Talk Given at the Prince Charles Art School

7/31/2019 Talk Given at the Prince Charles Art School

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Research by Practice

24th January 2012

DrGary Pritchard


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Michael Biggs, Henrik Karlsson, Eds. (2010)

The Routledge Companion to Research in theArts. Routledge


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How to read Art?Expressivist school: Art is the expression of the intentions and feelings

of the artist. We can thus best interpret art by understanding theoriginal intention of the artist

Croce, Collingwood, TolstoyFormalism: its true meaning lies in the work itself.

Balzac, Flaubert, LyotardBirth of the Reader: (Death of the author). Primary locus of themeaning can only be found in the responses of the viewers

themselves.Barthes, Heidegger Gadamer, Derrida


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This is the last picture that Vincent van Gogh painted before he killed himself

John Berger Ways of Seeing


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Postmodernity

Douglas Kellner - postmodern society is the site of

an implosion of all boundaries, regions, and

distinctions between high and low culture,

appearance and reality

Kellner, D. 1989


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Oliviero Toscani


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"Research is the curiosity-driven production of new knowledge.It is the process oriented toward the realm of possibilities that is

to be explored, manipulated, controlled, given shape andform, and transformed. To put research (back) into the arts,to make visible and explicit the function of research in the arts

and in the act of 'creating knowledge is a truly ambitiousundertaking ...

Helga Nowotny,President of the European Research Council


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My present contribution is a plea for plurality, and first of all

plurality in concepts and understanding of what artisticresearch may be and how it should be conducted I am,

simply, pleading for a way of understanding artistic researchthat accepts the plurality and, if necessary, finds way of

defending it. What I am up against, then, is fellow

theoreticians (and some practitioners) who want to definesome specific kind of activity as the one and only real artistic

research.

Sren Kjrup


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Art practice as an inquiry process takes into

account more than the physical and formal

process of creating images, objects or events.Not only is the artist involved in a 'doing'

performance, but this also results in an image that

is a site for further interpretation by others.

Sullivan, G. (2006) Artefacts as evidence within changing contexts.

Working Papers in Art and Design 4


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Although I am interested in theory, I am not of course a

theoretician. I ask such questions and make the theories onlyafterwards, not before only after I have done something. I keep

pictures I have done around the studio; you want to look at them.And it takes a while to realize what I really did there, how it works;

then I may use that in something else. But though painting can't be

done theoretically, all painters must, to a certain extent, analysetheir work afterwards.

Hockney, D. (1993). That's the way I see it. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books pp. 130-131


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the value of a work of art is not objective facts it might reveal, not

merely its expression of an artist's emotional state, and not that it capturessome ideal, eternal formal rightness. Rather, the value of an artwork lies in

the ways it shows the meaning of experience and imaginatively exploreshow the world is and might be - primarily in a qualitative fashion.

Therefore, art can be just as much a form of inquiry as is mathematics or

the empirical sciences.

Johnson, M in Biggs &Karlsson, Eds. (2010)The Routledge Companion to Research in theArts. Routledgep.149


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Christian

Boltanski


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Case Study: Eileen Little

Tape slide (with technology)

AutobiographicWho gets to decide? (permissioning)

Memory

Parent/childAuthenticity

EthicsI need every single move that I make to have

meaning its got to be theorised


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Memory





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The role of the artists as a theorist and researcher was developedto help argue that art practice as research is based on theassumption that the outcomes of inquiry are focused and open-

ended; conclusive and open to conjecture; beyond doubt andopen to question. This does not contradict the accepted notion

that research is supposed to come up with unequivocal results. On

the contrary, the task of any rigorous intellectual and imaginativeinquiry is not only to produce new insight, but also to realize how

this can transform our knowledge of things we assume we alreadyunderstand. Within fields such as the visual arts this research

approach involves a creative and critical process whereby

imaginative leaps are made into what we don't know as this canlead to crucial insights that can change what we do know -

create and to critique.Sullivan, G. (2006) Artefacts as evidence within changing contexts.

Working Papers in Art and Design 4


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Understatement was the hallmark of the late Felix Gonzalez-

Torres's works... lyricism, formal rightness, contextual aptness,economy of means, intellectual courage, toughness wrapped in

gentleness, a hard-won equilibrium between private reality andpublic participation, and finally, a desire to engage the average

viewer-as if there were nothing average about such a person but,

rather, as if everything that made that person particular were his orher differences from other individuals-are the qualities that inform

his art

Robert Storr,on Felix Gonzalez-Torres


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discuss?

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Documents

Talk Given at the Prince Charles Art School