Contemporary discussion on the main tendencies in the field of art based research for qualitative research is based on the already accepted belief that art is also the cognitive practice. The discourse about artistic as cognitive should be then moved forward, and the questions about the concrete examples of synergy of artistic and qualitative research should be posed. The profits resulting from this contract should be evaluated, and the inventory of the real democratic equivalence of artistic and humanistic tools should be done. How the balance between competences and roles in the artistic-qualitative research is maintained? Can we speak about them as of art based, or maybe it would be better to cautiously think of them as of arts informed? Are these projects the most experimental and critical bridgehead of the qualitative research, or rather trade trend of proffesionals? Should we treat them as examples of the interdisciplinary practices, or rather as exemplars of the transdisciplinary cultural analysis? The last mentioned will serve here as the axis of deliberations: from the perspective of cultural analysis we will evaluate the role of art in the field of qualitative research.
Articles gathered in this issue represent the wide range of the possible approaches to the art based research. The introductory article of my authorship, „Between authonomy and ephiphany. Art based research, qualitative research and the theory of art”, attempts the analysis of the main tendencies within the field of art based research in the historical, methodological and aesthetical terms. It draws the historical coincidence in the social sciences and the humanities which enabled the emergence of the artistic qualitative research, and emhasizes the special role of the narrative turn. It reveals the slits within the cultural analysis and the qualitative research which became the new places for the artistic-research practices. It also reveals the entanglement of these practices in the dichotomies founded on the modern theories of art and analyzes the most important of them: between the autonomy of artistic symbolical forms and the epiphanic evocativeness of art. The last mentioned emerges on the foundation of the presence and experience, and in the consequence, opens the social spaces for the ethics of care.
An article of Dariusz Brzostek, „Black Science – Black Magic. Afrofuturism, narrative and cognition”, can serve as an example of the classical cultural analysis in the semiotic-critical spirit, representative for this version of cultural studies which was explicitly conducive for the growing tendencies of art based research. An analysis of afrofuturism as the narrative formation and speculative fiction which are formative for the specific socio-cultural groups, realizes an assumption of Paul Willis of searching the creative action in the practices of everyday life. The democratic impetus of cultural studies has diminished the historical burden of an autonomy of art, treating it as the one of many cultural practices, as a place of production of socially important meanings, and in the same time, has strenghtened the labourious practices of cultivation of every day – accentuating its creative aspects in the terms of art living. In the Brzostek’s cultural analysis which can be defined as artistically informed, one can also notice the clue of the narrative turn. The productive and formative aspects of the popular narrations are crucial in this analysis: they tie together the two records of the qualitative research – biographies and social structures. In the consequence, an analysis of afrofuturism reminds the best years of the cultural studies, as from the Paul Willis’ projects Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs.
The clue of the disciplinary thinking, attempting to situate the art based research in the front of, within, and besides other social sciences and the humanities is continued in the article of Dorota Łuczak, „The Iconology of X-Ray Images”. Łuczak analyzes the history of the process of including X-ray photography in the area of the interest of the history of art, especially in the project conducted by Horst Bredekamp, Das Technische Bild in years 2000-2012 in Hermann von Helmholtz–Zentrum für Kulturtechnik at the University in Berlin. In the epistemological and metodological aspect, the project raised the problem of the subject of the visual research and the role of technical images in the social process of construction of knowledge. The subject of the inquiry was rather not the prove of the social construction of the visual reality (as in the anglo-saxian visual studies) but rather an analysis of the reciprocial determination between systems of knowledge and the conventions of representation of technical images. Finally, in the conclusion an author points out, that it is not necassary to resign from the rigours of the art historian analysis (style, iconology, comparative studies), that they can be productive for the research of the bodily, perceptual, subjective and habitual contexts of the technical images. Most of all, the subjectivitizing category of style can be refferred to the mental constructs constituting the processes of knowing.
The usage of drawing, sketching and doodling in the practice of the organizational development is the subject of consideration of Adam Dzidowski in his article „The formative role of art and organisational aesthetics – visualisation and drawing in organisational development”. Dzidowski analyzes drawing as an expressive medium, enabling to reveal the creative and innovative solutions. Drawing and sketching can be seen as a cognitive tools, resolving problems, representing the stage of the organizational development, diagnozing, searching for the creative solutions. In those areas their usage in the organizational development inscribes itself into the heuretic tendencies in the field of art based research – as the practices of creation of the generative formulas, resulting with the creative scripts of action. The achievement of these goals can be supported by the artictic practices changing the models of organizations and breaking the prevailing schemes of thinking. Dzidowski refers to the dychotomy between functionalism and the cultural and interpretive studies, outlining the situation in which the management practice is still founded on the functional paradigm and the artistic tool of drawing is intended to „soften” this quantitative and formal attitude. He refers to the old dychotomy between the structuralism and ethnography, the scientific heritage of Emile Durkheim and the sociological writings of Georg Simmel – revealing in the same time the deep entanglement of the art based research in the series of various oppositions. The most solid of them is the opposition between knowledge and emotion, from which the whole current Issue of Art and Documentation begins.
The two articles in this Issue: of the duo Joanna Bielecka-Prus and Aneta Pepaś and an article of Karolina Sikorska, represent the activist tendency in the field of art based research. The perspective of Bielecka-Prus and Pepaś is the precise reconstruction of the realized by them project Where the cocs crow – the wedding ethnoperformance. This was the animation-research enterprise, organized by the City Culture Centre in Dynów, realized with the cooperation with ethnographers, anthropologists, ant socio-cultural animators. This two-voice reconstruction is then the record of the interdysciplinary art based research project. The aim of this ethnoperformative action was the reconstruction and play of the the wedding ceremony characteristic of the Dynów Foothill, for which the point of departure was a scenario of the wedding from Ulanica. It was not the accuracy of the ethnographic reconstruction at the stake of this action, but rather the mediation of tensions and relations in the local communities through the common, performative action. The wide range of the qualitative research has been centered around the scenario of the wedding ceremony, scenario negotiated with the local community. The final version of the ethnodrama, the performative scipt built on the basis of data gathered in the research, was the common decision of the inhabitants of the Dynów Foothill.
An article of Karolina Sikorska, „Female artists in work and about work. The cognitive dimensions of art” reveals this version of the activist tendency in the field of art based research which does not exist without the critical theory. This perspective takes often the critically based form of detailed case studies. Sikorska in the context of the subject matter of this Issue draws the specific map of the problems specific for the cultural and political contexts of work of women artists at Academies and Universities. She poses fundamental questions for the practice of the art based research: what makes impossible and what enables being the artist-researcher functioning in the institutional structure and not in the partisan field beyond that. Finally Sikorska points out three concrete artistic-cognitive strategies taken by women making art about other women work.
Paula Milczarczyk, an author of an article „Omnis natura artificiosa est. Project The Symbiosity of Creation” in the light of the theory of paraartistic values” analyzes the artistic practice of Jarosław Czarnecki/Elvin Flamingo in the context of an aesthetics of reality and the conception of paraartistic values of Maria Gołaszewska.
Finally, Sebastian Dudzik and Marek Glinkowski in the dialogue „The graphic art as a cognitive tool. The two voices about the matrix” convey the conversation of the artist and art historian considering the cognitive aspects of the ways of thinking and action in the graphic art. They represent the graphic thinking as the paradigmatic for the media art, they define the notion of the matrix, the matrix thinking, the cultural matrix, the matrix trancoding, analyzing the transitivity of these notions from the classic graphical techniques to the new media art. Using the cultural matrix notion, they define graphic art as the medial tool of the cultural analysis.
We were opening this section on art based research with the assumption of the qualitatively directed cultural analysis of Paul Willis, that the symbolical wholeness of the expressive human life is the sort of art, and its research demands aesthetic tools. Similarily, in the aesthetics of paraartistic values, artistic structures are treated as usable to the reality. Artist become in this context an accoucher, revealer, finder of the hidden aspects of the reality, who helps to see and analyze its qualities.
