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Art-based research uses artmaking as a mode of inquiry and presents the art as evidence. While sharing many qualities with science, it is distinguished by the unique character of each expression and personal dimensions that must also transcend their creators in establishing relevance to others.
Artistic intelligence is a gestating, unpredictable, and often challenging crucible of creation that furthers discovery ahead of conscious thought. Rather than treating art as data to be analyzed by social science procedures, it speaks for itself and offers empirical evidence of its contributions to human understanding.
In discussing the practice of art-based research emphasis is given to how methods emerge, sometimes unplanned, from the research process in keeping with the nature of art rather than following fixed and preexisting institutionally approved methods. Although strongly recommending format freedom for the future, the practical discussion explores how to work creatively within prescribed structures and embrace tensions with new technologies as sources of artistic transformation. It explores the role of video and digital media in generating convincing art evidence, universal accessibility involving trained and untrained artists, and the future importance of natural art experiments happening throughout the world beyond academic and professional settings.
Shaun McNiff is University Professor Emeritus, internationally recognized for furthering universal access to artistic expression as a source of creative well-being and human understanding through teaching, lecturing, critically acclaimed books and publications. Recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Journal of Applied Arts & Health for “leading a global commitment to art-based research.”
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Preface: To Research Through the Making of Art
1. Foundations and Guiding Principles
Original premise and paradigm clarity
Defining art-based research
Institutional challenges
Free movement of ideas and research
2. Personal and Empirical: A Pervasive Misunderstanding
Embracing and transcending the personal
3. A Natural Emanation from Practice
Formative processes—Liberating artistic interpretation
Learning by not doing: A paradoxical realization
Completing a natural art experiment 50 years later
Art Alchemies
Personal artistic expression can advance professional understanding
Firsthand experimentation with methods of practice
Plans and the “nature” of artistic intelligence
4. Art Is the Evidence: Persons, Process, and Creations
An evidentiary epiphany
Clear and convincing: Artistic quality matters
Engaging art’s unique presence and expression versus data analysis
5. Doing Art-Based Research in Academic Settings
One person’s perspective
Working within limits and prescribed formats
Breadth of artistic possibilities
Freedom of inquiry
6. Research Structure: Simpler the Deeper
Concise, jargon free, and natural writing
Literature and citing
Abstracting and distilling
Proposals
Questions and methods
Presentation of the research and outcomes
7. Innovations Shaped by Experimentation
Solo and reciprocal inquiry with others
Artistic reflection in response to the research
Video and new media
The integral relationship of form, content, and process
8. Looking to the Future
Who can do art-based research?
Natural art experiments emerging through practice
“No rules” and the art–science relationship revisited
In closing
References
Index