The practice-exegesis relationship in PhD research
"What characterises creative arts research practice in universities that offer doctoral degrees is the requirement not only to undertake a substantial practical project, but also a reflective exegesis that contextualises the methodologies and significant contributions of the research. The specific components of the exegesis are defined by each institution and re-negotiated by each candidate according to differing emphases. Fortunately, and by design, the function of each candidate’s exegesis can be redefined in relation to the practice it seeks to elucidate. And whilst the requirement to also present a substantial written component can initially appear as a burdensome or daunting prospect for those unfamiliar with the processes of critical reflection - to those who recognise its reflexive possibilities - the exegesis in parallel with the creative work of the project can provide another arena of creative practice. In this respect, the outcomes of both a creative arts-based project and its exegesis can be presented as significant contributions to knowledge in the field. Moreover, a third creative space opens. By interchanging and integrating the practice with the exegesis, it may be possible to generate a combined and reflexive research praxis. This chapter examines aspects of the practice-exegesis relationship with reference to my experience of undertaking and completing my doctoral research at Deakin University. I am, therefore, speaking from a position of having confronted and struggled with the practice-exegesis relationship from inside the playing field."
(Stephen Goddard, 2007)
Goddard, S. (2007). Correspondence Between Practices. "Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry". E. Barrett and B. Bolt, I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Tape Art
"Watch what happened when Foot Locker and Converse invited a collective of street artists to create tape art installations inspired by the new Converse winter collection created for Foot Locker."
(Uploaded by footlocker on 15 Nov 2010)
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Kay Van BellenSHARE
Visit to Picasso: painting on glass
"‘Visite à Picasso’ is a classic documentary by dir. Paul Haesaerts which features the frequently used footage of Picasso painting on glass while a camera films him from the other side. The trick of filming thru (sic) glass allows the viewer to witness Picasso's true genius as he paints his famous Torros with just a few well-placed brushstrokes. Shot in beautiful black and white in Picasso's home in Vallauris, the film is a poetic treatment of the master-painter."
(DocsOnline)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Towards a critical discourse of practice as research
"A problem confronting many artistic researchers is related to the need for the artist to write about his or her own work in the research report or exegesis, The outcomes of such research are not easily quantifiable and it can be difficult to articulate objectively, methods processes, and conclusions that emerge from an alternative logic of practice and the intrinsically subjective dimension of artistic production. Moreover, conventional approaches and models of writing about art generally fall within the domain of criticism, a discourse that tends to focus on connoisieurial evaluation of the finished product. How then, might the artist as researcher avoid on one hand, what has been referred to as 'auto-connoisseurship', the undertaking of a thinly veiled labour of valorising what has been achieved in the creative work, or alternatively producing a research report that is mere description (Nelson 2004)?
In this paper, I suggest that a way of overcoming such a dilemma is for creative arts researchers to shift the critical focus away from the notion of the work as product, to an understanding of both studio enquiry and its outcomes as process. I will draw on Michel Foucault's essay 'What is An Author ' (Rabinow, 1991) to explore how we might move away from art criticism to the notion of a critical discourse of practice-led enquiry that involves viewing the artist as a researcher, and the artist/critic as a scholar who examines the value of artistic process as the production of knowledge. As I will demonstrate, in adopting such an approach, practitioner researchers need not ignore or negate the specificities and particularities of practice - including its subjective and emergent methodologies which I have argued elsewhere, constitute the generative strength that distinguishes artistic research from more traditional approaches Barrett, 2005). In elaborating the relationship between a these aspects and the more distanced focus made available through Foucault's elaboration of author function, I will draw on Donna Haraway's (1991, 1992) notion of 'situated knowledge' and her critique of social constructivism which reveals how the scientific method is implicated in social constructivist accounts of knowledge. It is this alignment, suggests Haraway,that results in the effacement of particularities of experience from which situated knowledges emerge. In order to ground and illustrate the arguments and ideas presented in this paper, I will also refer to Pablo Picasso's, Demioselles d''Avignon and a selection of critical commentaries on this work by Leo Steinberg (1988), William Rubin (1994) and Lisa Florman (2003)."
(Estelle Barrett, 2006)
Barrett, E. (2006) Materializing pedagogies. Working Papers in Art and Design 4 Retrieved
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Design scholarship through the Research Project module
"The final year NTU Multimedia module called the Research Project provides useful insight into the changing knowledge relationships operating within regionalised knowledge contexts. The module requires students to demonstrate scholarship that spans multiple traditional domains, it requires them to: situate their work and communicate its worth through academic writing; build conceptual models which they must be able to explore through applied research; express their design knowledge and craft skills so that they are able to plan and produce creative work; and design software and application development skills to produce working prototypes. In this way the module provides a challenge which is unique to such programmes. It requires that students engage in a sustained conceptual and technical discovery process which is located within a rapidly changing knowledge context."
(Simon Perkins, 2011)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
