ART&RESEARCH

I contend that what’s developed in the context of UK Fine Art university departments in the last fifteen years with regards to a ‘research agenda’ has been thoroughly counterproductive. Artists whose teaching skills and dedication were never in doubt have been forced to find new ways of justifying their practice, and defining it, somehow – anyhow – as research. Such is the pressure on all academics to fund their own jobs that those members of staff who can’t attract research funding feel themselves to be locked out of career advancement and to believe that their positions are at best tenuous.

So good, established artists have to learn a new language for defining their work that is not at all about the work itself, but entirely about the processes and decisions leading to it, and their ability to evaluate and discriminate in making those decisions. The problem here is that such an evaluative approach can only measure the efficacy of a research process and can’t ascertain whether that process has produced good, bad or stolidly mediocre art. And, of course, we have the corollary of the artist pressured into a research agenda, which is the academic trying to pass off research – maybe very thorough, rigorous research – as art. Subjective aesthetic judgements become rationalized as objective. Dull, process-led art, illustrative in the worst way of concepts and arguments, is promoted by university-linked galleries and in an internally-circulated round of theoretical publications, entirely at a parallel to any kind of art ‘mainstream’, however we might define that.

The latest development in the institutions has been the sudden mushrooming of PhD programmes in Fine Art. Within Northern Ireland (which is the academic context that I know), the government have allocated large amounts of funding to doctoral programmes generally because they want to grow research that can be applied or instrumentalized within a supposedly post-conflict political context. But all across the UK, PhD funding is now extremely high.

Candidates’ suitability, and their understanding of their fields of research are increasingly highly questionable. Once again the old university demand for ‘high-value’ students dictates that numbers must grow every year, regardless of whether sufficient resources are in place for the new cohorts. Several friends confirm to me that they are currently registered for PhD programmes primarily because of the large grants available (at a time when undergraduates find it increasingly hard to fund their studies). The majority of Fine Art PhD students I know receive more in grants than the half-time staff supervising them are paid. And increasing student numbers mean extra demands on staff who are pressured into supervising when, theoretically, they’re sometimes only one chapter ahead themselves.

Many students completing Fine Art PhDs are equipped neither to be academics nor artists (I make this comment because it’s not such a long time since the PhD was presumed to be a qualification one took because one wanted to have a career as an academic). If a Fine Art department takes in thirty doctoral students a year (as some do), there are clearly not going to be enough academic posts for them to fill at the end of their research. And their lack of engagement with the mainstream of art during the compressed period of their research means that they often have no experience in dealing with galleries or curators, developing a professional practice, or even making work at all independently of academic supports. The fact that a growing number of such students are entering their courses straight from MAs or BAs means that they have never had an independent practice; the methodological approaches learned in their theoretical studies, developed without reference to the structures of professional art, produce graduates who are simply incapable of making careers as artists. One former BA student of mine, having immediately undertaken an MA at the same institution, was affronted and indignant when I suggested that she might benefit from a year or two as a professional artist before embarking on a PhD. It seems that, rather than the studio-based, professionally-geared MA, the PhD is now the necessary terminal degree.

These situations needn’t be quite so. Practice-based research within the academy does not have to be entirely divorced from the research-based practices that are increasingly common in Europe today. Staff who feel themselves unqualified or insufficiently prepared to supervise PhD students (whose suitability they may anyway question) need not be forced to ‘adapt or die’. Fine Art research funding structures need not adopt so slavishly the dictates of Humanities research. Art colleges do not have to copy the labour casualization and funding-led research agendas of the universities of which they are now part. But academics in the UK system generally seem to feel so overworked, so cowed, and so distanced from the policy decisions that shape their work that they continue to accept these conditions as inevitable. I would hope that this need not be the case as Ireland considers what practices it should adopt in the implementation of programmes of Fine Art research.