rhetoriC: writing, reading and ProduCing the visuaLlandscape) or multimodal. By applying rhetorical analysis to movement, visual and
aural productions, the arts practitioner can underscore that their scholarship involves
studying and publishing in the language specific to their field; one with a grammar that
is equivalent to print- only research.
perhaps the corollary can be more easily seen by considering mathematical or
computer science research. While words in these areas are interlaced with equations,
codes and formulae, it is these, not the alphabetic communication that predominates
and stands as knowledge. i am drawing here a parallel: that movement, sound, visual
and spatial manipulation and production stand as knowledge in their respective fields,
and that the use of rhetoric, because it is always about expression and effect, can play a
crucial role in establishing what stands for research in the creative arts. Thus rhetoric
becomes a useful research tool for artists who seek to produce and ‘publish’ – write,
perform, exhibit and record – new knowledge that results from investigating and
furthering their own and others’ artistic performances and productions. The practice
of doing so is as old as the very performative, public and evaluative space of the greek
forum.
Within the field of writing studies, informed by rhetoric, research about
communication comprises theory and praxis: one theorizes practices which in turn
challenge theories as conditions or subjects change. For writing as well as arts practice,
this means developing and questioning theories about how someone writes (or dances),
about what is or how an effective piece of writing (music) is composed, about giving
language to what is observed (in design) and sensed (in landscape architecture). new
theories produce new practices and new observations about communities, discourses
and practices produce new theories about communication whether that is in writing or
through media specific to the arts. parallels between this circular process of knowledge-
making in writing studies and the practices that result from art researchers/performers/
creators drive this chapter and thus form the basis for arguing for rhetoric’s usefulness as
a tool to produce scholarship in the arts, and for considering it as a means of reflecting
on and evaluating that scholarship. The same questions that have guided rhetorical
research can be used as a starting point for scholarship in the arts: what the nature
of the discourse^2 at hand is: what the elements used to declaim, persuade, unmask,
affect, shift or praise are. By answering these questions in the medium in which art
practitioners work, arts research can lead to doctoral quality scholarship, illuminating
as well as demonstrating how performances/exhibitions/objects/spaces construct and
communicate what we see and believe.
This chapter will further explore how the application of rhetoric to artistic practice
is not necessarily cemented to alphabetical ‘logic’, but can cross all media, serving as a
method of discovery and analysis of communicative processes and production. it will
include an examination of how rhetorical research applied to art practice can produce
multiple kinds of scholarship recognized today in higher education: scholarship of
teaching and learning; analyses of practice that involve using alphabetical language
alone and analyses of practices that combine the art medium under consideration with
alphabetical language. in these three forms, artist practitioners can employ rhetorical
tools to examine not only their practices (a useful and common default when one
thinks of art scholarship), but also to inquire about the relationship between viewer
and artist, artist and self, artist and medium. The final section of this chapter, will