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Representing creativeness: practice-

based approaches to research in cre-
ative arts
Peter Dallow

ABSTRACT
The investigation of creativeness in the creative arts requires some theoreti-
cal originality to enable the development of an effective research method
capable of subtly reporting upon original artistic activity. The research
endeavour requires something of the tactfulness of the work it seeks to
understand. Considered introspection, in the form of practice-based
research, into creative arts practice offers the opportunity to try to under-
stand the way an artist engages in an original way with their physical,
cultural and psychic raw materials.

KEYWORDS
practice-based research, creative arts practice, contemporary arts, cre-
ativeness, artist-researcher, practitioner-researcher

Opening/s
Art is, in a sense by definition, like philosophy, difficult to pin down, defini-
tionally and conceptually. If it was not, it would no longer be art, or philoso-
phy, respectively. However deconstructive or reconstructive the artist’s
intent, the recognizable face of a contemporary artistic work still functions,
much as Martin Heidegger suggested - like a ‘shimmering veil’, a ‘reveal-
ing’ which ‘conceals in a way that opens to light’ (1977, p. 25). As cultural
theorist Henri Lefebvre puts it, art is based upon ‘an appearance inca-
pable of appearing’ (1991, p395). It is about producing something new
(unknown) within culture (what is established).

One way art can usefully be thought of is as an indeterminate condition, a

threshold between conscious thought and unconscious feeling, an opening
onto a liminal space where rationality (theory) and irrationality (experi-
ence, emotion, art) mix in the individual creative act (practice). It appears
to offer a doorway beyond mere perception, an opening onto the imper-
ceptible. The difficulty is, as Heidegger suggested, that in trying to reveal
something of the qualities of ‘the veil’ which we apprehend as the recog-
nizable face of an art work, we only reveal this ‘veil’ as that which ‘veils’.
That is, we cannot find an isolatable essential quality behind it.

To investigate and report upon creativeness in the creative arts requires us

to think about artistic originality with some theoretical originality. Art, as

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Shklovsky observed of the chess knight, does not progress in a straight

line (cited in Bordwell, 1991, p. 274). It gets deflected because it aims to be
unpredictable in relation to reigning norms. Art, then, might also be
thought of as constituting a mode of investigating human understanding, as
much as it is of producing something new.

Investigating how something new is produced therefore requires us to try

to examine not merely the workings of creative practice in the arts, but our
very concept of what creative practice represents. This is certainly not
without some methodological difficulties. Tracking the movements of the
‘ribbons stirred by the wind’ as Gilles Deleuze described the endeavour
of artistic practice (1987, p. 75), as with the investigation of all culture,
requires what Michel de Certeau called a savoir faire (1984, p65). Simply
put, it requires finding a new way (or rediscovering an older way) of
considering the relation between knowing and doing. The task of investi-
gating the conditions under which something new is produced, creative-
ness, calls for a processual approach. It requires an ‘art of thought’, a
certain tact, by which artists might track their movements into the
unknown, as they pursue the ‘lines of flight’ of their music, writing, painting
or performance. In so doing, they may manage to represent something of
the thought at the root of their art. This gives rise to the ‘image’ of the artist
as a ‘practical intellectual’, as one actively engaged in critical reflection
about the creative process whilst making work.

Practice, research and creativity

Investigating art practice requires charting something of the ‘doing’
involved in the return movement from the unknown of the imagination, to
the relative known of the artefacts or productions of artistic practice. The
undertaking of creative practice usually means having to advance without
a theory, or to go beyond theory, initially at least, to work beyond estab-
lished practices and ‘outside’ of the disciplinary protocols, outside ‘the
true’, as Foucault terms it (1976, p. 224). This appears to hold true, regard-
less of whether the specific instance of creative arts practice being investi-
gated sits within or across the visual or fine arts, the performing arts and
music, creative writing and media arts, and to a certain extent within the
branches of communications and design. The challenge for the contempo-
rary artist also operating as a researcher is to attempt to represent or chart
this activity, whilst remaining open to the possibilities present in their art
practice.

By employing the overarching descriptor ‘creative arts’, I am not seeking

to neutralize the many formal and operational differences and divergences
within and between these different areas of creative practice. Nor am I
intending to overstate any of the overlays and resonances across and
between them. The particular art forms, as the name suggests, are taken to

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be cultural formations, determined by the specific trajectories and flows

evidenced by particular instances of practice, and from which new work
emerges to redefine or hybridize these (force) fields. The academic
discipline or subject areas which correspond to some extent with the
different art forms, and with the meshworks which exist in creative arts
practice, represent even more provisional cultural spaces. They are taken
to be ‘problematic fields’, governed by the ‘production of solutions’, to use
De Landa’s terms (1999, p. 132). No definitive general agreement, then, is
implied here about either the nature of the fields of activity, or how they
might be represented. It is all taken to be contestable, in practice, as well
as in theory and criticism.

There have been, though, a number of attempts to formulate and extend

research approaches to the creative arts over the past ten years which are
specifically focused upon creative practice (Frayling, 1993, 1997; Strand,
1998; Margolin, 1998). These have generally viewed creative arts research
as qualitative research which ‘does not, typically, begin with a predeter-
mined set of questions or assumptions but arises from the particular
situations or contexts’ being investigated (Frayling, 1997, p. 22). There have
been more recent debates about research in the various creative arts in e-
mail discussion lists, none the least those archived online at the PhD-Design
e-mail list forum. Contributors there, like the prior publications, have
variously wrestled with setting creative arts research into a typology
organized around the prepositions ‘into’, ‘about’, ‘in’, ‘by’, ‘through’ and ‘for’
practice, without, it has to be said, a great deal of general agreement about
which is the most relevant preposition/approach, or even about how these
prepositions should be applied to describing what is done. The
approaches are most commonly framed as:

• research into arts practice;

• research through arts practice;
• research for arts practice.

Research into the creative arts would include the traditional history, theory
and criticism triumvirate. It would also include aesthetic and perceptual
research, social, cultural and psychological research, and research into the
technical, material and structural perspectives of/on the creative arts.
Research through creative arts practice centres on a ‘studio/creative
project’ which results in the production and presentation of a body of
‘finished’ creative work, where, additionally, the documentation of what is
done in the process of creating these works is taken as a significant com-
ponent of the research. Research for the creative arts, might include
research into the behaviour of materials and processes, the customizing of
software and hardware, and extending what can be creatively accom-
plished. Although it need not necessarily result in ‘finished’ creative works,

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this approach may however point the way towards possible new fields of
practice.

Those who engage in more conventional forms of arts research are pre-
dominantly undertaking research into the arts, which leads to historical,
theoretical and/or critical writing published in scholarly books, articles in
established refereed journals and conference papers. They may also result
in extended comparative reviews and formal professional, critical and
cultural debates, as well as for educational purposes. However, the major-
ity of those professionally engaged in the creative arts of visual and per-
forming arts, media and literary arts and design, and perhaps more
pointedly those who teach in the arts training/vocational academies in
these disciplines, are generally actively creating new images and sounds,
movements and language, as part of their professional practice. It is this
approach to research through creative practice, where the specifics of the
creative practice set the parameters and define the methods required for
the associated research project. The emphasis is in part upon the creative
processes of art production, and, by extension, also located upon the
contemporary cultural context within which the artist operates.

Margolin describes the approach of research through art and design,

centred as it is upon the ‘studio project’, as representing a new ‘practice-
led’ approach to research which is not bound by traditional methodologies,
but seeks to ‘facilitate the relation of reflection to practice’ (1998, p. 98). But
here again the terminology used to describe the relationship between
practice and research more broadly also has been as disputatious as the
prepositional formula previously alluded to. The options are couched here
though in terms of the hyphenated, compound phrases:

• practice-led research;
• practice-based research;
• practice-oriented research.

The most apt overall descriptor is probably the practice-oriented one.

However, given the breadth of approaches to inquiry encompassed by this
phrase, as it seems to embrace all of the ‘prepositional’ research cate-
gories already alluded to - ‘into’, ‘by’, ‘about’, ‘in’, ‘through’ and ‘for’ prac-
tice - I have elected to use the somewhat narrower, but perhaps more
widely employed term ‘practice-based research’ here, as a subset of the
broader and more general orientation towards arts practice. I will be
dealing with the aspects of contemporary arts research which are not
merely oriented towards practice, but those approaches which are quite
literally based upon or located in the specifics of the ‘problem’ posed,
explored or presented by a particular body of original creative work.

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Practice makes research

The practice-based approach to contemporary arts research usually
involves the practitioner engaging with their own creative work, investigat-
ing the ‘enframing’ practice/s of their area of the creative arts, so as to
bring into the open some of the qualities which distinguish and illuminate
the general and specific processes at work. It offers a unique way of
conceptually modelling art disciplines at the workface, so to speak, and a
method for framing an enquiry into ‘creativeness’. This practice-based
approach to research augments and complements the more established or
conventional research approaches into or about the creative arts, which
focus upon the finished ‘forms’ of art works, their historical and theoretical
contexts, and/or their broader social and cultural situation and consump-
tion.

For many practising artists, research is integrally bound up with their art
practice/s. Strand indicates, ‘Their research methodologies are in the arts,
their investigations are in the practice of their art form’ (original emphasis)
(1998, p. 42). Substantial parts of art practice are research, because it is
investigative. It is about enquiry. So the application of the research skills of
‘reflection’, of ‘theorizing’, according to Blauvelt, is ‘not something that is
done either before or after work has been made, but is crucial to the
process of making’ (1998, pp. 74-75). Art practice thus is generally based
upon an ‘active’ process of enquiry. The ‘emergent’ qualities of this process
are bound up with the specificities of the art form adopted, as well as the
final mode of presentation, exhibition or performance, which includes how
it will be seen, heard or otherwise experienced or consumed, and
perhaps by whom, where, under what conditions, and for how long. These
are all potentially part of the nature of the enquiry, not merely an end point.

But how do we distinguish between the kind/s of routine research under-

taken in the course of everyday professional artistic practice, and that of a
practice-based approach to research? One way to approach this problem,
as Strand suggests, is by considering intent. On the face of it, those doing
routine professional practice as a creative practitioner with no major
challenges in terms of ‘originality, risk-taking or boundary-pushing’, as
Parr (1996) points out, or in terms of a significant broader cultural engage-
ment, cannot readily make a valid claim for their art practice to be recog-
nized as research. Undertaking work which is not considered innovative,
especially where it is only incremental in terms of developing professional
skills through practice, or is habitual or highly conventional, is not suffi-
cient. Even where professional artistic practice is innovative, ‘speculative’
and leads to breakthroughs in the field of practice, its intent is primarily
about product. Unfortunately, within most current research regimes, espe-
cially those administered within universities, contemporary forms of art

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practice are not necessarily likely to receive formal peer recognition as

research, as such, as Strand (1998, p. 51) asserts, without an explicit case
being made for it to be considered as a contribution to knowledge.

In practice-based research, investigation through practice is the methodol-

ogy. The logic of the particular implementation of the method resides
somewhere within the specifics of the creative practice under investigation.
Extending creative arts practice into the territory of research involves
some rendering as explicit something of the specifics of the situation in
which the work has been undertaken, and exploring some of the complex
of relations within the work, and the relations of the work to the outside
context.

In Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, the practitioner employs an ‘economy of logic’,

so that ‘no more logic is mobilized than is required by the needs of prac-
tice’. The assumptions about, and in, the work remain implicit, defined by
the ‘practical relation to the situation’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 110). Practice-
based research on the other hand has investigation as the ‘primary objec-
tive’. This may be a very fine line to draw, literally and metaphorically, and
only discernible by an assessment of the methodology of explication, and
an analysis of the related processual and contextual documentation. The
distinction between a purely professional practice role in producing art
works, and an academic research perspective being brought to bear in
creating art works, is that the practice-based creative arts researcher is
‘obliged also to map for his or her peers the route by which they arrived
at’ their product/s (Frayling, 1997, p. 13). Strand observes: ‘It involves
research in the art form, provided there is a substantial accompanying
document evidencing research about the art form’ (original emphasis)
(1998, p. 40).

The account of the process and the creative outcomes should each
demonstrate some of the ways in which the work has developed and/or the
extended knowledge of and in the field. If the function of developing and
extending knowledge is based ‘essentially on investigatory, exploratory,
speculative or analytical processes’, then the outcome of the process of
that practice/enquiry is ‘a result of synthesizing the problematics of the
discipline’ (Strand, 1998, p. 34). This is quite consistent with ‘the classic
method’ of research in the physical sciences, social sciences and humani-
ties. To that extent it should really require no more than to assert how the
particular field of knowledge/practice has been developed or extended.

The practice-based research methodology quite specifically puts the case

for how the creative work develops and extends knowledge of and about
the particular discipline/field of creative practice. It can evidence how the
work extends practice in the field, in some sense invigorating it, by outlin-

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ing the ways it asks new questions of the discursive formation of the field of
engagement, of the materials and forms, and developing new sources of
inspiration for ongoing creative activity. It can also capture something of
the transverse ‘structures of thought’ at work in creative arts practice,
revealing the artist as an ‘accidental’ intellectual, to use Muecke’s term
(1997, pp. 31-32). The artist-researcher is like a ‘tangential tourist’ who
travels the world impulsively following the threads, connections and revela-
tions they encounter, and may refuse to do ‘disciplined’ research, working
instead across the boundaries of art forms and usually discrete discipli-
nary spaces, in an interdisciplinary mode of enquiry.

This approach requires that there be an extended commentary, which

‘maps the route’. The commentary has a pivotal role in distinguishing
professional practice from practice-based research. It provides evidence of
the originality of the art work, demonstrates mastery of professional
creative skills, signals that a significant contribution has been made to the
field, and sets out the degree of ‘conceptual rigour’ applied. Many innova-
tive artists will baulk at the prospect of this seemingly self-justifying step;
however, the commentary need not necessarily be dispassionate, as may
be required in other more overtly empirical discipline areas. It can be self-
reflexive, being based upon the art work created by the commentator. The
art work itself here can be considered as research, or at least as an integral
aspect of the research, because it is an indispensable part of the research.
Unlike the standard research report in other discipline areas, the extended
commentary here need not be unambiguous. It is generally a more open-
ended statement, produced in support of the primary research ‘data’ - the
original art work/s. As Frayling puts it, ‘the artist isn’t in the business of
unambiguous communication’ (1993, p. 2), and hence the communication
of the ‘results’ equally cannot be expected to be unambiguously communi-
cable.

The ‘grammars of practice’

Research by creative practitioners through their own arts practice, then, is
where the process of making, producing or creating cultural presentations,
and the exploration and transformation which occurs in the process, is
taken as an act of research itself, where knowledge is gained in the cre-
ative act, and can be directly attributable to the creative process. This
‘emergent’ knowledge may be abstract or cognitive (theoretical) knowl-
edge, as well as practical knowledge gained in and from the ‘doing’, from
the application of a developed creative methodology. The consequence of
this creative methodology is primarily demonstrated by the art work/s
themselves, but also can emerge further into public view through the
development of a practice-based research methodology.

But, if we take creating new works of art as being somehow outside con-

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ventional forms of rationality, how can a logical method (research) be seen

to be applied to the creative arts through practice? As with hypothesis
formation in the sciences, originality in art comes from ‘outside’ rationality,
initially. According to Medewar: ‘The process by which we come to form a
hypothesis is not only illogical but non-logical; i.e. outside logic’ (1969, p.
46). Further, logic cannot be objective, however much experimental
evidence is subsequently produced to support a given concept. Even
physics can only muster operational definitions of many of its conceptual
models - the 22 compacted dimensions of String Theory, for example,
remain essentially unverifiable mathematical abstractions.

Seago argues that the process of discovery in much successful research

work, like creative work itself, is based upon ‘a combination of rigorous
methodology and the following up of intuitive, imaginative “hunches”
‘(1994, p. 5). He argues that it is erroneous to consider creative work as
‘somehow beyond reason and analysis’. Strand asserts:

Much of the activity that leads to these new creations is based in research,
and that generally there is often a strong conceptual link between the
creative output of people doing their professional practice and what is
widely accepted as genuine research in other fields. (1998, p. 19)

How then might we go about tracking the movement from this logic of
discovery to the discovery of some of the qualities of that logic?

It has already been suggested that art is based upon producing something
new (unknown) within culture (what is established). This gives us a clue
about one kind of method. It is hardly surprising to suggest that the art
practitioner-researcher might go initially to the more established bodies of
research, both within the creative arts, and in other disciplines - history,
literature and so on, in developing, situating and contextualizing something
of the originality and unoriginality (if you will pardon the awkwardness of
the term) of their creative practice. This may reveal some of the departure
points from the known, and some of the qualities of the art of thought at
work in that movement beyond the known, in their area of music, writing,
painting or performance. They might then be better equipped for the task
of examining closely the relation between knowing and doing through
reflection and analysis, and for tracking their movements into the unknown
of creativeness.

Adopting the notion of process as central to a creative arts method of

research through creative practice should help in unravelling something of
what Bourdieu calls the ‘semi-learned grammars of practice’, by which
these hunches are tested and accepted or rejected, as they are ‘put into
practice’(added emphasis) (1977, p. 20).

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Arguably much twentieth-century arts practice, kept volatile by a succes-

sion of transitory avant-gardes, was driven by this imperative to unpack the
‘grammars’ of the older binary oppositions of the preceding century’s
romanticisms, between art as a convention-bound activity, administered by
the academies, and art as free expression. The Surrealists, for example,
established a ‘research office’ in Paris in the mid-1920s to explore the
notion of ‘psychic automatism’ by experimenting with, as Breton described
it, ‘the disinterested play of thought’ through the ‘dictation of thought’ in
new art practices (cited in Curtis, 1971, p. 22). Similarly, the engagement
with the workings of cognition by the Bauhaus, where the concept of
modern design was revealed as a research methodology within the arts, as
well as a creative and functional field in its own right; the consideration of
tonality on the horizon of expectation of modern music; or the exploration
of theatre practices by way of the self-conscious fictive nature of character;
or through the anti-dramatic distantiation of the audience; and so on,
cemented the self-conscious role of research in and through arts practice.

Although they were not the first artists to adopt the research through
practice approach, the Modernists certainly set the ground for the repre-
sentation of research as (self-)consciousness, which later became figural in
so much postmodernist art work. Think of the late work of John Cage, or
the films of Jean-Luc Godard, the collages of Barbara Kruger, amongst
very many. One of many examples of this kind of research-based practice
and practice-based research, from within the visual arts, can be seen in
Phillip George’s recent work with old and new visual technologies in
exploring links between diasporic identity, place and memory, combining
fictional landscapes and histories with the symbolic manipulation of
representational photographic imagery (see George, 2002). The post-
avant-garde pastiche of postmodernism, which self-consciously
approached artistic practice as a means of theorizing art, served to
confirm the continuing (gravitational) ‘pull’ of this tendency towards an
approach to creative arts research through practice, and practice through
research.

The past and the present (in)tense

With the problematizing of the forms, fields and media of the creative arts
which accompanied the postmodernist shift, practice, according to
Rosalind Krauss, was ‘not defined in relation to a given medium - sculpture
- but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms’
(1983, p. 41). Rather than being defined by historical precedent and
established forms, the contemporary arts might be better understood by
examining how individual artists ‘found themselves occupying, succes-
sively, different places within the expanded field’ of the arts (Krauss, 1983,
p. 41).

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In this view, the logic at work in the shifting trajectories of art practice is not
primarily bounded by the previously established creative field, and the
critical work which accompanied that formation, but is driven more by the
energy and imperatives of the prevailing broader cultural conditions. The
contemporary ‘conditions of possibility’ in postmodern, and subsequently
by what is being termed ‘post-human’ conditions, may be revealed in the
logical structure deployed by the artist in the permutations embedded in
the work, or implied through the response of the viewer/spectator/con-
sumer, interacting with the work.

To that extent, the teaching of contemporary approaches to the creative

arts has generally ceased to be primarily driven by the inculcation of
precedent (historicism), however valuable that may be intrinsically or
extrinsically to the development of the arts practitioner, and has tended to
include a good deal more of the explorations of the contemporary cultural
conditions (of possibility) within which emerging practitioners find them-
selves. To some extent this seems to apply regardless of discipline, form or
function. In a sense it can be seen that the contemporary multidisciplinary
character of much teaching of arts practice can be located in transdiscipli-
nary concerns with, say, gender, race, ethnicity and cultural identity, and
with history, art, technology and science, as well as within discourses
embedded in the tensions between local, national and global positions and
influences. Arguably this has both mirrored the concerns and develop-
ments already evident within some areas of practice in the contemporary
arts, and also helped to drive those tendencies in a broader cultural
interventionist sense.

There is no simple pattern to be found around teaching and research in

the arts academies and institutes though. There are competing tendencies
evident between those teachers who insist upon students being inculcated
with the disciplines and attitudes of (high) modernism, and those who
insist that students should be ‘thrown in at the deep end’ of contemporary
circumstances. Those subscribing to one tendency fear that the ‘others’
will merely produce cultural monsters - by either merely imitatively per-
petuating the past (known), or blindly wallowing in the incoherence of the
present (unknown). Rather than students simply being made familiar with
‘the new’ as having evolved almost organically from the forms of the past,
as Krauss asserted, what does seem to be observable in contemporary
approaches to teaching arts practice, as already indicated, is a shift
towards a multidisciplinary approach, and to a preoccupation with transdis-
ciplinary concerns. In this way, new practitioners are encouraged to find
their own relation to everyday life in the present, and to the culture of the
past, which is not exclusively dictated by the established forms and struc-
tures evident within the discipline area. In the best academic arts pro-

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grammes, arguably, the developing practitioner is encouraged to grapple

both with the discontinuities of contemporary life, and to ponder the
similarities within it to the discursive conditions of ‘the’ past, and their past
in particular.

The circle of theory and practice

Lorraine Wild writes of contemporary practice as a space where ‘individu-
als improvise and make do’ with what is to hand, and ‘create their own
reality’ (1998, p. 51). This kind of everyday life ‘creation’ involves a ‘perfor-
mance’, which is for creative arts professionals ‘tactical and not strategic’,
rather like the difference between knowing a language, and using it
expressively. This performative view places activity at the centre of the
knowledge generated or employed in art practice, and illustrates the ways
in which practice not merely directly shapes the contemporary field but
also supplements theory in understanding the arts. The activity-centred
view helps to establish some of the ways in which art practice decodes
everyday life, disrupts disciplinary conventions, and, according to Blauvelt,
‘transgresses the professional boundaries and limitations’ (1998, p. 75). It
allows the research activity of the creative practitioner not only to ask
questions about work, like a theoretician, but also provides the basis to ask
questions through work. Blauvelt asserts:

A critical, theoretical disposition helps frame and limit the answers found in
research by making them contingent - specific to the historical moment
and the particular context from which they emerge; in effect, situated
knowledge and timeliness replace objectivity and timelessness. (1998, p.
75)

Practice-based research activity in the creative disciplines can be under-

stood then as being located within a ‘third’ space, situated between the
limits of theory and the limitations of practice. This is where research is
bound up with the creative ‘act’, in a kind of exploratory and transformative
encounter, akin to travel. It involves a process of negotiation and exchange,
as Salen suggests, where ‘the process of making work becomes a notation
on connections across, among and between’ the artist’s experiences (1998,
p. 93).

These exploratory, and even transformative views of research in and

through practice (and vice versa) reinforce a view of research into cre-
ativeness as processual or action-oriented. Frayling indicates that the nexus
between the doing and thinking of research in and through creative prac-
tice, of action following reflection, and of reflection which follows action,
represents an approach ‘where the action is calculated to generate and
validate new knowledge or understanding’ (1993, p. 4). This project-based
approach can be seen as an action-research methodology to the extent

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that it is engaged upon problem setting and/or problem solving and

knowledge generation, as well as with communicating that knowledge. In
doing this, it informs the knowledge base of the profession, and through its
communication has the possibility of demonstrating a broader cultural
contribution. It also has the potential in turn to generate further basic
research in/about/through the creative arts.

Creative agency does not occur in a vacuum though. An individual creative

‘practice’ is itself as much a product of the broader social and cultural,
generative (transdisciplinary) schemes it emerges from, as it is (in)formed
by the field of practice and academic discipline it is dependent upon. But,
however susceptible it may be to being critically contextualized as being
produced from within the ‘culture machine’, creative arts practice, like all
human agency, cannot be seen as mechanical, ‘regulated merely by cause-
and-effect forces’, as Bogue (1999, p. 88) suggests. That is, it cannot be
reduced to a purely machinic causal logic. Mattelart and Mattelart put it:
‘The “mechanical” and the “fluid” are two opposite modes of thought’
(1992, p. 48). The ‘flows’ of creative practice, like all living, are also in some
qualitative way products of the individual, conditional, subjective, although
not necessarily ‘unitary’, lived experience. It is part of the aggregate of
being in the provisional world of meaning, as much as in the unstable
material world. Investigating the flows of creative practice therefore calls
for flexibility and openness in developing a ‘cross-analysis’ of both the
activity and its outcomes.

Understanding something of the particular qualities of ‘action’ involved in

this kind of research methodology further requires some consideration of
the highly individualized qualities of the activity being reported upon.

Turning inside out - subject or object?

Tracking and considering the ‘becoming’ of creative practice requires an
approach susceptible to the differential rhythms of emergent activity. The
‘emergent’ qualities of practice are based in turn upon the particular
decisions and directions taken by the artist within the project, and are
determined by the development of the project. In developing something
new and unexpected, the ‘inner’ coherence is not immediately apparent. It
is transparent, or better still ‘veiled’, as Heidegger (1977) put it. Further,
this emergent symbolic activity blurs the boundaries between what is
professional and what is personal for the artist-researcher. Frayling sug-
gests, creative work is ‘as much about autobiography and personal devel-
opment’ as it is about ‘communicable knowledge’ (1993, p. 5). Hence we
need not be afraid of the adoption of a subjective methodology for this
task. Media artist Trinh T. Minh-ha has observed that traditional Western
science-based academic methodologies prefer the seemingly empirical
approach of externalizing all phenomena so that they might be objectified.

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Such methodologies cause us ‘to relate to a situation or to an object as if it

is only outside of oneself’, rather than trying to also understand a structure
‘from within ourselves out’. Trinh speaks of her own art work, and critical
work, as inscribing the ‘constant flow from the inside out and outside in’
(1994, p. 435).

The riskiness of a subjective methodology is knowing where ‘to draw that

fine line between what is merely individualistic and what may be relevant
to a wider number of people’ (Trinh 1994, p. 435), and perhaps explains
why it is so infrequently utilized in Western academic contexts. But is such
‘groping’ about, as Mattelart and Mattelart ask, ‘not a virtue when the
problem at hand is to open the field of expressivity’ (1992, p. 46)? The risk
of teetering over the edge of that ‘fine line’, between purely individual
experience and ‘communicable knowledge’, does not diminish the validity
nor the freshness of the approach. In a ‘dialogical’ approach, one is neither
exclusively subjectifyingly inside one’s own creative experience, nor
objectifyingly looking in from outside the field or territory of work. The art
practitioner-researcher is somewhere ‘on the boundary, wrestling relation-
ally with the various conditions, inner and outer, practical and theoretical,
creative and imitative, biographical and analytical’ (Dallow 1998, pp. 42-
43).

For the traditionalist researcher, the issue of objectivity may still pose a
barrier to validating such a research approach. However, the position of
the ‘impartial spectator’, as the phenomenologist Husserl termed it, of
traditional critical, theoretical and/or historical research approaches can be
seen much along the lines outlined by Bourdieu in his Outline of a Theory
of Practice (1977), as rather like mapping. But this is where an outsider, in a
foreign landscape, ‘compensates for his lack of practical mastery’ by the
‘use of a model of all possible routes’ through this (cultural) landscape. In
this way, all practice is seen by the ‘impartial spectator’ as spectacle
(Bourdieu 1977, p. 2). So whereas the outsider view reports upon an
abstract (historical/theoretical) space, the artist-researcher undertakes a
specific route through their ‘practised’ cultural space/s, reflecting upon the
practical particularities of the space in which the creative ‘journey’ was
actually made. Both vantage points are valuable in gaining a ‘truer’ under-
standing of what is at stake.

The insider’s view, in re-searching the creative journey, might be seen as

akin to Zizek’s notion of being ‘objectively subjective’ (1997, p. 119). The
objectively subjective observational position can convey something of the
(subjectivity of) creative experience in relation to the specifics of a particu-
lar (objective) body of work. Although this may seem somewhat ‘socially
abstracted’, to use Watney’s term (1982, p. 156), it would be erroneous to
think of a practice-based creative arts research methodology as being

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wholly predicated upon Romanticism’s notions of ‘free-spirited’ originality

emanating always from somewhere outside of ‘conventionalized’ culture.

This kind of action approach to research through practice may draw in part
upon a cultural studies perspective in framing its context. This broader
perspective might take the artist-researcher beyond their immediate
specific disciplinary field of activity, and their concerns with the aesthetic
or formal properties of the work, or with content or motif. The approach
would enable the practitioner to take in something of the contemporary
existential conditions which she or he inhabits. It can also facilitate con-
structing a report upon the contemporary conditions which made the
creative ‘journey’ possible at all, and how the social, cultural themes in
these conditions have helped shape the work.

Performing art
It can be said that engaging with the kinds of symbolic activity involved in
the sensory and conceptual experiences and expressions of the arts
through a programme of study via the focalizing point of where the objects
of such activity are generated involves both looking outwards and inwards.
It entails the recording and analysis of the movement from outside to
inside, and in turn inside to outside. It would include reporting upon the
development of the sensory and conceptual elements of/in the work. This
may help locate creative work within its own ‘structures of thought’. It might
also attempt to situate the ‘ensemble of practical steps’ involved in doing
the work within the broader context of contemporary cultural and social
relations. This kind of consideration decentres the art object/performance
and emphasizes the creative process, the performative quality of all art and
culture.

Focusing upon creative practice then does not represent a return to a

version of pure ‘aestheticism’. The approach allows for the artist-
researcher to explore the borders between their art work and the various
relations to the broader social, historical, technological and cultural spec-
trum within which the work arises. It allows for reporting upon the
processes by which they take something of the irreducible complexity of
reality, and transform it into particular forms, by the application of knowing-
doing (savoir-faire). We might think of this as trying to locate a specific
instance of creativity in the arts within a loosely conceived, notional three-
dimensional matrix, comprised of the conceptual (x), the material (y) and
the social (z) planes, or spaces, which the work occupies. It is the preroga-
tive of others to attempt to extrapolate this instance of contemporary
practice into broader critical and or interpretative frameworks. This in turn
may become part of the theoretical or critical ground from which further
creative work might emerge.

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Although this approach brings ‘reflection’ closer to practice, it is not

intended to subsume practice within theory, or research. The aim is not to
demystify creativity to the extent of trying to ‘think it away’, so much as to
illuminate a particular view of it. Practice-based research offers an inter-
mediary intellectual space which facilitates the exchange of ideas between
theory, analysis and practice. It does not offer a fixed methodology or set
of procedures, any more than some well-established fields of research do.
Anthropology (the study of ‘otherness’, ‘elsewhere’), for instance, has had
to reinvent itself as a contemporary discipline to some extent to take
account of the postcolonial conditions it finds itself in. And whereas in
many traditional forms of research the aim seems to be collecting or noting
identical characteristics between situations and contexts, often at the
expense of the consideration of differences, in the creative arts we are
critically inclined to seek out divergences more than similarities. We are
interested in originality, or at least points of departure into the previously
unknown or uncharted, rather than in patterns or congruence. As Tzvetan
Todorov asserts of the new approaches to research in the human sciences
which take account of postmodern theory - the ‘very idea of differences
among society and individuals implies qualities in common’ (2001, p. ix).

The study of the expanding and changing fields of the creative arts can
only benefit from the kinds of mapping and analysing of new trajectories
which retraverse the old, and venture off into new territories of practice.
Considered introspection, in relation to creativeness in art practice, offers
the opportunity to try to understand the artist’s way of engaging in an
original way with their physical, cultural and psychic raw materials in the
present.

Closing/s
There is nothing definitive in the description of a practice-based research
approach outlined here, any more than there can be a definitive view of
what research is in any case. What does appear to be clear is that examin-
ing contemporary art practice in this way is based upon observational
descriptions and operational analyses by the artist which are subjective in
nature, although the objects of those observations which they produced
are empirical. It does not aim at logical proof of a hypothesis, as such, but
rests upon the symbolic, evocative and at times intuitive thinking of art
practice, by tracking the conceptual movements as well as the material
processes of the given form. The anthropologist and narratologist Tzvetan
Todorov says of literary thought, much as might be said of the contribution
of the arts more generally to the field of knowledge: ‘What is expressed
through stories or poetic forms escapes the stereotypes that dominate the
thought of our time and the vigilance of our own moral censure, which
operates above all on assertions we manage to make explicit’ (2001, p.
xi).

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Although art may be seen as being about repetition (of past forms) as
much as it is about difference (novelty/newness), the way that contempo-
rary art practice relates to prior activity, and indeed to the notion of the
past itself, is not via the historian’s methodology of clarifying meaning. The
examination of ‘how an individual develops his or her representations’
offers not merely an opportunity for empirical observation, according to
French anthropologist Augé, it is ‘a methodological necessity’ (1999, p. 94).
This is as true in the creative arts as it is in anthropology. ‘The past’, much
as the relation to ‘the real’, in contemporary arts practice, serves not so
much a referential purpose, but in a sense an illustrative one, operating as
a conceptual category to help us understand contemporaneity. It offers a
space within which we may confront our (self-)conscious existence,
temporally.

As the established forms of culture hybridize, or are nostalgically brutally

reasserted, and older social categories break down, the examination of an
individual approach to arts practice offers a micro-observational opportu-
nity to examine a specific response to contemporary conditions. Augé
(1999, p. 94) asserts that ‘ours is an age where intermediary rhetorics are
becoming disorganized or collapsing altogether’. Practice-based
approaches to creative arts research attempt to ‘capture’ or represent
something of the creative responses to those transformations, and how they
help to reshape the fields of human enterprise. The focus upon the individ-
ual art practitioner as a researcher in the kinds of practice-based
approaches outlined, or at least alluded to, here, reflects a shift which itself
represents the transformations which have been occurring elsewhere.

Acknowledgments
Acknowledgment is due firstly to the Editor of ADCHE, Linda Drew, for
supporting this paper through its initial stages, and to the referees who
devoted so much time to helping develop it. Further back, Darren
Newbury of BIAD, UCE and Jeremy Aynesley of the RCA, both provided
valuable advice and/or information which were formative. And thanks to
Leon Cantrell from UWS who asked me to take on the DCA Coordination
there, which caused me to think further on this area, and to staff of the
University of Wollongong Faculty of Creative Arts for their patience in my
own initial practice-based research meanderings.

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BIOGRAPHY
Peter Dallow currently lectures in media arts in the School of
Communication, Design and Media at the University of Western Sydney,
Australia. He has worked in film and television and exhibited as a visual
artist. He holds a doctorate in creative arts, researches and practises in the
areas of imaging, new media and fiction writing. His first novel, The Past
Within, is forthcoming.

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