[iDC] Praxis-based Ph.D.s

[Kevin Hamilton]

INTRO:

We're not considering a PhD program here at Illinois yet, though I know 
it's on our department's UK-originating Director's mind. I suspect that 
the push will come soon, and it will come for design, rather than for 
studio art practice. I'm not against the idea, and like Saul I suspect 
that it may be necessary for survival of the work I value, but I'm 
extremely wary.

Here as in many other research universities, funding and support for the 
arts are slimming, and the pressure is on to justify art "research" 
within the broader economic and institutional climate. It's within this 
context that I've been foraying into the sciences here, and based on 
these experiences that I'd like to offer some observations.

I understand the enaction of a practice-based PhD to entail a more 
methodical identification of artistic practice as research. Here are the 
challenges to this that I've observed. Forgive me if I'm rehashing what 
some of you have already been through with your home departments.

CHALLENGES, BRIEFLY:

1 - Curricula and pedagogy for art and design at the undergraduate and 
graduate levels widely varies, undergoes little inter-institutional 
examination or critique, and is often still regarded with suspicion by 
even young professors who doubt that art can really ever be taught. 
"Hidden curricula" dominate.

2 - Institutions and the curricula they oversee are rarely transparent 
to students at the undergraduate or even graduate level.

3 - Collaboration between artists and scientists, or even justification 
of artistic research within a scientific paradigm, faces a significant 
challenge in the area of evaluation.

4 - Most undergraduate and graduate art curricula pay little or no 
attention to methodology. (Design seems to be a little better at this.)

5 - The "apprentice model" for PhD research, combined with restrictive 
tenure and funding models, creates an environment that discourages 
creativity, critique or service.

6 - Areas of artistic practice that don't easily fit into the processes 
and practices of institutionalized research-based inquiry stand to lose 
their support and protection, as peer disciplines cautiously align 
themselves with dominant economic forces.


WHO:

For positionality's sake - I'm in my fifth year of a tenure-track job at 
a research university where science and engineering dominate. I am 
jointly appointed to the Painting and New Media programs within the 
School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois, 
Urbana-Champaign. The School is comprised of Art, Design, Art Education 
and Art History divisions, and is located within the broader College of 
Fine and Applied Arts, where our peers are the Departments of 
Architecture, Dance, Music, and Theater.

I identify more as an artist than a designer. My education was an 
institutional mix - a small liberal arts college to start, then a 
traditional art school (where I majored in Painting), and finally a 
large research university for graduate school (M.S. in Visual Studies). 
Because it's not uncommon, and because I think it's worth remembering in 
the space of this conversation, I'll humbly confess to applying to 
college out of high school based on colleges I knew of from watching 
Basketball on television.

CHALLENGES, EXPANDED:

1 - Curricula and pedagogy for art and design at the undergraduate and 
graduate levels widely varies, undergoes little inter-institutional 
examination or critique, and is often still regarded with suspicion by 
even young professors who doubt that art can really ever be taught. 
"Hidden curricula" dominate.

Art education at the undergraduate and graduate level, even at its best, 
is discursive only at the local, institutional or even classroom level. 
All over the world, instructors are, as modern art dictates, reinventing 
the wheel with their students (or perhaps leaving the wheel just the way 
it was when they were in school). Outside of a few popular cultural 
resources (textbooks, for example, or the PBS Art21 DVD series, or art 
magazines), art is taught in all manner of ways and covers all manner of 
subjects. I'm increasingly struck by how different my field is from that 
of my university peers in this way - we can't really depend on our 
graduate students having any sort of common experience, especially as 
MFA programs begin to attract students without undergraduate degrees in art.

I celebrate this pluralism, and certainly will make no appeal to canon, 
but I worry about the situation on several levels. In my opinion, 
non-discursive plurality doesn't make for diversity, it produces opaque 
and inadequate education.

Firstly, it's difficult to make the design of curricula and outcomes 
clear for students when there is no defined outside body or bodies of 
knowledge. It's all too easy in this situation to produce BFA or even 
MFA graduates with scant information or preparation for functioning in 
the world. Most related to this IDC thread, it's difficult for me to 
imagine what prior knowledge or experience PhD programs would require of 
their applicants.

Most worrisome to me, when there is little exchange or critique among 
practitioners and fellow instructors at the global level about 
education, precedent takes hold. Precedent in art education in this 
country leans toward an exclusive apprentice-model that relies on 
notions of self-expression and heroism, and that's exactly what I see 
springing up everywhere, even under the rubric of postmodern critique. 
This is not a pedagogy of access and discovery, but one of implicit 
learning and socialization into the professional worlds of galleries or 
academic cliques. (Richard Cary describes this well as a "hidden 
curriculum" in his book Critical Art Pedagogy.)

I'm not asking for the kind of national oversight and standards that I 
hear taking hold abroad. That's the last thing I want. I'm asking for 
more application of modern and postmodern self-critique at the 
inter-institutional level. We have organizations of national 
accreditation and scholarship about art education, but they're not 
nurturing such a discussion, and I don't think they're the ones to do it 
anyway. This discussion isn't about standards.

And again, my excuse for voicing this concern is that I can't imagine 
how PhD programs could function when there isn't much agreement or 
exchange between institutions about what a BFA or MFA comprises. There 
may be more such exchange taking place than I'm aware of, but if so then 
we should ask why it's not happening elsewhere - it's not at CAA, and 
it's not present where I've been. (It's all we can do to make time for 
discussion within our department, let alone with those outside - see the 
CPA thread.)

Looking to science, our potential partners in PhD research, we see even 
less attention to pedagogy. Teaching is far from respected, core courses 
are moving to distance-learning content-delivery models, and I suspect 
that much of the material will always be more defined and clear than 
that of arts courses.

2 - Institutions and the curricula they oversee are rarely transparent 
to students at the undergraduate or even graduate level.

Based on this thread and other discussions I've been part of, a key 
distinction between MFA and PhD work would be a requirement to 
"distance" oneself from one's work to understand it as a discursive and 
contextualized addition to existing bodies of practice and knowledge.  
To some extent, MFA programs require this as part of a Master's Thesis, 
but I suspect that this exercise is often more of an expanded "artist's 
statement," a locative exercise rather than a discursive one. Students 
describe their work in the terms learned from theory, and in relation to 
the work of other dead or living practitioners. But there's rarely the 
same sense there of contribution and critique among equals that the 
educational machines of other disciplines require.

I don't believe that such a practice is always desirable. It certainly 
carries its own politics - here at Illinois I've witnessed some 
interesting political critiques launched from within against this system 
by Humanities scholars . But for those who DO wish to pursue PhD-level 
research, some degree of ability to understand art education outside of 
self-discovery seems to be required. For many reasons, chiefly those 
outlined in my first point, I don't believe that there will be many able 
to do this. I wonder even about the gender, class, and race dynamics of 
such preparation as it currently exists, or doesn't.

An ability to understand education as moving through an external set of 
discursive fields, or even as a negotiation of flawed institutions, will 
be especially important for artists who are the first in their 
institution to act as Researchers. Navigating established structures of 
labor and evaluation that are, in some cases, wholly counter to their 
own enterprise will take more than a little understanding of 
institutions as plastic. This is not something I've seen to be commonly 
part of undergraduate or graduate art education, and it's not something 
that's likely to grow with the turn towards education as 
"content-delivery" fostered by some distance-learning initiatives.

Heck, I'm embarrassed to admit that I hadn't even thought about the 
difference between a research institution and a teaching institution 
until I  started teaching.

3 - Collaboration between artists and scientists, or even justification 
of artistic research within a scientific paradigm, faces a significant 
challenge in the area of evaluation.

It's interesting to me that, as far as I can tell, so far this thread 
has focused on the practice-based PhD participating in the paradigms of 
science, rather than the humanities. (Maybe I have the wrong 
impression.) Of course that's where the funded research is, but it's 
also the hardest transition to make. How often are practice-based PhD 
programs in art allying themselves with quantitative research, compared 
to qualitative research methods?

The safest collaborations between artists and scientists rely on 
established divisions of labor to produce little new knowledge or 
practice. That is, the scientist comes away with new data or tech, the 
artist comes away with an exhibited object, and the host institution 
comes away with a new banner story on the homepage. Wouldn't actual 
productive research, risky research, by artists within a paradigm of 
science require more difficult navigation of differences?

In such cases, the criteria for success, as measured for purposes of 
tenure, funding and matriculation, are difficult to determine. I'm 
barely familiar with quantitative research methods, let alone 
qualitative ones, but I'm beginning to suspect that PhD students in art 
may have to enroll in Statistics classes if they really want their 
research to count alongside that of science. I don't even know what that 
would look like.

I don't have many positive suggestions here yet (we're working on it - 
join us at our CHI workshop in San Jose if you want to help). But as I 
see it, art research that is recognized by universities as substantive 
will have to negotiate some deep and profound differences around goals 
for success. OR, art research will have to be relegated a similar 
position to that of say, Art History, where PhD scholarship is sometimes 
recognized as something other than research but still valued (if not 
very funded.)

4 - Most undergraduate and graduate art curricula pay little or no 
attention to methodology. (Design seems to be a little better at this.)

Work with scientists and artists in the classroom has made me painfully 
aware of this. Students who choose to work in theme-based, conceptual or 
sited practices, rather than materially-driven disciplinary work, 
receive little instruction in how to produce, explore, and discover. 
I've learned from observing HCI practices that, ironically, the sciences 
have it all over the arts for equipping students to explore and iterate 
without actually building the Thing. This is especially evident in 
New/Digital Media, where art students sometimes spend so much time 
learning the new tool needed for a project that the resulting object is 
premature and misunderstood by the artist.

Methodology seems to be the first thing learned by Masters students in 
other fields. Like Richard Cary (again, props to his helpful book 
Critical Art Pedagogy), I don't hope for established and accepted 
methods for artists, just for a consideration of methodology's role and 
some instruction in options. From Fluxus on up to more recent Oulipian 
digital media projects, methodology for artists has often been seen as 
an end in itself. I love that stuff, but the kind of exchange and 
discourse required for art as research necessitates a different 
approach. Students even as undergraduates would need to be offered some 
exposure to methods as means. A PhD student in art would need to be 
already versed in the role of methodology in research.

It sounds like some of the new PhD programs are accounting for this by 
redesigning their Masters programs as well, which makes sense. But this 
raises the question of what a terminal MFA is, of course. Either way, if 
the institution of PhD programs causes more consideration among art 
educators about how choices of method and process affect and determine 
the resulting artifact/experience, then I'm all for it.

5 - The "apprentice model" for PhD research, combined with restrictive 
tenure and funding models, creates an environment that discourages 
creativity, critique or service.

Others have touched on this already in regards to the mentor vs 
apprentice model, I just wanted to echo this. It's a serious and real 
concern - I'm still shocked and adjusting to what the traditional PhD 
apprentice model effects on the levels of labor, education, and 
exchange. As far as I can tell, the sciences rely on the labor of RA's 
in a way that the Jeff Koons of the world may celebrate, but which is 
detrimental to the production of new knowledge or free-thinking 
researchers. I've learned a great deal about collaboration already in my 
short work with those in the Sciences, but many of the spaces I've seen 
are far from collaborative.

This seems to happen despite the best wishes, ethics or critiques of 
young faculty - anyone who doesn't have their students writing papers 
for them, teaching classes for them, and writing grants for them, stands 
to end up inadequately prepared for tenure review. Add to this the 
pressure to raise funds through outside sponsorship, and there's a 
recipe for highly prescribed research that often neglects real needs.

The only solution I can think of to this would be to look at some 
different models of funding and labor in regards to New Media. From my 
(very brief) and thirdhand experience, Holland's Waag Society, for 
example, seems to have devised some good strategies and models to 
protect service, theme-driven research and motivated, recognized labor.

6 - Areas of artistic practice that don't easily fit into the processes 
and practices of institutionalized research-based inquiry stand to lose 
their support and protection, as peer disciplines cautiously align 
themselves with dominant economic forces.

In the same way that art or design research must struggle to protect 
autonomous, exploratory, accountable research, it has to find ways of 
using any newfound credibility to protect other practices, other models 
that may not be able to justify their existence within a research 
university structure. Traditional crafts or individualized work MAY find 
shelter under lingering institutional desires for a visible, if 
marginalized, arts domain to aid in the construction of cultured 
citizens. But if these or other practices express critiques of the 
founding principles of a university's dominant practices, there will be 
little understanding, and possibly hostility. Those who can find ways to 
practice as art researchers and support themselves and their departments 
need to build in protection for others.

LASTLY:

I don't intend the concerns expressed here to serve as a criticism of 
efforts to initiate a PhD program for artists, but as a collection of 
observed and experienced challenges that I've encountered as part of 
finding a place of relevance and support within a science and 
engineering research university. Some of these challenges I've begun to 
find some answers to. I'm interested in hearing, for anyone who's made 
it this far in this reflection, which, if any of these you have 
experienced as well, and whether you've found some success. Perhaps Mary 
Anne or Margaret can share whether meeting any of these challenges have 
been part of the planning process so far?

Thanks,

Kevin Hamilton
Assistant Professor, Studio Art
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
http://kevinhamilton.org