Contextsin addition to Art and Research we must place the Journal of Visual Art Practice, and
Working Papers in Art and design^6 hosted by the university of hertfordshire (uK). it is
here that debates about, for instance, art works as research are proposed. if a potential
or existing supervisor were to deploy the papers published in the latter by scrivener,
Reilly, smith and harrison, they would be able to approach the question of how, if
and in what circumstances, art work counts as research from a number of different
perspectives and discipline bases. This is useful because it takes the supervisor and
those he or she supervises or intends to supervise, outside the intimacies of an actual
or potential relationship and draws her/him into an arena of scholarly exchanges,
carefully managed and appropriately presented, also accessible for international
engagement. active networking and cross- disciplinary exchanges almost inevitably
enhance ambition as well as tempering an eccentric research frame. earlier we looked
briefly at some aspects of literature in the field, where one of the key sources was
Borgdorff’s understanding of both the urgency and scope of current debates in 2006.
These resources are appropriately complemented by websites and journals such as Art
and Research which draws to itself artists who have undertaken phds, artists scholars
of international reputation, as well as offside contributions which have caught the eye
of an editor. editors ensure that the journal is a suitable vehicle and forum for debate
and that its various contributions attest to ‘the deep purpose of their writing task’
(lockheart and Wood 2008: 113). in the case of the Journal of Writing and Creative
Practice, the editors also attest to: ‘The style and beauty of a dialogue’ conducted by
artists and designers (lockheart and Wood 2008: 115). We would hope that the phds
that we have briefly outlined in the second part of this chapter will attest to the same.
Concluding commentin this chapter, we have touched on some of what we take to be the key issues for
an appropriate recognition and development of phd research cultures in Fine art.
We have addressed the role of writing, described the role of the researcher and his or
her embodied and active relationship to and within the research, and touched on the
implications of this. We have described the submissions themselves. on one level, we
have placed ourselves, just like our key research sources, in a paradoxical position of
wanting to refuse any imagined rules, guidelines and protocols for the presentation of
phd research studies in Fine art and to produce convincing evidence of research. it
has been our intention to enter into a reflexive space of enquiry to give credence to the
nature of these critically reflexive and complicated phds cited here.
in relation to the literature in the field, there are guide books which cover some
areas of our research, for instance, Barrett and Bolt (2007), graeme sullivan (2005)
and gray and malins (2004). however, in our view, there is still so much that such
guides have been unable to identify in their drive towards giving practical assistance and
historical or theoretical substantiation within these developing research fields. This is
not our intention. We hope that whoever reads this chapter will be inspired as we have
been to attend to phds in Fine art, to their methodological form, to their provocations
and their risky and uncertain outcomes; we hope that the complex role of writing
within these studies can be more fully understood and that writing can be more readily
explored and developed within the phd. We hope too that the insistent conventions of