TOOLS FOR RESEARCH IN THE ARTS
Malcolm Quinn, ‘Practice-Led Research and the Engagement With Truth’, in Reflections on Creativity (Duncan of Jordanstone College, University of Dundee 2006) ISBN 1 899837 56 6
This chapter offers the thesis that practice-led research in art and design should propose changes to those relations of knowledge that currently ensure the integrity of practice and the neutrality and objectivity of theory. I assert that the ‘common ground’ of theory and practice can be located within a structure of identification that binds the practitioner to the analyst or theorist of practice. I offer an example of one theorist (Slavoj Žižek) who has instituted a game with this structure of identification of theorist and art object, a game that is necessarily limited by conditions for the ‘practice of theory’ in the humanities. A way beyond these limitations is suggested in a discussion of Lars von Trier’s film The Five Obstructions (2004). This film makes a series of displacements of the integrity of practice within the forms of identification that structure the engagements of Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth.
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Malcolm Quinn, ‘The whole world+the work: questioning context through practice-led research’, Working Papers in Art and Design 4 2006 ISSN 1466-4917
This paper proposes that practice-led research, rather than confirming existing assumptions about the relationship of art and its cultural context, is in a position to challenge those assumptions, which are based on concepts of sociality and culture-as-ground which are dominant within the humanities. My argument for a division between practice-led and humanities-based approaches, depends on a distinction between the mobilisation of context as artifice within fine art, and cultural foundationalism in the humanities. A work which keeps both of these elements in play is Martin Creed's neon light piece 'the whole world+the work=the whole world' of 2000, which is a key point of reference in this paper. I use Creed's piece as an exemplar of the possibility of including 'the whole world' within the work of investigation. This strategy can be used to counteract both the uncritical acceptance of 'the whole world' as the final ground of research practice, and reactions in favour of tightly defined fields of inquiry and micro-specialisms. I argue that neither of these extremes are appropriate to practice-led research in fine art. At doctoral level, we are used to telling artist/researchers that their research project 'can't take on the world', and referring them to 'fields of inquiry' and 'areas of research' as the proper alternative. I argue instead that we should be telling them that practice-led research must always take on 'the world', as a shibboleth that tends to skew or distort the direction of research undertaken by artists. Paradoxically, an emphasis on the artificiality of context may offer the best challenge to its mythic and sacred status, and may also help to ensure that sociality does not become 'the only game in town'.
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Malcolm Quinn and Naren Barfield, ‘Research as a mode of Construction: Engaging with the artefact in art and design research’, Working Papers in Art and Design 3 2004 ISSN: 1466-4917
In this paper, we examined the concept of construction insofar as it applies to, and can be taken to determine, the production of the artefact in the art and design research process. These modes of construction, we argue, are specific to the research process, and can also be defined using disciplinary and socio-economic criteria. The work of artefact construction according to a plan of research is what distinguishes the process of art and design research from the analysis or interpretation of artefacts in disciplines such as material culture studies, design history or anthropology. Secondly, the causal chains determining construction in art and design research are distinct from those that apply to the production of design artefacts for industry, or the manufacture of artworks for gallery display and sales. For these reasons, research in art and design can be seen to establish a specific mode of production, taking its place alongside those traditionally associated with studio practice (to which it is complementary, but distinct), or product development. This ethic of artefact production requires the development of systematic, replicable and transparent procedures and systems that are reflected in both the final form of the artefact and any associated documentation. We conclude that the development of these core research values for the activity of making art and design artefacts is also congruent with current examples of best practice in generic research training that is applicable in diverse disciplinary contexts.
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Malcolm Quinn, ‘Teamwork and the Knowledge Base: Doctoral Study and Design Research’, in Proceedings of the Third Doctoral Education in Design Conference Japanese Academy of Sciences 2003 ISBN 4-9980776-2-7
This chapter was the outcome of a conference paper for the only international conference devoted to doctoral education in design, held in conjunction with the 6th Asian Design Conference in Tsukuba, Japan. Both the paper and the chapter were informed by consultancy work at the Royal College of Art, where I had been commissioned to produce a report and recommendations on research provision in the School of Architecture and Design. My focus in this chapter was on the opportunities that practice-led research and doctoral study in art and design has for addressing issues relating to the ‘knowledge commodity’ and knowledge transfer that more established academic disciplines may be unable to encounter. I also addressed some weaknesses in attitudes to design research, surveying some historical tendencies and current developments in this field, focusing particularly on the work of Victor Margolin, who had advocated a socially engaged philosophy of design research distanced from commodification. I argued that Margolin’s approach is characterised by a blindness to the knowledge commodity that hampers the progress of a fully socially contextualised attitude to doctoral study and post-doctoral research in design.