Theory, embedded and embodied

Abstract

One’s own practice is a constant articulation of one’s position in relation to actual conditions, in which one’s work appears. One relies upon one’s own readings of the conditions the world offers, in which one is immersed and formed, and an innate sense of resistance to its coercions and restraints. One seeks further means of understanding those conditions, which inform, sometimes direct, and at other times deepen one’s own convictions as to what must be done. One might call those means, embodied in texts and in other practices, past and contemporary, theory.
The observations and the work one makes in light of this are not enactments or realisations of theory. Rather, aspects of that theory consciously and unconsciously become part of one’s world-view, and find themselves embedded in what one says, writes, teaches, proposes, and makes. They accumulate. And as one finds one’s practice, through necessity, needing to use various means and media, needing to appear and engage in different actual and discursive contexts, one’s points of reference or guidance in other practices, discourses, and texts are correspondingly, inevitably, varying, diversified, eclectic.
This paper proposes a chronology of exchanges between theory and acts within my own multi-disciplinary practice, beginning in 1964, before I was aware of the very idea of either theory or practice, but conscious of a world of relations.