“...early on I learned that even though I might not be the first to ask a particular question or experiment with materials and forms in a particular way, my questions and ideas belonged somewhere. Moreover, by doing enough research, I would often find areas of study, practice and expertise that for whatever reason still remain largely under-explored, unresolved and even neglected in relation to my lived experience…” (Johan Thom 2024)
As part of the Octopus Programme, I had the opportunity to interact with the participants Octopus Programme, I had the opportunity to interact with the participants Octopus Programme on a number of occasions. This included presenting a performance lecture ostensibly based upon my current research for a solo exhibition, Things Appear and Disappear, held in Johannesburg in early 2023. I used the opportunity as a means to think through the ideas and methodologies pertinent to the project in a performative, material manner. For example, for the online presentation, I used three different cameras to jump between various ‘movements’ that comprise the presentation. These movements included close-ups of relevant theoretical and personal texts that I read aloud in different voices (first person, second person), showing excerpts of artworks in progress, and also an open session comprising questions and comments from the audience. Since then, Başak Şenova has visited and participated in studio discussions (or ‘crits’) with undergraduate and postgraduate students from the University of Pretoria. Quite recently, Şenova commented that my presentation seemed to align quite clearly with the teaching methodology we follow at the Fine Arts Division at the University of Pretoria. She urged me to consider the matter a starting point for my written contribution to this publication, a suggestion I am very happy to follow. For one thing, even though I have been deeply involved with the question of artistic research both as a professional artist and academic lecturer, I have never published anything that clearly plotted my position thereto, as well as the development thereof, throughout my career.
In what follows, I briefly discuss the manner in which a highly particular approach to artistic research has become part and parcel of the manner in which I routinely produce contemporary artworks and how it is integrated into the teaching methodology my colleagues and I follow at the Division of Fine Arts at the University of Pretoria. In this text, I highlight some of the more salient reasons for the adoption of this teaching methodology by referring to a number of interrelated factors that include issues of scholarly rigour, the changing nature of artistic practice and its funding and methodologies, the exercise of politics and power, as well as some of the more pragmatic factors that accompany the actual production and dissemination of artistic practice globally today. Though I am by no means certain that this approach making ought to be implemented across the board in contemporary artistic practice, I am convinced that aspects thereof are greatly beneficial to almost any artist who wishes to cultivate a serious, lasting practice.
From the book The Octopus On Diversities, Art Production, Educational Models, and Curatorial Trajectories, p32-37, edited by: Başak Şenova and published in 2024 by Edition Angewandte
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