[-empyre-] FW: FW: Research in Practice, week three, January 21-28

[Adrian Miles]

On Friday, 25 January 2013 at 12:08 AM, Phi Shu wrote:

> Quite clearly, in the context of creative practice, knowledge can be communicated in many different ways, therefore upholding the written word as the de facto method of assessment is a mistake and I think it is the duty of academics in this area to communicate to those holding the purse strings that actually, the written word is not the only means of communicating valid research outcomes.
> 
In any practice knowledge can be communicated in different ways, but that's not the terms of the argument. It is not whether or not creative practice expressed knowledge, or if it can express different sorts of knowledge (of course it can, pick any number of theories here ranging perhaps from Bachelard's depth psychology gestalt's through to Deleuze and Guattari's elaborate outline of what art does in "What Is Philosophy?" and also "The Logic of Sensation").  

The problem is whether this knowledge is research. The sky is blue today is a knowledge claim. Perhaps part of a SMS art work. But that is not yet research. 

While I don't think anyone has specifically signalled writing as the only form, it does have some advantages. For instance to undertake research you need to make arguments, which generally require forms of negation (this is not). Negation is incredibly important to research as argument and could well be impossible without (not sure though). However, many art forms (as a Belgium surrealist playfully made concrete many years ago) can't negate. A painting of water lilies in itself says "here are water lilies, they have these qualities, etc", a photograph much the same, ditto cinema. Each needs language (as Magritte too did) to be able to say "this is not a hill", or "this is not a photograph of a gun", or "this is not a particular sky with some fluffy clouds". 

So for me the problem I'd raise is while art objects in themselves clearly express knowledge this knowledge might not yet be research. Furthermore to be research it needs to be able to say or do more than state what is. When I raise this people suggest all sorts of examples, yet to date every case relies on something *outside* of the artwork whether this be a description, statement or other commentaries. This is the issue I've raised several times here, and is the logic of the supplement (Derrida) where we like to think that just because the comments we attach to the work are only small they don't count for much, yet it is this which provides for the possibility of the art work engaging in its way outside of itself in the first case. It is, simply Derrida's parergon.

-- 
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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