Abstract
This chapter seeks to define some of the key terms at play in discussions of practice-based arts and media research, and places this endeavour in its institutional setting. A review of the various forms of arts research currently being practiced in higher education reveals the marginalisation of the forms of research and project development conducted by artists in the course making their work, which the academy is loath to acknowledge. To advance the artistic research paradigm, we may need a broader historical perspective on artistic research. The historic avant-garde pioneered a revolution in arts pedagogy in the first decades of the twentieth century, and this provides the basis for the emergence of a tradition of artistic theorising and research practice that we can continue to learn from. The chapter sketches the model of artistic research that emerged at this time, and argues that this still has cogency for contemporary practice-based, creative arts and media research.
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Notes
- 1.
As Raymond Bellour reminds us, the use of tableau in film ‘makes cinema lean in the direction of photography, towards its power to inscribe death’.
- 2.
Considerable numbers of practising artists and media professionals have been recruited into higher education to staff the expansion in creative arts and media provision. And, given their professional backgrounds in areas of artistic and media practice rather than in traditional humanities scholarship, many of these academics are drawn to practice-based forms of research more readily linked to their teaching commitments and professional experience.
- 3.
In the race to enhance an institution’s research profile, the art works produced by creative practice academics and research students are now treated to all intents and purposes as equivalent to the print-based research publications of other disciplines. Thus, for example, a film screened at the Venice Film Festival or an art work exhibited in one of the national pavilions of the city’s Art Biennale and widely reviewed, was evaluated as being towards the top of a hierarchy of exhibition outcomes, while a film screened in a local festival or art piece exhibited in a small and not yet established gallery, and largely unreviewed, nestled at the bottom.
- 4.
As the research funding guidelines of the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Board state (2004), ‘Work that results purely from the creative or professional development of an artist, however distinguished, is unlikely to fulfil the requirements of research’. Such art activity, ‘might be more appropriate for support from an arts funding body purely concerned with the creative output’. The unfortunate consequence of this ruling has been to encourage some creative arts academics to shroud their studio projects in theoreticist verbiage, or in the instrumental language of project management employing a quasi-positivist logic of enquiry. This logic of accountability requires researchers to adopt an ‘administrative aesthetics’ based on the formulation of research questions and objectives, identification of milestones and deliverables, and the testing and corroboration of hypothesis that does not serve artistic research as an open field of enquiry very well.
- 5.
A number of institutions managed the new research economy to great effect and in the UK, at least, money flowed into ‘research active’ creative arts departments. Almost overnight, universities—now hiring professional filmmakers and visual artists with impressive portfolios of exhibited work to boost their research profiles—became important funders of arts projects and artists, rivalling, in some areas eclipsing public arts funding.
- 6.
Frayling’s paper has appeared to many art educators to be a good place to start from in identifying the major research approaches found in the creative arts within higher education and the challenge these present to the traditional academy. It provides a good overview of the types of activity which cluster under the general title of art research, although it is rather weaker in its exploration of how these might interact together not only within the academy but more widely within contemporary art practice. It certainly describes the range of research activity present in any art college or university department of creative arts where critical scholars work alongside practising artists.
- 7.
Interestingly enough, Stanley Kubrick, breaking free from the shackles of the Hollywood studio system, was able to fashion his own artist’s studio on his premises at Childwickbury Manor in Hertfordshire, England, complete with extensive picture-editing and sound-editing facilities, thereby giving him the sort of autonomy and creative freedom more typical of an artist’s atelier.
- 8.
As film critics never failed to remind Gordon and Perreno, their filmic strategy for Zidane had already been pioneered by German filmmaker Hellmuth Costard in his 1978 portrait of George Best, Football as Never Before. Costard used eight 16-mm film cameras to follow Best, in real time, for the course of an entire game, playing for Manchester United against Coventry City. They could have just as well reminded the directors of Zidane of Leni Riefenstahl’s logistics in the shooting of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games in Olympiad.
- 9.
To use the term that film historian Jean-Louis Comoli (1973) employs specifically with regard to Serge Eisenstein’s film theorising, but which seems applicable across the creative arts of the period, for the avant-garde the teaching challenge was, ‘the true site of theoretical construction’.
- 10.
This topic is explored in a forthcoming book dealing with the historical origins of practice-based arts research which has a section specifically dealing with the modes of theorizing, programmes of artistic research and pedagogic models developed by the historic avant-garde and associated with the restructured art and design academies in post-1917 Russia, the Vkhutemas, and the creation of the Bauhaus Academy of Design in Germany.
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Bell, D. (2018). The Primacy of Practice: Establishing the Terms of Reference of Creative Arts and Media Research. In: Batty, C., Kerrigan, S. (eds) Screen Production Research. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62837-0_4
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