Między autonomią a epifanią. Art based research, badania jakościowe i teoria sztuki

The subject of the article is an analysis of the most important contexts of emergence and the crucial tendencies apparent in the field of contemporary art based research. The author reconstructs the historical coincidence in the humanities and social sciences, which enabled the emergence of art based research. The author analyzes the changes within the field of qualitative research and cultural studies, especially those being conducive to searching the qualities of socio-cultural phenomena through artistic practices. An analysis of the methodological tendencies and the basic aesthetic categories of that field is undertaken and a question about the value of the qualities gained in the course of the artisticly based research is posed. The article inscribes the art based research in the context of the fourth historical phases of qualitative research by the discerned Yvonne S. Lincoln and Norman K. Denzin, and also in the democratic and postmodern flow of cultural studies. It underlines the importance of the reflexive turn in anthropology, but most of all, the role of the cultural analysis of literature and the narrative turn. It punctuates as the most important in the field of art based research – the modern dichotomy between knowledge and emotion. From that dichotomy the basic ways of defining the cognitive possibilities of art has emerged. Artistic practices are treated here as evocative, revealing emphatic experience. Finally, the author undertakes a comparative analysis of the modern theory of art and the activity of symbolization in the conception of Susanne K. Langer with the conception of evocative, epiphanic genres and identifies them as the two crucial tendencies in the field of art based research. They are analyzed as defining differently the cognitive qualities of art, resulting in distinct ethical and political consequences.