Inoperative Gestures: On Artistic Research Beyond Production and Representation: 4th International AIE Conference | Art, Research and Education

Are there artistic practices that predate the post bologna move towards academicized forms of artistic research that might help us both re-consider our approaches to research and the pedagogies we employ in contemporary schools of art?
This paper explores the intersection of Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophical concept of being singular plural with the artistic practice of Roger Ackling, situating their resonance within the field of artistic research. Nancy’s ontology dismantles the notion of the autonomous subject, proposing instead that all being is fundamentally co-existence—each singularity exposed to and constituted by its relation to others. This framework offers a compelling lens through which to understand Ackling’s minimal, sun-burnt line works on found driftwood. Created using only sunlight and a magnifying glass, Ackling’s gestures are acts of quiet co-production with the natural world, time, and place. Each work is irreducibly singular yet inseparable from the elemental conditions of its making.
By engaging Nancy’s thought, this research suggests that Ackling’s practice enacts a form of being-with that resists both mastery and representation. The artwork becomes a site of inoperativity—a non-productive activity that foregrounds presence over production. In the context of artistic research, this convergence prompts a rethinking of methodology: knowledge does not precede practice but emerges through attentiveness, repetition, and the shared contingency between artist, environment, and material. Ackling’s approach, like Nancy’s philosophy, calls for an ethics of exposure—a being-in-common without appropriation.
This paper proposes that such artistic practices embody a mode of research grounded not in accumulation or resolution but in the radical openness of relation. Here, artistic research becomes a way of thinking-being that is not illustrative of philosophy but parallel to it—enacted through gesture, trace, and time.
We will argue that such an approach can help us transform the way we approach artistic research and its teaching in art schools through a reformulation of communities of practice that are better suited to the challenges we face