Waywardness and Artistic Research: Speculation, Skepticism, Difference

Waywardness and Artistic Research: Speculation, Skepticism, DifferenceTW

Waywardness: to shout back, walk away, escape confinement, resist expectations, refuse norms, pursue alternatives, be at odds with the world.

Wayward people see how the world nurtures some by blocking others. They feel it. Know it. Hate it. The wayward therefore struggle against those who would build and administer such a world: from queers who abandon the slow death of compulsory heterosexuality, maroons who run from the ubiquitous colony, or dilettantes who say fuck you to the patriarchy and go off to do something cooler; when we go wayward, we refuse the rules that reduce our ability to live well.

So for the wayward, the good life gets defined mostly by what we do against the things that are being done to us.

Art often glorifies the premise of waywardness. Artworks and artists get credited as ‘good’ when they are about liminality, interstices, ambiguity, deviancy, or non-normativity, while both avant-gardism and institutional critique aspire to be wayward by default. Art should enhance the beauty of living dangerously! But ironically, such aspirations also posit waywardness as a rule… Surely a paradox.

From that point of view, we could say that waywardness is a desired yet rarely realised principle in art making and research. Something essential gets lost when waywardness is valued as a rule. A rule comes from order and predictability, so the moment that artworks or artists that want to be wayward get recognised as wayward, we often end up at one of the more self-defeating contradictions for art today.

It is similarly contradictory for an academic seminar about waywardness to be itself wayward. That doesn’t have to be a problem, for as long as the aim is to understand how waywardness gets valued within and outside of the forces that make it necessary. An underlying question to this year’s Reading Days seminar therefore was: what are responsible ways for us to think about waywardness, and in what situations does it become a good category for thinking and making?

During the Reading Days we also asked how waywardness could be kept as a principle for those who needed it, and better understood by those who were curious. We approached waywardness in multiple ways: as an attitude for critical thinking and researching, but also a mode of reading, arguing, recognising and/or inventing patterns. With these approaches in mind, we also worked with three concepts adjacent to waywardness: speculation, skepticism, and difference. The first was about making room for fiction and the ‘more-than’ of the given world. The second was about delaying knowledge and embracing the wisdom of the not-yet-made-up mind. The third was about truly acknowledging that, at the root of everything, there is a plurality without order.