Category: practice-based research (Page 4 of 4)

Moogee in The Times Higher Education

March 6, 2013 / shaun belcher / 0 Comments

Moogee in the THE 🙂

A bit of ‘raised profile’ news for my canine cartoon research character…

A ‘Moogee the Art Dog’ V Frayling’s Categories cartoon accompanies a ‘Practice as Research’ feature in this week’s Times Higher Education edition (March 7th) by Matthew Riesz article.

Moogee Cartoon and original paper it based on available here: https://shaunbelcher.com/research/?p=229

and as part of Drawing Research network Proceedings available here:

http://www.drawing-research-network.org.uk/drn-2012-proceedings/

Studio Diary: Digital Drawing?

March 5, 2013 / shaun belcher / 0 Comments

I finally managed to get some things working in studio after the old XP laptop that I had managed to set up the larger tablet on failed. I have upgraded slightly an old toshiba laptop thrown out by work and after ripping the now dead screen off it have a serviceable digital drawing workstation at last. the new cheap Medion tablet (£3.99 from Oxfam!) actually works ok with Windows 7. I then drew a couple of digital versions of the daily ‘doodle’ that I have been doing in studio when there. Not with any great research output in mind but just to keep hand in and to start thinking about the glorious ‘art object’.

Below are these digital drawings and the comparable ‘real’ works. Interesting to work with similar materials in digital and physical space. Two are digital rest are drawn and scanned.

The strange thing is that the two ‘digital’ drawings are much free-er and less ‘digital’ than the hand drawn ones. I felt less prescribed as was trying out tablet and also trying out various brush sizes and effects whereas with pens I had a narrower range of mark-making available ironically ( a large, medium and small sharpie for those interested in such things and a biro). When using biro as thinner, scratchier implement I tried to match that in digital arena with photoshop brushes.

The other interesting thing is the process of trying out some new ‘textures’ was same in both processes. Maybe I have used digital pad enough now to feel more comfortable with it whereas before I always felt inhibited by the technology . But does any of this constitute ‘new knowledge’? I started reading Scrivener’s Hertfordshire essay on knowledge and the art object as preparation for the ‘art object’ as cartoon character series.

http://sitem.herts.ac.uk/artdes_research/papers/wpades/vol2/scrivener.html

Container or contained? Unpacking the ‘art object’

February 13, 2013 / shaun belcher / 0 Comments

I have about 24 hours to pull together a reasonable attempt at a PhD bursary application. No pressure there then.

For the purposes of this application I am rehearsing what may be the research ‘question’ that I would interrogate and keep coming back to the same, to me key question, of where ‘knowledge’ may be said to reside.

James Elkins in a draft of a new chapter in his second edition of ‘Artists and Phds’. Provisionally titled ‘ Fourteen ways to mistrust the PhD in studio art’ touches on this in a subsection devoted to the question of ‘knowledge’ and most pertinently for me categorises it as the following two options:

C. How is this knowledge extracted from, read into, or interpreted in, visual art?

If “artistic knowledge” is partly outside of language, then it presents a problem for assessment and what are called in the UK “learning outcomes.” The fundamental choice here has to do with how the “artistic knowledge” is imagined to be related to the art object. There are fundamentally two choices here:

(i) “Artistic knowledge” inheres in the visual object or practice, so that the object or practice is itself a form of knowledge, or

(ii) “artistic knowledge” is interpreted to exist in the object or practice, so that discourse reveals the art’s contribution to knowledge.

In a separate facebook posting he also said the following:

Is art research? Is it knowledge?
Bruce M. Mackh asked me these two questions:
1. Is “Arts Practice” research?
2. Can the products of “Arts Practice” be original contributions to knowledge?

At the moment I am revising all those posts from earlier this year, for the new edition of the book “Artists with PhDs.” So these questions were timely. He made it necessary for me to try to answer in a very succinct way. Here are my answers — any thoughts?

1. Is “Arts Practice” research?
It hasn’t been until the 20th century. It’s important to bear in mind the relatively recent development of the notion that art is research: it comes from post-war academic pedagogy, and especially the structure of UK universities, which require new fields to present themselves as being aimed at “new knowledge” by way of “research.” This isn’t to say some art practice is not research: it’s to say the great majority isn’t.

2. Can the products of “Arts Practice” be original contributions to knowledge?
If you can give me one example of art research that is comprehensible as knowledge, I’ll say yes. Until then, I’ll say that art can often be understood as if it were producing knowledge: but that “knowledge” is insight, expression, understanding, feeling, affect, constellations of objects, unexpected juxtapositions, new sensory configurations. Note that your question asks if artworks can be knowledge. The other option is that the lead to knowledge, or can be interpreted as constituting knowledge. That leads in entirely different directions.

Studio Diary Day 3: Art Magazines & research culture

December 11, 2012 / shaun belcher / 0 Comments

I spent most of today in studio again for first time in six weeks as illness prevented me from being there. I went in today with the supervision meeting yesterday for M.A. in the back of my mind. Clarifying the subject of the M.A. as ‘Graphic Research’ has helped greatly. However my next decision is how far I pursue the Frayling argument between now and next September. In what form I investigate the ‘research question’ when defined (has to be submitted as a new proposal by 7th January) so something to work on over Xmas and finally how much of this can I move forward as interrogation of own practice leading to a possible PhD?

To that end I started looking through old art magazines in studio going back to 2001. I was looking for mentions of ‘academic research culture’ in an attempt to find out when this started affecting what artists produced and the way they worked. Without going into detail it did seem that by 2003 it was observable within magazines to a degree which it wasn’t earlier. There is a whole PhD in analysing this subject in relation to magazines and wider art practice ‘fashions’ but for now i simply cuttiing out references then analysing them as best iIcan with cartoons drawn over the top. This could develop into a range of artefacts or be a dead end but seems a useful way of directly looking at shifts in artist self-definitions and institutional advertising.

Studio Diary Day 1: Practice based research?

October 10, 2012 / shaun belcher / 1 Comment

Ok so here I am back in the studio at the beginning of the second year of my M.A. by registered project and after a summer of drawing related ‘research’ I am standing in front of a very old work on paper (c.1988) and two new canvases done over the summer in the time not spent researching Frayling’s Categories (which wasn’t much). So what do the canvases have to do with research if anything?

I am struggling already to codify or analyse the works from any kind of methodological perspective. The ideas ’embedded’ in the paintings are intuitive, visceral (acrylic paint applied to canvas) and come from a half-formed naive idea of ‘comic’ forms from looking at various comic and graphic novels and studying Philip Guston’s work in some depth especially his drawings. I did read the book ‘Night Studio’ by Musa Meyer which I remember was quite a harrowing account of how his depressions and rages affected his family ( Musa is his daughter). It did however convince in describing the sheer effort that went into his work.

I suppose if I mined back into other works on him I would find material relating to his genesis of the comic forms that replaced his earlier ‘abstract expressionist’ period. I also own the book ‘Sweeper up after artists’ by Irving Sandler which I was half way through and which is very telling in its depiction of the fraught nature of post Abstract Expressionist careerism in New York in the early 1960’s. But is this research…it is art historical research for sure but unless it impacts on my physical creation of an object could it be said to describe anything but ‘contextual knowledge’. To impact on the creation of an art object surely it has to be more profound than that?

I am just asking questions here as at the start of a difficult journey. Turning ‘intuitions, feelings and observations’ into theoretical research is a hard task. I am not convinced as I start this ‘Studio Diary’ that it at all possible but I may learn something else in the process.

I am standing looking at the works. Day One. I photograph them so as to show the similarity in pieces created nearly twenty years apart and in very different locations and circumstances. Maybe that affects how I create images. Maybe the context is more important than I thought.

I am also awed by the quotation from Dickens that I discover Guston had on his wall, which he held to, about complete devotion to the cause. I have never liked ‘Sunday painting’ but never had the means to devote my life to painting and this the reason I have stopped painting for long periods. I found an interesting article online by chance detailing Guston in the studio by Dore Ashton.

http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft4x0nb2f0;chunk.id=d0e2683;doc.view=print