First lecture - Lecture on Methods

From notes written at the time:

IAN BRIGGS
Three methods
1. Comparative analysis (compare & contrast)
from Harvard Writing Center

• Frame of reference --> your context --> external
• Grounds for comparison --> why these pieces?
• Thesis --> claim/argument
• The 'whereas' --> both sides of the argument
• Organisational scheme
• Linking A + B etc.

2. Observer participation
Professional discourse - talking about work within your area. Observer participation is stepping outside of your own dicipline and explaining your work to someone not part of your professional practise. Comes from anthropology, from ethnography, used by artists such as Susan Hiller. Necessary to observe own work dispassionately, exercise self-reflexivity and try to remove presuppositions. Academic diciplines and new diciplines start up between existing ones, questioning current conventions.

3. Bricolage
Combining different influences, concepts or media to create something new (see Wikipedia's entry). Example is the punk movement or the cargo cult the 'Prince Philip Movement' (Wikipedia article).

BRET WILSON
Characteristics of research

• Rigorous & systematic
• Critical & analytical --> open to question and not dogmatic
• Reproducible & independent --> same answers on repeats
• Communicable & novel
• Testable predictions

Synthesis <--> analysis

To be testable, a prediction or theory must be capable of being proved wrong or else it is a belief.

Perspective is an example of a paradigm: a way of seeing that makes previous theories redundant.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thoughts on this lecture

Briggs' section on comparative analysis was familiar ground for me- it was only 2005/6 that I wrote my BA dissertation comparing Rachel Whiteread's monumental pieces House & Embankment using this method and it is still relatively fresh in my mind.

I was initally dubious of the necessity to state the validity of observer participation; however after a while I remembered that at the previous session, gathered in our smaller groups, I had had difficulty in explaining my work when faced with cross-diciplinary students and that this concept was relevant to me. It is easy to forget how to explain your work to someone from another media that is related yet distant to an extent. I realised I have developed a language to explain my work to friends and family who know very little of the visual arts language at all but I cannot use the same style to other arts students. It is patronising at least and perhaps not very informative to students who could easily understand what I want to explain if I find the right language. It was a strange deja vous to hear the MA Printmaking, Fine Art & By Project students using the language I used for three years on my Fine Art BA but have all but forgotten how to use. I find animation a more practical and less wordy dicipline than fine art, and in some ways the better for it: I can explain myself in a much more 'everyman' language whereas fine art requires its own definitions for regular-use words. After being away from it for a few years, fine art language sounds pretentious and hollow.

Bricolage as a concept is also familiar to me from my bachelor's course, from studying outsider art and certain sculptors. Was interested to hear about the cargo cult obsessed by Prince Phillip.

I found Bret Wilson an engaging speaker but I remain somewhat unconvinced the characteristics he listed can be so dirctly applied to reseach within the arts. His giving perspective as an example of a paradigm that changed people's theories helped although I think I need examples on how, for example, to rigorously test an artistic idea.

I felt that Briggs' lecture 'cannot see the wood for the trees'- it concerned itself so energetically with the methods of research that I found myself wondering where the art comes in. I am not sure this focus on research in art is really that helpful. I am reminded of Prof. Jon Dovey's session during our Tuesday evening contextual lectures entitled 'ScreenWork - Media Practise as Research Journal'. I actually became angry during this lecture because I thought Dovey's ScreenWork DVD journal was pointless- the idea that an artist would make a film purely for research purposes only with the intention to further the collective knowledge of the artistic community appears to me to be self-indulgent and irrelevent. Art should be made for its own sake or surely it loses that momentum or energy that inspired its creator in the first place? I cannot imagine putting all that effort into designing a film to try out a new technique and then submitting that for peer review, instead of moving the embryonic concept/technique forward to a finished work of art. Dovey's support of ScreenWork was not aided by the rough, unfinished-looking and ultimately uninspiring pieces he showed us from this project. Or maybe I just don't get it yet.