In Search Of The Wanderer: An Art Practice As Knowledge

Abstract

The following thesis is a piece in process, written in the middle. This experimental approach to the thesis means that this piece of writing is not fixed: parts can be added, things can be removed, it is becoming. By approaching my day to day life and consequently my research in the middle, I refuse to start this thesis with an explanatory introduction and end with a concluding statement. To grasp things always in the middle, I will argue, is imperative for an art practice that searches to free itself from the habitual ways of thinking and doing regulated by the transcendental. Living the middle is a freedom to act according to an understanding of the linkages, the chain of causes that connect every thing to all others. This thesis, which is composed of a tapestry of auto-ethnographic vignettes, exposition and philosophical musings, explores the potentialities that arise in the search for freedom. It is through and with my art practice, which I also call the decolonisation of the body, that this search for freedom is being conducted. The decolonisation of the body as an art practice tries to discard old Cartesian divisions, the first placing the body as a separate entity independent from its relation to the world; the second separating the mental from the physical. Through the philosophy of Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari I will argue for a becoming one with the world, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, becoming-imperceptible, if any sense of freedom is ever to be attained.