sadness, suffering, the creative act and social position

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artist because of a dispositional failure to fit any other social position — sadness, suffering and the creative act

Pierre Bourdieu Attempting to filter the flow and follow a single textual strand upstream into the real world, I am temporally torn between a responsive biographical dispositional debriefing of artist versus unpacking the alluring line in which Bourdieu suggests that the “artist invents himher-self in suffering” (Bourdieu, 1993 p 169). This line is provocative for the ways it relates to the alternate fields I study. I suffer deliberating between the two strands for which ONE to follow. 

Pierre Bourdieu

MicroResponsive Reading – Unfettered word count, Pierre Bourdieu’s Fields of Cultural Production and suffering the self reflection that I am artist because of a dispositional failure to fit any other social position. Damn.

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Easing in, I slog through Pierre Bourdieu’s Fields a second time. Textual strands evasively tug and bind my moments. I poise in place, hands trailing behind flirtingly fingering each eddy of his thoughts. They become muddied from the eroding runoff from alternate fields I plow—fields cultivated with accumulating research on artists, creativity, psychophysiology and my own lived experiences.

Louise Bourgeouis

The artist sacrifices life to art not because he wants to but because he cannot do anything else – Artist, Louise Bourgeouis (Bourgeois, Bernadac, and Obrist, p. 173).

Heck, why not do both in this temporary field of unfettered word counts?!

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PART 1 :: Artist by Dispositional Default, a Social Position

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subjugate that! first scholarly neophyte research question to pursue relative to my dissertation interests

RESEARCH QUESTION:
Are contemporary female visual artists using self subjugating language?

—-end of requested—-

Language sampling source and narrowing the playing field:
Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz’s text, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, 2nd Ed, published in 2012, in addition to male artist writings and interviews, the text contains seventy-seven writings by female artists and twenty-four interview transcripts with female artists. The female samples will be used as source material for analysis relative to the research question.

Sampling source narrows female category to

1. visual artists practicing within the last 100 years 
2. artists established as relevant to the art world by art historians via inclusion of artists’ writings and interview transcripts in published anthologies 
3. artists who vary in conceptual and physical practices 
4. to a manageable quantity 

Based on this source material, a logical follow up presents itself as: Are the patterns relative to self-perceived position expressed differently in a female visual artists’ writings versus her use of language in an interview?

The research and methodologies will draw from the field of psychology/linguistics and a literature review searching for pre-existing material, methods, or lines of questioning in the fields of art theory and/or art criticism that might be relevant or theoretically transferable into the study of the language use of visual artists.