Art is Useless, Edgeless and Homeless

By Professor Graeme Sullivan Visual arts has no singular function because it can be called on to do just about anything. Arts’ usefulness is because it is edgeless and homeless—art is masterful at shape shifting and form fitting

By Professor Graeme Sullivan

I have been in conversation about the relationship between art practice and research for quite some time. The questions raised ask us to think more deeply about what we believe we do as artists, educators, researchers, and cultural theorists. The title suggests why the visual arts is successful in taking on any role deemed necessary. Cultural, social and educational history is well served by aligning visual arts with a cause. Where we are less successful is explaining how the ever-expanding universe of visual arts practices makes a bang within traditional institutional systems. However, in the current business of educational incorporation, why is it a good idea to describe visual arts as useless, edgeless and homeless and how can this be defended?

Visual arts has no singular function because it can be called on to do just about anything. Arts’ usefulness is because it is edgeless and homeless—art is masterful at shape shifting and form fitting

Visual arts has no singular function because it can be called on to do just about anything. Arts’ usefulness is because it is edgeless and homeless—art is masterful at shape shifting and form fitting. Furthermore, the inference that visual arts is merely equivalent in form, conceptual structure, and discipline practices and protocols to other academic areas is shortsighted and unsustainable. The institutional tools of argument, methods of persuasion, and rules of investment do not see uncertainty, contradiction and unanticipated outcomes as assets. Research that renders prediction aligned with acceptable levels of confidence is perceived to be true and conclusive. Cultural capital, on the other hand is context dependent and although not easily reduced to singular metrics, has the capacity to be mapped, analyzed and visualized in robust ways that render a more complete picture. I’m very comfortable asserting that the only viable base from which visual arts can continue to respond critically, responsively and creatively to the Zietgeist of the times is from a position that honors the centrality of the ever-expanding place of studio practice.

For artist-researchers the studio is a place one is born into, when the hard wiring that helps shape who we are awaits the formative cues necessary to help us flourish. It’s where our capabilities of thinking, making and doing merge amid the interactive and messy multidirectional processes that give rise to our actions and aspirations, and the explorations and exploitations that help us make sense of who we are, and how we learn to make meaning from where we are. The studio is a metaphorical place of flexibility and adaptability that is chaotic in confirming and destabilizing our predictions of what makes sense, and where chance occurrence nudges up alongside boundary conditions as we translate, transform and transition to a temporary place of momentary understanding.

If a goal is to deepen our commitment to potential and to what’s possible then this needs to be uncoupled from a reliance on merely knowing what’s probable. Understanding visual encounters and experiences is a dynamic process of change that travels in every possible direction and dimension. The picture is much more complex and much more interesting when the myriad braids of visuality are embraced. In messing with the probable and possible meanings that arises from sensing, knowing and making, one can transact logically, transpose conceptually, translate analogically, transform metaphorically, transfigure symbolically, transfer associatively, transcribe structurally, transgress conventionally, transcend expressively, transmit imaginatively, and so on.

The inherent passion and commitment of working purposefully and aimlessly at the same time, adapting, innovating and discovering, and pushing the limits of possibility through failure to success, are practices found in abundance in visual arts studios. This cycle of creative investment, productive yet often unanticipated outcomes, peer review and cultural critique, are typical of the actions that constitute cultural capital.

Contemporary art practitioners extend traditional studio pathways by adapting new ways of thinking to new modes of making. The inherent passion and commitment of working purposefully and aimlessly at the same time, adapting, innovating and discovering, and pushing the limits of possibility through failure to success, are practices found in abundance in visual arts studios. This cycle of creative investment, productive yet often unanticipated outcomes, peer review and cultural critique, are typical of the actions that constitute cultural capital. And they are readily observed in most visual arts studios within universities, but not so readily understood by institutional administrators. And of course, part of this perception problem lies with visual arts educators who need to be more effective advocates and leaders in profiling the specific ways that visual arts contribute to particular institutional goals, as well as the general manner by which visual arts enhance the common good. That visual arts is useless, edgeless and homeless is a good thing, because its purpose is multiple and mutable, its boundaries are fluid and flexible, and it is located beyond disciplinary limits and lives within the potential of life experience and human connection.

Professor Graeme Sullivan PhD. has been messing with art for quite a while in his many roles as teacher, artist, researcher, art writer, and administrator, and uses creativity, information, persuasion and streetsmarts to ‘excite others about art.’ He is currently the Director of the School of Visual Arts, Pennsylvania State University. Graeme has been researching studio-based practices since the early 1990s, and authored the text, Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in Visual Arts (2005/10). He continues to publish on research in higher education and participate in professional development and visual arts and design program initiatives.

More from this issue

More from this issue

By Su Baker, President, Australian Council of Deans and Directors of Creative Arts — Over 2 decades the creative art academic community has grown and matured as a sector - so have the questions of method and purpose of publically funded research, that influence the processes of evaluation. Discussions around impact and ‘end-user’ value is a live issue at the ARC and we look forward to the new thinking that will shortly emerge. The creative arts depend almost entirely on end-user experience, and the impact of these experiences aspire to have real and meaningful impact on peoples lives.
By Dr Jenny Wilson. DDCA’s Research officer Jenny Wilson caught up with Henk Borgdorff in Amsterdam in April 2016, hot on the heels of his recent speaking tour of European and UK universities, art and music schools, to find out more about artistic research and European experiences of the politics of art and higher education.
By Professor Jeri Kroll Since the Strand report (1998), scholars have been unpacking the manifold ways in which creative works can be research. Explaining the usefulness of questions to doctoral candidates not only keeps supervisors honest, but also keeps at the forefront of everyone’s mind why theory is unavoidable.
By Professor Paul Draper and Professor Scott Harrison Communities of profession, the old academy and the new academy, intimately rub up against each other and while some research may still be considered ‘more equal’ than others for now – this evolving mix can only positively impact on the rise of artistic research, its acceptance in society and its measurement by governments and universities.
By Associate Professor Cheryl Stock AM — The narrative of knowledge is almost always underpinned by the cognitive but how we know the world is often through the experiential. Whilst we have moved a long way in redefining knowledge in research terms to include the processes and outcomes of our practices (artistic, creative, professional) and importantly have privileged the artist’s voice as the expert in this recasting of what a knowledge claim might look like, some art forms prove more problematic than others in this endeavour.
By Dr Jenny Wilson As many in creative arts grappled with the amalgamation challenges of the 90s, few were aware that the Dawkins reforms also had increased the centrality of research to university funding. This ‘blissful ignorance’ was not to last.
By Dr Leo Berkeley — The creative practice of filmmaking, understood as a form of academic research, has been growing in scale and significance within Australian universities for several years. While doctorates involving the making of a film have been occurring for decades, it is only relatively recently that the academic screen production community has been seeking to more systematically establish how the production of a film can lead to the discovery of new knowledge.
By Professor Brad Buckley and Associate Professor John Conomos — Recently, there has been much discussion in the press and beyond about the importance of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) subjects at high school and at university. In particular, the Commonwealth Government’s National Innovation and Science Agenda has focused exclusively on STEM disciplines. However, that discussion misses the central importance of creativity, inventiveness and innovation.
By Dr Danny Butt — During the 1990s and 2000s, as readers of NiTRO know well, an intensive debate took place among art and design academics as to whether their practices and those of their graduate students could be called research, and if so what “contribution to knowledge” might be made by the creative output, as distinct from the writing that has traditionally accompanied submissions in higher degrees in creative arts.
By Professor Margaret Sheil — On my last outing in an ACUADS conference, I was described by Flinders University’s Julian Meryick as the “artist’s ideal of a scientist… impatient with the reduction of everything down to short term utility.” So as I venture once again into the creative arts domain, I draw on a scientific analogy. The principle of chemical equilibrium refers to a system in which the rate of consumption of inputs is the same as that at which outputs are produced so that the system is in a stable state of consumption and production.
By Professor Ross Woodrow — The decision by the Australia Research Council (ARC) to achieve the long-mooted merging of the Higher Education Research Data Collection (HERDC) and the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) exercise by adeptly disappearing the HERDC has been welcomed by many discipline leaders, and not just those in the creative arts. With the inclusive ERA becoming the singular evaluation of research quality across Australia, there couldn’t be a better time to rethink the classification of research in universities.
By Associate Professor Robert Burke and Dr. Andrys Onsman — Criticism of the scientific methods of doing research has increasingly pointed out that all experimental research involves some sort of creative leap. In the performing arts such creative leaps are fundamental to artistry.
By Professor Estelle Barrett and Professor Barbara Bolt — At a roundtable at the Australian Council of University Art Schools (ACUADS) annual conference in 2014, panelists were asked to address the following question: What impact are higher degree research programs having on emerging trends and themes in contemporary art? Whilst the panel felt that the development of higher degree research programs in creative arts did not lead to better “art” they did agree that it has profoundly affected the way art is framed and understood both within the academy and beyond.
By Dr Kate Tregloan and Professor Kit Wise — Interdisciplinarity has been widely recognised as a valuable response to the wicked problems of our time. The ability to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries brings together different perspectives and expertise, and allows entirely new approaches and solutions to emerge. To prepare students and graduates for the complex challenges of the twenty first century we need good quality interdisciplinary programs. But how do we know what is ‘good’?