Looking for the real in visual art research

Abstract

In its brief academic history, practice-led research in the visual arts has been considered by many as highly problematic, fraught with unanswered questions and lacking clear concepts, criteria and models. In current literature on this new research area, the subject’s desire is defined as a crucial element in art practice yet at the same time it is considered problematic and conceptually obscure and, as a consequence, it is under-theorised in visual arts practice-led research. This article positions these problems and limits as productive lines of inquiry which may be advanced by redirecting toward the discipline of visual arts certain questions asked by Jacques Lacan of psychoanalysis: Can the question of the subject’s desire be left outside the limits of our field? What would art research have to be in order to take the problem of the subject and of desire into account? To address these questions, the discussion centres on Lacan’s theoretical developments to Freud’s theory of fantasy and, in the concluding section, proposes a practice-oriented approach in which the production of knowledge in art research would be conducted in a transdisciplinary alliance with psychoanalysis.