Phantom limbic: notes on process

‘…Simon, you’re an artist, I’ve seen your paint spattered overalls and listened to your single-minded diatribes in dingy cafes. So can you tell me what the difference is between art and art-as-research? I get the feeling that art-as-research involves the production of knowledge, whatever that is. Whereas by-itself art is, you know, an indulgence of the self. Anyway, I figured that since you weren’t around to clarify this, I’d just Google “define:research”. The cloud-mind told me that Research was a full-rigged sailing ship built in 1861, renowned for the voyage it made from Quebec to Glasgow in 1866, during which its rudder was torn off by a Turner-esque storm-as-sublime in theAtlantic. The plucky captain and his loyal crew set about jury-rigging another rudder, only to have that one destroyed as well. Anyway, to cut a long story short, the crew kept on dismantling bits of the boat in order to fabricate a working rudder, but the implacable seas kept on tearing their constructions to pieces. In the end they made it to Glasgow, but the ship had to be towed into port and it looked more like a Venetian gondola than a cargo vessel since they’d had to produce eight different rudder versions on the way from whatever was available. So I guess art-as-research is something along those lines…’