Title, to be announced: Uncertainty as methodology in the performance based research of Frank Wasser with examples situated in a set of specific contexts
First a quote? ‘What the example shows is its belonging to a class, but for this very reason the example steps out of its class in the very moment in which it exhibits and delimits itself’ - Agamben, G. 1998 (p.22) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press
- This abstract is an attempt to do two things. It is an exercise to determine a title for this body of research. It is also an attempt to invite the reader or examiner to consider an ongoing larger body of research.
- Currently, this performative research cumulates within an inhabitation of the stressed neoliberal structures of contemporary art education, the university and contemporary art institutions.
- The researcher has and continues to inhabit these spaces as a means to develop a practice and to test the capacity for artistic research within the contemporary university and on the other hand to devise a practice which proposes and tests uncertainty as a methodology in art making across a wider context.
- The research takes the form of a performance which is documented and undocumented. It is happening right now.
- The performance unfolds through a variety of materials, fictions, forms and encounters both discrete and explicit, including all interactions the researcher has with staff and other researchers and students within the university.
- This research will determine a rationale for unfinished work. This research will present itself as a double bind.
- The specific contexts referred to in the title of this abstract are institutions, namely, Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, Goldsmiths, University of London, London Metropolitan University, Tate Modern, the Ruskin Wing of Kings College Hospital, London and the mind of the researcher.
- Much of this research has overflown * into other contexts.
- This thesis considers the implications of historical precedents. Subjects and objects both historical and contemporary are analysed and appropriated in order to explicate this thesis. These subjects and objects can be partially identified as Conceptual Art, the 1960 Coldstream Report, the history of the lecture and lecturing as a form, frame analysis, the history of exhibition making and the invention of Powerpoint.
- The form of thesis is (and may continue to be) determined by the shifting parameters of the research conducted.
- This research is comprised of fractured but subjective critical voice.
- This thesis contains a multitude of components, as of the time of writing: An exhibition, two published books, a voice, a personality, a repository of artworks staged across multiple institutions, interviews, an index of recorded sound-pieces, notebooks.
- This research forms a record of an ongoing investigative preoccupation with class, the contemporary and the historical formal structures that govern and determine what currently constitutes an art education.
Selected Portfolio
Images of 'On Tenterhooks' - Exhibition November 2022
LECTUS 2021-2023 ( An ongoing Performance)
After Forethought - Performance at University College Cork
Lectus - Documentation of Performance at 'My PhD has no Words' - University of Reading (2021-2022) *
