In this paper we position improvisation as a way of knowing that is experiential, pivotal to the body's movement and growth in the world. Improvisation allows us to manage the constraints and freedoms of a world rich in possibilities, associations, and combinations. Improvisation, we argue, works across intuitive perception and intellectual analysis. We act and feel our way with whatever is to hand. The impetus is an urge to move from a point of stasis, to catalyse relationship: as we grasp the world, the world grasps us. Improvisation is a means of 'keeping going'. Where in life it may be unselfconscious, in art it leaves a trace, the means to repeat the process but not replicate its experience. Improvisation provides us with a means to create new experience and new knowledge. We draw on selected artists including the Harrisons, Klee, Kaprow, Kurtag, Cage. As authors we take their work into our creative experience of musical performance and the visual arts. This is a research method that is experiential and generative in nature, articulating knowledge from the perspective of the maker/performer rather than that of the spectator. The research approach itself is therefore improvisational in nature. We draw on perceptions of improvisation in other fields including anthropology and psychology examining how far these inform artistic experience and test its assumptions. The question remains: Is improvisation a quality of all art? Can we speak in a precise way of forms of art (therefore approaches to life) that are improvisational and others that are not? What are the implications of this question for our understanding of knowledge more broadly? (265 words
This article takes the question 'why drawing, now?' as a speculative way to enter the debate on the relationship of art to different understandings of community. Drawing offers a paradox around the place of art in society. Drawing can be thought about as a traditional medium that yields an individually focused interior exploration. It has also performed a social or ritual role historically, in different times and places. Imagine a think that it is individuals -singular units -that make up society. The second, however, suggests that community as already present can be made visible through the drawing activity. Our exploration draws on a period of a collaborative practice-led experimentation, in particular a three-day research workshop involving drawing and writing. The aim was not to focus on what the results 'looked like' as art products, an approach that arguably fails to reveal the knowledge underpinning art's appearances.Instead we set out to create the conditions for experiencing community through drawing. We found that drawing, in its most intimate relationship between maker/viewer, surface and mark, evokes a world to come, a world in formation rather than pre-formed. This revealed the need for careful scrutiny of the ways in which community itself is imagined. Our offer to the practice of participatory arts is to question deeply held assumptions about what community is rather than to propose new forms of access or techniques that can be transferred from one situation to another. Keywordsdrawing collaboration community experimental research participatory arts artistic knowledge
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address the following questions: in what sense does experimentation as improvisation lead to methodological innovation? What are the implications of artistic experimentation as improvisation for education and learning? Design/methodology/approach – The paper tracks the known concept within research of “experimentation” with a view to revealing how practice-led research in art works distinctively with experimentation. It proposes experimentation as improvisation drawing on a research project Sounding Drawing 2012 as an example. The paper situates art experimentation as improvisation in art (Cage, 1995) anthropology (Hallam and Ingold, 2007; Bateson, 1989) and the theoretical work of Arnheim (1986) on forms of cognition. Findings – Arts research as improvisation is participatory, relational and performative retaining the research subject in its life context. The artist as researcher starts with open-ended critical questions for which there are no known methods or immediate answer. By setting up boundary conditions from the outset and understanding the situatedness and contingencies of those conditions, the artist as improviser seeks ways of not only avoiding chaos and the arbitrary but also being trapped by what is already known. Originality/value – This approach is important within and beyond the arts because it consciously draws together different forms of cognition – intuition and relational knowledge and also sequential knowledge. It is also significant because it offers a different epistemology in which new knowledge emerges in the relationship between participants in the research taking form in co-creation. These qualities all position improvisation as a research paradigm and a counterpoint to positivism.
"Replacing artist with player as if adopting an alias is a way of altering a fixed identity. And a changed identity is a principle of mobility, of going from one place to another…" (Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life 125-6) This paper explores an experiment in improvisation in which the practices of music, the visual arts, philosophy, and anthropology come together. Calendar Variations (2010-11) draws different kinds of artists into creative experiences through the use of verbal scores. The score invites participation in a process in which the outcome is indeterminate. The experiment raises a question within the group of artists and participants about the nature of artistic practice itself and whether any single aesthetic approach is more appropriate than another. The experiment frames the following questions: Why do we have/institute improvisation in life? Can art particularly inform those situations in life in which the unscripted and contingent challenge us to rethink in situations in which we may be encountering failure either in what is around us or failure in ourselves to cope? Drawing in particular on Allan Kaprow’s articulation of Experimental Art (Essays), informed by Ingold and Hallam’s construct of improvisation as a metaphor for existence (Creativity and Cultural Improvisation), I propose that the radical questioning of certainty in experimental art practices offers a different insight into improvisation, one that deals with experiences of failure. The paper concludes that sustaining uncertainty about what the arts might be has given rise to two possible understandings of visual art, one based on contemplation, and the other on time and duration. Our creative imagination is challenged by the collisions and complementarities of these different understandings to sustain a perpetually mobile state of creativity, akin to "adopting an alias as a way of altering a fixed identity" (Kaprow, Essays).
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