What particular languages and narratives does artistic practice incite or provoke? How might one speak of artistic works that are fundamentally at odds with conventions of discourse and critical description? Are there unique forms of knowledge generated by artistic research that require other ways of speaking and understanding? The seminar focuses on how the materials and processes of art making generate what we may call “poetic knowledge”. In contrast to discourses based on rational thought – a making sense – poetic knowledge is considered as being aligned with the irrational and the unnameable, the intuitive and the felt, one that finds support by way of confusion, invention, unlearning and fantasy. Poetic knowledge, and the fevers of poetic discourses, are explored as offering a critical interruption and dissident imagination onto structures of linguistic and social ordering, enabling a radical position of Not Knowing.
The seminar was initially developed and presented at the Bergen Art Academy, in 2017, and consisted of four lectures and discussions organised around specific poetic figures, including: The Fool, The Daydreamer, The Fugitive, and The Monster. Through these figures a range of topics and perspectives were considered, such as Confusion, Incoherence, Stupidity, Non-Knowledge, Shadows, Liquids, Formlessness, the Ephemeral, Perversion, Erotic Being and Intoxication.