Practice-Led Research and the Engagement With Truth

This paper offers the thesis that practice-led research in art and design should propose changes to those relations of knowledge that currently ensure the integrity of practice and the neutrality and objectivity of theory. I assert that the 'common ground' of theory and practice can be located within a structure of identification that binds the practitioner to the analyst or theorist of practice. I offer an example of one theorist (Slavoj Zizek) who has instituted a game with this structure of identification of theorist and art object, a game that is necessarily limited by conditions for the 'practice of theory' in the humanities. A way beyond these limitations is suggested in a discussion of Lars von Trier's film 'The Five Obstructions' (2004). This film makes a series of displacements of the integrity of practice within the forms of identification that structure the engagements of Lars von Trier and Jorgen Leth.

Research Interests:

Politics and aesthetics, art and the social bond, psychoanalytic models of the social bond

Biography

Dr Malcolm Quinn (PhD and MA RCA) is Reader in Critical Practice and Research Co-Ordinator at Wimbledon College of Art, where he leads the 'Agendas, Agendas, Agendas' research initiative. His writing deals with relations of aesthetics, politics and social structures, with particular emphasis on psychoanalytic models of the social bond. He is a member of the AHRC College and an editor of Journal for Lacanian Studies.

Current Research

Current research is focused on art and the social bond, employing the psychoanalytic model set out in Jacques Lacan's theory of four discourses, in his Seminar XVII (1969-70). The four discourses of the Master, the University, the Hysteric and the Analyst, express four different forms of the social bond. The four discourses are logical (i.e. not existential) forms of the social bond, constructed from Lacan's critique of the Oedipus myth (the father as the origin of the social bond) and of the myth of the commodity (calculation as basis of spectacular social links). An analysis of the relationship of art practice and Lacan's four discourses is the subject of a seminar I am running with Dr Sharon Kivland at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, Birkbeck. Another outcome of this strand of research, is a review essay in Journal for Lacanian Studies dealing with two recent books, a new translation of Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated with notes by Russell Grigg, New York and London: WW Norton and Co. 2007, and a book of essays Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis : Reflections on Seminar XVII, Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg (eds.) Durham and London: Duke University Press 2006.

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