Rom8 Gallery, Bergen - Exhibition - 'Mixing Business and Pleasure' a retrospective of artistic practice - Lecture - 'Hybrid Artistic Research'

‘Mixing Business with Pleasure’ is an exhibition and symposium at Rom8, Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Norway.

Many artists have become ‘curators’ within a greater curatorship. Consequently some artists either (a) exhibit collected artifacts or (b) become ‘pointers to interesting phenomena’. Is it possible that an artwork can have a meaningful life and role in the world before it enters the museum?

The symposium and publication explore aspects of hybrid activity. Some artists have developed research that operates in other disciplines. These artists act with an ‘obsessed amateur idealism’ that has some associations with eighteenth century polymath inventors. But Engineers have constrained their own creativity and conversely artists struggle with the complex science and engineering underlying any project.

In the exhibition, Murray uses previous work to explore notions of artistic research. As technological breakthroughs become more complex, artists need to develop strategies to understand the vocabularies of science and engineering.

Artists have an inherent freedom to pursue obsessions that can lead to interesting objects and interactions. But those outcomes may be seen by some to be manneristic and inconsequential. Recently artists have used a ‘design’ approach to make artworks. They have produced practical, functional products and this approach can help an artist work within the social structure of society rather than act in an alternative or oppositional way. Inventors, enthusiasts and obsessive amateurs share similar goals to those of artists; an underlying idealism in their work coupled with a relative freedom. If artists can widen their vocabularies through a user-centered approach and translate and communicate ‘complex information’ by immersion, then artistic research may play an increasingly important role.

Lecture: Hybrid Artistic Research

Alan Murray has a simple and pragmatic approach to art making; ‘knowledge is only meaningful when coupled with action’. Indeed by doing things himself and temporarily disengaging the abstract, he hopes to shed new light on seemingly simple matters. In 1991 he made a series of works with household steam iron instruction manuals challenging industry to make better manuals. Recently he has developed a guide to the game of squash suggesting the designer needs to be totally immersed to be able to translate expert and complex information.
This paper explores how art that positions itself in an applied arena can develop meaningful research that, by its hybrid nature, reflects on both the applied and the artistic.

Furthermore it may be possible for the artist to be designer to be user, based on overlapping interests in materials, technologies and practices. When a practitioner works in another profession they become, by definition, an amateur. This paper argues that historically obsessive amateurs have been the creative force that has begun and fuelled revolution (eg. the Lunar Society of Birmingham). Engineers are looking to bring a creative and playful element to their practice alongside standardisation and exploitation. Artistic research can show the way.