Contexts‘for’ art because the processes involved are central to the discipline of Fine art and
its essential transformative aspirations (Chapter 15). These have been duly noted
by the sources we deem to be important to art practice and doctoral study research
development.
Sources appropriate to doctoral study and art practice researchone of the reasons for the ongoing contentious nature of doctorates in Fine art is quite
simply the politics of institutional powers which dictate what is valued as research
and thus what a phd in the arts might be. This line of argument is taken up by
henk Borgdorff (2006), when he points out that debate still rages around institutional
issues such as parity, benchmarking and the effective delivery of universal rules and
procedures for the conduct of doctoral study and submissions. We will offer evidence
in support of a plurality of approaches to research because there is too much at stake
in our emerging cultures, most particularly in the uK and australia, as well as in the
more robustly independent cultures of sweden and Finland, to enforce homogeneity.
We view this as important to the individual achievements of research artists who have
delivered thinking through their phds which could not easily have been predicted
and might well not have emerged had particular rules and procedures been in place.
This unanticipated and unpredictable research has been noted by very few scholars
internationally, partly because it is difficult to produce anything like a comprehensive
understanding of what these new phds might propose. one of the sources in this
context which refuses the often distracting debate about the required demonstration
of ‘new knowledge’, is ‘Research, Relativism, and Truth in Art’ by dena shottenkirk
(2007).
shottenkirk spells out very simply that we must take for granted that a phd in Fine
art produces new knowledge, as does any other doctoral study, and that the context
within which the broader research arenas must recognize this is one where relativism
is prevalent and most appropriate to understanding how phds in Fine art function.
This is very much the context for our selection of phds where relativism and the
ensuing uncertainty of any fixed positioning, most particularly of theory, are axiomatic.
methodologies, for instance, are not subject to theory but have to be found within the
research art practice: publications by hannula (Kiljunen et al. 2002; hannula et al.
2005; hannula 2008), demonstrate a tenacious understanding of the fundamentals
of doctorates, where methodologies are produced in this way. These texts illuminate
how arts research relates to the experience of the researcher whose world is being
drawn into the research project, and within which the formulation of the research
is relative to the subject positioning of that researcher. in other words, there is a
highly reflexive tension between author and context. The demands that this makes
on artist researchers has not been fully recognized within the literatures, either within
the uK, the eu or what is being developed in the us. one of our central sources
in this area has been an issue of the swedish journal geist^1 on ‘method’, in which,
like hannula’s publications, there is a clear understanding that art does make such
demands. one of the most important findings within ‘method’ is the understanding
of an ‘aesthetics’ of arts methodologies which arises from an artist being ‘inside’ the
processes of research. a compelling argument by malcolm Quinn in this book has