A&HHE Special Issue December 2016AHHELogo-e1420559902593

Editorial

Julian Meyrick

Flinders University

At the edge of the Great Australian Bight, before the southern seaboard gives way to the endless scrub of the Nullarbor Plain, sits the city of Adelaide. Colonised by white settlers in 1836, with a State Library surreally formed two years beforehand, Adelaide’s wide boulevards and sandstone buildings reflect the settled calm of once-considerable rural wealth, and an un-Australian ease with culture. As South Australia slips down an economic gear or two, and the city loses ground to brash capitols like Sydney and Brisbane, and respectable ones like Melbourne and Perth, its relationship with culture comes to increasingly define it. The Adelaide Festival, begun in 1960 and held annually, is the oldest performing arts festival in the country. It is but one cog in a State-wide machinery of cultural presentation that makes Adelaide, like Edinburgh or Bayreuth, very much a festival town. Adelaide’s history is defined by vivid polarities, a lurching from prosperity to penury, radicalism to conservatism, the place to be to the place to get away from. Politically weakened but culturally still influential.

            Flinders University, fifty years old in 2016, has always represented the progressive edge of South Australian consciousness, a dissident function the wall-to-wall corporatization of the higher education system has not entirely traduced. As Adelaide sits on the bottom of Australia, so Flinders sits on the bottom of Adelaide. The Drama Department was inaugurated under Wal Cherry, one of Australia’s most influential post-War theatre directors. Over the years, the surrounding departments have acquired a loose collective identity that is more than a disciplinary cluster, but less than a school or faculty. The Flinders creative arts ‘area’ (for want of a better term) is both unique and representative. It is unique because it avoided the modish restructures of the 1990s and 2000s to arrive in the second decade of the new millennium with an art form focus old enough to be new again. It is representative because the art forms are well established as professions in the field, and Flinders sees itself as providing ‘industry ready graduates’ while also equipping them with the analytical tools and resources of a wider humanities education. Such a juggle can be seen in creative arts departments across Australian universities (a brief survey of these is given in the Afterword). But Flinders’ continuity of operation and institutional memory, old by national standards, means the tension is framed in a quizzical rather than polemical light. There are no easy answers at Flinders to absorbing unconventional artistic disciplines into conventional university systems and curricula. But the questions have been kicking around for a bit longer than elsewhere.

            The essays in this special issue were originally delivered at a Symposium in 2015 designed to voice the Flinders creative arts area, its range of forces and resources. This made a change from international and interstate experts winging in to instruct the locals on the latest trends and theories. What stood revealed was a consistency of concern underlying a diversity of artistic and research practices. This consistency is worth commenting on since it marks what the sociologist Howard Becker calls ‘a school of activity’ as distinguished from a ‘school of thought’ (1999: 3-12). At Flinders, there is no central philosophy or paradigm demanding uniform intellectual allegiance. But there is a set of problems – ‘dilemmas’ is possibly a better word – which attract repeat attention. These may be summarized as follows: the problem of subject knowledge; the problem of vulnerability; the problem of invisible discourses; and an unresolved and perhaps unresolvable tension between creative art goals and processes on the one hand, and research modes and procedures on the other. The fourth issue over-determines the other three, and the core of it is laid out in Tiffany Knight’s essay where she quotes Dorothy Smith as saying,

[academics] have learned to set aside as irrelevant, to deny, or to obliterate our own subjectivity and experience. We have learned to live inside a discourse that is not ours and that expresses and describes a landscape in which we are alienated and preserves that alienation as integral to its practice.

Art particularizes, research generalizes. This is a quick way of encapsulating the difference between two deployments of human intelligence, as well as two different institutional mobilisations. Current assumptions are that the creative arts either fit conventional university curricula or should fit them. If they do not, this shows the need for new pedagogical arrangements and research paradigms. The idea that they do not and should not fit them is unwelcome, a disloyal thought at a time when gaining acceptance as ‘proper’ university disciplines is the aim of many academics working in the area. Yet these essays suggest this will not be an easy ambition to achieve. The problem is not truculence but inscrutability. The undecidability of what creativity is, the difficulty of teaching a discrete set of skills in relation to it, and the impossibility of capturing results with standardized indices, leave a weeping scholarly wound that is never salved, however erudite the surrounding critical commentary or theory. In the words of the filmmaker Alain Renais, art is stubbornly ‘there and something’ as opposed to ‘just there’ (1968: 2).

The problem of subject knowledge. All of these essays use the personal pronoun at some point. Some, such as Jeri Kroll’s on reverse adaptation, Carter, Hawkins and Young’s on film development, and my own and Katie Cavanagh’s on dramaturgy and mental time travel, are conceptually based, using adaptation theory or cognitive psychology to inform their positions and arguments. Yet even in these cases, our creative referents come from our own arts practices, and the perspective taken is one of direct experience mixed in with removed analysis. Actually, all of the essays have a bit of their creative referents in them, a splinter of art, as a matter of both author preference and editorial choice. It is easier this way to show how epistemological questions – what we can say about art – rub against ontological ones – what art is in the first place. When Amy Matthews constructs a letter between two imaginary lovers, in a way that is contemporary in syntax but period in tone, and assigns it to a genre regarded as the boondocks even by popular literature studies, and then writes about it in her research, what is the result exactly? More, certainly, than a series of ironic, intellectual pirouettes. She comments, ‘writing in multiple modes doesn’t feel like wearing multiple hats, so much as having many heads, like a Hydra’. The issue is how we know what we know, not just what we know. The creative arts provide not another research ‘method’, but a fugue realm of understanding. If this realm were entirely distinct from analytical research or entirely coterminous with it, the job of incorporating it into universities would be more straightforward. As it is, the overlap feels chronically disjunctive, a clown with one trouser on who can’t get the other leg in, hopping around trying to stay upright.

            The problem of vulnerability is raised in a number of essays: Sonja Vivienne’s on digital self-representation (‘I regard vulnerability as an overwhelming state of trepidation that is unexpected, unavoidable and temporary’); Tiffany Knight’s on actor training (‘their ability to connect, to be vulnerable and empathetic, to be human, can be the foundation for the lives [actors] lead and the biographies they forge’); and Patrick Allington’s on giving feedback to creative writers (‘when writers place words of fiction on the page or on the computer screen, they expose their inner worlds to scrutiny and possible ridicule: to write fiction… is a genuinely exposing act’). In these essays, vulnerability is explored in a pedagogical context, but the experience the authors draw on comes from the broader creative field. That is, Vivienne, Knight and Allington work as curator, actor, and editor respectively in a professional capacity. When they scrutinize their activities academically they highlight an affective register of understanding that is often regarded as embarrassing or beside the point by traditional research. This is especially true of acknowledgements of uncertainty or ignorance, which for those in the business of knowledge, like university scholars, is an un-saleable commodity.  Yet here such admissions crop up as research’s shadow, inseparable from its positive form, with a role to play in creative art processes, where what is known ahead of time is both limited and of limited value. Vulnerability has to be managed as an expression of epistemic tolerance, a hole in knowledge, potentially affronting for those who think of education as a once-and-for-all acquisition. By contrast, artistic creativity regularly sinks back into the primal murk, never knowable for that long, the anxiety surrounding its appearance an integral part of its being.

            The problem of invisible discourses. A number of essays deal with what many might perceive as ‘secondary’ creative practices – film producing, editing, dramaturgy, digital curation, mentoring. It is striking how present these are at Flinders, and how they demand more attention now that there is so much art in the world. They are practices that are simultaneously indiscernible and all-powerful. When we read a book, see a firm or play, or page-hit a youtube video clip, we do not care about the cooperative relationships that have gone into creating them. Our attention is exclusively on the art in front of us. Yet producers, editors, dramaturges, curators, and mentors are creative facilitators in a world where the facilitative function is increasingly pivotal to culture’s flow and impact. How to judge these discourses? How to even see them given that their outcomes disappear into other outcomes, leaving nothing to be patented, footnoted, cited, or valorized? As Ann Thompson observes of one of her mentoring experiences:

After two years and five creative developments I questioned my involvement in a process with no theatrical outcome… I could have pushed the project towards [one] many times but always chose to back Shelly’s thinking, desire for creative control and trajectory as an artist… I eventually realised that the outcome of the project was the collaboration, our relationship, and Shelly being able to see herself as a maker and choosing her art form… sometimes creating something new is as much about saying ‘no’ as it is about saying ‘yes’. It is not always about steering something towards a known goal. This is a challenge that only gets bigger once you have established yourself in the industry and when you are an academic.

These negative discourses of possibility are the ultimate example of the problem of incorporating the creative arts into university systems and curricula. They are impossible to count in research indices and hard to pin down by way of concrete outcomes. They exist largely as a series of creative effects. Yet the vocabularies and categories of thought with which they are equipped are analytically sophisticated. Thus an irony: the discourses most able to converse in conventional research terms are the ones least visible to conventional research institutions.

Beyond Adelaide’s arable hinterland lies the Flinders mountain range, and beyond that lies the outback in all its immense emptiness and beauty. The Australian landscape is a permanent reminder that whatever forces govern the Australian imagination they are conditioned by geographical factors unlike any others in the world. Small, is how going to Country can make you feel, its epic scale and dream-like colours overwhelming. Understanding the landscape is as much a cultural task as a scientific one, and Vicki Reynolds’ essay on the Mallee is an example of how this can be actioned. Key to the practice of ‘land agency’, as it is key to every creative arts practice, is repetition:

My intention was to learn the Mallee landscape to a depth that is greater than I could learn through one journey. A number of the journeys I made were recurring, performed over the same ground many times. These recurrences provided more time to learn the country in greater depth, through different seasons, weather, light, and times of day and night, as well as allowing me to observe other changes such as growth and death in the natural habitat. It also gave me time to see and know those changes brought by human construction and destruction in the landscape, such as road making, property delineation and fencing, and the cycles of agriculture and changes in crop plantings.

Reynolds’s suggestion that ‘The journey is the practice’ is an echo of Ann Thompson’s ‘the outcome…[is] the relationship’, which is an echo of Jeri Kroll’s ‘variation and repetition [are]… integral to vibrant artistic practice’. Knowledge in the creative arts is a layered mastery built up in mind and body over time that finds climactic expression and/or evaporates. Then the creative artist must start again. Unlike the bench chemist or legal theorist, there is no ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ to gain a better view. The cultural realm, like the Australian landscape is too vast, and often it is night. What is already known is of minimal utility for what has to be known next.

As a final point, it is worth observing that it is for these reasons – chronic epistemological instability, profound ontological opacity, the euphoria and panic that surrounds creative projects – that failure looks different in the creative arts area than anywhere else. It is both more distressing and more inevitable. Failure, the fact of it, the fear of it, seeps through these essays like a blood stain. Failure is the outcome for many creative arts projects, and while it is frightening, it is also liberating, a ‘Wrong Way Go Back’ sign that tells artists to move on to something new. It might also be a check on the chronic over-claiming that has descended on traditional research and become a serious problem in both scientific and social scientific domains. Exaggerated findings, non-replicable results, and a reluctance to publish null experiments, today seriously distort the social fund of knowledge, our promotion of a winners’ mentality at odd with the values of lasting scholarship (Ioannidis, 2005).

It is here, perhaps, that the creative arts have something to offer traditional researchers. In the messiness of our approaches, our unwillingness to distinguish process from outcome, our inability to subtract subjective response from objective inquiry, we are doomed to live in the realm of the un-generalizable. But we get on with it rather than disappearing down a rabbit hole of endless methodological self-reflection, and this is revealed in the essays too. Each attacks their chosen problem with a mix of creative arts and research skills, and heads towards a better balance between the two the only way possible: by actively looking for it.

References

Armes R (1968) The cinema of Alain Resnais. London, New York: Zwemmer; Barnes.

Becker HS (1999) The Chicago School, So-Called. Qualitative Sociology 22(1): 3-12.

Ioannidis JPA (2005) Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Medicine 2(8): e124. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124.