[-empyre-] practice-led (art/science/writing)

[Adrian Miles]

hi Danny 



On Tuesday, 29 January 2013 at 5:00 PM, Danny Butt wrote:

> I believe we would do well to take the history and anthropology of science rather than the philosophy of science as our guide in the discussions of research and creative practice, and this would mean avoiding thin but authoritative pronouncements of what research is or isn't, or what knowledge is or isn't. The more political theorisations of qualitiative research (Laurel Richardson in particular) have shown us that accepting institutional constraints on the genre of research writing precisely fails to practice the questioning of categories and taxonomies that a 'writing lab' as you put it should foster. 

Indeed. My intemperance comes from a milieu where forms of art practice by themselves are proffered as research and as with anthropology there is a difference between the practice and the role of that practice. But as with anthropology (where these same issues have been debated, I'm for instance reminded of Robert Gardner's "Forest of Bliss") there are very interesting ways to 'write' anthropology that are the sorts of things being advocated here. For me and what you've described here is the difference between work that foregrounds and engages with that issue ontologically and epistemologically, versus work that thinks just being 'art' in itself is a radical act in the academy when in fact I suspect it has merely been co-opted by the banal 'mathematisation of impact' you mention below. 
> 
> A lineage of conceptual artistic practice - one that I think artists as researchers could be held accountable to as a point of departure, in the absence of other disciplinary identifications - would take those questions of the form of knowledge as the very material of their research. This may be an area where artists can identify better than scientists what epistemological presuppositions are at work in the kinds of knowledge validated in the research paradigm.
I still aren't sure that there is such a distinction, where does Stengers or Latour lie on such a scale? (I'd put them closer to science for instance.) But knowledge form and construction as the material of research is essential and a great way of framing it. This is something I tried to do once, but got worn down by the whole fucking conservatism of the institution, so have retreated to the margins and the minor. In the honours I look after we try to do this as much as we can, but it's a hard road when you get students for two semesters after three years of acculturation to 'professionally' orientated degrees! But it happens :-)
> 
> It is precisely for the reasons of furthering art as a university discipline that I would question the value of 'research reportage' as a distinct form of writing that must be sharply differentiated from the forms of writing customary in the visual arts.
Agreed and I hope this didn't come across as my point. I'm not interested in reportage, I'm interested in writing as a material practice which is understood to be the stuff of where research happens. As a theory led practitioner ideas then words then artefacts are my method, but I really don't see any difference between thinking about composition, compression, sequence, and so on in video then I do in the difficulty of making a good sentence. Different media, but same principles, it is all a making, all the way down.  
> From my point of view, our failure to critically validate the forms of writing customary in artistic enquiry, with epistemologists proposing practice-based research as an entirely different domain has led to a cleavage between the art star and the knowledge-making "creative researcher", and the bad-faith administrative decisions involved in rewarding what Sally Jane calls "high-impact" individuals, or indeed "lower-impact" individuals who are good at forms of writing (and writing as filling out forms) that are primarily accountable to a bureaucratic calculation rather than a disciplinary dialogue. Neither of these modes help the visual arts feed and extend its distinct disciplinary terrain of evaluation of singularities against the mathematisation of the impact factor, something I see as most urgent for most colleagues working in university-based art schools right now.
> 
too much in there for me right now. I believe in a distinction between creative works qua creative works and works that are research. They can and do intersect, all the time, and one can do both (Marker, creative nonfiction, etc etc) but what we're calling creative works that don't engage with the question of their knowledges in the context of enquiry need to do more to participate in this context of enquiry. But I'm tired of 'high impact' individuals with 'high impact' art practices who are unwilling or unable to engage with the material knowledges and epistemological propositions of their work simply because it is 'art' and therefore the job is done. 

Sounds cantankerous and even rancourous, though I hope you know me well enough to know it isn't. Possibly bitter from having many insisting that what I do in honours here is not 'real research' largely because we do the things you describe above. 
 
-- 
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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