Repositioning artistic practices: a sociomaterial view

Abstract

Practices, positioned through a sociomaterial lens make visible everyday work, often challenging our understanding of practices in consequence. Artists, and the world of contemporary art offer interesting contexts to explore practices through a sociomaterial lens and render visible everyday work important in the accomplishment of art. As such, this paper presents a distinctive sociomaterial exploration of practices that reconfigures our understanding of professional practices and their pedagogies in art. Drawing on theoretical resources of practice and materiality, I present findings from an art-based ethnographic study of conceptual artists that combined art and practice-oriented perspectives to look beyond discipline-based processes of artmaking to practices as they happen. I present these findings first, and innovatively, as a series of photo-collages and then, using words, as mundane practices of looking, studio-making and pause, around which other practices coalesce including peer-support, self-promotion, pedagogy and movement-driven. The photo-collages, visually and literally, reposition artistic practices as those necessary in the accomplishment of everyday work, preserving a relationality sometimes lost in written accounts of sociomaterial practices. The paper thus presents novel and necessary insights into the professional development of artists; methodological insights for relational studies of practices; and questions for professional education broadly.