In Significant Research

Inasmuch as institutions of education are devoted to various forms of evaluation and assessment it seems logical that the research of art teachers should be assessed just as that of other academics. If the professional practice of art teachers is to be given comparable credence as other disciplines, and is to be financially supported, then presumably art teachers should be able to demonstrate the value of their output to the wider community – and the more significant the better. Nonetheless, as a discipline, art does not fit comfortably within the regime of research assessment (See REF), not least because of the continual emphasis on the very term "research". Do artists conduct research? Does it make sense to define the work that artists produce as research?

Most people think of artists as practitioners, as makers, certainly not as bookish academics or scholars lost amongst the shelves of a dusky archive and even less as lab-coat-clad experimenters. But perhaps this is to make a caricature of what is surely a heterogeneous practice in which many forms of enquiry are engaged. Neither is it intended to suggest that artists do not concern themselves with questions of knowledge or understanding. They do. But the search that artists are involved with articulates itself primarily through a frequently messy and unstructured engagement with materials and processes. Art concerns itself with experience from the inside, as it were, and looks to knowledge as a means to deepen this experience, much less as a means to understand it. In recent times this form of enquiry has come to be called "Situated Knowledge" or "Material Thinking" and it seems likely that these terms, and the arguments that underpin them, have emerged as a backlash against the preponderance of emphasis placed upon more conventional forms of knowledge production that are so venerated by the Research Excellence Framework and its like.

If art creates knowledge at all it is certainly not because artists deliberately seek it in the ways that, for example, scientists do. Artistic Method, if there ever were such a thing, would doubtless be a singularly ineffective means to accumulate knowledge or articulate it. Any knowledge that comes about through the creation or interpretation of art does so as a by-product of experience - experience that must first be felt and interpreted to be understood. Experience is the point, both in the making and in the contemplative encounter with art, even if the experience, as such, is the discovery of knowledge. Art shows us how the experience of forming - as distinct from 'acquiring' - knowledge can, in itself, be more edifying and fulfilling than knowledge alone. Where art is concerned, experience eclipses knowledge.

“It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of ‘culture.’”

John Cage does an excellent job here of clarifying the difference between various kinds of involvement and how, as we remove ourselves further and further from being 'in' an experience, the more passive and pointless the exercise. Art is not a declarative process - it does not hand itself over easily. The power of art resides in the degree to which it rewards concerted engagement. You have to work at it and the closer you approach the condition of the maker - in fact of supplanting them - the more rewarding the experience promises to be. At its best, art transforms its audience, in the act of interpretation, into creators, not viewers, not listeners, nor even performers, but makers: creators of significance.

There are deep pleasures to be gained from this process: "The pleasure of finding things out" as physicist Richard Feynman put it, not of being told, nor even of possessing new knowledge, but of engaging to the point of discovery. Art is not simply something we consume then, but rather something we make anew for ourselves.

It should be apparent by now that the skills, insights and imagination of the artist are only fragments in the overall constitution of the artwork, though indispensably important ones. But without the engagement of an audience the artwork can be little more than an inert and anonymous object. Each engaged audience, each thoughtful viewer, re-creates the artwork - the more they devote, the more they are likely to reap.

But if it is we who re-create the artwork, if its significance is largely of our own making then why credit the artist at all? Moreover, if the significance of an artwork is, to some indeterminate degree, a projection of its audience then how can an accurate estimate of the contribution of the artist ever be formed? This is a question for which no criteria - whether for the evaluation of art students or art teachers - will ever provide a satisfactory answer.

The impact of any experience emanates in multiple directions like ripples on an already turbulent pond. Quite how the influence of any particular impact can be assessed from the ensuing tumult is highly questionable. Granted, large impacts create a measurable increase in overall activity but if Chaos Theory has taught us anything it is that small events can sometimes have profound consequences.

Culture is the product of collective activity and the ripples across its surface are a complex interleaving of causes and effects. By singling out only the measurable influences, not only do we vastly exaggerate their perceived significance, but we also overlook the significance of a multitude of other constitutive, and therefore vital, contributions. The outcome is a situation where those individuals who are already successful reap yet more rewards, whilst the untried, the speculative and the unpredictable are simply ignored, thus promoting and perpetuating a culture of risk aversion, performativity and self-regard.

Evaluating the Sensuous

"Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine – good God, how fine. It went down soft, pulpy, slushy, oozy – all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified Strawberry." –John Keats

Meaning, or “content”, as it is often described, is certainly a primary dimension of artworks but it would be a mistake to consider it as the primary dimension. Whilst art is undoubtedly a realm of significations, meanings and associations it is also a realm of the sensuous: of the profound variety and variability of physical qualities and their exquisite influence upon our senses. Artworks are formed through physical engagement with the stuff of the world and this stuff gives texture, substance and colour to experience. Indeed it is impossible to conceive of experience as something divorced from its physical causes and forms. To be without our senses would be precisely to be denied experience, since experience is surely the very stuff of sense impulses triggered and stimulated by the world around us. Without it would be to exist as an entirely disembodied consciousness in the most profoundly isolated and terrifying emptiness imaginable, with nothing but our memories and thoughts for company.

An education in the arts, at its very best, seeks to sensitise students to the subtleties and nuances of process and material, to encourage and inspire a deep familiarity with the extraordinary potential of sensory experience and to instil a sensitivity to the importance of inflection and an appreciation of the pleasures of lingering with and savouring the vast spectacle of the sensuous.

Grand ideals indeed, but are students aware that these are amongst the ‘objectives’ that their education sets out to instil and where exactly are they, or their equivalents, explicitly stated? - certainly not in the Grading Criteria, Learning Outcomes or even in the benchmark statements of the Quality Assurance Agency. How then, are the sensuous qualities of artworks to be evaluated, or rather, how might the sensuous qualities of artworks be evaluated fairly and, in order to do so, might it be necessary - or even possible - to establish meaningful and applicable criteria?

“In addition to interpretation, critics almost always make judgements about the quality of the work. Such judgements are statements about the merits of what has been seen, not statements about matters of preference. Judgements, such as “I think this is a good piece of work,” can be debated. Preferences, such as “I like this painting,” are not debatable; they are matters of choice.” –Elliot Eisner

This aspect of debatability - and the scrutiny it implies - is crucial, but in order for debate to proceed the discussion must address itself to the reasons that led to any judgements made. The more consistent and widely applicable these reasons, the more they are likely to approach what we might consider to be criteria: standards or principles by which judgements are qualified. But when it comes to sensuous experience are criteria really of any use in forming opinions? Surely we simply respond instinctively to the things we like, dislike or hate; to the things and experiences that impact upon our senses and emotions?

Certainly we are primed with instinctive reactions towards various phenomena and these instinctive responses may be relatively universal but they are also relatively unsophisticated. Just as often, perhaps significantly more so, our responses are informed and conditioned by prior experience and this allows us to judge similar experiences directly and immediately without having to abstract ourselves from the immanent sensation of embodied experience. Keat’s didn’t apply criteria to his nectarine, at least, he didn’t consciously deliberate in-the-moment over the specific qualities of his experience. To have done so would have distracted him from the fullness of experience. His evaluation – if we can call it that - is retrospective and clearly seeks not simply to describe the experience but to celebrate it by inducing, as far as possible, a palpable evocation through the eloquent flow of precisely woven form.

Could we formulate criteria for the evaluation of nectarines? No doubt, and it seems likely that these criteria would probably capture much that Keats sought to distil (fruit growers and competition judges probably already use such criteria). Could we create criteria for fruit in general? Possibly, but this would pose a much more challenging task and the criteria formed would likely have little value to the individual nectarine grower.

So, what possible value could criteria have for that impossibly diverse and bizarre form of fruit known as art? And does this mean that we have no means to fairly evaluate the sensuous qualities of art? Moreover, might the relative lack of emphasis and acknowledgement of the sensuous in art school Assessment Criteria and Learning Outcomes be responsible for a growing indifference and lack of awareness of one of art’s most vital attributes?

“How should we develop students' unassessable qualities? Should we refrain from developing them because we can't measure them?” –Phil Race 

Resolution

It is often mistakenly assumed that resolution and refinement are the same thing. However, just because something is well presented or precisely executed, it doesn’t follow that it is resolved. In order for artwork to be resolved there has to be an indication of the issue that the artist is trying to get to the bottom of. The viewer needs to be able to identify what is at stake in order to fully appreciate how the imagination or ingenuity of the artist has allowed them to overcome the difficulties and challenges which are presented by the subject or media that have been tackled. If there are no obstacles to be overcome then there is unlikely to be anything to be resolved.

Expert Learning

What if we were to give up on the idea that what really distinguishes an expert is what they produce: what they do? But then what else might distinguish an expert? I would suggest that it is the criteria - frequently tacit - that they have gradually acquired and evolved through practice and experience - that are applied to what they do. And whilst the exercise of such criteria may be discerned within the things or circumstances that experts create, it invariably takes another expert eye to notice such details. Since these are often tacitly inscribed they are also often only tacitly registered.

Whilst we should certainly strive to unravel these ephemeral and priceless rules and guides in order that we might also benefit from them and share them more widely, we have no alternative other than to accept that some things cannot be so easily reduced to transmissible tokens of truth.

Expert Criteria

If we accept that we each apply subtly different (and sometimes radically different) criteria to the decisions that we make and to the production of our work then does it make sense to require students to comply with a one-size-fits-all set of criteria?

In 1989 artists and Turner Prize nominees Jane and Louise Wilson (sometimes known as "the Wilson twins") graduated from their respective BA courses in fine art: Louise from Dundee and Jane from Newcastle. For their degree exhibitions they decided to collaborate and to submit exactly the same work for assessment.

Unless I am mistaken, the two identical shows received unequal marks: one a 1st class honours degree, the other a 2:1 (2nd class upper). The twin who received a 2:1 subsequently appealed and her mark was raised also to a 1st class honours degree. We might be tempted to assume that the initial disparity in marking was due to either a lack of professionalism or thoroughness - which amounts to the same thing - on the part of one of the institutions awarding the marks. But there is another interpretation which we might make: each institution was employing different criteria.

All courses have criteria by which they mark student work but, in the Humanities at least, these criteria often differ quite significantly between different institutions. Thankfully this distinctiveness has not yet been overridden by a singular set of criteria to be applied to all work across all institutions. Such a move would surely make a mockery of education, even if it were to have the desired result of creating greater parity in assessment. Nonetheless, the disparity between different institutions in terms of the way that work is marked, ie: how certain outcomes are weighted and how certain activities are prioritized, may offer an insight into what we are actually evaluating when we assess student work.

During assessments it might be thought that we make evaluations based on the stated assessment criteria? We certainly strive to. But can we be so sure that these criteria really capture the full extent of our evaluative judgements? In the Humanities as elsewhere, few experts agree about exactly what constitutes the good, the great or even the deplorable, so it is no surprise that most assessment criteria are little more than stripped-down compromised rationalizations of a barely understood, complex and intangible process.

"Indeed, the history of dramatic criticism, including criticism of the plays of Shakespeare, is in great part the history of unresolved disagreement over the necessary and sufficient properties of dramatic greatness. If there are such properties, then, we must nevertheless admit that no one has ever stated satisfactorily what they are.” -Morris Weitz

When we judge a person, in no matter what aspect, is it true to say that we are judging them on the basis of that particular characteristic as an objective fact? Or isn’t it more true to say that we judge them on the basis of our own criteria of what exemplifies that characteristic? In other words, without a clear and precise universal designation of what constitute greatness in any particular form, we are limited by the frailty and capriciousness of our own judgements. Such judgements are based upon experience, experience which furnishes us with conceptual models - exemplars - that we use to compare with other experiences and artifacts. The more wide ranging and sophisticated these models, the more discriminating we become and the more elaborate and extensive become our evaluations.

Much as we may value our own hard earned criteria, it is the criteria that the students apply to their own work that matter, not their compliance with ours. If we want students to make work according to our criteria then, by extension, we wish them to make the work that we would make. What makes far more sense is that students are supported to make the very best work that they can make and in the process become as expert in their deployment of their own criteria as we are with ours. Granted, such criteria take time to develop, but far better that they should be formed through deliberate practice and experience than through conformity and compliance.