2013 Conference Proceedings

26 28 November 2013
Adelaide, South Australia

The Frontiers of Artistic Research: The

challenge of critique, peer review and
validation at the outermost limits of
location-specificity
Sean LOWRY & Nancy de FREITAS
This paper deals with the complexity of critique in the context of contemporary artistic
practice that challenges conventional spatial/temporal notions of exhibition. In an academic
context, contemporary artists working in this genre face unique difficulties when it comes
to the critique and validation of their work as artistic intervention or as a practice-based
research outcome. For example, a public space intervention by an art activist, designed to
disrupt the quotidian experience of its viewers, may be reduced through documentation
to a skeletal, digitally packaged concept with significant depreciation of its artistic and
aesthetic quality. Similarly, works that exist in remote geographical locations, or works that
are designed and intended to transcend physical locations or to occupy space for very brief
or very long periods of time provide similar challenges for critical and archival access. With
specific reference to a new exhibition project space, Project Anywhere, a website devoted
to this genre of work, the authors examine the difficulties and possibilities associated with
critique in this context. PA has differentiated its core function by replacing the usual role of
curator with a peer review model. The significance and potential value of this experimental
model will emerge over time as more artworks are submitted, critiqued and archived in this
open-access forum where modes of critique, artistic claims and methods of documentation
can be reconsidered. The authors consider key areas for further development of this
research initiative and suggest that new methods of documentation and combinations of
documentation formats could better represent the work and facilitate the process of critique
and validation for this rising form of contemporary artistic practice.

Keywords: critique, peer review, artistic research, exhibition

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Introduction
This paper discusses key issues underpinning the conception and development of an
exhibition model specifically dedicated to the validation and dissemination of artistic
practice situated outside conventional exhibition environments. Given that much
contemporary art is relatively ill-suited to the spatial and temporal limitations of
traditional exhibition contexts, and given that the idea of the curator as gate-keeper is out
of step with forms of peer validation typically used to validate academic research, Project
Anywhere was conceived as a potential solution for artist academics whose practicebased research faces this double bind. To this end, Project Anywhere is specifically
designed to meet the challenge of defining and implementing a new concept for the
critique, peer review and documentation of artistic practices that fall outside of the forms
and structures accommodated by conventional exhibition and publishing modes. Far
from being an online gallery, the Project Anywhere website1 is instead a contextualizing
framework for a project space that potentially encompasses the entire globe, and in
which the role of curator is replaced with an adaptation of the type of peer review model
typically associated with a refereed journal. Significantly, Project Anywhere endorses a
rigorous two-step peer review process to address lingeringbias toward the journal-based
paradigm for assessing the quality of research outcomes. This paper will assert the value
of peer validation as an alternative model of critique to curatorial selection, and also
discuss difficulties that arise when the material or experiential conditions of an artwork
are translated into documentation in the form of text, image, links or video.

Background context: Changing practices, disciplinary disobedience

1 Project Anywhere: a global

peer reviewed space for art
at the outermost limits of
location-specificity, accessed
October 12 2013, http://
projectanywhere.net/.
2 See Lucy Lippard and
John Chandler, The
Dematerialization of Art, Art
International (February 1968):
316. 10.

138

Various iterations and combinations of site specific, nomadic, social, participatory,

virtual, ephemeral, performative, interventionist and expanded installation-based artistic
practices, many of which unfold outside of conventional exhibition circuits, have become
more common during the last few decades. Much of this often dematerialised2 and postobject practice is specifically concerned with critiquing traditional exhibition systems. In
particular, such practices challenge the idea that art only functions through its reification
into an object such as a painting or sculpture. Accordingly, discrete paintings on walls,
films screened in theatres, and conventionally staged theatrical performances are no
longer necessarily a primary focus for many artists, critics, curators and institutions.
As a consequence of this rethinking of artistic practice, many artists have attempted to
transcend the discrete exhibited and distributable object by producing ephemeral works,
or using their bodies, or by framing networks of social and political relations as sites for
artistic expression. Such practices have also restructured relationships between spectator
and artist. The spectator is no longer a passive and detached but rather an intrinsic
element, and by extension, a whole aesthetic experience that attempts to experientially
consider such things as relationships between conditions of production and networks of
reception is implicated. This radical reorientation of arts perceived purpose has had a
profound (and still unfolding) impact on modes of critique. This impact has extended to
academic research culture.

The roots of these developments can be traced back to the 1960s, when movements such
as the Situationist International (SI)3 and Fluxus4 began to challenge conceptions of the
way in which viewers are involved in the process or situation of artistic production.
Drawing upon ideas that had originated in early twentieth century avant-garde
movements such as Dada, this second horizon5 of post war neo-avant-garde6 tendencies
was however far more explicitly concerned with the creation of art experiences that
offered active viewer participation. The outcomes of these interventions were not objects
but rather experiences, and resulted in a blurring of boundaries between art and life. With
aesthetic experience transformed from passive to active, both art and the conditions
of its production and dissemination became a subject of critique. Such developments
would open the way for even more radical challenges to the idea of place and spatial
location. This tendency is perhaps most explicitly demonstrated in the institutional
critique performed by artists such as Hans Haacke, Marcel Broodthaers and Andrea
Fraser. For Miwon Kwon, one the best reasons for expanding the idea of site specificity
is the epistemological challenge to relocate meaning from within the art object to the
contingencies of its context; the radical restructuring of the subject from an old Cartesian
model to a phenomenological one of lived bodily experience; and the self conscious desire
to resist the forces of the capitalist market economy.7 Accordingly, many recent forms
of art are relatively unbounded by the physical limitations of conventional exhibition
contexts, and can include work in remote geographical locations, technically specialized
contexts, and even imagined spaces. Project Anywhere, the subject of this paper, is
specifically dedicated to the validation and dissemination of art at the outermost limits of
location-specificity.

During the 1990s participatory practice was famously reframed by Nicolas Bourriaud
(1998), who argued that audience involvement made work political, since the space of
interaction created fleeting communities whose inter-subjective relations and concrete
communications could be politically affective. The political, he suggested, could emerge
within and through the aesthetic experience without the art or the artist engaging directly
with politics. Laying claim to the term relational art to describe a set of practices which
takes as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations
and their social context8 Bourriauds influential ideas were also roundly criticized.
Claire Bishop, in particular, has critiqued the lack of critical antagonism, loss of aesthetic
criteria, and assumption of democracy she sees evidenced throughout much the work
and ideas championed by Bourriaud. For Bishop, the aesthetic antagonisms presented
in the work of artists such as Santiago Sierra and Artur mijewski contain more critical
potential. Bourriauds ideas have also been critiqued by Owen Hatherley9 for their
alleged ignorance of the persistent political ramifications of advancing neoliberalism,
declining socialism, and an expanding mass media, and Adam Geczy for being a sanitized10
Situationism. At any rate, in the academic/research environment in which many artists
are working today, this contested terrain and its inherent defiance of traditional locationspecificity is presenting a new series of challenges. Here, it could again be argued that
a political dynamic is inherent, since this kind of work sets up a distinctive ambiguity,
particularly in terms of academic expectations for peer review and critique. Responses
are often remarkably similar to the skepticism that earlier artists faced when they
abandoned medium specificity.

3 The power of mass media

was the target of Guy
Debord and the Situationist
International. In The Society
of the Spectacle (1967),
Debord characterises the
reified spectacular image as
symptomatic of capitalistic
alienation and, moreover,
that the spectacle actually
conceals this estrangement.
(Guy Debord, The Society of
the Spectacle, trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith (New
York: Zone Books, 1994),
10). For a comprehensive
introduction to SI, see
Tom McDonough, ed., Guy
Debord and the Situationist
International: Texts and
Documents (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2004).
4 In the late 1960s, George
Maciunass insistence upon
concretism (materiality) in
fluxworks and his criticism of
illusionism (representation)
aimed to problematise the
spectacular reification of
reality. For Maciunas, the
irreproducibility of material
contextual conditions marks
out all representation as
inexorably illusory. For an
introduction to Fluxus, see
Ken Friedman, ed., The
Fluxus Reader (Chichester,
West Sussex and New York:
Academy Editions, 1998).
5 See Peter Brger, Theory
of the Avant-garde, trans.
Michael Shaw (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota
Press, 1984).
6 See Hal Foster, The Return of
the Real (Cam`bridge, Mass:
MIT Press, 1996), xi.
7 Miwon Kwon, One Place
after Another: Notes on
Site Specificity, October, 80
(1997): 91.
8 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational
Aesthetics (Paris: Presses du
reel, 2002), 113.
9 See Owen Hatherley, PostPostmodernism?, New Left
Review 59 (Sep/Oct 2009):
160.
10 See Adam Geczy, Sanitised
Situationism, Broadsheet:
Contemporary Art + Culture
37:2 (2006): 127-127.

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New circuits
Within this expanded approach to art, it is no longer realistic to expect all art and
artistic research to fit within the physical and material constraints of established public
art institutions or other public viewing spaces such as theatres, libraries, community
centers, universities and art academies. Clearly, some contemporary artists are
positioned to critique the institutional spaces in which they are expected to present
their work and ideas. Others, however, are simply unable to fit their concepts into such
spaces. In widely divergent ways, many artists eschew such spaces in favour of dynamic
exhibition environments, ever expanding in their physical and temporal parameters.
An exhibition can now be anything from a Silent Dinner Party11 to the performative
ascent of a mountain12 to a modular eco structure in the Kalahari Desert.13 Significantly,
such practices invariably disrupt established critical processes of review insofar as they
make direct access to the artwork difficult. Established models of critique and review
typically require direct, physical access and a comprehension underpinned by full sensual
experience of the physical work. Consequently, the challenge for artists who create work
in defiance of location-specificity is that their works are often situated outside of quality
assurance processes that define value within the academy. Critical peer validation of
practice-led research output is of course fundamental for artist academics. But if the
direct experience of an artwork is potentially inaccessible to a reviewer or critic, what
kind of assessment can be made? What purpose is served by a critical review of artwork
based upon selected documentation?

11 See Honi Ryan, Silent

Dinner Party (from Project
Anywheres pilot program,
2012), accessed 12 October 12,
2013, http://projectanywhere.
net/archived/silent-dinnerparty.
12 See Mark Shorter,
Schleimgurgeln: Song
For Glover, (from Project
Anywheres pilot program,
2012), accessed October 12,
http://projectanywhere.net/
archived/schleimgurgelnsong-for-glover.
13 See Hans Kalliwoda, WiaS
(The World in a Shell) (from
Project Anywheres inaugural
peer-reviewed program,
2013), accessed June 30, 2013,
http://projectanywhere.net/
project/wias.
14 Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on
the North Sea: Art in the Age
of the Post-Medium Condition
(London: Thames & Hudson,
2000), 56.

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In the 1960s, when Michael Fried and Clement Greenberg famously argued for medium
specificity, they were arguing from within a modernist position that emphasised
disciplinary integrity and the purity of the medium. The situation is very different today.
Rosalind Krauss has more recently described a post-medium condition that re-presents
the idea of the medium as an aggregative network or complex of media.14 At any
rate, although purity and disciplinary integrity are no longer critical priorities, peer
assessment certainly is.

One counter argument to the presumption that the morphological instantiation or

physical performance necessarily constitutes the primary text (and therefore the only
means by which to adequately access full comprehension) is found in the idea of the
aesthetic object as something expanded and unfolding within a network of relations
that includes both sensory and non-sensory information. This idea of a creative
work as something inhabiting a network of both material and immaterial elements
(such as historical and social context, multiple forms of documentation, critiques
and interpretations) can accommodate the possibility that the thing that is critiqued,
discussed and experienced via its mediated dissemination is still an aesthetic object
insofar as it can still be distinguished from other forms of human cultural and intellectual
expression and activity by virtue of its dependence upon the structural idiosyncrasies
of the art condition. Moreover, with physical spaces and materials now inextricably
intertwined with expanded structural conceptions of what constitutes a creative work,
it no longer makes sense to pinpoint a single fixed and immovable location or moment
for a creative work. Given that we cannot simply behold a work without bearing in mind

the surrounding historical, subjective and cultural contextualizing information bound

up in its structural determination as art, an aesthetic object can potentially be anything
that directs aesthetic contemplation and interpretation toward this idea of network.
For David Davies, the physical model accompanying a conceptual work of art should be
considered its vehicular medium in the sense that: the product of an artists manipulation
of a vehicular medium will ... be the vehicle whereby a particular artistic statement is
articulated.15 Thus, the morphological instantiation or physical performance of a creative
work makes no exclusive claim to an art condition in itself, but is instead designed to
symbolically represent the aesthetic experience as network.
Once we regard the supporting apparatus of art history and the political, social and
economic contexts that underpin the production and reception of art as artistic elements,
it soon becomes possible to argue that the art condition (a cultural projection) is
something that is always dematerialised. This art condition, i.e. the structure that hosts
aesthetic comprehension (as distinct from other languages of comprehension) can
therefore be understood as something potentially built in the mind of the interpreter
via both direct experience and documentation, and moreover, that it is problematic to
separate these elements. Most of us, for example, did not directly experience the seminal
performance works of the 1960s and 1970s that continue to inform our understanding of
contemporary art. Although our understanding of the ideas carried within these works is
dependent upon documentation, they are nonetheless interpreted aesthetically; that is in
a manner fundamentally distinct to other forms of knowledge.

Much contemporary art is deliberately framed to implicate structural relationships within

the spaces (both physical and social) in which it is situated. Working within the systems
and symbolic languages of the host context, such work invariably produces meaning
and experience contingent upon that host context (again both physical and social). A
creative work is a dynamic collection of signs, concepts, myths, traces, objects, sensations
and contradictions all intertwined with its surrounding contextualising apparatus of
documentation, versions and network of interpretations. Thus, fuller comprehension of a
creative work often demands a combination of aesthetic experience and contextualising
information. The central question at play within this paper is whether this relationship
can be adequately extended across time and space via documentation, facilitating
authentic access to both aesthetic experience and critical comprehension. This, as we will
discuss later, is Project Anywheres raison dtre.

Distinctions between art and artistic research

It is important to remain mindful that communicating a research hypothesis through

art is not the same activity as creating art. Given the possibility that a research topic
may reflect a focus other than art as aesthetic experience, it is finally the originality
of the research claims rather than the art that are at stake. Because research typically
demands that the implicit be made explicit, in the case of art, that which is implicit is
not necessarily clear to reasoning. As Adam Geczy puts it, art is not research.16 Art
can, however, in concert with other paratextual and exegetical information, provide a

15 David Davies, Art as

Performance (Oxford:
Blackwells, 2004), 59.
16 Adam Geczy, Art Is Not
Research, Broadsheet:
Contemporary Art + Culture,
38:3 (2009): 207-9.

141

means of experiencing new knowledge. What is at stake is finding an appropriate way to

validate the way in which art can communicate new forms of knowledge. Irrespective as
to how dry and theoretically based an artistic concept might be, art is dependent upon
aesthetics. For Elizabeth Schellekens, even conceptual artists instantiate ideas by turning
a dry theoretical proposition into something experiential, or as Schellekens describes it,
experiencing the idea.17

Just as distinctions between artistic outcomes and documentation are often (and
sometimes deliberately) blurred, and given that exegetical elements are sometimes
included alongside or within creative works, approaches toward the framing of artistic
research can also vary enormously, especially given the potential for reflexive recursion
in projects that emphasise dynamic, participatory, or unfolding outcomes. Generally
speaking, although an accompanying text need not literally explain a creative work, it can
in a limited sense provide a form of explanation or analysis typically designed to work
in concert with the aesthetic experience itself. In the words of Robin Nelson, a champion
of practice-based research, perhaps it is time to speak less of practice-as-research and
to speak instead of arts research (a significant methodology of which just happens to be
based in practices).18 In this sense, an aesthetic experience can be regarded as something
that can assist in unlocking insight and understanding that is potentially elusive in a
theoretical proposition. For David Pears, practice nearly always comes first in knowledge
production, for a discriminatory response typically precedes an ability to codify that
response.19 Despite the seemingly defensible nature of this argument, the validation of
thinking through making still finds itself on shaky ground, especially with university
research increasingly measured against economically determinable key performance
indicators. Notwithstanding the challenge that embodied forms of knowledge pose to the
locus of knowledge and power, we are still drawn back to a perceived need to justify the
value of practice in words.

17 Elisabeth Schellekens, The

Aesthetic Value of Ideas,
in Philosophy & Conceptual
Art, ed. Peter Goldie and
Elisabeth Schellekens (Oxford
University Press, 2009),
8081.
18 Robin Nelson, Practice-asresearch and the Problem
of Knowledge, Performance
Research: A Journal of the
Performing Arts, 11:4 (2006):
105-116.

142

Not surprisingly, there are widely differing conceptions as to what constitutes research
quality in the arts. It is generally regarded as important to reflect upon whether the
researcher is communicating the intent and realisation of the project effectively. Although
some argue that peer reviewers should be able to read the art alone, context is usually
manifestly unclear without well-articulated supplementary materials. Given that aesthetic
judgment is already a subjective union of sensory, emotional and intellectual responses,
it is clear that the position of using sense perception (such as visuality) as the only
criterion for forming an aesthetic judgement is potentially problematic. One option is to
employ functional analysisi.e. to look at how the work functions to convey meaningas
an additional criterion for judging success. Another is to consider the artists apparent
awareness of the social and cultural contexts of the works production and reception.
Yet once we introduce such forms of evaluation, we are already looking outside of the
work and back toward the domains of speaking and writing. At any rate, without a
good contextualising argument, it can be very difficult to determine a specific context
and contribution to knowledge. Although artistic context is often fuzzily determined,
a suitable context within which to frame a specific research question is usually more
sufficiently limited. Underpinning the value of artistic research within the academy is the
value of the artist as consciously informed through the feedback loop of thinking through

making. For Richard Shiff, the artistic process of thinking through making (in which the
artist affects the work and in turn the work affects the artist) can reveal itself through
hitherto unexpected turns.20 To lose sight of the generative value of this process within
the demands of academic validation is to lose sight of the potential for art to exercise a
point of difference within the academy.

Academic context: Institutional influence/documentation/validation

There is currently much debate across university sectors surrounding non-traditional

outputs; i.e. anything that is not a book, chapter, journal or paper, and which uses time,
sound, image, space or gesture as part of its presentation of new knowledge. The issue is
often not the creative work per se but an ability to somehow explain, validate and transfer
its findings in a manner that is institutionally acceptable. Many institutions now employ
tenuous metrics such as attributes based on venue, duration etc. Many universities in
Australia attribute 1 HERDC point for a major creative work as opposed to 5 HERDC
points for a peer reviewed book. Addressing this imbalance is a difficult battle that many
artist academics consider worth waging. Explanation, critique and credibility are crucial
in the university context and moreover, they are essential to the task of nominating a
creative work as research. Project Anywhere is designed to play an active role in meeting
this challenge.
Despite the radical transformations that have occurred over the last century of artistic
practice, institutional agendas continue to have a disproportionate, conformist influence
on artist academics, many of whom are dependent upon university and residency
programs for financial support to produce work. Some of these conditions and
requirements have contributed to an environment in which particular, assumed limits
are set on artistic processes and outcomes. Consider for example, the typical requirement
for artistic research to include: documentation and analysis as research evidence; quality
assurance through academic peer review; public programme collateral for institutional
use (museum or public gallery); media and social network friendly publications as well as
public funding justifications.

The documentation and reproduction of artworks can duplicate many recognisable

characteristics of an original aesthetic experience except for the essential reality of a
particular presence in time and space. Typical documentation that consists of a series of
reproduced stills or moving images of a complex site-specific artwork, for example, or one
that changes over time or entails audience interaction is unquestionably an ineffective
substitute for the unique material existence of the artwork in the designated place in
which it is designed to be experienced. What is communicated through legitimate or
informal traces of documentation comprises a different kind of experience altogether. For
reasons already discussed, this secondary experience can often contribute, alongside or
instead of the original, to the whole aesthetic experience as network. Accepting that the
knowledge and comprehension gained from a direct experiential encounter with artwork
is not the same as the knowledge gained via artistic documentation, the important point
to stress within the context of the academy is that new knowledge can be communicated

19 David Pears, What is

knowledge? (London: Allen &
Unwin Ltd, 1972, 29.
20 Richard Shiff, Every shiny
object wants an infant who
will love it, Art Journal 70:1
(2011): 7-33.

143

Fig. 1. A conceptual live art

performance event across
the London Underground
& Disused Eurostar
Terminal at Waterloo
Mainline (Remembrance
Day Sunday, November 11,
2012)

http://www.no-mans-land.
me/#!charing-cross-underground-tube/c1dfy

Fig. 3. I Wanted to See All of the

News From Today (2007)
An online artwork by
Martin Callanan, which
continuously collects the
front pages of over 600
newspapers from around
the world, as and when
they are published.

http://greyisgood.eu/
allnews/.

Fig. 2. Sculptures, musicians,

poets and filmmakers
converging at Waterloo
Eurostar entrance.

http://www.natashareid.
co.uk/no-mans-land--london-underground---november-2012.php

Fig. 4. This Progress (January to

March, 2010) Tino Sehgal,
Guggenheim New York

http://www.terminartors.
com/artworkprofile/
Sehgal_Tino-This_Progress

144

145

and extended through both art and its documentation.

Ultimately, the fact that contemporary artists are increasingly engaged in the making
of works that are designed and intended to transcend physical locations or evolve over
long periods of time increases the likelihood that many audiences will only experience
the work as a form of documentation. In the extreme, some artistic interventions are
impossible to distinguish as art without a designed, corresponding presence on the
Internet, as a website, in a blog or perhaps as an on-going e-mail network. We are now
less likely to expect artworks and their documentation to exist in a singular destination,
but rather, to be situated and understood within an unfolding process of formation.
Consequently, adequate artistic documentation for the task of communicating new
knowledge also needs to be able to incorporate the kinds of open-endedness and
contradiction that art itself can experientially manifest. Otherwise, any understanding
produced between the complexities of the creative work (which cannot be other than
itself) and parallel, contextualizing elements (i.e. documentation, reflection, analysis,
interpretation etc.) will never hold.

These contemporary developments demand new ways of introducing, curating, linking,

recording, documenting and connecting audiences with the work. The following examples
of artistic interventions illustrate the growing complexity associated with this genre
in relation to the documentation, critique and validation of interconnected material,
conceptual, temporal and virtual components where formal and informal traces of the
work exist in parallel.
One example of the way in which artistic documentation can play a role in the
development of new knowledge is found in the example of a project that inspired the
initial concept for Project Anywhere. This work, Invisible-5 (2006), is a self-guided audio
tour located on Interstate 5 (I-5) between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Invisible-5
combines traces of natural, social, and economic history associated with the route.
The collaborative partners made use of a typical museum audio tour format to guide
listeners along the highway at their own pace. It includes analytical stories of people
and communities in the area who were fighting for environmental justice along the I-5
corridor. The listener experience includes recorded music, oral histories, field recordings,
local sounds and archival audio documents accessed online at a website or downloaded
for iPhone or Android apps for GPS-enabled mobile listening.

The elements that make up this work all exist within a network of relations that together
constitute the entirety of the cultural object that is Invisible-5. It is unlikely that anyone
involved in making or encountering the work will have experienced its entirety and it is
impossible to determine the extent of the aesthetic impact on any local or global audience
since there is no evidence available. Nor is it possible to measure the quality of the new
knowledge produced by this intervention. Despite this, the Invisible-5 project was an
inspirational model for Project Anywhere. The rich layers of documentation, interpretation
and other web-based contextualizing that exist around the concept are regarded as a
strong indication that new knowledge was nonetheless communicated. Project Anywhere
has been set up as an experimental platform that can develop and test new forms of

146

documentation and critique and new approaches to the validation of new knowledge.

No mans land, (Figs. 1, 2) was an artwork/event conceived and curated by John

McKiernan with live performances, sculpture and installations across 10 London
Underground stations. Described as deliberately complex and bureaucratic, with the
involvement of nearly 200 people, the project adapted and adjusted as new people
joined and left. Circumstances changed and each person affected the project direction.
Consequently, to declare that any single direct experience of this work is directly
comparable to any other direct experience is absurd. Meanwhile, the projects website
went through several different phases as the event evolved from a planning site to a live
documentation of events and finally into an archive that the organisers hope will prove a
rich source of information for researchers and makers of live performance and any major
(or minor) event involving many people who do not know each other.21 The complex
site remains as a multi-media testimony to the event; a collection of explanatory texts,
recordings, analysis and links with a connection still open for donations.

In another example, Martin Callanans online continuous collection of newspaper front

pages (Fig. 3) is a work that accumulates data in constant on-going relationship to the
international press. Presenting an example of the hyperreal as famously described by
Baudrillard, Callanans digital collection and replication process collapses the reality of
world news into a dislocated and impoverished duplication of the reported, duplicated
real, and breaks down the concept of information from one reproduced medium into
another, downgraded reproductive medium. Baudrillards theory of destruction through
simulation, from one medium to another is the destruction of the real; no longer an object
of representation, but only ritual extermination: the hyperreal. Documentation, critique
and peer review of this genre of work is difficult unless the work itself is reduced to the
core conceptual idea that instigated the making of the work. Yet the work, in its live and
evolving form creates ever more complex intersections with world events.

A third example points to the way in which artistic documentation or technical

reproduction can become problematic for some artists, particularly when a copy or part
copy is made available at times and in locations unimagined by the artist and therefore
potentially beyond direct control. For many different reasons, some artists distrust and
even oppose the documentation or recording of their work. For example, a workplace or
public space intervention by an art activist that disrupts the quotidian experience of its
viewers is reduced in documentation to a skeletal, digitally packaged concept with visuals.
Significant artistic and aesthetic qualities are inevitably depreciated.
Anyone who experienced Tino Sehgals 2010 work, This Progress at the Guggenheim
in New York (Fig. 4.) will understand the impossibility that any documentation can
communicate the core experience of a participatory, social work of this type. Although it
was a shared experience between the interpreters working for the artist and the visitors
to the museum, it remained, for each person, a unique distillation of prior knowledge,
expectation and personal engagement. Visitors were ushered up the vast empty spiral
ramp of the museum by a series of guides, first a child, then a teenager, then an adult
and finally an older person each of which disappeared without trace as the transition

21 no mans land, November

2012, accessed August 4,
2013, http://www.no-mansland.me/#!how-the-event-hasunfolded/c5eo.

147

22 Project Anywhere Steering

Committee (2012): Professor
Brad Buckley, Associate Dean
(Research), Sydney College
of the Arts, The University of
Sydney,Australia; Professor
Su Baker, Director, Victorian
College of the Arts, Faculty of
the VCA & Music, University
of Melbourne,Australia;
Professor Richard Vella,
Head of School, Drama, Fine
Art & Music, University of
Newcastle, Australia; Dr. Sean
Lowry, School of Drama, Fine
Arts & Music, The University
of Newcastle, Australia;
Associate ProfessorNancy
de Freitas,School of
Art and Design,AUT
University,Auckland,New
Zealand; Mr. Ilmar Taimre,
Executive Consultant,
Independent Researcher/
Virtual Musician,
Brisbane,Australia. Dr.
Jocelyn McKinnon, School
of Drama, Fine Arts &
Music, The University of
Newcastle,Australia; Dr.
Andre Brodyk, School
of Drama, Fine Arts &
Music, The University of
Newcastle,Australia; Dr.
Angela Philp, Deputy Head
of SchoolResearch,
Drama, Fine Arts &
Music, The University of
Newcastle,Australia; Dr. Tony
Schwensen,School of the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
U.S.A.
23 Project Anywhere Editorial
Committee (2013): Professor
Brad Buckley,Professor
of Contemporary Art and
Culture,Sydney College of
the Arts, The University of
Sydney; Professor Bruce
Barber, Director MFA, School
of Graduate Studies,Nova
Scotia College of Art and
Design; Associate Professor,
Simone Douglas, Director,
MFA Fine Arts, Parsons The
New School for Design, New
York; Dr. Adam Geczy,Sydney
College of the Arts, The
University of Sydney; Dr.
Sean Lowry, School of
Creative Arts, The University
of Newcastle, Australia; Dr.
Les Joynes Visiting Associate
Professor of Art, Renmin
University of China, Beijing.

148

took place leaving the visitor and the new guide in command of a unique, embryonic and
ongoing conversation related to the idea of progress. Although this work appeared to have
a physical location, it was unquestionably without specific place or forma quality that
Sehgal understood implicitly.

New and strangely expanded forms of symbolic territory, can, in some contexts, be
implied by the artistic object that questions the boundaries of the institution that contains
it. Such art no longer adheres to any particular content that is necessarily distinctive from
ordinary, everyday experience. What changes the commonplace into art is context and the
internalisation of the experience. This requires an inclination to be affected on the part of
the audience; a willing appreciation of something experienced. Arts alterity from non-art
has been rejected in this process and the critique of these new distributed, networked
forms is also in a state of adaptation.

The challenge of new practices: Project Anywhere is born

Project Anywhere was conceived and developed as one possible solution to some of the
challenges presented in this paper. As Project Anywhere prepares for a second round
of peer review toward the selection of its 2014 program, Nancy de Freitas and Sean
Lowry (the authors of this paper) have looked to the parallel task of documenting and
philosophically contextualising the evolution of its unique peer validation system. Prior
to the development of this system, and based initially upon the founding concept of
Sean Lowry in 2011, Project Anywheres Steering Committee (2012)22 was formed with
a view to developing appropriate policy for the task of validating artistic research at the
outermost limits of location-specificity. After much consultation and debate, a unique
two-stage peer review process was developed. Accordingly, it was decided that a blind
peer review of project proposals would be used to determine which projects would
be hosted, whilst an open peer review of project outcomes would better suit the task
of deciding which projects would be finally archived as validated research outcomes.
In concert with this task, a comprehensive set of evaluation criteria was developed.
It was also emphasised that Project Anywhere should retain verification materials
to demonstrate that all evaluation criteria are met (these materials are archived for
external auditing). Once this two-stage peer-review policy was formulated, an Editorial
Committee23 was formed to review all proposals that had successfully navigated the
peer-review process and select the final four projects for the 2013 program. Meanwhile,
an Advisory Committee24 was formed in order to oversee the overall strategic direction of
Project Anywhere.

The first review and critique round resulted in a selection of works to be hosted on the
site. With four projects and a live web presence, the site and its conceptual framework
was finally open to the scrutiny of the Project Anywhere committees. The digital
conditions of each art projects web presence (text descriptions, image quality and links)
became the focus of the committees attentions and evaluative discussions are continuing
on the value of: (1) higher quality visual and textual information on hosted works; (2)
more comprehensive artist statements; (3) supportive texts by invited writers and/or
comments from external critics; and (4) advice for artists on quality documentation (good

writing style, web format, image choice and quality).

Artistic research practice and exhibition practice are the two interconnected frameworks
under examination here. Project Anywhere is a critical response to both of these
problematic contemporary issuesart AS research (artistic research) and the notion of
the exhibit or exhibition as the primary product of artistic practice. Many practical and
theoretical questions have arisen in the process of designing and managing the launch of
the project, which has opened up a valuable site for research and experimental methods
to be tested in the future as the project is consolidated.

Moving forward

Three lines of enquiry in particular will be drivers of research and development

associated with the site. The first relates to the concept of distributed project
documentation. This is the relationship between official and informal material and the
opening out of archival and documentary environments and structures accessible as
part of the aesthetic experience of contemporary work. There are implications for the
maintenance of any digital archive that is expected to be true to the form and complexity
of the work being produced. The second line of enquiry will focus on the quality of
documentation produced by and for artists working in the new genre. Project Anywhere
is poised to play a significant, forward-looking and experimental role in the development
of new approaches to visual/textual documentation of contemporary practice. The third
line of inquiry, and perhaps the most far-reaching, is reconsideration of the function and
impact of critique in this new environment.

In recent years, tertiary art education and the artwork associated with higher education
programmes (and graduates) has become a product dominated by research paradigms
and objectives with quantifiable, verifiable end results. The institutional requirement
for documentation and evidence of research, and scientific models of peer validation,
has undoubtedly introduced a political dimension and a homogenizing effect on artistic
activity. Distinctive parallels emerge with marketing attitudes and productivity agendas
as we witness the loss of unfettered, open-minded, value seeking creative action.
Socially oriented, critical processes and work towards self-enlightenment or pure
experimental, speculative thinking may be in decline. In 2012, an interesting examination
of this phenomenon took place at the 1st Tbilisi Triennial, Offside Effect,25 which was
focused on the conceptual development of educational platforms that challenge the
current prescriptive influence of the Bologna process in Europe.Artists and lecturers,
collaborating with groups of students from several selected experimental academies,
attempted to open a window on their creative orientations and strategies for making
work. Much of the visitor experience of these works entailed: encounters of a discursive,
critical or archival nature; interpretations of artistic freedom; collective, experimental,
bohemian and squatter action, and the idea of an exhibition functioning as a school in
turn framed as a work of art.26
In asserting that the art itself is not directly presented on the Project Anywhere website,
the idea that the art is to be somehow apprehended as existing elsewhere in space and

24 Project Anywhere Advisory

Committee (2013): Professor
Su Baker, Director, Victorian
College of the Arts, Faculty
of the VCA & Music,
University of Melbourne;
Mr. Ilmar Taimre, Executive
Consultant, Independent
Researcher/Virtual Musician;
Dr. Jocelyn McKinnon,
School of Creative Arts, The
University of Newcastle;
Associate ProfessorNancyde
Freitas,School of Art and
Design,AucklandUniversityof
Technology, New Zealand;
Dr. Sean Lowry, School of
Creative Arts, The University
of Newcastle, Australia;
Professor Brad Buckley,
Professor of Contemporary
Art and Culture,Sydney
College of the Arts, The
University of Sydney,
Australia.
25 1st Tbilisi Triennial, Offside
Effect, curated by Henk Slager
and Wato Tsereteli, Center
of Contemporary Art, 10
Dodo Abashidze Street, 0102
Tbilisi, Georgia, October19
November 20, 2012. Contact:
tbilisitriennial2012@gmail.
com.
26 The Triennial exhibition
included documentation from
Unitednationsplaza, by Anton
Vidokle and Martha Rosler,
an exhibition as school
project intended to start as a
biennial (Manifesta 6, 2006),
but eventually realised as
an independent temporary
school in Berlin (October,
2006). The work had a later
reincarnation under the name
Night School at the New
Museum in New York, 2008-9.

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time is implicated. To this end, the indexical information made available via the website
functions to direct attention to a work existing somewhere else in space and time. The
potential remoteness or transience of some hosted projects will invariably mean that it is
difficult, and in some cases impossible, for all subjects in the intended audience to directly
apprehend the work. This raises the question of whether mediated apprehension is
somehow a second-best experience. Given the post retinal nature of much contemporary
practice, philosophical questions have arisen in a range of institutional contexts. In some
cases, these theoretical uncertainties have been developed into an artistic or curatorial
premise. To cite one recent example, the artistic director of Documenta XIII (2012)
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev directly addressed the necessity of the relationship between
aesthetic and sense perception: What does it mean to know things that are not physically
perceivable to us through our senses? What is the meaning of the exercise of orienting in
thought toward these locations?27 Accordingly, some Documenta XIII sites included in the
Kassel catalogue were actually located elsewhere on the globe.
Other social experiences reinforce this notion that it is possible to build an aesthetic
experience in the mind of an interpreter who does not directly sense a creative work. We
sense many things vicariously, without direct experience. For example, many humans
who have not experienced life in the wilderness may still hold strong political opinions
about the value of an unvisited wilderness and have a personal attachment to the idea of
it. In this sense, simply knowing that it is there offers an experience profoundly different
to a theoretical proposition. Consider, for example, the description of the six hundred
thousand hectares of wilderness that constitute Southwest National Park (part of the
Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area) provided on the Tasmania Parks and
Wildlife website:

The park, the largest in Tasmania, epitomises the grandeur and spirit of wilderness
in its truest sense. Much of the park is remote and far removed from the hustle and
bustle of the modern world. For many, just the fact that such a place still exists brings
solace.28

27 Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev,
Introduction, The
Guidebook, dOCUMENTA (13),
Catalogue 3/3 (Kassel: Hatje
Cantz, 2012), 7.
28 Southwest National Park:
Introduction, Tasmania
Parks and Wildlife, accessed
November 14, 2012, .http://
www.parks.tas.gov.au/index.
aspx?base=3801.

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There are of course many other lived examples of things that we can potentially sense
without resorting to direct experience. We do not, for example, necessarily need to
directly witness events ranging from sexual impropriety to genocide in order to be
reasonably convinced of their existence. Extra sensory information in the form of
substantial documentation can provide forms of validation that come close to (and in
some cases supercede) direct sense experience. Continuing with this train of thought,
one of the reasons that Tehching Hsiehs work arguably remains compelling is the way in
which systematic documentation has enabled interpreters who did not directly witness
his five One Year Performances in New York between 1978 and 1986 to build his works
aesthetically in the mind. Hsiehs Time Clock Piece, for example, is validated by 366 time
cards, 366 filmstrips, signed witness statements, a record of missed punches, and a 16mm
time-lapse film. Consequently, Hsiehs performances arguably provide a profoundly
different kind of comprehension of concepts central to the mechanics of capitalism,
surveillance, production, control, discipline and submission than might be possible within
a more traditional theoretical or philosophical argument.

In conclusion
The conditions under which Project Anywhere was conceived are underpinned by a
series of now long standing debates concerning the paradoxical conditions of artistic
production, display and consumption. From the historical avant-gardes through
conceptualism and institutional critique, to new modes of exhibition, display and
performance across the global contemporary art spectrum, artistic researchers are
increasingly aware of what Sabine Folie recently described as the paradoxical insight that
total comprehension is impossible.29 Engaging with this notion of incomprehensibility
has become a defining characteristic in the framing of artistic research. Moreover,
the difficulty of adequately determining the edges of a creative work has meant that
exegetical and paratextual elements are increasingly considered as necessary parts of a
creative works orbit. Expanded forms of symbolic territory are in many cases implied by
artistic objects and strategies that aim to problematise the boundaries that contain them.
The ongoing challenge that faces Project Anywhere is the question of how the veracity of
artistic documentation might accommodate these paradoxes in a way that is sympathetic
to the contradictions characterizing much contemporary artistic practice, whilst also
somehow being accountable to the institutional expectations of university-based
research culture. Ultimately, perhaps what we are really proposing here is an institutional
acknowledgement that more and more contemporary artworks now appear to function
as a conduit for connecting the beholder to extra-perceptual networks of textures,
events, meanings and associationsas opposed to simply evoking the more specific
phenomenological relationships that more orthodox forms of modernism once claimed to
instantiate.

Within an expanded conception of art, it no longer necessarily makes sense to pinpoint

a single fixed and immovable location or artefact as constituting the primary text
underpinning a creative work. It is within these expanded conceptions of artistic practice
that Project Anywhere seeks to offer a point of difference by simultaneously encouraging
artist researchers to push against the edges of artistic practice and the specificities of
exhibition location whilst maintaining the specificities of art as research via the process
of peer validation. Project Anywhere enacts this point of difference using a website that
directs attention toward an expanded conception of exhibition space that effectively
encapsulates the entire globe and beyond,30 whilst at the same time maintaining an
appropriately rigorous contextualizing framework for validating artistic practice as
research though a unique two-step peer validation model.31 As a new exhibition model,
Project Anywhere attempts to connect the phenomenological and aesthetic experience of
apprehending art with the communication of new knowledge that comes from artistic
activity framed as research. As a research platform, it promotes new and experimental
methods and combinations of documentation with a view to accommodating better
representations of artworks. As an academic publication, it facilitates the process of
critique and validation for this rising form of artistic practice. How this experimental
project serves the artistic/research community of the future will depend on the openness
of the researchers involved and the care taken to manage the development of the project
within a robust and ethical framework.

29 Sabine Folie, unExhibitDisplay and the Paradoxes

of Showing by Concealing,
unExhibit, exhibition
catalogue, trans. Gerrit
Jackson (Wien: Generali
Foundation, 2011), 169. Folie
concludes this catalogue
essay with a claim toward art
that restitutes imaginative
space by a concealment that
paradoxically shows while
leaving behind a vestige that
cannot be differentiated, that
is neither entirely transparent
and comprehensible
nor utterly opaque and
comprehensible., 173.
30 In 2013, Project Anywhere
received its first proposal for
a project designed to take
place in space (in this case
in lower earth orbit). This
proposal is currently awaiting
peer evaluation.
31 Project Anywhere Peer
Evaluation Policy, accessed
12 October 12, 2013, http://
projectanywhere.net/peerreview.

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