CharaCteristiCs of visuaL and Performing artsaesthetics (Bourriaud 1998) and ideas of participation (Bishop 2006) means that the
active engagement of a live audience is often sought. The temporal and embodied
quality of most performing arts has stimulated debates around the ephemeral non-
reproducible quality of the performance event (phelan 1993), issues of ‘liveness’
(auslander 1999), the importance of the energy exchange between performer and
spectator and a demand for the valorization and study of the repertory along with the
archive (Taylor 2003). an ambivalent relationship to documentation prevails, although
areas like music and film have developed huge industries based on the reproducible
documentation of performances.
Traditional differences between visual arts and performing arts concern the division
of labour (solitary work or group work), distribution (producing objects for investment,
ephemeral events or repeated performances) and impact (creating a canon versus
immediate audience response). however, areas of shared interest and the blurring
of boundaries are many, like installation art, scenography, lighting design, video art,
screen dance, audio art, site- specific practices and so on. performance art (body art,
action art) and live art practices form an in between zone, which can be looked at
from a visual arts perspective or from a performing arts approach.
any general characteristics of visual and performing arts would be hard to find (and
fairly useless as well). instead of listing conventions and presuppositions about various
art forms within visual and performing arts,^3 i will, in what follows, take up only a few
aspects for comparison – such as the role of research in artistic practice, the position of
the artist and the place of the artwork.
There is one more dichotomy that has relevance for artistic research, however,
namely the traditional division between artistic inquiry and history of art (or history
of music, dramatic literature) and scholarship in humanities, which is often also
institutionalized. Concerning this division (as well as other dichotomies) we can ask
whether it is desirable to accentuate differences, or to minimize them by emphasizing
continuities. it seems reasonable to emphasize continuities rather than artificial
dichotomies, but the idea of one research world encompassing all forms of research
(history, philosophy, science, social sciences, practice- based research, etc.) is not
truthful. arts and humanities have many things in common, but sometimes artists
come closer to scientists than historians since they engage in experimentation, and
sometimes they have more in common with philosophers than social scientists, since
they question the nature of reality. The term art- based is apt to underscore continuity –
and to create confusion – since all traditional forms of art research could be considered
art- based. is not renaissance art history art- based? The term is perhaps best known from
art therapy (mcniff 1998). another option is to speak of art- as- research (as opposed to
science- as- research) and to focus on truth as impact (Bolt 2008). a strict dichotomy
between art- based (or artist- based?) research and other forms of research is probably
not useful. Combining different forms of research, even different research traditions –
could be fruitful. however, if artistic research (or art- based research) would be nothing
special, if it had nothing particular to contribute, at least potentially, why engage with
it, why propagate it, why write a book about it?