SMILJANA GLISOVIC, Editor, Creative Matters, DDCA
“Wonder unsettles––exposes the limitations of––existing frameworks of understanding.”
Anders Schinkel Wonder, Mystery and Meaning 2019
“By posing the unanswerable questions of meaning, (we) establish (ourselves) as question-asking beings. Behind all the cognitive questions for which (we) find answers, there lurk the unanswerable ones which seem entirely idle and have always been denounced as such. It is more than likely that (we), if (we) were to ever lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions, would lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions.”
Hannah Arendt The Life of the Mind 1971
“Art provides us an opportunity to catch ourselves in the act of achieving our conscious lives, of bringing the world into focus for perceptual (and other forms of) consciousness… it also gives us an opportunity to move from not seeing to seeing, or from seeing to seeing more or seeing differently… both art and philosophy—superficially so different—are really species of a common genus whose preoccupation is with the ways we are organized and with the possibility of reorganizing ourselves. ”
Alva Noë Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature 2015
The relationship between art and knowledge has been a topic of inquiry for philosophy since the ancients (this is true not only of the western tradition, but this is the tradition that is most frequently called on for sense-making in our contexts). It hasn’t necessarily been a topic of interest for the artist, but since the inclusion of art practice in the university (and by extension in all scholarly activity), this question has come to matter for the artist in the academy. Henk Borgdorff (2012) draws a very clear lineage of thought on the subject of art and knowledge which many creative arts practitioners in the university have also pointed to as a matter of justification for their inclusion in the university (read: knowledge) ecology (read: economy). Interestingly, as Butt (2017) points out, the inclusion of artists in the university was not a response to any philosophical understanding of art and knowledge, but, rather, more or less a financial one.
Given so many centuries of rather cogent (poetic and edifying) arguments, creative practice researchers still experience a type of ‘defensive’ stance they have to adopt in justifying their presence and work according to the expectations of their institutions. In addition to the early historical literature, the now rather plentiful literature of the past 20 to 30 years that is specific to art practice in the context of the university is also very convincing in regard to not only the ability of art practice to generate new knowledge, but also the wonderfully revolutionary capacity for art practice to show us how narrow our conception of knowledge has been since the scientific revolution. What this means is that by expanding the types of practices we understand as generative of new knowledge, we expand what can be known – and here, I mean: what we can come to understand about the human condition and its interrelationship with everything in the universe. (I almost want to apologise for overstating this claim so as to appear moderate, but actually, I stand firm on this point). To say it in more sober terms: to challenge frameworks of evaluation is to challenge some foundational principles that the modern university has built itself on. With the introduction of creative practice research into the university, some of these foundations have been profoundly and productively challenged with the potential to expand established notions around the university and its relationship to knowledge production. (I say nothing new here, this is a point argued very well, very often, and for decades by others.) We should all be very supportive of this opportunity for expansion, this isn’t just a matter for creative practitioners to get excited about.
The good news is there is a general move toward questioning some of the practices of the academy, including evaluation processes and the ‘values’ they are founded on by other disciplines, so we are not alone. Other disciplines outside creative practice are rethinking what a university is for, challenging the materialist paradigm, the scientific method or the neoliberal principles that the institution undergirds itself by. Perhaps it’s emboldening to know that this is a movement much larger than creative practice research. Just as one example is the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment (2022) by The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA): ‘a collective of organisations committed to reforming the methods and processes by which research, researchers, and research organisations are evaluated’ (CoARA). The agreement has over 800 signatories from around the world predominantly from STEM disciplines.
Much has changed and improved in the conditions for creative practice researchers and the recognition (dare I say, celebration) of their work. Yet the most acute frustrations in the current moment are around how this type of work is ‘evaluated’ (for the purposes of things such as promotion, funding and government accounting). This seems, at first, a pedestrian point to get hung-up on. If not ‘pedestrian’, then: administrative busy-work; judgement we’d all rather live without; ultimately irrelevant to what we think our work is and does. But, actually, it brings up some foundational questions which are worthwhile (re)considering: it asks us to attend to the ways the field has developed and how we may have moved on from the early literature and our understandings of who we are and what we do.
Art is and does many things. Perhaps one of the likely reasons that the global research community has had so much trouble aligning art practice with extant university research contexts and their evaluation frameworks is because of this multiple capacity, function, quality, agency of art practice and art objects. This is a welcome complexity and one which any evaluation framework ought to recognise. To ‘recognise’ it though says nothing about what it does with this understanding or how it ‘accounts’ for it. This is one of the tasks at hand as we work toward the development of a new Evaluation Framework.
The fear some have expressed is that if we incorporate the language of the academy, which is increasingly coming out of MBA and management-speak, we will lose the potency of our power to resist the neo-liberalisation (of absolutely everything) and expand the possibilities of how we come to know the world. Not to mention, make bad art. So there are some principles we don’t want to forget, things we want to protect which will anchor us to what’s most important, and allow us the agility to be in this dance (with institutions, epistemologies, divergent practices etc), which is not always comfortable or desirable.
The architecture clearly needs to change: to be in line with the practices actually taking place which have exceeded the old architectures; to meet and support the government and universities’ changing demands. Demands such as the shift (apparently) from quantity to quality; a (re)focussing onto ‘impact’; the introduction of the Indigenous Knowledge code (which has the potential, if taken seriously, to radically uproot the current epistemological paradigms that everything is built on. At present, simply including a code seems another colonial act of asking certain knowledge systems to comply with euro-centric ideas of knowledge).
On ‘impact’: this is an ungenerous word that misunderstands art practice/research, and is generally tone-deaf to the contemporary moment. There is a burgeoning literature and practice that has made ‘relationality’ a fashion; we’ve seen the rise of ‘superstar’ scholars such as Karen Barad; there’s a resurgence in interest in process philosophy; we’ve seen an entirely new field of scholarly interest developing into ‘care’ and a strong return to the subject of ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’. All of these movements are strong currents in creative practice research of the past 5 to 10 years as a response to the ‘crisis moment’ for humans on this planet, or, said another way: ‘real-world problems’.
Julian Meyrick, in ‘In the ruins of the future’ (2023) describes a particular image of the contemporary artist: a lonely figure without an audience (apologies for flattening a much more complex argument, Julian, but for my purposes here this is an image powerful enough). The artist needs to be part of the fabric of the world; their work is about dialoguing with the contexts they are in. This is not how things are, generally, in Australia. Our society does not adequately support the role of the artist as a critical (and welcome figure) in public debate. The ground for the artist is not sufficiently cultivated, we make very little space for them in public life, they are marginalised, irrelevant to the ‘real-world’ issues.
So then, when one is asked to make an ‘impact’ with their work, the violent overtones and blindness of the word are amplified. Art needs an audience that knows how to be present to its material offering and to dialogue with that offering. The artists themselves do not have all the agency as a separate force that makes impact. Art is a conversation and the ground for that conversation needs to be cultivated, it is in relation that the ‘work’ happens.
This state of things signals the need for a big cultural shift (supported, of course, by an economic and funding shift) which our activities, in developing a new Evaluation Framework, are not going to solve. However, it is important to sketch out the context if only to acknowledge what sometimes feels like a mountain too big to climb, to bring relief in solidarity, understanding and community.
An important development in the creative practice research field is the question of ‘identity’ and, more significantly, how this identity speaks to one’s understanding around their ‘purpose’ or ‘responsibility’ in regards to their role as a practitioner-researcher in the university. It makes sense that much of the literature looks at the ‘artist’ that has come into the ‘academy’ – because that is what happened with the mergers: practicing artists moved into the university space by need of institutional and funding restructures. This is no longer the only journey for how one ‘becomes’ a ‘creative practice researcher’. Increasingly, people move in a linear fashion, from undergraduate studies, to honours, Masters then PhD, without ever having worked as ‘an artist in industry’. One may never have identified themselves as ‘an artist’. We might say there is a new breed of researcher (rather than a new breed of artist) who is a thinker, an investigator, someone who happens to use the tools of their (art) practice to pursue questions in the world. A study currently being undertaken by Craig Batty and myself confirms this through interviews with 20 creative practice researchers around the world, where very few identify as ‘artists’. This is also confirmed anecdotally amongst Australian colleagues, but it is important to note that for some (recently confirmed at the 2025 DDCA National Online Forum), the title of ‘artist’ is a critically important one to maintain.
We are no longer all ‘artists in the academy’, though we may all be (creative) practitioner-researchers, using artistic methods to make inquiries into all manner of things in the world. These practitioner-researchers and their working methods, interests and sensibilities are a welcome and crucial contributor to our societies and ‘institutions of knowledge’. This should be a given. How we then recognise (rather than prove) the details of these contributions is the discussion to be had. This discussion is, in the first instance, oriented toward supporting this important role of the practitioner-researcher; and only in the second instance, along the way, helpful to any ‘evaluation exercises’.
One or two other things (or, what is to be protected?)
Some of the tensions that exist in assessing creative practice research works, according to scientific paradigms and data-driven metrics, bring attention to dimensions of the human experience which are not reducible, which escape representation or categorisation. Art is often alive with ‘mystery’, it inspires ‘wonder’, it seduces, gives rise to pleasurable or uncomfortable feelings which we don’t always understand. Phenomenological experiences at the site of our encounter with art are not to be resolved into concept. This observation – and similar assessments – has been made by many. I note it here to say that what follows in our collaborations and discussions around evaluation measures holds these things dear, seeks to protect – and not diminish – the powerful qualities and potentials of art. We do not measure and evaluate what must remain open, uncertain, tenuous, tender, invisible, affective, mysterious – that which makes artworks wonderful, ecstatic, powerful, unique and essential to all our lives. The work exceeds what can be measured, quantified, evaluated, or put into a spreadsheet. The work is more than a research artefact or an ‘output’. The Evaluation Framework will not excise the ambiguous, the unsayable, or the mysterious.
Creative practice research is emergent, it does not necessarily follow a predetermined path set by an explicit question. The Evaluation Framework must preserve art’s power in posing questions, rather than arriving at answers. This does not mean there is no rigour in the work. It also does not mean a creative practice researcher is uninterested in contexts, in the history and state of their discipline or subject, or in their relevance. While an artist may have these pleasures and simply move from impulse to impulse, the researcher does not. The creative practice researcher is informed by their craft, of the concerns and practices in their field, the subject matter they are exploring, and the expectations of their audiences.
There are precedents for understanding these relationships – between rigor and mystery; between art and knowledge – in the western philosophical tradition. From Beaumegarten to Hegel, Gadamer and others (again, see Borgdorff 2012) we can be guided by the idea of ‘sensuous knowing’ (and, after Kant on subjectivity and ‘I demand everyone’s agreement’) which speaks to the knowing that happens in an encounter with a work. This seems like a helpful framework to make some important distinctions: creative practice research artefacts contribute knowledges that are ‘known’ in one’s encounter with the artefact. Whilst the knowing cannot in totality be reduced to concepts, or articulated in language, language can help to guide the experience for the audience.
The Evaluation Framework is not everything. The work we do will always exceed it. However, the framework is one thing that serves certain requirements as a result of practicing in the university. The framework speaks to the current moment, it is not the definitive framework but a responsive one: responsive to the body of literature/understandings we have developed so far; the government of the day and their priorities; the particularities of our current working conditions in our institutions. This is the balancing act we are aiming for. One that protects the aspects of the work that are its special power, while at the same time meets certain requirements that are part of the contract that makes a space for us in the university in the first place.
One last thing (for now)… on subtlety
I recently clicked on The Piano, a new ABC reality television show (bear with me) hosted by Amanda Keller (I thought: promising. I’m of the generation that grew up on Beyond 2000). The opening sequence tells you about the set up, which is to pop a piano in various public places around the country and see who sits down to have a play (the piano being one of the most common instruments people learn). I thought: how lovely and simple to just put the piano in people’s way and observe what happens. And then, they introduce the gaming and celebrity aspect: Harry Connick Jnr and concert pianist Andrea Lam lurk at the sidelines and ‘judge’ the most virtuosic player, they make the big ‘reveal’ and invite ‘the best’ players for lessons or the next stage of the competition.
This type of programming is another symptom of our addictions that need to get bigger and louder and more stimulating for us to feel anything. Yet this unchecked impulse is how we got ourselves into the ‘crisis’ point that we are now champing-at-the-bit to solve with more of the same. I suggest we need the quiet, the subtle, the small, the tender and the contemplative. Art knows how to do this, to arrest us with the smallest gestures, to invite us to listen to the nothing-at-all until we hear the ‘unanswerable questions’.
Our Evaluation Framework will recognise the efforts of the delicate, the small, the subtle, and not inadvertently push us all toward the ‘Las Vegas’ of research – which can also have its place! The point is, the dynamic range of what art is and can do is large, we need to be able to make room for all of it and not create hierarchies built on economic models that have a value-system of a single pitch.