You are Here: Relocating ‘Artistic’ Research in the Contemporary University

From a limited perspective as a belated newcomer to teaching and researching within the performing arts in a British university, I would like to offer a very partial and mildly polemical contribution to a debate around what is variously described as practice-led/-based/-as-research within the academy.

Much of this debate appears to have gravitated around the epistemological teasing out and testing of these terms in relationship to a hyper-specialised academic context and its obsession with the competition-driven generation of knowledge as a social good, either ‘for its own sake’ or as an instantly marketable commodity or, ideally, as both. Taking a necessarily naïve and idealistic standpoint, I would like to propose that, while artists and academics have much to gain from the re-admission of art ‘practice’ to academy, in terms of access to both new resources and practical possibilities, much of this well-behaved discussion is a distraction that functions unwittingly as a cover for the painless absorption of the more antagonistic forms of political and pedagogical praxis that have fuelled the development of art-making during the 20th C.

The university is perhaps one of our least examined institutions, yet in the era of the so-called ‘knowledge economy’ and the rollout of mass higher education across the globe, it is surely going to play an increasingly significant part in shaping many aspects of society. At the same time questions of site, place, location and social obligation still appear to be central to contemporary art’s ongoing interrogation of its own grounds of production. Given that, I want to discover if and how practice-as-research in such an institution - whose ‘corporatization’, at least in the UK, is almost complete - might yet mobilize a collective examination of not just its own practices of making, teaching and research, but also of its underlying models of organisation, responsibility and sustainability.

My suggestion is that as belated newcomers themselves, practice-as-researchers in the arts and humanities academy, however defined, may be best positioned to take up such an examination and, crucially, to take it forward via localised projects of inventive social action that focus squarely on the university as public institution. This process will hopefully offer its own pleasures and rewards, as well as challenges to our core self-conceptions as artists, researchers, educators, citizens or activists. Iceland is, according to various international indices, one of the happiest, wealthiest and most developed nations on earth. How these demands might or might not be taken up with a specifically Icelandic context will obviously be very particular and will hopefully mark the point of departure for subsequent conversations.

Simon Bayly teaches at Roehampton University in London, where he is currently involved in developing a new MA in Performance and Creative Research.  Since 1991, he has directed the London-based live arts company PUR.  His interests are shifting rapidly, but include the relationship between performance and pedagogy; practical investigations into contemporary understandings of the figure of the expert; creative research and activism; the university as sustainable social institution. Recent performance projects include Babel of Tower: A Report to the Academy, 2007, a dialogue with audio-visual accompaniment about a creative research project that did not go according to plan and Dear All, 2006, a customizable ‘encounter’ for formal conference rooms, non-actors and archives of ‘all-user’ email archives from large institutions.