Practice as Research in the Arts

Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances

Robin Nelson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137282910
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

At the performance turn, this book takes a fresh 'how to' approach to Practice as Research, arguing that old prejudices should be abandoned and a PaR methodology fully accepted in the academy. Nelson and his contributors address the questions students, professional practitioner-researchers, regulators and examiners have posed in this domain.

Part I

Robin Nelson on Practice as Research

1

Introduction: The What, Where, When and Why of ‘Practice as Research’

Why research?

People engage in research from a variety of motives but, ultimately, the rigours of sustained academic research are driven by a desire to address a problem, find things out, establish new insights.¹ This drive is apparent in the arts throughout history, but it is relatively recently that it has been necessary to posit the notion of arts ‘Practice as Research’. Time was when there were arts practices, on the one hand, and ‘academic’ research on the other.² Artists engaging in inquiry through their practices may not have thought of what they did as ‘research’, even though they were aware of an exploratory dynamic to address issues and achieve insights.³ The term arts ‘Practice as Research’ would probably not have been coined had artists not got involved with modern higher education institutions in respect of programmes of learning, particularly at PhD level.⁴ The emphasis on studio practice in art schools or academies has found itself in tension with university protocols in respect of degree-awarding powers and the question of what constitutes knowledge in research.

Among the arts, literature, music and the visual arts have historically been nominated as figuring more in respect of academies, whereas conservatory schools for dance or theatre have been more typically associated with vocational training (and perhaps with entertainment, as Carlson suggests below) than knowledge-production.⁵ While the scope of this book embraces all the arts, the emphasis is on the performing arts, in part because less has been published on them in respect of ‘Practice as Research’ (hereafter PaR) than the Visual Arts. Also the ephemerality of the performing arts poses particular challenges to their inclusion in an already contested site of knowledge-production. Numerous instabilities in the diversity and ephemerality of performing arts practices pose particular challenges to ideas of fixed, measurable and recordable ‘knowledge’. At the same time, however, the concept of ‘performance’ has contributed a new conceptual map – and mode of knowing – to the academy and to research. In McKenzie’s formulation, ‘performance’ ‘will be to the twentieth and twenty-first century what discipline was to the eighteenth and nineteenth, that is an onto-historical formation of power and knowledge’.⁶ Indeed, ‘performance’ and ‘the performative’ have become influential concepts in a number of academic disciplines.⁷

Once artists of all kinds entered today’s HEIs, and it was possible – at least in principle – for arts, media, and other practices to be recognised as knowledge-producing and submitted as research for PhDs and professional research audits (RAE, REF, RQF), a complex web of questions about processes and protocols began to be woven.⁸ Even now, however – after much debate over two decades, several conferences and two AHRC-funded investigations of the phenomenon in the UK and equivalent initiatives in some other places – PaR remains for some either elusive (in that they are unclear how to go about it) or incomprehensible (in that arts approaches are thought not to be readily reconciled with established conceptions of ‘academic research’).⁹ For a range of very different reasons, different constituencies prefer to dismiss the idea. For some arts practitioners, the requirement to do a little more to articulate their research inquiry is an unwarranted imposition from beyond their culture. For some established arts scholars, PaR is not accepted as a respectable methodology and is seen perhaps to tarnish newly-established arts and media subdisciplines.¹⁰ For academics in non-arts disciplines with established methodologies and (quantitative and qualitative) methods, PaR is at once both a challenge to some of the fundamental assumptions about ‘research’ and ‘knowledge’, and another competitor for a limited pot of research funding. Confronted with this complexity, some find it convenient permanently to defer understanding in a world where everything is deemed to be fragmented, relative and undecidable.

There is, however, a burgeoning literature (see the Bibliography) on PaR to reflect ‘an international and spreading phenomenon, with strong established or emergent movements of postdoctoral and postgraduate practitioner-researchers’.¹¹ The literature is dominated by the presentation of case studies which do not always bring out clearly what constitutes research (as subtly distinct from professional practice). Furthermore, case studies do not typically aim to illuminate a generic methodology distinguishing the approach of practitioner-researchers nor offer an exemplary pedagogy to support the development of new practitioner-researchers. An agglomeration of case studies does emphasize that very richness and diversity of PaR enquiries which has made it difficult to establish the commensurability between projects required, for good or ill, in institutionalized research culture. Indeed, Kershaw’s summary remark, that PaR ‘thrives on a proliferation of types of creative and investigative difference that always-already will tend to resist the incorporation into meta-schemes or systems of knowledge’, retains an attractive radical sonority in this context.¹² But it might not best serve students and tutors struggling to get PaR accepted within their project, institution or territory. Limited attention has been paid to the institutional constraints that in some instances have hindered the development of PaR.¹³ These range from strong academic traditions which privilege theory, to divisions between theory and practice in the very structures of education (university vs. art school/conservatoire), and regulatory frameworks which in some instances effectively exclude PaR by inscribing ‘the scientific method’ into research regulations.

The literature also includes some complex conceptual work on the problematics of PaR. This book resonates with much of what has been written, in particular the common aim to challenge the schism in the Western intellectual tradition between theory and practice and to valorize what I shall call ‘praxis’ (theory imbricated within practice – see Chapter 3), or what some call intelligent practice or material thinking.¹⁴ Though this book explores new modes of knowing, it notes and puts aside (‘parks’ in the philosophical sense of marking an aporia) some of the limit paradoxes which propose that practitioner-researchers may well ‘have no coherent epistemology upon which to ground their multifarious activities’.¹⁵ In an elegant and sophisticated essay, Simon Jones has teased out the many conceptual paradoxes of PaR and suggested that it

moves outwards in two opposing directions simultaneously, towards two limit cases – the interior void of the soul and the exterior void of absolute possibility, rather than inwards toward a common ground or sense of knowing.¹⁶

Piccini and Rye have in parallel concluded that, unless praxis can be directly experienced, assessment is typically made by way of documentation that always inevitably (re)constructs the practice such that the thing itself remains elusive.¹⁷

These are compelling reservations about the PaR initiative and would seem at first sight to militate against it on principled grounds. But, informed by these insights, it is possible to make a significant distinction between documentation (by way of translation) of a practice and documentation of a research inquiry based in practice. Where, typically, the visual arts, including screen media, produce (relatively) stable objects, literature produces book-based publications and music frequently has scores, the practices of the other performing arts leave only traces. Where some form of durable record is institutionally required of research findings, the documentation of practice may at worst displace the thing itself (see Chapter 4). Indeed, Kershaw notes, ‘in practice-as-research communities of the twenty-first century “documentation” has been conflated with ‘evidence” and “document” with audiovisual material’.¹⁸

In the context of arts peer review in the UK, however, an understanding has developed such that few now mistake the audio-visual document for the performance itself. Indeed Piccini and Rye recount fresh approaches to documentation which afford a ‘telling otherwise’ and keep alive ‘a sense of “what might be”, rather than a fixity of what was’ (see Chapter 4).¹⁹ Documentation of a product serves as just one kind of evidence (with an indexical aspect, albeit reconstructed) in the multi-mode approach advocated in this book in which different kinds of evidence serve to confirm the findings of a consciously articulated research inquiry. Moreover, in rigorously critiquing PaR methodology, we should recognize – as argued in Chapter 3 – that in the twenty-first century no methodology or epistemology can be taken to yield an unmediated, self-evident truth.

While it revisits some key debates, this book takes a more pragmatic approach, aiming to extend the acceptance of PaR within ‘the academy’. It offers examples of particular challenges and opportunities in specific aspects of projects rather than general case studies. Though it does not aspire to a meta-scheme, it develops a model in which a diverse range of enquiries conducted by means of arts and performance practices might be framed. It has four additional purposes:

• first, to afford (quite directly in Chapter 2) a ‘how to’ approach to PaR;

• second, to propose a distinctive pedagogy for PaR, operable at all levels of heuristic learning and leading into a methodology of research – fleshing out the paradigm of ‘performative research’ posited by Haseman;²⁰

• third, to consider a range of institutional constraints through reflection on undergraduate as well as postgraduate arts education contexts; and

• fourth, through a dialogic engagement with different ‘territories’ to try to understand why and how PaR has variously burgeoned or been met with resistance in different parts of the world.

While the book will take on the complexity of things – and indeed show some advantages to PaR of the contemporary intellectual context at the ‘performance turn’ – the aim is to be as clear and direct as possible. A direct approach is taken to articulating what ‘Practice as Research’ is, how the concept came about and how working practices have now established a number of protocols.

The directness is achieved in Part I by a single-authored account drawing from, rather than explicating, actual examples in my own experience, substantially in the performing arts and screen media (though also embracing visual arts and writing projects), and mainly in the UK. Though the effect of this approach is to have a UK-centric – if not a Nelson-centric – bias, I call upon a range of voices to assist in making the case. By the single-authored means in Part I, however, it is possible to be less broadly illustrative and more reductive about what has been proven to work and what has proved difficult, if not disastrous, for some students in the domain. It is in this sense that the book in part constitutes a practical ‘how to’ guide. The writing of the book is prompted by participants in the many seminars on ‘Practice as Research in the Arts and Media’ to which I have contributed in the UK and abroad, who have proposed that I should write up what I have articulated. Repeatedly, colleagues have been encouraging in saying that my presentations and my model for PaR are exceptionally clear and persuasive. The approach taken here, though in writing rather than performed, aims to sustain that clarity.

It must be said, however, that I do not claim my model to be the only one with all the answers. Stressing the plural, Jones has proposed that, ‘[o]ur greatest challenge is to find ways . . . of housing the mix of performative and textual practices alongside each other’.²¹ Emphasizing the dialogical relation between elements yielding resonances by way of affirmation (the italics are used to emphasize key terms), my model affords one way of ‘housing the mix’. Those colleagues who take the view that a practice alone is sufficient without a written complement may well resist it (see Chapter 8), and there certainly has been a UK tradition in Music for composition alone to be submitted as a research outcome.²² However, I share Schippers’s view that

[a]lthough much music making involves research, the latter does not necessarily qualify all music making as research. Not every rehearsal is a research project and not all performances are research outcomes . . . Much of what musicians do may certainly be high-level professional practice, but all does not necessarily constitute research.²³

Those who are deeply sceptical about the viability of PaR as a scholarly practice may not be persuaded by the arguments rehearsed here, though I hope they will approach the proposed methodology with as open a mind as possible. The model does require a shift in established thinking about what constitutes research and knowledge, but it has proven to work for a considerable number of colleagues and students. My approach owes a debt to those students with whom it has been developed and also to numerous other symposia contributors – some of whom I am unable to acknowledge personally in what follows – for what I have learned in the process of engagement and debate. To offset an inevitable partiality in Part I, the second part of this book comprises contributions from colleagues in different parts of the world where PaR is well established, emergent or resisted.

Part II, in dialogic engagement with Part I, thickens the description of the overall account. Contributors are drawn from Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, (continental) Europe, the Nordic countries, South Africa, and the US. The choices are not intended to give world coverage but to reflect different aspects of the debate about PaR and how different inflections of meaning and practice operate in different ‘territories’. In some substantial territories, continental Europe and the US for example, postgraduate programmes in universities have not emerged as quickly as might have been expected given the now substantial provision in the UK and elsewhere. Indeed, there are significant pockets of entrenched resistance. Each contributor to Part II of the book responds to aspects of Part I, affording an overview of their ‘territory’ and marking any differences of approach and cultural specificities from their perspective. Thus, besides a direct ‘how to’ approach, the book will additionally afford an overview of developments in research based in a range of arts and cultural practices.

What is ‘Practice as Research’?

Let me be clear at the outset what I mean by PaR. PaR involves a research project in which practice is a key m...