Partnerships - Richard Stanford

Before I start, I'd just like to pick up on a point that Sue made. I have just applied for a post doctorate position at ANU through the ARC. It's a really difficult process - a thirty page document. I had to revise my project around the research framework that the ARC works under with about four or five drafts. While I encourage people to start developing ARC projects, we really do need to have some form of centre of excellence for the creative arts that helps applicants get through the ARC application process.

To my paper. The idea of any individual entering a workplace to engage in activities that are deemed 'outside' the established experiences within that workplace often meets with a cautious reception. Cautious, in the sense that the individual initially encounters the relationship as an outsider and seems predisposed to accept a position of stranger or even intruder. Cautious, also, in that the strangers' own experience is fraught with coming to terms with the 'strangeness' of this new environment.

Consider then, the macro dynamic approaches to the relationships of one field attempting to work with another. What happens to the skills, structures, mechanisms and systems of professional practice that separately, each field has so purposefully invested in? What processes are needed to shift the focus of the relationship from notions of unfamiliarity to that of partnership? My presentation considers these questions from the perspective of art residency and art research partnerships with science.

Over the past decade, I have been committed to developing an art residency practice with medical institutions. My research into a visual culture of death in medically based settings has provided me with opportunities to not only access highly restricted environments such as operating theatres, dissecting rooms, laboratories and scientific offices but to also work with people with extraordinary capabilities.

These opportunities have also presented me with so many overwhelming experiences: from observational situations such as witnessing a heart transplant operation or autopsy procedure or specialised laboratory experiment; to participating situations such as being part of the Forensic ID Team in a forensic case with the NSW Police; to technical situations such as working with the Shellshear Museum on a 3D craniofacial research project and giving a paper at an International conference on Forensic Science; to personal situations such as spending time with a family whose daughter was murdered or an organ donor family whose son had been tragically killed in a car accident.

What is so significant about these experiences is that I have been involved because I am an artist ?not a scientist, surgeon or medical staff member. As such, this unique perspective provides an opportunity to conduct original research that can significantly contribute to the fields of the creative arts and visual studies as well as to interdisciplinary practices that cross borders with medicine, anthropology, computing and science.

In principle, residency donates a sense of attachment through the occupation, participation or observation of the external environment in which the artist is placed. The host-guest relationship of residency immediately offers a complex web of inter-subjective forms of communication and chaotic interruptions to consider.

When an artist enters into a residency in a science setting, a number of fundamental changes to their working conditions are likely to take place. First and foremost, residency places the artist within a working relationship directly with a host environment through some form of partnership or connection.

These relationship exchanges within residency are particularly enhanced when members of that environment recognise that there is a stranger in their midst. The complexity of this situation immediately moves artists well beyond the limits of the studio/theory mechanisms the art world currently maintains. How do artists deal with having to work within an environment where they must rely on relationship building in some form or other?

Generally speaking, modernism appears to have promoted a vision of the artist working in isolation ?operating outside the boundaries of society. Working in any form of relationship therefore seems to be at odds with the way in which we generally perceive artists to work. The stereotype of the artist working alone in a garret for example, still remains a very common public perception.

Although art residencies in science settings challenge this type of perception, artists continue to use skills and theories within the creative arts system that rely primarily on methods based on working in isolation. Without any theoretical or conceptual distinctions about the numerous differences of working in a relationship it is likely that their residencies will result in restrictive and ineffective experiences for both artist and scientist alike.

Even though I use the term residency to describe a part of my own creative art practice, the current use of the term evokes considerable misunderstanding and misrepresentation. In the past, my own scope as an artist has been severely restricted by a real lack of any critical understanding about residency practice. The art system I have inherited and utilised to describe my professional practice often works against me in a residency situation.

For example, when the exchange between artist and scientist develops into questions of 'what the artist does', considerable communication problems are likely to occur. Both parties relying on their own individualised ideas of 'what the artist is' are likely to struggle with the exchange of the concept. If any common ground is found, it often has no way of progressing because of the conflicting processes that each party brings to the relationship.

Under these conditions, the potential of the residency period is almost immediately denied its partnership. At worst, this type of conceptual misunderstanding can totally restrict the artist from access to the host's resources or place severe limitations on the use of the artist's own creative processes. For many artists, access to resources, production facilities or technical exchange may be drastically effected by a misconception that the scientist has to have something in common with the artist.

A practical example of this is illustrated in an interview I conducted with a new media artist at the end of a residency developed by the Australia Council with the CSIRO.

"In straight commercial terms I would say that it (technical exchange) was totally ineffective. The only benefit widely acknowledged at the end of the residency by the staff was the fact that it was nice having me around with a different background, different expectations, different work ethic (ie. no regular hours), leading to different conversations in the tea kitchen and at least two people commented on my level of enthusiasm for what I did, which they said, inspired them to push a bit harder on their own projects as well. Most of the staff would spend up to an hour talking to me and looking at pictures, etc. and deciding that there is no meeting point between what they and what I do. The exception was the project leader who understood my interests quite well, and had concrete plans of integrating me in the project. Unfortunately it took much longer for his project to get to the level where I could contribute meaningfully."

Another example is when the role of the artist is undermined or undervalued by a science directive. Without traditions of research back up and 'track records' it may be difficult for artists to clearly articulate and negotiate residency outcomes, often resulting in a host institution reverting to their own administrative forms of implementation or evaluation. In an interview with a new media artist in the middle of a residency developed by the NSW Dept. of Health she stated: "I was rostered to cover reception when the administrator/receptionist went to lunch. I had to account for my hours on a schedule book and file notes on each client I saw. I became a computer support person for computer illiterate staff and was even paged when the photocopier jammed - the whole 'new media' term meant anything that turned on I knew about. By around the middle of the residency I had negotiated for just one day a fortnight to work on my own projects. The condition was that clients be allowed to come and talk with me during this time so they could watch and learn. I believe an artist in residence needs to be supported - especially when the host is not accustomed to arts practice and culture. The artist is at risk of being entrenched in the hosts politics and history, which poses a great risk to the integrity of the residency and it's possible outcomes".

So, in order to make residencies and partnerships more effective, I think artists need to consider new relationship processes that can be utilised specifically for artists when working with scientists.

This does not mean abandoning any of the artist's studio processes, on the contrary, it means using all of them where possible but in conjunction with new methods, processes and skills for working in a relationship.

If artists really want to develop partnerships with science, then I think it fundamentally means expanding the foundations of what constitutes our education and professional practice within the creative arts. In particular, I think it means embracing a research culture for the creative arts that will allow artists to more actively interact with a new community, a vast array of researchers from all sorts of fields.

In this way, a research culture for the creative arts presents all sorts of completely new opportunities to pursue. Research can offer the artist a professional partnership with this community because they use research as a kind of common language, even though each field has its own particular dialect. Personally, I think that the creative arts will be able to offer a vital range of unique and intricate research mechanisms to this community that other research fields such as science would not be able to pursue.

An example of this potential would be if residency practice was utilised as a formal research methodology. Although it could be vaguely aligned with action or participatory research, residency deals with complex relationships that can combine multiple perspective's of observation, witness, participation, collaboration, emotion, communication and representation that a science-based approach such as anthropology could not achieve without going 'native'.

To date, the creative arts has not yet presented to artists the real benefits that research can offer them. Perhaps this is partly because research has long associated with scientific inquiries that are developed through systematic methods and analysis. But it is widely accepted, even in science fields, that research is a highly creative process. For artists too, research has always been something intrinsic to an art practice. It is only when the implications of the 'formal framework' for research by artists are considered that several complications have started to emerge.

In 1998, a Report on Research in the Creative Arts represented a significant step in the debate about research in the arts. However, the discussion is still primarily oriented around benefits for an isolated arts community, rather than a focus of negotiation, inclusion and partnership within a much broader research community. A more positive step was developed in 2001 by formulating a Humanities and Creative Arts section within the Australian Research Council.

It is only been in the past few years that the arts has begun to hold more significance towards the development of a research culture for the arts. Both artists and art institutions are beginning to realise that any kind of partnership with another field requires research because it is a universal academic system that builds on the work of others. Without a research culture the fascinating nature of an artists' research cannot be adequately disclosed or disseminated to our own or our partner communities.

The question of why artists themselves are not more actively articulating research methodologies and citing their own research also needs to be much more clearly understood within the current art system. Without a research culture, artists 'in the field' continue to be placed at a considerable disadvantage of not being able to ground a whole range of political, technical, social and economic values for their practice, nor build on the research of others.

I don't think there is any doubt that the development of partnerships with science are an example of how there is fundamental change beginning to occur within the creative arts. However, we now need our own research culture to provide a new structure to get us there and we might as well question who we are and what we are doing along the way.

Further information and reference images available at www.artresidency.com

© Richard Stanford 2002