Over the past two decades, geographers’ attentions to the ‘visual’ arts have broadened considerably. From a tightly focused study of 18th- and 19th-century landscape paintings this engagement now encompasses: a temporal reorientation towards 20th-century art practices; an opening out of concerns beyond the thematic frame of landscape; the embrace of a wider variety of artistic media beyond painting practices; and a shift in modes of engagement that sees geographers taking up a range of creative practices. In this paper I do not want to further expand the field, but rather to draw attention to how and with what effect these engagements have proceeded. Discussion is framed by Rosalind Krauss’ influential exploration of art’s ‘expanded field’, itself an attempt to rethink art as an analytic object in the face of a multiplication of artistic practices, materials, operations and sites. The body of the paper explores three analytics that mark intersections of art’s expanding field of theory and practice, and geography’s own expanding field of operations: these are, artists’ changing orientations towards ‘site’, a phenomenological critique of the ‘body’, and the ‘materialities’ and ‘practices’ of making (keywords that have usually been articulated as intrinsically geographic, and applied to the art world). Synthesizing these perspectives with current geographical engagements with art and broader disciplinary debates is, I suggest, to affirm the place and value of the study and practice of art within key disciplinary concerns.
Creative Geographies, methods of experimental 'art-full' research that have creative practices at their heart, have become increasingly vibrant of late. These research strategies, which see geographers working as and in collaboration with a range of arts practitioners, re-cast geography's interdisciplinary relationship with arts and humanities subjects and practices as well as its own intradisciplinary relations. Amidst the vibrancy of this creative 're-turn', a series of important questions are cohering around how exactly, and for whom, these methods are creative and critical. If the potential of creative methods for both researching and living differently is to be achieved then it is important we spend time reflecting on these and other questions. To begin these reflections this article tells three stories of creative doings that concern knowing, representing and intervening in place. These creative doings came about in the course of ethnographic work with the participatory arts project Caravanserai led by artist Annie Lovejoy, and among other outputs resulted in the collaborative artists' book insites (2010). From a focus on these three sets of creative doings come larger concerns, principally around how the materialities, technologies and aesthetics of different art forms might enable various ways of knowing and conceptual experiments, as well as concerns around skill and expertise. These latter query what it is that geographers do and what it is that visual artists do, seeking to appreciate the expert as well as the amateur and what might be gained through learning to practice -in other words, how our creative methods might not only focus on finished products but also what can be learned in the processes of creative doings. Drawing the article together is a concern to understand better the work creative methods can do in the world in terms of enabling us to research and to live differently.
Geographers have engaged with a huge variety of art practices in the study of a range of different geographical themes. Using a series of examples including painting, mixed-media art and contemporary participatory works this paper explores three of these themes: landscape, critical spatialities and participation. Two different, although often entwined methodological approaches are set out, 'dialogues' whereby geographers interpret and analyse art works, and 'doings' in which geographers become exhibition curators, collaborate with artists and even become creative practitioners in their own right. During its course the paper considers the potential of the geographical study of art works to contribute to contemporary disciplinary debates around embodied experience, practice and more-than-human worlds. The paper also points towards a series of resources to help guide further study.
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