Stuart Evans and Malcolm Le Grice

Transcription

1 Research in the Practical Arts - Doctorates - Autonomous Methodologies Stuart Evans and Malcolm Le Grice This article presents some views on the appropriate conditions for treating art and design PRACTICE as the basis for a research degree but particularly as a PhD. It puts these views into the context of the historical development of the arguments which have taken place in the UK and the general changes in British art education which over the years have brought it almost completely within the university framework. Art and the University As seems to have been generally typical in Europe, the art schools in Britain originated as specialist and independent colleges whose main focus was practical art training. At the turn of the century most schools reformed the curriculum under the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement. This had an immense influence on how craft and later design were taught, based on skills peculiar to the discipline, and taught live in studios/ workshops which also impacted on the teaching of fine art. Over the years these schools gradually included theoretical subjects, the history of art, perspective and other mathematical systems of drawing, and the technical aspects of any craft. But until the 1960 s, following a national report prepared under the Chairmanship of Sir William Coldstream, Professor of the Slade School, there was no serious debate about the relationship between art and the traditional disciplines which made up the curriculum of the university. It was not that the art schools, nor drama and music schools, were excluded from the university, there had never been any concept or suggestion that they should be included. In the period following World War 2, many British art schools began seriously to challenge the academic traditions in art education with a new generation of young practicing artists and designers teaching part-time and introducing an experimental modernism to the curriculum. This anti-academicism was not directed at the university, which still did not feature in the debate, but was a continued resistance to the influence of academic traditions in art in a period when many features of British life, culture and society were in transition. Even the Slade School, which was fully integrated as the art school of London University still offered the Slade Diploma not a Masters nor even a Bachelors Degree. At all levels, art education was considered as fundamentally different from university education. By 1990 this situation had changed completely to the point where only a handful of art schools remained outside universities and even those which were not part of a university offered BA and later MA degrees often validated by a local university. The main broad stages of this change had their beginnings in the Coldstream Report which presented a view that art education should have the credentials of a liberal and intellectual education as well as being a practical training in art and design. Studies in theory and practice - emphasising context - were systematically introduced with an increasing demand for some written dissertation to be produced for examination alongside the practical studio work. The next significant stage in bringing art into the university concerned an educational constituency beyond art - the polytechnics. Like the art schools, the polytechnics and technical schools, were outside the university. They represented a different class of education and even an education for a different class, the first generation of Waugh s Butlerites enjoying higher education on the welfare state. In Britain, an education as an engineer and in other practical or applied knowledge had a lower status than an education in the theoretical, historical and philosophical subjects of the university. This powerful and class based division in education only reflected the lower status of these professions in Britain, a division probably less marked or even absent in other parts of Europe. In a prolonged period of rational reorganisation of education initiated by local government for economic reasons in the sixties and seventies a high proportion art schools were merged administratively with technical schools (as schools of Art and Technology) or polytechnics (as art faculties within the polytechnic). This was not without struggle or resistance as art schools proclaimed their difference and independence often attempting to protect their more generous levels of funding and staff. In the same period that art schools became merged with the polytechnics another and directly linked change was under way. The relative status and quality of education between the polytechnics and universities began to be questioned seriously. The now world-famous style change of Britain in the sixties - the rock music and fashion - was only one part of a serious erosion of the class values under pinning those other divisions embodied in professional status and education. Academics in the polytechnics began to resent the second class assumption both of the practical bias of their subjects and the standard of achievement represented by their diplomas. Out of this, and a corresponding governmental recognition that these educational divisions undermined economic development, came the Council for National Academic Awards - the CNAA - established in 1964 to oversee the development and maintenance of standards of degree level education in the polytechnics and other colleges of higher education. 1

2 The schools of art were slowly carried along in this change. Many had resisted incorporation into the polytechnics, but once inside it began to be evident that the intensity and quality of their curriculum was of equivalent standard to the other new degree courses and that they might move from the award of diplomas and take advantage of the higher status attached to the degree. Responding to this tendency and shift in attitude, the CNAA began approving degree courses in art and design in The structure of the CNAA, built on subject panels with a membership drawn from teaching staff in the schools and faculties themselves, went a long way to ensuring that the form and style of the new degrees in art and design were appropriate to the subject. The panels enabled a continuity with the early influence of the Arts and Crafts tradition, but also included artists and designers representing newly defined subjects like graphic design. The CNAA panels were responsive to degree course ideas based on unique curriculum proposals. This ensured diversity and avoided centrally determined course content. If art education was changed in this process, which it certainly was, it retained its primarily practical and vocational base with a steadily improving relationship to cultural history and theory underpinning the intellectual credentials of the subject. By the end of the 1980 s the highest levels of art education in Britain had become almost completely degree awarding. The national validation system under the CNAA had assured the university standard of degrees in art and design along with all the other degrees offered by the polytechnics. In 1990 the anomaly that polytechnics offered the same qualifications as universities and often covered the same subject areas was recognised by government and eliminated by giving them fully equal university status. Research and the Arts The main stimulus to a widespread debate about art and design as research, a debate which continues to develop in the UK, began as a direct consequence of the incorporation of the polytechnics into the university system. The periodic quality assessment of research (the Research Assessment Exercise - RAE - crucial as it determined future research funding) previously only applied to the old universities now included the new universities formed from the polytechnics. Though a very small number of art departments had previously existed in universities, the Slade, Goldsmith s College, the Ruskin School at Oxford, Newcastle, Durham and Reading Universities, for example, the assessment of research which took place in 1992 increased the number of art departments being assessed to over seventy. Preparation for this national exercise led to a fundamental debate on the definition of research as it applied to art and design. As the RAE made its assessment based on output in the public domain, this debate and subsequent definition revolved around the concept of equivalence to publication. If publishing a book or journal article was the recognised output form of research in the sciences for example, what was the equivalent form of output in art and design? This question led to an interpretation of research output where the presentation of practical work - an exhibition of paintings, a performance, a film in the cinema or on TV, a design used in manufacture or the presentation of a collection at a fashion show - was seen as the appropriate equivalent to publication. Though the RAE established its definition primarily around equivalence of the output, by implication, this established a radical interpretation that the practical experimentation leading to that output, if genuinely innovative in its field, represented the basis of the research process. This recognition that art and design practice could be the equivalent to the research process in other subjects was not universally accepted at the time and is being refined and revised in the current debate following the establishment in Britain of a new Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) in 1998 to act as a funding body equivalent to a research council ffor the arts. If art and design (and by implication the other arts) are to be within the university system and to have an equal opportunity for research funding both for staff research projects and research degrees, the definition of the research process and output appropriate to the subject is crucial. If an inappropriate definition becomes generally established, reinstating, for example, a social sciences model for the research process, then a generation of art research could be veered in a direction confirming the fears of those artists who have consistently resisted art s incorporation into the traditional academic environment. In order to develop this debate, it is again valuable to trace the longer history of art as research in the context of the British art schools. It has been widely recognised that almost all the innovative developments in British art and design (and even some aspects of music) of the past forty or so years have had their origins within the art schools. They were rightly seen as the boiler-houses driving both the debate and the innovation in many art and design fields. The determination to restructure the traditional art training curriculum in the period after WW2, the widespread employment of radically minded practising artists and designers as part-time teachers and the inability of the professional art establishment to adapt quickly enough to the new forms of art found the schools leading a transforming profession rather than simply training students for it. Though never talked of as research at the time, the new concepts and directions being forged in the British art schools in the sixties and seventies were the direct equivalent to research in other fields. They fulfilled the same role in their field as research did in other subject areas. However, the general acceptance of this equivalence has not been without argument. Though it is 2

3 an oversimplification, the development of the debate on art practice as research has faced two oppositions. The first has come from artists and designers themselves and is based on their long held fear that academic institutions stifle creativity and innovation. The second has been the resistance of the traditional academic community to recognising that art and design practice can be research or to attempt to impose inappropriate methodologies on it. Giving way to the artists fear of the academic would have lost the opportunities for establishing a properly funded base for art and design research enjoying equal status within the academic environment. Succumbing to the conservative tendency in universities would have seriously inhibited the development of practice based research in art and design. In the UK the process of incorporation of art and design education into the universities is now almost irreversible and the debate on the appropriate form for art and design research is well advanced. It is possible to summarise the current state of the debate as revolving around two sets of issues with some common features. The first issue which has become focused as a result of the formation of the AHRB, concerns the form of the art and design research process (rather than the issue of output which was largely resolved in the RAE definition). The second concerns the form of the research degree which is based in, or has its major part in art and design practice. The common features in the debate follow from the way in which Dr. Michael Jubb recently expressed these issues at a symposium held at the AHRB as: Questions; Context; and Method. In more detail these concern the way in which research questions, issues or problems are defined prior to the research, the context of other research (or practice in the field) in which the research takes place and methods or the methodologies used in development of the research. The main concern, as this debate develops is to interpret these research conditions in a way which is appropriate to art and design and in particular to the practice or project-based tradition. Research Degrees in Art and Design The general debate about art and design as research, mainly applied to the research conducted by staff and centred around the research assessment exercises (RAE s) has gone on in parallel to the debate on research degrees in art and design practice. By the time of the university designation for the polytechnics, Postgraduate Masters programmes were becoming wide spread amongst the various faculties of art and design across the country, and under the umbrella of the CNAA there had been a very small but growing number of research degrees undertaken. By 1980 the CNAA had opened up this possibility with two inclusions in its research degree regulations, one permitting the use of practice-based methods, the other allowing a research degree submission to include work in other than written form. The CNAA further promoted research through two conferences held at Middlesex Polytechnic (1984) and Manchester Polytechnic (1987). The PhD in the practical arts began to be seriously debated during the 1980 s through conferences like MATRIX, the first of which was held at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in There is by now an extending list of publications, with research networks, discipline-specific research websites, and an expanding number of practice based PhD case histories. A similar development of practice based research degrees in the arts is also well progressed in Finland under the umbrella of the Academy of Finland but with one significant difference of policy. In the arts, including the performing arts, a major feature of the debate in the UK has been the nomenclature of the research degree. In Finland the concept of a professional doctorate, where the doctorate is designated by the subject (Doctor of Music for example) has been pursued consistently. This parallels similar approaches to the practice based doctorates in the performing arts in the UK. The advantages of this approach has been to by-pass some of the issues concerning academic or theoretical content, allowing a much easier approach to establishing the credentials of practical work or performance as an integral part of the degree examined as the thesis. The disadvantage, which has been a significant feature of the discussions surrounding the designation of the research degree in art and design in the UK, has been concern with the relative status of the degree when placed against the PhD common and commonly recognised in other subjects. There remains the option for development of the professional doctorate in the UK, an option adopted for art practice by some UK universities like the University of East London. However, following the report Practice-based doctorates in the creative and performing arts and design (1997) published by the UK Council for Graduate Education, following a working party under the Chairmanship of Professor Christopher Frayling, a broad consensus has emerged, that art and design should continue to develop its practice based (or as Frayling now prefers studio based ) doctorates under the PhD designation. The explicit arguments for this stance are, as with the status of research in the arts in general, to avoid any under valuing of the arts in the broader academic community. This is a philosophical and political thrust which has been consistent throughout the incorporation of art and design into the university ethos in the British context. 3

4 Implicitly, this position supports the notion that art practice is an intellectual pursuit in its own terms and can be the basis of a research degree satisfying its philosophical content and designation through the discourse contained in the works themselves. The more radical aspects of this remain both contentious and problematic and need to be resolved through the growing case history of PhD's based fundamentally in practice. In order to arrive at a situation where those in art and design can be confident of the quality of the PhD based in practice and simultaneously demonstrate this to the wider academic community, a number of concepts need to be refined. Autonomous methodologies - propositions The following represents a set of ideas which could form the basis on which some consistent but non-restrictive debate on the practice based PhD in art and design might develop. The main and fundamental contentions are that: Art and design practices are intellectual pursuits in their own right not requiring translation to other terms in order to have sense and coherence Art and design works embody meaning through their interior symbolic languages and syntax (formal organisation) Art and design works embody meaning through their discursive relationship to other works in their field and their corresponding cultural positions. Art and design works can be read by those trained in the subject in the same way that, for example, mathematicians read mathematics or philosophers read philosophy. Much remains problematic in these contentions and will be the subject of continuing debate: Is it possible to define artistic or design (research) problems as the basis of a structured and disciplined research process which do not require expression in another form of language or discourse? In other words, can the initial research issues for a research degree project be expressed non-verbally or must they always take literary form? Are the interior language systems of art or design able to express the equivalent of question, hypothesis or argument or are they intrinsically and forever set in the expressive mode? If the arts have no other mode than expressive, can the practice element of a PhD ever replace the argument of a written thesis? Can we define methods or methodologies which bring practical art and design within the controlled environment of research, experiment and test? What, if any relationships with theory can be envisaged so that the practical discourse in a practice based PhD remains primary rather than subservient to discourses belonging to other subjects. (There are many instances of practice based PhD s where the legitimisation of the practice is achieved through the critical application of another autonomous discourse like psychoanalysis, semiotics or sociology.) Applying the general categories proposed by Dr. Jubb - Questions - Context - Method to the practice based PhD in art and design in the light of the above contentions the following specific issues emerge. Research Questions The idea that art or design practice derives from a clear set of predetermined questions does not fit well with experience of the creative processes as experienced by practicing artist. A practical project may derive from a more-or-less clearly defined set of issues to be explored or experiments to be undertaken but rarely are these as concretely defined as the questions which might apply in science or other fields of the humanities based PhD. Of course, the general approach to creative practice in art or design is not the same as the academic condition of a research degree. However, other subject areas would expect that the research degree would be able to contribute relevantly to the development of its field and so its approach would be expected to be broadly similar to the forms of research used in that subject rather than fit another methodological pattern. The traditions in art and design education have adopted the concept of the practical project as central to its method of learning. The project process is largely iterative based on partial definition of the issues, followed by practical exploration or experiment, followed by a refinement of the issues or problems. In the arts, definition of the problems is an integral part of the exploratory process. In the current debate, artists and designers need to develop and articulate what, in the process of arts research, is an appropriate equivalent to the research question at the initiation of a research degree. Context In whatever field or subject, a research degree must be placed in relationship to other work in the field in such a way that its creative or innovative contribution can be demonstrated. Again, for art and design, it is important that the definition of context 4

5 is appropriate to the subject. For example, it is important that a research degree in the arts is able to take as its points of contextual reference other practical work in the field and not be confined to references drawn from the critical discourse surrounding the field. This represents an implicit recognition that the other practical experimental work in the field is the primary context for the discourse within which the research is placed and that it is not subservient to the critical (literary) discourse. With this in mind the main, and most obvious aspects of context are: the relevant historical framework from which the current research derives and the other contemporary work where similar issues are being explored and with which the current research has a dialogue. Without placing the work into the public research context it is difficult to envisage how the creative process may be justified in the context of a PhD. As well as the attempt to define the main concerns of the investigation (the questions ) the attention to context is necessary in order to demonstrate that the work makes (or will make) an innovative contribution in the chosen field. The general and acceptable condition held in the sciences and humanities, that a PhD should make a recognisable contribution to knowledge and understanding, requires interpretation so that the form of knowledge and understanding is appropriate to the discourse of the arts. The primary innovative contribution must be in the chosen field but demonstrated by reference to context. However, there is no single orthodox context which suits all investigations and the definition of the context within which a particular research is being conducted is integral to the definition of the research field itself. This is particularly true of contemporary art and design practices which are inter- or cross-disciplinary as, for example where computer art might require reference to developments in the technology as well as their artistic uses. As yet it is difficult to cite examples where this contextual relationship is achieved outside the framework of a written text or commentary but this interpretation should resists the assumption that the text in a practice base PhD is there to explain the work to a non-artist. The contextual framework, as in other research subjects, addresses an expert rather than novice reader. This paper is primarily an argument for the development of autonomous methodologies and resists the subservience of the practical discourse to other forms. However, most practice based PhD s make reference to theoretical concepts either as part of the critical and analytical debate around the practice, as part of the contextual framework or as an integral part of the practice itself (integrated theory and practice). In order to admit theoretical issues whilst retaining the primacy of practice, we offer the following three distinct forms of theory and their possible relationship to practice within the PhD in art and design. This list is not seen as exhaustive nor is there any implication that any are essential nor more appropriate than others. Critical Theory is the most common and best recognised theoretical form drawing often on, for example, psychoanalysis, semiotics or philosophy. Whilst critical theory can (and frequently does) form the basis of a research project in its own right, in the PhD which is primarily concerned with practice it has its function in the analysis and evaluation of meanings of the practical experimentation. It forms an aspect of the context but also has the form (style) of its application as part of the methodology of the research. Case histories show that a research degree which starts out in practice can be taken-over by the critical discourse to become two PhD s - one in practice and one in theory. Parallel Theory is frequently used by artists to make partial and speculative relationships between the forms, meanings and constructions in the practical work and similar concepts expressed in other discourses. Here theoretical fields may share concepts with the practical work without any simple direct relationship. Definition of this parallelism acknowledges that practice and theory are distinct discourses which may contribute to each other without threatening the primacy of the practice within the research. Projective or Generative Theory is often used implicitly in the artistic process. It may take the form of a conceptual launching pad from which a practical exploration takes off. It may function to define intention and guide the experimental work. However, projective or generative theories in art need make no claim to generality, neither requiring proof nor refutation as they might in science, but instead may be artistically idiosyncratic (note-row compositional theory in music is an example) or provisional (to be reworked in the light of practice). They do however offer structure, as part of a methodology, to the relationship between intention and result. Methodology - Method Defining suitable and appropriate methodologies more than any other factor in the evolution of the PhD in art and design practice will determine its evolving autonomy. These are emerging through case histories. It is probable that the more refined and defined the methodology or methods of practice becomes the less dependent the research will be on demonstrating credentials through a theoretical framework drawing on another subject field. The most general aspect of methodology for practice relates to the structure of the overall process whereby the stages of intention or initiation, relate to the practical experimentation and are followed by evaluation and review. Whatever form this 5

6 takes, its consistency and controlled application bring the artistic process into the framework of a definable (even if modifiable) research structure. Within this general structure, matters like the function of theory, its form of application are component issues of the methodology as are the means by which the practical experimentation (exploration) are related to context. Other factors of methodology may be more mundane but equally significant in bringing the broader creative processes of art and design practice into the research context. These include particularly the methods of keeping track of the process so that it can be described or reviewed. This is not a simple matter as some work like a small drawing might be considered to form its own documentation whereas larger or ephemeral works like sculptures or performances require a methodological decision for their form of documentation. In addition to the more obvious reasons for developing methods of recording or keeping track, if the concept of art practice as a form of argument, having its own interior critical language is to be taken seriously, then extending systems of documentation to include new conventions for presenting comparison or contrast might help provide these tools. Developing more sophisticated conventions of visual argument and presentation, perhaps exploiting digital and electronic technologies, might help develop a greater autonomy for practice in the research process. These issues of tracking and comparison also have their potential impact on the evolving form of the thesis itself, its conventions of examination and the extent to which this may encompass other forms than the literary. Conclusions In the UK, for better or worse, the incorporation of art education into the university structure and context is largely complete and irreversible. This has resulted in an equal status of undergraduate achievement through the adoption of university degrees as the norm. It has brought significant advantages for staff through recognition of art and design practice as research and a funding system to give it support. It has a twenty year history of the development of research degrees with a developing debate about the viability and credibility of PhD s achieved primarily through practical research. This debate is currently refining the understanding of the terms of this research particularly its methods and the form of expressing its research questions. This paper attempts to open up some of the current issues on the structure and methodologies for research degrees in this field in a way which will help the evolution of appropriate forms and a greater degree of autonomy for research in the subject. 6