Art & Research : What do you think?
Two artists on the 2.0 site recently engaged in a brief discussion about how work is described and it got us, here at BlackFlash, thinking. Specifically, I’m referring to Colin Carney’s entry in the artist pages and David Pollock’s reaction to it. The issue underlying their exchange, and perhaps the larger issue behind artist statements and art research in general, is the role of research in art. To what extent is a “social sciences” dialogue being used in art-speak nowadays?
Being through the art school system myself, I remember the days of my MFA when my colleagues and I would scramble to put together our SSHRC grant applications. In case you don’t know, SSHRC stands for Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Funny that it should be offering funding to fine arts student, no? Evidently not. SSHRC grants are given to fine arts students as researchers. The caveat is that the student must show what sort of new research he/she is engaging in and what methodology he/she is using. I was not the only one at the time to be struck by the foreignness of the demands. Indeed, funding bodies create demands and artists, who often need money to make ambitious projects, attempt to deliver.
While this is an academic context that I’m citing here–SSHRC grants are there to fund your graduate studies–the people who are being educated in these programs go on to shape the future art community. Are these changes good or bad? Are they largely propelled by the decisions of funding bodies and society’s desire for an instrumental function in art, or is it also a part of art’s natural evolution that stems from a history of political art and social engagement? How do we begin to qualify art that takes as its premise social engagement–by ethics or aesthetics?
We’re hoping the BlackFlash community can share their ideas about their own travails in being an artist, in looking about art and in reading about art. What do you think?
Let me start by throwing out a few thoughts.Yes Genda I would agree that the background issue of Art as a form of sociological observation that uses the language of the social sciences reveals a desire for credibility for an activity viewed as frivolous by many (Arts Cuts)
Let me introduce my bias as follows: Most of us begin our involvement with Art by drawing. Our continued interest is a facination with representation and behind that a heightened awareness of the contingencies of existence and consequent need for control.We seek this through picture making.
There is a difference between a Artist who uses photography and its inherent qualities to illustrate questions of perception,social roles and values,memory and time and a photographic artist who is coming from a photographic tradition ( which for me starts with Walker Evans and continues up to the Bechers,Joel Sternfeld,Alec Soth and Jeff Wall to name a few ). The most signigicant difference being an engagement with picture making.
I recently attended a themed group show at an Art school centred around the Urban Environment.There was a panel to discuss “What makes a city livable”.The work on the walls was not discussed but only served as a backdrop for sociological observationsI. It revealed to me that photography is still viewed by many as a means to illustrate ideas and concepts.
I think of Artists such as teh Bechers and Jeff Wall as picture makers first.Their social critique,and poliics are aspects meaning including some that are contradictory.The work is a continuation of Baudelaires “painting of modern life”.
I will end with this.: Jargon is used to create identity in a subculture and Art should represent our attempt to find collective meanings in contemporary life.
I wholeheartedly agree about the nature of picture-making, and object making in general–that one must engage with the medium on its own terms rather than use it as an illustrative apparatus. It’s the lesson modernism taught us that, I think, would do well to stick around. Indeed, I think there is a renewed interest in skill and material but where I see a problematic persisting is in the way art has diversified and the results of that diversification.
Now, let it be clear I think this diversification is a fantastic thing. But the dialogue one type of work engages is very different from another. Of course there’s no need for the artist to be well-versed in all of them. Indeed, more and more, the artist seems to be a specialist in a larger field. I’ve often heard painters criticizing video artists and video artists being suspicious of performance and performance…etc. etc.. What I’m concerned about is the increased division is rendering certain types of work more favourable to funding initiatives because they have greater instrumental value or are more implicated in the social through medium alone. So I wonder what the relationship of work to funding looks like. Which leads the other and how much give and take is there? Is art practice also dividing on a more fundamental line–between the academic artist (i.e. the one who gets the PhD) and the commercial/career artist? Is the PhD just a way to get at job or is it partially a product of the diversification of artist interest and specialization? When art becomes as subsumed by the market as it is now, is there a search for a different type of art that might find its place within the university setting?
Admittedly these answers to these questions aren’t clear cut but I think they’re worth looking at in earnest. I’ve seen a marked amount of students switch into BFAs from other faculties when they discovered they had creative inclinations that did not include drawing. Art education is spilling over into specialized schools, gallery-run programs (and I’m not talking about those bring your kids to drawing class enterprises), artist residencies and other opportunities that are re-contextualizing art education itself. I wonder to what extent art is changing and redefining itself at its core.
Catherine Wilcox-Titus posted this on Colin Carney’s artist page and I’d like to repaste it into this discussion as I think it should be here as well. Catherine wrote:
“The question of the (somtimes) forced link between the social sciences and art is as already noted often an attempt to assure audiences and potential audiences of the usefulness of the arts. I value art that offers those kinds of links but only when the aesthetics are absolutely primary and the social observations are complex, non-polemical, and come back to an individual perspective that is alive to that phenomenological content. The example of William Kentridge comes to mind (not a photographer though he does use some lens-based media. I am not completely conversant with the field of photographers). His work is rich, complex, and he has a political and social content, but it is always subordinate to the strong aesthetic content and his sensitivity to his location in time and space.”