El género en una sociedad binaria

The research was undertaken from within a dual denotation and understanding of practice: as art and teaching. The notion of practice-based research that was applied to address these areas was adopted from emerging positions and methods in artistic research. The research project arose from the meeting point between ine arts practice and teaching, thus approaching the discipline or ield of pedagogy from the very speciic, culturally and temporally located arena of western

2 ‘Jacques Rancière and Indisciplinarity’ an interview by Marie-Aude Baronian and Mireille Rosello translated by Gregory Elliot in Art & Research vol. 2, no.1, 2008 www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/jrinterview.html, (accessed 02.05.10).

contemporary arts practice. There is a long history of arts-based pedagogy, from Vasari to the present, and this research builds on this tradition whilst critically

examining how the research can question, as well as contribute to this tradition.3

As relection became a key term as well as being the central concept behind this research, it was particularly important to engage with philosophical, pedagogical and arts-based models of relection in order to formulate and conduct the research. As noted above, as the research progressed, parallels appeared between the project and a key area of emerging interest within contemporary arts, i.e., ‘the educational turn’, where artists, curators and even non-academic institutions

appropriate forms of pedagogy as a mode of practice.4 _{This interest has it roots}

in relational art practices and can be seen as signalling a particular desire for content production in art practice, a shift in the practice/audience relationship as well a growing unease with the direction and development of art education, which

is becoming increasingly standardised and uniied.5 _{This interest in pedagogy as}

art and the problems of the contemporary art school is currently shared across most of the Western art world, not just the UK or Europe. The Bologna Accord from 1999 has inadvertently altered how we can understand artistic practice in terms of research and knowledge, so we are not just dealing with perceived problems and challenges but also a fundamental shift in the conception of what art education is or should be.6

This particular mêlée of issues, from art as research to pedagogy as art, has made this project interesting, but also challenging — particularly in terms of determining its focus. Insights arising during the research have revealed how contemporary art practices that appropriate education as their medium (such as relational, discursive, practices and artistic and curatorial practices) raise new questions regarding the mechanisms by which practice informs or can inform teaching, and the insights

3 Giorgio Vasari, Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella, The Lives of the Artists (Oxford University Press; Oxford, 1991.

Arthur, D Eland, A History of art Education: Intellectual and Social Currents in Teaching in

the Visual Arts New York Teachers College Press, 1990.

Carl Goldstein, Teaching Art: Academies and Schools from Vasari to Albers, Cambridge University Press, 1996.

4 Irit Rogoff, ‘Turning’, e-lux journal #0, 11/2008, http://www.e-lux.com/journal/view/18, (accessed 18.03.11).

5 ‘So if the transformative function is what we are after, an exhibition may not be the place to start. Perhaps the school as model can point the way to recuperating the agency of art in the absence of an effective public.’ Anton Vidokle, ‘From Exhibition to School’, Art School, Madoff, H. (ed.), MIT Press, 2009, p.193.

6 Dieter Lesage has stated ‘....the Bologna Process, in a way that is completely

unintentional, may eventually contribute to the end of the hegemony of the natural sciences in the ield of research.’ in ‘Who’s Afraid of Artistic Research? On measuring artistic research output’, Art & Research, Vol. 2 No. 2, Spring 2009, http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n2/ lesage.html (accessed 30.05.10).

achieved here inluenced the unfolding of the research process.

Both the ongoing development of artistic research and the similarly expanding ‘educational turn’ in the art world resulted in a sudden upsurge in material both relevant and potentially applicable to this study. This ongoing expansion of the research ield stimulated and energised my ambition for the research to contribute to the discussions around the future of the art school, particularly in relation to its intersection with contemporary art practices. This dialogue gives increasing importance to practice-based art research, particularly in so far as it renegotiates understanding of knowledge within ine art and ine art teaching.

As an artist, I had (and still have in some senses) a relatively ‘conventional’ practice. For instance, prior to the onset of this project, I was not involved with relational practices, nor did I see teaching as part of my art practice (in the sense of pedagogy as an artistic practice). My work was mostly materially-based or reliant, and my own training had been very discipline speciic: I was trained throughout my BA and MA as a painter. This research project has thus changed how I think about my practice, the work that I undertake as my practice as well as how I conceptualise the relationship between teaching and my practice, and in practical terms, how I undertake teaching,

The desire to undertake this research was multifarious. I had been a practicing artist for ten years and I had taught for nearly the same amount of time, in different institutions. The two areas, practice and teaching, were for me both interlinked and held in tension, and I wanted to relect on what this meant or why this was. Secondly, increasingly I was teaching on courses that were not subject-speciic. This led me to think about what I could teach, what my knowledge in the ield was and how any kind of knowledge is made sense of in a ine art teaching and learning encounter. Finally, I had since my MA, been interested in undertaking a PhD but was concerned how this might force me to instrumentalise my practice towards the research. To work across both my art practice and the teaching practice was both a way to bring two key aspects of my life together in a meaningful way, and also to agitate one against the other. Crucially, it was a way to circumnavigate my anxieties around the Fine Art PhD, anxieties that I have since found to be very common both amongst those who do and do not undertake practice-based ine art

research.7

I hope to show that the expanded way of understanding proposed here, in which a

7 Fiona Candlin, ‘A proper anxiety? Practice-based PhDs and academic unease’, Working

Papers in Art and Design 1, 2000, http://sitem.herts.ac.uk/artdes_research/papers/wpades/

practice is seen as including a range of related activities, can contribute to a new appreciation of practice in art, art teaching and art research.

Thus, this research revolves around key notions and structures, which, as far as possible, have also been harnessed and applied methodologically. Each of these terms appears in different ways, within different disciplines, but also from theories to practices within the same ield, and as a result do not have singular meaning. In preparation for the following discussion, I will irst introduce the terms as I have used them; each will be revisited and revised at various stages of this thesis, as usage shifts with the different terrain of the research.

Practice/Praxis: This is a practice-based research project. The notion of ‘a practice’ is not straightforward (and particularly not in this case as it feeds on and explores two interlinked practices — teaching and making in ine art, each with its own traditions and understandings of what constitutes a practice). Bordieu’s notion of

practice from The Logic of Practice, as neither unconscious or conscious, drawn

on what we take for granted was the starting point for the project, but Schön’s use

of practice in The Relective Practitioner, where it is coupled with relection, soon

emerges as the dominant deinition as the research unfolded.8 _{Over the duration}

of this project, however, the notion of practice has steadily been shifting towards exploring a notion of praxis. Praxis is the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted or practiced. For praxis, practice in a public sphere is performative and enacted, and praxis is, as such, a particularly useful model for a discussion of art teaching which can be productively considered as a particular, publicly performed, enactment of an art practice.

Relection/relexion: This whole project can be seen as a multi-facetted, critical relection on the relationship between practice and teaching. Consequently, theories of relection have been used as a conceptual framework for the research and as a method in the research process. I have drawn upon, in particular, Donald Schön and Jürgen Habermas who have differing philosophical conceptions of relection. In addition, I have explored what we might consider as art-based forms of relection, like Dan Graham’s exploration of relective materials, or that articulated

by Michel Foucault when discussing Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez.9 _{The terms}

relective and relexive are often used synonymously and can to some degree be

8 Bordieu, Pierre, The Logic of Practice, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1980.

Donald A. Schön, The Relective Practitioner How Professionals Think in Action, Ashgate Publishing, 1991.

9 Schön ibid, Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971, Dan Graham, Two way mirror power, Alexander Alberro, (ed), Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1999, Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, Routledge Classics, 2004.

interchanged.10 _{For this research it has proved more useful to distinguish the term}

relexive as being a speciic form of relective work, involving relection on several

levels or directed at several themes at the same time.11 As relection and relexion

are foundational for the whole project these terms and their shifting meanings will be explored and utilised in each part of the thesis.

Site: The notion of site has been key for ideas addressed here, as a container for the subject of interest without resorting to the default deinitions of the situated subjects involved, art and pedagogy. Site emerged from a particular notion of practice in my own art practice, as a strategy and structure for managing a diverse ield drawing on the disciplines of ine art and pedagogy, but also related disciplines, like cultural

theory, philosophy, and art history. Expanding on the possibility of discursive sites

as deined by Miwon Kwon, I have attempted to construct the thesis as a series of

discursive sites, as an art-based research approach, and as a methodology.12

Knowledge: A problematic concept in relation to art practices as well as ideas around an art curriculum. The word is used in this study, however, because it is in full use within the domain of higher education and research. So although this research, follows Stephen Scrivener’s use of knowledges (in the plural sense) rather than knowledge, knowledge is still used as a term to locate the work within a particular historical and cultural trajectory, in which ine art has been reframed as

an academic subject of study at the highest university level of scholarship.13