CONTEXTO HISTÓRICO, EL BARROCO

The scene is a lecture hall at a scholarly conference. At the front of the hall are three television monitors and three video recorders on trolleys arranged in a slight arch facing the viewers. Two or three people are already seated looking at their conference programs. Others gather in small groups discussing, chatting, and generally enjoying being with colleagues they haven’t seen for a while or with whom they are sharing interests for the first time. Others are filing in. One person is standing at the entrance, reading the program, looking at the set-up at the front and apparently trying to decide if this is where s/he wants to be. It is not immediately apparent who will be giving or chairing the presentation. A woman extricates herself from a rather lively discussion and steps to the front.

Chair : Welcome everyone. If you’ll take your seats, please . . . It’s time we began

the next session. (She waits for people to find seats and quiet down.) Thank you. Without further ado, I will turn things over to our three presenters who have asked that we begin informally. (From different places in the hall, three women

get up and come to the front. Two position themselves to start the video installation. The other addresses the group.)

Presenter 1: Thank you all for coming. We’d like you to simply watch and listen.

(She moves to the monitors and together the three women start the three videos,

adjust the sound levels and then take seats in the audience.)

For seven or eight minutes, the audience watch and listen to three apparently uncut video sequences: one of water lapping in and out over a seaweed-covered rock, one of a small sailboat moored in the middle of a cove blanketed in wafting fog and one of the moon rising almost imperceptibly over a cove as daylight slowly fades (Figure 3.1). The impression is that each video sequence is happening in ‘real time’. Each of the three videos has its own sound-track mixing intermittent sounds of wind and lapping water, a flute playing as if to the wind, a dog barking in the distance and snippets of conversation and laughter among three female voices with a fourth female voice singing in the background (Chandra, 1994):

– Once I declared it as ‘my area’ I got nervous.

– No. Just go at it. What you bring to it is going to be your own thing.

“I’m gonna be; I’m gonna be-ah-be-ah-be . . . ”

– When you’re finished, it’s your own process that creates something new. It doesn’t matter what you call it. Brand X. (All three laugh.) The generic . . .

– Dissertation!

– Applicable to all disciplines . . . (picking up tone of an info-mercial) – At all times,

– Anyone can write it! (Gales of laughter then they pause. Percussive singing

heard in background.)

– The robins around here are huge.

– They have to be (laughing). Have you seen the seagulls? (All three laugh.)

“With the grace of an animal . . .

At this point in the videos the three presenters nod to one another and slowly move to the front where each turns the sound down slowly on one monitor. The video images continue to play. The presenters turn as if to address the audience.

Presenter 2 : (smiling) Could you please share with us your responses to what

you’ve just seen and heard? (There follows a rather awkward pause of several

seconds that feels much longer. The presenters wait patiently, apparently not disturbed by the silence.)

Chair: (tentatively looking around the room to see if anyone else is about to speak up first) Well, I . . . ah . . . thought we might be in for something a little different

here. To be honest, I didn’t know what to think and after a few moments, when I realized that nothing was going to happen, I began to get . . . (hesitates as if

concerned about how best to say what she actually felt) . . . well, I found it . . .

boring. (She laughs rather nervously as she says this last word. Others laugh in

response, as do the presenters. This breaks the tension as several hands go up at once. The session continues.)

In the scene above, the video installation, “Ockham’s Razor: (1) (1+1) (1+1+1),” represents the beginning of our collaboration as scholars and artists in the field of education. It has been installed and presented at scholarly conferences much as depicted above. We work according to a guiding principle: the value of the collaborative process in its capacity for inquiry. With overlapping interests and a commitment to consensus in our decision-making, we have realized the complex- ity of deciding anything collaboratively. Our mutuality of commitment depends upon the bonds of friendship that have been tried, tested, and strengthened through this attempt at mixing art with inquiry, the personal with the professional. We try to be vigilant, in every aspect of our collaborative scholarship, to insure that one person’s set of interests does not dominate those of the others. Whenever we reach an impasse—that is, a point of decision where the only apparent alternatives compromise our guiding principle of collaboration—we impose a chance operation. By adopting chance as a methodology, we follow the example of John

Cage’s aleatory compositional process. The term aleatory refers to depending on chance or the throw of dice [fr. L. alea, die] OED. The American composer John Cage (1912–1992) subjected his compositional ideas to chance operations in an attempt to escape the limits of his own tastes and intentions; to wake up to “the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord” (Cage, 1961, p. 12).1_Each

time we have invited chance into our work, we have discovered something interesting and peculiarly fitting to our purposes. The following describes just such an example.

We first met as colleagues and began our collaboration when we were all teaching in an education department at the same university. While “Ockham’s Razor” was still in its post-production phase, we were asked to participate in the university’s research showcase. The production was to be a computer compilation of individual slideshows, each consisting of three electronic slides presented in three minutes. We accepted the invitation to participate but then began to wrestle with the limitations of the format. If we transcribed split seconds from “Ockham’s Razor” into three still shots, we would lose the ambience of the moving video images with their interweaving sound tracks. How were we to incorporate this three-slide format into our work?

We also had to consider how our artistic medium would be perceived in an academic setting where the norm is to pronounce research findings. Since the process of collaborative inquiry is both the method and the subject of our research, art making suits our purposes. “Ockham’s Razor” represents our collaborative process by both demonstrating and constituting the findings of our inquiries. We are a sample group of one, performing our ongoing process. It takes us a long time and much conversation each time we introduce a new means of expression into our work. It must be more than a mere means or vehicle for reporting. Following John Dewey’s definition of “medium,” we strive to make the means or vehicle one with its effect, incorporated in its outcome, thereby transforming means into medium (Dewey, 1934, pp. 197–198).

Although not all art is about its own process, Process Art is an established practice (Lucie-Smith, 1984, p. 153). The “real time” quality of “Ockham’ s Razor” is necessary to our reality of process approach to scholarship in education. The phrase “realism of process” is borrowed from Brydon Smith’s assessment of Michael Snow’s Authorization. Smith describes it as “a beautiful reconfirmation of one of Snow’s main artistic tenets since 1960, namely that the content of his art follows from the process of its realization. It is realism of process” (Smith, 1970, p. 19). Our work is the process of its unfolding as represented in the media, sounds, images, words, and ideas that accompany our time together. We made this point as best we could to the producers of the research showcase, asking that we be allowed to use three minutes of video footage instead of the prescribed three slides; but the format was fixed and we had to figure out what to do next.

We decided to experiment with a computer application that captures still images from video footage. There is a split second on one of “Ockham’s” three, hour-long video sequences when by chance the tripod screw slipped, causing the camera to

swing away from the shot of the rock in the water. To this point in the sequence there is nothing to imply to the viewer that s/he is indoors looking out. Then, suddenly, the window frame and curtain are in the picture. We lit upon the idea of trying to capture this key moment in the filming when chance intervened to re-frame this phase of our work. We hoped that by capturing this key moment of change we could imply in a still image the ideas of movement and transition representing collaboration.

Trying to capture an image with this computer application turned out to be a hit or miss process, not precise like professional film or video editing. Try as we might, we just couldn’t grab the image we wanted and were about to give up when something very interesting happened. The videotape must have been moving out of pause mode when the application kicked in and snapped a shot between the

frames. Eureka! We call it “Split Rock” (Figure 3.2) and it served our purposes better

than the image we were aiming to capture. “Split Rock” was a new re-framing, one we had not intended or predicted but which foregrounds the very process we were engaged in at that time: the process of representing video in a static medium.

The title “Ockham’s Razor: (1) (1+1) (1+1+1)” alludes to Dan Flavin’s 1963 art- work the nominal three (to William of Ockham) which consists of six eight-foot white neon tubes placed vertically in the configuration: I II III. Not only does the physical configuration of the work provide a visual metaphor for our collaborative trio of individuals, its underlying aesthetic concepts also illuminate our intentions. In the catalogue to a Flavin retrospective, Joseph Kosuth (2000, npn) observes:

It [nominal] was its own self, as art, because Flavin took the subjective responsibility for it to mean that. [. . .] It showed art, Flavin’s, or it showed nothing. Yet, in order to do this, in order not to be a crafted object or an attempt at formal invention, in order not to satisfy anyone’s idea of what an artwork should look like, it needed to utilize the banal: the empty carrier of meaning of an office lamp put out of place.

The reference to William of Ockham (c.1285–1347) situates our work in the context where theory is understood to evolve from careful attention to the details of a phenomenon. Ockham asserted that all knowledge begins with direct sensory experience as the foundation of cognition and abstraction. His practice was to strip arguments to their bare essentials—to argue from the particularity of experience. William of Ockham and his principle of parsimony came to us by chance. Michelle saw the nominal three at the National Gallery in Ottawa and was struck by the following statement below the title of the work:

“Ockham’s Razor” is based upon his original maxim: “It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer.”

Ockham argued that reality exists solely in individual things, while universals are merely abstract ideas. Flavin reinforces this proposition by using only the minimum number of fluorescent fixtures needed to establish a series, that is, (1) (1+1) (1+1+1), and create a sufficient play of light and shadows on the wall behind and in the surrounding space.

When the three of us discussed the nominal three, we began to develop a language and imagery for identifying critical aspects of our work: the complexity within the sparseness of three and the assumption underlying our comfort in beginning from everyday sights, sounds, objects, and interactions. In this way a title was born, but we soon realized that a title naming William of Ockham led people to assume things that we didn’t assume. It is generally believed that Ockham began what is now our concept of empiricism and, as a result, an allusion to him today may be taken to imply a belief in a form of materialism or realism and a view of modern positivism as the superior arbiter of knowledge.2

We chose to allude to William of Ockham because we were drawn to his anti- realist theory of universals: identifying universals with the acts of understanding themselves.3_{As it turns out, the fact that this allusion may raise realist assumptions}

works in our favor. Engaging with the contingent and commonplace particulars of the video installation, with its absence of narrative or descriptive structure, the viewer who reads “Ockham” as synonymous with a materialist view of reality may be puzzled. If this piece represents Ockham’s stripped-down world, what does it mean? Our allusion to Ockham accidentally sets up a Socratic irony: the viewer’s knowledge is in apparent opposition to the particulars of the work. The viewer is thrown back upon the acts of her own understanding in the question, “Nothing is happening so how can this be research?” Even though as Wade Rowland puts it, “Ockham’s razor sliced through the umbilicus linking material reality and human

consciousness” (Rowland, 1999, p. 152), their mutual dependence remains. The razor cuts both ways. The boredom and/or puzzlement our video installation effects provoke the viewer to question her own assumptions. As Feyerabend warns: “We must not demand that the process of learning be structured in accordance with the categories, laws and perceptions we are already familiar with” (1975, p. 272).4

Phase II in Which the Reader Glimpses New Stories and Possibilities for