Practicing Art/Science

Experiments in an Emerging Field

Philippe Sormani, Guelfo Carbone, Priska Gisler, Philippe Sormani, Guelfo Carbone, Priska Gisler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351708074
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Over the last two decades, multiple initiatives of transdisciplinary collaboration across art, science, and technology have seen the light of day. Why, by whom, and under what circumstances are such initiatives promoted? What does their experimental character look like - and what can be learned, epistemologically and institutionally, from probing the multiple practices of "art/science" at work?

In answer to the questions raised, Practicing Art/Science contrasts topical positions and insightful case studies, ranging from the detailed investigation of "art at the nanoscale" to the material analysis of Leonardo's Mona Lisa and its cracked smile. In so doing, this volume brings to bear the "practice turn" in science and technology studies on the empirical investigation of multifaceted experimentation across contemporary art, science, and technology in situ. Against the background of current discourse on "artistic research," the introduction not only explains the particular relevance of the "practice turn" in STS to tackle the interdisciplinary task at hand, but offers also a timely survey of varying strands of artistic experimentation.

In bringing together ground-breaking studies from internationally renowned scholars and upcoming researchers in sociology, art theory and artistic practice, as well as history and philosophy of science, Practicing Art/Science will be essential reading for practitioners and professionals in said fields, as well as postgraduate students and representatives of higher education and research policy more broadly.

Part I

Positions

1 Engaging performative contradiction

Introducing the rhetorics of practice and method to artist researchers

Mick Wilson

1 Introduction

One of the recurrent features of doctoral research education is the task of introducing early stage researchers to the challenges of methodology. The task of disclosing the researcher’s reasoning in respect of the choice of a viable and appropriate way of conducting a given enquiry is specifically foregrounded within most doctoral award descriptors – especially national descriptors used in European Union countries and predicated on the Dublin Descriptors.¹ In the domain of artistic practices, very often this opening of a discussion on method choice is the point at which controversies emerge. Within the doctoral student body these debates arise on the theme of the radical difference between artistic and scientific practices, on the claimed incommensurability across disciplines, or on the presumed opposition between artistic and academic modes of understanding and activity. The present chapter is informed by my experience over the last decade in developing several different doctoral-level courses specifically addressed to the task of introducing early-stage researchers in the visual and performing arts to methodological reflection.² The chapter seeks both to describe and to problematise a pedagogical strategy for negotiating the questions of methodology and disciplinary difference in this context.

The basic premise of the pedagogical strategy under discussion, is that through establishing that discourses on method have a genealogy that encompasses a very dispersed range of “artistic” and “scientific” practices – and through historicising the opposition of “science” and “art” – it is possible to problematise established habits of disciplinary differentiation and create the conditions for a critical renegotiation of methodological questions by the doctoral student. The key insight proposed is that talk of method (or indeed of “anti-method”) is not the exclusive propriety of any one domain of practice, and that attending to the diversity of ways in which practice is rhetoricised, enables the researcher to explore generative potential in the (knotted) entanglements of suasive discursivities and practical comportments.

The chapter is divided into six sections. The second section begins with outlining the wider context of the development of debates on the nature of research through artistic practices and the emergence of doctoral research across the arts in recent decades. This is followed by a short section on the way questions of methodology play in these debates, and the particular importance accorded to reflection on method in research education. In the fourth section, a pedagogical strategy adopted for teaching a basic course on research method for artistic practitioners is outlined, primarily through identifying the question-tasks proposed to the doctoral student and the schematic rehearsal of historicisation of method discourses as proposed through the course materials. In the fifth section some problems with this research pedagogy are identified, and some emergent responses to them through modifying the pedagogical strategy in question, are articulated. Finally, by way of conclusion some experimental avenues to re-orient the practice-theory nexus of methodological reflection in practice-based research education for artists are indicated.

2 The development of research through artistic practice

This section summarily outlines the multiple genealogies and contexts of artistic research and artistic research education in a way that seeks to indicate how the notion of artistic research is contested; it also aims at identifying some of the different factors underpinning the energetic contest of meanings and values – and specifically of method rhetorics – which characterises contemporary artistic research education. The argument is not simply that the genealogy of artistic research needs to be considered as a uniform development within the arts, but also that we have strong grounds for not limiting the artistic research debate to its determination by institutional and policy imperatives emerging from governmental educational and cultural planning discourses. This outline of artistic research as a contested zone also provides a context for one key area of dispute, namely the contestation of method discussions with respect to artistic research education.

The applicability of doctoral study to different artistic practices is integral to the question of artistic research, and as such one of the key areas of debate and practical experimentation in higher arts education in recent decades. This debate has a long history, arguably going back to the 1960s and earlier. However, in the past two decades, there has been an intensification of this debate and a wide expansion in the variety of third-cycle (i.e., doctoral-level) platforms available to artists in different disciplines and domains, including performing arts, film and audio-visual media and contemporary fine art. This may be seen as consistent with the broader pattern of massification in doctoral education during the last decade, which has entailed a very large expansion of the number of students pursuing doctoral-level studies across most disciplines, akin to the earlier massification of undergraduate studies in Europe from the 1970s through to the late 1990s (for a discussion of massification of post-secondary education and its interconnections with wider change processes in higher education, see Altbach et al. 2017; Kwiek & Kurkiewicz 2012).

It will be helpful to make three basic observations at this point. Firstly, the wider debates on artistic research have most often taken an abstracted epistemological (“What does knowing mean in art?”) and/or ontological (“What is knowledge?” “What is art?” “How is art different from science?”) and/or politico-critical form (“What is valorised in artistic research?” “What form of labour is being proposed?”).³ We may term this as a prioritisation of “arguments from first principle”. Secondly, due to patterns of institutional resourcing and the ways in which research opportunities for artists have been created in the last two decades, the doctoral level of studies has operated as the primary site of contestation as to the nature of research within artistic practices and as to the institutional arrangements appropriate to developing the research cultures of different arts practices. Thirdly, while a variety of doctoral-level education already exists, catering to artists employing a wide range of models, practices and organisational modes, it is notable that this research pedagogical practice has been relatively under-represented in the wider debates. This is to say that paradoxically, a research domain that rhetorically announces itself as essentially rooted and oriented to “practice” has underplayed the significance of the actually existing practice of research education and concrete formally instituted research projects, in favour of according more attention to generic pronouncements on first principle.⁴

The prominence of doctoral research education as a key site for contestation is partly (though not primarily) a consequence of the Bologna Process, the attempt to coordinate higher education across Europe and the wider policy significance attached to research education in general (in terms of “knowledge production”, “intellectual property”, “cognitive capital” and the contribution of research to innovation and development agendas). It is also partly to do with the way the question of doctoral education has been prioritised within the policy framework of human capital formation now typically employed by contemporary nation-states. This is an emerging global norm heavily influenced by the role of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the increasing hegemony of neoliberal economic instrumentalism in all policy areas.⁵

The debate on the doctorate in the creative arts may sometimes appear to be permanently trapped inside an argument about basic legitimacy. The question “Can or should a doctoral research process be applied to the creative arts?” has surfaced repeatedly. This discussion slowly began to appear in the second half of the 20th century, and it intensified to become especially prominent in the first decade of the 21st century. Some countries and disciplines now have almost two decades of experience of doctoral-level study through arts practices (e.g., Australia, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Sweden) and some countries and disciplines have only recently entered substantially into these debates about whether there is a need or a desire to develop the third-cycle award (e.g., Germany and France). This means that the discussion has often returned to such first principles as: “What is a doctorate in the arts?” “Can there be such a thing?” “What does research mean in the arts?” “Should it be ‘taught’ within an academic institution?” “How is ‘art’ different from ‘science’?” In addition to this, the debate has also been shaped by concrete experience as countries such as Australia, Belgium, England, Finland, Hungary, Portugal, Scotland and Spain have implemented (widely different) models for doctoral-level studies across such disciplines as architecture, contemporary art, dance, design, music and theatre, leading to the development of new questions in the debate.⁶

As the debate on the doctoral level of studies for the arts has intensified over the past decade, there has been a move towards identifying the ideological stakes of the discussion so as to question the broader changes taking place in educational policy and practice. A recurring theme in such debates has been the impact of ideological and economic arguments about the nature and function of higher education (Holert 2009). Ideological approaches to education may be described as having a dual impact/effect. On the one hand, higher arts education has been subject to a wide range of interventions such as: institutional mergers; new and revised university laws; the introduction of new public management models; new financing models, including student loan systems in some countries; performance metrics and the re-calibration of educational work as learning “experience” and service provision. On the other hand, state subsidies for the arts have in many countries diminished; proxy markets have been created, advocating competitive, market-like behaviours for cultural “providers”; private sector organisational models have been implemented as normative; and cultural policy rhetoric has been colonised with terms such as “cultural industries”, “creative economy”, “creativity”, “clients” and “prosumers”.

The re-ordering of higher arts education has multiple conjunctions folded into it – the development of the doctoral level is but one of these – and, as such, it touches upon both the instrumentalising and the (putatively) emancipatory tendencies within the contemporary state’s approaches to contemporary art and education. The question, for arts educators and researchers, then becomes: “How do we work with these contradictions rather than pretend that we are completely free of them?” This is difficult, especially if these contradictions are to be kept “live” and actively avowed in our dialogue. Indeed, it would seem important to acknowledge that there is a considerable emotional charge to the debates about the doctoral level of studies in the creative arts.

While the emergence of the debate on artistic research is often attributed to the effects of the Bologna Process on higher arts education, and the focus on the doctorate in the arts this enabled, this should not be accepted at face value. An engagement with the doctoral level was a relatively late development within the Bologna Process.⁷ It would seem more appropriate to regard the question of artistic research as emerging from several strands of development. So that in addition to lines of development that are extrinsic and shaped by wider institutional and policy changes, there are contributory lines of development that are intrinsic to artistic practice. In modernity, tendencies to foreground artistic practice as a mode of enquiry have emerged within the various artistic disciplines, including audio-visual media, design, film, fine art, literature, and music. Within the visual arts, for example, the emergence of conceptualism in the 1960s had a decisive impact, making the question of art as a form of cognitive activity central to practices within both certain art academies and different institutional sites of the international art world. Indicative of this development are initiatives such as Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT, 1965–1981)⁸ and the Artist Placement Group (APG, 1966–1979).⁹ The exemplary case of Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–1979) may also be cited here, as it indicates the way in which an art project was explicitly formulated as a practice of enquiry at the intersection of a political project (feminism) and an ongoing artistic programme (the examination of the exhibition as semiotic system) operating within the infrastructure of contemporary art, and not primarily positioned within an academic institutional context. This takes place decades before the emergence of Bologna or a prioritisation of doctoral education within the arts.¹⁰ This exemplary instance may serve to counter the recurrent suggestion that the conducting of enquiry through art-making is a recent anomaly or a prerogative rooted exclusively within the protocols of the academy or university.

Other developments in neighbouring fields had a similar, though differently determined, impact. Research in ethnomusicology, for example, contributed to a debate on performance practice as a research action, again bringing together the consideration of artistic practices, research and the generation of new knowledge (Béhague 1984; Nettl and Russell 1995; Solis 2004). A key area of enquiry here was the topic of improvisation, the study of which requires performance as an integral activity within the research process, and so the turn to improvisation engendered a context in which the role of the performer-researcher emerged very clearly. Within literature, the emergence of the novel in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the rise of various realisms and naturalisms in the 19th century, generated a very different context for addressing creative writing as a form of knowledge practice.¹¹ This was complemented by the question of historical writing and the recognition that historical scholarship had often produced historical knowledge as a work of literature (White 1978: 41–62). In the 20th century, the emergence of the study of literature as a separate university discipline, and the co-evolution of new critical and theoretical paradigms (such as Russian “Formalism”, Anglophone “New Criticism”, Francophone “Écriture Feminine” and Postcolonial “Subaltern Studies”), further complicated the ways in which the writing of literature and the conduct of research might converge or be differentiated (Scholes 1998).

In theatre, the engagement with anthropology and concepts such as liminality in the 1960s and 1970s had a decisive effect in generating a context in which artistic practice and a concrete and widely shared research problem became intertwined.¹² Within the field of film practice, both the increased emphasis on psychoanalytic models in criticism and theory in the 1960s and 1970s and the emergence of various politicised documentary practices contributed to a renewal of film as a self-conscio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Experimenting with “art/science”?
• PART I: Positions
• PART II: Practices
• PART III: Implications
• Index