Is there an
‘artistic method’ which parallels the
‘scientific method’ or has postmodernism made this question redundant? 
If so, why?

I’m going to a symposium on Tuesday 5th where we’ll get to talk about this. It’s something I could certainly do with the help in, since I am writing about how books affect this practice. I’d attack the subject here though. I think there are these methods, several among many. Postmodernism has made our basis of judging their relative value redundant, but they are still useful categories of thought. I think that there is some sort of artistic method (though no single method in the sense the subject perhaps implies from its comparison to scientific method.) However, inasmuch as a postmodernist view of scientific method reveals it as one possible paradigm (rational, logical) among several, it is in exactly the same position as artistic method, where we have seldom had such strong paradigms for ‘how to do it’. Instead, we have mutitudes of empirical ways: certainly methodical, certainly strategic, but poorly-understood in terms of a theory of their function. I need some sort of theory of what artists do  in order to frame the effects that the book medium and its attendant possibilities (roles, intermedia, book-as-social-constrction, etc) has on the artists’ practice. There has to be some frame of reference for me to talk about my analyses of book artists’ ways of making. This would be, on some level, a framing of artistic practice, however relativized our judgement about it has to be. So what would this look like? What would I say? How would I show how these multiple ‘ways’ came together, how to talk about them with some thread of commonality? As ‘my view’?