Mobilizing the “Multimangle”: Why New Materialist Research Methods in Public Participatory Art Matter

Abstract

This research study is focused on new materialist modes of social inquiry and in particular the material-discursive practices that situate all bodies, human and nonhuman, in relations of matter and mattering. The present study investigates the work of the Mobile Art Studio (MAS), a transitory creative research lab that brings participatory art into pub-lic space to develop greater community engagement with issues of social justice. We explore MAS's recent performance, Reconstruction (2016), as a case study for new materialist arts-based methodologies that decenter the human as an exclusive maker of meaning, shifting instead to focus on the relationships between humans, lived spaces, and creative media. We situate this discourse within Leisure Studies as it is a vital site for developing a broadly interdisciplinary scholarly conversation on arts-based practi-ces oriented toward the public good. The paper first outlines how Reconstruction (a sculptural, mixed media, sitespecific, participatory, screen-based project) can elucidate posthuman understandings of the subject/object divide as a multimangle. That is, Reconstruction's research design and collected data reveals a research space constructed through the contingent relations between public architecture, the performance installation, the art materials, and participants. These relations offer an understanding of space as agential, containing multiple temporalities, materialities, and affective resonances. We then argue that creative intra-actions with such spaces produce knowledges that are scarcely, if at all, represented in the academy.