To use theory or not to use theory

Theory can help you to conceptualise your subject matter and clarify why you might use certain materials, working processes and decision making strategies.

All theories are, as Foss, Foss, & Griffin state, “a way of framing an experience or event, as well as an effort to understand and account for something and the way it functions in the world” (2006, P. 8). One of the most useful aspects of theory is that it can raise your own awareness of possible moves to make, as well as deepening your knowledge base and helping you develop an understanding of your own work. It can help you think through this key question, “How can you explain to yourself what you are already doing?”

Different theoretical stances will of course drive work in different directions; they are also vital to your ability to write about your work when developing your COP3 rationale. As Boris Groys (2012) states “The true goal of every theory is to define the field of action we are called to undertake.” I.e. critical theory should not just be informative it should also be transformative.

The way theory works is to help you ask questions such as, “What does a new bit of knowledge mean to me and how can I include it in my practice?" (This can be your subject matter, your working material's properties, your processes of working or the tacit knowledge you develop as you evolve as an artist.) You can use theory to help you think about how a new piece of knowledge or information could possibly transform your thinking and of course then transform your practice.

However the choice of theoretical ‘lens’ is a complex one because you need to have at least a basic idea of what stances are available. Semiotics, anthropology, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, performance studies, art history, philosophy, museology, queer theory, communication theory, post-colonialism, material thinking, cultural studies and many other frameworks of thinking are all available to you. I shall therefore try and slowly drip-feed these positions into occasional posts when I have the energy to unpick them, however if there are particular approaches you would like me to focus on, remember you can always contact me via the comments box and put in suggestions for posts.

One way of starting is to conduct a basic visual analysis of your own work or other artists that you believe are working in a similar area, once this is done you can apply a chosen theory to help explore how and why the various elements of your analysis might be put together to make various meanings. 

When setting out on a visual analysis I would usually recommend undertaking a detailed compare and contrast of paired images dealing with a similar topic; this is a lot easier than trying to analyse a single image, in doing this you can hopefully develop a sense of what possible meanings a work might have. 

However as always there is a complex issue in relation to seeking meaning in this way. So I shall digress again.

One way to make a detailed analysis of an image is to use a semiotic breakdown. I have demonstrated how to do this in a previous post. See 

Semiotics is a powerful tool and one that can help you ask questions about what your work means and it is often used as a structural framework for conducting a visual analysis of objects and situations. However it presumes that what is being analysed 'signifies' something. That what you are doing actually relates to a wider body of meaning out there in the world. This is though not always as clear as it would appear to be.

In order to explain, I shall diverge again into another story.

After the Second World War the old Gold Standard was dropped. This meant that no longer did the pound in your pocket actually relate to something real. The war had reduced the Western economies to their lowest levels and gold stocks had been severely depleted, so it was decided to uncouple the pound and the dollar from their previous link with actual gold deposited in the Governments' vaults. From this moment onwards the money in people's pockets was only worth what was agreed by the banks and associated systems of exchange. What was at one time related to something of real value out in the world was now only significant as a system of agreed exchange. People had to grow to accept that money was part of a virtual reality and that it only existed as part of a process or system of agreed exchange. The previous link between money and a particular reality was now gone, the sign system now becoming 'free floating'.

As people became accustomed to this they also became used to other systems operating in the same way. Instead of always expecting art to relate to something outside of itself, (religion, politics, etc.) people became aware that art was also an agreed process and artists began to make work that reflected upon how this process might work. For instance Greenberg's ideas about media specificity only begin to make sense once the link between art and 'reality' has been broken.

The theorist Rosalind Krauss explains all this in her book 'The Picasso Papers'. (Don't forget this is Krauss speculating, developing an idea of how things might have been, it doesn't mean it is true, we could I'm sure find another theorist that would argue the opposite) 

Arthur Danto and Georges Dickie would in the 1960s and 70s formalise an understanding of how the processes of art world thinking could be understood by developing Institutional Theories of Art.

For many artists the critical break with rationality was of course Dada. Dada set out to undermine the logical framework of referents that had been built up as part of the Enlightenment Project. The experience of the First World War signifying for many, that all a reliance on logic and technological advancement would bring, was death and horror in the trenches.

The key to this if you are writing for COP3 is to outline the complexity of the situation before heading off into any particular theoretical direction. Writing about these issues is not about stating it's one thing or another, it is more about demonstrating that you are aware of the complex issues that surround your subject. COP3 is marked in such a way that higher marks are awarded to students that can navigate complex arguments and make sense of sometimes conflicting opinions, rather than producing writing that sets out to prove that something is like this or like that.

Therefore we have two questions that could be asked even before we set about making an analysis. One is whether or not the work references an 'out in the world reality' or whether it is more concerned with meanings associated with processes and systems. As Krauss (1998, p.18) states, "meaning itself becomes a function of the system rather than of the world". The other is a question related to the process of logic itself, is it appropriate to use objective analysis in relation to something that might itself be constructed in direct opposition to logic and rationality? It may be that a narrative or story that belongs to your life or others you have met will help you develop a lens with which to understand some aspect of practice, even though this is bound to be somewhat subjective, if approached carefully you can construct a framework of meaning that can be of value.  

The problem is that no one theory is true, however a good theory can give a useful insight into why you might make certain decisions. In art theory we are dealing with speculation and whether we like it or not, sometimes matters of opinion, therefore you might question why art theory is not more like scientific theory. Scientific theories are though subject to testing and at times proven to not always be accurate. Even so, they tend to hold water for a while. I've been around long enough to see art theories become fashionable and then fade away again. Certain styles of Marxist influenced writing were in vogue during the 1960s, these were then seen as too Romantic, semiotics becoming very fashionable in the 1970s and deconstruction in the 1980s, critical theory took over all the art schools by the 1990s and then anthropology held sway for a while and following that systems theory, more recently performance theory has been fashionable. Nowadays I tend to use theory when it can provide a helpful narrative. My somewhat rambling introduction to this might make it seem that theory is something to avoid, on the contrary I have always found it useful, in order to help make sense of my own allegorical drawings I have often used Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory, it just takes a while to get used to picking your way through sometimes quite complex specialist language. Once you start to write using a theoretical standpoint, even though some books you may well read will use complex terminology, my advice is to try and avoid jargon and always see if it is possible to say what you mean using plain English. 

References

Chandler's Semiotics for Beginners available at: http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html

Foss, K. A. Foss, S. K. & Griffin C. L. (1999) Feminist Rhetorical Theories Sage: Thousand Oaks, CA

Hodge, R and Kress, G. (1988) Social Semiotics  Cambridge: Polity

Narrative theory available at:  https://ohiostatepress.org/Books/Book%20PDFs/Herman%20Narrative.pdf

Walter Benjamin's Theory of allegory available at: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/487866?uid=3738032&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21104572531081

Boris Groys (2012) e-flux (search for theory Groys) Under the gaze of theory

Chicago school of media theory http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/drawing/

Architectural Drawing theory: an introduction Link

What is drawing? Catalogue essay 

For Institutional theories of art see:

Danto, A (October 1964). "The Artworld". Journal of Philosophy 61 (19): 571–584.

Dickie, G (1971). Aesthetics, An Introduction. Pegasus. p. 101.

https://www.theedit.site