Practices and Languages of Art

Abstract

Recognition of artistic practices as academic research continues to provoke much debate. In exchange for their validation, higher education institutions demand the clear articulation of artistic research questions and methodologies, and of critical commentary to set works of art in wider intellectual contexts. Much artistic research mobilises recent conceptual frameworks including the practice turn, new materialisms, vibrant matter, and non­representational theory. Yet these frameworks largely derive from discursive traditions that cannot fully account for the affordances and effects of poetic artifacts. How, then, can we uphold the usefulness of such theories for creative exploration, without undermining the singularity of art's complex, willfully ambiguous manifestations of other kinds of irreducible, untranslatable knowledge? This presentation looks at ways artistic research employs contemporary theoretical rhetoric, and seeks to emphasise the related yet fundamentally different qualities of art works, and of the languages employed to describe and legitimate them.