2007 URO Spotlight: John Keppel
- Phenomenology in the Arts
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Jon Keppel is a fourth year student in the Department of Art. His senior thesis consists of five videos that plot a unique relationship between content and form.
What advice would you give to current undergraduates who want to get involved in research?
The research process for me was a way to challenge myself and reassess what I was doing artistically. The great thing about research in the arts is that there are so many different approaches that one can take, both in terms of goals and the methods for achieving those goals. There are innumerable ways to gather information that is meaningful and an endless variety of places to look for it. There is no reason why you should keep yourself confined strictly to your particular area of expertise. You never know what kind of connections you might find in areas that are typically not associated with your field. Keep asking questions, the tough ones, especially about yourself.
What specifically do you research? What projects are you currently working on?
I am currently working on a series of videos collectively titled mere. The project takes a look at how our conventional notions of meaning and value are influenced by the nature of perception, and how this in turn leads to distorted and problematic conceptions of ourselves, others and the world at large. Nodal points connecting late phenomenology to early existential trends in Europe of the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s are my central reference point. The questions that I raise are heavily informed by my reading of continental philosophers circulating at that time such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Each of these thinkers took lived-experience as the starting point for their mature philosophical efforts: a sentiment that my work takes on as well.
Structurally, however, the mere project draws upon the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, his conception of "the Real" and its related schematization. This is where the heart of my research starts to emerge. I am interested in taking categorical frameworks from disparate philosophical viewpoints and having them interact with each other in unintended ways (via an artwork) to prompt new connections and forge alternative pathways through the theoretical issues involved and the stakes they imply. Lacan had a very particular way of conveying the architecture of his thought. The idea of stripping this structure from its philosophical context and using it to choreograph how my videos would relate to each other excited me. This notion of cross-referencing, cross-pollinating and appropriating unrelated disciplines and their structural elements as a way to compose art works is something I would like to take farther.
Can you explain how you actually conduct your research ?
My approach to researching this project had two phases. First, I began by familiarizing myself with thinkers and their philosophical works that were relevant to the central issues of the mere project (namely the issue of meaning as it is taken up in philosophical paradigms that take lived-experience as their starting point). This entailed extensive supplemental reading which was necessary in order to get an idea of not only how each body of thought worked as a system within itself but also to see whether or not it would have the potential to be translated into the context of my video project and still maintain its initial strength, integrity and general format.
The second phase then consisted of actually producing the videos as a sort of test ground. I used the categorical frameworks that I gathered from my reading in situating my series of videos to see whether or not they would actually stand up and, if so, in what way. It was all about extracting that form or system; abstracting it, then filling it up with an unrelated content to see what it would do to that new set of information, what kind of reaction it would set off.
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