When the sun suddenly appeared after several rainy days I rushed out on the slope above the fortifications to video the May session of the remake of the Year of the Horse from 2002. I reacted as if the subtle green of the small birches on the cliffs would immediately disappear and turn into ordinary foliage consequent to the light. The wind from southwest was freezing cold, so no risk.
 
Yesterday I finished reading an anthology edited by colleagues on the editorial board of JAR (Journal for Artistic Research), the editor in chief Michael Schwab and Henk Borgdorff, called The Exposition of Artistic Research: Publishing Art in Academia. (Leiden University Press 2014). The last contribution, “Counter-Archival Dissemination” by Henk Slager I remember best, since I have read one text every now and then. And of course I could detect an archival impulse of sorts in my own practice, too. The article I have marked as one to return to deals surprisingly with music, “Integrating the Exposition into Music-Composition Research” by Hans Roels. What fascinates me in that text is the idea of the open sketch as exposition form and research tool, and I guess that notion could be transposed to other art forms as well. He emphasizes the unfinished character of the sketch, which is deliberately created to investigate a research topic and also performed and discussed by an invited critical audience, but differs from a finished complex composition by being focused on a specific problem and perhaps allowing some emotional distance as well.
 
So would I call these sketches or remakes and the notes related to them an exposition? Why not? Perhaps one would expect a research exposition to be a little bit more thought out and planned, more focused and analytical. In some sense these sketches and notes are more like field notes, observations as part of a process, material to be analysed and articulated at a later stage. But then again, they are immediately shared and published here. If we understand the word exposition literally, I am certainly exposing my artistic practice here, and the work at a very rough stage, in the making. Thus I am of course exposing myself as well. Probably this material could be understood as some kind of open sketches made public, some sort of attempts at looking at differences created by the time-lapse of twelve years, for instance. But exposing my artistic practice publicly in process does not automatically mean exposing it as research…