My viva voce exam went fairly well, but pointed up one or two areas which I could do to develop more clearly. One of these was about how exactly making artwork might help me produce new knowledge. While I have a few ideas about this (outlined below) I want better ones. I want better theoretical integration/justification, and I want more/better practical strategies for producing and (scrutinising? analysing? synthesising-from?) the artwork. Hence this parking lot to throw a few ideas about. I’m also reading G. Sullivan’s Art Practice as research, and I desperately want to get hold of Katy MacLeod’s book, Thinking through art?. Sullivan’s book looks promising but is an inscrutable read for someone with my current shopping-list approach. However, it seems worth working with…

Methodologies for Reflexive Artistic Practice

Experimental Comparison

Adopting methods and techniques (and subjects?) of studied artists and reporting on the effect/effectiveness on /of expected outcomes

Theoretical Reflection

Works which engage with material from the theoretical/methodological basis of the project, using the poetic/expressive conjunctions available through artwork.

Evidence for Indicative Practice

The provision of works about which one can make (at least some sort of) objective statements. (Beware: one needs to make objective statements about the practice indicated by the works, as well as/not merely statements about the work itself (its expressive/aesthetic/narrative qualities, etc).)

Working with these at various stages

Some of the above (particularly narrative practice) have clear applications at the outset of research- in building a sound basis for argument and leading the argument from its genuinely indicative origins in my practice. Theoretical reflection would have application at various stages as the theoretical framework mutated. Perhaps at different stages in the research these methodologies could be revisited?

Basics (Methods?)

Production notes
Annotated sketchbooks/work research
Reflection on completed work/self crit
writeups of other criticism, reception
Recording reception
Relating outcomes to propositions/defined criteria (whether these be related to theoretical propositions of the project, or more ‘micro’ propositions regarding a particular part of the research)

an analogy: architects models help architects visualise their work, but how could they produce knowledge about the problems the architect’s work deals with?

How to produce knowledge from art?

Visual knowing visualises ideas through a number of strategies (cf Sullivan, last chapter). This visualization on the part of the artist reflects the artists’ work in assembling various references and inferences using analogy, metaphor, homology, and so on, and can be a process of visual conceptualization or design. Sullivan notes that this work is informed by the artists’ situated state. I think this has potential in terms of the sort of knowledge art produces that is unacknowledged, and perhaps has greater potential for providing ‘a meaning for art’ and a character of art knowing than is acknowledged.

It’s one of art’s capabilities to make explicit a ‘situatedness’ in the viewer, by imparting knowledge to those sufficiently in the know; to those viewers with taste or various other mediating factors affecting cognition, endowed by habitus and practice (by social positioning). Some mediating factors are more or less universal, some belong to tiny fractions of a viewing public. Not all artistic experiences are equally endowed, though we may wish to allow that individual’s experiences are to be seen as equally valuable.

The knowledge that art produces cannot but make situatedness explicit in its production, both by the artist and the viewer. It produces many different experiences, and the work that artists do can help us to understand our own situation.  The sense in which knowledge produced from art is accessible only to the few need not discourage us from an understanding of the phenomenon which acknowledges other experiences, other knowledge. We could deliberately open up value judgements about what knowledge artwork produces, so that a number of viewer’s situted responses become a focus for various situated understandings: sites of empirical knowings.