CharaCteristiCs of visuaL and Performing artsroughly: when artists, who sometimes lack sufficient intellectual education and have
survived and thrived due to their special skills or charm, are forced to try to please and
satisfy their new audiences of research connoisseurs in the same way as their previous
bourgeois audiences, not much is gained.
Further problems for artistic research in both visual and performing arts have been,
and sometimes still are a) attempting to claim a parallel status for art, an ‘equivalence’
in relationship to research instead of actually being research; b)attempting to collaborate
mainly as ‘birds’ with ‘ornithologists’, that is, as artists with art researchers (people
studying artists), instead of working with other researchers on subjects of common
interest; c) attempting to do a philosophical investigation. Though philosophy can inspire
art making, it is necessarily speculative rather than empirical (besides being a tradition of
its own); d) attempting to work in the inbetween as a means of double escape – justifying
sloppiness as research by saying ‘this is art’ and justifying sloppiness as art by saying ‘this is
research’, rather than exploring the in between as a challenging area (sand 2008).
Ways of avoiding some of these problems could be a) to admit that there is art which
is a form of research, but that most art in itself is not research; b) to focus on the purpose
of the research c) to try to think of producing knowledge and understanding for the
field in question d) to be clear about the place and function of the artwork or artistic
practice within the research; e) to allow artists to venture into historical, philosophical,
sociological, or pedagogical research if they wish, but to really encourage and support
those artists who are prepared instead to do artistic research, that is, use their art making
to produce knowledge and understanding about art and the making of it.
To summarize some of the specific problems related to artistic research in performing
arts, especially theatre and dance and to some extent live art, they could be listed as
follows: a production format demanding resources is a limitation to experimentation;
the playful character is conducive to exploration but creates difficulties in terms of
credibility; the tradition of valorizing virtuosity over critical thinking creates problems
for some artist researchers; lacking habits of documentation (cherishing the perishable
moment) is a challenge for some practitioners; focusing on the audience, and on
instant response makes long-term focus difficult for some artists; complaining how
impossible it is to verbalize embodied practices can become a self- fulfilling prophecy;
the collaborative nature of a performance, both the creation process (with extreme
cases like mainstream theatre) and the actual event (with extreme cases like live art
created by the participants), provides challenges and possibilities for research.
What could artist researchers in contemporary visual art and performing arts learn
from each other? in performing arts we could learn to respect the so- called freedom
and independence of the artist, to focus on the intention, and to see the artwork as
a contribution to an inquiry, something that is supposed to be different from what
precedes it, and to work with a long-term view – since all these aspects are related
to traditional academic ideals in other forms of research (such as academic freedom,
integrity and critical thinking, systematic inquiry, etc.). in contemporary visual art we
could learn to respect the skills of collaboration, dialogue, sharing ideas and working
as a team, and to respect the tacit knowledge embodied in practices – since these are
related to traditional academic ideals in other forms of research (like a self- correcting
discourse, research groups of scientists, situated knowledge, etc.).