Potentials and limitations of language in observing and interpreting art

In this commentary, I design, implement, and evaluate new ways of writing about art. For this purpose, I contextualise and interrelate four video artworks that I produced between 2013 and 2018. Scaffolding my research framework, in a first inductive research phase, I scope the works and provisionally conclude that the pieces connect through the concepts of Time, Repetition, Absurdity, and Play, and aesthetically, they link by improvisation, lo-tech, static camera, short duration, and linearity. In a second deductive research phase, I connect these findings with concepts and artefacts within and outside the artworld. I then critically question my voices as an artist and as a researcher and evaluate the potentials and limitations of language which I apply in my analysis that I base on a structuralist paradigm. Specifically, I question the correlations between signifiers in the artworks and the above concepts and aesthetics. Challenging the stability of meaning, I then scrutinise my writing through a Derridean, post-structuralist lens, and suggest how different authors would reach alternative insights, had they implemented alternative standpoints, addressed different concepts and aesthetic characteristics. In the final phase, I demonstrate how a poem that I wrote offers deeper insights into one of the artworks, thereby proposing that poetic writing can expand an artwork experience as well. I conclude how and why my research contributes new knowledge to the conceptual and aesthetic discourses in which I contextualised my artworks, how analytical and poetic writing can expand access when observing and interpreting art, why and how language has limitations in comparison to holistic art experiences, and how my research can be used as a methodological tool to write about art. I conclude that my findings primarily add new knowledge to discourses in art practice, art writing, art education, and to the wider art world.

The related outputs can be found at:
https://westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk/portfolio/w2z82/resear...