requires a theory of knowledge as action, rather than presence (as
suggested by DeNora 2003) a focus on knowing, not knowledge.
The role of art is unique in its ability to create conditions for knowing,
experientially. Theorizing from the work of Guattari (1995), Bourriaud
(2002: 101) defines art as a construction of concepts with the help of percepts and affects, aimed at a knowledge of the world, aimed at producing
relationships with the world through signs, forms, actions and objects. Art
is a relational activity. However, this relational aspect of art is not limited
to discursive networks of signs and symbols, but is active on a much more
essential level. Artworks involve affective intensities, they engage us bodily.
Art reaffirms the body as a key instrument of knowledge: a knowledge
that embraces the totality of our sensual perception and experience rather
than intellectual activity alone (Schneider and Wright 2006: 16). Artistic
encounters reunite mind and body such that the experience can become
knowledge.
Artworks are not passive intermediaries transmitting knowledge
between artists, viewers/audiences and the world but rather should be seen
as active mediators, in the sense of actor-network theory. As Latour (2005)
notes, Mediators transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or
the elements they are supposed to carry. Building on Gibsons (1979)
theory of affordances, DeNora (2000) points out that aesthetic materials
have this transformative power because they provide parameters (stylistic,
physical or conventional) that afford particular dimensions of experience
Thinking with art: from situated knowledge to experiential knowing

133

5.

http://www.
kjartan-art.no.
Accessed 25 May
2007.

JVAP_6.2_05_art_Sutherland.qxd

6. The 10-year rule refers

to findings that many
creative actors are
active students and
practitioners in their
fields for a minimum
of 10 years before they
make any
achievements widely
celebrated as
creative.
7.

In this context, we are

speaking of
performance in a
social, not an artistic
sense. Thus, Young
and Sehgal provide
room for variability in
the public-oriented
presentation of their
work (as carried out
by musical performers
or curators/
interpreters), but in
the physical encounter
with their work these
individuals, as well as
the listeners or
viewers engage in a
habitual otheroriented social
performance
(see Goffman 1959).

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or agency. Thus, the cognitive functions with which the viewer or listener
interprets the artwork are not located within the individual or the work, but
are rather distributed throughout the setting. As artworks, environments
and individuals transform, rather than simply filter experience, the arts as
object-oriented practices are an excellent example of how knowledge can be
produced through experience, rather than simply replicated.
Of course, individuals afford things as well; they are also mediators.
Through the example of the 10-year rule, Weisberg (1999) argues that
creative thinking is related to the knowledge one brings to any situation.6
As vom Lehn, Heath and Knoblauch (2001) discovered in their visual study
of museum visitors that visitors encounters with artworks are not only
shaped by the knowledge they themselves bring to the encounter, but also
by the knowledge and actions of those co-present in the space (both those
they came with as well as strangers). Knowing becomes a social activity,
what Jones (2006) terms accumulated discourse or Cossi (2004) terms
the visitors becoming a container for the artwork.
In sum, then, knowledge production is a path towards what Kawatoko
(2000) terms mutual visibility. Knowing takes place within a work group
that encompasses both human actors and artifacts, and humans may make
their work mutually visible to each other through artifacts at hand. Artistic
appreciation necessitates a practical aesthetic (vom Lehn, Heath and
Knoblauch 2001: 283) by which people interact with all sorts of objects,
environments, events and each other.
However, the question remains as to how knowledge emerges experientially from relational artistic encounters. Mills (1940) recognized the
existence of two separate actions, motor-social and verbal. While verbal
actions involve an appeal to a vocabulary of motives associated with a
norm or established convention, motor-social dimensions of action may be
an attempt to work outside these existing vocabularies. The latter demonstrates the importance of what Freund (1998) terms body consciousness.
Emotional communication often takes place through the body, which
respond to situations in ways that our minds cannot. As Young (2007)
states, art allows the opening of the imagination beyond the usual preconceived categories into which we fit much of our daily experience. Our
cognitive findings may often emerge only out of our subsequent interactions with the environment (Freund 1998: 279; see also Witkin 1974). Thus,
it is the embodied and relational encounter with aesthetic materials that
creates room for modification of existing understandings, an essential condition for nascent knowing.
Knowledge is process and, as No (2006: 4) points out, Experience
isnt something that happens to us; its something we do. Cage and Warhol
illuminate this by removing the webs of shared meaning tonality, harmony,
contrast and framing leaving us in the darkened hall or gallery to ponder.
Youngs recipe pieces and Sehgals This Success/This Failure add another
layer to webs of shared meaning, text and sound. Listeners or viewers have
an unexpected experience within established conventions, just as Young
and Sehgal provide room for performance within compositional and artistic
structures.7 Therefore, rather than trying to translate knowledge production
in sociological conventions, further research into experiential knowledge
must allow artistic practice itself to modify vocabularies of knowing.
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Conclusion
Knowledge is self-proving within social processes (Nassehi 2004); it is real
when practiced within society. The work of art cannot be interpreted for
what it knows. Rather, the listener or viewer may be compelled to engage
in tacit processes of contemplation, reflection and consequent knowledge
production, interwoven with context, aesthetic materials and participating
individuals. This is perhaps why Becker (2006) insists upon the Principle
of the Fundamental Indeterminacy of the Artwork, in saying that we cannot
speak of the work itself because there is no such thing; there are only
occasions when we engage with it in different ways. Knowledge lies in
encountering art, and the artwork itself exists in this knowing.
This is not a radical shift in our understanding of what knowledge
entails, but simply requires a return to tradition. As Latour (1993) points
out, the relationships between subject and object, knower and known were
never severed during the Enlightenment; rather, performance has always
been a socially situated action that develops connections between materials
and symbolic resources. Every individual writes social realities, as well as
being educated within them. The making of knowledge is a form of communion, which, in the vernacular of actor-network theory (see Latour 2005)
binds us together.
An understanding of experiential knowledge production is, thus, simultaneously an exercise in political democracy. Artists are public intellectuals
called to question boundaries and make personal conditions public (Becker
2000: 243). Their role is not to create ideal objects of immutable absolute
meaning, but rather to construct aesthetic systems of mediation, affording
experience. Contemporary creators explore alternative narratives and discourses not privileged by current research and this unclaimed knowledge
exerts its specific power because of its ambiguity or indecisiveness and not,
as in existing knowledge systems, because of its authoritative truth (BAK
2006). This is the inherently political aspect of work like Youngs and
Sehgals they are expressively involved in creating new channels of communication with an emphasis on contingency. They construct frameworks
for experience but not with any definite outcome.
As artists challenge audiences to bring more imagination and involvement to creative products, understanding knowledge and its production
comes to mean understanding it as an embodied, tacit and contextual phenomenon, a phenomenon that is as varied as its participants and as subjective as human existence itself. As evidenced through sociological practice,
knowledge production is a political activity (Saukko 2003). Thus, experiential
knowledge requires the expansion of arts education programmes to ensure
democratic engagement with public knowledge systems. While many people
are content to have structure/information/ instructions, as with Youngs
Black Bean Soup we have to be willing to cook, and with Sehgals This
Success/This Failure, it is only a failure if we are not having fun.
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Suggested citation
Sutherland, I. and Krzys, S. (2007), Thinking with art: from situated knowledge to experiential knowing, Journal of Visual Art Practice, 6: 2, pp. 125140,
doi: 10.1386/jvap.6.2.125/1

Contributor details
Originally from Canada and trained as a pianist and musicologist, Ian Sutherland
works at the intersection of sociology, musicology and music theory. His main interest is in the compositional process as social action; how works of music are socially
influenced or act as affordance structures for social discourse. Currently Ian is working on aesthetic changes in music from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich
under the supervision of Prof. Tia DeNora.
E-mail: Ian.Sutherland@ex.ac.uk
Sophia Krzys Acord has arrived to sociology from a background in theatrical design,
musical performance and arts education. Her past research includes an ethnography of Parisian artist-squats and the study of artistic censorship in the US and UK.
She is currently working within visual sociology to interrogate tacit knowledge production and extra-verbalized practices of aesthetic decision-making among curators
of contemporary art. Contact: Department of Sociology and Philosophy, The
University of Exeter, Amory Building, Rennes Drive, Exeter, Devon, EX4 4RJ, UK.
E-mail: s.k.acord@ex.ac.uk

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