How can Practice-led Research broaden our Definition of Knowledge
A short summary of two texts -Ā āAcquiring Know-How: Research Training for Practice-led Researchersā by Brad Haseman and Daniel Mafe and āKnowledge as Production: a dialogue between Liam Gillick and Lucy Cotter.ā
Knowledge is often understood in something that can be demonstrated through writing, images or action. It is also often depicted as a linear process of input and output. However, practice-led research has shed a new light on the path of research and artists involved in practice-led research are bringing a new understanding to both research and knowledge itself. One of the main hurdles of practice-led research, especially in the realm of higher-research degrees, as discussed in āAcquiring Know-howā is that we must find a way of qualifying this new form of research so it may sit more comfortably next to traditional research methods, and be better understood by those not engaged in it.Ā
Practice-led research is a diverse and possibly limitless field that could dramatically change the research landscape. When practice leads research, it has the power to take us to entirely new and unprecedented research questions and therefore could shape not only the art world but also those of science and philosophy. A practice focused research could be explained as the act of drawing new lines in the relationship between things. It does not take us smoothly from A to B,Ā but instead exists in the messy grey areas. An amalgamation of unsorted information may/will confront the practice-led researcher, but we must learn that this is vital to this methodology. Unlike traditional research, much more can be discovered by not sorting out this āswampā but allowing the research to swell inside of it.
Practice-led researchers may also use methods of friction to create research, allowing paths of information to cross and become tangled in an attempt to pull insight from new depths. And it is often the moments of āIn-actionā, as Cotter states, that are crucial to the discoveries of practice-based research. The outcomes of such methodsĀ can be difficult to demonstrate. We continue to run into the problem of how to quantify this research, and the key to this must be a redefinition of knowledge. We must push past the idea that knowledge is something that can always be written, or demonstrated or reviewed. In order to fully grasp the potential of practice-based research we must repurpose conventional tools of research to better suit these new definitions.
Most of the examples and challenges discussed in these texts are in line with my current understanding of practice-led research. Particularly when Haseman and Mafe state that āPractice needs to be understood in its wider sense as all the activity an artist/creative practitioner undertakes. Practitioners think, read and write as well as look, listen and make.ā However, I think the full complexities of this field can only be understood in its undertaking. Some of the more abstract notions of what practice-led research is leave me with with a desire to fully experience the process myself, allowing my practice to create my own definition of knowledge. Nonetheless, I believe the essence of what must be understood is that art is not necessarily the product of a thought process, one that we expect to be clearly outlined like that of a traditional research paper. Art is thinking in and of its self. If we can fully grasp this, we will then be able to transform our definition of knowledge.
