Full Description
In Research in the Creative and Media Arts, Desmond Bell looks at contemporary art and design practice, arguing that research activity is now a vital part of the creative dynamic.
Today, creative arts and media students are expected to develop a range of research competencies and critical capacities in their creative project work. This book plots the basis for a research culture in the creative and media arts. It provides an illuminating genealogy of artistic research, revealing the intimate connections between art and science over the centuries and identifying some of the founding figures of practice-based artistic research. Bell explores the research that artists undertake through a number of case studies, talking to a range of contemporary artists and media makers about their work and the role research plays in this. He also traces the dialogues between art practice and a range of other humanity disciplines, such as history, anthropology and critical theory. His analysis reveals how contemporary art practice is now so locked into a set of interlocutions about process and purpose that it increasingly resembles a research practice in and of itself.
Research in the Creative and Media Arts is a comprehensive overview of the relationship between research and practice that is ideal for undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as researchers in the fields of art and design, art history and visual culture.
Contents
Part I. Critical Parameters
Chapter 1. Creative arts and media research: key terms and perspectives
Introduction
Defining the key terms
The distinguishing characteristics of artistic research
The main types of artistic research
Modelling artistic research
Chapter 2. The research that artists actually do
Introduction
Re-evaluating "background" research
Artist reflections and critical dialogues as research sources
The artist interview as a research tool
Case study: found footage film-making
Chapter 3. A research turn in the visual arts?
Introduction
The dynamics of contemporary art practice
Conceptualism
Curational strategies
Relational aesthetics
Performativity
The practice turn in contemporary theory
Conclusion
Chapter 4. The spectre of science
Introduction
The methodological drive in artistic research
Understanding the logic of scientific discovery
The specificity of artistic research
Against method (and for art)
Artists and science
Case studies of art-science collaboration
Conclusion
Part II. Antecedents and Foundations
Chapter 5. The historical antecedents of artistic research: the Renaissance
Introduction
Renaissance vision
Leonardo, science and invention
Assessing the Renaissance contribution to the advancement of artistic research
Chapter 6. A science of art?: theory and practice in the modernist avant-garde
Introduction
A science of art?
Founding fathers (and mothers) of twentieth century artistic research
Theory and practice in the work of Wassily Kandinsky
Art as expression
Founding texts and axioms of modernist artistic research
Conclusion
Chapter 7. Utopian visions and material realities: artistic research and the revolution
Introduction
Artistic research for a revolutionary moment
The auspices of non-objective art: from the analysis of style to language and system
Malevich as pedagogue: the UNOVIS experiment
The Constructivist challenge
From Suprematist painting to Constructivist imaging
The eclipse of the avant-garde
Conclusion
Part III: Interdisciplinary Dialogues
Chapter 8. Art and the sciences of man: reframing history
Introduction
Method, craft and science in history
Material memory: exploring a family archive (case study)
The artwork as historiographical intervention: interpreting the Spanish Civil War
Imaging the past: The Enigma of Frank Ryan (case study)
Contemporary art and the engagement with history: Hito Steyerl's Der Bau and Free Fall
Conclusion
Chapter 9. Artistic research and the human sciences: staging anthropology
Introduction
An ethnographic turn in the visual arts?
The tarnished legacy of anthropology
Lens-based ethnography: documenting Dublin's docklands (case study)
Susan Hiller: a coming to terms with anthropological method
Trinh T Minh-ha: speaking nearby
The auto-ethnographic impulse in artistic research
Chapter 10. Artistic research and critical theory
Introduction
Theory in the creative arts and media
Paradigms of the theory-practice relation
Exemplars of contemporary creative arts practice in the critical tradition
Conclusion: artistic research and critical theory
