Using Phenomenology in Contemporary Arts Research/Interviewing Images: Academic Workshops September 2018 - Present

This ongoing project delivers practical, phenomenologically-based methodological resources that are not readily or comprehensively available within current arts scholarship.

Originally a collaborative enquiry conducted with colleagues from LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore it began by addressing a specific question: How might researchers in the emergent fields of modern and contemporary S-E-Asian art history best identify, engage and think with art practices and projects that may never have been exhibited or studied and whose specificity would most likely be obscured if previously-formulated, generally Eurocentric art historical and theoretical models are the only ones deployed?

Drawing on my research in the fields of Merleau-Pontean phenomenology and visual culture, the workshops tested and delivered the following findings:

1) that rigorous research in both emergent and already-familiar terrain must be (re)grounded in pre-conceptual and pre-critical modes of engagement with primary sources. This involves strategic sensitivity to the self-presentation of that material on its own terms, as far as this is possible, and requires the relinquishment of already-established personal and disciplinary presuppositions;

2) that visual methodologies such as drawing and often overlooked descriptive methodologies (including listing, transcription, ekphrasis, paraphrase, (re)enactment and mapping) are particularly effective in forging deep connections with one's source materials and their modes of self-showing;

3) that these phenomenological techniques serve the decolonisation of scholarship;

The project also introduced arts scholars to Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (a qualitative methodology predominantly used in the social and health sciences which uses in-depth, open-ended interviewing techniques and respect for idiosyncrasy to gather and examine rich, experiential data), demonstrating how this can bring rigour to art-historical interview-based research.

It also successfully extended the remit of IPA by demonstrating how its techniques can be applied to the study of images. Indeed, within the context of this project, I developed and have been testing a multi-staged visual methodology which I've called "Interviewing Images".