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Keynote presentation for North East Scotland Visual Arts Research Network: summer school for doctoral researchers at Grays School of Art, August 2010. Exploring issues of conversation, collaboration and learning in artistic projects/interventions.
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Spaces of Encounter
Artists, conversations and meaning-making
(project by artist Dan Robinson: http://black-dogs.org/)
My interests in research/practice• Conversational forms of learning; dialogic rather than ‘banking’ theory of
education (Freire)
• Working between universities and other research/practice communities –the state of being ‘in between’
• Network spaces: spaces which enable interchange and learning: what are their characteristics?
• Theoretically informed reflective practice: practitioners/professionals analysing and reflecting on their own situations/dilemmas
• Co-construction of knowledge – using technologies and open processes
• Artistic practice as musician/collaborator/educator, and activism…
Researching art…
• Art as a form of knowledge (knowledge in and through art-making)
• Knowledge about art
(borrowed from Phil Taggwww.tagg.org, who in turn borrowed it from Herbert Read: knowledge about art, knowledge in/through art, knowledge for art)
Ways of „knowing‟
• Academic discourse privileges language
• But artistic communication encompasses more than language –music, art, dance, performance, image-making etc. Otherwise why wouldn‟t we just write it?
• Writing, speaking and acting are different –academia often privileges writing and more „fixed‟, apparently less fluid ways of knowing
• „Performative turn‟ in accounts of practice – more dynamic, fluid, but also difficult to explain
• Academic research requires argumentation and „proof‟ – can practice provide this?
Situations not objects of study…
• ‘The world is a making; it is processual; it is in action; it is ‘all that is present and moving’ (Williams). There is no last word, only infinite becoming and constant reactivation.’
• The world is constituted through activity
• Talk is there to do things (not just rule-bound, concerned with exchanging meanings)
(Nigel Thrift: Afterwords)
„Theory‟ and „practice‟
• Theory – theorein (Greek) – to see – contemplate -essentially to think about
• Practica – to do, practice (complex word)• Praxis – the interplay between theory and practice –
reflection in action, knowledge in/through action
Underpinning every practice there are sets of theories –an implied ways of seeing the world –worldviews, standpoints, set of values and learned behaviours – research unpacks this.
Raymond Williams: from medium to social practice: making work in the arts and media, (we can reify the products as ‘objects’ AND think about them as a social practice).
praxis…?
Creativity
• Meaning-making
• Combination/recombination
An ‘interdisciplinary turn’?
• Dialogue becomes prominent
• Meanings less settled
• Emergent processes: play, improvisation, chance, generating situations rather than objects
• Artistic work that illuminates a situation
Theories/Mythologies of Creativity
• Collaborative• Social• Socially and culturally
constructed• Everyday creativity• ‘High’ creativity• How creativity is valued, and
what kinds of creativity are valued most…
• Individual• Psychological• Cognitive• Modernist• Romanticist etc etc
Creativity = agency/autonomy – the ability to be able to reshape the world
Is this why creative work/labour is so sought after? It’s generative: a sense of agency?
Creative milieux
• The city
• The neighbourhood
• The organisation
• The programme
• The project
Creative places and situations are both
designed
and performed
(by who?)
A creative situation is both a question of design AND performance
Top-down/bottom-up – but more complex than that
The ‘creative city’
• From mid 1990s, creativity has moved closer to centre of urban and national policy rhetoric..
Place-making? Artistic interventions
artists’ organisations; media co-ops; cultural enterprises at various scales
Knowledge
In traditional research/schooling – “acquiring knowledge is largely separated
from the situations in which, through knowing in action, knowledge is
constructed and used” (Gordon Wells)
(Friere – „banking‟ theory of education)
…and knowing (in action)
We mobilise knowledge through practice.
Why the arts matter…
• Artistic approaches are powerful because they embody the ‘knowing in action’ paradigm.
• Learning ‘about’ the arts (history, context, convention, tradition, etc)
• Learning through the arts – through practice
• And learning through encounter with the arts (E.Bosch: The Pleasure of Beholding); again, illuminating a situation
• Active, agentive, engaged, not passive
Locating practice
solitarySocial/conversational
Interior/privatecollaborative
Spaces
Domains of practice
Disposition
Economy/resources
Institutions
Traditions
Interests
Questions
etc
Locating practice…complex/dynamic
solitary social
Interior/privatecollaborative
Working in private?Working in public?
Exteriorising the interior world? The imagination/the imaginarium
Two collaborations
• Both cast and funded as ‘professional development/professional learning’
• One formal – an accredited CPD programme, Teacher-Artist Partnership
• One informal – artist residency: ‘The Cave’ (BBC SSO) – a ‘project’
Teacher Artist Partnership Programme
Artist-educator pedagogies
• art and design (and some traditions of performing arts) education has championed the ‘artist-teacher’, in which the skill and craft of the arts practitioner is blended with pedagogical knowledge
• a rich vein of research from Dewey to Stenhouse to Schonhas championed the idea of teaching as a type of artistry, which involves making rich, complex judgements about teaching - a form of empowered, active professionalism
• Now - Creative PartnershipsTMand a host of other policy invocations based on ‘partnership’ have brought these debates to the surface
• Arts-led approaches supposedly enhance learning outcomes. But this is not unproblematic, (US: ‘arts integration’; UK ‘creative/cultural learning’)
‘Teachers’ and ‘artists’• Embodied roles -
performing identities
• Interpersonal -psychosocial AND occupying ‘positional role’ within institutions
• Pervasive mythologies -using highly loaded terms in everyday language
• Reference orientations/generative metaphors/controlling discourses/organisationalnarratives
‘Mediated conversations at a cultural trading post’
• mediated conversations at three levels:
• Firstly we have recorded and analysed literal conversations between teachers, artists and tutors in various combinations.
• Secondly, we treat ‘conversational learning’ as a broader aspiration implying a particular set of social, intellectual and pedagogical commitments.
• Thirdly, the programmes themselves as a complex ‘instructional system’, and the discourses of policy and pedagogy that they mobilise, act as a kind of ‘holding framework’ and conversational form that uncovers some of the paradoxes, tensions and debates that characterise the territory.
TAPP stories
• Artistic/pedagogic research practices
• Applied problem solving – for whom?
• Complexity of artist roles and teacher roles
Thurle Wright: critique of TAPP
• There is something suspicious about the TAPP constant call for ‘collaboration’ which denies the essential self referential nature of the artist.
• Art forms have their own communicative idioms, whereas TAPP prioritises verbal communication.
• Residencies imply a deficit model (‘redressing an inherent lack’).
• Equal partnerships is a myth (‘circumstances do not allow it’)
• The blurring of the artist into the ‘arts educator’ creates role confusion.
• The apparent TAPP over-emphasis on process over product is misplaced (‘as an artist I must value product’).
• Artists should not be expected to perform an instrumental role with respect to other areas of the National Curriculum.
Dilemmas/tensions
• Pedagogy implies dialogue/collaboration/conversation
• But many artists (and artistic thinking?) need solitude
• Achieving a balance?• Signal/noise ratio in
schools (and HE) can be very poor….
• The ‘quality of time’
The Cave
Creative places, projects and proceses
Situations/events are enabled by conversation: we imagine and talk things into existence
Questions of design and performance
Illuminating situations – is this what artists do?
“If we knew what we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”
(Albert Einstein)
Contacts/web
generalpraxis.blogspot.com
Graham.Jeffery [at] uws.ac.uk
uwspracticeresearch.blogspot.com
uwscreative.blogspot.com
twitter.com/grahamjefferytwitter.com/UWScreative