Research
Art research is conducted through the Centre for Fine Art Research (CFAR). Four research strands provide the intellectual framework for all research activities within the Centre:
- Art in the public sphere
- Interpretation and documentation
- Performance and performativity
- Form and meaning through process
Art in the public sphere
This strand consists of a broad range of practices addressing the role of art in culture through the renegotiation of the conventional and alternative/artist-led gallery space, site-specific practices and the new genre of ‘offsite’ project based activities staged by galleries and museums. This involves a sustained exploration of the notions of ‘community’, ‘society’, ‘social inclusion’ and ‘participatory practice’ by artists, writers and arts organisations through a critical analysis of, and engagement with, theories of public culture, philosophical and relational aesthetics, curation and new media activities. A number of exceptional projects have been developed regionally, nationally and internationally by members of the Centre and the emergence of the ‘artist-curator’ has led to a significant investigation of the parameters and perceived limits of existing curatorial practices and the potential for new artistic/curatorial strategies to be established.
The research undertaken in this strand has developed several lines of enquiry. Researchers are concerned with rethinking the relationships between art and social space, and also community and participation. In relation to shifts within contemporary public art practice, regeneration and museum practice, the researchers have also been concerned with the integrity of art practice when meeting or confronting the demands of external agencies. Other lines of enquiry concern the relationships between the artist and those without specialist art knowledge, and the position of the artist in terms of authorship, when engaged in a collective or shared experience or project.
Interpretation and documentation
This strand encompasses a range of approaches from empirical and archival research to continental philosophy, and all researchers contributing to the strand share a concern for the historical, theoretical and philosophical analysis of artefacts, documents, events and cultures. The research produced is concerned with various aspects of the production, reception and theorisation of art and also philosophical aesthetics.
The strand also addresses the relationship between arenas of visual arts practice, critical perspectives in new media and the centrality of memory as a theme in contemporary art. It also encompasses research exploring global developments in contemporary art, in particular art in China, and also anthropological perspectives that examine indigenous methods of display in non-Western cultures and the counter-narratives that they produce. Researchers also address the methodology and processes of historical and archival work and professional debates on the treatment of historical sources.
Performance and performativity
This strand encompasses a wide field of research that embraces physical performance as art and also art concerned with subjectivity, performative studies and queer theory. There are a number of high-profile researchers contributing to this particular research strand and their concerns include: the exploration of identity constitution, notions of becoming and ‘trans-subjectivity’, the impact of performed action on material production, performative writing practices, the performative presentation and circulation of artworks in culture, performance theory and context.
The researchers are interested in the complex configurations of identity, both within and across individuals, and they are concerned with addressing such configurations as open-ended ‘works in process’ resistant to normative, homogenising logic. The research strand is concerned with how this ‘process’ might be considered as art. In addition to this, the researchers consider the performative self-fashioning of ‘other’ bodies, such as intersexual, transsexual and dysmorphic bodies, as demanding a different understanding of what constitutes performance and art. With this in mind the researchers are interested in exploring the maxim "art becomes you".
As well as an interest in the field of identity and subjectivity, researchers are concerned with the impact of performed action on material production. A corollary of this interest is a further concern for the status of material production that is often the by-product or trace of a performance or event. It is through research in these two areas that a consideration of the relationship between performance and performativity, and also events and subjectivity as a process, is investigated.
Form and meaning through process
This strand encompasses a number of disciplines: painting, sculpture, print, lens-based media, and their interdisciplinary relationships in which our knowledge, understanding and experience of the manipulation of materials, processes of production, their limitations and potential forms of application has been enhanced. This is realised through experimentation and the exploration of several shared concerns including: repetition, mediation, translation, illusion and surface effect.
The key interests of researchers are formal and embrace an interest in repetition, surface and illusion, the transformation of materials through processes and an investigation of the relationship between two and three dimensions, and matter and image. This concern for the formal allows for the investigation of the relationship between the actual and the virtual and also an exploration of subjectivity, history and identity in relation to processes, materials and visual and sensory presentations. The relationship of form to notions of the cultural and political is also investigated in this strand.