Aslaug Nyrnes

Professor of the Didactics of Literature and the fine Arts, Bergen University College, Norway

Series as topos in artistic research and artistic valuation

Working with or in series is a paradoxical phenomena in artistic work. The series is to be understood somewhere between the universal and the particular. It can be recognized as part of well known processes in popular culture – samples of resembling objects – it signifies/implies copying, something secondary, trivial, that has to do with an assembly line way of working or mass production. At the same time the series is a site of research located within the art field itself, a site where one, among otherwise resembling objects, can get hold of differences. The concept of series, and of repetition, one could link rhetorically to the aesthetics of production. In rhetorical theory the series is a formal topos that points towards copia – store, materiality, archive. In the rhetorical mode of thinking new ways of expressing oneself are always to be understood and read in connection to already existing forms. And the series is best understood as a row/sequence of experiments, a row of examples

The paper will have a theoretical scope – I want to explore how serial work, sampling, copying are to be understood in texts by Foucault, Deleuze and Benjamin. However, the fundamental theoretical questions will be raised and developed exploring a specific art objects (not yet chosen), and will be presented as a discussion of those specific objects. Altogether, the aim of the paper is to contribute to building theory in the field of artistic research.