The story of Art Practice as Research begins with artists who consider their practice to be incisive, robust, and fearless and who are very willing to explore all kinds of theories and practices of inquiry in all types of settings. This site opens up portals that expand what is unique about art practice as research because new understandings are created from what we don’t know, and this profoundly changes what we do know.

Graeme Sullivan.

The past year has seen a major change in the setting where the ArtPracticeasResearch.com is housed and the context shaping updates about issues about studio-based research in the visual arts. Much of the original material generated by the site is being retrieved from archives and will be re-posted. New resources will be identified as they become available and an active blog and information service again put in place.

On a personal level, I have moved institutions and in August 2010 accepted the position as Director, School of Visual Arts, Penn State University. The previous 11 years at Teachers College Columbia gave me the chance to work with an array of extraordinary students who helped us re-think what graduate research in art and art education can be in the US. The lure of returning to an art school located within a large research university was too hard to resist. Having settled in amid another extraordinary group of faculty and students the hope is that even more possibilities will emerge for imagining what graduate education can be about.

I’m looking forward to catching up.

Graeme.

In Graeme’s recent visit to lecture on his research and arts practice to Department of Art students at Syracuse University, Graeme and Mary stayed over with Me’Shae and I and there was an opportunity to revisit his reservation. Once again, time was too short. But on the morning they were getting ready to drive back to State College, Graeme mentioned that to delineate “the artistic method” as I was attempting to do is to wrestle with loaded terminology, given its proximity to “the scientific method.” He suggested that I would have to make a strong argument to claim the word “method” for the arts-based research paradigm, or work to redefine it (to my mind, in the same way that Graeme has wrestled the terms “empirical” and “rigor” away from the sole ownership of the sciences.

I took his caution to heart. Not long after that, I woke one morning to find myself engaging in a thought experiment. What if the artistic method is best understood as a null hypothesis, just as the definition of art is actually a null definition?—in both cases, the prevailing hypothesis or definition is presumed to be valid until new evidence brought to bear nullifies it for an alternative hypothesis or definition. Like “the definition of art,” each concept of an artistic method is thus a place-holder for the next, which is entirely in keeping with a paradigm of knowledge that purposes the creation of possibilities over the proving of certainties. Clearly, there is no single definition of art. But few are fully aware that there is also no one scientific method. The idea of “the scientific method” is part of a powerful narrative mythology about the preeminent place of science and the Western mind in the pantheon of knowledge-making–when the truth of the matter is that scientific practice is actually a wide body of methodological approaches developed over centuries, with many contributors from across the world. (This Wikipedia link is useful in detailing the array of contributions toward “a scientific method.”) Just the same, when I refer now to “an artistic method,” I am not suggesting a single definition but a long-known and widely practiced iterative process, akin to the history of the scientific method, a system of practices by which to: 1) generate myriad methodologies for investigating phenomena, 2) create new knowledge or processes, and 3) correct or integrate prior knowledge and processes across an array of disciplines and content areas.

I hope this thinking begins to address Graeme’s concern.

~James Haywood Rolling, Jr.

A clue to the future role of process, method and technique seems to me to be best found in the studio thinking we do – and this can be in artist’s studios, classrooms, on the street, or in your cellphone. The point is that the space for thinking is always expanding. But at the heart of it we do our most imaginative thinking through the materials and processes we know that are part of the rich family of atelier traditions and its newer digital cousins; across the multiple languages when visual forms are created and interpreted, and within and between the many and varied personal and public contexts and settings where the things we make can be seen as creative and critical acts that can have an impact on individuals and communities.

What I didn’t mention in my response was to refer to a slide in the talk (click here) that identified some of the ways that studio thinking can be opened up when we look closely at what artists do; the way they think to open things up; the ideas that they offer through the things they make; and what can happen when we take flight with them. And in writing this I am reminded of some comments James Haywood Rolling (another faculty member at Syracuse) made in a panel presentation at the recent CAA conference. James described several distributed and interactive ways that  artist-researchers give form to ideas and knowledge through artistic inquiry and some of these are anticipated and embodied before and during the process of artmaking, and some occur after the event as outcomes and interpretations are enacted in broader social contexts. So questions of process and product enliven our respect for tradition and method, yet encourage the unanticipated because that’s what happens when knowledge and imagination meet possibility.

A more substantive concept that was seen by one of the panel members as a problem yet to be faced by those advocating advanced research degrees in studio art was the ongoing difficulty in justifying the outcomes as “repeatable knowledge.” With a commonly cited goal of research being the “production of knowledge,” the expectation that outcomes of research can be repeated and independently replicated is a long-time gold standard of scientific research. The belief that all research should yield “repeatable knowledge” and that visual arts therefore has to address this criterion comes from arguments made over twenty years ago when the possibility of studio-based Ph.D. degrees were first mooted. The task at the time was to demonstrate that for artists who worked in the academy, what they did in their studios could be seen as “equivalent” to the research undertaken throughout the wider university. Understandably this raised considerable debate and some curious attempts to fit square pegs into round holes. It was also an initial step in opening the debate and got us a seat at the table.

But ‘equivalence’ is a rationale that is not sustainable. Acceptance into any community, such as a research culture, where acceptance is determined by those who currently control the conditions for inclusion or exclusion will always yield an unequal alliance. Unless artists whose motivation and expertise takes them into the academy are able to claim a seat at the table in terms of what art ‘does’ then we are destined to remain marginalized. Being on the edge is, of course, a great place from which to see “in and out’ at the same time. But if there is a belief that artists have a critical and creative role in the larger debates and dilemmas facing institutions and communities, then there is a crucial need to take control of the language of change.

There is no better place for this to happen than in art schools within university settings. Re-imagining the role of visual arts in these ‘institutional artworld’ spaces is already changing the landscape in many places. It can be seen in the slowly evolving, but adventurous work of students who have decided that a degree beyond the MFA is a place where ideas can be given a mature, rigorous work out that enhances rather than limits their creative capacities. And it is also evident in the questions posed and post-disciplinary attitudes present in the young generation of art students who are currently re-visioning the MFA itself. And this is global, not merely local. It seems to me that they deserve better leadership in opening up opportunities to continue to shape what it is that artists can do in the 21^st century, and it is certainly not terminal.

PS: To read more about the background to the emergence of practice-led research degrees in visual arts see Chapter 3, Practice and Beyond, in my text, Art practice as Research: Inquiry in Visual Arts. A brief summary can be found in the Menu Bar>From the Book.

For more discussion about issues such as ‘equivalence’ and other arguments mounted to support practice-based degrees university settings see my chapter, Making Space: The Purpose and Place of Practice-Led Research. In Hazel Smith, H. & Dean, R. (2009) (Eds.), Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts (pp. 41-65). Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. A PDF can be downloaded for Menu Bar>Resources.

Routledge_Companion_to_Research_Flyer

>>I am moving on: my new project is about methods on how to domesticate the unknown, exploit randomness, figure out how to live in a world we don’t understand very well. While most human thought (particularly since the enlightenment) has focused us on how to turn knowledge into decisions, my new mission is to build methods to turn lack of information, lack of understanding, and lack of “knowledge” into decisions—how, as we will see, not to be a “turkey”.<<

Alternate Path for Teachers Gains Ground

__Under the Regents’ proposal, which the board is expected to approve on Tuesday and does not need the approval of the State Legislature, Teach for America and similar groups could create their own master’s programs, and the Regents would award the master’s degree, two powers that are now the sole domain of academia.

The Regents are looking for academic programs that would be grounded in practical teaching skills and would require teachers to commit to working in a high-needs school for four years.__