Contextsof past work. artists involved in design, on the other hand, are often familiar with
sharing unfinished work, and trained to present plans, questions, ideas or sketches
before the work is done.
in contemporary art more and more emphasis is put on procedures and on conceptual
framing. in performing arts – with the exception of performance art, live art or socially
engaged practices – this approach is rare. What counts in theatre, dance and film is
the end result, what the audience sees and hears, and its impact. The performance is
the ultimate goal, and the way to get there is the professional secret of the artist, or
something she does not even know herself. alternatively it is considered the concern
of the working group, as in theatre practice, where ‘being in process’ is common jargon
during rehearsals. Focusing on the research process versus research outcomes (artworks
or performances) is an interesting question to consider.
new challenges for academic conventions are encountered when artworks or
performances are treated as research outcomes and evaluated as such. Then we can
ask, with Borgdorff (2006), what makes an artwork a research result, the outcome of
an original investigation. is it the originality or conceptual rigour, or some quality of
the artwork as artwork which makes it a research outcome? or is it rather the research
question, the explanation of working procedures, the theorizing commentary or perhaps
the contextualization of the work, or all of these together? if i have a research question,
albeit a loose one, or even a hunch, i can claim that sitting on a rock once a week for a
year is a possible answer to that question. But if i start by sitting on a rock once a week
for a year, i probably have to explain in detail why i have chosen that way of performing
and how the work is supposed to be understood, if i want to claim it as research.
The question could be formulated as: What is the place of your artwork or your
artistic practice within your research project? The artwork is rarely the question
directly. But is the artwork the method? not all artistic practices are easily systematized.
most commonly the artwork or artistic practice constitutes data for research, for
reflecting on experiences afterwards. after creating several artworks or productions
the questions you started with have probably changed. so sticking to your data, and
changing the questions you ask of it, as well as the methods for analysing it (and
thus perhaps even the theoretical framework), is the path most commonly used, and
comes close to proceedings in qualitative research. probably the best way of producing
significant results would be to have questions for which you really try to find answers.
producing interpretations, contextualization and articulation of experiences around
one’s art is more common and can be valuable as well, especially in areas where little
explicit knowledge articulated from the artist’s side exists.
it is not always easy to determine what the place and role of the artwork in the
research project is. are the artworks or performances evaluated as research results, or
are they considered as tools only, a method of research or are they material or data to
be treated in the written report? if the artwork is considered to be data, the research
resembles any ethnographic or pedagogical research, where the researcher uses her
own experiences as material. This is what practice- based research mostly has come to
mean, and one wonders what the fuss is about. only very scholarly oriented researchers
working mainly with archival knowledge would probably find problems with that. The
same applies when artistic work is used as a method, which can be complemented by
other methods, and the research outcomes discussed on the basis of the written report