Jane Linden

Senior Lecturer, Manchester Metropolitan University.

An investigation of praxis:
Process as the research locus of ‘practice as research’ in the wake of post 1960’s visual arts.

I am a senior lecturer working within the visual/live art field in a BritishUniversity. I am currently writing a PhD based on my interest in the relationship between theory and artistic practice. The work is a written thesis, but looks at a variety of artworks that arise from practice-led research. The format of the presentation will be a written paper based on the following:

An investigation of praxis: Process as the research locus of ‘practice as research’ in the wake of post 1960’s visual arts.

The aim of this research project is to contribute to an understanding of the inter-relationship between theory and artistic practice, and to establish the terms and conditions and ultimate value of an emerging ‘praxis’ based methodology within artistic production today. In specific terms the aim will be established through:

1. Identifying the historical discourses that gave rise to the move towards a dialectical relationship between theory and practice.
2. Determining the development and significance of ‘praxis’ within the context of artistic creativity.
3. Determining the influence of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) within British academic institutions on the emerging ‘practice as research’ activity.
4. Identifying a critical context for ‘praxis’ based endeavour within the field of research and its significance in the public domain.

Research to be undertaken:

Although rooted in the discipline of philosophy (Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’ for example) much 20th century writing on the relationship between theory and practice stems from Marxist social and political theory. Current research activity in the fields of science, education and the arts too, continues in pursuit of an explanation of how the two activities might usefully converge. Although ideologically significant, attempts to unite theory and practice into a single critical activity continues to present difficulties, not least because each activity has its own intrinsic ideals and as such “obeys quite different principles” (Bordieu).

Within the arts the difficulty is particularly foregrounded by the complex abstract nature of the practical manifestations, which – as theorists such as Bakhtin, Barthes and Derrida, have revealed – can be interpreted or ‘read’ from a variety of perspectives. Therefore, for an artist practitioner to pay too much attention to ‘grounding’ her/his work theoretically may suggest that it has a fixed analytical framework, thus restricting its own ability to become an active constitutive form.

Furthermore, all too often ‘theorised practice’ can be led by, rather than imbricated within, theory, rendering the resultant artwork either indecipherable, or, equally redundant in terms of meaningful artistic discourse, formulaic. Arts practitioners, then, are arguably at risk of becoming “ carriers of structures” or “vectors of processes” (to coin E.P. Thompson’s terms in his critique of Athussurian Marxist ideology), and as such marginalise the value of artworks and their own intrinsic potential to provoke and stimulate. Terry Eagleton has recently made the comment that “Critics of theory sometimes complain that its devotees seem to find theory more exciting than the works of art it is meant to illuminate. But sometimes it is”. The art historian Jonathan Harris, too, states that, since the 1970’s “…the study, practice and pleasures of analysis came to equal, even surpass, the study, practice, and pleasures of looking at art”

The development of the artist as critic is historically mapped most seminally through the Conceptual Art movement of the 1960’s, where the tangible/visible ‘artefact’ was significant only as a vehicle for ideas, and subsequently through the transition into Post-modernism where the process and (what might hitherto have been considered as) the tangential [by]products take precedent over an easily commodifiable object. The notion of an actual, tangible, autonomous ‘artwork’ within praxis may be difficult to define even within the context of the public gallery as, here too, curators struggle to ‘frame’ and make palatable a recalcitrant diversity of material for the non-specialist consumer. Praxis-based material is not motivated toward the gallery as a final resting place, and challenges attempts to institutionally contextualise its many parts.

It is significant to the focus of this project that current pedagogic processes, in Britain, allow for an increasingly expandable approach to arts practices where the goalposts shift from neatly packaged artefact to a more critically engaged process-led method. The outcomes may be defined more on their success in revealing rigorous engagement with ideas and processes rather than attention to finished product. This is not entirely unconnected to the consequence of the requirements of the Research Assessment Exercise within British university art departments which state that “The key requirement is that the work should bring about enhancements in knowledge and understanding in the discipline”, thus the primary role of the arts practitioner shifts even further towards that of researcher, with a responsibility to undertake both an examination, and explanation of, the practice.

This project therefore aims to define this emerging field of work arising from RAE objectives in this country, and to identify how praxis can function effectively within artistic terms – by this I mean the generation of actual artwork that is intelligent and challenging on its own terms and not that which is seen to emerge as mere by-product of a theoretical thesis.