Research Paper Feedback
1:1 Feedback with Alexis Rago
7th June 9am
Well organised
Cautioned being too focussed at an early stage - embrace opportunities for cross-disciplinary study and the implications on art
Focus on ethics and philosophy allows a broad basis of ideas, bringing in sociology, psychology and many other fields but the central subject is ART
Is my enquiry artistic or cultural? Bear this in mind. The art object and the context of community and people. Clearly not separate - reciprocal and inter-determined. Bear this in mind so that the research paper is useful to me
Bigger picture/complexity - history and science. Materials for example are both artistic and methodological
Is the paper about the artists or the ideas? A compare and contrast format will command this question. What do the artists DO and why - what emerges might be less universally applicable
Primary research interviews are gold standard so this is good. Using artists as examples to an idea or question rather than the artists themselves as the central subject is good
Scope for original contribution here - would be a shame to just rearrange the chairs
Observe a state where the research makes a jump: rather than simply constructing an argument (which I must) the work takes on a new life, traversing into new ways of thinking. The way to do this is through confusion
Learn to embrace these moments and then logically retrace their steps. It is an intuitive process and you must then apply the logic - this is the golden seed. Art, research and poetry share this capacity to make leaps without knowing how you got there
Informed confusion
Retain a clear sense of premise - why am I doing this and keep returning to this so I can justify it through evidence and reasoned thinking
Discussion lead onto distinctions between kindness, empathy and compassion. We both attempted definitions - empathy being the building blocks of the emotional state, compassion being a mediator for that but can be empathetically or non empathetically driven (my example of ‘compassionate leave’ not really being an act of empathy but a policy/legal requirement). Kindness is the sort of all encompassing state and actions derived from empathetic feelings
Considered the etymological root of the words. Kin meaning family or species. Alexis suggested the idea of ‘kinship’ - what is this, familial, tribal, racial. We discussed multispeci
Broad basis for understanding paleoanthropology and ancient religions - ideas of how we group in animism, polytheism and monotheism - what are the implications for agriculture? Hunter/gatherers and dwellers, patterns of thinking/action
Literature to read: The Golden Bough, Joseph Campbell, Robert Graves’ The White Goddess.