Just a bit of a shakedown here, to see if, secretly, I already know what I need to do, without actually knowing it.
In terms of research which is actually based on artwork- (practice-based research)- what evidence can be produced?
• sketchbooks. All the work comes from somewhere. All of it goes through a process: some of it visual, some of it theoretical, some of it reflexive. Some of my working notes can be effective guides to the "design process" of artwork and the various guises it takes to achieve final form. ( I was reading earlier today in the Research Training Initiative folders about some stuff touching on Popper and Kuhn in relation to the process of knowledge formation in formal situations. I wonder if a transplant will take, or indeed, what I'll use it for if it does. certainly it's true that the process of creativity in the arts follows a process of positivist progress one day and tearing things up to start again the next. And there are often discoveries that are made in the context of a work that could come about, it seems at the time, no other way)
What, I wonder, would be a useful way to talk about such processes? What sort of way of writing would I adopt to dramatise these events, being as they are partly mental events, partly written events, partly events-of-the-gesture which happen in the physical process of creation; some are events which have a logical chronology, some follow an intuitive or emotional or short-lived context that makes them difficult to write about or apprehend in a larger-and-trying-to-be-all-embracing ontological context for practice. They vanish or cease to make sense before they can be grafted meaningfully into my understanding of the artwork. How can I capture these events within creativity when they so often produce no "paper trail" and not even (to pursue the metaphor) any sort of "heat signature" that I can lock onto in my ruminations of what I was thinking about when I made such and such? ( A strange endeavour to class as "research", anyway) The "experimental apparatus" for creating artwork is cleared away so swiftly and completely from the mind that it can be difficult to piece together how a thing was made from the physical traces that remain: they're only part of the process itself. I think this process is the mysterious thing we call practice.
• logs of intentions and library/source research undertaken to inform work. Commentary on sources. A "compost heap of ideas" informing the contextual basis.
• detailed analysis of intention. How successful has the idea for the artwork been? What changed? What does this reveal about the working process in my artwork? ( I suspect: that it doesn't follow a pathway easily definable as research per se, but that it does of itself fork over new ground and turf up some interesting things).
• analysis of the medium: why choose it and how has it coped? This could mean several things in terms of "medium" eg: the composition of pencils and inks and paints and so on, or the particular capabilities and effective valencies of a medium of representation
• production of materials which are exemplars of the theoretical points raised:eg a book which depends on the social construction of the book for some of its effect; a book which recursively examines its own place in epistemological space (and some evidence of the researches undertaken to produce the artifact)
•stages of production: writing :storyboarding: photo materials: drawings: reference materials: in case of painting, photos of stages of production: (the premise being that the finished artifact constitutes the outcome of a body of research, embodied in the artifact itself.
• experiment with porting the work to other media: results
I could "transcribe" my own work OR MY INTERPRETATIONS OF OTHER'S WORK to other media than that in which they originally appear. This appeals to me in a perverse sort of way, But I'm not sure what it would show...
• reflexive practice: work which is aware of the evidence produced in the analyses arising from some of the other methods. This could be recursive, producing artwork where the subject research is based in the research I've been doing into my own artwork...which is in fact, artwork based on my own research into my own artwork...which is... I don't know if this sounds like a good thing. After a couple of generations of this we'd soon see the weaknesses of the breed though!
One use of this reflexive practice would be the retrofitting of various bits of theory I've picked up for explaining artists' books to the books themselves. But what would this achieve? Would a book that was about the book as a social construction tell me anything more about how this phenomenon works, or would it simply be a sophisticated sort of redundancy: an artistic tautology (actually, art abounds in tautologies: endlessly piling on layer after layer of signification'll often do that sorta thing)
This is an area where I'm doing a few bits of reading just now anyway, and I hope I'll be better informed before long. I still feel slightly furtive about research through artwork, which is clearly something I'll have to surmount if I want seriously to let my fine art practice have any place in my research.
