An Artistic Method
I wanted to use this forum to address a reservation Graeme had about a term I was using in my presentation at the recent CAA conference he mentioned in an earlier posting. I was describing the arts-based research paradigm and repeatedly made reference to what I called “the artistic method.” Time was short at the end of all the panelist presentations and in Graeme’s response, he said that he felt compelled to put the word “method” in quotes and it was something he wanted to talk about with me later.
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.
