Contextsexpressed in terms of existing concepts. Revolutionary breakthroughs of the kind that
are common in the arts, are correspondingly difficult to validate in such a context.
one of the bridges between the new arts research and the traditional expectations of
the academy is the role of writing. it is interesting that, despite calls from some parties
to abandon the written text in favour of artefact-only research outcomes, one can also
find artists who produce very extensive texts in addition to their artefacts. one might
ask, what is the role of these texts in relation to the artefacts, what does each contribute
and for whom. in the current context, in which the arts faculty could be perceived as
the relative newcomer, one might conclude that the written text is a way of speaking
to the academy through a medium that they will understand. But if the context were
different and the art school had somehow absorbed the university rather than the other
way around, might not the lingua franca of research be artefacts instead of words? Thus
the present position of the arts and the strategies for justifying or describing its benefits
reflect the balance of power between the established university and the entering field
of arts research.
all this could seem very separated from the world of professional arts practice. The
concerns described have been academic ones; however, the arts researcher has been
trained in new skills and enculturated in new values. on the one hand they have been
trained as future professional artists with craft and conceptual skills for the production
of significant cultural outputs. on the other hand they have been trained to work as
academic researchers within the arts. usually, both of these branches of training have
been undertaken in a period of time when an individual would normally train for just
one specialist activity. identifying the benefit of having a single individual with both of
these trainings will also contribute to identifying what artistic research brings that was
not available before.
identifying the professional role of artistic researchers will also help to identify the
potential they bring to the research context and help in the evaluation of quality:
when one knows what artistic research does, one will be able to know when it is being
done well. evaluating quality in terms of the existing activities of academic research
and professional arts practice may put artistic research at a disadvantage. Traditional
academic research involves meeting criteria of scholarship and argumentation, etc.,
leading to outcomes that make an identifiable, if small, increment to the totality of
academic knowledge. similarly, professional arts practice has its own, but different,
criteria and expectations. ambiguity about which standards to meet leads to apparently
paradoxical questions such as ‘can one do good research leading to bad art?’
it has been our strategy in this book to try to approach core issues on research in the
arts from a number of different points of view. We have grouped these as foundational,
related to voice and related to context, but we recognize that they could also be regarded
as multiple strands in a complex web. owing to the protean nature of artistic research
we anticipate that some of these positions will be more resonant with some audiences
than with others. in our view all of the issues discussed in this book are essential to the
development of research in the arts, and one gets different views on what such research
is like according to which issue one places at the centre of the inquiry.