Visual Art Practice Research Articles

Otherwise Possibility

Otherwise Possibility Ashon Crawley (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution dancing in one spot (number 8), 2017. Pigment powder, acrylic paint on paper, 30 × 44 in. All images courtesy of the artist. [End Page 18] learning about life and love in the spiritual space of Blackpentecostalism, I was able to sense the world by paying attention to how my flesh felt. We sang songs loudly. We shouted hard. We spoke in tongues. The flesh was the conduit through which praise and worship happened. But the flesh was also a site to control, a site that was always available to sinfulness. The doctrine about queerness as beyond the scope of possible joy and holiness is a doctrine I had to reconcile and eventually contest. For my visual arts practice, I use choreography to paint, hand clapping to splatter. I use voice to sing and make music. I listen to recorded church services, clap and dance and play the tambourine to the rhythm of the sounds and music with paint on my hands or feet. I use paint, ink and canvas, paper and other surfaces to visualize that which remains after my body moves to the sound of the music and of praise, to more fully consider residue—lingering—that escapes capture. My art practice lets me think about the ways the religious, as a conceptual domain and field of thought, has sequestered particular kinds of meditative, transformative, collective modes of existence, reflection, behavior. With audiovisual practices, I have occasion to think about hiddenness, about the practice of composing and constructing, of putting ideas and concepts and colors and sounds together—and taking them apart. When she was alive, Nancy Ambrose, grandmother of mystic thinker Howard Thurman, vowed that if she ever became literate, she would refuse to read biblical passages by Saint Paul because his words were used against enslaved people. Though illiterate, she created her own canon, and engaged in critical reading practices of the text. She made art, practiced otherwise possibility, by engaging critical erasure, contending with the architecture of racist thought. She unsettled scripture, made it contingent. My work is an attempt toward a similar kind of process, a similar kind of thinking, using texture and color and choreography and voice. I attempt to honor traditions of my emergence while thinking and feeling with and against it. Whether writing, sound performance, visual art, augmented reality, light sculpture, or action painting, the work is about exploring versions of the same, the same with difference, otherwise possibility. [End Page 19] Click for larger view View full resolution yes. surrender. bloom. (number 4), 2020. Acrylic paint, oil paint, spray paint, flowers on canvas, 24 × 36 in. [End Page 20] Click for larger view View full resolution thy word have i hidden in my heart (number 2), 2020. Acrylic ink, acrylic paint, scripture text, permanent marker on vellum, 8.5 × 11 in. [End Page 21] Click for larger view View full resolution i did not not know i could be beautiful (number 7), 2021. Acrylic paint, acrylic ink, polyester film, pigment powder, dyed hymns on watercolor paper, 30 × 44 in. [End Page 22] Click for larger view View full resolution i will fear no evil (number 1), 2019. Acrylic paint, markers, plaster, thread on canvas, 24 × 30 in. [End Page 23] Click for larger view View full resolution i did not know i could be beautiful (number 4), 2019. Acrylic paint, markers, plaster, thread on canvas, 24 × 30 in. [End Page 24] Click for larger view View full resolution i did not know i could be beautiful (number 5), 2021. Acrylic paint, acrylic ink, polyester film, pigment powder, dyed hymns on watercolor paper, 30 x 44 in. [End Page 25] Click for larger view View full resolution i did not know i could be beautiful (number 1), 2021. Acrylic paint, alcohol ink, digital print, decorative paper, moroccan pigment powder on watercolor paper, 20 x 20 in. [End Page 26] Click for larger view View full resolution the sound of blackpentecostal noise grows flowers, is floral (number 8), 2021. Acrylic paint, alcohol ink, tambourine jingles on yupo paper, 26 x 40 in. [End Page 27] Click for larger view View full...

Contesting class, gender and national identity: The visual art practice of Test Dept

The 1980s was a time of discontinuity in the United Kingdom as the country was restructured through an extensive reconfiguration of economic, social and political relations. This shift towards what would subsequently be termed neo-liberalism included the deliberate dismantling of organized labour as a political force, privatization, deregulation, cuts to the welfare state and a belief in the pre-eminence of the market as the most effective processor of information. Test Dept formed in 1981 and evolved politically in the socio-economic context of the early imposition of neo-liberalism. Test Dept’s visual art practice contested neo-liberal representation and discourse, opening up space and providing resources for alternative identities and the perpetuation of models of identity based around collectivism and solidarity. This article explores Test Dept’s practice, focusing on three aspects of identity that neo-liberalism attempted to restructure: class, gender and national identity.

The Expansion of New Media Art in Indian Visual Art Practices: An Analysis

Artistic creativity thrives in line with cultural contours and individual artist intent. The Digital age is a postmodern reality. The postmodern era is either on the verge of its conclusion or it has almost concluded. Galleries and museums are far from exempt from the effects of these technological transformations. By the mid’90s a number of young artists had begun to make installations and site-specific art objects even as others continued to work in the conventional mediums of painting, sculpture, and print-making. Notion of pluralism and multiculturalism infect the artists of the 90’s, as there is a confident borrowing from all cultures and frequent crossovers. Artists like Ranbir Kaleka, Shilpa Gupta, Sheba Chhachhi, Thukral and Tagra, Jitish Kallat and many more are blurring the gap between the art and cutting edge technology with their inter/multidisciplinary approaches in their art practices.

Making Visible the Invisible

This article documents how I came to combine autoethnographic accounting with visual arts practice. I developed this mixed methods approach for my PhD study which explores the interdisciplinary possibilities offered by combining visual arts practice with STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Visual arts practices as narrative forms tend toward the non-linear (Anae, 2014), whilst autoethnography offers self-reflection. Writing an autoethnographic account for an artwork has the potential to generate a wealth of data, some of which are visible, some of which are not. The invisible data become available only when the artist speaks to/writes about the artwork. If some content/context of a visual artwork is only visible through background information provided by the art maker, this discovery troubles another issue concerning our notions of what a good visual artwork is. Finally, I test this article’s autoethnographic authenticity against Adam’s four characteristics of autoethnography.

Understanding and Creating Art with AI: Review and Outlook

Technologies related to artificial intelligence (AI) have a strong impact on the changes of research and creative practices in visual arts. The growing number of research initiatives and creative applications that emerge in the intersection of AI and art motivates us to examine and discuss the creative and explorative potentials of AI technologies in the context of art. This article provides an integrated review of two facets of AI and art: (1) AI is used for art analysis and employed on digitized artwork collections, or (2) AI is used for creative purposes and generating novel artworks. In the context of AI-related research for art understanding, we present a comprehensive overview of artwork datasets and recent works that address a variety of tasks such as classification, object detection, similarity retrieval, multimodal representations, and computational aesthetics, among others. In relation to the role of AI in creating art, we address various practical and theoretical aspects of AI Art and consolidate related works that deal with those topics in detail. Finally, we provide a concise outlook on the future progression and potential impact of AI technologies on our understanding and creation of art.

Сетевая культура и два вектора развития визуальных искусств

In the article, from the standpoint of the theory of network culture and the concept of «symbolic capital» by P. Bourdieu, the processes taking place in visual art practice under the influence of the development of the Internet are considered. Contemporary art practices and digital art explore the same symbolic capital from different conceptual positions. For contemporary artistic practice, the critical theory and idea of D. Kossuth about the search for the boundaries of art as such, the study of the socio-cultural reality of the here-and-now, and the formulation of the principles of identity remain the main ones. In digital practices, the focus is on the search for an individual style through the study of the structural features of the artistic language itself, autonomy from verbal commentary. The presence of these vectors is also associated with the redistribution of power capital under the influence of the development of network culture and the Internet, when the museum and gallery sphere is not able to control all the processes taking place in art practice. Not one of the participants in artistic communication possesses the integrity of power. Networks today have become a platform with their own power and authority. At the same time, rules from offline flow into the virtual environment and new restrictions are created, related both to the ontological features of digital logic and to the work of online communities.

Ruins, Ruination, and Counter-Memory in Kurdish Women’s Art

This article focuses on the contemporary visual art practices by Kurdish female artists as strategies of counter-memory. The Kurdish community in Turkey has been facing ongoing violence, with its (cultural) heritage, memory, and archives constantly under threat. In this article, I use the archaeological metaphors of “ruins” and “ruination” by Ann Laura Stoler to examine the destruction, and discuss a selection of contemporary artworks by Kurdish women artists who represent such forces of destruction symbolically to build a counter-archive. Consulting research from other disciplines to explain the colonial dynamics in the region, I trace the decolonial feminist discourse within the Kurdish women’s movement. Finally, I explain how the female body and the city are recurrent themes in these artworks to challenge the colonialist, heteronormative, and nationalistic paradigms. Such artistic expressions of ruination, I argue, animate politics, disturb common sense, and mobilize counter-memory, one that is decolonial and feminist.

The Autobiographical Hinge: Revealing the self in architectural drawing

Some argue that the tendency to ignore the self as an aspect of the relationship between architects and their drawings is a consequence of the hegemony of digital modes of representation, others that it is inherent to traditional perspectival and projective techniques. It is in this repressive context that architects struggle to consider their subjectivity in relation to the drawings they produce. This article aims to divert this subjective distance by proposing a method for revealing the unconscious forces that abide between architects and architectural drawings. Through a comparative analysis of this intermediate space with the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s theory of the Transitional Object, the author considers his own relationship to perspective drawing and materializes this through the production of a drawing apparatus titled: the autobiographical hinge. Bilaterally, the conception of this drawing apparatus is founded on examples of visual art practice that challenge the repressive qualities of linear perspective, this includes the work of Penelope Haralambidou (2003); Lawrence Gowing (1965) and Marion . In a time of dissolved agency for the architect, this article presents a method through which to mine one’s own relationship to architectural drawing, through which a disturbance to those codified regimes occurs as a consequence of one’s own subjectivity being recognized.

Black Gold: A Black Feminist Art History of 1920s Montréal

The 1920s have been touted as the golden era of jazz and Black history in Montréal. Similarly, the decade is well known for the Harlem Renaissance, a key moment in African American art history. Yet this period in Black Canadian art histories remains largely unknown. As a first step toward shedding some light on this period in Black Canadian art history, I propose to use what I term a Black feminist art-historical (bfah) praxis to discuss some visual art practices undoubtedly active alongside well-known jazz musicians and cultural producers in 1920s Montréal. This paper presents an overview of critical race art history and feminist art history, as well as Black feminist approaches to visual representation, to outline what might be considered four tenets of bfah praxis. Applying these tenets, I propose that a new art history may emerge from well-known art objects and practices as well as lesser-known ones. I posit that through a deliberately bfah approach, new meanings emerge and the voices of Black women, even when obstructed by mainstream white narratives, may begin to stand out and shed light upon a variety of histories. This praxis aims to underline the subtext lurking at the edges of these images and to make intangible presences visible in the archive and in art history. I propose bfah as a strategy for more nuanced discussion of the work of Black Canadian artists and histories that have by and large been left out of official records.

A visual, journal practice: Journal of Visual Art Practice, twenty years on

ABSTRACT This editorial introduction marks the 20-year anniversary of Journal of Visual Art Practice. It sets out the vision of the newly established editorial team, who took up the editorship of the journal at the start of 2021, which happened to be the journal's 20th year. The article sets out the editors’ commitment to an international and diverse approach, which also recognises the rich history and archive of the journal. At its core, the journal remains steadfastly focused on visual art practice. Thus while cognisant of shifting trends and modalities of academic publishing and research, the editors renew the journal's ethos and practical undertaking in presenting the best in new visual art practice research.

Theory and convictions of practice: Agamben on Kant and contemporary art

ABSTRACT The article explores the implications of Giorgio Agamben’s The Man Without Content for beliefs necessary to visual art practice. It examines in particular Agamben’s critique of Kantian aesthetics and the use he makes of ideas of historicity. While Agamben has controversial but sometimes insightful and persuasive things to say about the modern art world, specifically aspects of making, spectating and exhibiting, his reading of Kant is distorted by his adoption of a technique of neutralising dialectical oppositions, and then his determination to find in key texts the grounds for this operation. At times Agamben’s critical judgements, uncorrected by the perspective of practice, are indiscriminate and insensitive, and it is difficult to see how his politics escapes quietism or apathy on the one hand or an unwitting convergence with Kantian notions of moral providence on the other.

A peripheral vision?

ABSTRACT This article reflects on the founding of the Journal of Visual Art Practice in 2001, as written from the perspective of the journal’s inaugural editor. The article provides a brief overview of the history and context to the development of the journal, which includes the role of the National Association for Fine Art Education, a prior, associated publication, Drawing Fire, and also, critically, the outcomes of the Jarratt Report (1985) in the UK, which led to the framing of art practice as ‘research’, and inclusion in national research audits. The article considers some of inner tensions at stake in establishing the journal and outlines the hopes for the journal as considered in its early years. It concludes with questions regarding the future of the journal as something, in the words of Bruno Latour, which might ‘cherish a maximum of alternative ways of belonging to the world’.

Practice PhD toolkit

ABSTRACT This article provides an account of the practice PhD in art and the nature of the debates surrounding its development and status. Primarily, the article is aimed at prospective and current PhD candidates (as well as supervisors), offering a critical approach to shaping and championing practice research. In helping to define the practice PhD, the article distinguishes between projects and practice and provides a reference to key debates. A catalogue of articles from Journal of Visual Art Practice is included in an appendix as part of wider encouragement for candidates to be critically informed about practice research and to help develop a literature review. The article ends with 8 practical steps for pursuing the practice PhD.

A personal perspective on pedagogical structures and strategies that uphold Indigenous ways of knowing

This article gives a brief background of where I come from and how my experiences in Africa and North America have framed the ‘philosophy of teaching’ that defines me as a visual art educator. I reflect on the postcolonial concept of ‘decolonization’ as a means to identifying possible pedagogical alternatives of practice. Acknowledging that my knowledge embraces both ‘western’ and ‘Indigenous’ ways of knowing, poses a question for me as an art educator about ways to design and implement pedagogies that embrace contextualized experiences in order to achieve meaningful learning within formal education. I conclude by stating that nothing will effect change within Uganda’s education sector, particularly in reference to visual art education and practice, without educators having a firmer grasp of their scholarly standpoint on knowledge and learning. Development of concrete ways of bringing together diverse ontological, epistemological and axiological positions of western and Indigenous knowledge systems as well as art pedagogies to facilitate learning, will require educators to develop structures and strategies that progress from the bottom up in order to benefit from the values, beliefs and ways of knowing within diverse local communities.

Spatial-cultural dialogism and contemporary expanded visual art practice in Britain: The art of the British-Indian artist Hardeep Pandhal

The British-Indian artist Hardeep Pandhal’s 13:40 minutes two-part video work titled En-sorcelled English: Prestige Repellent was on view both at the gallery and online as part of the exhibition titled SOLOS, which opened at the Goldsmiths Centre for

Demands of the diagram: creative abduction in artists’ research and practice

ABSTRACT This is the introductory article by the guest editor of a special issue of Journal of Visual Art Practice, under the title of ‘Demands of the Diagram’. It addresses the work of the six contributing artists who explore different aspects of the ‘diagram’ at the intersection of history, philosophy, science, semiotics and art, in relation to their own and others’ creative practices. The article addresses emerging themes of embodiment, evolution and ethics arising out of the discussions, situating them with reference to C. S. Peirce and his theory of creative abduction. In conclusion, the author calls on the work of Isabelle Stengers to argue for the diagram as a commons, where heterogenous knowledges might co-create, helping to make us fit to respond to the demands of our time.

Combining Science and Humanities to Assess and Promote the Development of Visual‐Spatial Skills in Medical Learners

Skillful observation and interpretation of visual information is key to practicing medicine, not only in specialties that emphasize anatomy but also for effective physical examination and recognizing patients’ emotional states and needs. Since visual analysis appears to depend heavily on tacit knowledge, often it is difficult for learners to develop and educators to teach appropriate skills. Recently, efforts to integrate the humanities into medical training have generated interest in using pedagogical methods adapted from visual art practices to teach medical learners how to analyze and interpret visual information. Such efforts are predicated on the idea that cognitive processes involved in analyzing visual information are to some extent independent of the specific nature of the visual information. As part of our ongoing efforts to develop novel approaches to promote the development of visual analysis skills in medical students, one current goal is to test whether facility in analyzing medically relevant images covaries with facility in analyzing art images and whether pedagogical approaches that are used to teach art students can increase the ability of medical learners to analyze medically relevant images. We developed a custom assessment of visual spatial ability that is based on a simple task in which subjects must identify the two similar images in groups that include two similar images and one dissimilar image. Half of the questions use histological images, while the other half of the questions use images representing fine art or furniture design (Figure 1). Sixteen experienced (3rd and 4th year) medical students completed the assessment in an initial study. The results from this cohort revealed significant, positive correlations between the subjects’: 1) past performance in 1st- and 2nd-year biomedical science courses or anatomy practical examinations and their scores on histology-based questions, 2) self-reported level of previous art instruction and time spent taking the assessment, and 3) time spent taking the assessment and overall score. Thus, as expected, in this group of experienced medical learners, those who previously demonstrated stronger performance in biomedical science courses and specifically on anatomy examinations performed better when analyzing medically relevant images. Previous experience with art instruction increased the time subjects spent taking the study assessment, and taking more time increased overall performance on the assessment. In ongoing studies, the performance of early and advanced medical learners and art students will be compared to test the effects of experience in art- and medical curricula on the ability to analyze similar and disparate images. The early medical learners will be retested after completing the histology discipline in the medical curriculum, and half of those learners also will receive explicit training in evaluation of visual images using methods drawn from art education. This will test directly the effects of 1) experience with the histology curriculum and 2) adding explicit, art-based training on visual analysis skills.

Installation Art and the Issue of Gentrification: Exploring the Expanded Scenography of Zelige Door on Golborne Road

The concept of expanded scenography is applied to the analysis of the design and public interaction with the multisensory digital art installation Zelige Door on Golborne Road. This is an attempt to re-think visual and live art practices with communities and the creation of immersive digital environments in terms of a “scenographic ecology of relations.” The analysis aims to reconceptualise the field of environmental-centric live performance in the digital context by exploring an art installation designed to facilitate a synchronic dialogue amongst different design elements and participants on issues related to the aesthetics of the place, urban development, Community Memories, heritage and migration. Concepts such as participatory dramaturgy and remediation will be employed to analyse and theoretically locate the expanded scenography of relations of Zelige Door on Golborne Road within the wider context of activist actions in Britain aimed at preserving and making visible the intangible heritage of migrant communities in contested urban areas undergoing gentrification.

Meta-relativist agenda in contemporary visual arts theory and practice

The borders of visual art on the eve of the 20th-21st centuries are being extremely expanded both at the empirical and theoretical levels and so is the agenda of contemporary philosophy of art. Is the unprecedented polyphony of discourses a methodological drawback or is it a heuristic opportunity that can help to broaden our knowledge about the essence of art and the notion of a work of art? What is visual art and what is artwork speaking the 21st century language? The study examines the current trends and innovations in the visual arts field and how they can be interpreted. Authors come to conclusion that the times of normative or negativist approaches are over. The plethora of transformations is a value-in-itself and can be seen as a legitimate methodological situation, namely, as a meta-relativist turn. Examples that are presented in the paper deal with different sides of “a work of art formula”: span of discourse, artist, audience, art space, art market, new technologies, etc. Those cases demonstrate the ambivalence of current visual art practices that can be interpreted either as complete negation of the preceding standards or as new discourses that are equally legitimate with the older ones. Meta-relativist approach treats all existing discourses and practices as equally legitimate and thus provides the method to broaden our understanding of the essence of art and definition of an artwork. The study suggests that it is a contemporary tool for further intra- and inter-disciplinary dialogue.

Artistic Freedom or Animal Cruelty? Contemporary Visual Art Practice That Involves Live and Deceased Animals.

Simple SummaryThis paper examines a selection of 21st-century international examples of exhibited visual artworks involving live or deceased animals. It seeks to reveal the risks and benefits of unique encounters with animals through art and to consider the ethical implications of artwork deploying animals. Australian and international animal protection laws are not explicit when it comes to the sourcing of animals for art nor for the direct inclusion of animals in artworks. This lack leads to a variety of artistic practices; some considered ethical while others are viewed as controversial, bordering on animal cruelty. Recommendations of how to better determine what is the acceptable use of animals in art with a view to informing legal guidelines and artistic best practice are presented.This paper examines a selection of 21st-century international examples of exhibited visual artworks involving live or deceased animals. It seeks to reveal the risks and benefits of unique encounters with animals through art and to consider the ethical implications of artwork deploying animals. Australian and international animal protection laws are not explicit when it comes to the sourcing of animals for art nor for the direct inclusion of animals in artworks. This lack leads to a variety of artistic practices, some considered ethical while others are viewed as controversial, bordering on animal cruelty. Artwork selection is determined by a focus on high-profile artists who intentionally use animals in their practice and whose reputation has been fostered by this intention. The study provides insight into how the intentional use of ethically sourced animals within art practice can be a method of addressing hierarchal human–animal imbalances. Further, this study identifies unethical practices that may be best avoided regardless of the pro-animal political statements the artists put forward. Recommendations of how to better determine what is an acceptable use of animals in art with a view to informing legal guidelines and artistic best practice are presented.