The Third Cycle in Arts Education: A Contested Construct 23
1. B. The Development of the Debate
for practical experimentation and concrete intervention, and the discussion needs to attend closely to specific examples of work by artist-researchers and educators, not just to abstracted debates on epistemology or policy. Before attempting an examination of specific cases, it will help to provide an overview of the wider debates. As seen above, the debate on the doctorate in the creative arts has been framed within larger debates on the doctorate. There is also a specificity regarding the question of artistic research as it has emerged within the practices of the arts and not simply within the institutional logic of educational policies, universities and academies.
1. C.
Genealogies of the Artistic Research Debate Introduction
As mentioned at the outset, the question of research by artists has been prominent in international academic debate and within certain areas of the mainstream art system. It has become especially intense during the 2000s, a development often attributed to the effects of the Bologna Process on debate within arts education in Europe in general. However, this should not be accepted at face value, as an engagement with the doctoral debate was a relatively late development within the Bologna Process. It would seem more appropriate to regard the question of artistic research as emerging from several strands of development, and from different aspects of the various artistic disciplines (including audio-visual media, design, film, fine art, literature, music, and so forth). So, for example, within the visual arts, the emergence of conceptualism in the 1960s had a decisive impact, making the question of art as a form of cognitive activity central to practices within both certain art academies and different institutional sites of the international art world. Indicative of this development are initiatives such as Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT, 1965–1981) and the Artist Placement Group (APG, 1966–1979). Other developments, in ethnomusicology for example, contributed to a debate on performance practice as a research action, again bringing together the consideration of artistic practices, research and the generation of new knowledge. A key area of enquiry here was the topic of improvisation, the study of which requires performance as an integral activity within the research process, and so the turn to improvisation engendered a context in which the role of the performer-researcher emerged very clearly.