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Explorer-at-large: artist-led inquiry and the rise of the museum as athenaeum

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Explorer-at-large: artist-led inquiry and the rise of the museum as athenaeum

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EXPLORER-AT-LARGE: ARTIST-LED INQUIRY AND THE RISE OF THE MUSEUM AS ATHENAEUM

BY

SONIA SEETHARAMAN

B.S., University of Southern California, 2008

THESIS

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the degree of Master of Arts in Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere
in the Graduate School of
The University of Southern California
May 2016

CONTENTS

Figures ...……………………………………………………………………………………. ii
Introduction ...………………………………………………………………………………. 1
Art Historical Foundations for Artist-Led Inquiry ...……………………………………….. 6
A Post-Studio Research Practice: Helen and Newton Harrison ...…………………... 9
Institutional Critique: Hans Haacke ...……………………………………………….. 14
The Artist as Researcher ...…………………………………………………………... 18
Mining Archives/Questioning History: Group Material and Fred Wilson ...………... 20
Artist-Led Inquiry: Case Studies ....………………………………………………………... 25
Artists Leading Inquiry: Mark Dion …..…………………………………………….. 26
Leading Inquiry at an Art Mega-Museum: Tate Thames Dig ...……………… 31
Leading Inquiry at a University: Cabinet of Curiosities at the Weisman Art
Museum ….…………………………………………………………………….

39
Institutional Inquiry Programs: the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship ………. 45
Fellowship Example: Ken Gonzales-Day and Taína Caragol ………………... 49
Methodologies of Artist-Led Inquiry ……………………………………………………… 55
Techniques of Inquiry …………………………………………..…………………... 56
Collaborative Elements ………..……………………………………………………. 59
Conclusions ………...……………………………………………………………………… 61
Challenges for Artist-Led Inquiry …………………………………………………... 62
Curating Inquiry …………………..……………………………………………….… 67
Looking Forward ……………………………………………………………………. 75
Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………………….. 78

ii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Title Page
1 Helen and Newton Harrison, Brine Shrimp Farm 10
2 Helen and Newton Harrison, The Lagoon Cycle, Fifth Lagoon, installation view 12
3 Helen and Newton Harrison, The Lagoon Cycle, First Lagoon, installation view 12
4 Helen and Newton Harrison, The Lagoon Cycle, First Lagoon, panel 12
5 Helen and Newton Harrison, The Lagoon Cycle, Fourth Lagoon, panel 13
6 Helen and Newton Harrison, The Lagoon Cycle, Sixth Lagoon, panel 13
7 Hans Haacke, Condensation Cube 15
8 Hans Haacke, MoMA Poll 17
9 Group Material, AIDS Timeline (Berkeley), installation view 21
10 Group Material, AIDS Timeline (Berkeley), installation view 21
11 Group Material, AIDS Timeline (Berkeley), installation view 21
12 Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum 23
13 Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum, Cabinetmaking 1820-1960, installation view 24
14 Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum, Metalwork 1723-1880, installation view 24
15 Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum, Baby Carriage c. 1908/KKK Hood, installation view 25
16 Mark Dion, On Tropical Nature, research documentation (collecting specimens) 29
17 Mark Dion, On Tropical Nature, installation view 29
18 Mark Dion, On Tropical Nature, installation view 30
19 Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, research documentation (collecting artifacts) 32
20 Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, research documentation (collecting artifacts) 32
21 Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, research documentation (collecting artifacts) 32
22 Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, research documentation (collecting artifacts) 32
23 Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, research documentation (field center) 33
24 Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, research documentation (field center) 33
25 Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, research documentation (field center) 33
26 Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, research documentation (field center) 34
27 Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, research documentation (field center) 34
28 Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, research documentation (field center) 34
29 Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, installation view 35
30 Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, installation view 35

iii

LIST OF FIGURES (CONTINUED)

Figure Title Page
31 The Wunderkammer of Ferrante Imperato, illustration 36
32 Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, installation view 36
33 Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, installation view 36
34 Mark Dion, Cabinet of Curiosities (UMN), research documentation (studying collections) 40
35 Mark Dion, Cabinet of Curiosities (UMN), research documentation (studying collections) 40
36 Mark Dion, Cabinet of Curiosities (UMN), research documentation (studying collections) 42
37 Mark Dion, Cabinet of Curiosities (UMN), research documentation (studying collections) 43
38 Mark Dion, Cabinet of Curiosities (University of Minnesota), installation view 44
39 Mark Dion, Cabinet of Curiosities (University of Minnesota), installation view 44
46 Ken Gonzales-Day, Profiled series, Untitled (The Field Museum, Chicago) 50
47 Ken Gonzales-Day, Profiled series, Untitled (National Museum of Natural History, Paris) 51
48 Ken Gonzales-Day, Profiled series, Untitled (The Field Museum, Chicago and, The J.
Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles)
51
49 Ken Gonzales-Day, Profiled series, research documentation (photographing artifacts) 52
50 Ken Gonzales-Day, Profiled series, research documentation (photographing artifacts) 53

1

Introduction
The role of the artist in society has undergone a significant transformation in the last half-century,
particularly with regard to the integration of non-art studies and practices. Artists are now routinely engaging with
science, philosophy, social theory and other disciplines in connection with their art making activities. Such well-
rounded intellectualism has fundamentally altered their cultural responsibility. Their charge is no longer limited to
the craftsmanship of visual artifacts – instead, they use their aesthetic perspective to produce new knowledge in a
variety of different fields. The mission of the contemporary artist, as stated by artists Helen and Newton Harrison, is
to “search, to discover value, to value discovery . . .”
1
This notion underscores the creative and critical capacity of
artists to promote an ethos of curiosity and wonderment about the human experience.
It is from this legacy that we derive the recent phenomenon that I am calling “artist-led inquiry” – artists
who have recast their role as that of an explorer-at-large, tasked with pursuing diverse investigations in innovative
and thought-provoking ways. More importantly, however, these explorations are now being treated as an art making
activity in their own right. In other words: inquiry has become a medium. The artist is not just adopting new fields of
study, but also a new form of aesthetic production. They use reflexivity, criticality and theoretical/historical analysis
to pursue an open-ended examination of some interdisciplinary subject matter. Towards this objective they seek
mutually beneficial collaborations with experts in other academic fields. They then combine research activities –
some borrowed from non-art fields, some from art – to engage in a deep level of inquiry on the topic at hand. It is
this exploratory process that is emphasized within the model of artist-led inquiry. The entire process is viewed as,
for lack of a better term, an extended work of art.
2

The development of artist-led inquiry has its origins in the Conceptual art practices of the 1960s, when
artists began moving away from material, object-focused modes of art making. Their works emphasized process
over product, and privileged creating discourse over creating commodity. This new value system paved the way for
inquiry to become a legitimized aesthetic form. Conceptualism also built a foundation for post-studio practices such
as Earthworks, which brought artists into close contact with non-art disciplines, and institutional critique, in which
artists used their work to question the social and political constructs of the prevailing art system. Stripping away
art’s preciousness and exposing its mechanics allowed it to regain some measure of humanity and has spurred the

1
Helen and Newton Harrison quoted in Michael Auping, Common Ground: Five Artists in the Florida Landscape (Sarasota: The John and Mable
Ringling Museum of Art, 1982), 102-3.
2
This does not mean that artists who work within this genre do not produce actual objects. They do sometimes make physical components, or
they use found objects (artifacts that they do not fabricate). Regardless of provenance, the importance of each object is minimized against the
greater significance of the inquiry. The objects do not drive the research process – they are part of the research process.
2

growth of social art, pedagogical practices and works of art that explore the everyday human experience. These
interdisciplinary, interactive and audience-engaged methodologies are an important pre-cursor to inquiry projects.
Artist-led inquiry typically includes three equally significant components: (a) the collection of data
(objects, information, or experiences), (b) the interpretation(s) of said data, and (c) the presentation of the
collection/interpretation(s). It is important to emphasize that these components do not necessarily occur sequentially.
Since the artists are not being held to the empirical research standards of other fields, they have the freedom to
perform their inquiry through a variety of different mediums and methodologies. Whatever the format, the defining
factor of this structure is that some portion of the inquiry takes place in cooperation with the institution (though it is
not necessarily on public view). Over a prolonged period of engagement, anywhere from a few weeks to a few
months, the artist works with institutional staff to conduct their inquiry under the auspices and sponsorship of the
institution.
3
Activities include but are not limited to excavating, interviewing, prototyping, cataloguing, examining,
teaching, discussing and experimenting. The subject of the inquiry is typically localized in some way – it addresses,
directly or indirectly, the spatial/societal/temporal context of that institution. It may also involve collaboration with
one or more of the institution’s multiple publics.
The intimate connection between the inquiry and its site has roots in institutional critique, a practice in
which artists conduct an exploration of the institution itself – its biases, structures and context – from within that
very institution. These explorations are often process-based, participatory and discursive, necessitating that they take
place onsite. The entire process is treated as the work of art. Artist-led inquiry follows a similar trajectory. The
subject of the inquiry may not be the institution itself, but it is specific to some aspect of the institutional context. As
such, it is conducted with the institution’s support and sponsorship, and it generates a discourse that is the work of
art.
To what does all of this inquiry lead? As already discussed, artist-led inquiry proceeds under the
assumption that the process itself is the product, and thus it does not begin with a clear “end product” in sight. To
take this idea a step further: the concept of artist-led inquiry disavows a strictly predetermined outcome of any kind,
be it material or otherwise.

It would be naïve to state that the artist does not have expectations, but these expectations
are often not translated into specific goals. Put another way, the artist does not angle their inquiry to reach a specific

3
In this model, the work may or may not actually take place inside the physical space of the institution. The artist might work in residence, or
they might conduct the inquiry at specific external field sites. In either case, it is supported by the institution and therefore is still considered an
institutional project.
3

result. Instead they allow their research to follow its own path – this openness, this natural flow, is crucial to an
understanding of artist-led inquiry.
The rising ubiquity of artist-led inquiry practices has been paralleled by a significant shift in the design and
operation of the contemporary art museum. Until relatively recently, the museum’s main responsibility was its
collection of precious static objects: paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs. Museum staff were allocated
to archive, catalog, preserve and present this cultural repository. The arrival of ephemeral art genres in the late 1950s
and early 1960s augmented this definition. The museum widened its scope to also become a backdrop for
performances, happenings, conceptual installations and temporary structures.
Artist-led inquiry presents an altogether different paradigm for the contemporary museum, a phenomenon
that I call the “museum as athenaeum.” To echo the sentiments of Terry Smith and others, this model represents a
move from “temple” to “forum” as an organizing concept.
4
In ancient Rome, the Athenaeum was a hall of learning
founded by the emperor Hadrian as a locus for the advancement of the arts, culture and scholarship. It was meant to
“to re-establish the tradition of public recitation, conferences and poetry contests, as it used to happen in classic
Greece.”
5
In the 19
th
century the word was revived to mean an association (or society) devoted to literary and
scientific studies.
6
My use of “athenaeum” is meant to evoke these historic connotations; the museum is no longer
simply a locus for passive knowledge consumption but rather a discursive hub for vibrant knowledge production. As
with artist-led inquiry, its key feature is flexibility and unpredictability. “The idea is to open things up, not to work
against the old museum . . . it’s important not to reduce our reflections to one single model but to study several
different ones.”
7
The museum takes on many diverse roles; it is a complex amalgamation of a laboratory, a white
cube, an archive, a community center, a conversational space and a school. While its outward manifestation
fluctuates among these various identities, the essential goals remain the same: to foster experimentation,
conversation and collaborative engagement on a variety of interdisciplinary subjects.
Thanks to this expanded definition, the museum can support dedicated artist research initiatives alongside

4
The “temple to forum” concept can be connected with famous essays, by respectively, Duncan Cameron, “The Museum, a Temple, or the
Forum,” Curator: The Museum Journal 14, no. 1 (1971) and Journal of World History 14, no. 1 (1972), reprinted in Gail Anderson, ed.,
Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift (New York: Altamira Press, 2008); and Stephen
Weil, “From Being About Something to Being For Someone: The Ongoing Transformation of the American Museum,” Daedalus 128, no. 3
(1999), reprinted in Lois Silverman, ed., The Social Work of Museums (New York: Routledge, 2010); as referenced by Terry Smith in Thinking
Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2012), 74.
5
Marta Falconi, “Ancient Auditorium, Called Athenaeum, Unveiled In Rome,” Huffington Post, October 21, 2009,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/21/ancient-auditorium-called_n_328657.html. The Roman Athenaeum was named for the city of
Athens, considered to be the cultural center of ancient Greece. Athens is named for Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom and knowledge.
6
Merriam-Webster Dictionary, s.v. “athenaeum,” accessed June 8, 2015, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/athenaeum
7
Stefano Boeri, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and Vivian Rehberg, “Moving Interventions: Curating at Large,” Journal of Visual Culture 2 (2003), 150.
4

conventional exhibitions. Of course, this benefits those whose main practice is inquiry but it also encourages
younger practitioners to consider artist-led inquiry as a viable medium. Artists are invited to the institution for an
extended residency, during which time they engage with a research topic of their choice. Their position within the
institutional community gives them access to museum resources – archives, people or networks – to aid them in the
inquiry process. A very important characteristic of these emerging research initiatives is that, following the lead of
artist-led inquiry, the chosen artists are those whose proposals are somehow connected to the museum’s total site
(physical, social or virtual). Their project should be particularly suited to this institution, taking advantage of
resources they do not have elsewhere. Perhaps the artist needs to view and examine artifacts from the collection. Or
they might request to meet with experts within the museum’s network. In some cases their research might be linked
to the community, or to sociopolitical conditions that have an anchor within the local context. If the purpose of the
inquiry initiatives is to precipitate conversational exchange, or a discourse that flows in both directions, they are
made infinitely richer by choosing a topic that appeals to multiple stakeholders.
As artist-led inquiry does not have predetermined outcomes, it is the responsibility of the museum to
accommodate any shape – conceptual, methodological, or curatorial – that the inquiry may take. The artist might
create physical objects for display, arrange an event, host a workshop, organize a conference, give a lecture or
produce documentation. Similarly, there are multiple layers of audiences that might engage the project at any given
time. The museum must remain responsive, constantly morphing to create receptive spaces for knowledge
production as befits each artist and each audience. Such versatility requires a deep familiarity with the site, but more
importantly it requires adaptability, patience and a culture of cooperation. These traits form the heart of the
athenaeum paradigm.
Before delving into the case studies for artist-led inquiry and athenaeum practices, it is important to
consider my definition of artist-led inquiry as it relates to current terms such as “art practice as research,” “arts-
based research” and “research-based art.” These practices are inextricably intertwined; they are a complex system of
overlapping relationships among research, critical inquiry, art making practices, and education. Indeed, most
creative professionals who identify in this subcategory view their work as a combination of some or all of these
nomenclatures
8
. The boundaries between them are vague at best, but since my focus here is artist-led inquiry I will
attempt to establish some basic demarcations for the sake of clarity.

8
Theorist Kathrin Busch has written about these terms in “Artistic Research and the Poetics of Knowledge,” in Art & Research 2, no. 2 (2009),
accessed January 2015, http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n2/busch.html.
5

The difference in these terms lies primarily in the scope within which they use the term “research.”
“Research-based art” has been used widely to describe an art making process that begins with the artist conducting
some form of investigation that may be formal, conceptual, historic, academic, psychological or otherwise
experiential. Whatever its shape, its inevitable goal is to yield the skill and knowledge needed for the creation of an
art object.
9
“Arts-based research,” on the other hand, has come to describe a practice that utilizes art making as a
method for scholars conducting research in other academic disciplines. Frequently referenced within the social
sciences and humanities (especially with regards to emergent pedagogies), arts-based research “draw[s] on literary
writing, music, performance, dance, visual art, film, and other mediums. . . . This new breed of qualitative methods
offers researchers alternatives to traditional research methods that may fail to ‘get at’ the particular issues they are
interested in, or may fail to represent them effectively.”
10

The term “art practice as research” also refers to the use of artistic processes as a methodology for
conducting research. Unlike the previous terms, however, this practice embraces the confluence of art and scholarly
research as a singular, simultaneous action rather than two distinct occupations. Its recent emergence can be linked,
perhaps, to the academizing of the fine arts as a discipline. The development of advanced degrees in art (such as
MFAs and PhDs), especially at research universities, has demanded that art be reconsidered as a research field.
Instead of an artist doing scientific research to support art making, or instead of a humanities scholar making art to
support sociological research, the artist makes art that is a unique kind of research into cultural experience,
knowledge and human understanding. It is a reframing of aesthetics as a form of research unto itself, using a critical
and theory-driven approach.
11
This inquiry in turn can spur new inquiry, and thus contribute to the net growth of the
art discipline through a series of aesthetic investigatory methods.
12

With these definitions in mind, I contend that artist-led inquiry is not an inversion or a departure from other
related terms – rather, it is a recombination. Like “research-based art,” it involves the artist collecting both skills and
knowledge from other non-art fields. Like “art practice as research,” the artist views his/her actions as a distinct

9
One might argue, as many do, that all art is in fact research-based. Some artists will venture further than others into non-art disciplines, but they
all must investigate the properties and behavior of their materials, the subject of their representation (whether pictorial or abstract) and numerous
theoretical and conceptual models before creating their final work.
10
Patricia Leavy, Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice (New York: The Guilford Press, 2009), 3-4.
11
Artist/theorist Graeme Sullivan has written extensively on this topic in his book Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in Visual Arts (Thousand
Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2010).
12
The word “inquiry” here is preferable to “research,” as it allows for a slightly broader interpretation of the traditional empirical research
strategies used by the academy. It prioritizes the act of questioning over the presentation of facts, solutions, or standardized knowledge. This
strategy is also reflected in the “inquiry-based learning,” a current method in progressive education. This method underscores the experiences of
the learner and he/she develops questions and then attempts to answer those questions through the collection of new and existing data. The
writings of scholar and educator Joseph J. Schwab explore inquiry pedagogy in greater detail.
6

form of critical research into the practice of art making. And like “arts-based research,” the artist’s collaboration
with non-art experts allows these experts to engage their own work in new and exciting ways. Artist-led inquiry
underscores the aesthetic significance of the inquiry process over its purely functional capacity. That is, the research
doesn’t just inspire the art, or inform the art. The research process (in its entirety) is the art.
In the first section of this thesis, I explore the art historical foundations for artist-led inquiry beginning with
1960s Conceptual art. Some brief case studies are cited to clarify this history: Helen and Newton Harrison, Hans
Haacke, Group Material and Fred Wilson. Together these artists represent an aesthetic lineage that has inspired the
contemporary model for artist-led inquiry. Armed with this historical understanding I go on to consider inquiry in its
current manifestation. Two in-depth case studies are introduced: the work of artist Mark Dion, and the Smithsonian
Artist Research Fellowship program (SARF). Dion is presented as an artist who repeatedly pursues inquiry as his
preferred method of practice; SARF is presented as an institutional program that supports artist-led inquiry
(independent of any single artist’s work).
After approaching artist-led inquiry from both artistic and institutional perspectives, I propose certain
methodologies that I believe are crucial to the successful implementation of any inquiry project. I begin with the
techniques of the inquiry artist and continue with a discussion of cross-disciplinary collaboration strategies. In
particular I address issues of generalized vs. localized knowledge, standardization vs. flexibility, singularity vs.
multiplicity and display vs. discourse. Finally, in my conclusion I look to the future of artist-led inquiry and
institutional inquiry initiatives. There are an array of emerging museum research programs that speak to the rising
popularity of the genre. I present suggestions for how curators might approach such programs, while also
considering the challenges that must be overcome in order for them to thrive.

Art Historical Foundations for Artist-Led Inquiry
The foundations for artist-led inquiry were established in the early 1960s, during a time of intense political
and social upheaval. The rise of counterculture had opened the floodgates – no longer content with the status quo,
youth populations worldwide were questioning authority, demanding action and campaigning for change. In the
United States, protests against the war in Vietnam reached a fever pitch. Riots broke out nationwide in support of
civil rights reform. The publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963 heralded the birth of second-
wave feminism, and the Stonewall Riots in 1969 promoted a radical stance on gay rights. There were labor
7

movements and educational movements, an aggressive environmentalism and a distaste for conformity. In all
categories of personal experience, people were calling for both awareness and liberation.
The turmoil outside the art world during this period forced artists to redefine the terms of their existence,
and to challenge the reigning traditions of modernist practices. One such tradition was the apparent removal of the
artist from the concerns of everyday life. The concept of artistic autonomy, as it had developed since the Romantic
period, “brought with it possibilities for the artist to free himself of the religious or secular . . . obligations laid upon
him by his patrons. Together with this development evolved a social position wherein the artist was not only
independent, but also obtained a status different from other professional occupations.”
13
The artists of the 1960s
were eager to engage with the social and political topics of the day, not only through their quotidian activities but
also through their art. This desire to participate and interact in the real world challenged the reigning notion of the
artist as an abstract genius. Instead of living above the material burdens of society, they were choosing to live within
it and to leverage their skills for humanistic purposes. Thus the cloistering of artistic production was no longer a
sustainable model to uphold.
The move towards an art that addressed contemporary issues served as the primary impetus for the rise of
Conceptual art. The concept behind an art object began to take precedence over the object itself - artists favored the
creation and transfer of ideas while deemphasizing its visual appearance. This strategy was dubbed “the
dematerialization of the art object” by Lucy Lippard and John Chandler in their 1968 essay of the same name, often
considered a landmark theoretical text for Conceptual art.
14
According to Lippard and Chandler, dematerialization
shifts the focus of the artwork away from its formal aspects, instead calling attention to its underlying concepts and
processes. It is a phenomenon driven by “the abstraction and liberation of the idea,”
15
wherein the art object is
simply a medium to convey the artist’s idea.
Seating an artwork’s value in its intangible properties had the additional benefit of challenging the
commercialization of the art system. By the 1960s, the commodity status of art had run rampant, effectively
corrupting the relationships between artists, patrons, audiences and institutions. Conceptual practices offered the
possibility of a retaliation: instead of creating objects that are irreplaceable and one-of-a-kind, Conceptual artists

13
Marga Bijvoet, Art as Inquiry: Towards New Collaborations Between Art, Science, and Technology (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1997),
6.
14
John Chandler and Lucy Lippard, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International 12, no. 2 (1968): 31-36.
15
Joseph Schillinger, The Mathematical Basis of the Arts (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948): 17, as quoted in John Chandler and Lucy
Lippard, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International 12, no. 2 (1968): 31-36.
8

produce works that glaringly lack material worth. From performances to digital artifacts to installations, they
endeavor to create artworks that resist commodification. The elements used are non-precious, like soil or paper;
temporal, like light or sound; or immaterial, like language. They might be eroded, destroyed, reproduced or
randomly altered – the inherent value of the work is held within these processes and actions, not within the materials
themselves.
16

Another key strategy of Conceptual practitioners was to leave the bubble of the art world and “to go
outdoors, into nature or the city environment.”
17
Their desire to integrate art into the contemporary social milieu
necessitated that they first integrate themselves in that milieu. In her book Art as Inquiry, Marga Bijvoet points to
two specific instances of this: Earthworks and practices using art and technology. Though seemingly on opposite
sides of the spectrum, these post-studio practices have a great deal in common. Both adhere to the ideals of
dematerialization; they use non-precious or immaterial objects and they focus primarily on process over product.
More importantly, both are also the result of the search for new art contexts. “Moving out” was not just about
maintaining a physical distance from the art world, but expanding the reach of art to other non-art arenas, and
expanding the role of the artist as cultural producer. Artists “sought contact with and access to other disciplines . . .
so that the work might function through a relationship with or in context with ‘the real world.’”
18
Earthworks
brought artists into the natural landscape, and it brought their work into the contexts of conservation, land use and
ecology. Art using technology brought artists into the media landscape, and it brought their work into the contexts of
technology, science, and engineering. Art making was no longer enacted in a void but in a complex web of
interdisciplinary relationships.
It is not insignificant that this search for new contexts coincided with the rise of systems theory and
cybernetics. Bijvoet notes that a fundamental concept of systems theory is the idea of “seeing things in relations.”
19

This approach emphasizes that any information must be understood as part of a system, relative to multidisciplinary
and ideological frameworks. (Elements of this argument can be seen in the basic tenets of poststructuralism, which
views all knowledge as socially constructed and encourages a critical analysis of the contexts of knowledge
production. This will be described in greater detail later.) Systems thinking supports the pursuit of an expanded
context for art, wherein artists must consider their creative production as part of a system, relative to other non-art

16
Two landmark exhibitions of dematerialized art were “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials,” curated by Marcia Tucker and James Monte
(1969), and “Information,” curated by Kynaston McShine (1970).
17
Bijvoet, Art as Inquiry, 1.
18
Bijvoet, Art as Inquiry, 4.
19
Bijvoet, Art as Inquiry, 5.
9

disciplines. “An aesthetic exists always in interaction with, and in commentary on, a larger social context . . . to
isolate an aesthetic and attempt to make it unrelated to other things, is impossible.”
20

A Post-Studio Research Practice: Helen and Newton Harrison
The Harrisons were part of the first wave of artists who left the studio in favor of a dematerialized,
recontextualized art practice. Before they married and began their decades-long artistic collaboration, Newton
Harrison was a practicing sculptor and painter and Helen Mayer was a teacher with advanced degrees in literature
and education. Both were discontented by the narrow focus of their work – Newton felt the art world had become
too insular and object-driven, and Helen felt that the educational system had stagnated. “No matter what I could
imagine doing, it would never be enough. The resistance to creativity and innovation in the system was too
extreme.”
21
Their mutual dissatisfaction with the current state of modernist practices prompted their collaborative
effort to search for new models of art making.
For a short time in the late 1960s, Newton experimented with colored light, liquid crystal displays and glow
discharge tubes, and in 1969 was invited to participate in the Art and Technology Program at the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art (LACMA).
22
Within a few years, however, his interests shifted from technology to nature,
and he and Helen began to focus on an exploration of growth processes, ecosystems and biological survival. The
Survival Pieces (1971-1973), some of their earliest works, were a series of self-contained ecosystems constructed
within the gallery space. A portable orchard, a fish farm, a vegetable garden, brine shrimp ponds, etc. - each piece
was the result of the artists’ experiments with nature and natural growth.
Brine Shrimp Farm (Survival Piece #2) (1971) (fig. 1), for example, was a collaboration between the
Harrisons and Dr. Richard Eppley from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. The installation, exhibited as part of
the Art and Technology Program
22 above
, included a series of 10’x20’ ponds filled with shrimp and algae. Each pond
was given a different saline content, and the algae would react to the increased salinity by releasing carotene and
changing the color of the water. As the shrimp ate the algae, the color would change again, due to the decrease in
carotene. The effect, a cycle of slow color shifts, gave the impression of a large field painting, while each pond
simultaneously produced several pounds of shrimp per month. Brine Shrimp Farm utilized the inherent beauty of a

20
Harrisons quoted in Auping, Common Ground, 99.
21
Harrisons quoted in Auping, Common Ground, 34.
22
Bijvoet, Art as Inquiry, 136-137. The Art and Technology program ran from 1967 to 1971 under the leadership of Maurice Tuchman. The
works produced during the program were exhibited in 1971 at LACMA’s Art and Technology exhibition.
10

natural process to call attention to that process, and to provoke questions about aquaculture, sustainable food
systems and the fragility of natural environments.

Figure 1. Helen and Newton Harrison, Brine Shrimp Farm, 1971. Installation, mixed media, 40 x 160 x 2 ft. Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California. Available from: ARTstor, http://www.artstor.org (accessed June 9, 2015).

In an interview with Michael Auping, Newton Harrison credits Robert Smithson for their move into nature:
“[He] got artists out of the museums. There is general indebtedness to him for that.” Beyond the physical locations
of their work, however, any similarities between the Harrisons and the Earth artists had all but disappeared by 1975,
and they are more often considered today as some of the first ecological artists. “Our concerns with the earth tend to
focus on its properties to support life. So we do growth pieces. Or we do reclamation pieces. . . . Earth Art was more
concerned with the making of structures.”
23
Their work is inspired by the idea of survival rather than the
monumentality of nature. The physical objects that are created, whether inside the gallery or elsewhere, are simply a
“meeting ground for discourse”
24
to present the viewer with new metaphors for understanding life. Indeed, myth and
metaphor are central to their practice, and it is what distinguishes it from the empiricism of the sciences. Helen and

23
Harrisons quoted in Auping, Common Ground, 98-100.
24
Newton Harrison quoted in Arlene Raven, “Two Lines of Sight and an Unexpected Connection: Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison,”
in Art in the Public Interest, ed. Arlene Raven (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993), 93.
11

Newton use their position as artists to approach ecological subjects from new perspectives, and thus critically
change the conversational framework by which we understand them. “We believe many of the metaphors that drive
our culture need to be questioned and are in immediate need of revision. Art is the best discipline for doing this; it
has the closest connection to metaphor.”
25

This is perhaps better exemplified by The Lagoon Cycle (1972-1985) (figs. 2 and 3), one of the Harrisons’
most notable projects. During their time at the Scripps Institute, Helen and Newton were alerted to the plight of the
mangrove crab, an Asian species whose existence was being threatened by overharvesting. They began a long
investigation of the crab and its habitat, with the intent to develop a successful aquaculture system in which it could
survive and reproduce. The Lagoon Cycle, produced over the course of ten years, is the story of their research. On
the physical level, the installation is a photomural 360 feet long and 8 feet tall. The panels (figs. 4, 5, and 6) of the
mural are a collage of maps, photographs, drawings, texts, and research data, overlaid with a quasi-fictional dialogue
between two characters, the Lagoon Maker and the Witness. There are seven chapters, or lagoons, in the cycle,
…each of which represents a phase in the process of thinking about the survival of the human
species and the earth. The narrative takes place in the form of a dialogue between the Lagoon
Maker on one side, who represents the position of the efficient organizer and developer of new
technologies which promise progress and success, and the Witness on the other, who observes and
comments on the possible consequences of the Lagoon Maker’s proposals and plans.
26

The First Lagoon recounts the Harrisons’ trip to Sri Lanka to find the crab, and confronts how technology is
changing the local environment. The Second Lagoon is about their scientific research to create a manmade
ecosystem for the crab. It is also a critique of scientific objectivity and scientific research methods. The Third
Lagoon narrates how the Harrisons were approached by businessmen, scientists and journalists, all trying to find
ways to “capitalize” on the successful breeding of their crab. It questions capitalism and the commodification of
food resources. The Fourth Lagoon tells the tale of the Salton Sea as an example of a destroyed ecosystem and The
Fifth Lagoon is a proposal for cleansing and restoring it. The Sixth Lagoon tells the tale of the Colorado River - how
human intervention has irreparably damaged the ecosystem, and temporary fixes will not be enough to change it
back. The Seventh Lagoon, the last one, is a proposal for a ring of aquaculture systems around the Pacific Ocean,
providing food resources to much of the world’s population. The closing argument is that such a proposal cannot be
executed if we do not change the terms of the conversation, and alter the way we think about nature.

25
Harrisons quoted in Auping, Common Ground, 32.
26
Bijvoet, Art as Inquiry, 140.
12

Figure 2. Helen and Newton Harrison, The Lagoon Cycle: Fifth Lagoon: From the Salton Sea to the Pacific, 1985. Mural installation. Johnson
Museum of Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California. Available from: ARTstor,
http://www.artstor.org (accessed June 9, 2015).

Figure 3. Helen and Newton Harrison, The Lagoon Cycle: First Lagoon: Lagoon at Upouveli, 1985. Mural installation. Johnson Museum of
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California. Available from: ARTstor,
http://www.artstor.org (accessed June 9, 2015).

Figure 4. Helen and Newton Harrison, The Lagoon Cycle: First Lagoon: Lagoon at Upouveli: Panel 7, 1985. Panel from mural installation.
Johnson Museum of Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California. Available from:
ARTstor, http://www.artstor.org (accessed June 9, 2015).

13

Figure 5. Helen and Newton Harrison, The Lagoon Cycle: Fourth Lagoon: On Mixing, Mapping and Territory: Panel 5, 1985. Panel from mural
installation. Johnson Museum of Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California. Available
from: ARTstor, http://www.artstor.org (accessed June 9, 2015).

Figure 6. Helen and Newton Harrison, The Lagoon Cycle: Sixth Lagoon: On Metaphor and Discourse: Panel, 1985. Panel from mural
installation. Johnson Museum of Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California. Available
from: ARTstor, http://www.artstor.org (accessed June 9, 2015).

Works like The Lagoon Cycle are indicative of the first step towards the perception of artist-led inquiry as
it exists today. The Harrisons’ research is interdisciplinary, yet still very much in the realm of artistic thought. And
though much of it takes place outside of the museum, the installation very clearly presents the research process, and
its resulting discourse, as the primary material of the piece. The most important outcome of The Lagoon Cycle is an
14

expanded notion of the artist’s role in society. The Harrisons’ later works have involved not only collaborations with
scientists and academic researchers, but also with city planners, politicians and activists. They are often invited by
local officials and state governments to address environmental problems, to which they would propose solutions
such as irrigation systems, urban promenades, river restorations, even the reforestation of the Tibetan Plateau. On
more than one occasion, their proposals were actually enacted in real space. According to the Harrisons, the artist is
no longer simply the producer of fetish objects; they are enablers of dialogue, creators of knowledge and active
promoters of exploration and discovery.

Institutional Critique: Hans Haacke
Following the lead of artists like the Harrisons, many artists working in the 1960s and 1970s left the
confines of the art institution in search of new interdisciplinary contexts. It must be acknowledged, however, that the
artists who remained within the institution were not unaffected by these changes. Though they chose not to overtly
engage with subjects like science or history, they did examine the art world within new contexts: the context of labor
politics (Mierle Laderman Ukeles), the context of real estate development (Hans Haacke), the context of physical
space and environment (Michael Asher), etc. Inspired by systems theory, they saw art in relation to its supporting
structures. Some of these structures were literal (the museum building, the gallery space and the institutional staff)
while others were nonliteral (the economics of the art market, art as a form of public diplomacy, the metanarrative of
Western art history). The resulting artwork strived to expose “the cultural confinement within which artists function
– ‘the apparatus the artists is threaded through’ – and the impact of its forces upon the meaning and value of art”
27

This phenomenon is now referred to as institutional critique.
Many of the earliest instances of institutional critique focused on the physicality of exhibition spaces and
the unconscious restraints that they place on artworks. Artists considered the dimensions of museum walls; the
sterile “whiteness” of the “white cube”; or the carefully controlled atmospheric conditions of the gallery. In Hans
Haacke’s Condensation Cube (1963) (fig. 7), the gallery’s standard temperature and lighting are used to power a
perpetual water cycle within a Plexiglas cube. The artist begins by placing a small amount of water inside the sealed
cube and placing the cube on display. As the gallery lights heat the container, the water evaporates. The vapor
eventually condenses on the walls due to the temperature differential, and the condensation grows into droplets that

27
Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004), 18.
15

adhere until their mass overcomes gravity and they slide down to rejoin the initial pool of water. The cycle of
evaporation and condensation continues for as long as the cube exists.
28

Figure 7. Hans Haacke, Condensation Cube, 1963. Plexiglas and water, 30 in x 30 in x 30 in. Collection Wulf Herzogenrath, Bremen, Germany.
Available from: Artnet, http://www.artnet.com (accessed June 9, 2015).

Like the Harrisons, Haacke’s work focuses on change and growth over static form. Condensation Cube
documents the perpetual transformation of the water and how these processes manifest visually over time. Every
iteration of condensation is unique, leaving a discrete set of traces that cannot be predicted or repeated identically.
These traces are, of course, dependent on the variant atmospheric and structural conditions of the gallery. Thus the
cube is like a living organism, constantly changing with its environment. Its appearance is an artifact of change.
29

The piece forces its audience to pay close attention to parameters that they would normally ignore when looking at
art. It reminds them of the context, both spatial and temporal, within which they are situated. How long has the cube
been there? How cold is the gallery? Was it colder the day before? Who regulates the temperature? How are the
changes in temperature affecting the artwork? What would the cube look like in another museum? In another city?
What would the cube look like tomorrow? A heightened awareness of the relationships between the cube and its
surrounding conditions, and their relative interdependence, encourages a critical discourse about the physical (and
biological) systems that support art.

28
“Condensation Cube,” Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, accessed June 15, 2015, http://www.macba.cat/en/condensation-cube-1523.
Details from artist’s statement.
29
“A very important difference between the work of minimalist sculptors and my work is that they were interested in inertness, whereas I was
concerned with change.” Jeanne Siegel, “An Interview with Hans Haacke,” Arts Magazine, May 1971, p. 18 as referenced in Bijvoet, Art as
Inquiry, 84.
16

It was during the 1960s that Haacke was formally introduced to systems theory through the writings of
biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy. His work had already begun to reflect an interest in systems thinking, but
Bertalanffy’s texts provided him with the adequate language to describe his methods and develop them further. The
systems approach reframes art, like all things, as part of a larger network or structure. It must be produced, seen and
understood in relation to its contexts: space, time, environment, process or social/political milieu. “I use the word
‘systems’ exclusively for things that are not systems in terms of perception, but are physical, biological, or social
entities, which, I believe, are more real than perceptual titillation.”
30
The systems approach is crucial to the
development of institutional critique. Works like Condensation Cube clearly illustrate this notion – the audience
must interpret the artwork by interpreting the systems in which it participates, and the relationships between these
systems. Air temperature, light, elapsed time – how does the cube reflect and interact with these conditions? How
do they interact with each other? It is not sufficient to simply interpret the cube’s visual or formal appearance.
While early systems theory was primarily focused on biological structures, this eventually gave way to a
broader consideration of social structures. Haacke’s work during this period also began to engage more directly with
the political and economic conditions of art making. One such artwork was MoMA Poll (1970) (fig. 8), which was
created for the exhibition Information at the Museum of Modern Art. The poll asked gallery visitors, “Would the
fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon’s Indochina policy be a reason for you not to
vote for him in November?” The visitors answered by submitting a “yes” or “no” ballot into one of two Plexiglas
ballot boxes. Because the boxes were transparent, viewers were able to see the results both before and after they
submitted their own ballot.
MoMA Poll follows a similar schema as Condensation Cube – the artwork changed in real time over the
course of its exhibition, never reaching a final state because visitors continued to submit ballots throughout. The
fluctuating poll results painted a demographic picture of the art-going public, but more importantly, it called
attention to the political and economic apparatus that supported the museum. In 1970 the Rockefeller family had a
large presence on the MoMA board of trustees. Though their conservative leanings were directly at odds with the
liberal attitudes of most artists, their seats on the board ensured that they maintained some ideological control of the
museum’s programming. “The fear of alienating donors and sponsors has institutionalized self-censorship, a form of
censorship that is rarely recognized and impossible to prove. The question for my poll was not known to the

30
Jeanne Siegel, “An Interview with Hans Haacke,” Arts Magazine, May 1971, p. 18 as referenced in Bijvoet, Art as Inquiry, 83.
17

museum until the night before the opening. I was later told that the museum director and an emissary of David
Rockefeller had a nervous meeting.” Haacke’s project was designed to make museum viewers aware of their own
political sentiments, and to place those sentiments within the context of the larger contemporary art community. It
also highlighted the relationship between the Rockefeller family and MoMA, interrogating the mechanisms of power
and patronage that drive artistic production.

Figure 8. Hans Haacke, MoMA Poll, 1970. Installation. Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York. Reproduced from James Putnam, Art and
Artifact (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2009), 29.

Like the work of the Harrisons, institutional critique is highly dematerialized. There is also a clear feeling
of cross-disciplinarity, though it manifests as a “moving in” rather than a “moving out.” Artists like Haacke enter the
discourse of other disciplines, such as politics and biology, but they do so with the intent of bringing these
discourses into the realm of art and art making. Most artists who practice institutional critique are adamant that their
work is seen within an art context, not as a social science or any other research discipline. The fact that Haacke is an
artist, critically analyzing a system to which he himself belongs, gives the work more strength than if he was an
economist studying the economic models of the distant “art-world.” In fact, some of his more poignant works were
rejected by art institutions because of their degree of transparency. In Manet Projekt ’74 (1974), Haacke exhibited
18

Edouard Manet’s Bunch of Asparagus (1880) alongside a series of documents that detailed the sale and acquisition
history of the painting from its creation to its acquisition by the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne. The museum
promptly rejected the piece because the documentation highlighted some embarrassing connections to the Nazi party
(uncovering and presenting such information was, one suspects, the entire point of the work).

The Artist as Researcher
By the 1980s, the rise of interdisciplinary, dematerialized and systems-inspired art making (both within and
outside of the institution) had led to the acknowledgement of a new class of artist: the artist as researcher. Unlike
their predecessors, these artists were not just the producers of visual experiences. They were explorers, ambassadors
of curiosity who gathered information in the search for a deeper level of human understanding. In constructing a
historical basis for artist-led inquiry, this development was crucial. It represented a standardization of the new
artistic methodologies that had been introduced during the previous decade. Art making now incorporated elements
of theory and critical analysis, paired with traditional methods of artistic production. It delved into the intricacies of
our experience and knowledge, particularly the mechanisms by which we produce this experience and knowledge.
Thanks to artists like the Harrisons or Hans Haacke, art was now a practice of constant questioning.
31

These changes prompted many ongoing conversations about how artists perform research, and to what
degree it is similar to or different from other academic methodologies. A myriad of styles and strategies have been
applied, but one of the common threads is a general aversion to a goal-oriented approach. They eschew the standard
research protocol of selecting a question to be answered or selecting an argument to be proven. Instead, they choose
a theme to explore, and they allow their investigation to flow freely from one point to the next. The result is a
meandering path of discovery – questions do not necessarily lead to answers, but to more complex questions.
The theoretical component of this exploration is particularly tied to the development of postmodernism and
poststructuralism in the 1970s. These philosophical schools of thought – which evolved from the writings of
scholars such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Jean Baudrillard
32
– expanded

31
The idea of the artist as a researcher and scholar can also be linked to the academizing of art in the late 20
th
century. The MFA
degree was popularized in the United States after World War II, but placing art into an academic context alongside disciplines like science and
engineering required a drastic revision of the typical “art academy” curriculum. Art students were asked to perform research, to publish critical
writings and to be evaluated in accordance with university-wide standards. They were also encouraged to explore possible intersections with non-
art disciplines. After completing their degrees, many would return to academia as professors, dividing their time between teaching, research and
art making. Two references on the development of university art curricula are Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American
University (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) and James Elkins, ed., Artists with PhDs: On the new Doctoral Degree in Studio Art
(Washington: New Academia Publishing, 2009).
32
The works of these scholars and their contemporaries are sometimes referred to collectively as French Theory or deconstruction theory.
19

certain literary and psychosocial theories and applied them to the analysis of art, film, technology and mass media.
Contemporary artists and critics were both deeply influenced by the work of these scholars. While the systems
approach establishes that art should be interpreted as part of a larger framework of interrelated conditions,
poststructuralists question the definitive nature of those conditions. They contend that the underlying structures
contributing meaning to any object or situation are themselves constructed. Rather than absolute or essential truths,
they are built from assumptions and biases (and power dynamics) that are embedded in our individual perceptions of
reality.
What emerges from poststructuralist philosophy is a complete disavowal of the notion of absolute
knowledge. If all human experiences are reliant on social constructs, it follows that there cannot be a single “true” or
“correct” narrative of reality. Instead, variations in construction will result in a multiplicity of narratives, each
equally valid with respect to the others. In this way poststructuralism challenged the dominant worldviews of the
1950s and 1960s, particularly with respect to issues of gender, history, race, class, representation and language. It
encouraged scholars to “deconstruct” hegemonic narratives to discover their structural biases, and by doing so, to
unearth the possibility of alternate forms of knowledge.
This notion has resonated deeply with art practitioners, especially those who pursue research as their
practice. A commonality among them is their dedication to highlighting new narratives from within an existing body
of knowledge. In other academic disciplines, the role of a researcher is to present ideas that either support or refute
the prevailing narrative of that field. The goal is to continue building this narrative by removing earlier uncertainties
and slowly honing in on the absolute truth. For an artist, however, the process of inquiry is more about complicating
the truth than distilling it. As they immerse themselves in mountains of information, they work to uncover the
multiplicity of narratives and truths that have often been ignored in favor of a single “right answer.” This emphasis
on new pathways is a crucial element of the artist’s conceptual toolbox. It is an exercise in complexity, reminding
the viewer that each new perspective holds the potential for greater understanding. The “artist as researcher” doesn’t
prove or disprove knowledge – rather, he/she shines a spotlight on how knowledge and culture are made.
More than a research methodology, the emphasis on interrogating hegemonic structures can also be seen as
a form of political or social activism. Absolute truth, the so-called “master narrative” of human knowledge, is
embedded in our social consciousness by those in positions of power. Exposing the histories that they sought to
suppress (in order to promote their own) is an act of liberation. It undermines the authority of what we claim to
20

know as truth, and in so doing promotes action and change. It is no surprise that these developments in research
practice coincide with the rise of social art practices in the larger contemporary art sphere. Rather than speaking
from a position of authority to advocate change, artists discovered that creating awareness through information and
dialogue was a better strategy for social action. By complicating and questioning our understanding of “true” reality,
and presenting multiple narratives and viewpoints for consideration, they are better equipped to emancipate their
audiences. Encouraging them to understand and participate in their own constructions of reality can provide a deeper
level of empowerment than any soapbox.

Mining Archives/Questioning History: Group Material and Fred Wilson
One example of this phenomenon is the work of the artist collective Group Material (GM). Formed in the
East Village in 1979 by a group of recent graduates of the School of Visual Arts, GM was committed to “the
creation, organization and promotion of an art dedicated to social communication and political change.”
33
Rather
than creating art objects, GM’s exhibitions incorporated found objects, texts, or items solicited from the public to
catalyze social awareness regarding specific political or economic issues. GM’s works from the late 1980s are
particularly striking – in AIDS Timeline (1989) (fig. 9, 10 and 11), the artists built a chronology along the gallery
walls documenting the conflicting histories and perspectives on the AIDS crisis. They incorporated magazine
covers, agitprop paraphernalia, running text and several works of art from other artists. The result was a multivalent
discourse, alternating between pedagogy, critique and visceral experience. The artists did not intend to convey a
single complete message to the audience – rather, in the spirit of exploration and questioning, the goal of the work is
to provoke new meanings and dialogues. According to historian Alison Green, “This is not the de-politicised ‘mash-
up’ of contemporary postmodernism, but something more akin to critical discourse in its best sense.”
34

33
Julie Ault, ed., Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material (London: Four Corners Books, 2010), 19. This quote comes from the Group
Material inaugural statement, as highlighted in the excerpted news article “Artful Dodger,” written by Gerald Marzorati for The Soho News,
October 15, 1980.
34
Alison Green, “Citizen Artists: Group Material,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry 26 (2011), 22.
21

Figure 9. Group Material, AIDS Timeline (Berkeley), 1989. Installation. Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California. Available from: Doug
Ashford, http://www.dougashford.info/ (Accessed June 9, 2015)

Figure 10 and 11. Group Material, AIDS Timeline (Berkeley), 1990. Installation. Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California. Reproduced from:
Julie Ault, ed., Show and Tell: A Chronicle of Group Material (London: Four Corners Books, 2010), 248 and 240.

22

Another example of research as an artistic practice is the work of artist Fred Wilson. Unlike Group
Material, Wilson’s study of the museum itself is the prima materia of his art. His research, equal parts archival and
dialogical, interrogates an institution’s histories, sites, audiences and collections, focusing “on how the museum is
assembled and how meaning is constructed in that context.”
35
These explorations eventually lead to multi-room
installations that re-present objects from the museum’s permanent collection, placed into new contexts that “disrupt
taken-for-granted assumptions about how museums exhibit and interpret their collections.”
36
Wilson’s work is as
much about the individual object’s narrative as it is about the overarching narrative of the institution. His displays
call attention to each artifact’s layered memories, and how these memories can be obscured, forgotten or
purposefully misinterpreted by curatorial strategy. Like Group Material, he does not privilege any single memory as
the “truth” – he simply “[lets] both meanings or multiple meanings be present at the same time,”
37
opening a space
for dialogue in the viewer’s consciousness. The element of surprise is a key factor here – the irony and dissonance
found within his displays jolt the viewer into questioning their traditional museum-going expectations.
One of Wilson’s most important works is Mining the Museum, exhibited at the Maryland Historical Society
in 1992. It is particularly significant to the development of artist-led inquiry because Wilson performed much of his
research in residence at the institution. The project was based on the artist’s exploration of the Historical Society’s
existing archive of historical and cultural artifacts. During his residency Wilson delved into this archive, examining
each object and interrogating its relationship to the institution and to certain historical narratives. He met with
institutional staff, asked questions and did background research to contextualize his findings (fig. 12). The
connection between the research and its site is significant – because he engaged within a local context, Wilson’s
investigation resonated deeply with the museum’s existing constituency. His audience (staff as well as patrons) had
the opportunity to participate in a dialogue, sometimes controversial, about the construction of their collective
histories. Were certain histories being erased? Were others being promoted? What does that say about the power
structures of their institution, their community, or their personal worldviews?
Wilson’s research culminated in an exhibition of these archival artifacts, showcasing not only the objects
themselves but also the threads of the artist’s inquiry process. In a series of installed vignettes, Wilson juxtaposed

35
Martha Buskirk, “Interviews with Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, and Fred Wilson,” October 70 (1994), 109.
36
Lisa Corrin, “Mining the Museum: Artists Look at Museums, Museums Look at Themselves,” in Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred
Wilson, ed. Lisa Corrin (New York: The New Press, 1994), as referenced in Mark Graham, “An Interview with Artist Fred Wilson,” The Journal
of Museum Education 32, no. 3 (2007), 211.
37
Fred Wilson quoted in Graham, “An Interview with Artist Fred Wilson,” 214.
23

traditional historical artifacts with other, more obscure artifacts to highlight the racial prejudices and selective
memory of the institution’s chosen narrative. For instance, in Cabinet Making: 1820-1960 (fig. 13), four elegant
Victorian chairs are turned to face a wooden whipping post. The lavishly upholstered chairs represent a romanticized
history of the wealthy white landowner, a standard trope in historical museums. The inclusion of the whipping posts
reminds the viewer that these same landowners were also slave owners, and such a structure would be as common as
fancy chairs in those days. “Taken together, these objects appear to be in conversation with each other,
counterpoising signifiers of privilege and oppression that rarely, if ever, share the same page in historical narratives
or the same space in museums.”
38
In another vignette, a collection of silver dinnerware is displayed alongside a pair
of shackles (fig. 14). A Ku Klux Klan hood is draped within a baby carriage, a ghostly reminder of the generations
of white supremacists who were raised by black nurses (fig. 15). Wilson’s goal, like that of more artist-researchers,
is not to provide answers or to preach a definitive political opinion. It is to provide more questions, and to encourage
viewers to engage in a discourse with these questions. “I’m not trying to say that this is the history that you should
be paying attention to. I’m just pointing out that, in an environment that supposedly has the history of Maryland, it’s
possible that there’s another history that’s not being talked about.”
39

Figure 12. Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum, 1992. The artist conducting research. Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, Maryland.
Photographer: Larry Qualls. Available from: ARTstor, http://www.artstor.org (accessed June 9, 2015).

38
Maurice Berger, Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations, 1979-2000 (Baltimore: Center for Art and Visual Culture, University of Maryland
Baltimore County, 2001): 9.
39
Fred Wilson quoted in Buskirk, “Interviews,” 109.
24

Figure 13. Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum (Cabinetmaking 1820-1960), 1992. Installation. Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, Maryland.
Available from: Maryland Historical Society, http://www.mdhs.org/ (Accessed June 9, 2015).

Figure 14. Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum (Metalwork 1723-1880), 1992. Installation. Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, Maryland.
Available from: Maryland Historical Society, http://www.mdhs.org/ (Accessed June 9, 2015).

25

Figure 15. Fred Wilson, Mining the Museum (Baby Carriage c. 1908 and KKK Hood), 1992. Installation. Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore,
Maryland. Available from: Maryland Historical Society, http://www.mdhs.org/ (Accessed June 9, 2015).

In the case of Mining the Museum, Wilson’s residency activities can be considered as valid an art form as
his final exhibition. Bringing the research process into the physical context of the institution encourages an
expanded understanding of knowledge production as an artistic practice. Research is no longer merely
documentation that precedes a formal object – instead, artists are invited to consider it as an independent creative
act. The aesthetic value in such projects, like in most artworks, is the artist’s ability to provide a unique critical
perspective that thrives on provocation and difference. By disrupting the standards of conventional academic
research, they become facilitators for discourse and, though such discourse, the co-producers of new forms of
knowledge and understanding.

Artist-Led Inquiry: Case Studies
All of the artists mentioned thus far – the Harrisons, Hans Haacke, Group Material and Fred Wilson –
represent the art historical and conceptual trajectory that has led to the phenomenon of artist-led inquiry. It is
through their collective efforts that inquiry has earned its place as a legitimate form of aesthetic production. The
section that follows explores two contemporary examples of artist-led inquiry.

26

The first case study is the work of artist Mark Dion, whose career serves as a touchstone for the kind of
artist-led inquiry that has become exceedingly prevalent since the mid-1990s. Dion is known for pursuing research
projects across a broad array of academic disciplines, from ecology and history to archaeology and epistemology.
Two projects in particular will be analyzed: Tate Thames Dig (1999) and Cabinet of Curiosities, Weisman Art
Museum (2001). The former is an inquiry performed within the context of an art mega-museum, while the latter is
performed within the academic context of a university museum.
Shifting focus from the artist to their supporting frameworks, the second case study is the Smithsonian
Artist Research Fellowship program (SARF). Rather than accommodating the work of a single inquiry artist, like
Mark Dion, the SARF program provides an institutional and curatorial structure within which many artists may
pursue inquiry practices. Its creation as a recurring initiative speaks to the Smithsonian’s desire to recognize artist-
led inquiry and hold a permanent space for it within the museum context. An analysis of the program’s objectives
and procedures, as seen through the recent fellowship of artist Ken Gonzales-Day, highlights certain curatorial
strategies that may be used to cultivate a fertile environment for inquiry artists.

Artists Leading Inquiry: Mark Dion
An artist whose work epitomizes the concept of artist-led inquiry is Mark Dion, who was born in 1961 and
raised near New Bedford, Massachusetts. His early exposure to art, especially contemporary art, was limited –
indeed, the only museum that he frequented as a child was the local whaling museum. It was here that Dion first
encountered works of fine art, namely the landscape paintings of Albert Bierstadt, William Bradford and Albert
Pinkham Ryder. Dion was equally inspired by both the conservationist and the expansionist approaches to
naturalism – “[he was] attracted to the idea of the travelling artist-explorer with paintbox in hand, using experiences
of foreign environments as the source of an art.”
40
Beyond the representational value of these paintings, their
placement within the artifact-laden exhibits of the whaling museum also played an important role in Dion’s
appreciation of art as a medium. “That was the first sort of art I saw, and I saw it in a way that was integrated with
other things – with natural history, industrial history, with craft . . . It was all one thing instead of quite separate
things.”
41
From the beginning Dion has viewed art as part of a larger cultural context rather than an isolated sensory

40
Lisa Corrin, “Mark Dion’s Project: A Natural History of Wonder and a Wonderful History of Nature,” in Mark Dion, by Lisa Corrin, Miwon
Kwon and Norman Bryson (London: Phaidon Press, 1997): 49.
41
Mark Dion as quoted in Marsh, “Fieldwork,” 38.
27

experience. His own artistic practice positions representational objects in dialogue with texts, data and other non-
precious artifacts, contributing to an ongoing discourse that is interdisciplinary and interconnected. This applies to
the institution as much as the artwork - the whaling museum (and later, natural history museums) provides the
blueprint for Dion’s preferred model of cultural institution. It is a space of intersection, where the audience “sees
things in relation” (i.e. systems thinking) in order to facilitate knowledge production.
42

Dion’s formal education at the Art School at the University of Hartford, then the School of the Visual Arts
in New York, underscored the theoretical component of art making as a research methodology. In 1985 he joined the
Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP), studying under the guidance of Craig Owens, Martha Rosler, Joseph
Kosuth, Hans Haacke and others. The Whitney Program was crucial to Dion’s artistic development because it
encapsulated the four-pronged approach of critical inquiry, research, art making and pedagogy. His teachers
promoted the notion of art practice as a unique research methodology; they encouraged him to develop a
dematerialized and process-oriented practice, and to bring interdisciplinary contexts into his art. Whitney students
from this time period were also heavily influenced by postmodern theory and philosophy, which rejected the concept
of a “universal truth” in favor of a multiplicity of truths and narratives. Dion and his classmates became particularly
interested in exploring what he calls an “expanded documentary practice”
43
– namely, how can information be
effectively communicated while simultaneously questioning the authority and/or authenticity of that information?
These influences left a strong impression – in the early 1990s, Dion’s sculptural production evolved into a
practice of inquiry. His installations became living instances of the interdisciplinary research process, spanning
disciplines such as environmental science, biology, archaeology and history. He “has taken on the role of explorer,
detective, natural scientist, and museum curator to create actions and environments which fuse natural history with
the politics of contemporary culture.”
44
Dion’s work has also contributed significantly to a new vision for
contemporary art museums and cultural institutions, especially with regard to their pedagogic role. While in the past
museumgoers were expected to engage in serious inquiry at very high intellectual levels, competition with pop
culture and the media has pressured some museum educators to reduce their content to increasingly simplistic, easily

42
“That is the great thing about museums, that they are this place where you gain knowledge through things but you also gain knowledge through
things in relationship to other things. It is one very precise composition, one total artwork. . .” Mark Dion as quoted in Marsh, “Fieldwork,” 40.
43
Mark Dion as quoted in Kwon, “Conversation with Mark Dion,” 8.
44
Iwona Blazwick, “Mark Dion’s ‘Tate Thames Dig,’” Oxford Art Journal 24, no. 2 (2001), 105.
28

consumable “bites” of information.
45
The passivity and fleeting interest of the audience is even more problematic
when one considers that the “truth” they are consuming is a product of the institution’s ideology.
46

Dion’s artwork tries to address this issue by provoking questions about how we consume information, and
what leads us to accept that information as truth. This is the true beginning of his engagement with artist-led inquiry.
Dion treats the museum as a laboratory, a space where he critically engages in interdisciplinary research. Museum
staff, disciplinary experts, and especially the general public are invited into these processes, allowing them to
actively participate in their own intellectual growth. “His works attempt to undermine the authoritative voice of the
artist, honouring and encouraging the audience’s capacity to make associations and form independent meanings that
are not merely an extension of his own.”
47
Participants not only gain new understandings of the chosen subject
matter, but they also gain a critical perspective on the conditions of knowledge production within an institutional
space.
Dion’s inquiry art installations are something of an inversion with regard to the public/private space of the
institution. He asserts that the back rooms of the museum are its most vital spaces, while the displays are more of a
relic, an archive of the museum’s official narrative at a particular moment in time.
48
By this logic, Dion contends
that the museum environment should be flipped, “the back rooms put on exhibition and the displays put into
storage.”
49
This is exactly what his inquiry artwork seeks to achieve. “Sometimes my job as an artist can be very
much to embody the museum, to personify what it does as one person – so that includes the research, development,
fieldwork, and collecting, archiving, storing and displaying.”
50
Dion’s works intend to encourage the public’s
“healthy skepticism of institutional narratives” by turning the museum inside out and exposing its processes of
knowledge production. In this way, the museum becomes a vibrant yet non-authoritative learning environment.
An early example of this laboratory-style methodology is On Tropical Nature (1991), commissioned by the
alternative art space Sala Mendoza in Caracas, Venezuela. For the installation, Dion spent three weeks hiking
through the jungles of the Orinoco Basin collecting plant and animal specimens and sending them back to the

45
“The museum seems to conceive of its audience as younger and more childlike now. Rather than a place where one might go to explore some
complex questions, the museum now simplifies the questions and gives you reductive answers for them. It does all the work, so the viewer is
always passive.” Mark Dion as quoted in Kwon, “Conversation with Mark Dion,” 17.
46
There are, of course, some museums that have actively resisted the abbreviation of their material. I refer more generally to a trend found in both
art and non-art cultural institutions.
47
Corrin, “Mark Dion’s Project,” 49.
48
“There are hundreds of people in the back rooms working with specimens and artefacts, hidden from public view. That’s where the museum is
really alive and interesting.” Mark Dion as quoted in Kwon, “Conversation with Mark Dion,” 18. Dion believes that museums should be treated
as time capsules, and their displays should never be updated to accommodate for new knowledge or new ways of thinking. Instead they should
remain frozen in time, a document of how we understood the world in that specific moment.
49
Mark Dion as quoted in Kwon, “Conversation with Mark Dion,” 18.
50
Mark Dion as quoted in Marsh, “Fieldwork,” 44.
29

gallery via boat (fig. 16). The gallery staff received his packages along with various notes, maps, photographs and
tools. They were then instructed to arrange all of these materials in the gallery according to their own judgment,
without any instructions from the artist (fig. 17 and 18). “They had to create an order and rationale to display the
materials, raising questions about how we make sense of nature. This emphasis on process prompts a reflection on
and realization that our sense-making is a human construction and not necessarily a truth of the natural world.”
51

The general public was invited to view this whole process beginning from Dion’s departure into the jungle though
the creation of the final installation. “On Tropical Nature opened with empty tables, signaling to the viewers that I
was working somewhere but not in the exhibition space. . . .Essentially, the piece changed with the arrival of each
box, which were events in themselves.”
52
Because they were able to observe every step of the procedure, the
audience was given the unique opportunity to develop their own sense of the project while simultaneously
witnessing the sense-making mechanisms of others.

Figure 16 and 17. Mark Dion, On Tropical Nature, 1991. Research documentation (fig. 16) and installation (fig. 17). Sala Mendoza, Caracas,
Venezuela. Reproduced from: Lisa Corrin, Miwon Kwon and Norman Bryson, Mark Dion (London: Phaidon Press, 1997), 63 and 21.

51
Colleen Sheehy, “A Walrus Head in the Art Museum: Mark Dion Digs into the University of Minnesota,” in Cabinet of Curiosities: Mark Dion
and the University as Installation, ed. Colleen Sheehy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 7.
52
Mark Dion as quoted in Kwon, “Conversation with Mark Dion,” 25.
30

Figure 18. Mark Dion, On Tropical Nature, 1991. Installation. Sala Mendoza, Caracas, Venezuela. Reproduced from: Lisa Corrin, Miwon Kwon
and Norman Bryson, Mark Dion (London: Phaidon Press, 1997), 20.

Attention to site in these projects is as important to Dion as his emphasis on exposing research processes.
He prefers to use “site sensitivity” or “relation to site” over the more common term “site specificity,” perhaps
because of the historical baggage that comes with using the latter term. Dion’s site sensitivity differs from Richard
Serra’s explorations of the formal qualities of a site and Hans Haacke’s critiques of the social conditions of an art-
space. It also encompasses history, politics, pop culture, technology, nature, and even the artist’s personal
experiences. It also takes into account the multiple publics that have access (physically or conceptually) to the work.
The main point is that, in most cases, Dion’s art would not have the same level of efficacy if it were re-created in a
different location. It reaches its audience(s) through a web of complex relationships that are nearly impossible to
replicate.
Dion also directs his inquiry at the more general idea of fieldwork, and at those who are usually tasked with
its execution, harkening back to his interest in exhibiting the back rooms of the museum.
53
In particular he seems
entranced by the storied figure of the 18
th
century naturalist – this is perhaps explained by the fact that the Romantic
Age gave birth to the notion of the scientist as an intrepid explorer, a Darwinian character with which Dion seems to
strongly identify. In his laboratory projects he assumes a similar role, not just to play out the fantasy of the character

53
“To me, seeing a painting is not as rewarding as seeing a painting in production. So I want to build the process into the work, to have the work
exist in several stage, and to have the metamorphosis available to the viewers so that they can engage in it in different ways. I’m greedy about not
wasting any productive moments.” Mark Dion as quoted in Kwon, “Conversation with Mark Dion,” 25.
31

but also to critically interrogate their position as producers of knowledge.
54
As much as his artwork presents the
information gleaned from his research activities, it asks the audience to consider the motivations of the
explorer/academic in equal measure. How do fieldworkers reconcile their personal prejudices or a prevailing
rhetoric against their observations? How do they endorse progress without compromising the integrity of their
subject(s)? What happens when fieldwork enters the space of the laboratory? Does its gain or lose its authenticity?

Leading Inquiry at an Art Mega-Museum: Tate Thames Dig
In the mid- to late-1990s Dion began to apply this same methodology towards a new area of study:
archaeology. One of his best-known pieces from that time period is Tate Thames Dig (1999), produced for the Tate
Gallery in London. Acting as an amateur archeologist Dion performed a quasi-archaeological survey of the Thames
riverbank while on site at the institution over a three-month period. The exhibition/research process has been
described as a book with three chapters: the collection of artifacts, the cleaning and cataloguing of these artifacts,
and their eventual classification and presentation. There is also an appendix, a series of lectures and tours given by a
range of disciplinary experts over the duration of the project.
55
What makes Tate Thames Dig a milestone in Dion’s
repertoire is the degree to which the audience was actively involved in his inquiry process. All three chapters, plus
the appendix, invited direct participation from members of the Tate staff as well as members of the general public.
All participants were treated by Dion as co-producers of knowledge – they engaged in the discourse of the project,
and their thoughts and opinions were considered as equal contributions to its critical output. This cooperative
approach opened the doors for a mutual trust to be built between the artist and his audience, and for both parties to
share the responsibility for knowledge production through artistic methods.
In the first phase of the project, Dion recruited a crew of volunteers to work with him to comb the beaches
of the river, looking for any interesting artifacts or curiosities (fig. 19, 20, 21 and 22). Prior to beginning this
fieldwork, Dion first consulted with a number of professional archaeologists, historians and ecologists to gain an
understanding of the appropriate protocols to use when collecting artifacts. Armed with this knowledge, Dion and
the field team collected a variety of objects over the course of two months. Their findings ranged from Bellarmine
pottery shards and oyster shells to modern-day credit cards and plastic doll parts.

54
Dion’s practice is often characterized as performative. It is heavily influenced by the performance art movements of the 1960s and 1970s, in
which artists assumed alternate identities on order to critically engage the very notion of those identities.
55
Robert Williams, “Disjecta Reliquiae The Tate Thames Dig,” in Mark Dion: Archaeology, eds. Alex Coles and Mark Dion (London: Black
Dog Publishing, 1999): 73. Williams acknowledges that other unnamed writers have also used the book/chapter analogy to describe Dion’s
project.
32

Figure 19. Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, 1999. Research
documentation, collecting artifacts from Thames riverbank. Tate
Gallery, London, United Kingdom. Reproduced from: Alex Coles and
Mark Dion, eds., Mark Dion: Archaeology (London: Black Dog
Publishing, 1999), 27.
Figure 20. Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, 1999. Research
documentation, collecting artifacts from Thames riverbank. Tate
Gallery, London, United Kingdom. Available from: Tate Gallery,
http://tate.org.uk (Accessed June 9, 2015).

Figure 21 and 22. Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, 1999. Research documentation, collecting artifacts from Thames riverbank. Tate Gallery,
London, United Kingdom. Available from: Tate Gallery, http://tate.org.uk (Accessed June 9, 2015).

In the next phase of the project, the collected artifacts were cleaned and catalogued by Dion and his
volunteers, again with advice and guidance from various disciplinary experts. This procedure took place over the
span of two weeks in three tents on the south lawn of the Tate (fig. 23), an area that was quickly dubbed “the field
center.” The first tent contained maps and photographs of the collection sites, timetables, and a small vitrine
containing an array of small finds (fig 24 and 25). The other two tents housed the activities of the field workers –
they would carefully clean each item, and then sort them into broad (and eventually, more specific) categories.
These tents were open to the public so that museum visitors had the opportunity to observe the cataloguing process,
and engage with Dion and his team (fig. 26, 27 and 28). “The scene in the tent is entropic: the mud and sludge

33

traffics the assistants around the Tate’s lawn, each of the fragments of clay and glass they fling makes a crash
landing in its respective container, and at the center of it all Dion is in the midst of a heated debate with a member of
the audience.”
56

Figure 23. Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, 1999. Research documentation, field center. Tate Gallery, London, United Kingdom. Available from:
Tate Gallery, http://tate.org.uk (Accessed June 9, 2015).

Figure 24 and 25. Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, 1999. Research documentation, field center. Tate Gallery, London, United Kingdom. Available
from: Tate Gallery, http://tate.org.uk (Accessed June 9, 2015).

56
Alex Coles, “The Epic Archaeological Digs of Mark Dion,” in Mark Dion: Archaeology, eds. Alex Coles and Mark Dion (London: Black Dog
Publishing, 1999): 29.
34

Figure 26. Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, 1999. Research documentation, field center. Tate Gallery, London, United Kingdom. Reproduced from:
Alex Coles and Mark Dion, eds., Mark Dion: Archaeology (London: Black Dog Publishing, 1999), 13.

Figure 27 and 28. Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, 1999. Research documentation, field center. Tate Gallery, London, United Kingdom. Available
from: Tate Gallery, http://tate.org.uk (Accessed June 9, 2015).

The third and final phase of Tate Thames Dig was a gallery installation consisting of a large cabinet and a
collection of photographs (fig. 29). The photographs on the wall depicted Dion’s many collaborators, an
acknowledgement that the project was truly the result of scholarly cooperation (fig. 30). The cabinet – reminiscent
of a renaissance Wunderkabinett
57
(fig. 31) – was four meters long, with a vast number of shelves and drawers to
display the field team’s discoveries (fig. 32 and 33). Its organization, however, was not according to any known
archaeological taxonomy. The objects were instead categorized (or juxtaposed) by aesthetic characteristics: color,
shape, texture, etc. Gallery visitors were invited to touch the cabinet, to open its drawers and browse its contents,
and in so doing they would discover these new and unorthodox symmetries.

57
During the renaissance it was common practice for aristocrats to collect natural specimens, artifacts, and other curiosities in a Wunderkabinett,
or a cabinet of wonders. Wunderkabinetts and Wunderkammern (full rooms) are considered to be precursors to the modern museum.
35

Figure 29. Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, 1999. Final installation. Tate Gallery, London, United Kingdom. Available from: Tate Gallery,
http://tate.org.uk (Accessed June 9, 2015).

Figure 30. Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, 1999. Final installation, photographs of field team. Tate Gallery, London, United Kingdom. Reproduced
from: Alex Coles and Mark Dion, eds., Mark Dion: Archaeology (London: Black Dog Publishing, 1999), 96-97.

36

Figure 31. The Wunderkammer of Ferrante Imperato, Naples. From Historia Naturale by Ferrante Imperato, 1599. Reproduced from: James
Putnam, Art and Artifact (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2009), 10.

Figure 32 and 33. Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, 1999. Final installation. Tate Gallery, London, United Kingdom. Available from: Tate Gallery,
http://tate.org.uk (Accessed June 9, 2015).

The participatory and process-oriented methodologies of Tate Thames Dig are crucial to a complete
understanding of the project. While the cabinet conveyed a great deal of information and provoked many questions,
it was never meant to be considered as a standalone piece of art. “The heart of Tate Thames Dig is not really the
display at the end of it. It is the work of the volunteers on the foreshore, and all that labour of conservation and
classification in the tents.”
58
The inquiry process was the real work of art, and in this case such a process relied
heavily on the participation of Dion’s volunteers. This is why Dion credits them as co-producers of the project (fig.
30). Their contribution was more than just labor, it was knowledge – “they have been participants in the

58
Colin Renfrew, “It May Be Art, But Is It Archaeology? Science as Art and Art as Science,” in Mark Dion: Archaeology, eds. Alex Coles and
Mark Dion (London: Black Dog Publishing, 1999): 21.
37

categorization of objects during the different phases, as well as in the discourse, interpretation, and presentation of
the project as a whole.”
59

The participation of the audience also plays a significant role in the process of inquiry. Alex Coles
compares it to Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre of the 1930s, where the gap between actor and audience (the orchestra
pit) is closed through audience interaction. “The orchestra pit is filled in, as such, by the way the actors jolt the
audience into participation . . . provoked by this tactile experience, the audience ‘as a collective feels impelled to
take up an attitude’ towards what they see.”
60
Brecht’s plays were often referred to as Lehrstücke, or learning plays.
Encouraging the audience to participate in the formation of the play’s narrative, rather than passively watching it
unfold, allowed Brecht to transform entertainment into a pedagogical experience. The performative elements of Tate
Thames Dig echo the Lehrstücke – they provoke the audience into thinking for themselves, into asking questions and
forming judgments, into taking positions and drawing conclusions. Given the project’s educational goals such
integrated participation is essential. Captivated by Dion and his team, they willingly throw themselves into the fray
as fellow explorers rather than malleable consumers of information.
The outcomes of a project like Tate Thames Dig are manifold. First and foremost, it highlights the
quotidian activities of the archaeologist, activities that are typically obscured from public view. There is an element
of spectacle in this, certainly – “[Dion’s] tents were both functional and yet somehow exotic, evocative of distant
ruins and buried treasures, or of murders and criminal investigations.”
61
Despite its fantastical or mythical allure,
such staging is not designed just for show. Giving the public unrestrained access to the process of archeological
analysis allows them to critically consider how conclusions are drawn, rather than focusing on the conclusions
themselves. It questions the reliability and accuracy of the process itself, and it exposes the potential for subjectivity
to enter into a seemingly objective terrain. “The fact that laboratory analysis is a practice hidden from view and
public scrutiny can only strengthen the archaeologist’s difficulty in exposing the arbitrariness of his/her
classificatory methods.”
62

The same motivation lies in Dion’s eventual classification of the Thames artifacts, and their placement
within the cabinet. By using his own radical system of taxonomy he reminds the viewer that any packaging of
knowledge is subject to the ideologies of the packager. By this logic the knowledge itself can become a vehicle for

59
Williams, “Disjecta Reliquiae,” 92.
60
Coles, “The Epic Archaeological Digs of Mark Dion,” 28. The notion of filling the orchestra pit is taken from Walter Benjamin’s analysis of
Brechtian theatre in Walter Benjamin, “What is Epic Theatre?,” Understanding Brecht (London: NLB/Verso, 1988), 22.
61
Blazwick, “Mark Dion’s ‘Tate Thames Dig,’” 108.
62
Flora Vilches, “The Art of Archaeology: Mark Dion and His Dig Projects,” Journal of Social Archaeology 7, no. 2 (2007), 205.
38

ideology. His goal in this is not to denigrate the position of the scientist or the archaeologist, but to give them back
their humanity. They are not all-knowing deities, and the narrative that they choose to convey is not the only
narrative of consequence. They cannot be solely responsible for discovering “the truth.” Dion asks the public to
share that burden by exchanging their blind acceptance for a critical scrutiny of the knowledge that they receive.
This notion of the classification of knowledge does not just extend to the items in Dion’s cabinet, but to the
cabinet itself and its position within an art gallery. Dion points out that the modern museum complex still abides by
an outdated division of artifacts inspired by bourgeois collectors: naturalia (organic specimens) in natural history
museums, artificialia (manmade art objects) in art museums, antiquitates (historically relevant items) in field
museums and ethnographica (exotica from other cultures) in cultural museums.
63
His homage to the renaissance
Wunderkabinett recalls a time before such divisions, when artifacts of all genres were kept together and treated as an
undifferentiated body of knowledge. There are obvious problems with our current segregation of disciplines: for
instance, fine art goes in an art museum but primitive art goes in an ethnographic museum. Paleolithic artifacts are
natural objects but they are also manmade. Such restrictions allow objects to belong to only one area of knowledge
production when they might actually benefit from a holistic analysis. By placing so-called archaeological objects in
an art space, Dion encourages an awareness of these boundaries and posits a proposal to break them down in the
interest of discovering new areas of inquiry.
Projects like Tate Thames Dig are evidence of Dion’s enduring fascination with epistemology. His innate
love of learning, coupled with his critical training, results in these deep investigations on the contexts and processes
of knowledge production. It would seem natural, then, that his work would eventually lead him to engage with the
ultimate context of knowledge production: the modern research university. The university is a laboratory and an
archive, a place for experimentation as well as a repository of historical knowledge. More importantly, however, the
university is a microcosm that “attempts to represent the entire universe of knowledge through its multitude of
disciplines, departments, schools and institutes.”
64
For an artist trying to study knowledge, what better environment
could there be?

63
Corrin, “Mark Dion’s Project,” 52-54; Renfrew, “It May Be Art,” 18-19.
64
Sheehy, “A Walrus Head in the Art Museum,” 4.
39

Leading Inquiry at a University: Cabinet of Curiosities at the Weisman Art Museum
In 2000-2001 Dion pursued a collaborative project with the Weisman Art Museum at the University of
Minnesota (UMN) titled Cabinet of Curiosities (2001). On the surface, the project follows a somewhat similar
trajectory to Tate Thames Dig – Dion and his co-producers collected objects from across the campus and displayed
them in a series of nine curiosity cabinets. This time, however, the objects were not excavated from the ground.
They were culled from the university’s official (and unofficial) collections. Dion and his team spent six months
probing the depths of the UMN archives, exploring the dusty shelves and dark corners that had long since been
forgotten. They met with scholars from a variety of disciplines, who helped them to navigate each collection and to
understand its respective context(s). The final curiosity cabinets were a result of these wide-ranging investigations.
In addition to presenting some truly remarkable objects, such as a bezoar and a printed edition of the Gettysburg
Address, they interrogated the notion of collecting as a practice, the evolution of academic disciplines, and the
multiplicity of narratives that can mold the collective history of an institution.
Cabinet of Curiosities unfolded over six months from September 2000 to February 2001.
65
Colleen Sheehy,
the Weisman’s director of education, knew that Dion’s work was not just about showcasing objects in a gallery; it
would be a process of inquiry, a deep exploration in which the final cabinets would play only a partial role. With this
in mind she enlisted the help of eight student collaborators, who were enrolled in a special seminar course, to work
with Dion for the duration of the research process. “Our exhibit,” Dion told the students, “will be an artifact of our
experience.”
66
The first phase of the project, from September to November, was a thorough investigation of all of
the university’s collections. To save time Dion and his team adopted a divide-and-conquer approach; each person
was responsible for identifying collections, contacting the curators, and visiting these collections to search for
artifacts of interest (fig. 34 and 35).
67
“To some extent, our treks around campus to dozens of far-flung buildings . . .
recreated in miniature the voyages of discovery that underpinned the Renaissance cabinets.”
68
Due to the sheer
vastness of the campus and the limited time available, the collection curators became an invaluable resource to the
research team. Sheehy describes them as enthusiastic partners who were eager to share their time and expertise.

65
Dion had recently completed a very similar project at Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the Arts. The Ohio State University iteration
of Cabinet of Curiosities ran from May to August of 1997 at the OSU Wexner Center for the Arts. It was a collaboration between Dion and
curator Bill Horrigan. The projects share a similar inspiration, but they are markedly different due to the differences between the two sites.
66
Mark Dion as quoted in Sheehy, “A Walrus Head in the Art Museum,” 11.
67
Among the spaces explored were the Library of Biology and Medicine, the Immigration History Center, the Hubert H. Humphrey Forum, the
Children’s Literature Research Collection, the Herbarium, the Veterinary Anatomy Museum, the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and
the Weisman Museum itself.
68
Sheehy, “A Walrus Head in the Art Museum,” 16.
40

Figure 34. Mark Dion, Cabinet of Curiosities (University of Minnesota), 2001. Research documentation, studying collections. Dion visits the
children’s literature collection. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Reproduced from: Colleen Sheehy, ed., Cabinet of Curiosities:
Mark Dion and the University as Installation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 13.

Figure 35. Mark Dion, Cabinet of Curiosities (University of Minnesota), 2001. Research documentation, studying collections. Students Cassie
Wilkins and Jean-Nickolaus Tretter study illustrations from horticulture collection. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Reproduced
from: Colleen Sheehy, ed., Cabinet of Curiosities: Mark Dion and the University as Installation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2006), 15.

During the fall semester Dion was in residence at UMN for one week of every month. Those weeks were
devoted to meeting with the students, planning the final exhibition and visiting many collections. He perused live
insect specimens, Jane Goodall’s original notebooks, WWII poster campaigns, nineteenth-century clocks and Paul
Bunyan’s ring. He was particularly drawn to the painted dioramas found at the Bell Museum of Natural History.
41

Each of these “voyages of discovery” represented a research excursion into a particular discipline, such as primate
biology or immigration history. More important for Dion, however, was the research trajectory that overlaid these
excursions – an inquiry into how collections are created and how narratives are expressed through artifacts. Thus the
research team’s foray into the UMN collections was accompanied by a scholarly examination of museum history,
cultures of collecting, modes of display, and installation art. It is this overarching research, which served as the
guiding principle for the organization of the final curiosity cabinets.
At the end of the fall semester, armed with a long list of possible artifacts for inclusion, the team was
tasked with making final selections for what would be displayed, and how and where this new collection would be
arranged. In their first meetings Dion had outlined a general organizing concept for the final installation - there
would be nine cabinets in total, each with a different thematic emphasis: Cabinet of the Underworld, Cabinet of the
Sea, Cabinet of the Air, Cabinet of the Terrestrial Realm, Cabinet of Humankind, Cabinet of the Library or Archive,
Cabinet of the Allegory of Vision, Cabinet of the Allegory of Sound and Time and finally Cabinet of the Allegory of
History. “We spent class meetings at the end of the semester compiling lists of objects that could represent the
various themes of the cabinets. Using large sheets of paper, we plastered our seminar room with cabinet themes . . .
[each student] recommended from his or her research collections objects of astonishment, intrigue, significance,
visual power, and symbolic relevance that would be appropriate for one theme or another.”
69
When the time came to
narrow these selections each student became responsible for a single cabinet, superimposing their individual
interpretation onto the group’s collective proposals.
In her essay “A Walrus Head in the Art Museum,” Sheehy explains that the selection process was highly
metaphorical, likely the desired result of such vague themes. The Cabinet of the Underworld, for instance, referred
to objects literally found underground, but also to death, illicit activities and unsanctioned lifestyles. Many of the
cabinets also contained clear divergences from accepted histories and standard academic canons. “Cabinet curators
seized the opportunity to shape the cabinets to reflect their own critiques of power or of official historical
narratives.”
70
Once the design and organization of each cabinet was finalized, the next step was their actual
fabrication. The chosen artifacts were requisitioned from their respective collections, packed by their curators, and
loaded into the Weisman’s van for transport to the museum. Upon arrival they were unpacked, photographed and
placed into temporary storage (fig. 36). It should be noted that the logistics of obtaining each item was as much a

69
Sheehy, “A Walrus Head in the Art Museum,” 17.
70
Sheehy, “A Walrus Head in the Art Museum,” 17.
42

part of Cabinet of Curiosities as its initial selection or its eventual display. Dion and the students worked together
with museum staff throughout the process, shining a light on the hidden labor that usually goes into the planning of
an exhibition. The unconventional nature of many of the objects also forced an interrogation of what we consider as
“standard” museum practice. For instance, how do you display organic materials without contaminating the gallery
space? How do you catalog fifty pairs of eyeglasses? How do you clean a meteorite?

Figure 36. Mark Dion, Cabinet of Curiosities (University of Minnesota), 2001. Research documentation, building cabinets. Student Kate
Carmody examines loaned objects in Weisman study room. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Reproduced from: Colleen Sheehy,
ed., Cabinet of Curiosities: Mark Dion and the University as Installation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 20.

Dion was in residence for several weeks leading up to the opening, working alongside his co-curators and
the Weisman exhibition crew to build and arrange each cabinet (fig. 37). The cabinets morphed many times during
their construction, reflecting the continually emerging ideas of the curatorial team. The objective, however,
remained the same: to present a multiplicity of narratives and to allow the audience to produce their own
interpretations of these narratives. Like Tate Thames Dig, objects were not organized by any prevailing physical or
historical taxonomy (shape, date, location), and the cabinet themes were applied so metaphorically as to be entirely
obscured from the casual observer. This ostensible disarray, the juxtaposition of so many seemingly unrelated
objects, allowed each viewer to assume the role of explorer – they navigated freely through the artifacts, forged
43

conceptual connections, and built a variety of narrative threads that could not, and would not, be anticipated by the
curatorial team.

Figure 37. Mark Dion, Cabinet of Curiosities (University of Minnesota), 2001. Research documentation, building cabinets. Dion and students
build and install cabinets. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Reproduced from: Colleen Sheehy, ed., Cabinet of Curiosities: Mark
Dion and the University as Installation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 22.

The final cabinets were exhibited in the main gallery of the Weisman Museum from February to May 2001
(fig. 38 and 39). The artifacts on display did document the history of the university, but not the pomp-and-
circumstance version of that history. Instead it was many small histories: the uncommon, the everyday, the
idiosyncratic, the wondrous and, of course, the bizarre. They varied in specificity, producing a layered discourse
whose focus could be as narrow as a single object or as broad as the whole of academia. “The stories of the
collections represent much about the history of various disciplines and of departments at this institution. These
stories also become accounts of the movement of objects and accounts of spaces . . . [and accounts] of individual
collectors and scholars.”
71
Each artifact was embedded with the story of its discovery, its discoverer(s) and the
journey that brought it to UMN and eventually to the Weisman exhibition. Taken together these narratives serve to
interrogate the act of collecting, the role of the collector, and the production of knowledge through objects.

71
Sheehy, “A Walrus Head in the Art Museum,” 4.
44

Figure 38. Mark Dion, Cabinet of Curiosities (University of Minnesota), 2001. Final installation. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis,
Minnesota. Available from: Goodwater Gallery, http://www.goodwatergallery.com/ (Accessed June 9, 2015).

Figure 39. Mark Dion, Cabinet of Curiosities (University of Minnesota), 2001. Final installation detail. Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis,
Minnesota. Available from: Goodwater Gallery, http://www.goodwatergallery.com/ (Accessed June 9, 2015).

On a macroscopic level, the installation also chronicled the curatorial team’s six-month-long research
process. It was not project documentation in the traditional academic sense – there were no photographs of the team
at work, no handwritten notes and no video footage.
72
But the objects on display did evoke a narrative about how the
cabinets came into existence. They particularly underscore the collaborations that manifested throughout the
project’s duration. The relationships that were built between the students, the Weisman staff, the collection curators,

72
While the exhibition does not include traditional documentation, the catalogue for Cabinet of Curiosities does include documentary
photographs and text.
45

the exhibition visitors and the wider UMN community are as much a part of the artwork as the cabinets themselves.
“This project created opportunities for the students and curators to initiate and negotiate connections that did not
exist before. The physical piece embodies these relationships, just as the historical cabinets represented relationships
between Europeans and other cultures.”
73
This notion of connections refers not only to the connections between
people at UMN, but also to the connections between disciplines. Divisions of knowledge have grown so vast since
the Renaissance that there is little or no overlap in the modern academe. “The lack of crossover . . . suffocates the
possibility of developing a fluid, interconnected concept of knowledge.”
74
Cabinet of Curiosities considers the
possibility of scholarly cross-pollination, and how it might affect the subsequent production of knowledge.
One might argue that the outcomes stated above were more relevant to the co-curators and the museum
staff than to the exhibition audience. To Dion, however, each of these populations was an audience in its own right.
In his first meeting with Sheehy’s students, he told them, “I think of you, my collaborators, as the first audience for
this work, with other layers of audience building from there.”
75
Sheehy notes that these other layers included
“collections curators, the Weisman staff, and eventually the exhibition visitors.”
76
This attitude is another defining
characteristic of artist-led inquiry. Each stage of the inquiry process has its own audience, and their inputs and
outputs are specifically engineered to complement their respective roles. The layering of audiences, as opposed to a
linear progression, also allows individuals to self-select their level of participation. Such an approach indicates that,
to Dion, the “artwork” of Cabinet of Curiosities was comprised of much more than just the February exhibition. It
was six months of building relationships, starting conversations and pursuing explorations and investigations. The
work’s lifespan might even extend to the present, if any audience members have transposed their experiences onto
their daily life. In other words: the cabinets might be long gone, but the curiosity remains, and therein lies the art.

Institutional Inquiry Programs: the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship
Dion’s aforementioned projects showcase how an artist may lead inquiry at a variety of different
institutions. In each case, the curator and the supporting staff had to adjust their usual procedures to account for the
exceptional conditions of an inquiry project. As artist-led inquiry grows, one might consider the following proposal:
what if a museum was to program inquiry rather than merely tolerating it alongside traditional exhibition displays?

73
Sheehy, “A Walrus Head in the Art Museum,” 26.
74
Corrin, “Mark Dion’s Project,” 80.
75
Mark Dion as quoted in Sheehy, “A Walrus Head in the Art Museum,” 11.
76
Sheehy, “A Walrus Head in the Art Museum,” 11.
46

What if dedicated research initiatives were funded in parallel with exhibitions? One instance of such an initiative is
the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship program (SARF). The SARF program invites a different group of artists
each year to pursue artist-led inquiry practices through residency at the Smithsonian Institution. The following
paragraphs explore SARF as an institutional case study, using the work of Ken Gonzales-Day and Taína Caragol as
a specific iteration.
There are undeniably some similarities among the Smithsonian Institution, the Tate and the Weisman
Museum, which perhaps indicates that certain institutions may be predisposed to supporting artist-led inquiry. The
Tate is a mega-museum with a broad institutional presence and the Weisman is situated at a major research
university. The Smithsonian, likewise, is a massive collection of museums and cultural centers with vast scholarly
resources. Institutions with such academic and interdisciplinary connections are natural choices for inquiry
initiatives. Their network offers a diversity of subject matter with which the artist may engage, as well as
disciplinary experts in many fields. As stated earlier with Dion, the locality of the inquiry is crucial to maintaining
an ethos of cooperative discovery.
As a cultural institution the Smithsonian has always placed research at the forefront of their activities - in
addition to their nineteen museums and galleries they also operate nine research centers and the National Zoo.
Despite this breadth, however, the majority of institutional funding has traditionally been reserved for scholars with
the appropriate professional or academic qualifications. SARF presents an intriguing alternative to conventional
research programming by inviting artists to pursue inquiry projects in a number of non-art disciplines. “While the
Smithsonian has long hosted historians, scientists and other researchers, the Artist Research Fellowship program
invites artists to come to the Smithsonian to discover, explain and react to its holdings and expertise.”
77
Those who
are awarded the fellowship are provided with the necessary funding to undertake a short-term residency in
Washington D.C., during which they actively engage with the vast collections, archives and expert staff associated
with their chosen topic. The program distinguishes itself from other residency programs by pointing out that “instead
of providing studio space it offer a dynamic research environment . . . to explore cross-disciplinary connections
between history, art, culture, and science.”
78

77
Jane Milosch, director of the Smithsonian’s Provenance Research Initiative, as quoted in “Smithsonian Awards Fellowships to 10 Artists to
Conduct Research at Museums and Research Facilities,” United States Federal News Service press release, May 12, 2009, ProQuest document,
accessed December 1, 2014.
78
This text is taken from the official correspondence that is sent by the Smithsonian Institution to SARF nominated artists. It was provided to the
author by artist Ken Gonzales-Day, via email, on November 15, 2014.
47

SARF was founded under the leadership of Susan Talbott, director of Smithsonian Arts, and Ned Rifkin,
the Smithsonian Under Secretary for Art. The primary goal of the program was to offer artists an opportunity to
access and use the Smithsonian’s wide array of resources, and in so doing, to “stimulate artistic exploration.”
79

These explorations would be interdisciplinary and collaborative, creating unique and perhaps unprecedented spaces
for dialogue between the Smithsonian’s many diverse entities. From the outset, the program has followed these two
parallel lines of intent: the advancement of the arts and the subsequent enrichment of the institution. The artists
receive funding and support to pursue their work, and the institution embraces a culture of collaboration and cross-
disciplinary thinking. Over time the institution also increases its relevance in the contemporary art community. With
these goals in mind the first cohort of nine artists were announced in January of 2007. The program has admitted a
new group of artists every year since then – over 100 fellowships have been awarded overall.
The process by which artists are selected for SARF is a combination of nomination and application review.
An internal committee, comprised of curators and research staff members, is first asked to nominate any artist who
they believe is well suited to the program. They also select a group of outside nominators – these might be
international curators, art scholars and specialists, or former SARF fellows. These distinguished adjuncts are asked
to recommend additional artists for the nomination list. Once an artist has been nominated, they are contacted and
invited to submit an application for review by the SARF committee. The application is not an easy one – it is the
artist’s responsibility to submit a thorough research proposal, two letters of reference, a proposed budget, a CV and
examples of previous work. They must also identify the resources that they wish to access and the Smithsonian
curator who will serve as their project sponsor. The sponsor is often (but not always) the same person who originally
nominated the artist.
80

It is worth noting that, while a SARF proposal must be clear and well defined, it is also very much subject
to change. The artist is not required to use the resources delineated by their proposal. Nor are they prevented from
accessing resources that they did not propose to use. The mission of SARF is to encourage artists to engage in open

79
Susan Talbott as quoted in “Smithsonian Announces New Artist Research Fellowship Program,” United States Federal News Service press
release, January 16, 2007, ProQuest document, accessed December 1, 2014.
80
There are instances, though rare, when an artist may choose a non-curator to serve as their main sponsor. If the artist is selected for the
fellowship, then this sponsor will become their research facilitator and advisor – it is crucial, therefore, that they select the person who will offer
them the best possible support. As an example, 2014 SARF fellow Muriel Hasbun is a photographer whose research centered on taxidermy: its
methods of practice, its vernacular traditions and its relationship to our living experiences. Her sponsor was not a curator but a retired staff
member, a man who for many years was the Museum of Natural History’s main taxidermist. Hasbun’s research necessitated a sponsor with an
intimate knowledge of taxidermy, who could guide her through the Natural History collections and offer practical first-hand knowledge. The
SARF committee understood that need and thus allowed her the flexibility to propose a sponsor who was better suited than any of the curators.

48

inquiry, and that by definition requires flexibility and a constant mutation of ideas. They are free to move in any
direction that they wish under the gentle supervision and support of their sponsor.
The artists whose applications are accepted for the fellowship display a wide range of backgrounds and
research interests, and their proposed projects span across all of the Smithsonian’s affiliated museums and institutes.
While the committee does not actively seek the “big names” of the art world, they do prefer artists who are
experienced; this means that they have exhibited work outside their local community, that they have a proven track
record, and that they are established or up-and-coming in the contemporary art sphere. There is also a desire to have
a strong international presence within each year’s cohort. Past fellowship recipients have hailed from countries such
as Germany, South Africa, Malaysia, Brazil, Norway, Japan and the Central African Republic. This general directive
supports the Smithsonian’s mission of academic rigor, cultural prestige and global relevance. They want fresh
perspectives and innovative approaches, but at the same time they want artists who are deeply invested in the
research that they are pursuing. To that end younger artists can still be considered for the award if their proposal and
their recommendation letters are particularly impactful. Beginning in 2015 the committee has also decided to allow
artists to apply with or without a formal nomination (they will still need a sponsor, and additional recommendation
letters if they are not formally nominated). This development may open the doors for a myriad of new and even
more diverse research proposals.
In addition to their ethnic diversity, SARF fellows come from a variety of professional contexts and art
making mediums. They are photographers, sculptors, painters, glass artists, textile artists, printmakers, designers,
multimedia artists, and everything in between. Their inquiry has varying degrees of integration with their existing
work; for some it is an extension or a reinvention of an existing pattern of projects, and for others it represents a
newer direction in their practice. 2012 fellow Christine Dixie, a printmaker from South Africa, proposed to work
with the National Portrait Gallery and the Museum of American History to research the Victorian gender stereotypes
of “the angelic girl child and the heroic explorer.”
81
2009 fellow Nancy Friedman-Sanchez, a Colombian-born US
artist, proposed to work with the American Art Museum, the Museum of Natural History and the Cooper-Hewitt
Design Museum to explore the relationships between lace design and botanical illustration in the colonial era. 2013
fellow Walmor Correa, and painter and sculptor from Brazil, proposed to study ornithologist William Belton’s

81
“Smithsonian Awards 15 Artist Research Fellowships,” United States Federal News Service press release, July 13, 2012, ProQuest document,
accessed December 1, 2014.
49

research on Brazilian wild-bird migration patterns with the Museum of Natural History’s Ornithological Department
and the Smithsonian Institutional Archives.
Because these inquiry projects hinge on resources and expertise that are unique to the Smithsonian, artists
are required to be in residence for at least one month in order to truly take advantage of the offerings. “SARF
Fellows are expected to spend their fellowships in residence at the Smithsonian, conducting research with
Smithsonian staff and resources following a project schedule agreed to by the Smithsonian advisor. . . . [They] can
research what is on view in the 19 museums, the National Zoological Park, and the 9 research centers of the
Smithsonian. They might also do research in non-public areas, libraries, archives, gardens, laboratories, field sites in
the U.S. and abroad as well as storage facilities.”
82
SARF funding mostly covers travel and accommodations in
Washington, D.C. for up to three months, as well as any auxiliary travel expenses to affiliate sites outside of
Washington.
83

Fellowship Example: Ken Gonzales-Day and Taína Caragol
In order to further examine the administrative and curatorial methodologies of the SARF program, I will
use the case study of artist Ken Gonzales-Day and curator Taína Caragol. Gonzales-Day, a photographer based in
Los Angeles, participated in the 2014 class of SARF fellows under the sponsorship of Caragol. The processes
undertaken by both artist and curator throughout the residency underscore certain important aspects of artist-led
inquiry as it pertains to the institutional context.
Gonzales-Day’s portfolio is heavily based in research and scholarship. Projects often span several years,
during which he engages in a deep inquiry of some interdisciplinary subject matter. In particular his work tends to
focus on historic constructions and/or documentations of race and violence. The research that Gonzales-Day
proposed for SARF was part of a project investigating the depictions of racial physiognomy in public displays. He
refers to drawn profiles, portrait busts and other sculptures from antiquity through the early twentieth century. From
the posed perfection of the Greek marbles to the scientific symmetry of Enlightenment profiles and the Victorian

82
Taína Caragol, correspondence with the author, January 2015.
83
This has included places like the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in New York, NY or the Harvard Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge,
MA. On the Smithsonian campus itself, artists have engaged with numerous resources including those at the American Art Museum, the Museum
of Natural History, the Museum of American History, the Museum of the American Indian, the American Art Museum, the Freer and Sackler
Galleries, the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Archives of American Art, the Air and Space Museum, the National Portrait
Gallery, the Smithsonian Institution Archives, the Smithsonian Photography Initiative, the Museum of African Art, the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy
Center, the Center for Folklife and Heritage, the Museum of African American History, the Human Studies Archives, the Cullman Library,
Smithsonian Folkways, and the National Postal Museum.
50

busts of “primitive” peoples, depictions of the human form “may tell us as much about the times in which they were
made as the subjects they depict.”
84
Their proportions, shaping, specificity and relative aesthetics can provide
valuable insights into the historical assumptions and contexts for understanding racial difference. Since 2009
Gonzales-Day has been traveling to museums and cultural institutions worldwide, finding sculptures and other
objects that contain references to human physiognomy. He then carefully photographs each item (fig. 45, 46 and 47).
The process of finding the artifacts, learning about their historical context and finally encountering them (in person
and through the camera lens) leads the artist and his audiences to produce knowledge that questions and critically
considers the ideological constructions of race.
85

Figure 46. Ken Gonzales-Day, Untitled (Malvina Hoffman Collection, [top:left to right] Mayan Man [336921]; South African Bushwoman
[336951]; Asparoke Indian Man [336935]; Ubangi Woman [336943]; [bottom: left to right] Sudan Woman [336938]; Padaung Woman
[336925]; Tibetan Merchant [336941A]; Zulu Woman [336945]; Lapp Man [336917], The Field Museum, Chicago, IL), 2009-2012. From the
series Profiled. Lightjet print on aluminum, 20 x 28 in, ed. 5. Courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Gallery, Los Angeles, California.
Reproduced from: Sharon Mizota, “Ken Gonzales-Day Re-Examines Violence, Race, and Identity,” Artbound, KCET Los Angeles, November 29,
2012, http://www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/counties/los-angeles/ken-gonzales-day-race-identity.html.

84
Overview of Profiled, Ken Gonzales-Day, http://kengonzalesday.com/projects/bonegrassboy/index.htm.
85
While Gonzales-Day’s photographs do maintain a high production value, and are exhibited as art objects, they are but a small component of the
artist’s larger research process. They are meant to convey a narrative about the artist’s path of discovery as he uncovers and documents each
artifact. (or series of artifacts).
51

Figure 47. Ken Gonzales-Day, Untitled (buste de Matua Tawai, natif
de Cororareka, ile Ikanamawi, Nouvelle Zelande, MNHN-HA-886-1,
National Museum of Natural History, Paris), 2010-2012. Lightjet print
on aluminum, 20 x 30 in, ed. 5. Courtesy of the artist and Luis De
Jesus Gallery, Los Angeles, California. Reproduced from: Sharon
Mizota, “Ken Gonzales-Day Re-Examines Violence, Race, and
Identity,” Artbound, KCET Los Angeles, November 29, 2012,
http://www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/counties/los-angeles/ken-gonzales-
day-race-identity.html.
Figure 48. Ken Gonzales-Day, Untitled (Malvina Hoffman, Barefoot
Man [337236], The Field Museum, Chicago and Jean-Jacques-
Francois Saly, Faun Holding Goat, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los
Angeles), 2009-2012. Lightjet print on dibond, 45.5 x 73.5 in, ed. 5.
Courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Gallery, Los Angeles,
California. Reproduced from: Sharon Mizota, “Ken Gonzales-Day Re-
Examines Violence, Race, and Identity,” Artbound, KCET Los
Angeles, November 29, 2012,
http://www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/counties/los-angeles/ken-gonzales-
day-race-identity.html.

Taína Caragol, curator at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), became aware of Gonzales-Day’s work
through the publication of his book Profiled (2011), which was awarded a prestigious prize from the LACMA
Photographic Arts Council. An early manifestation of the aforementioned physiognomy research, the book is a
collection of photographs showcasing artifacts from several collections in the United States and Europe. Impressed
and inspired by the work, Caragol obtained permission to nominate Gonzales-Day for the SARF program in
partnership with the NPG. “We’ve been very interested in the topic of portraiture and race. That’s something that we
wanted to explore in our permanent display and in upcoming exhibitions.”
86
For Gonzales-Day, SARF presented an
opportunity to expand his existing inquiry to certain artifacts located at the Smithsonian, specifically in the
collections held by the NPG, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Museum of Natural History. “I chose
[to pursue SARF] because I have been researching objects in the collection since 2010 . . . much of the information
on [these objects] are only contained at the Smithsonian, and are not digitized or published.”
87
Being able to work on
site gave him the chance to access artifacts and archives that could not be found elsewhere. In particular, he was
interested in objects from the 1915-1916 California-Panama Exposition held in San Diego.
At the beginning of his residency, Gonzales-Day worked with Caragol to request access to the various
Smithsonian collections. “Taína . . . contacted and worked with all the other curators to coordinate my access, and

86
Taína Caragol, conversation with the author, January 2015. Transcribed from audio.
87
Ken Gonzales-Day, correspondence with the author, November 2014.
52

shooting schedule with the registrars and other staff members. . . . If she hadn’t been willing to reach out to all these
other institutions, curators, collections, I would never have been able to complete the work I did.”
88
After the initial
planning was complete, the artist spent the majority of his remaining time photographing each object and gathering
background research (fig. 49 and 50). Some of this took place in the Smithsonian’s public spaces, while the rest took
place in laboratories and research rooms. In either case, the artist’s interactions with Smithsonian staff were crucial
to the progress of his exploration. They allowed him to gain insights into each object’s origins, uses, and contexts,
which in turn opened new spaces for knowledge production. Caragol continued to facilitate these connections and
exchanges for the duration of the residency.
89

Figure 49. Ken Gonzales-Day, Profiled project, 2014. The artist conducting research. Smithsonian Institution National Portrait Gallery,
Washington, D.C. Photograph courtesy of Taína Caragol.

88
Ken Gonzales-Day, correspondence with the author, November 2014.
89
It is important to note that Gonzales-Day was not chosen for this residency based on Caragol’s expectation that he would create new
photographs as artworks. The photographs are part of the artist’s process, a necessary documentation that allows him to examine each artifact as a
research specimen. He was chosen for the discourse that his photographs produce, not for the photographs themselves.
53

Figure 50. Ken Gonzales-Day, Profiled project, 2014. The artist conducting research. Smithsonian Institution National Portrait Gallery,
Washington, D.C. Photograph courtesy of Taína Caragol.

Following the fluidity of artist-led inquiry, SARF does not require its fellows to produce deliverables at the
end of their residency. Caragol cites two reasons for this: to reduce the pressure on the artist for an outcome, and to
reduce the pressure on the institution for a public-facing exhibition or event. SARF residencies are short, and the
need for results can stifle or alter the potential of the artist’s inquiry. It can also force them to show an unfinished
process as a finished product, which misrepresents the essence of the work. On a more practical level, having an
exhibition or a large event for every SARF fellow is a very labor-intensive proposition for the Smithsonian staff.
“It’s work that you do on top of your other work. . . . because you enjoy research, because you enjoy meeting artists,
because you really believe in someone. But it’s a lot of extra work that you will have as a curator.”
90
With these
concerns in mind, artists are simply expected to use their research to inspire or inform future projects.
Most SARF artists are also invited to give lectures during their residency. The lectures are open to the
public, but they are not widely advertised externally. They are geared instead towards a particular audience of
researchers and scholars, many of whom work at the Smithsonian Institution themselves. This underscores the
notion that SARF’s primary audience is the institutional community and its scholarly networks. Because each artist

90
Taína Caragol, conversation with the author, January 2015. Transcribed from audio.
54

engages directly with Smithsonian-specific collections and/or initiatives, their research process is built around the
conversations that they have and the cooperative explorations that they undertake alongside curators, registrars,
researchers and other institutional affiliates. This rich discourse is the real outcome of the residency. New
knowledge is produced, not just about the subject of inquiry, but also about the Smithsonian archive and each
participant’s relationship to it.
Ken Gonzales-Day gave two lectures during his residency, one brown bag lunch for the staff and one talk
in the Smithsonian Director’s Suite. In the staff lecture, he presented photographs of sculpture casts found in the
collection of the Museum of Natural History. These casts, which were originally created for a world exposition,
were likely part of a public display depicting “primitive” Native American peoples. More than the photographs
themselves, the artist’s presentation centered on the new avenues of discourse that he had discovered through his
photographic research. For example, he noted that the many of the casts had their eyes closed, a fact that resonated
strongly with his collaborators at the National Portrait Gallery. “The final part of the finishing process in any
sculpture or cast is opening the eyes . . . they all have their eyes closed. They’re dormant or dead.”
91
The violent
implications of these artifacts, from the viewpoint of an art scholar, are very different than what might be gleaned
from historical or anthropological evaluation. The artist was able to bring these new perspectives and narratives to
the fore through his process of inquiry, and Caragol notes that “listening to him raise those questions with images in
our collections made it much more poignant.”
92

Gonzales-Day’s analysis of the Native American casts also inspired a broader discourse among the
Smithsonian staff about why the casts, which are portraits, are not located at the National Portrait Gallery. It
questions the institution itself: how it is organized, how its artifacts are acquired, and how it chooses to enforce
disciplinary boundaries. What makes a portrait a “portrait”? What makes it natural history as opposed to art? Is there
a metanarrative, or a power structure, that is inherent in these delineations? How can this affect how an artifact is
catalogued, identified, analyzed and displayed? Like all artist-led inquiry, these questions are not intended as an
attack on the institution, on academia or on the scholars who works within its boundaries. Rather, the artist is
respectfully prodding, pushing participants outside of their natural limits. His contact with multiple different
collections and programs allows him to move fluidly between them, a perk that is not always available to the
bureaucratically entrenched staff. These migrations (and the connective nodes that they create) reveal discursive

91
Taína Caragol, conversation with the author, January 2015. Transcribed from audio.
92
Taína Caragol, conversation with the author, January 2015. Transcribed from audio.
55

channels and scholarly frameworks that, through their otherness, can stimulate new institutional knowledge and
growth. “Since [Gonzales-Day] was doing research in 3 collections . . . he brought a comparative look to our
methods and collections that I thought was very revealing.”
93
The Smithsonian recognizes the value of such
reflexivity - rather than taking a defensive stance to guard a dominant ideology, they embrace the discomfort and
controversy that research like Gonzales-Day’s might cause. It forces the institution to view its own practices through
a critical lens, and to gain new understandings that contribute to the complexity and enrichment of its scholarly
community.
Naturally the discursive output of a SARF project does not end when the residency is over. The artist
continues on their original trajectory; Ken Gonzales-Day began his project on racial physiognomy several years
before his fellowship, and he is still pursuing that line of inquiry today. Within the Smithsonian, however, the
discourse persists in a series of diverging threads, each representing the experiences of a single participant. Every
historian, curator and scientist who interacted with Gonzales-Day during his residency came away with different,
tacit interpretations, derived from lived experiences and contexts. They also forged new personal connections and
discursive channels spanning across the entire Smithsonian community. These interpretations and exchanges might
inspire them to approach their research differently: to collaborate with someone outside their field, to reassess their
methodology, to curate a new exhibition or to change the wording of their latest publication. However big or small
the impact, it will propagate to a secondary audience, and then to a tertiary audience and so on. Thus, while
ostensibly a nonpublic program, the echoes of SARF can still reach the general public through a variety of disparate
mechanisms. They may or may not be attributed to Gonzales-Day, and they may or may not have anything to do
with racism or sculpture. But they exist, and those echoes are the real material legacy of SARF.

Methodologies of Artist-Led Inquiry
The case studies of Mark Dion and the SARF program serve to illuminate not only how inquiry unfolds as
an artistic practice, but also how certain institutional and curatorial structures can support these practices. With those
examples in mind, the next section proposes a loose methodological framework for artists who wish to pursue
inquiry projects. How can they distinguish their work from other forms of scholarly research? And what continues to

93
Taína Caragol, conversation with the author, January 2015. Transcribed from audio.
56

root them in the world of art as opposed to any other academic discipline? As part of this conversation I also
consider the role of non-artists within inquiry, and how transdisciplinary cooperation manifests within this genre.

Techniques of Inquiry
Artists who lead inquiry assume the role of an explorer-at-large: asking questions, gathering information,
collecting artifacts and performing experiments in a variety of disciplines. With every new project they embark on
yet another maiden voyage of discovery, and the hosting institution and its networks (of people, sites, etc.) are the
terra incognita. But what exactly constitutes artistic inquiry? In the projects described earlier, Mark Dion takes on
the guise of a botanist, an archaeologist, and a museum curator, and yet he is none of these things. Ken Gonzales-
Day acts as an anthropologist and a historian, but he is neither. Dion says, “I never disguise the fact that I’m an
artist, working with a methodology borrowed from another field.”
94
Even when they borrow from another field, their
projects look nothing like those pursued by scholars in that field. They exude an aesthetic essence. So what are the
elements of this essence? Are they consistent across all types of artist-led inquiry?
On a very basic level inquiry projects are considered artwork because they are being conducted by those
who call themselves artists. On further examination, however, there are certain characteristics (beyond the identity
of the researcher) that can also distinguish the inquiry as artistically driven. Curator and scholar Henk Slager has
distilled some of these ideas in his recent publications on artistic research. He begins by outlining the goals of
artistic research, and how they might differ from research in the humanities or the sciences. The first and most
obvious difference is that, while empirical research aims to produce generalizations that can be used by other
researchers, artistic research is highly localized and singular. It is not repeatable, and its outcomes cannot be broadly
applied to other contexts.
95
In addition to being localized, artistic research seeks to develop a multiplicity of
experiential knowledge rather than the professional knowledge sought by other forms of academic research. This is a
clear reflection of art’s longstanding emphasis on the individual encounter as a mode of enlightenment. In inquiry
projects, the experiences of each participant - the curators, the volunteers, the staff, the consulting professionals, and
even the gallery visitors – produce knowledge that is distinct from the experience and subsequent knowledge of

94
Mark Dion as quoted in Vilches, “The Art of Archaeology,” 207.
95
“Even though artistic knowledge understood as a mathesis singularis – because of its focus on the singular and the unique - cannot be
comprehended in laws, it deals with a form of knowledge . . . Hence the emphasis on the singular and the unique in the aesthetic domain does not
imply that artistic research is impossible.” Henk Slager, “Art and Method,” in Artists with PhDs: On the new Doctoral Degree in Studio Art, ed.
James Elkins (Washington: New Academia Publishing, 2009), 52. Slager references concepts introduced in Alexander Baumgarten’s Aesthetica
(1758) and Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1980).
57

every other participant. “Artists’ inquiries might contribute to knowledge and especially understanding, but many
contemporary artists expect that contribution to be formed by the audience for themselves as individuals.”
96
The
emphasis on experience over data is not meant to “soften” the research, or to demonize the quantitative approach of
empiricism. Rather, it underscores how the data is interpreted by people, and how these interpretations are
transformed into meaning. It reinforces the complexity and multiplicity of human understanding, an uncommon
mission for empirical research but a fairly common one within artistic practice.
The methodology of artist-led inquiry also deviates from the traditional research methodologies used in
other disciplines. Scholarly research often begins with a question to be answered, a hypothesis or argument to be
proven, or an unknown quantity to be found. In all cases there is a proposed end result that the researcher will
definitively reach or definitively reject based on a methodological analysis. Artistic research, on the other hand, does
not proceed with the expectation of a neatly tied-up conclusion. Slager advocates the use of the term methododicy to
describe this phenomenon: “a firm and rational justified belief in a methodological result, whose existence
ultimately cannot be legitimized apriori.”
97
Methododicy is logical yet open-ended – questions beget more questions
rather than answers, loose ends are highlighted rather than hidden, and divergences from the starting point are
encouraged rather than ignored.
98
Inquiry proposals are thematic but not specific; the artist does not know ahead of
time what he or she might find, what relevance the findings might have, or how the audience might react to their
individual experiences. Nor does the artist attempt to drive the projects towards any particular terminus. The primary
goal is to complicate the audiences’ expectations and to trigger their curiosity, which might in turn spark a multitude
of unplanned conversations and a process of continual discovery. In this way, artist-led inquiry celebrates the
complexity of knowledge and its aberrations instead of reducing it to succinct and isolated generalization.
While inquiry artists do borrow methods from the humanities, the social sciences or the sciences, they do
not adopt them universally. Instead they develop specialized strategies that are the union (or intersection) of several
different methodologies.
99
Artist-led inquiry breaks down the divisions between research disciplines by borrowing
components of each, and fusing these components to create an entirely new methodology. Slager also posits that

96
Chris Rust, “Unstated Contributions: How Artistic Inquiry Can Inform Interdisciplinary Research,” International Journal of Design 1, no. 3
(2007), http://www.ijdesign.org/ojs/index.php/IJDesign/article/view/201/80.
97
Henk Slager, “Methododicy,” in Artistic Research, ed. Annette Balkema and Henk Slager (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 14.
98
“The result is not a fixed concept or a static point, but the indication of a zone, leaving unmarked room for the continuation of the artistic
experiment.” Slager, “Art and Method,” 55.
99
“Art knows the hermeneutic questions of the humanities; art is engaged in an empirically scientific method; and art is aware of the commitment
and social involvement of the social sciences. It seems, therefore, that the most intrinsic characteristic of artistic research is based on the
continuous transgression of these boundaries in order to generate novel, reflexive zones.” Slager, “Art and Method,” 51.
58

“multiplicity and a poly-aesthetic attitude should always function as a regulating guideline” for artist-led inquiry.
100

This means that artistic research must be open and tolerant to an array of unique research methodologies. Every
project will call for a different amalgamation of procedures and interpretations, but they are all equally valid as
forms of knowledge production. The reason for maintaining such methodological variety is to avoid the emergence
of a dominant or standard research model. If artistic research is standardized, it risks becoming mired in the
bureaucracy and hegemony of conventional academia. Its capacity to recognize difference, and to transgress
established norms, is compromised when it becomes normative. Thus artistic research methodologies must be
flexible and numerous, continually shifting and multiplying to elude any sense of formal establishment.
Beyond the hybridized adoption of research methods from other disciplines, artist-led inquiry also relies on
an explicit attempt to subvert or detourne those very methods. This follows the historical imperative of artists to
“[claim] a critical viewpoint on the different, the irregular, and the other.”
101
One kind of subversion is the use of
humor, allegory and irony, tools that are seldom used in connection with scholarly work but are deeply rooted in
artistic practice. They uphold the project as a carefully constructed fiction, creating rich discursive spaces for
critique between the artist’s narrative and the scholar’s reality.
Another strategy that artists may use to recognize and invoke difference is to approach their research
process from a meta-perspective. Transcending the operational scope of their project and understanding it as part of
a larger context enables them to critically analyze and reflect upon their work in relation to a variety of
acknowledged and unacknowledged perspectives. Slager presents meta-perspectival analysis as having two
complementary axes, one of knowledge economy and the other of ethical responsibility. The foundation of the
knowledge economy axis is Jean Francois Lyotard’s maxim that “artists should pose the epistemological question of
what art is.”
102
Applied to artist-led research, this means a deconstruction of the foundations and supporting
structures that underlie each research methodology, in order to fully comprehend how it translates into meaning
and/or knowledge.
103
The basis of the ethical responsibility axis is Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that an artist has the
ability to notice what others cannot see. The artist has a responsibility to consider their research methodology from

100
Henk Slager, “Discours de la Méthode,” in Artistic Research, ed. Annette Balkema and Henk Slager (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 37.
101
Slager, “Discours de la Méthode,” 36.
102
Jean-Francois Lyotard as referenced in Slager, “Art and Method,” 53.
103
This requires the artist to “pursue a speculative mode of questioning for its own sake connected with the activation of imagination.” Slager,
“Methododicy,” 14.
59

an ethical standpoint, and to address opportunities for an improved and more socially conscious mode of knowledge
production.
104

Collaborative Elements
The concepts enumerated in the preceding paragraphs firmly establish that artist-led inquiry espouses a set
of goals and procedures that are very different from those of other academic disciplines. As plain as it might seem
from the artist’s perspective, however, it is important to consider how non-art academics perceive the motives and
processes of artists leading inquiry. Are they threatened by the artist’s infringement on their scholarly territory? Do
they feel that they are being replaced, criticized or relegated to the sidelines?
Contrary to the ethos of our highly proprietary academic culture, some academics approach artist-led
inquiry with both openness and enthusiasm. This is due to the collaborative mentality that is espoused by the artist –
they are not conducting their inquiry in a void, but in cooperation with non-art scholars who serve as partners in the
pursuit of knowledge production. These scholars can readily offer their expertise when needed, participate in
research activities, and even go so far as to write about their experiences. They are willing to cooperate because they
recognize the differences between the artist’s work and their own. Anthropologist and archaeologist Flora Vilches
writes of Tate Thames Dig that “to those who are experts in archaeological practice, the resemblance of Dion’s
project to reality is not an issue.”
105
A crucial component of artist-led inquiry is the artist’s establishment as an
amateur. While they might dabble in archaeology or chemistry, they do not pretend to be professional archaeologists
or chemists. The adoption of such a specific academic persona is temporary. Dion remarks, “I never take on the
mantel of mastery in these projects. It is always obvious that I am a dilettante struggling to find my way.”
106
Despite
the extent and duration of Gonzales-Day’s inquiry projects, he too denies any claim of professional expertise. This
dilettantism is not just an end but also rather a means of keeping the artist’s practice within the art sphere. They are
neither trying to replace academic professionals, nor are they trying to denigrate their work. Rather, they appreciate
the knowledge that experts can offer, and they need it in order to provide a context for their own, more aesthetically-
driven approach.

104
“The artist compels us to see the world in a different way…from that perspective, artistic research is also connected with the search for a
critical understanding of our existential conditions and the formulation of utopian proposals for improvement.” Slager, “Art and Method,” 54.
105
Vilches, “The Art of Archaeology,” 207.
106
Mark Dion as quoted in Vilches, “The Art of Archaeology,” 207.
60

Beyond the obvious differences in methodology, most academics can also appreciate that artist-led inquiry
has a different set of outcomes and messages than disciplinary research. Dion’s Tate Thames Dig did not yield a
standard archaeology of the Thames, and Gonzales-Day’s research during his SARF residency did not yield a
standard anthropological or art historical analysis. In an interview about Cabinet of Curiosities, Dion remarks that
his collaborators “were intrigued by the notion that we were, temporarily at least, giving the loaned objects another
function, a discursive life beyond being an instrument, or specimen, or rare and obsolete technology.”
107
Artist-led
inquiry has the potential to be exactly that: the creation of discursive spaces for unconventional, untested and/or
“unprofessional” forms of knowledge production. As long as the artist maintains an intentional separation between
their discourse and that of other disciplines, then there is no reason for non-art scholars to be threatened by artistic
inquiry.
The lack of threat that non-art scholars feel towards artists, though mollifying, is not enough to account for
their eager engagement with inquiry projects. The catalogues for Tate Thames Dig and Cabinet of Curiosities
include several statements from Dion’s collaborators attesting to their keen interest, and Caragol’s description of the
SARF program suggests a similar zeal from the participating Smithsonian scholars. Such a positive response stems
from the fact that artist-led inquiry is a two-way cooperative process. Put another way: the scholar stands to learn
just as much as the artist might from the process of collaborative inquiry. The artist’s mimicry of an academic
discipline can prompt professionals in that discipline to reconsider their process in a reflexive, critical and aesthetic
way. “Openness to the work of artists might facilitate [scholars’] efforts to create distance with their practice . . . and
build connections not previously foreseen.”
108
Collaborative inquiry provides a flexible discursive space for
academics to interrogate their scholarship, and conversely, for artists to interrogate their practice. By examining
their field from an outside perspective, each participant can trigger discoveries about themselves that may never
have happened otherwise, leading to new forms of knowledge production and disciplinary growth. It is the
expectation of this mutually beneficial knowledge that drives the scholar’s appreciation for artistic interventions.
Such self-reflexivity can be very liberating for the non-art researcher, as it presents an opportunity to
challenge the usual strictures that are imposed by the controlling bodies of each academic field. Today’s scholars are
constantly influenced by the pressure to maintain relevancy, gain prestige and satisfy funders - to that end they

107
Mark Dion as quoted in Bill Horrigan, “A Conversation with Mark Dion,” in Cabinet of Curiosities: Mark Dion and the University as
Installation, ed. Colleen Sheehy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 31.
108
Vilches, “The Art of Archaeology,” 210.
61

pursue only certain types of leads, following meticulous research protocols and seeking validation through formal
publication. To the most inquisitive minds such dictates can be stifling. Pursuing inquiry in cooperation with artists
allows scholars to question how they engage in discovery, and it gives them the freedom to consider alternative
avenues of inquiry. Without the influences of funding and publication, they can follow their own instincts rather
than submitting to the tendencies of their professional peers. “This created a generative space for ideas and
exchange. . . .We have improvised and allowed things to grow and develop, alter and be adjusted.’’
109

Artist-led inquiry does not replace traditional academia but, importantly, it still has knowledge value. The
artist’s process can remind scholars to acknowledge the cognitive potential of all forms of research, formally
pursued or otherwise. While scientists are beholden to rigorous methods in order to uphold the quality and
credibility of our knowledge systems, artists have the freedom to focus on what meaning might be lost through these
methods. “Many good ideas are orphaned, unheeded in the wilderness. . . . [The arts] could become the place where
abandoned, discredited, and unorthodox inquiries could be pursued.”
110
Artist-led inquiry valorizes these outliers,
the incongruous data points that are discarded as insignificant by empirical research methods. When combined with
formal scholarly findings they have the potential to bring new dimensions and layers to academic research, and to
the researchers themselves. Thus the cooperation of art and non-art research can ultimately contribute to a more
nuanced understanding of human experience.

Conclusions
I conclude my investigation of artist-led inquiry by highlighting strategies that are crucial for art
practitioners who intend to engage with inquiry as a medium. I introduce some common obstacles to successful
inquiry projects, followed by organizational recommendations for curators and institutions. These recommendations
reformulate the contemporary museum as a true athenaeum – a multifaceted center for discourse and
interdisciplinary knowledge production. I close by looking forward, spotlighting certain new and emerging museum
initiatives that herald the continued development of the inquiry and athenaeum paradigms.

109
Boyes et al., “Artists, Art & Artefacts.” The authors refer to the process of their own cross-disciplinary collaborative project.
110
Stephen Wilson, “Art as Research,” San Francisco State University, http://userwww.sfsu.edu/swilson/papers/artist.researcher.html.
62

Challenges for Artist-Led Inquiry
When successful, artist-led inquiries can be enriching learning and aesthetic experiences for everyone
involved. There are, however, several potential challenges that the artist must overcome in order for the project to
meet the aforementioned requirements. First and foremost the artist must resist didacticism. The process of inquiry
is not about simply communicating data through art objects, but about creating spaces for discourse through
aesthetic thinking. Artists can fall into the habit of presenting information without offering the audience a chance to
engage in an open dialogue about it. Paulo Freire referred to this as the banking model of education, whereby the
learner is an empty receptacle to be filled with deposits of knowledge that they passively accept as truth.
111
Artists
who lead inquiry must view their audience not as passive receptacles but instead as active partners in the search for
knowledge. They must invite the audience to engage as autonomous beings with varied histories and experiences,
each capable of their own unique interpretations through critical and reflexive thought. Allowing each visitor to
reach their own conclusions, instead of privileging the artist’s, keeps the inquiry away from singular truths and
reiterates the importance of acknowledging the multiplicity and variety of human understanding.
Artists who lead inquiry are also routinely challenged to resist methodological standardization or the
acceptance of academic hegemony. Artist-led inquiry uses a multiplicity of hybridized methodologies, never
privileging a single model and constantly maintaining the otherness of the process. It must remain fluid and
changeable, different and unfamiliar, in order to create spaces for new and heterogeneous kinds of knowledge
production. If artists settle into a standard practice of inquiry, or if they revert to the standards of any discipline, they
can lose the subversive or critical capacity that is inherent to aesthetic engagement.
A common culprit of standardization or academic hegemony is the duration of artist-led inquiry. Too much
time dedicated to one academic area puts the artist in danger of becoming overly invested in that field – they might
mistakenly assume the role of an expert, and thus adopt the methodologies of an expert. After a time they may cease
to act as artists at all. If Mark Dion had spent twenty years surveying archaeological practices for Tate Thames Dig,
he might have become too much of an archaeologist himself. This is not only a problem for other archaeologists, but
it is a problem for Dion – it jeopardizes his position as an artist and the knowledge contributions that he can make
from that standpoint. Keeping projects short-term and variable allows the artist to continue engaging from an artist’s
perspective. As Professor Stephen Wilson writes, “Many of the best young artists I had as students who became

111
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2009): 72.
63

involved as researchers ultimately ended up being seduced by the recognition and economic rewards of research that
they quit functioning as artists. . . . I am not claiming that artists should act exactly like researchers. If they did, they
would be unlikely to make any unique contribution.”
112

One might argue that the later work of Helen and Newton Harrison, if it had been considered artist-led
inquiry, may have succumbed in part to these very pitfalls.
113
When the artists began studying the mangrove crab for
The Lagoon Cycle, their work became so steeped in scientific methodologies that they were able to apply for (and
receive) a research grant from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Because the project took place over more than
ten years, they had plenty of time to gain a working knowledge of ecology that bordered on expertise. The final
installation was driven primarily by elements of narrative and metaphor, but the actual research process was
carefully modeled after the standard protocols of the scientific method. If the Harrisons had conducted their
experimentation from within the museum as artist-led inquiry, the work may have been compromised by its
entrenchment in the bureaucracy and hegemony of the scientific community. It may have lost “the capacity to
mobilize an open attitude, an intrinsic tolerance for a multiplicity of interpretations, and, if necessary, to put those
into action against the spreading excesses of one-dimensional contextualizing.”
114

As artists spend more time devoted to a single non-art discipline, they run the risk of establishing a
professional reputation within that discipline. They may become more than artists; they may be accepted by the
academic community as scientists, activists, social workers or consultants. As a consequence they may be expected
to generate certain functional results beyond their freeform artistic production. This brings us to another obstacle for
artist-led inquiry: the predetermination of outcomes. If the artist begins their research process with a set of precise
goals, it does not allow the inquiry to proceed in an exploratory manner. They may be asked to save an ecosystem,
build responsive architecture, quell gang violence or impact governmental policy. Under such pressures, their
process of knowledge production is limited by the narrow scope of their perceived goals. Any avenue that does not
lead to the desired outcome is discarded, and the need for viable solutions leads back to the hegemony of academic
research. The artist’s process of questioning is relegated to the background. The desire for results guides the inquiry,
rather than the desire to produce a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the topic at hand.

112
Stephen Wilson, “Art as Research.”
113
The Harrisons are used here to illustrate a point. Their work cannot truly be judged or evaluated as artist-led inquiry, because that would place
their work in a context that did not exist at the time of its creation.
114
Slager, “Discours de la Méthode,” 37.
64

In addition to aesthetic challenges, artists who lead inquiry also face a variety of logistical issues with the
execution and reception of their work. These problems are not threats to the foundations of artist-led inquiry, like the
obstacles listed above – rather, they are the result of the artist’s fidelity to those very foundations. From the start it is
difficult for artists to obtain funding from the usual sources because their work necessarily deviates from traditional
funding models, both within art and non-art disciplines. When they do manage to obtain funding, their supporting
institutions often struggle with how best to receive, facilitate and record the inquiry process. Museums do not know
how to exhibit the project to advantage; critics do not know how to analyze it and funders do not know how to
assess its success. The knowledge contributions of the project are often at risk of being ignored or forgotten due to a
lack of archiving or formal documentation. All of these challenges are made even more difficult by the fact that all
artist-led inquiry projects are, and must be, radically different than the projects that came before. The advantage is
that this prevents standardization, and the disadvantage is that it prevents standardization. Every project’s logistics
must be rethought from the ground up, which stops museum staff from developing reliable and universally adoptable
curatorial strategy.
As inquiry projects are often undertaken over the course of several months or even years, they require
substantial financial support. If the museum is unable to provide this level of support they will appeal to other
institutions: arts nonprofits, academic entities, governmental organizations and occasionally private sponsors. This is
where problems can begin to arise. Regardless of provenance, most forms of funding are dispensed with strings
attached. Arts endowments, for instance, typically require their applicants to propose one of two outcomes: the
creation of an art object or some kind of measurable community impact. The production of knowledge, while
ostensibly valued, seems to be disregarded unless the proposal offers a quantifiable real-world result. Obtaining arts
financing for artist-led inquiry is problematic because, by definition, the artist cannot predetermine their findings in
a proposal. Nor can they promise any particular interpretations or any deliverable outcomes. “Most artists would
assert very strongly that their ability to perform as artists would be compromised by that kind of intentional
approach.”
115

Research funds can offer a respite from these material considerations, but they still have other conditions
that must be met. “Researchers are expected to identify a problem or question which they will resolve in some way,
they must gain an understanding of the wider context of knowledge in which that problem is set, they need

115
Rust, “Unstated Contributions.”
65

appropriate methods for investigating the problem and their research must result in a contribution to our shared
knowledge, usually formalised in an explicit way through a peer-reviewed document.”
116
Again, artists may not be
able to identify a problem ahead of time or with enough specificity to satisfy a funding body. Too much direction
can interfere with the meandering, aimless flow of their exploration. Their methodology will likely not meet the
approval of the funding board either. Artist-led inquiry doesn’t follow the accepted, official methods of any single
discipline, nor does it have a standard methodology of its own. The artist purposefully maintains a position of
uncertainty and otherness from normal methodologies, and the refusal to capitulate to academic hegemony can often
prevent the inquiry from being acknowledged as legitimate from a financial perspective. Lastly, and perhaps most
significantly, artists who lead inquiry are often at a loss to describe their “explicit contribution to shared
knowledge.” This is not due to a lack of knowledge but rather to a lack of shared interpretation. As stated
previously, artist-led inquiry produces individualized knowledge in each person who encounters the project. The
work draws on the viewer’s history and experiences to engender the development of new tacit and generative
knowledge. In the words of Marcel Duchamp: “The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator
brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus
adds his contribution to the creative act.”
117
Those multiple experiential interpretations and meanings cannot be
predicted, nor can they be reduced afterwards to some accepted standard or sweeping generalization. For this reason
many artists are disinclined to formally represent, predict or “own” the knowledge contributions that result from
their inquiry.
The fact that artist-led inquiry cannot follow the guidelines for most funding options naturally limits the
popularity and proliferation of the genre. The work of artists like Mark Dion has helped its cause, however, and in
recent years many arts organizations have loosened their restrictions in order to provide funding for such work.
Though art institutions accept and value inquiry projects, there are still many obstacles that are in the process of
being resolved at the curatorial, critical and administrative levels. How should such projects be exhibited? Is formal
exhibition necessary at all? The museum staff, the volunteers, the collaborators – if they are all audiences in equal
measure to the general public, and if the project is the process, then perhaps exhibition is a secondary concern.
Evaluation of artist-led inquiry is also a grey area. Since artists do not delineate specific goals or outcomes,
it is difficult for funders and institutional sponsors to determine what constitutes a successful project. It is not the

116
Rust, “Unstated Contributions.”
117
Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” 1957. From Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp (New York: Grove Press, 1959): 77-78.
66

completion of an art object, nor is it finding a solution to a problem or answering a question. These may be side
effects of the inquiry but they are not the criteria for it. It would seem that success stems from the quality and
complexity of discourse – but how can discourse be measured and gauged? Does it correlate to the number of people
who participate? Or to the depth of each participant’s engagement? Is one lone viewer’s experience as valuable as
the conversation between two viewers? How do we account for the long-term, generative discourse that might
trickle down from the original inquiry? Quantitative museum metrics are inadequate for answering these questions;
the best that can be done is to collect extensive anecdotal evidence to supplement any numerical data. This kind of
qualitative analysis has become much more ubiquitous in the contemporary arts environment.
Review and feedback from critics can also serve as an evaluative mechanism for inquiry, but Miwon Kwon
points out that this is a laborious endeavor. “It is very demanding on critics, too, because we have patiently to piece
together fragments of information from elsewhere, usually, and follow the project over a relatively long period of
time – days, months, maybe even years – as it goes through complicated transformations, generating multiple
narratives.”
118
For a critic to obtain a complete understanding of an inquiry project, they cannot simply fly in, view
something and leave. They must insert themselves into the process, which requires more time and effort than most
people are willing to spend. The fact that each project is a single work, rather than a collection of works, also
prevents them from critically engaging the developmental arc of the artist’s career. They do not see multiple projects
side-by-side, and thus cannot make a comparative analysis.
119
Unless critics can accommodate for these issues, they
will not be able to address inquiry practices in a serious and thoughtful way.
With so many challenges to the assessment and appreciation of artist-led inquiry, it is crucial that such
projects are fastidiously documented and archived. Artists and curators continue to experiment with various methods
of documentation: written records, interviews, anecdotes, photographs, artifacts and video/audio footage. While
nothing can replace the experience of participating in the inquiry, the publication or presentation of these records
can help to create some virtual instantiation of the discourse. But how and where should one publish and present? Is
a written catalog sufficient? What about lectures or roundtable discussions? Or an installation? Or scholarly articles?
Perhaps the more important question to ask artists and curators is what they seek to achieve by re-presenting the
inquiry to a secondary audience, and who comprises that audience. Is it necessary to reach beyond the immediate

118
Kwon, “Conversation with Mark Dion,” 26.
119
“One of the biggest problems with this kind of practice . . . is that it is virtually impossible to track the conceptual development of an artist. . . .
I like to have a dialogue with other things that I’ve done. But this kind of conceptual layering is not visible to most people because they encounter
isolate events or installations that are in fact part of a continuous development.” Mark Dion as quoted in Kwon, “Conversation with Mark Dion,”
25.
67

participants? If so, how far? It is against the general ethos of artist-led inquiry to exhibit findings or conclusive
results – instead, any re-presentation should still give the audience an opportunity to enter (and continue) the
discourse. What is the best method to achieve such a goal?
The emphasis on continued knowledge production, even after an inquiry is finished, might explain why the
lecture has become such an important mode of documentation. It allows the audience to have a direct and
conversational exchange with the artist, leading to any number of new and interesting interpretations. Written
publications must also maintain a similar openness. Catalogues for inquiry projects may choose to avoid the
inclusion of analytical essays in favor of participatory anecdotes and/or descriptions of the inquiry process. They do
not give the reader the outcomes of each project – instead they paint a vivid picture of the inquiry from several
different personal and temporal perspectives. The catalogues for Dion’s Tate Thames Dig and Cabinet of Curiosities
are good examples of this. The reader can attempt to insert himself or herself into a particular moment, or into a
particular discourse, and extrapolate individual meanings and/or understanding.
These methods of documentation might reach art audiences, but what about those in other disciplines? The
notion that they must bring their research to the attention of a non-art audience can sometimes cloud or interfere
with the artist’s original intentions. Should the artist attempt to publish their findings in a scholarly journal? Should
they present at non-art conferences? Both of these options seem inappropriate, as they would require the artist to
recalibrate their research to fit the standards of a specific academic discipline. They also force the artist to claim
ownership and accountability for some definitive knowledge, as opposed to the inspiration of an open dialogue.
Artists who lead inquiry must therefore resist the impulse to take on the mantle for non-art-world dissemination. A
plausible resolution is to allow their collaborative partners to shoulder this responsibility. Some artists have also
suggested the possibility of co-writing or co-presentation at conferences, which would offer the same layers of
crossover and instability as the inquiry itself.
120
These methods allow the artist to retain his or her aesthetic voice,
while simultaneously reaching a wider audience through the voices and interpretations of others.

Curating Inquiry
The challenges that an artist faces in the process of artist-led inquiry may be numerous and wide-ranging,
but they are not insurmountable. They simply require a certain kind of curatorial encouragement. The rise of inquiry

120
Boyes et al., “Artists, Art & Artefacts.” The authors refer to the process of their own cross-disciplinary collaborative project.
68

within the modern museum necessitates a reframing of the curator’s position, both in relation to the artist and the
institutional structure. The museum has become more than it used to be. It is more than a sacred repository of art
objects, more than an exclusive purveyor of culture, and more than a consecrated exhibition space for artists. It is
now a site of critical inquiry and engagement, a place of conversation and growth where knowledge is produced
rather than consumed. How does this emphasis on discourse and learning affect our perceptions of the museum
complex? How must we augment our understanding of its spaces, its collections and its supporting structures?
Programs like SARF deviate strongly, in both workflow and organizing concept, from most traditional
museum-based artist engagements. The most obvious difference is that less emphasis is placed on the exhibition of a
completed product – indeed, in the case of SARF, there is no exhibition at all. Instead curators seek to support an
artist’s process of inquiry and to share that ongoing process with various audiences. They work with one artist at a
time over an extended residency, and during that time the artist pursues a single inquiry project that is both site-
sensitive and responsive. This means that it does not, and should not, have a static manifestation that can be
replicated and peddled from museum to museum. If it is to have more than one instantiation, each will be distinctly
shaped by the spatial, social and archival networks of that site. Even within a single site, projects may favor a
structure that is mutable over the duration of the artist’s engagement. During Gonzales-Day’s residency at the
Smithsonian, the project changed every day as the artist was introduced to new resources and networks. The same
can be said of Dion’s engagement at the Weisman Museum for Cabinet of Curiosities. “Why should exhibitions [or
non-exhibitions] stay the same from the moment they open to the day they close? . . . Can they not be events,
constantly changed by their visitors, and available at times and in modes that are responsive to need?”
121

The nature of these museological frameworks gives new meaning to the physical spaces of the museum,
and to the collections that are held within. Rooms that were always considered separate from the aesthetic
experience – offices, laboratories, storage rooms and libraries – are now an integral part of that experience. They are
no longer obscured or hidden but celebrated and acknowledged as spaces of cultural value. In other words, what was
behind the scenes has become the scene itself. Like the museum gallery, these spaces host a number of artistic
activities in their own right, engaging a variety of different publics. The audience experience has, in large part,
adopted their ethos: participatory, processual and dialogical. Such a spirit of openness and discourse has
reconfigured the way that museums view their collections. Rather than a closed system, they are an “’archive of the

121
Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating, 209.
69

commons’ . . . a repository of other narratives . . . with works of art treated as relational objects, that is, objects to
which people can relate in a variety of ways.”
122
This definition can also be extended to the other aspects of the
museum’s site: its location, its constituency and its networks. Rather than being provided with a narrative by a
curator or historian, artists and audiences are invited to participate in the creative and intellectual labor of
developing new narratives alongside researchers.
Embracing the expanded role of the museum requires an equally expanded curatorial paradigm. In the early
years of modernism the curator’s role was simply that of a caretaker or “keeper,” a loving guardian whose job was to
protect and maintain a collection of objects. Then they became exhibition makers, people who arranged these
objects in a gallery to effectively communicate some overarching narrative. The professionalization of curating
during the 1980s marked an important moment for curatorial practice – it not only established the curator’s role as
an exhibition maker, but it proposed to elevate this role to the level of an artistic practice. “The presentation of an
exhibition is now a form of curatorial self-presentation, a courting of a gaze where an exhibition’s meaning is
derived from the relationships among artistic positions.”
123
This view of curating places the artist’s intentions in a
subservient position to the authorial voice and creative vision of the curator. Their work is instrumentalized as a
mere fragment of the exhibition’s cohesive whole, like the individual pieces of a readymade. Boris Groys suggests
that this model is particularly apt in describing the work of independent curators. “The independent curator travels
the world and organizes exhibitions that are comparable to artistic installations – comparable because they are the
results of individual curatorial projects, decisions, actions. The artworks presented in the exhibitions take on the role
of documentation of a curatorial project.”
124

The absence of both objects and exhibitions from the practice of artist-led inquiry means that the curator
can be neither a caretaker nor a meta-artist. It is perhaps for the best – the former places the curator at the mercy of
the artist, and the latter places the artist at the mercy of the curator. In both cases the two are at odds while jockeying
for authority and mutual respect. Instead of the curator working for the artist or as the artist, the emergence of artist-
led inquiry suggests a third alternative: the curator working with the artist. This model recognizes and attempts to
reconcile the interdependence of both practices by placing them in parallel rather than in series. The curator works

122
Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating, 77. Smith refers to remarks made by Manuel Borja-Villel during The Now Museum Conference in
May 2011.
123
Dorothee Richter, “Curating Degree Zero,” in Curating Degree Zero, ed. Barnaby Drabble and Dorothee Richter (Nuremberg: Verlag fur
Moderne Kunst, 1999), 16, as referenced by Paul O’Neill, “The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse,” in Issues in Curating
Contemporary Art and Performance, ed. Judith Rugg and Michele Sedgewick (Bristol: Intellect Ltd., 2008), 22.
124
Boris Groys, “On the Curatorship,” Art Power (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 50, as quoted in Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating, 223.
70

alongside the artist for the duration of the artist’s engagement, providing everything from logistical support to
institutional hospitality, discursive engagement and pedagogical design. Together these layers of participation
constitute an active and vibrant contribution to the process of creative production.
What are the responsibilities of the curator according to this new mode of practice? What role(s) are they
meant to play? Their most basic role is perhaps that of an administrator or organizer for the artist. “The desired
relationship is close to the model of that between a film director and the producer on the set of a movie, thus the
self-description, often heard these days, of the ‘curator as producer.’”
125
The curator, like a movie producer, acts as
an enabler. They make the phone calls, write the emails and find the resources that are needed to support the artist’s
process. They also address and facilitate the more pragmatic elements of a project, such as documentation,
presentation and/or publication. During Ken Gonzales-Day’s SARF residency, curator Taína Caragol coordinated
most of the logistical support that was needed in order for the artist to successfully pursue his inquiry. She arranged
his access to the various Smithsonian collections, obtained permission for him to photograph the artifacts and helped
him organize and maintain his shooting schedule. She also planned both of the events associated with the residency,
a brown bag lunch for Smithsonian staff and a lecture/reception in the Smithsonian Director’s Suite.
126
While
seemingly easy, these tasks can often be time-consuming and bureaucratic. Having a curator on hand to support the
general orchestration of a project gives the artist more freedom to focus on the aesthetic elements of their work.
Logistical support is certainly not the highlight of a curator’s job when it comes to artist-led inquiry. It is
more of a scaffolding, or a framework, that allows them to enter as partners into the artist’s process. For instance,
when Gonzales-Day had identified the Smithsonian artifacts that he wished to photograph, he asked Caragol to help
him gain access to those collections. She did just that, but she also took an extra step; she did her own research, and
then suggested additional resources that she felt would be pertinent to the artist’s work. “The way that the curator
becomes part of the process of the artist is by making him or her aware of other things that might be related to his or
her project, that he or she has not considered before. . . . You sort of guide the artist through your collection to make
the best use of it for his project.”
127
The artist’s initial access request gave Caragol an opportunity to plug into his
process, and then she used her expertise as a curator to add new dimensions to the original inquiry. Kate Fowle
describes this new curatorial charge: “It involves supporting the seeds of ideas, sustaining dialogues, forming and

125
Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating, 225.
126
Ken Gonzales-Day, correspondence with the author, November 2014.
127
Taína Caragol, conversation with the author, January 2015. Transcribed from audio.
71

reforming opinions, and continuously updating research.”
128
In other words the curator is a sounding board for the
artist. He or she engages discursively, suggesting new avenues of inquiry and challenging existing ones. Curators do
their own research, ask questions and embrace conversation. They provide advice and resources. They work to push
the inquiry further without compromising its flexibility. This notion can only be sustained by the with-artist
curatorial approach. The relationship between artist and curator becomes something like a tennis match – a back-
and-forth for the duration of the project, each hit adding a level of depth and complexity to the inquiry as a whole.
Another aspect of this curatorial strategy is the integration of the artist into the curator’s institutional
community. In the art world today, the artist is “an outsider to art’s institutions, a stranger in the place ostensibly
devoted to his or her unique creativity.”
129
Every new project means working with museums, collaborators and
audiences to whom they have little or no previous affiliation. In cases such as these, the curator must play the role of
a host or an emissary. They make artists feel at home by promoting a culture of inclusion. They introduce them into
local networks, and invite them to actively participate in the goings-on of the community. Most importantly, they
use their institutional knowledge to facilitate collaborations and to identify potential audiences. This is especially
crucial for artist-led inquiry as it is directly related to site. During Gonzales-Day’s SARF residency he was given
access to both private and public spaces, with exposure to many interesting people and to the day-to-day life of the
institution. Caragol connected him with curators at the Natural History Museum and the American Art Museum, and
of course with her own staff at the National Portrait Gallery. She also organized lectures to bring his project to the
attention of the larger Smithsonian community. The curator’s role is that of a mediator between the artist and the site
- they identify populations who can contribute and benefit from the work, and proceed to create spaces for dialogue
among them. These new circuits of knowledge production serve to further enrich and advance the artist’s inquiry
process.
130

In addition to involving themselves directly in the artist’s inquiry, curators are called upon to “make space”
for that inquiry within the context of their institution. The space may be physical or discursive. It may incorporate
some display, but it is not an exhibition in the traditional sense. Exhibitions are “contemporary forms of rhetoric,
complex expressions of persuasion, whose strategies aim to produce a prescribed set of values and social relations

128
Kate Fowle, “Who Cares? Understanding the Role of the Curator Today,” in Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating, ed. Steven Rand (New
York: apexart, 2010), 32-33, as quoted in Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating, 227-8.
129
Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating, 138.
130
Boeri, Obrist and Rehberg, “Moving Interventions,” 152.
72

for their audiences.”
131
Artist-led inquiry does not intend to force any particular narrative or viewpoint on the
audience. It does not try to persuade them of any single framework for understanding their experiences. Nor does it
attempt to anticipate each audience member’s response. The space that curators must create for inquiry is not an
exhibition, but an ongoing learning system that “does not pretend to be an authority on knowledge but . . . enables
knowledge.”
132
Possible frameworks include conferences, lectures, seminars, screenings and publications. Less
public options might take the form of workshops, discussions or laboratory experimentation.
Curators are responsible for enabling this learning system - carving it out from the existing institutional
environs, carefully shaping it, and maintaining its integrity for the duration of the artist’s engagement. But how is
this accomplished? What principles must they adhere to in order to uphold an ethos of discovery and open
exploration? Like artists, curators must embrace a multiplicity of overlapping methodologies, culled from various
institutional cultures. Rather than choosing a single organizational model for an artist’s work, they must be willing
to continually offer “oscillating spaces and conditions.”
133
Sometimes the institution will model a laboratory, and
other times it will model a white cube. It might become a think tank or a scholarly forum. Or it might become some
hybrid of these environments. The curator must respond to the artist’s system of inquiry and derive a viable structure
from its purpose.
134
This structure should be flexible and dynamic, mutating and evolving as the artist’s purpose
shifts from one phase to the next. “Classical exhibition history emphasized order and stability. In contrast, we now
see fluctuations and instability: the unpredictable. . . . Combining incertitude and the unpredictable with the
organization seems an important issue.”
135

It is imperative that the curator does not force any particular agenda, organizational model or end result on
the artist. They might make suggestions for how a project may proceed, but they should leave ample room for the
artist to say yes or no without the discomforts of obligation. Hans Ulrich Obrist writes about facilitating
collaborations, “I take an active part. I do research in different fields and then bring people together, but ultimately
[the artists] decide if they would like to collaborate . . . I don’t mastermind the thing.”
136
The curator’s job is to
create a protected space for artist-led inquiry. Externally, they learn to deflect or suppress the institutional demands
for deliverable outcomes. This keeps an open inquiry open. Internally, they learn to check their own productive

131
O’Neill, “The Curatorial Turn,” 16.
132
Hans-Ulrich Obrist quoted in Boeri, Obrist and Rehberg, “Moving Interventions,” 152.
133
Hans-Ulrich Obrist quoted in Boeri, Obrist and Rehberg, “Moving Interventions,” 150.
134
Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating, 210.
135
Hans-Ulrich Obrist quoted in Boeri, Obrist and Rehberg, “Moving Interventions,” 150.
136
Hans-Ulrich Obrist quoted in Boeri, Obrist and Rehberg, “Moving Interventions,” 149.
73

impulses in favor of allowing the artist to explore freely. It is common for people in coordinating positions, like
curators, to approach each project with a standard to-do list of items that must be completed in order to proceed.
Curating artist-led inquiry requires that the curator leave their checklist at home. They cannot allow the pursuit of
completed tasks to drive their engagement with the artist – instead they attempt to make open suggestions without
the promise of completion or follow-through. “If one does not stick to a fixed programme it means nothing has to
happen and that anything can happen.”
137
Curating becomes less about finding solutions and making things happen,
and more about finding options and allowing things to happen. This gives both the artist and the curator an
opportunity to focus on what they can do to further the inquiry, rather than what they should do to further the
institution or their careers.
The recent growth of educationally driven curatorial methods, commonly referred to as “the educational
turn,” has been addressed frequently within professional and institutional circles. In her essay “Turning,” curator Irit
Rogoff traces its emergence in her own practice to the Bologna Accord, a series of European educational reforms
made in 1999. Many art practitioners were unhappy with the Bologna legislation’s increased emphasis on
standardization, professionalization and commoditization over criticality, experimentation and dialogue (at that time
many similar criticisms were also being leveled against non-European systems). In an effort to combat this
perceived weakening of public education, Rogoff and others proposed to bring the principles of education into art
institutions, and thus to provide an alternative environment for continued learning and critical thought. “Instead of
hanging our heads and lamenting the awfulness of these reforms . . . we thought it might be productive to see if this
unexpected politicization of the discussion around education might be an opportunity to see how the principles we
cherish in the education process might be applied across a broader range of institutional activities.”
138

These words suggest an expansive view of the museum as a think tank: a site where people can engage with
new ideas beyond the scope of any single exhibition or object. It becomes “a space that generates vital principles
and activities—activities and principles you can take with you and which can be applied beyond its walls to become
a mode of life-long learning.”
139
Curators can promote this model by encouraging an interactive and dialogical
approach to artistic practice. They can empower artists, cultural practitioners and audiences to collectively engage in
knowledge production as an essential part of the aesthetic experience. This goes a step further than the “accessible”

137
Boeri, Obrist and Rehberg, “Moving Interventions,” 156.
138
Irit Rogoff, “Turning,” e-flux #0 (2008), accessed October 15, 2015, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/turning/.
139
Rogoff, “Turning.”
74

or informational strategies championed by museum educators. Rogoff argues that audiences can be challenged with
complex ideas and multiple perspectives, and that institutions can provide access to larger dialogues without
simplifying or reducing them. She also underscores the importance of potentiality and actualization. Potentiality
refers to the possibility for learning beyond the restrictions of any predetermined ability or skillset. Actualization
“implies that certain meanings and possibilities embedded within objects, situations, actors, and spaces carry a
potential to be ‘liberated.’”
140
The liberation of these meanings occurs during each individual’s engagement with the
institution, and is based in part on their lived experiences and subjectivities. It allows for the production of tacit
knowledge as opposed to standardized truths, which is a key feature of critical educational practices.
For many, the notion of a learning system in place of an exhibition leads to serious questions and doubts
about existing institutional roles. Traditionally it has been the purview of the education department, not the
curatorial department, to implement academic or pedagogically driven programs. Curators only intervene when
programs begin to incorporate direct critical engagements with artists. Even when curators are involved, however,
their contributions are considered to be secondary to their “real” curatorial work. Jens Hoffmann refers to the
establishment of learning systems as a “paracuratorial” activity. “For Hoffmann, these activities are like curating,
close to it, associated with it, but are not it . . . his strategy is to acknowledge the interest in these matters, but
relegate them to a somewhat lesser status.”
141
This perspective is both limiting and elitist. It implies that the
educational and social imperatives of the museum are not as important as its cultural relevance. In doing so, it
privileges the curator’s relationship with high-art circuits over his or her relationships with the institutional
community. It also creates an unnecessary hierarchy between curators and educators. Their work should be a
collaborative effort, interweaving elements of both fields in order to reach a balance between criticality, discourse,
pedagogy, entertainment and culture. By giving curators the power to dismiss educational objectives as
noncuratorial or paracuratorial, Hoffmann creates a rift between the two sides that prevents any likelihood of a
successful convergence. Such rigidity also thwarts the natural growth of the curatorial discipline.
Curators such as Livia Paldi and Emily Pethick,
142
on the other hand, assert that such hierarchical
distinctions are unnecessary and professionally counterproductive. What Hoffmann calls paracuratorial has become,
in fact, an essential strategy for curators “to think through practices that have shifted away from conventional

140
Rogoff, “Turning.”
141
Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating, 229.
142
Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating, 229-230.
75

exhibition formats and refuse to be contained.”
143
While exhibitions are standard fare for art institutions, learning
systems tend to be considered sideshows for the main event. With artist-led inquiry, however, the learning system is
the main event. Downgrading the curator’s contribution to these projects does a disservice to the artists and
invalidates the integrity, quality and relative significance of their work. As new artistic practices emerge and evolve,
so too should the institution’s relationship to those practices. Thus what was paracuratorial is now curatorial,
“distinguished from its precedents by an emphasis on the framing and mediation of art and the circulation of ideas
around art, rather than on its production and display.”
144
Contemporary curating also encourages an intimate and
nuanced relationship between the curatorial and educational departments of a museum. Mark Dion’s Cabinet of
Curiosities, for example, was facilitated by Weisman Director of Education Colleen Sheehy. While educators work
primarily with publics, and curators work primarily with artists, formats like artist-led inquiry can benefit from a
delicate balance of both perspectives. The formation of a hybrid curator-educator support system breaks down the
rigid boundaries that separate each role, resulting in an institutional structure that is responsive to the learning
systems of contemporary arts practice.

Looking Forward
Since the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship began in 2007, several other institutions have christened
new research and inquiry programs. Stanford Arts has a transdisciplinary Research Residencies program, as does the
Perez Art Museum Miami. The Bell Museum of Natural History at the University of Minnesota recently initiated a
Resident Artist Research Project (perhaps inspired by Mark Dion).
145
Like SARF, these programs embrace open
inquiry as an art making practice in its own right. Artists are given the freedom to explore a site-related topic
without boundaries, using a hybrid methodology that facilitates discourse as a mode of complex knowledge
production. The institution makes space for that exploration by enabling an open, generative and flexible learning
system that addresses various layers of institutional audiences and contexts.

143
Emily Pethick, “The Dog that Barked at the Elephant in the Room,” The Exhibitionist, no. 4 (2011), 81, as quoted in Smith, Thinking
Contemporary Curating, 230.
144
Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson, Curating and the Educational Turn (London, Amsterdam: Open Editions, 2010), 19, as quoted in Smith,
Thinking Contemporary Curating, 231.
145
Information about the Research Residencies at Stanford Arts can be found at http://arts.stanford.edu/office-of-the-associate-dean/research-
residencies/. Information about the Perez Art Museum Research Residencies can be found at http://www.pamm.org/learn/programs/researcher-
residence. Information about the Bell Museum of Natural History Resident Artist Research Project can be found at
https://www.bellmuseum.umn.edu/programs-events/rarp.
76

It is natural that many of these programs would be associated with universities, due to their broad range of
non-art resources and networks. There also seems to be a strong affiliation with institutions of digital media and
emergent technologies. Among the newest inquiry programs are Black Box Projects at the Beall Center for Art +
Technology (University of California, Irvine)
146
, the Vilém Flusser Residency for Artistic Research at
transmediale
147
and the Art + Technology Lab at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
148
The emphasis on
technology is most likely a residual of the 1960s Art and Technology movement –but it is an emphasis in name only,
as the new residency programs are open to a broad range of inquiries. Topics range from the more scientific, such as
DNA sequencing and nanotechnology, to the more humanist, such as media archaeologies and philosophical
analyses of time. It is easier to host inquiry programs in institutions that are historically familiar with the process, be
it a media arts museum or a university environment. They can acknowledge and benefit from the inheritance of the
institution and its impact on artist-led inquiry as a practice, but they do not limit the artists in the scope or style of
their investigation.
As inquiry programs begin to make regular appearances in the greater contemporary arts sphere, outside of
universities and technology spaces, it is imperative that artists and curators develop new structures to support it as a
primary practice. Historical models may ease the transition but they are not enough to rely on - they tend to treat
inquiry as both para-aesthetic and para-curatorial. The work of artists like the Harrisons and Mark Dion, however,
would suggest that inquiry no longer occupies such an ancillary role. Allowing artist-led inquiry to be considered
aesthetic, not para-aesthetic, means that historians, curators and other art professionals must shift the foundational
structure of their work. They must learn to support inquiry, both practically and discursively, in ways that are
commensurate to other conventional or “normal” forms of art making. This necessitates an expanded curatorial
practice, new methodologies, new criteria for critical analysis and new institutional procedures.
Programs like SARF, and those mentioned above, provide a starting point for such growth. They open a
dialogue for institutions to consider new models and new formats for the contemporary museum. Perhaps, for
instance, it is no longer viable to keep art, science and history in separate entities. Or perhaps the relationship
between the curatorial and educational components of the institution would benefit from a fresh, more egalitarian
perspective. It is important to note that I do not advocate for a standard organizational model to support artist-led

146
Information about Black Box Projects can be found at http://beallcenter.uci.edu/submissions/blackbox. Additional information was gathered in
conversation with David Familian, the Artistic Director of the Beall Center for Art + Technology, in January 2015.
147
Information about the Vilém Flusser Residency for Artistic Research can be found at http://www.transmediale.de/resource/vilem-flusser.
148
Information about the Art + Technology Lab can be found at http://www.lacma.org/lab. Additional information was gathered in conversation
with Joel Ferree, Program Manager for Art + Technology at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in October 2014.
77

inquiry. Rather, in the spirit of the inquiry itself, I believe that we must embrace a multiplicity of models. This does
not obviate the need for scholarship on the subject – in fact, that need becomes more crucial than ever. Art
practitioners must engage in a critical discourse on historical, aesthetic and curatorial strategies while
simultaneously disavowing a “correct” or “universally accepted” one. They must be flexible, and they must resist
the ease of normalization. They must push boundaries and test the unknown, constantly reimagining their practice to
suit new and particular contexts. And perhaps most importantly, they must trust in the pursuit of new knowledge
over all other outcomes. By maintaining this sense of fluidity, responsiveness and perpetual exploration, the
institution can truly embody the notion of the athenaeum: a rich, vital space for conversation, collaboration,
knowledge production and cultural exchange.

78

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Asset Metadata

Creator Seetharaman, Sonia Lakshmi (author)

Core Title Explorer-at-large: artist-led inquiry and the rise of the museum as athenaeum

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere

Publication Date 02/24/2016

Defense Date 01/20/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag artist,curating,Dion,inquiry,OAI-PMH Harvest,research,Smithsonian

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Moss, Karen (committee chair), Tain, John (committee member), Willis, Holly (committee member)

Creator Email seethara@usc.edu,soniaseetharaman@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-216225

Unique identifier UC11279315

Identifier etd-Seetharama-4165.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-216225 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Seetharama-4165-0.pdf

Dmrecord 216225

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Seetharaman, Sonia Lakshmi

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA