The Doctorate in Fine Art: The Importance of Exemplars to the Research Culture (original) (raw)
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This essay is concerned with Practice-based PhD degrees, intended as a site for production of a specific art practice that is rooted in theory. I will draw on the work created by artist Uriel Orlow in this context as an example of a practice intrinsically intertwined with theory and academia. Practice-based PhD degrees are at the core of a very specific and current discourse about the nature of art practice as research and the nature of academic definitions of research and knowledge. This debate is mainly centred around two issues: the increasing theorization of art education and the difficulty of assessing practice. However, the scope of this essay is neither to favor certain theory-based approaches to art practice nor to establish how such programs should be assessed. I believe that PhDs offer those artists whose practice intersects with writing and theory a suitable environment to thrive, even though the current system imposes controversial restrictions. In this regard, my intent is to analyze the ways in which such limitations can benefit these theory-based practices. In order to do so, I am going to employ Uriel Orlow’s work, investigating how art practice as research as it exists now, can create opportunities for artists to minimize market pressures on art production. Moreover I will suggest that, because of their dependency on display and their ‘experiential’ qualities, the artwork produced in PhD degrees can offer a channel for outreach in the public sphere and a more suitable approach to certain subject matter.
Practice in the Flesh of Theory: Art, Research, and the Fine Arts PhD
Canadian Journal of Communication, 2012
in what follows I offer an anecdotal engagement with the Fine Arts PhD at a moment when it is just emerging in North America. I argue that doctoral activities that cross theory/practice lines, at their best, offer a unique opportunity to rethink what constitutes academic knowledge production and assessment by necessitating that these lines be made porous and responsive to each other. This reconfiguration, to the extent that it calls into question both the subject and object of knowledge, is one that benefits from the insights of feminism in its "new materialist" incarnation.
Doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts: two ends of a continuum
Studies in Higher Education, 2011
Doctoral degrees in the visual and performing arts are a fairly recent entrant in the research higher degree landscape in Australian universities. At the same time, a new kind of doctorate is evolving, a doctorate in which significant aspects of the claim for the doctoral characteristics of originality, mastery and contribution to the field are demonstrated through an original creative work. A substantial written contextualization is also generally required to clarify the basis of these claims. Managing the relationship between the written and creative components is a challenge for students and supervisors. The study reported on in this article examined the nature of the written component of doctoral degrees in the visual and performing arts submitted for examination in Australian universities, as well as the range of practices and trends in the kinds of texts that are presented in doctoral submissions in these areas of study. The study included a nation-wide survey of doctoral offerings in the visual and performing arts, the collection of a set of ‘high quality’ doctoral texts, and interviews with doctoral students and supervisors. This article reports on two doctoral projects that can be seen to represent opposite ends of a continuum in the set of doctoral works that were examined.
Researching the research culture in art and design:the Art and Design Index to Theses
2006
The phrase 'Research culture' indicates an intangible state of being that might exist in an academic department in a university. It could be likened to a Petri dish of sticky goo in which fertile memes combine with emerging questions and pressing issues. Or more concretely it could refer to interactions between interesting and interested people which involve talking about their academic enquiries, sharing references to other work in the field, reaching consensus on the questions that need to be asked to further understanding in their field and finding the resources to answer them. A third, and more negative, view of a research culture might reveal a corridor of closed doors, where no one knows much about what their colleagues are doing, and certainly never gets the time to read or see their work, but where there is intense competition to be known to be getting the grants, or being invited to give keynote presentations, or getting that publishing deal-in art and design, these achievements could translate to getting that gallery show, selling to that collection, or getting a contract with that manufacturer. These analogies imply that a research culture can centre on a place, exist in a social context, be reflected in sets of values, and result in various modes of operation. This paper discusses what it is possible to say about the research culture in art and design in the UK by reviewing some of its outcomes-abstracts of completed UK PhD projects collected in a recently compiled database, the Art and Design Index to Theses. This resource helps us to see a variety of things. The quantities of completed PhDs in the various sub disciplines of art and design can be seen to increase over time, with some subjects advancing in a different pattern to others-this variation in activity can be related to institutional changes and particular discussions about the nature of the PhD in art and design. The principles in play in these discussions can be seen reflected in the abstracts of the PhDs in the database. It is the ways in which these principles are enacted in the practice of research that is of broader interest, since this indicates the CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
Art as Research, Doctoral Education and the Politics of Knowledge
Engage, 2006
In the university system, as in many other aspects of British institutional life, the gap between the officially projected image and day by day lived experience is now so great that almost nothing is as it is made to appear. Academics are not supposed to draw attention to this, but in the present case this is unavoidable. As with art's other contemporary forms, an understanding of context is central to any consideration of art as research. This is particularly the case because it must locate itself in relation to the presuppositions of both the commercial and state-subsidised art worlds and that of university research. Although the value of art as research is still contested, there is a growing sense that the interface between the nonverbal intelligence it manifests and more traditional forms of research may offer valuable, even radical, possibilities. Inevitably however, this sense of possibility also gives rise to opposition, both tacit and explicit. My concern here is to illuminate something of the politics of knowledge at play in this situation. It should go without saying that the perspective offered is a personal one.
One of the significant challenges of the university today is the growth and expansion of the research student population. Research training and doctoral education has exploded around the world, including doctoral education in the creative and performing arts. This development has occasioned many debates – none of them simple. Positions intersect, overlap, concur, and contrast. This paper examines several key issues about the doctorate and doctoral study to ask what aspects of doctoral writing ought to remain the same across all fields.
The PhD in Studio Art Revisited
After all one's art is not the chief end of life but an accident in one's search for reality or rather perhaps one's method of search."