[-empyre-] Practice in Research & odd methods, rude mechanics

Sun Jan 20 01:45:08 EST 2013

This resonates in Scotland. Creative Scotland, which recently replaced the Scottish Arts Council, appears to be modelled on Creative NZ, although I have no evidence for that other than its name and the nature of its focus (having spent a year in NZ I have some idea of how Creative NZ works).

What you say about the funding of art that might also be research is true in the UK too. If you go to the Arts Council or Creative Scotland with a project emerging from academic research they will not fund it. Equally, if you go to the Research Councils with a creative arts project they will not consider it. You have to clearly be one or the other. I'm not aware of any project that has managed to be in both camps at the same time - but perhaps there are examples I am not aware of (excluding multi-faceted projects, where different parts might be funded by each source - in this instance there are examples).

I've no problem with this (except where you might fall between chairs) - these are funding organisations with distinct remits answering to different strands of government. This relates to the thread being pursued by Adrian, Talan and others, which concerns how we value art and science differently - and as is clear from that thread, this is very fuzzy territory (which is probably why it's interesting).

best

Simon

On 18 Jan 2013, at 21:34, simon wrote:

> following this discussion with interest, I would like to ask, given this "non-instrumentality" or the contingency of research to art, why does art need research? 
> 
> a secondary question would be does the obverse really pertain, is research also contingent or in the same way contingent?
> 
> the word contingency I would like to suggest recalls Oscar Wilde's "All art is quite useless," made into a great little song by A House, able to viewed in wobbly low-res here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmEvTa7Npk0
> 
> is all research quite useless in endless research? - this would get at the true meaning and reason for the word academic having a pejorative sense.
> 
> I tried to become an practitioner-researcher five years ago. The academy were all for my T-Cell theatre group idea and were prepared to back a scholarship application. However, when I approached Creative New Zealand, the Government's arts funding organisation, the preeminent arts institution left standing in NZ, I was told any work with an academic component would not be funded.
> 
> Creative New Zealand is all about instrumentalising art practice. This is, giving it and having an ideological function. Best expressed in the still often repeated slogan: Telling our own stories in our own words.
> 
> These words apparently do not have an academic component.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Simon Taylor
> www.squarewhiteworld.com 
> 
> On 19/01/13 04:08, Simon Biggs wrote:
>> ... and to respond to my own email (probably bad etiquette) one can observe the obverse to be the case - just as plenty of research is not necessarily instrumental so too is much art instrumental, whether responding to a commission brief, applying for thematised funding, completing a work destined to be sold in an art gallery or making adjustments to a performance in response to audience feedback. Adrian's argument has value but is too black and white...
>> 
>> best
>> 
>> Simon
>> 
>> 
>> Sent from a mobile device, thus the brevity.
>> 
>> Simon Biggs
>> simon at littlepig.org.uk
>> s.biggs at ed.ac.uk
>> http://www.littlepig.org.uk
>> 
>> On 18 Jan 2013, at 14:49, Simon Biggs <simon at littlepig.org.uk> wrote:
>> 
>> I agree with everything Adrian says except the statement that in an academic context all research is instrumentalised. It is true that there is more and more pressure for this to be the case but there remain numerous threads of non-instrumental research, whether in theoretical physics, astronomy, pure maths, anthropology, philosophy or creative practice. Happily it is still possible to spend tax payers money on useless inquiry.
>> 
>> best
>> 
>> Simon
>> 
>> 
>> Sent from a mobile device, thus the brevity.
>> 
>> Simon Biggs
>> simon at littlepig.org.uk
>> s.biggs at ed.ac.uk
>> http://www.littlepig.org.uk
>> 
>> On 18 Jan 2013, at 10:53, Adrian Miles <adrian.miles at rmit.edu.au> wrote:
>> 
>> hi all
>> 
>> On Friday, 18 January 2013 at 4:53 PM, Johannes Birringer wrote:
>> 
>>> And would Kathryn Bigelow need to defend Zero Dark Thirty? how would you (or Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3D, for that matter)? or defend Stifters Dinge? or Lexia to Perplexia (Digital Rhetoric and Poetics: Signifying Strategies in Electronic Literature)? or, say, the fabulous video, 'Shadow Sites II' (Jananne Al-Ani), shown at the recent exhibition "Light from the Middle East" at the V&A in London?
>>> I am not sure how to defend these works.
>>> 
>> Such things only need 'defending' when they want to be offered up as research. Art is, to keep this rudely crudely simple, non instrumental to the extent that it can quite happily be only about itself. Whether that is formalism, or via Deleuzean intensities, or what ever terms you like. If you want to call it it knowledge then you need to recognise that it is non instrumental knowledge while it is art. (It doesn't have to serve or answer to any purpose outside of that which it proposes.)
>> 
>> Research on the other hand, particularly in the university context, is instrumentalised knowledge. It has to make contestable, evidenced based claims about something. (In these sorts of debates people seem to think that these claims must all be highly instrumental in a dumb sense, but this is a straw man argument. Just as a pure mathematician can do research into "Knot theory: different aspects               of the topic." (http://www.math.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/home/about/our-research/postgraduate-research-topics/postgraduate-research-topics-in-pure-mathematics) so practice and project based research can investigate highly specific and possibly arcane topics only relevant to a very particular problem within a narrow field.)
>> 
>> So any of the items listed by Johannes only need to be defended if presented as research objects and/or outcomes in themselves, in which case you need to demonstrate and make contestable, evidence based claims. You can do this using evidence from the work, or as the work, or the work might provide a demonstration and proof of these claims, but leaving the work by itself is not research, it is art.
>> 
>> In Talan's comments about project based teaching, for example, I would imagine the role of the project is not just to be creative, or make art, or a project, but for the project to embody and explore key problems. I'd also think that how these are explored or realised in the project probably get documented outside of the project, whether that is through studio conversations, presentations, critiques, a brief accompanying essay, or some other device. These things are not supplements outside of the project but are what shifts the project (or the art thing) into a research practice.
>> 
>> And before I get treated as a troll or this as flame bait, art is and should be just as it is, and is under no obligation to do anything else apart from be. But if anyone then wants to also claim it as research, then more is needed. Finally, research here is not the same as the sorts of professional research anyone does to learn about something to then use that knowledge in a work. For instance a journalist researching a story, a writer researching some history to write a novel, or an artist researching biology to make bioart. Research in the sense intended by the university is a contribution to knowledge, but the examples just cited are merely the application of existing knowledge. 
>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> an appropriate closing
>> Adrian Miles
>> Program Director Bachelor of Media and Communication (Honours)
>> RMIT University - www.rmit.edu.au
>> http://vogmae.net.au/
>> 
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Simon Biggs
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s.biggs at ed.ac.uk Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh
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