Exposition

Summary

The simplicity of nature is not to be measured by that of our conceptions. Pierre-Simon Laplace, Exposition du système du monde (1796)

I say no world

shall hold a you

Edward Estlin Cummings, from Four Poems (1940)

‘How splendid it would be’, muses the French poet Paul Valery, ‘to think in a form one had invented for oneself’ (Valery 1962: 649). This implies that as long as we are not thinking in a form we have invented for ourselves, we are obliged to adapt, translate or otherwise shape our thinking to the vehicle of its expression. If we then make an additional claim for this expression – e.g. as research – we face a further separation between what may be considered the work itself and the account given concerning its significance. Here we have a preliminary definition of what distinguishes artistic research from artistic practice per se – the challenge of giving an account of a work or method, of ‘making a claim’, while still respecting a work's intentions and coherence on its own terms. Such an account may be articulated from within a community of practitioners, yet addressed to an audience beyond such a community (and therefore concerned with both strengthening and extending a practice). It follows that the question of exposition becomes a vital consideration, for it is here that the work's wider significance is articulated, defended and assessed.

Changing definitions of ‘exposition’ hint at the rise of scientific thinking over several centuries as the term evolves from notions of displacement to those of setting forth and explaining. Hence under ‘exposition’ in the Oxford English Dictionary (1989) we read:

being put out of a place, expulsion (C16-C17); ‘aspect’ i.e. situation in regards the quarter of the heavens (C16-C19); action or process of setting forth, declaring, or describing either in speech or writing (C14-C20); action of expounding or explaining; interpretation, explanation (C14-C19); an expository article or treatise; a commentary (C15-C19).

Over the same period, the shift in emphasis from oral to literary modes of exposition eventually produced the conventions of academic writing – arguably, the pinnacle of this process of ‘technologising’ exposition.