Arts-Based Research: A Critique and a Proposal

Abstract

A provocative book, an important book! jagodzinski's and Wallin's 'betrayal' is in fact a wake-up call for art-based research, a loving critique of its directions. jagodzinski's and Wallin's reference is the question 'what art can do' – not what it means. Theirs is an ultimate affirmation that uncovers the singularities that compose and give consistency to art not as an object, but as an event. Their betrayal consists in an affirmation of life and becoming, positing a performative 'machinics of the arts' which is in absolute contraposition with the hegemonic discourse of art and|as an object of knowledge and representation. This does not only concern academia, but also politics and ethics – an untimely book that comes just at the right time! Bernd Herzogenrath, Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main (Germany), author of An American Body|Politic. A Deleuzian Approach, and editor of Deleuze & Ecology and Travels in Intermedia[lity]. ReBlurring the Boundaries. Approaching the creative impulse in the arts from the philosophical perspectives of Deleuze + Guattari, jagodzinski and Wallin make a compelling argument for blurring the boundaries of arts-based research in the field of art education. The authors contend that the radical ideas of leading scholars in the field are not radical enough due to their reliance on existing research ontologies and those that end in epistemological representations. In contrast, they propose arts-based research as the event of ontological immanence, an incipient, machinic process of becoming-research through arts practice that enables seeing and thinking in irreducible ways while resisting normalization and subsumption under existing modes of address. As such, arts practice, as research-in-the making, constitutes a betrayal of prevailing cultural assumptions, according to the authors, an interminable renouncement of normalized research representations in favor of the contingent problematic that emerges during arts practice. Charles R. Garoian, Professor of Art Education, Penn State University, author of The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art. Jagodzinski and Wallin have written a challenging book on the theme of betrayal which aims to question the metaphysical ground of the practice of many arts educators and researchers. Dismantling the notion of praxis which assumes a prior will as well as the pervasive notion of the creative and reflexive individual, they revisit the notion of poiesis and the truth of appearing in order to advocate the centrality of becoming in pedagogical relations. Is it possible to develop pedagogies beyond those images of thought that attenuate learners, teachers and researchers? We need a new image of thought, or better, a thought without image, and this book asks us to take up the challenge. Dennis Atkinson, Director of the Centre for the Arts and Learning, Department of Educational Studies, Goldsmiths University of London, author of Art Equality and Learning; Pedagogies Against the State.

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