@article{345ec3fc1aa640babda8733568871a2f,
title = "Studio Ruins: describing 'unfinishedness'",
abstract = "With creative practices things go wrong, work is ruined, and projects remain unfinished. Paradoxically, since failure is a matter of enhanced appreciation in the arts (e.g. Samuel Beckett{\textquoteright}s {\textquoteleft}fail better{\textquoteright}), neither {\textquoteleft}wrongness{\textquoteright}, {\textquoteleft}ruination{\textquoteright} nor {\textquoteleft}unfinishedness{\textquoteright} means what it says. Building on the topographical encounters of fine art studio teaching, this article explores the intersection of ruined work, incomplete creativity and disarticulating sensations. While Jason Rhoades{\textquoteright} messy installation art in a public gallery can evoke (like a 2005 account of abandoned factories by Tim Edensor) a problematic romanticization of unfinished and ruined work, I argue that other less recognized forces are in play. In the privacy of art school studios, monitoring {\textquoteleft}health and safety{\textquoteright} procedures challenges all evocations of aesthetic spectacle and poetic vision. This amounts to an alternative topology of ruination that relates to Caitlin DeSilvey{\textquoteright}s 2006 descriptions of agricultural decay. Because a creative struggle is more like daSilvey{\textquoteright}s material confusion than Edensor{\textquoteright}s romanticized disorder, my article considers four further theoretical ideas in order to place studio ruins at the service of practice-based research in art schools—the muddle of {\textquoteleft}mingled senses{\textquoteright}; the complicit character of {\textquoteleft}criticality{\textquoteright}; the {\textquoteleft}stupefying{\textquoteright} consequences of study, and the tactical defeat of {\textquoteleft}decreation{\textquoteright}.",
keywords = "failure, ruins, art schools, health and safety, privacy, mingled senses, practice- based research",
author = "Chris Dorsett",
year = "2017",
month = aug,
day = "22",
language = "English",
volume = "17",
pages = "1--16",
journal = "Studies in Material Thinking",
issn = "1177-6234",
publisher = "Auckland University of Technology",
}