Kia ora koutou My first presentations of a lot of recent research happening in Auckland this week if anyone's interested.
Hope you're all keeping warm! Danny ---------- Department of Film, Television and Media Studies Research Seminar Series AUDIO-VISUAL PRODUCTION IN THE UNIVERSITY: RESEARCH, KNOWLEDGE, AND CREATIVE PRACTICES. Danny Butt, Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland. Thursday 18th August, 4:15 sharp, drinks to follow. Pat Hanan Room, Room 501, Arts 2, University of Auckland. The emergence of practice-based PhDs in audio-visual fields is usually viewed by other university disciplines as a bureaucratic response to academic professionalisation of audio-visual production, or a marker of academic qualification inflation. Meanwhile, in the professional audio-visual environment the qualifications symbolise a needless academicisation of fields that rely on artistic freedom implicitly located in the market. While these cases have merit (and no shortage of empirical support), historically informed writers on the university such as Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler have for many years urged a response to the decline of the library as “the ideal form of archive,” in a world increasingly shaped by the technics of audio-visual reproduction. Such a response would involve greater consideration of performative rather than constative modes of knowledge. For Derrida, an institutional response appropriate to the times should involve a fundamental return to a university “without condition”, where research and re-elaboration can take place without presupposition, not to enclose itself in the university, but “on the contrary, so as to find the best access to a new public space transformed by new techniques of communication, information, archivization, and knowledge production.” Despite the language of the “return”, Derrida is under no illusions of a prior golden age, noting that the unconditional university has never been in effect. Finding access to the newly mediated public space will involve raising questions about “the form and the authority of the question, about the interrogative form of thought.” Derrida raises the example of the fine arts and literature as works the university to come should support, although he notes that the question remains of how the modes of reflexivity in such works can be productively sutured to the critical-textual traditions of the historical university and its qualifications. This paper traces the historical roots of this problematic and identifies a number of implications for practice-based research qualifications in the contemporary research university. Elam Friday Lecture Series Danny Butt - HISTORIES OF ART EDUCATION AND MODALITIES OF ARTISTIC KNOWLEDGE.* Friday 19th August, 3pm. Elam Lecture Theatre, Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland. >From the time of Alberti’s On Painting (1435), art theory has considered the >equivalence of the visual arts to other forms of knowledge, specifically the >seven liberal arts. The development of the European academy as a basis for >theoretical knowledge can be seen in the context of the professional search >for autonomy and a gentlemanly aspiration to court society, reflected in the >“elitist” reputation of the academy (and the "artworld") at various points in >its history. The primary institutional force in Anglophone art and design >education, however, emerges from the state-sponsored compulsory drawing >education programmes of 19th century Britain, which appropriated instructional >models from the French free drawing schools to provide industry-relevant >skills and moral discipline. The famous German institutions of the Werkbund >and Bauhaus appropriated these UK developments in turn (with a dash of >Romanticism) to inaugurate a “scientific humanist” approach to visual arts >instruction, aligning with the newly “scientific” form of the university >founded in Berlin in the early 19th century. By the 20th century the >incorporation of visual arts into the now-dominant U.S. university model had >been achieved by the teachers of art education, rather than the teachers of >professional artists. The result is that many doctoral programmes adopted the >psychological-academic mode of knowledge production, where artists were >expected to account for the usefulness of their own work in writing, rather >than the customary professional form of knowledge being transmitted by an >independent critic. This presentation will show how the diverse constituents >of the studio art discipline and the resulting tensions in the role of writing >in studio art instruction are at the basis of debates over the doctorate in >studio art today. * This paper is conceived as a supplement to my seminar for the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies the day before. While this paper will hopefully be enjoyable on its own, potential audiences are encouraged to also attend the Thursday seminar. -- http://www.dannybutt.net +64 21 456 379 _______________________________________________ Ada_list mailing list [email protected] http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/
