Artistic Research Methodology

15 Artistic Research Methodology argues for artistic research as a context-aware and historical ARTISTIC RESEARCHMETHODOLOGY process that works inside-in, beginning and ending with acts committed within an artistic practice. An artistic researcher has three intertwined tasks. First, she needs to develop and perfect her own artistic skills, vision and conceptual thinking. This happens by developing a vocabulary for not only making but also writing and speaking about art. Second, an artistic researcher has to contribute to academia and the “invisible colleges” around the world by proposing an argument in the form of a thesis, a narrative; and in so doing helping to build a community of artistic research and the bodies of knowledge these communities rely on. Third, she must communicate with practicing artists and the larger public, performing what one could call “audience education.” There is no way of being an engaged and committed partner in a community without taking sides, without getting entangled in issues of power. Consequently, the methodology of artistic research has to be responsive both to the require- ments of the practice and the traditions of science. Here the embedded nature of the knowledge produced through artistic research becomes evident. Artistic Research Methodology is essential reading for university courses in art, art education, media and social sciences. Mika Hannula (Ph.D., University of Turku, Finland) is a former rector of the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, Finland, and is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Gothenburg, Swe- den. He curates contemporary art exhibitions across Europe and consults for a contemporary art gallery in Helsinki. VADÉN HANNULA, SUORANTA, Juha Suoranta (Ed.D., University of Tampere, Finland) is Professor of Adult Education at the University of Tampere. Recently he co-edited Havoc of Capitalism (2010) and authored Hidden in Plain Sight (2011). Tere Vadén (Ph.D., University of Tampere, Finland) is a philosopher teaching art education at the Aalto University in Helsinki. He is an editor of the philosophical journal niin & näin, has published articles on the philosophy of mind and language and co-authored the books Artistic Research (2005) and Wikiworld (2010). www.peterlang.com PETER LANG T ABLE OF C ONTENTS Foreword by Juha Varto .................................................................................... vii Preface ................................................................................................................ xi Acknowledgments .............................................................................................. xv Part I - Fail Again, Fail Better 1. Artistic Research Inside-In .............................................................................. 3 2. Basic Formula of Artistic Research ............................................................... 15 3. Back to the Future: Democracy of Experiences, Methodological Abundance and Verbalization ............................................ 20 Part II - Narrative, Power and the Public 4. Face-to-Face, One-to-One: Production of Knowledge in and through Narrative Interviews ...................................................................................... 37 5. Methodology and Power: Commitment as a Method .................................. 52 6. Different Roles of an Artistic Researcher, the Public and the Uses of Sociological Imagination .......................................................................... 69 7. What to Read, How and Why? ..................................................................... 84 Part III - Case Studies of Artistic Research Practices 8. Per Magnus Johansson: What Do You Do When You Do What You Do? ............................................................................................................... 107 9. Wolfgang Krause: A Place for Imagination—Three Projects, One Discussion, Four Annexes .......................................................................... 125 10. Esa Kirkkopelto: “It Is a Matter of Collective Self-Education, Re-Education through Cooperation” ......................................................... 134 11. Mikko Kanninen: Seer/Doer .................................................................... 147 12. Leena Valkeapää: “Recognize the Unique and Stick with It” .................. 153 Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 167 References ....................................................................................................... 171 Foreword Recently, a colleague suggested to me that we should stop talking about the different types of knowing and admit, or even emphatically argue, that in art we are dealing with something that is “otherwise than knowing.” This remark shed light on an issue that was partly clouded and partly lit: why is it important to so many that art remain art, and why are so many interested in doing research that is based on artistic activity and that takes seriously art’s own way of operating, its manifestations and methods of conveying something to others, either through whispers, screams or discussions? If we approach the issue from the point of view of the critique of knowledge, it is certain that the concentration on knowledge according to the programme of the Enlightenment has, to a certain extent, clarified, simplified and crystallised our view of how everything works. At the same time, it has removed from our vision a great number of phenomena, only because they cannot, for some reason, be introduced as objects of knowledge or as their part, as our view of knowledge is exclusive and restrictive. Exclusiveness and restrictiveness are what have given knowledge its special power: claims that cannot be either falsified or proven coherent with something that is certainly known do not qualify as knowledge. We know from music that certain sounds are not in themselves discernible or meaningful, but their absence from among the other sounds would make these sounds dull. This image could be used to challenge the “practical razor” related to knowledge. The discussion maintained by Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend talked a lot about the beliefs according to which we tend to consider certain things to be necessary, even if we are not able to substantiate them or know about them in the critical sense. Feyerabend wanted to extend this idea to the “sine waves of knowledge”: some of the phenomena that are important to people cannot be turned into knowledge, but they also cannot be left out, because what is known is believed. Otherwise than knowing would mean a more suspicious approach to the critique of knowledge: the crucial phenomena and characteristics may be those that do not fall directly into the focus of knowledge but remain forever on the periphery of knowledge. In the short history of knowledge, we have examples of how phenomena that are considered marginal reveal themselves to be strangely important in situations in which we cannot immediately decide what is important, such as with obvious paradigm shifts. Nothing like this has happened in the last 100 years, so it seems to us that it never has. Yet before viii Foreword the current rule of academic critique, people strove, each according to their needs, to reveal and conceal phenomena that were in themselves out in the open. An obvious and indisputable agent in these operations has been the Church, which has emphasized knowledge according to its doctrine and brutally eliminated the people and phenomena that have not complied with its brand of knowledge. The State is another indisputable agent that has just as brutally forbidden the emergence of phenomena and threatened those who have striven to reveal things. The scholars have created the concept of “culture,” which resembles those of the Church and the State and which, for them, does not mean the cultivation of spirit but an entity that exercises independent and autonomous power and within which all of us exist, in our entirety, and according to which we think, act and struggle. These can only be explained by the “culture” that produced them, which is suspiciously circular. The important message of Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault and Paul Feyerabend has been that the representation of knowledge may be more decisive than its accuracy (“truth”). Research always requires a degree of reduction, generalisation, categorisation, naming and prioritisation of phenomena, which means that it is unwillingly doing violence to the richness and diversity of the reality out of which it is picking its phenomena. When the results of research are returned to the world, the way they are represented decides how this reading matches the potential richness and diversity of the reality to which they belong. This is particularly challenging in natural sciences, because it may happen that we do not even immediately realise how misguided the reading is, and, when we do, large-scale errors have already occurred, which is unforgivable. In the human sciences, the disasters following representational misreadings are slowed down by the human reluctance to accept and apply knowledge. Yet it is possible that the conceptual shape of human life changes in a way that is not desirable in the long term, for example, through the practices of subordination, oppression and stigmatisation. For these reasons, it is important that the democracy in research and knowledge becomes a reality. The Internet age has already, within knowledge,

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