Art Practice as Research

Arts Practice as Agency: The Right to Represent and Reinterpret Personal and Social Significance

by James Haywood Rolling, Jr.

Rolling, J. H. (2011). Arts practice as agency: The right to represent and reinterpret personal and social significance. Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education, 29, 11-24.

In this article, I reframe arts practice as agency, the right to represent and reinterpret personal and social... more In this article, I reframe arts practice as agency, the right to represent and reinterpret personal and social significance in a way that contributes a positive self-valuation. A positive self-valuation in turn becomes a berth for the beneficial habitus of the individual. Bourdieu (1990/1999) describes habitus as the locus of the capacity to generate reasonable, common sense behaviors that are beneficial to others. Arts practices are herein theorized as a stock of reasonable, common sense behaviors—making marks, making models, and making “special” aesthetic interventions that signal a person, object, artifact, action, event or phenomenon as uniquely valuable, sacred or life-sustaining. These are behaviors that human agents commonly and continually employ in response to social needs, causes, and the imperative to signify. Given the social significance of arts practice, there is also great potential in a broader application of arts education pedagogy as a force for social transformation. Brent Wilson (2005) sketches out a fundamentally democratic and transactional pedagogical framework that socially responsive and responsible educators can make use of in the cultivation of social justice, the ethical imagination, and the transformation of the systems that ill-define us.

How Performance Thinks Conference Pack

by Laura Cull

The conference pack for How Performance Thinks
An international, two-day conference co-organized by
the PSi Performance and Philosophy working group
and Kingston University’s practice.research.unit
April 13th-14th 2012

The London Studio Centre, London

Introduction

by Shannon Rose Riley

Co-authored wtih Lynette Hunter. Published in _Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies_, Eds. S. Riley and L. Hunter. New York and Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, xv-xxiv.

Performance-Philosophy: the philosophical turn in Performance Studies

by Laura Cull

Paper presented at Performing Research: Creative Exchanges conference at the Central School of Speech and Drama, London 19-20 January 2012

Martin Puchner’s The Drama of Ideas (2010), Freddie Rokem’s Philosophers and Thespians (2010), and Simon Bayly’s The... more Martin Puchner’s The Drama of Ideas (2010), Freddie Rokem’s Philosophers and Thespians (2010), and Simon Bayly’s The Pathognomy of Performance (2011) are only three recent publications that one could cite as evidence that the international field of Theatre and Performance Research is undergoing what we might call ‘a philosophical turn’: an intensification of its long-standing interest in and engagement with philosophy, as a source of diverse concepts, plural methods and multiple ontologies that can be productively explored in relation to performance.

But what is at stake in this turn? What relationship between performance and philosophy is being staged in this work? In this presentation, I will suggest that we need to move beyond the mere application of philosophy to performance, beyond an approach to philosophy determined by a pursuit of the next new and fashionable method of performance analysis. In particular, I will propose that our experiments with what I am calling ‘performance-philosophy’ need not begin with clear and distinct definitions of each term. We do not yet know what either performance or philosophy can do; it is precisely the indeterminacy of the distinction between the activities that we call ‘performance’ and ‘philosophy’ (as exposed in the ‘nonart’ of Allan Kaprow) that makes performance-philosophy an exciting prospect.

Ultimately, I will argue that the encounter between performance and philosophy is at its richest and most egalitarian if philosophy is willing to encounter performance as thinking, and as that which might extend what philosophy counts as thinking – a discussion that will also lead us to question the implications of the provocative idea that everything (not just the theatrical subject or philosophical mind) thinks. In this way, I hope to address not only the philosophical turn in performance, but also the non-philosophical turn in philosophy: the democratization of thought that has recently been called for by the French (non-) philosopher, François Laruelle. Non-philosophy will meet nonart, then – but as its equal, not as its illustration.

The Art of Uncertainty (2012): Art practice and leadership at a time of crisis

by François Matarasso

Originally commissioned in 2010 by NESTA and the Clore Leadership Programme and published online only.

This paper responds to the challenge of the 2008 banking crisis and the questions that it raises about scientific,... more This paper responds to the challenge of the 2008 banking crisis and the questions that it raises about scientific, rationalist models of management.

Drawing on the work of Joseph Stiglitz and Ralph Stacey it considers the limitations of existing concepts of causal rationality and the risks that arise from continuing to use them when we are faced with problems rather than puzzles.

It finds parallels between Stacey's ideas of 'extraordinary management' and the findings of research by Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle into models of artist leadership. 

Walking with Victor Turner: A Theater-Making Immersion Event

by Gerard (Jerry) Boland

Article No. 4 Conscientising Cultural Performance: Theatre-making Amongst Event-Specific Popular Audiences

by Gerard (Jerry) Boland

Article 3 Devising Original Entertainments for Popular Audiences:'New Lamps for Old!'

by Gerard (Jerry) Boland

30 September - 2 October 2009 ‘'Incidental, reflective and pragmatic acts of research in the transition to higher degrees” presented at ACUADS 2009 Conference: Interventions in the Public Domain Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Brisbane, Queensland.


by James McArdle

Ecoart in Canada – a conversation and brief survey of the terrain

by Beth Carruthers

Article for the inaugural issue of WEAD (Women in Environmental Art) online magazine

RETURNING THE RADIANT GAZE: Visual Art and Embodiment in a World of Subjects

by Beth Carruthers

A Paradigm Analysis of Arts-Based Research and Implications for Education

by James Haywood Rolling, Jr.

Rolling, J. H. (2009). A paradigm analysis of arts-based research and implications for education. Studies in Art Education, 51 (2), 102-114.

This article represents a paradigm analysis of the characteristics of arts-based research (ABR) in an effort to... more This article represents a paradigm analysis of the characteristics of arts-based research (ABR) in an effort to reconceptualize the potential of arts-based practices in generating new curriculum approaches for general education practice and the development of the learner. Arts-based theoretical models—or art for scholarship’s sake—are characteristically poststructural, prestructural, performative, pluralistic, proliferative, and postparadigmatic, offering the promise of divergent pedagogical pathways worthy of new exploration.

Un-Naming the Story: The Poststructuralist Repositioning of African-American Identity in Western Visual Culture.

by James Haywood Rolling, Jr.

Rolling, J. H. (2003). Un-naming the story: The poststructuralist repositioning of African-American identity in Western visual culture. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Teachers College, Columbia University. New York, New York.

Winner of the 2006 Narrative and Research Special Interest Group (SIG) Outstanding Dissertation Award of The American Educational Research Association (AERA).

Ugliness. Why does it seem to cleave so painfully to the flesh and blood, hair and bone of black folk? We are... more Ugliness. Why does it seem to cleave so painfully to the flesh and blood, hair and bone of black folk? We are possessed, it seems, by the symbols of social stigma. Or have we embodied the stories and images that have discredited us within a modernist reductive discourse? If the latter, what has been our agency for undoing the (ab)normative texts that have ferociously named us? This study explores a transgressive postmodern research methodology that interrogates modernity. I will make the argument that the de/re/construction of collective African-American identity from categorical ugliness toward a constitutive role in Western social discourse was also one of the early movements into a contemporary postmodern condition. The evidence for this repositioning is a part of Western visual culture. Thus a new methodology, a visual archaeology, has been derived for the deployment of this study. The data for this project are autoethnographic, both collected and created; the text is itself an argument for a hybridized arts-based, arts-informed process. Texts, embodied in personal memory, blend with those ensconced within America’s visual culture. Both memory and culture are the target sites of an epistemological paradigm shift and a poststructuralist repositioning. In spite of the dominating archaeology of Western scientific modernity, this study shows that rogue narratives of social acceptability—a matrix of anomalous and ultimately transgressive (re)configurations of identity and methodology—have been employed to mediate the stubborn texts (re)presenting African-American stigma, freeing us to explore the borders of a postmodern “normality.”

Why do art and design students usually choose practice based PhD's?

by Jules Findley

Draft Abstract

Practice led research conference 2009 Practice led research conference 2009

Ozcan. O.”Feel‐in‐Touch: Imagination through Vibration“, Leonardo, MIT Press, 2004, Vol:37, No 4,

by Oguzhan Ozcan

This article introduces a conceptual design for an interactive artwork called Feel-in- Touch! Its aim is to improve... more This article introduces a conceptual design for an interactive artwork called Feel-in- Touch! Its aim is to improve the use of imagination in artworks using abstract images in the formats of interactive media and vibro-tactile aids. New technolo- gies can visually realize every surrealistic narration we can imagine, but these technologies limit our perceptions by present- ing only one way of imagining, instead of multiple alternatives. This restricts creative thinking. Working from the above as- sumption, this article explores how to increase the degree of imagination in an interactive artwork. The author discusses problems of the imagination in art and interactive media and summarizes current research on vibro-tactile and vibro-acoustic applications. He then outlines Feel-in-Touch! and discusses the outputs of this conceptual design.

Oskar Schlemmer's Research Practice at the Dessau Bauhaus

by Melissa Trimingham

Soundwalking and Improvisation

by Andra McCartney

Written for the Improvisation, Community and Social Practice project.

Intermedialities: Theory, History, Practice: Proceedings of the European Science Foundation Exploratory Workshop (SCH)

by Ivo Blom

Intermedialities: Theory, History, Practice: Proceedings of the European Science Foundation Exploratory Workshop (SCH), convened by: Ginette Verstraete (NL), Ivo Blom (NL). Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, series Film & Media Studies, Vol. 2, 2010. Edited by Ágnes Pethő, Jens Schröter, Ginette Verstraete, and Ivo Blom.

Doing art and doing cultural geography

by Perdita Phillips

published in Australian Geographer, 35(2), 151-159, 2004. This was written in early 2003. The link is to original designed piece.

Accompanying examples of initial visual experimentation from the fieldwork/field walking PhD project the paper... more Accompanying examples of initial visual experimentation from the fieldwork/field walking PhD project the paper outlines some of the challenges being an artist and using systems of understanding from science, the new ethnography and cultural geography as a framework for making contemporary art. The PhD project is in its preliminary stages and is designed to explore the area of walking and fieldwork in art, and as art. Some of the challenges are the ambiguous role of the artist as scientist, ethnographer and researcher, the role of reflexivity in art practice; and the pitfalls of ‘academic art’. While cultural geographers have used artworks as texts to explain places, this project endeavours to work with issues of place, landscapes, power, identity and representation in the art, to feed back into this dialogue. The bulk of the project will take place in the Kimberley region of Western Australia where the concepts of wilderness and wildness are most relevant. The research question of fieldwork/field walking is, within the discourse between Art and Science what is the connection between fieldwork and walking in the field?

Keywords

walking; fieldwork; the field; contemporary art; artist as ethnographer; site specific art; Kimberley region; art and science; reflexivity; wilderness; wildness; nature; interdisciplinary; poetics

Figuring (un)figures: Reading Beckett's Ping through Moving-image (abstract)

by Jenny Triggs

Abstract of PhD thesis, 2009.