Journal of Social Work Practice

ISSN: 0265-0533 (Print) 1465-3885 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjsw20

WHERE IS THE LOVE? ART, AESTHETICS AND

RESEARCH

Yasmin Gunaratnam

To cite this article: Yasmin Gunaratnam (2007) WHERE IS THE LOVE? ART, AESTHETICS AND
RESEARCH, Journal of Social Work Practice, 21:3, 271-287, DOI: 10.1080/02650530701553518

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02650530701553518

Published online: 05 Jun 2008.

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Yasmin Gunaratnam

WHERE IS THE LOVE? ART, AESTHETICS

AND RESEARCH

This paper discusses the use of different forms of artistic representation (poems, images,
music, literature) to convey research findings. It theorises creativity as emerging from the
precarious interplay between external and internal worlds that can surprise and demand
invention and representation. Using examples from palliative care and ideas from post-
structuralism and psychoanalytic aesthetics, the article examines the form and content of
art works as encounters and events which can ‘make way’ for what is beyond immediate
recognition and experience, both how things ‘might be’ and the ‘not yet’. In tracing my
own experiences of where artistic representations come from, I suggest that such
representations can involve an emotional, sensual and corporeal opening out to others that
involves the suspension of intellect. Through this discussion I argue that art can touch
people and convey complex and incoherent notions of difference and otherness, precisely
because of its ambiguities and insecurities of meaning. This ambiguity means that the lived
experience of public presentation through and with art is always a gamble, based on risk
and vulnerability for both the presenter and the audience. The basis of this mutual
vulnerability is seen as productive and connective.

Keywords art; research; presentation; palliative care; social welfare

Almost three years ago, I was invited to speak at a multi-disciplinary conference on
end of life care. The event coincided with my birthday and I had been ambivalent
about the prospect of working that day. At the conference, I was confronted with a
steady stream of Power-Point slides of statistics, charts and diagrams, many concerned
with demonstrating the robustness and ‘evidence’ of different projects and initiatives.
Undoubtedly nervous, but also defensive about my own forthcoming narrative-
centred presentation, my mind started to wander. The sun was streaming through the
high windows of the Victorian town hall, illuminating dust motes swimming in pools
of light above the heads of participants. The room was warm and airless and I had
begun thinking about whether I should adapt my presentation. In the midst of my
distraction and seemingly from nowhere, the song ‘Where is the Love?’ from the hip-
hop band Black Eyed Peas came into my mind. In the song, key social issues —
terrorism, war, racism, greed and intolerance — are lamented. The opening lyrics
ask: ‘What’s wrong with the world, mama?/ People livin’ like they ain’t got no
mamas …’. The chorus raises questions of integrity and forgiveness and appeals to a
father figure: ‘People killin’, people dyin’/ children hurt and you hear them cryin’/
Can you practice what you preach/ and would you turn the other cheek/ Father,
Journal of Social Work Practice Vol. 21, No. 3, November 2007, pp. 271–287
ISSN 0265-0533 print/ISSN 1465-3885 online ß 2007 GAPS
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/02650530701553518
272 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

Father, Father help us/ send some guidance from above/ ‘cause people got me, got
me questioning/ where is the love?’ The power and urgency of this simple plea is
amplified in childlike repetition at the end of the chorus ‘Where is the love?/ Where
is the love/ the love/ the love?’. At lunch time, after my presentation, I left the
conference. I had a craving for Sri Lankan food and I went to eat in a local Sri Lankan
restaurant by myself. The smells in the restaurant, the sounds and the tastes mingled
with my birthday heightened feelings of loss for my own parents who had died a
decade earlier and whose deaths had precipitated my research into palliative care. A
year after this experience, ‘Where is the Love?’ became a frequently requested song
on London radio stations, as Londoners struggled to make sense of the 7 July suicide
bombings on the Underground. Soon afterwards, I began using the song in my
teaching and training with health and social care professionals to discuss the
suppression and the complexity of emotions in intercultural care.
I have begun with this personal account because it encapsulates the three main
themes that this article engages with. First, I am interested in the inter-relationships
and disjunctions between, on the one hand, forms of emotional thinking (Waddell,
1989) and ‘sensuous knowing’ (Taussig, 1993) that engage bodies, biography and
emotion, and on the other, techno-rational forms of knowledge that deny incoherence
and ambiguity and evade emotionality. These inter-relationships are critical in
understanding the dynamics that can shape practice and creativity in welfare services.
They also constitute a tension — perhaps even a paradox — that is embodied in this
very act of trying to write about creative processes and the artistic.
Second, at a conceptual and a practical level, as a researcher working with
questions of social difference in health and social care, I want to understand more
about where artistic representations might come from and what art can offer us in our
relationships to social difference and to otherness. My very practical concern is with
what art does in public presentations. Why does art appear to touch and move
audiences in ways that the written word and rationalist presentation doesn’t even
come close to? For example, since I have been using art in research presentations, I
have noticed that I receive far more feedback and also post-presentation requests for
poems or for extracts from short stories than I do for the academic papers on which
the presentations are based.
My third area of interest lies in reclaiming presentation as a vital, though often
neglected, part of the research process. It is rarely accounted for — financially,
conceptually or emotionally — by researchers and funders. It can come to represent
the validation of what is already known and the closure of the research process as
discovery and invention. Yet, what I want to demonstrate is that research can become
most alive in the field of presentation, carrying with it new understanding, ethical
responsibilities and corporeal exposure.
Using experiential examples and drawing upon ideas from psychoanalytic
aesthetics and post-structuralist theory, I will explore the form and content of my
artistic representations as encounters and events that can ‘make way’ (Caputo, 1997)
for what is beyond immediate recognition and realist representation. In many ways,
the structure of the article itself mimics the pull, tug and unevenness of the combining
of art with social theory, involving a sliding between personal experience, academic
and artistic literature and analysis.
ART, AESTHETICS AND RESEARCH 273

Creativity, care and social welfare

It is difficult to discuss the place and the value of creativity within the context of social
welfare without also recognising how the proliferation of market and consumerist
principles (Froggett, 2002) and the sheer intensity of caring work with inadequate
resources (Waddell, 1989; Jones et al., 2006) can suffocate and marginalise the spaces
that enable creativity and the aesthetic. Drawing attention to the value of creativity
and art within such organisational contexts can seem both trivial and grandiose — far
removed from the realities and constraints of ‘real world’ practice. It can feel
especially inappropriate and/or insensitive to talk about art, when so much of work
across the welfare services is concerned with human pain, frailty and suffering. As
Waddell (1989) has recognised with specific regard to social work, there are incessant
attacks upon emotional thinking in social work that is characterised by an inherent
paradox involving:

… the necessity of thinking in order to modulate pain, and the difficulty of doing
so because pain is so hard to bear, and the forces against thinking so recalcitrant
and becoming ever more so.
(Waddell, 1989, p. 32)

Such relations are also present in the palliative care field where much of my
research has been conducted and which involves work with people with life-limiting
illnesses and those who are dying. An environment of care marked by repeated losses
and grief, where trauma can be unspeakable and where bodies hurt, decompose,
unravel and fade. In addition to the complex physical, emotional and socio-economic
needs of patients and carers (Croft, 2004), palliative care professionals face very real
constraints of time in their work with dying people. As one hospice social worker
described the ‘pressures’ on her practice: ‘it’s now or never, basically’ (Gunaratnam,
1997, p. 172).
Yet somewhat paradoxically, in a field of care that is socially and symbolically
marginalised (Lawton, 2000) and that is emotion-rich and time-scarce, emotional
thinking and creativity can be a vital part of professional practice, not only through
structured activities such as art or music therapy (see Connell, 1998; Schroeder-
Sheker, 1994), but also through the enfolding of the artistic into everyday practices:
the researcher who ‘as a last resort’ spontaneously tells an agitated patient a story that
comforts and calms her (Stanworth, 2003, pp. 11–12); the psychologist who plays
Shubert’s ‘Ave Maria’ sung by Jesse Norman for a patient during a painful medical
procedure (De Hennezel, 1997, p. 6); the Japanese doctor who writes personalised,
traditional Japanese poems (tanka) for his patients (Tamba, 2006); the social worker
who after years of trying ‘very hard’ to acquire expertise in different areas of her
work, relaxes her desire for structure and certainty, recognising: ‘I am now
comfortable to work with mystery, to wait for the unspoken to emerge, to work with
image and metaphor’ (Mason, 2002, pp. 26–27).
The divisions between care and art and between rationality and sensuality in these
examples are blurred, but they also evoke a sense of extra-ordinary impulsiveness and
improvisation that appears outside of structure and forethought, yet is fully situated in
274 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

the context of palliative care. Qualities that are not dissimilar to my experiences of
using art in research. In focussing specifically upon my presentation of research
findings through art — photography, music, poetry, literature — I want to examine
how artistic representation can create opportunities for evoking and affirming some of
the poetics of human experience, that is: the non-measurable; the contradictory; that
which exceeds identity categories (Adorno, 1984); the ‘indescribable and the
undiscussible’ (Bar-on, 1999); and the hopefulness of a ‘not yet’ (Bloch, 1986).

Taking root: creativity and presentation

… poems happen. They spring up like weeds, growing through cement cracks,
under the most inhospitable of conditions, like leaves trapped in a fence or wall,
like fungi growing in crevices.
(Caputo, 1993, p. 183)

FIGURE 1 A tree growing through an abandoned house in the East End of London.

My use of art in research presentations has emerged over the past four years and was
significantly enabled by a move outside of academia and into the black voluntary
sector. Although my research focus has remained broadly the same, within the
voluntary sector I was presenting research to more socially differentiated and non-
specialist audiences. There is no doubt that I felt challenged in these new
ART, AESTHETICS AND RESEARCH 275

environments to find more accessible ways of communicating research and without

compromising complexity. However, I do not wish to give the impression that these
changes in style were wholly rational or controlled. While I prepare materials for
presentations, what actually happens during a presentation, both what I say/show and
how this is received/responded to is unpredictable. In this regard, I see the experience
of presenting in similar terms to Bourdieu’s (1990) notion of ‘practice’: as involving a
sensual, moment-by-moment unfolding of activity that is characterised by presence,
context and improvisation. What is especially risky and jeopardising about the practice
of public presentation is the role of judgement in linear time, that as Arendt (1978)
has pointed out is both unpredictable and irreversible.
In preparing research presentations, I often find that my thoughts and judgement
about what to include in a presentation are hijacked by a bubbling up of images,
music, and words or phrases, evoked and literal, from interviews and research
interactions. External and apparently unrelated events can have a similar effect and
can root themselves in my analysis of individual cases or topics. I feel called, or more
often whispered to and pestered, to take account of wispy and unformulated
connections. I can find myself drawn to certain images or to photograph something
(such as the tree growing out of the house in figure 11 that materialises the Caputo
quotation so beautifully) and not know why.
It is only at a later stage of assembling a presentation that these seemingly
haphazard fragments of thought and image can come together and make sense. At
other times the impulse for artistic representation springs from a profound irritation
at the inadequacy of my analysis, use of language or attempts to represent a fullness of
lives. I have a strong sense that I have missed or forgotten something. It is not
uncommon for the missing fragment to come to me in my sleep, so that in the
morning before a presentation I am scrambling through books or poetry, my own
writing or photographs to incorporate the missing item. Sometimes the mosaic of
these different representational forms can ‘work’, to the extent that I feel that I am
closer to what I had in mind (and heart). At other times the sense of an absent
presence continues to haunt a presentation.
What can connect these very different experiences is the delay and distance
between an event (such as an interview) and how artistic representations emerge or
pull me towards them. Using Arendt’s (1978) work on imagination to discuss
reflective thinking and practice in social welfare, Lynn Froggett (2002) has suggested
that it is precisely the withdrawal of the intellect and the holding of ambivalence that
can free creativity:

… all thinking involves a retraction of the mind from commonsense awareness of

the immediacy of the given world and is in some sense reflective in that the mind
becomes the ‘screen’ or ‘container’ where images and imageless thoughts are
formed and refashioned … Perhaps what we are referring to when we speak of
reflective thinking and practice is the ability to delay the return of thought to the
outer world long enough to turn things around, experiment with perspective,
infuse with emotion, manipulate, modify or enjoy them. This involves a tolerance
of ambiguity.
(Froggett, 2002, p. 179)
276 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

As Froggett suggests, creativity and ‘experimentation with perspective’ require a

holding off of interpretation and judgement, and a pacing, backwards and forwards,
between outer and inner worlds. For me, such movements are also intrinsically ethical
and corporeal. They involve an emotional and sensual vulnerability, an openness to be
touched by demands from the outside world and a surrendering of intellect, enabling
what the poet John Keats (1958, p. 193) termed ‘negative capability’ — a capacity ‘of
being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and
reason’. Relations expressed with great insight and power in the eighteenth century
poem ‘The Tables Turned’ by William Wordsworth (1798):

Sweet is the lore which nature brings.

Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things: —
We murder to dissect.

Enough of science and of art;

Close up these barren leaves.
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

Art as an event: accounting for creativity

What makes me think? Something gets under my skin, something disturbs me,
something elates me, excites me, bothers me, surprises me.
(Diprose, 2002, p. 132)

Ideas about how creativity can breakthrough the constraints of the intellect and
commune with intangible realities in external and internal worlds can be found in
pychoanalytic and post-structuralist theorising. There are strong resonances (but also
differences) between what the pyschoanalyst Bollas (1987) describes as the ‘unthought
known’ in his evocatively entitled book The Shadow of the Object and how the
philosopher Deleuze (1994) describes the generative role of writing:

One’s always writing to bring something to life, to free life from where it’s
trapped … a spark can flash and break out of language itself, to make us see and
think what was lying in the shadow around the words, things we were hardly
aware existed.
(Deleuze, 1994, p. 141)

Several post-structuralist theorists who have written about inspiration and

originality have done so through the conceptualisation of thought and writing as an
‘event’ (Lyotard, 1988; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), distinguished by the singular and
unpredictable thrown-togetherness of disparate, external elements (Clark, 2003).
Derrida, for example, has attributed his creativity to a process whereby:
ART, AESTHETICS AND RESEARCH 277

A sort of animal movement seeks to appropriate what always comes, always, from
an external provocation.
(Derrida, 1995, p. 352, emphasis in original)

The uncompromising emphasis (‘always’) given to the outside world in the first
stages of creativity, even when Derrida’s description of ‘a sort of animal movement’
is suggestive of an instinctive and embodied drive, is where differences lie between
post-structuralist and psychoanalytic theorists. From post-structuralist perspectives,
there has been a move to decentre and disperse creativity as being located solely in
the individual, thereby also challenging modernist and romantic notions of creativity
and art as emanating from exceptionality and genius. Unlike psychoanalytic theory,
the notion of creativity in post-structuralist scholarship is deconstructed to the
extent that its origins are always precarious and cannot be sited in any universalistic
terms.
For some theorists such as Deleuze and Derrida, creativity involves a responsive
and responsible opening out to opportunistic connections with the outside world that
together create and bring into being an ‘event’. Such openings are achieved through
language and carry with them the potential not simply to describe but also to
transform and invent new realities. As Clark (2003) has suggested with regard to
research, the flourishing of creativity is connected to openness and receptivity on the
part of the researcher:

… thinkers or researchers have to not only try and comprehend what is

happening but at the same time to open themselves to the transformative effects
of these happenings.
(Clark, 2003, p. 34)

In relation to difference, this brings with it ethical concerns: how we might ‘make
way’ (Caputo, 1997) for the unfamiliar and strange, whilst recognising that a
‘grasping’ encounter with difference and its translation into language and category —
itself a process that involves imagination (Castoriadis, 1987) — can ‘wipe out its
originality’ (Blanchot, 1971, p. 76).
From a different vantage point, psychoanalytic perspectives relocate and situate
creativity in interiority. As Glover (2000) has noted in relation to art, the
psychoanalytic method:

… involves an approach which is highly sensitive to the way in which meanings

are metaphorised through the play of language, as well as via the actual materials of
the visual arts.
(Glover, 2000, emphasis in original)

Despite their variations, psychoanalytic theories share a common concern with

the processes whereby creativity and aesthetics evoke, either through regression or
through construction, psycho-somatic and pre-verbal infantile experience. Winnicott
(1971) for example, whose work has had a significant influence on psychoanalytic
aesthetics, sites the origins of creativity in the infant–mother relationship: in the
278 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

mother’s adaptive presentation of the outside world to the baby at a pace when the
infant is ready to ‘find’ the external world. Central to this relationship is the mother’s
face — what the mother sees in the infant is reflected back, so that through her gaze
the infant sees/recognises something of his/herself. Winnicott describes this as ‘a
two-way process in which self-enrichment alternates with the discovery of meaning in
the world of seen things’ (p. 132). For Winnicott, this alternating movement between
subjective and objective realities is negotiated by a liminal ‘potential space’. Hand
(2000) has summarised the significance of this psycho-somatic and spatio-temporal
relationship to creativity in the assertion that:

When ‘what we create’ and ‘what we find’ are ‘linked up’ we are of course in the
realm of the transitional object, that ‘third area’ or ‘potential space’ in which play
and symbol-making begin, and continue throughout life.

My own experience of (re)creating art from research lies somewhere between an

awareness of the interplaying and partnerships between these external and internal
worlds. I have a sense that my use of art is a response to something that has a life in
the external world, that has meaning, histories and ‘truth/s’. It constitutes an ‘event’
as theorised by those such as Deleuze and Derrida. Nevertheless, the impulse to create
poems and short stories from my interviews (but also to do more ‘dry’ policy
oriented work), is related to complicated complicities and ambivalence in my position
as a minoritised woman in academia.
I am painfully aware of the inaccessibility of most academic writing (and as I am
writing this article) and of the elitism of academia, yet I also believe in the
transformative potential and power of ideas and social theory. In common with many
researchers, I have a sense of ethical responsibility as a witness to the testimony of
others (Frank, 1995). However, this concern accompanies a more ambiguous and
open-ended sense of obligation described by Bourdieu in his reflections on his own
class migration, from being the son of a farmer to an intellectual (Bourdieu &
Waquant, 1992, pp. 208–209):

I feel I have to be answerable — to whom, I do not know — for what appears to

me to be an unjustifiable privilege.

The artistic representations that I have been impelled to create are thus also the
result of intrapsychic processes. These processes are beyond my conscious
rationalisation, but at some level are caught up with an exploratory ‘drive towards
self-knowledge’ (Williams & Waddell, 1991) that is inseparable from the singularity
of biography and the patterning of social difference. So, while I use artistic
representations to communicate about others and external realities that I have
stumbled into, they are always also about me and offer uncertainties of embodiment,
judgement and relationship. This is why I believe that so many researchers can feel
uniquely vulnerable and exposed when using art (particularly their own art) in
presentations and why art can be marginalised in favour of more ‘objective’ and
rationalist approaches that deny practitioner subjectivity, social location and emotional
involvement.
ART, AESTHETICS AND RESEARCH 279

Rationality, art and a ‘crisis of representation’

Debates about the tensions and relationships between art and rational knowledge have
a long history, dating back to the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle. Drawing
upon these ideas, Adorno (1984), the social theorist and philosopher, has argued that
art offers neither a rational duplicate of the objective world, nor an inscription of the
‘psychic content’ and intents of the artist, rather it is a part of an interactive and
somewhat mysterious relation between objectivity and subjectivity that is conveyed
through ‘mimesis’:

Mimesis is the ideal of art, not some practical method or subjective attitude aimed
at expressive values. What the artist contributes to expression is his ability to
mimic, which sets free in him the expressed substance.
(Adorno, 1984, p. 164)

The acute contradictions of these relationships are animated through Adorno’s

dense theorising and use of language. His use of the word ‘mimesis’ for instance, as an
artistic ideal, combines imitation and repetition with otherness and singularity. It is
this slippery, paradoxical quality of art and its relationship to an unruly, autonomous
other, defying categorisation, identification and incorporation that is so relevant not
only to research and to professional practice but also to all human relationships.
We can get to know people (or to think that we know and understand others),
but there is always something unfathomable that exceeds and escapes categorisation,
knowing and representation. Something that can surprise and/or devastate,
particularly in times of late modernity, marked by the contingency of the social
and material worlds (Giddens, 1991; Thrift, 2004). In the social sciences this
predicament lies at the heart of what has been referred to as a ‘crisis of representation’
(Denzin, 1997) and has precipitated the exploration of new and experimental forms of
representing research, such as ‘messy texts’ (Marcus, 1994); multi-voiced textual
practices (Gunaratnam, 2001; Lather & Smithies, 1995); and performance art
(O’Neil, 2002). For some researchers this has meant a move away from ‘realist
practices of representation’ (Marcus, 1997, p. 410) in favour of the generation of
‘doubled practices’ where research:

… becomes a site of the failures of representation, and textual experiments are

not so much about solving the crisis of representation as about troubling the very
claims to represent.
(Lather, 2001, p. 201)

Aesthetics and ‘others’

Engendered in the move towards more artistic and experimental forms of doing and
representing research is a concern with difference, strangeness and otherness. In
relation to social inequalities and difference, it has been claimed that artistic
280 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

representation can subvert dominant ideologies (Benjamin, 1992) and convey hidden
or denied processes and subjugated experiences:

Works of art are ciphers of the social world — in art works we are able to access
the ‘sedimented stuff’ of society — what is normally unseen/hidden/overlooked.
The function of aesthetics is to reveal the unintentional truths about the social
world and to preserve independent thinking.
(O’Neil, 2002, pp. 78–79)

If art is capable of revealing ‘unintentional truths’ about others (both to audiences

and to researchers themselves), I have also found that art can simultaneously reflect
and engage audiences with the difficulties, confusions and responsibilities of
representing and encountering difference. Within the time constraints of a research
presentation, I have little doubt that a poem or an image is highly economic in
conveying some of the intricacies of difference and in enabling complex and
ambivalent interpretations. At the same time, art can maintain an ‘inaccessible
alterity’ (Lather, 2001, p. 214) and does not offer up otherness on a plate that can be
consumed through empathy or easy/lazy categorisation. In this sense, art and
creativity can also be constitutive of a hopefulness: the possibility of bringing about
new and uncertain ways of encountering difference and ‘what has never been’ (Bloch,
1986, p. 6).
An example is useful here. In one of my poems entitled ‘The Bed’ (Gunaratnam,
2005), the reader is invited to consider different and co-present representations of
‘race’, masculinity, bodies and emotions through the experience of illness:

Intent concern accompanied the glinting blade

that sliced from hip to hip.
A tributary
meandering down into dry recesses of manliness.
A cut so deep, so low
folds of distinction reopen.
Hard layers. Moist untouched spaces.
Shiny black skin. Striated muscle.
Prowess
flow into tired, needy sinews of a pure new
softness

In the poem, my commentary about ‘Edwin’ an African Caribbean man with

prostate cancer (‘He has a story to tell/ he doesn’t know/ how’), interweaves with
unmediated extracts from his interview account, culminating in an imagined scene
away from the research gaze. During our interview, Edwin had resisted my suggestion
that his move from the marital bed to sleeping on a settee since his wife’s admission
into a nursing home was due to feelings of loss (‘Do I miss her?/ He laughs’). Instead,
he emphasised that the settee was more convenient for his need for more frequent
urination during the night (‘I just roll off/ pee in the bucket/ it’s easier’). Whilst
grounded in the realities of an interview and a life, the poem contains elements of
ART, AESTHETICS AND RESEARCH 281

fantasy through which intersubjective relations in the interview are brought into play
and interfere with both my commentary and Edwin’s.
By using the poem in presentations I have been able to convey something of the
‘body-person’ of Edwin and a tussling of perspectives and interpretations which
maintains alterity through the insecurities of meaning surrounding the bed that were a
central part of the interview [see Gunaratnam (2003), Chapter 6 for an in-depth
analysis of the interview]. The poem also connects the subjective and intersubjective
with wider structural and historical processes by initiating a move towards restoring
an interiority to black masculinity (a ‘not yet’) in a social context where dominant
representations of black men are characterised by the hyper-physical and hyper-sexual
(St Louis, 2000; Gunaratnam, 2003):

In the shadows of nightfall,

he again feels the knife.
This time in his heart.
Quivering. Shimmering.
In this place of dislocation,
contorted emasculation
he marks his loss. Silently
with truth.
Rolling the saltiness around his mouth.
he leans forward slowly
pisses into the bucket.

Relieved.
(Gunaratnam, 2005, p. 121)

The capacity to feel and to live ‘in the question’ (Keats, 1958) of difference,
rather than to categorise and quantify its weight is challenging, particularly in social
welfare agencies where anti-discriminatory practice can be underwritten by
complicated emotions of anxiety, guilt, fear and shame (Gunaratnam & Lewis,
2001). Art does not necessarily by-pass these difficult emotional dynamics, but, it can
on occasions enable a responsiveness that is capable of modulating uncomfortable
psychic experiences whilst receiving uncertainty and ambivalence.
At one hospice based event at which I had used the poem ‘The Bed’ in my
presentation, an Indian woman bi-lingual advocate admonished me playfully in the
tea-break: ‘I can’t believe you said ‘‘pisses’’ in public’. By coincidence, this was also
the same person who I had interviewed some months before as a part of her palliative
care team. In returning to the transcript of that group interview in writing this article,
I was struck by a passage in the discussion that had turned to the advantages and
disadvantages of shared ethnicity. To the surprise of her team, the advocate had given
the following example as a disadvantage of commonalities in ethnicity:

… going to see an elderly Asian patient with prostate cancer, if you had a
particular list of questions you’re supposed to ask, I could not ask the question
about his sex life … I’m just about getting my head around questions like toilets
and things like that … and even that is a bit embarrassing sometimes.
282 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

By articulating these very ‘toilet’ experiences in public, I could see how the poem
triggered a defensive response of anxiety and embarrassment (no doubt further
intensified by me as an Asian woman) that did not allow for metaphorical meaning,
closing down an opening to the emotional pain that the poem traces. In contrast, soon
after the same presentation, I received an email from a male, Pakistani advocate who,
in referring to ‘The Bed’, wrote:

It reminded me of a couple of occasions when I was trying to ask someone certain

questions. He was replying in a similar style and I was trying to work out if he
was trying to hide his emotions by using practical problems as an excuse or was he
telling the truth … ? I think a bit of both maybe!

Aestheticising suffering?
Although art holds a potential to incite critical reflection, Adorno (1984), amongst
others, has warned of the limits of representation and the dangers of aestheticising
‘barbarism’, suffering and injustice. Adorno’s warnings, written with Auschwitz in
mind, articulate the risks of the immoral and arid distances that can open up between
works of art, the artist and the horrors of worldly realities; distances scorned and
deplored at the level of everyday life, by the doctor and poet William Carlos
Williams. In his poems, Williams assaults the reader with the ethical distinctions
between ‘ideas and action; between the abstract and the concrete; between theory
and practice; and not least between art and conduct’ (Cole, 1989, p. 193). For
instance, a Williams’ poem that I have used in presentations ‘Death’ (Williams, 1950),
confronts audiences with the fleshy realities of death (‘Put his head on/ one chair and
his/ feet on another and/ he’ll lie there/ like an acrobat’).
In the midst of the very beauty of the poem, Williams refuses to concede to the
aesthetic and pushes us closer towards the shame and existential terror that death and
dying people provoke (‘his eyes/ rolled up out of/ the light — a mockery/ which/
love cannot touch/ just bury it/ and hide its face/ for shame’). My experience of
using art, such as Williams’ poems to talk about the intersecting relationships between
death and difference is that art can evoke an emotional and sensual involvement with
difference that ‘erupts from the tension between the mimetic and the rational/
constructive’ (O’Neil, 2002, pp. 83–84) elements of a presentation. This is not to say
that such aesthetic experience is based upon a pleasure in the suffering of others. As
Meltzer and Harris-Williams (1988) have pointed out, all aesthetic experience
contains ‘aesthetic conflict’ based upon the deeply held tensions between beauty and
terror that emanate from infantile experiences of the mother’s body. Similarly, Bollas
(1987) has suggested that:

… aesthetic moments are not always beautiful or wonderful — many are ugly
and terrifying but nonetheless profoundly moving because of the existential
memory tapped.
(Bollas, 1987, p. 29)
ART, AESTHETICS AND RESEARCH 283

Against the backdrop of such theorising, I do not wish to give the impression that
art per se can be a more effective medium than say a research report or more traditional
presentation in communicating research findings, nor that it can close the distances
between an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. It is more the case that artistic representation can convey
meanings that are independent of linguistic systems and rationalist, sequential ordering
— this is why I believe that art can move us at an emotional and sensual level and have
an impact upon thinking. Moreover, art in its ambiguities, discontinuities and reversals,
can be more open than linguistic representation to holding the threatening dynamic
between ‘knowing’ and ‘not knowing’ that can involve denial, avoidance and
detachment from difficult or painful realities, forms of evasion that Cohen has named in
the wonderful term ‘pseudo-stupidity’ (Cohen, 2001).
This capacity to convey ambiguity and incoherence is why art is always a gamble in
communication and relationship for presenters and audiences, full of risk, chance and
possibilities of ‘hit and miss’. Somewhat paradoxically, I believe that it is through our
very awareness of its risks, omissions and limits, that art as opposed to more rationalist
research accounts can expose us to a fuller relationship to otherness and to what is
unknown and unfathomable. It is this contradictory relationship that the novelist and
philosopher Maurice Blanchot (1993) describes when he considers the affinities between
our attempts to ‘grasp’ difference and otherness (p. 43) and the ‘eternal torment of our
language when its longing turns back toward what it always misses’ (p. 36).

Conclusion
In a recent project on palliative care, older people and ethnicity (Gunaratnam, 2006)
involving group interviews with health and social care professionals, I was struck by
the recurring metaphor of tightrope walking used to describe professionals’ feelings
about intercultural care. The metaphor with its evocations of a perilous balancing act,
using interacting combinations of knowledge, vulnerability, danger, risk, intuition and
skill has some relevance to my use of art in public presentations. This vulnerability has
different facets. It involves ‘the tug of our vain selves’ (Cole, 1989, p. 195) that is a
part of the fear of public ‘failure’ and the sense of spectacular humiliation such failure
can entail. It involves exposing something of the highly personalised coincidence of
external and internal events that lie beneath creative moments, whilst taking the
chance that such coincidence may have broader resonance. It also means some level of
engagement with the presuppositions of public presentation that include performance,
authority, persuasion and illusions of connectedness; an engagement that is coupled
with an ever-present awareness that once a presentation is over the ‘speaker and the
audience rightfully return to the flickering, cross-purposed, messy irresolution of
their own unknowable circumstances’ (Goffman, 1981, p. 195).
The tightrope walking metaphor is not without its limitations however. In
producing research presentations, I am aware that for my research to have an impact
— ‘to make a difference’ — it must engage its ‘target audiences’ and within
constraints of time and relationship. I am therefore concerned with questions of
accessibility, relevance and economy. Yet, unlike the tightrope walker, I am not
wholly concerned with playing to the immediate audience. I have obligations to my
284 JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

research participants, to the density of their stories and to the meanings of their lives
and deaths which always far exceed, but must by necessity fit into the ‘sound bite’
opportunities provided by public presentations. It is this positioning between an open-
ended responsibility to others and a set of disciplinary practices with their own
demands and constraints that Spivak has recognised as being ‘caught between an
ungraspable call and a setting-to-work’ (1994, p. 23). Creativity and art do not lessen
this taut ethical position of being ‘caught’ any more than rationalist presentations do.
Rather, art in its open ambiguities and limitations can reconnect researchers and
audiences to the precariousness of internal and external worlds and to fundamental
questions of what can be communicated and understood, as well as what is ‘not yet’
(Bloch, 1986).
What I have learned through my experiences and experiments with using art in
public presentations — through my breathing, nervous hands and faltering voice — is
that the value of aesthetic experience — creativity and receptivity — can be less
about the representational qualities of a medium and is more about the mutual social,
emotional and corporeal vulnerability that connects us to one another. A vulnerability
that is all too often resisted, denied or avoided in research and in professional
practice.

Where is the love?/ the love/ the love? …

Note
1 The photograph in figure 1 was taken with Steven McDermott as part of the
‘Sociology Live’ training programme at Goldsmith’s College, 2007.

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Yasmin Gunaratnam is a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Ethnicity and
Health at the University of Central Lancashire. Address: Centre for Ethnicity and
Health, University of Central Lancashire, Preston PR1 2HE, UK. [email:
[email protected]]