YR 1 Proseminar: Research Practices 2019-20

Proseminar: Research Practices

Y1 seminar led by Liesbeth Bik, Kate Briggs, Jan Verwoert and Katerina Zdjela

4 credits: 8 sessions throughout the year.

Research Practices is a provision for first year Master Fine Art students. It is an invitation to share and discuss, to speculate on and try out (and possibly also to discard) various understandings of and relationships to the activities of “research”. What is research for an artist? What counts as research? What forms or actions does research consist in? When and how is research productive for an artist – and what exactly can it be productive of? When and how do practices of research get described, shared and made visible, in artworks, for example? And when and how are they hidden and obscured? This monthly seminar is a space to think these questions through together by means of discussion, observation, listening as well as directed activities and exercises. Part of our project will be to explore a new vocabulary for talking about what is commonly called “research”: perhaps “research” is the wrong term for some of us or all of us? Perhaps the term “references”, likewise, could be replaced with something else? The primary aims of this seminar are to enable students to identify, articulate and affirm in their own terms the value of their existing approaches to research, as well as to actively explore the affordances of new ones. Each session will be led by a different practitioner (artist, writer, critic, curator) who will open out these questions in relation to their own practice. The practitioners will assign the students a task per session – an action, style or approach to research to be activated in their own time. The seminar will culminate in a public presentation in the summer (the form of which is to be decided) and the submission of an essay on research and practice in the spring. In this way, Proseminar: Research Practices facilitates the Graduate Research Project and Thesis in the second year of study.