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Chu Yuan Chu The Practice of Art as a Form of Relational Knowledge Aims and ObjectivesMy research aims to articulate a methodology of art practice based on an understanding of art as a form of relational knowledge, embracing recent shifts in understandings of art in collaborative processes. This would primarily be framed around an aesthetics based on negotiation between participating and collaborating parties – a dynamic process that acknowledges and recognises differences in terms of power, values, beliefs, behaviour and interests. It emphasises each party’s personal agency and generates the imagining of possibilities. As such, this methodology will need to be responsive to specific contexts; cultural cognitive, communicative and behavioural processes; patterns of interactions; value systems; hierarchies, inclusions and exclusions, resistances. Therefore, the research will involve investigations into specific bodies of knowledge drawing on art and aesthetics, critical pedagogy, social and cultural psychology and anthropology. Observing the aesthetics of such negotiation will necessitate a re-evaluation and reworking of the roles, concepts and processes that artists have hitherto played and employed, and of the nature of collaborative relationships between artist and collaborators and a re-consideration of the ethics of practice. The research will also investigate and evolve visual methods - drawing, soft sculptures, performance and photography – that can facilitate, stimulate and capture interaction and dialogue; activate new ways of thinking, seeing (paying attention to both sight + insight) and acting; and map routes for the imagining of alternatives to existing knowledge/ practices. Integrating a research methodology with an artist’s methodology of practice, the research will explore questions and scrutinise issues around the methodology of practice, located within my various projects under IFIMA (http://www.ifima.net/), including the Open Academy, Imagining Possibilities and Reading the Self, Reading the Other (Burma, Mongolia and Ireland). This doctorate research is funded by the IDEAS Research Institute, RGU.
This research will produce new knowledge and insights that can be applicable to practices and discourses in public and socially engaged art practices, participative art and community art, art education as a resource for art students, the training and mentoring of artists and social workers working in public participative, community arts and youth work, as well as public management and policy making – influencing cultural policy and public arts programming, in terms of the commissioning, coordination, evaluation and reviewing of public art programmes. These new knowledge and insights could also possibly enlighten future interdisciplinary collaborations between practitioners of art with those of disciplines such as critical pedagogy, social and cultural psychology and anthropology. Within art discourse, the research will potentially contribute new knowledge in introducing/ articulating/ testing a new approach to the aesthetics of socially engaged and collaborative art practice based on negotiation that draws together the artist in relationships with the 'audience'/ 'spectator'/ 'participant', adding onto the existing body of knowledge in the field, i.e. an aesthetics based on artistic autonomy (the avant garde); relational aesthetics (Bourriaud), connectivity (Gablik), the everyday (Kaprow, De Certeau) and dialogue (Kester, Finkerpearl) and a new genre public art (Lacy).  // Back to Postgraduate Research |
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