We've talked previously about the criticism of practised-based research in art but moreover especially in design, and the difficulties that Research "for" design in particular struggles with.
Over the past 10 years there has been an opposition to the criticism from the artistic body... This criticism has been largely based on new manuals that re-brands the problem, but particularly for Art practitioners, rather than design practitioners. Within this blog I will start to introduce a new perspective to how practice-based research "for" art, - in art, but not design, can work.
The new texts that have been emerging over the last 10 years; For example "Approaches to Creative Enquiry" and "Practice as Research in the Arts" etc., spring up as a result of the keynotes lecture that Chris Frayling, the rector of the Royal College of Arts, published at the beginning of the 21st-century. Initially these books were written as an opposition to the criticism, tended to be written from the point of view of single authors, and hence, there was not a unified voice. However, as at these opinions generally grew, there was a counter movement which eventually converged onto a common set of themes of study.
Graham Sullivan and his book "Art Practice as Research", was one of the first books to put forward the notion of the act of performing arts as research within itself. This received much criticism from the design faction, almost as expected. However, as other art researchers, for example, Barbara Bolt and Hank Bergoff, and with Robin Nelson in particular, created a voice collectively with their latest books, that strongly summarise the transformation from research into practice to combine epistemology with "tacit", rather than "explicit" knowledge. For example this has been written extensively about in the "Journal for Artistic Knowledge" and the "Artistic Research Catalogue".
Institutional acceptance is now becoming more uniform, although introducing cultural change here, through persuasion, has been the result rather than a radical new argument.
After his landmark paper, Chris Frayling had started to comment, (after making the point about the problem of art at the Royal College), that the original concept of academic study, which was close to the standard historical learning approach, (that he calls research into art), compared with what Frayling terms "action" research; for example the diaristic commentary through the writing of contemporaneous notes during the performance or shortly afterwards, which he calls "research through" art practice, and finally, to fully re-cap, what he calls "research for" art and design. This later description he originally discussed as being the most difficult one to quantify, because within such work, there are "undisclosed materials", and often classical quotations such as "the work is intended to speak for itself".
This last observation was considered as an "illegitimate" concept. It is this last "illegitimate concept" that Frayling as the rector of the Royal Academy did not fully explore. However, most importantly, it is aso the role of the artefact that artists in particular (like Picasso) were most interested in, and Frayling seemed to mention it almost in passing.
In order to destabilise Frayling's position, the books as described above,The author and researcher Michael Biggs in 2002 outlined that this point is actually of some considerable merit and needs much further investigation.
Michael Biggs observes that Frayling constructs his argument originally by citing stereotypes taken from Hollywood. However Biggs also points out, and asks the question "what kind of research was Frayling conducting, himself". So the question becomes can Frayling legitimately call his own research, "research", especially as Frayling is a scholar of film study. In fact all the references that Frayling makes (except for Picasso), does seem to be based on Hollywood stereotypes, not real artists in the traditional sense of creativity through painting, sculpture, drawing, dance etc. Biggs goes on to point out also that the method of research that Frayling conducted was in fact a kind of documentary, so in actual fact it is action research, what Frayling originally termed research through art and design, and not research "for" art and design. So it seems that Frailing shot himself in the foot here, as what he was doing was just writing it down, just like "film theory". So Christopher Frayling was in fact, by posing the critique in the way that he did, was kind of reaching for his own tale.
"Action research" is almost a traditional (by now in 2014) method, and is considered as an 'emphasis on participation in change situations'. In other words it is like doing something that facilitates change. Or action research, where 'the action itself stimulates change'.
Whereas Christopher Frayling was saying action research is "where a research diary tells a step-by-step way of carrying out a practical experiment in the studio, and then reporting the results to contextualise it", the problem is that both in the diary and the reports are there to communicate the result, and yet both together, misses the research objectives in the first place. Michael Biggs, in his own book feels that this "action" research as defined by Chris Frayling is simply off target.
Meanwhile, whilst all this conjecture and corresponding theories and hypotheses has been written about, James Elkins, who was also an early voice in this debate, and who is able to commentate as a real practitioner of art, (who in fact is an artist first, then turned academic), makes the distinction between what he creates (as practice), but then comments, that his "research" is in fact, about the traditional and historic reviewing of old masters' works. Elkins, was in a perfect position to combine these two points of Frayling's observations together, but in fact he chooses not to, - he sits on the fence and continues to do both practice, and traditional academical "study" work.
All that the authors cited above, are all really trying to do, is bring the theories together into one unified "comment" or statement.
As a particularly ironic example, Donald Norman (who was famous for his writings in design, such as "what a good door knob" is), when speaking at the Doctoral Education in Design conference (Ph.D. design - which is a forum for theorising design practice). It can be seen on Norman's face and body language, the complete frustration, like that of emotion, confrontation and provocation, which seems to have been "performed" by Norman. It is rather ironic and this now seems to artists, what is of interest. (Ironically the image of the Hollywood artist just like Kirk Douglas and his role in Van Gogh).
To explain... Donald Norman at the conference in 2011 completely changed the purpose of the conference, (which would have been to present a 30 minute paper from each of the delegates), into what he specifically wanted which was for the group to do a "elevator pitch"... - This caused uproar at the conference!
It is this "performative" part of practice-based research that would be compromised and lost, if it was written down textually because it would become a "text" based proposition only! The example Norman puts forward, did indeed, speak for itself!!! The performative element would be completely smothered by typed up academic words, potentially thought up outside of the actual performance.
The significance would simply not be felt.
The affect would be lost.
- This last line of attack was therefore given by Donald Norman from the design faction itself, and serves to close the argument completely in my opinion.
To finish off, Graham Sullivan, Barrett and Bolt, Hank Schlage and Henk Bergdorf, Robin Nelson together with Michael Biggs are all good references of research material into the comparative study of art and design in terms of Research Through Practice. The book entitled "the Conflict of the Faculties" by Henk Borgdorff outlines the theorising within institutions. He says that an "actor" maybe a human, a microbe, or even a complete University. He goes on to discuss in this book what research actually means.
From my own opinion, I think that there is a huge amount of talk, with very little action, and what I mean by that is that the art and design community are trying to reinvent something that has been successfully applied by the scientific community for many hundreds of years.
Why don't they just collectively look at how scientific research has been done before?
- That is, by defining in advance, a theory, then performing series of experiments, with small adjustments and iterations, measuring the results, documenting those results and then setting further anti-thesis, in order to synthesise new objectives. Documentation DOES include film. A DOCUMETARY can be a performance...
This scientific approach "is a tried and tested practice", and even this simple set sentence explains the scientific process, succinctly. Try it and test it!!!
The practical analogy that is often quoted is "why try and reinvent the wheel when it is already invented?"
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