Understanding Art-Making as Documentation

Abstract

Typically, arts information professionals are concerned with the documentation of artwork. As a provocation, this conceptual article explores how art-making itself can be considered a form of documentation and finished artworks as documents in their own right. In this view, art works as evidence in referencing something else, within a broader system, and under scrutiny it exposes how it references. Some implications of this perspective are discussed, springing from a historical discussion of document epistemology, research on the information behavior of artists, and the philosophy of Nelson Goodman. This discussion provides a framework for conceptualizing artistic information behavior along the entire information chain. Framing art-making in terms of information science in this way may help arts information professionals assist artists, as well as provide grounds for deeper co-understandings between artists and information scientists. Once information scientists consider art as a kind of document, one can begin to see that even non-artistic documents perhaps never were as “objective” or “factual” as they may have seemed.