Visual Cultures

In this essay, I present a phenomenological approach to knowing, learning from, and teaching with what I call ‘orphaned matter’ — that is, images, objects or artefacts that are commonly regarded as ‘mute’, deactivated, or redundant because the meanings that accompanied their creation and journey into the present have been erased. Here, research is not directed towards the reconstruction of those lost contexts. Instead, counter-intuitively, researchers honour the gaps and losses that have occurred, however catastrophic, and work with what remains so that alternate insights, situated in the present for the sake of a different future, might begin to reveal themselves. Phenomenology is particularly well suited in this regard because, with its embrace of epoché, a
profound openness to erasure is methodologically central to it. Epoché (or phenomenological reduction, and more broadly the suspension of judgement) sets in motion an investigative attitude in which researchers seek to have their inherited habits of thought — their presumptions — illuminated and where necessary disposed of. Notably, this occurs through the agencies of the phenomenon under investigation as it progressively reveals itself, on its own terms, as far as this is possible.

Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is a qualitative method mainly used in psychology, the social sciences and health science. Beginning with processes of open question interviewing, and taking an idiographic approach, it elicits unusually rich data from persons about specific life experiences, opportunities, and challenges. In so doing, it generates flexibility of thought and feeling, and evokes unanticipated insight. As a visual culture scholar, and inspired by the distinctly visual connotations of the word interview , I propose that our understanding of contemporary lived experience and our attempts at change-making might be extended if the descriptive, analytical and interpretative techniques of IPA were applied to the image-worlds (and object-worlds) that play a role in shaping us as individuals, citizens, and researchers. But is it possible to interview images without this being merely or wholly a process of projecting our own perspectives onto them? This question has been central to a series of workshops I began developing and delivering in 2018 called 'Using Phenomenology in Contemporary Arts Research and Pedagogy'. In this paper, I present the philosophical underpinnings for the "interviewing images" methodology and report on the techniques involved. In particular, I focus on what workshop participants have found to be its decolonising potential. For purposes of demonstration, I draw on my use of this technique in early-stage research for a small-scale community-based urban development project I am hoping to initiate in the underprivileged area of the city where I live and teach.

This ongoing project delivers practical, phenomenologically-based methodological resources that are not readily or comprehensively available within arts scholarship into academic and non-academic/school learning environments. Originally a collaborative enquiry conducted with colleagues from LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore it began by addressing a specific question: How might researchers in the emergent fields of modern and contemporary S-E-Asian art history best identify, engage and think with art practices and projects that may never have been exhibited or studied and whose specificity would most likely be obscured if previously-formulated, generally Eurocentric art historical and theoretical models are the only ones deployed? Drawing on Andrews’ research in the fields of Merleau-Pontean phenomenology and visual culture, the project uses workshop formats plus publication to further test the following findings: 1) that rigorous research in both emergent and already-familiar t...

Leah Durner is a contemporary abstract painter living and working in New York City. She is one of the artists whose work I discuss in my book The Question of Painting: Rethinking Thought with Merleau-Ponty (Bloomsbury, 2018) and a detail of her 2006 painting Rousseau—named after the French eighteenth-century philosopher and advocate of freedom and compassion, Jean-Jacques Rousseau; he was also a composer, novelist and botanist—is on its cover. For Durner, as for me, the writing of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) has long been an important, ongoing source of inspiration. This extended conversation with Durner about the relation of her work to practices and histories of painting acts as an important companion piece to the book. Durner reflects on her development as an artist since the 1980s and on how the activity of painting has led her to identify and pursue some particularly deep veins of intellectual and ethical curiosity and concern. Uppermost here ar...

From a practical point of view, phenomenological research strategies train us progressively to let go of the presuppositions, inherited category or naming systems, desires, and expectations which we inevitably bring with us into any research process and which therefore obscure core phenomenological priorities: (a) the unfolding but generally unnoticed or ignored self-showings, or self-presentations, of the phenomena with which we are concerned as researchers, and, furthermore (b) the capacities of such self-showings to re-position, indeed radically reconfigure both researcher and research context. To embrace investigative processes of this kind, however, means entering a territory that may be experienced as decidedly and paradoxically unscholarly. An initial phenomenological challenge, for instance, is to engage in situated, perceptual and pre-critical processes of describing in which the desire to ‘explain’ is temporarily suspended, and in which the usual academic structures and co...

Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is a qualitative method mainly used in psychology, the social sciences and health science. Beginning with processes of open question interviewing, and taking an idiographic approach, it elicits unusually rich data from persons about specific life experiences, opportunities, and challenges. In so doing, it generates flexibility of thought and feeling, and evokes unanticipated insight. As a visual culture scholar, and inspired by the distinctly visual connotations of the word inter-view, I propose that our understanding of contemporary lived experience and our attempts at change-making might be extended if the descriptive, analytical and interpretative techniques of IPA were applied to the image-worlds (and object-worlds) that play a role in shaping us as individuals, citizens, and researchers. But is it possible to interview images without this being merely or wholly a process of projecting our own perspectives onto them? This question h...

Landscape with Gentlemen Visiting a Scholar in a Lakeside Pavilion. Korean, Chosŏn dynasty, first half 17th century. Traditionally attributed to Kim Che (active mid-16th century); perhaps by Yi Ching (b. 1581) or Kim Myŏngguk (b. 1600) Album leaf; ink and light color on silk.

This presentation reflects on how what was originally conceived of as a temporary labyrinth - constructed by artist Maria Strutz on Albion Millennium Green, Forest Hill, South East London, during an arts festival in 2013 (LEAF, or Little Ecological Arts Festival - organised by Bruno Roubicek) - has survived into the present and had local impact with respect to supporting the stewardship of the space on which is is located. This was particularly the case during the summer of 2018 when care of this Green Space was experienced by the local volunteers caring for it as particularly challenging. This observation provided a starting point for reflection on whether labyrinths, as designed structures with an ancient lineage, and as structures that can be walked and, as such, provide now-well documented well-being benefits, can be shown to have a beneficial inpact if introduced into other locations that are marked by forms of social deprivation or 'trouble'.

In this essay, I present a phenomenological approach to knowing, learning from, and teaching with what I call ‘orphaned matter’ – that is, images, objects or artefacts that are commonly regarded as ‘mute’, deactivated, or redundant because the meanings that accompanied their creation and journey into the present have been erased. Here, research is not directed towards the reconstruction of those lost contexts. Instead, counter-intuitively, researchers honour the gaps and losses that have occurred, however catastrophic, and work with what remains so that alternate insights, situated in the present for the sake of a different future, might begin to reveal themselves. Phenomenology is particularly well-suited in this regard because, with its embrace of epoche, a profound openness to erasure is methodologically central to it. Epoche (or phenomenological reduction, and more broadly the suspension of judgement) sets in motion an investigative attitude in which researchers seek to have the...

Although Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is not commonly used by researchers in Visual Culture or Art History - it has been adopted mainly in psychology, the social sciences and health science - it is effective when it comes to interviewing persons about their experiences of making and viewing images. But to what degree, and to what effect, might its descriptive, analytical and interpretative techniques be used to interview images themselves, without this being merely or wholly a process of projecting our own perspectives onto them? This question has been central to a series of workshops I began developing and delivering in 2018 called ‘Using Phenomenology in Contemporary Arts Research and Pedagogy’. In this presentation, I report on the techniques used and the discoveries made thus far as workshop participants have experimented with IPA in relation to both still and moving (audio-visual) imagery. I also reflect on the robustness we found IPA to have with respect to (...