Illuminating Artistic Processes toward Transdisciplinary Discourse (original) (raw)

THE ARTIST'S CREATIVE PROCESS: A Winnicottian view

The Artist's Creative Process: A Winnicottian view, 2018

The existing body of psychoanalytic literature relating to the process of making visual art does not include formal studies of first-hand reports from contemporary artists. This thesis addresses that gap through the creation of a new series of artworks and through a qualitative study of artists’ accounts of the states of mind they experience as they work. It aims to provide new evidence relating to the artist’s creative process and to question the extent to which psychoanalytic theory in the Winnicottian tradition can account for artists’ experiences. My methodology was two-fold: I kept a written record of my own states of mind as I created six video, installation and animation artworks; I also conducted thirty in-depth interviews with professional fine artists. The testimony of the artists and myself was interrogated using psychoanalytic theory from the Winnicottian and British Object Relations tradition. Winnicottian theory was chosen because it offers a particular understanding of the inter-relationship between inner and outer worlds and the thesis considers the artist’s process in these terms. Drawing on Winnicottian theory, the thesis presents the artist’s process as a series of interconnected and overlapping stages in which there is a movement between the artist’s inner world, the outer world of shared ‘reality’ and the spaces between. The research reveals aspects of artists’ experiences that are not fully accounted for by the existing literature. To address these gaps, the thesis proposes the introduction of several new terms: ‘pre-sense’ for an as-yet undefined first intimation of the possibility of a new artwork relating to a particular aspect of the outside world; ‘internal frame’ for a space within the artist’s mind, specific to a particular medium, which the artist ‘enters’ when starting work; and ‘extended self’ and ‘observer self’ for two co-existent self-states that constitute the artist’s working state of mind.

The Intruder. On Differentiations in Artistic Research

This essay is written on the basis of certain experiential feelings as well as experiential content. 1 It does not stem so much from literature research as from my personal experiences as a supervisor and a teacher of PhD students in artistic research in The Netherlands, Belgium, and Sweden; this within a university context.

Artistic Research: Charting a Field in Expansion

Artistic Research: Charting a Field in Expansion, 2019

Artistic Research: Charting a Field in Expansion provides a multidisciplinary overview on different discourses and practices, exploring cutting-edge questions from the burgeoning field of artistic research. Intended as a primer on artistic research, it presents diverse perspectives, strategies, methodologies, and concrete examples of research projects situated at the crossroads of art and academia, exposing international work of significant projects from Europe, Asia, Australia, South and North America. The book includes chapters on diverse fields of thought and practice, addressing a common thread of questions and problematics. The comprehensive editors’ introduction offers a much-needed extensive overview of practice-based artistic research in general. This book is ideal for graduate students across philosophy, cultural studies, art, music, performance studies and more.

A LIFE OF ITS OWN: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ARTIST, IDEA AND ARTWORK

In this paper I draw on interviews with thirty professional artists to explore the states of mind experienced by artists as they make new artworks. An analysis of the interviews suggests that the artistic process may be considered in terms of stages and I have termed these 'genesis' (referring to the conception, gestation and birth of an idea for a new work), 'development' (referring to the relationship between artist and nascent artwork as the artist engages with her medium) and 'separation' (referring to the release of the artwork into the outside world, usually in an exhibition). In viewing the artistic process in this way, I draw a parallel between the relationship between mother (or care-giver) and child and the relationship between artist and artwork. In common parlance, people may speak of their creations, artistic or otherwise, as 'my baby' and may experience feelings of loss or relief when these projects are completed, as if the 'baby' has grown up and left home. In this paper, I take this idea further to suggest that the psychoanalytic literature pertaining to the mother/child relationship, especially as put forward by psychoanalysts of the British Object Relations school, can shed light on artists' processes and the states of mind they experience. I draw on the work of D.W. Winnicott, Marion Milner, Christopher Bollas and others to explore the extent to which the mother/child metaphor offers a new way of understanding artists' experiences. Donald Winnicott, the psychoanalyst and paediatrician, famously wrote that 'there is no such thing as a baby … A baby cannot exist alone but is essentially part of a relationship' (Winnicott, 1964:88). Perhaps one can equally say 'There is no such thing as an artist'. Without artworks (or ideas for artworks), there is no artist and the artist is essentially part of a relationship with his or her artworks, at least while they are in the process of being created. From this viewpoint, the trajectory of the artistic process can be regarded as a movement towards separation and differentiation between artist and artwork that culminates in the production of an autonomous artwork that can exist by itself in the outside world.

Artistic Research: Quest for Method

Artistic research exploits new possibilities by deconstructing the traditional dualities of European thinking, like the duality between science and art, perception and thinking, subjectivity and objectivity, body and mind. It develops its potential in different overlaps, tensions and boundary fields across disciplines. Thanks to this it needs to reflect on specific methodology appropriate to this newly viewed plane of consistency. The article shows different approaches to the methodological question in artistic research.

Making and perceiving - Exploring the degrees of engagement with the aesthetic process

Artistic practice and education build on a long tradition of aesthetic critique and problem solving. This tradition has later on influenced also practice-led and practice-based research approaches centering on the artistic process. Although these research approaches depend on the processes and objects that essentially have not only cognitive but aesthetic qualities, the role of the aesthetics in these research processes still lacks an analytical discussion in this context. In this article we explore the process aesthetics in the context of artistic, practice-led research. Namely, we examine the potential of the concept of aesthetic engagement as a framework for understanding and analyzing the involvement with the artistic process. The results of this investigation are the two complimenting degrees of involvement with the artistic process through making and perceiving, and the relations that activate these different ways of engagement. To illustrate and concretize the subject, we employ an example of video material capturing moments of experimentation with ceramic art.

Journal of Artistic Research, Creation and Technology

2020

That art practitioners can be sceptical about theory-even to the point of developing a misplaced aversion to it-is perhaps not just because some theories seem far afield from the actual practice of art, but also because the performative power of theory competes with the performative power of art." Henk Borgdorff, The Conflict of the Faculties. Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia "Traditionally, artists have achieved matter-of-factness through 'complete familiarity' with the style, as Igor Stravinsky [...] demands of the performer, or, more recently, through what has been called 'deskilling' [...], a process of unlearning artistic habits, which may, indeed, imply a 'reskilling' [...] precisely in support of artworks as matters of fact." Michael Schwab, Experimental Systems. Future Knowledge in Artistic Research The rooting in an artistic practice is strong, and art-based research often draws on the artists' experience, professional expertise and creative ability. The research usually proceeds in combinations of systematic, exploratory, creative, experimental, action-oriented and speculative working methods through artistic creation and analysis, staging, simulation and modelling, critical innovation and reflection, and theory formation. Catharina Dyrssen, Artistic Research. A Subject Overview Editorial José Quaresma the issue of 'in between states'-asking questions about how changes and transitions are shaped, and what constitutes the brief moment of instability between two sets of conditions." ... scrutiny and oscillation between what is most intersubjective in approaching artistic situations and pieces of art, through a communicational delivery and an argumentative work (written, spoken, or both), requiring a certain technical formalization, either in the consistency of notions or in the density of discourse. ... but on the other hand, perhaps being possessed, experiencing a certain state of mania, swayed by an incessant and pendular rhythm that makes us return to the pre-predictiveness of our sensitivity, always there to renew the silence and to disturb us with states of discursive impotence, thus reshuffling everything we seek to utter about our access into artistic phenomena.

Curious Art: Art Research as Creative Process

This paper seeks to recontextualise the development of art research within the mainstream of C21st art. It valorises the artists voice, and it is written by an artist who has considered his drawing practice to be a process of enquiry into consciousness since 1979. Written for presentation at the 2010 ELIA conference, and since revised, it builds on and extends an argument first presented to the 2002 ELIA conference