Jackson (2009) - When is Art Research?
From Inventiopedia
Jackson, Shannon "When Is Art Research?" (p.157-163), in Riley, Shannon Rose, and Lynette Hunter, eds. 2009. Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies. 1st ed. Palgrave Macmillan.
In this short bookchapter, Jackson describes her work in two different interdisciplinary working groups to answer the question of when art is research. One of the interesting themes of the text is the distinction between interdisciiplinarity and interprofessionality - in other words, the fact that one person does both art and research does not necessarily mean that her art is a form of research.
Jackson points out that the connections between art and research are different in various art/research disciplines. The humanities is full of "work that exists in a critical mode or interrogative mode", so it often "dovetails" with certain forms of art practice. However there are also connections between socially oriented art and the social sciences, between musical or choreographical "reconstruction" and historiography, and between art and engineering:
"The work of the artist is more akin to the collectively spatialized, experience of laboratory work than it is to the seated, computered, paper-stacked, and highly individuated occupational practices of the humanities professor."
Discussing the different "registers" at which the question could be answered - e.g. the "professional" register ("Art is research when you need grant money") and the "Process" register ("'research' is the necessary thing that precedes art making") - Jackson lands at the "Conceptualist answer", which points at "the art object or event as itself a form of research". She points out that "'art since the sixties' has positioned the art object as a medium of critical exchange", and relates this to Foucault's notion of critique:
"Foucault [asked] us to take a critical stance on apparently normalized forms of power and regulation; critique was the 'art of not being governed quite so much' or at least, the art of 'not being governed quite like that'. [...] Contemporary art, like critique, is often about asking us to question how we know ourselves to be where we are."
Finally, Jackson suggests "the possibility that art can be doing research precisely because it violates a predetermined sense of its forms and its boundaries".
--Anders Sundnes Løvlie 12:27, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
