News & Events

Art in Academia: an unfolding personal project

Dr Andrew Patrizio - Edinburgh College of Art

I

Let me begin by setting out some important starting points, for me at least, that I will try to unfold as we go. Firstly, I believe that there are different and new ways of describing how art and design can achieve more within the academic context than has been done. These involve drawing to some extent on research and insights gained in other non-visual subjects. Secondly, we within creative subjects have to take far more responsibility and be far more persistent in placing new and radical paradigms of research within academia. This will inevitably lay down a challenge to increasingly outmoded forms of enquiry that still seem to dominate perceptions of the academic environment. Thirdly, we need to establish, with some degree of rigour and originality, a sense of the embodied nature of academic enquiry and how that functions in our creative subjects.

As a way of introducing all of this, I should say something about the interplay between ‘research’ and ‘practice’, terms with which you seem particularly concerned at University of Chester. The Arts and Humanities Research Board, increasingly the most important body on our project funding landscape, propose (or insist on, perhaps) a distinction along the following lines:

‘Creative output can be produced, or practice undertaken, as an integral part of a research process as defined above. The Board would expect, however, this practice to be accompanied by some form of documentation of the research process, as well as some form of textual analysis or explanation to support its position and to demonstrate critical reflection. Equally, creativity or practice may involve no such process at all, in which case they would be ineligible for funding from the Board.’

For the AHRB, practice has become a subset of research. Most of us in the creative disciplines probably assumed that research is a subset of the wider field of practice, i.e. an artist may undertake research as part of a larger creative project, not that an artist may undertake practice as part of research. A little perspective always helps. A rt practice has a continuous and multiple history spanning 20,000 years, compared to academia’s history of around 350 years, and the formal existence of subjects like psychology and genetics is barely a century old. Not that the enormous longevity of art should imply much practical superiority in contemporary life, but we have to be mindful of the proposed reverse model that springs from the AHRB’s definition. I would offer the counter proposal as an accommodation yet expansion of their position: ‘Research can be produced or undertaken as an integral part of a practice process, but within the research process c reative output can be produced, or practice undertaken, as an integral part of that research process.’ The model could extend outwards or inwards in a neat Russian doll-like way.

The image of the Russian doll is a good place to move on to my main concern, which is making a case for ‘A new embodied paradigm for university research’.

II

I think we are very fortunate at the moment, when creative disciplines have something of a history now within academia, that new thinking in the history of higher education is starting to reframe and re-imagine what university-type research should look like. The obsession with academic research as a predominantly ‘problem-solving exercise’ is that problems are often conventional - they tend to be generated by individuals who know how to ask questions they know they will be able to answer, at least to the satisfaction of their funding body. The language they use limits and determines the type of problem being interrogated. How can unconventionality be encouraged when the whole machine is designed to produce a conventional product?

Someone who has given this deep and radical consideration is Angela Brew, from the Institute for Teaching and Learning at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her first-hand research, and how she seeks to make sense of the conventions of research in the modern age, is highly relevant to the way in which we ‘creative types’ work. As she puts it: ‘we need to break the rules if research is to move us forward in learning how to live in a context of uncertainty and super-complexity.’

She encapsulates her argument in the view that ‘Any piece of research, in so far as it is a quest to make sense of a phenomenon or phenomena, has to work towards coherence… Recognising we are never going to find coherence on a general level, how we search for it, I think, must become a local, context-dependent activity.’ Moreover, ‘The research process is part of the individual’s process of becoming.’

Her broad philosophical approach, as a social scientist specialising in higher education culture, is influenced by the phenomenology of Husserl as well as by the revisionist thinking on scientific paradigms such as Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerbend. For her, ‘Research has to become part of the people who carry it out. It is through the systematic and sustained engagement with ideas that new realities are made. It is through the interpretations made by creative individuals that new ‘discoveries’, new fictions, emerge.’

Brew’s work is important because it invites a horizontal reappraisal of what constitutes academic research. In that reappraisal, distinctions between science and arts subjects, or between established and new subjects, become less heavily drawn.

As a further consequence, it is worth noting that this will have an effect on what constitutes PhD study, which I know you are interested in Chester. The United Kingdom Council for Graduate Education had this to say on PhD study in creative practice in relation to all the other subjects in academia:

'... the more eclectic approaches now not infrequently adopted within traditional science and mathematical disciplines, mean that it is no longer possible to polarise subjects as conforming - or not - to 'the scientific method'. However, it would be of value for the higher education community to achieve a consensus on the characteristics common to all PhDs'

I agree with this sentiment, as I suspect Angela Brew would. It means that PhD study in creative arts areas represents a challenge to the orthodoxy. Everything has to shuffle around and adjust, not just the arts.

III

So creative researchers may share many personal, social and academic factors in what makes them interesting and important. But the way in which personal drives and sometimes sacrifices are bound into a creative life is very explicitly present in creative disciplines. Nobody tells an artist in which area to enquire. To that extent all artistic projects have a strong factor of self-determination about them (even if it leads to unemployment and bitterness).

Emphasising that academic research activity has highly personal aspects to it is not necessarily new, but is often elided over in academia’s thinking and regulatory procedures. The very simple maxim of ‘research is an embodied expression of those who do it’ has become increasingly important in my thinking. The whole narrative around innovation and depth of knowledge is about that individual spark between an artist, their object of enquiry and their materials (and I mean ‘materials’ in the most expansive and inclusive way, so to include conceptual and hidden materials as much as tangible ones.)

Policy work in research must support individuals to achieve their potential, in terms that are meaningful to them but also have a context of wider significance. I hope this view gives more life to the particular, the idiosyncratic, the innovative and the deeply searching, in order that exciting work will ‘unfold into culture’ from the crucible that is the higher education environment.

I partly inherited this way of thinking from colleagues who were developing, in particular, PhDs in creative practice; specifically around the idea of the ‘reflective practitioner’ and the importance of ‘tacit knowledge’. For them, two of the most useful reference points were, and are, Donald Schön’s The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Practice and Michael Polanyi The Tacit Dimension. I would like to sketch out Sch ö n ’s work in particular.

Sch ö n’s The Reflective Practitioner is a study of psychotherapists, engineers, planners and architects. It a ttacks what Sch ö n sees as a series of unproductive & expensive splits in professional activities, namely: university study versus practical or professional study; thought versus action; pure research versus development or practice. He proposes that it is useless to talk of ‘thinking and then acting’, i.e. ‘research’ predating ‘practice’ because of his view that the two are much more intertwined. (Provocatively, he suggests that becoming hugely technically competent is often an escape from asking self-reflective problems of an ambitious nature.)

What does Schön mean by a ‘reflective practitioner’?: ‘Through reflection, he [sic] can surface and criticise the tacit understandings that have grown up around the repetitive experiences of a specialised practice, and can make new sense of the situations of uncertainty or uniqueness which he may allow himself to experience.’ He continues, in a crucial passage: ‘ The practice situation is neither clay to be molded at will nor an independent, self-sufficient object of study from which the enquirer keeps his distance. The inquirer’s relation to this situation is transactional. He shapes the situation, but in conversation with it, so that his own models and appreciations are also shaped by the situation. The phenomenon that he seeks to understand are partly of his own making; he is in the situation that he seeks to understand.’

The qualities he suggests of a good reflective practitioner seem to me to parallel greatly the qualities we find in many of the best artists, namely: selective management of large amounts of information; the ability to spin out long lines of invention; the ability to hold several options at once without disrupting a flow of enquiry. I think these are all very telling positions in relation to the higher aims of the creative disciplines and do not concern themselves only with formalistic and materialistic ways of working with conventional materials. It is why Sch ö n remains interesting to us.

Polanyi’s The Tacit Dimension is equally provocative and original, but I will give you only his wonderfully insightful starting point: ‘I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell.’

I would encourage you to read and digest Schön and Polanyi at your leisure, but I hope to have signalled the fact that the kind of skills and knowledge that artists, designers, performers and architects have can be discussed alongside other kinds of knowledge with no sense that one set of ‘knowledges’ is less profound or important than another.

Now, I used the word ‘unfolding’ in the title, and this is not an accident, and is becoming an increasingly important idea or metaphor for me. The term ‘unfolding’ as I mean it comes from a set of ideas developed by David Böhm – a respected quantum physicist who died only a few years ago. The idea of unfolding, and its opposite, enfolding, is his metaphor for the way in which meaning arrives into the world. It sets it apart from objects having pre-determined and fixed meanings before they enter the world. (And Böhm, I was pleased to discover, cites Michael Polanyi in his writing, when considering the term ‘emergence’ in all its aspects.)

In Unfolding Meaning, Böhm puts ‘folding’ at the centre of his thinking: ‘the movement of enfolding and unfolding is ultimately the primary reality and that the objects, entities, forms, and so on, which appear in this movement are secondary.’ I connect this with my sense of the inner, unfolding logic of artistic practice, which is not focused on predicting phenomena (the classic aim of nineteenth-century science and economics), but on enhancing understanding in all its various forms. For Böhm, ‘meaning is a constantly extending and actualising structure – it is never complete and fixed.’

In describing how he saw how an idea works within the ideas of un/enfoldment he responded: ‘… an idea I would see as a kind of seed that unfolds. The word ‘idea’ has a Greek root, meaning basically, to see; the same, ultimately as ‘eidos’, image… An idea is a way of seeing, just as a thought may be a way of seeing, and I think that a new idea appears as a sort of seed deep in the implicate order from which unfolds all sorts of thought. As you apply the idea to your previous thoughts and to experience, then you find the idea unfolding.’ It is thus easy to see how Böhm’s notions can drive thinking on research in visual arts. After all, we are all concerned with ideas, images, materials, seeing and the dynamic interaction between concepts and practice.

End

Now, this text could be characterised as similar to the writing of a letter. But left like that, of course, the message will not get from Edinburgh to Chester. So let me stick on the stamp. This takes the form of a final touch which revolves around the term ‘Personal Projects’ in my title. There is a line of thinking, stemming from the 1950s or so, in cognitive psychology, called personal construct psychology. It was developed by an American called George Kelly. In this, Kelly set out a theory of personality, roughly summarised by saying that each of us tries to make sense of the world as we experience it by constantly forming and testing hypotheses about the world. By adulthood, our model has become very complex, and this is our personality. Kelly was interested in whether and how we modify our constructs in the face of new information and experience. Those we do not change, he called our ‘core constructs’; i.e. to give up on these would erode our sense of self. His life work was in finding out more about how people construct themselves.

Over the summer of 2004, a rather well-known Harvard psychologist, and pupil of George Kelly, called Professor Brian Little, gave a small seminar at Edinburgh College of Art where he outlined his development of Kellian thinking, framed by the term ‘personal projects’. Personal projects, in Little’s thinking, could be small or large aspirations or activities that we all undertake. But whatever size, they share certain characteristics, or dimensions which can be analysed, such as – how important are they, i.e. are they meaningful to the individual; are you in control of them and have enough time to undertake them?; do you have a community around you to support and value your project?; do you have the resources to deliver this or that project?; does undertaking the project produce unproductive stress and difficulty, or a good level of challenge?

In summary, Little argues that ‘the self may be seen to be distributed through our deliberative acts and personal undertakings’, and ‘Highly self-expressive projects are also likely to be meaningful, structured, supported and efficacious.’

Now is not the place to expand on what this means, and I admit that it is an entirely new area for me. Yet it chimed well with my thinking as set out above, i.e. that we must assert the embodied and relative experience of what constitutes research in art & design, and that creative work in art can be seen as a self-delineated, self-determined ‘personal project’ which has to assert itself and unfold within a complex set of external circumstances.

But this is not quite my ‘stamp’ that gets my letter to you. By pure serendipity, two of my Edinburgh colleagues, Professors Peter Aspinall and Catherine Ward Thompson, who know the relevant ideas much better than me, have told me since that the major work in the UK on George Kelly’s idea is here in University of Chester. A seminal event on Kelly’s ideas around personal construct psychology took place here in 1993.

Art and academia: two small but very rich worlds coming together.

Now my letter is delivered.

References

Note: for ease of reading, page references for quotes in the text have not been given. The following is a full list of works cited.

Böhm, David, Unfolding Meaning: A Weekend of Dialogue With David Bohm, (New York: Routledge, 1985)

Böhm, David, Science, Order and Creativity, (New York: Bantam Books, 1987)

Brew, Angela, The Nature of Research. Inquiry in Academic Contexts, (Routledge Falmer Research, 2001)

Danvers, John, ‘The Knowing Body: Art as an Integrative System of Knowledge’, Journal for Art & Design Education, (NSEAD, 1995)

Feyerabend, Paul, ‘Creativity’ and ‘Progress in Philosophy, the Sciences and the Arts,’ in Farewell to Reason (London, 1987).

Harrild, Anthony / Frayling, Christopher / Painter, Colin / Woodham, Jonathan, Transcript of Research Seminar on Practice-Based Doctorates in Creative & Performing Arts & Design. Occasional Paper, (Surrey Institute of Art & Design, 1998)

Hill, Peter, ‘Is there a doctor in the art school?’, Art Monthly Australia, (October 1995)

‘Understanding George Kelly and Personal Construct Theory’, downloaded from www.enquirewithin.co.nz/HINTS’skills2.htm, October 2004

Little, Brian, ‘Personal Projects and the Distributed Self: Aspects of a Conative Psychology’ (PDF downloaded from www.brianlittle.com, October 2004)

Little, Brian, ‘Personal Projects Analysis: Trivial Pursuits, Magnificent Obsessions and the Search for Coherence’, in Buss, David M and Cantor, Nancy (eds), Personality Psychology. Recent Trends and Emerging Directions, New York: Springer-Verlag, (PDF downloaded from www.brianlittle.com, October 2004)

Polanyi, Michael, The Tacit Dimension, (Mass.: Peter Smith, 1983)

Schön, Donald, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, (Luria, 1983)

Schön, Donald, Educating the Reflective Practitioner (San Francisco, 1987)

United Kingdom Council for Graduate Education, Practice-Based Doctorates in the Creative and Performing Arts and Design (1997: downloadable at www.ukcge.ac.uk/downloads.html)