Visual Inquiry - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2014

jan jagodzinski and Jason Wallin’s Arts-Based Research: A Critique and a Proposal (2013) is a singular book that all arts-based researchers ought to attend to. jagodzinski and Wallin offer a gift that is sure to provoke and evoke a cacophony of responses. This book presents many challenges, but the challenges are exactly what arts-based researchers need in order to engage in the kind of creative and scholarly research that can transform how we understand and practice arts education in schools and communities. An arts-based researcher offers poetic ruminations on jagodzinski and Wallin’s book in order to invite further conversation.

In this a/r/tographic fable, four literacy education researchers convey the complexities encountered when they struck out to challenge scholarly norms that erased image-making from academic writing practices. Working from different paradigms – pragmatic, critical and postmodern – they formed an enquiry group with an a priori stance of ‘yes’ to each other’s positions and explorations. During data analysis and writing, however, the group discovered that consensus/disconsensus acted to both stitch together and fray their collective work. Drawing from a/r/tographic notions of communities of creative practice and Lyotard’s writings on the necessary role of ‘bizarre partners’ in the violence of learning, the authors present one telling of how they worked with ‘confusion and ambiguity’ to create knowledge in the energy generated when ‘contradictions and resistances are faced’.

After a short story, a fable or tale, sketch or exemplum, a moral draws out an unpretentious, localized, and provisional bit of wisdom, soon to be forgotten. Morals often, heedlessly, contradict each other. Together, they make a rustling of maxims, a cheerful lament: that’s life.

This article considers the disciplinary disturbances of recent turns in contemporary art in relation to processes of a/r/tographical enquiry. Specifically, it looks at the pedagogical and socially engaged turns in art practices that reverberate with the multiple disciplines that can exist within a/r/tography. These sites of disturbance are contrasted with the disciplinary debates that include traditional schools of art and design in order to delve further into notions of knowledge production and reproduction within disciplines yet to come aimed to inspire gatekeepers at universities towards reinvention. Moreover, the potentialities of Derrida’s iterability and Rancière’s indisciplinary knowledge are described as concepts significant to a rethinking of a/r/tography in ways that demonstrate Rogoff’s notions of the repractising and relocalization of disciplines through enquiry. Throughout, this article is structured as a series of interconnected turns that engage a/r/tography theoretically, artistically and disciplinarily in an expansive and speculative manner in order to animate methodological possibilities while stimulating disruptive movement generated within indisciplinary turning.

In this article, my a/r/tographic practice explores the complexity and uncertainty of educational situations in a third pedagogical space for inclusivity through the creation of a comic story. I draw, narrate and reflect on a situation during a participatory audio-visual project with nine young people (9–15 years old), where a learning proposal leads to different and unexpected results for three participants with learning disabilities. This experience invites me to reflect on the extent to which the creation of participatory audio-visual narratives in third pedagogical spaces can lead to inclusivity. To explore this issue, I first question the idea of third spaces of learning as places for democracy and transformation for inclusivity, free from power relationships. Furthermore, I propose complexity and acceptation of constraints as a path of unexpected transformation. Finally, I conclude by situating ‘aesth/ethics’ in a/rtography and propose the contiguity of image and text in comic narratives as an inclusive means to committing to living enquiry through with consent, capacity and confidentiality.

This article describes an a/r/tographic project entitled Art for Learning Art wherein the audience was invited to respond visually to a museum exhibition-installation. The three main objectives were: first, to rethink current practices in museum education in an effort to reach a dialectical synthesis between art-making and educational activities; second, to further develop three key identities held within a/r/tography; and third, to develop visual research instruments in a/r/tographic final reports. An exhibition-installation was organized around seven engravings, two photographs and one sculpture including the artworks by L. Bourgeois, E. Chillida, E. Munch, P. Picasso, A. Tàpies, among others, in the Spanish Caja-Granada Memory of Andalusia Museum. The main educational goal was to engage visitors with learning to interact visually with original artwork before producing new images that would then immediately became part of the installation.

This article maps how an a/r/tographic enquiry designed to interrogate curator identity as a way of being in both public and private realms is unpacked through the practice of curating the exhibition ‘Dress Stories’ at the University of North Texas. Throughout the curatorial process, there were opportunities to unpack, unfold and undo clothing as a way into curator, artist, researcher and teacher self-study. Each of Parker Palmer’s community models is interrogated as a means to ask: who is the curator who curates in community?

This article draws on Gilles Deleuze’s work with Bergson’s concepts to theorize a/r/tography as a methodology of intuition. Intuition in this work is understood as a particular form of knowing that is activated in a disruption to tacit perceptions in what Inna Semetsky refers to as ‘perception becoming’. To do so, this article explores a recent critique of the theoretical underpinnings of a/r/tography and the assertion that as a methodology, a/r/tography does not provoke an encounter with perception, with the virtual as ‘the unconscious Real’. This article develops this proposal through Deleuze’s work to examine this precise methodology of intuition as a way to examine the provocation of difference within the pragmatism of a/r/tography and arts-based research. It will also explore two a/r/tographical renderings: openings and reverberations to examine the actualization of creative thought in the real through intuition.