writing and the Phd in fine artformulation which posit complex questions of subjectivity within their research without
recourse to literal autobiography: some of the most ambitious new work, which is still
in progress, posits writing as a kind of unravelling of the subject in question and any
authorial certainty within that process. if we take two examples of work by current
artist researchers, we hope to demonstrate how each of them provides thinking which
does ‘force us back on our own agency and take us beyond ourselves’. in this endeavour,
writing becomes instrumental to what cannot be fully grasped through a satisfactory
conclusion or watertight hypothesis. What we are given is a possibility for new thought,
new speculation and new and provocative insights into what it might be to think as a
creative practitioner.
in the first study, the intention is to throw light on the philosophical problem
of what art might be and to show the limits of the philosophical issues drawn on to
sustain any creative practice in visual art (Chapman, university of Reading). it is a
highly abstract analysis of the contemporary moment which sees ‘rigorous thought on
creativity undermined by institutions, modelled and remodelled by market capitalism’.
its base line is a politics of engagement with the institution, but only with the intention
of understanding the unresolved relationship between art making and research, and
the requirement for the singular and unpredictable configuration of these terms. The
research employs a key theoretical source in deleuze (also Bergson through deleuze),
in the construction of its own distinctive self- referencing method. like key published
sources we have already mentioned, notably Barrett and Bolt (2007), we propose the
method is in the research and changes as new ideas are encountered. like our first phd
example, there is an elision of the research, its sources and its presence as art work;
it is proposed as a ‘writing- artefact’. Writing, of course, is central to the production of
its developing thesis, the positing of art as creative method. in the development of its
findings, fictional characters and aliases’ discourses are set beside deleuzian theory in
such a way that there is no status differentiation and no boundary construction between
unstable self- identification and theory. each is conjoined in what deleuze proposes as
a self differing, that is, at the limits of its own identification. in simpler words, artist
researcher, fictional characters and theories are formulated within writings which set
them in tension, so that no one intellectual and/or embodied positioning can be fully
grasped. in this way, the philosophical problem of research through art is thrown into
relief. We freely acknowledge that such ambition can only flourish in substantial and
supportive research cultures. The culture within which this phd has been undertaken
is a cross- disciplinary philosophy and Fine art culture at university of Reading, uK,
headed up by an artist who also writes as a theorist (alun Rowlands) and a philosopher
who writes on art and is art trained (Jonathon dronsfield). The culture is reinforced
through symposia where researchers from both these disciplines are invited to enter
into prolonged conversations about what it is they do. This must sound unalterably
commonplace, but it is not. in our experience, for many researchers in the uK, the eu
and australia, to say nothing of what is proposed in the us, research takes place in stilted
research environments, sometimes dominated by researchers from a related discipline
and those for whom the literary and the written thesis is of paramount importance. in
this chapter, through the selected case studies, we have proposed simply that writing is
one component of the phd. in our view it is fundamentally important, but its identity
can also be challenging. as our examples show, it is not easy to predict how writing