Research in Art II

Research in Art II is a practical application of the content, concepts and knowledge acquired during the course in Research in Art I. It covers the fields of fine arts, music, theatre, film, radio and television, architecture, landscape architecture and design (visual communications, industrial design, applied arts, textile and clothing design). In line with the nature of the creative work in art, whose characteristics are processuality and development, taking the forms of individual or team creation, two coordinated methodological matrices provide a field-specific framework for the research at the third level of arts education: (i) the matrix of action research and (ii) the matrix of specific methods of the research work in a particular art field.

Action research is a form of practical research aimed at identifying, establishing and reflecting about the facts, objectives and problems that individuals perceive in their own artistic practices (practice-based research). Researchers examine and determine the causes of their actions, thus opening the door to non-trivial changes and progress in their work. In the frame of the third-level research, action research has the following characteristics in the field of art: the ideas and problems stem from the concrete needs of practice; the objectives do not refer to the verification of theories but to the change in the context of practice; the obtained results are in the form of applicative operators allowing their direct use in practice; research situations are treated holistically; researchers are actively involved in the processes and interactively connected with the other participants in these processes (mentor, curator, audience, etc.).

Special methods of research work bring dispositional, i.e., practical, skill-related and actively verified knowledge into the pedagogical process. The pedagogical potential of action research and field-specific methods of research becomes instrumental through a practical methodological support provided to individual doctoral research (identifying and formulating problems, experimenting with alternatives, designing non-trivial alternatives, deciding between different alternatives, searching for second-order solutions, methodologically reflecting on the performance stages of a research project, etc.).

Constituting an applicative infrastructure of artistic research, field-specific methods are strictly linked to concrete research problem situations that students bring into the pedagogical process with their research problems and topics. On the one hand, these methods help students solve entirely concrete research problems, on the other hand, they provide for the students’ methodological training for research confrontations with other, never entirely predictable problem situations. The field specifics of these methods are only partly noticeable at the descriptive level, but they become more obvious from the reading list below, covering different fields, and, above all, from direct applicative conditions, defined by artistic expression media with their assumptions and communication nature. The basis for the course realisation is individual work with students focussing on their research projects.