writing and the Phd in fine artargument and the preceding comprehensive literature review, as well as the assumption
of objectivity, might at least be jostled; in this way phds in Fine art could prove useful
to the broader arenas of research. For instance, as proposed by haseman (2006b),
research in the creative arts will add to existing methods and definitions of qualitative
research. This is partly due to the constant testing out and re- planning involved in the
processes of critical reflexivity, such as an insistent questioning of purpose and value.
This distinctive internal critiquing, whose exacting qualities predict questions about
authorship, subjectivity and an ethics of engagement, has become a central theme to
this chapter almost against our will. it can be identified with what Barrett has called
an ‘emergent method’. The concept of an emergent method strongly relates to the
status of Fine art as a permeable discipline which does not so much promote inter-
disciplinarity, but simply rejects boundaried discipline- ness. Fine art is of its essence
an open and speculative discipline within which artists apply multi- sourced methods
and bricolage- like approaches to their research enquiries. it might be useful finally, to
remind ourselves that this is in no way new or radical, in that this is precisely what
artists have always done.
in an essay by White (2008), we are reminded of Robert smithson’s work which,
if we are to be engaged in it, invites us to be involved in an understanding that the
project itself carries within it ‘the seeds of its own destruction’; that it is ‘an openly
contingent value system or cultural context’. it is also something of ‘an architecture of
fiction’. What smithson produced are narrative fragments from an uncertain authorial
point of view. his work remains of enduring interest to contemporary artists. it also
reflects certain aspects of what art does: it disrupts narrative; it re- enacts; it makes
direct address; it employs fiction: art employs its strategies to provoke what an artist
believes at the moment of conceiving or making to be new (leighton 2006). Whether
we conceive it as new in the context of the phd remains firmly in artists’ hands. or,
does it?
We hope that we have shown that writing is integral to the phd research process:
that through the documenting, charting, formulating or even fictionalizing of the
research enquiry, writing can convince us that we have gained new insights and
understandings and the potential to be critically active in our own contexts. as
shottenkirk (2007) proposes, we need not worry overly about the concept of new
knowledge; by taking artist researchers on, we have done so on the understanding
that they will provide new knowledge, however, whether we accept that they have
given us new knowledge or insight into our worlds (institutional or otherwise),
remains subject to the politics of our environments and possibly whether we have
been able to retain open minds.
Notes1 http://geist.se/ (accessed 2 February 2010).
2 http://www. writing- pad.ac.uk/ (accessed 31 January 2010).
3 http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n1/v1n1editorial.html (accessed 15 February 2010).
4 We follow Borgdorff’s (2006) adoption of research ‘through’, rather than Frayling’s (1993)
research ‘for’ arts practice.
5 http://www.bris.ac.uk/parip (accessed 2 February 2010).
6 http://sitem.herts.ac.uk/artdes_research/papers/wpades/index.html (accessed 15 February 2010).