The Meeting of Aesthetics and Ethics in the Academy

Challenges for Creative Practice Researchers in Higher Education

Kate MacNeill, Barbara Bolt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429589034
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Meeting of Aesthetics and Ethics in the Academy provides a deep understanding of the nuances of ethics in the creative environment and contributes to the critical exploration of the nature of research ethics in higher education.

Written by world-renown academics with a wealth of experience in this field, this volume explores ethical challenges and responses across a range of creative practices and disciplines including design, documentary film making, journalism, socially engaged arts and the visual arts. It addresses the complex negotiations that creative practice researchers in higher education undertake to ensure that the ethical compliance required does not undermine the research integrity and artistic aspirations. By presenting carefully considered challenges to accepted models of research, this book illustrates critical analysis through a variety of case studies and anecdotal examples that provide an insight into improved ethics practices and policies in higher education.

This book is perfect for academics, ethics administrators, higher degree research candidates and supervisors looking to engage further in creative practice research and wanting to explore and understand its ethical oversight.

Chapter 1

The meeting of aesthetics and ethics in the academy

Barbara Bolt and Kate MacNeill

The meeting of aesthetics and an institutionalised ethics framework in the academy may be likened to the poet Lautréamont’s (1869, 2004) singular phrase, ‘as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table’,¹ a spirit that came to embody the Surrealists’ aesthetic of bringing together incommensurable realities through collage and the creation of surrealist objects in one space and seeing what might happen. In the Surrealists’ quest to take us beyond our everyday habitual ways of seeing the world, the painter Max Ernst described Lautréamont’s provocation as ‘the pairing of two realities, which apparently cannot be paired, upon a plane apparently not suited to them’ (Ernst, 1948: 22).² This ‘image’ of incommensurability desired by the surrealists and described by Ernst encapsulates the incongruity that faces creative practitioners who become engaged in creative-practice research in the academy and find that they are required to negotiate the complex ethics processes and procedures of the university as well as deal with an increasingly risk-averse institutional culture. This surreal and incommensurable ‘reality’ is not one necessarily welcomed by creative practitioners who have often been ‘blooded’ in an artistic milieu where artistic freedom is the highest value and art is seen as a necessary challenge to the status quo, not subject to its rules and regulations. Yet while the ‘plane’ might not suit them in some ways, the reality is that increasingly creative practitioners are entering the academy and finding innovative ways in which to negotiate the processes and protocols of the institution.

This volume examines the question of what happens when creative practice becomes research and is subject to institutional research frameworks and protocols including ethical oversight of creative-practice research projects. Ethics compliance is contextualised within the wider challenges facing the academy in the 21st century, as creative practices have entered the frame of research at the same time as Universities have adopted institutional risk management strategies. The collection explores some of the ethical challenges researchers face and offers responses across a range of creative practices and disciplines including design, documentary filmmaking, journalism, socially engaged arts and the visual arts. As a meeting place of different creative-practice research, this book addresses the dynamic and often complex relationship between the ethical regulation of research in the academy and the aspirations of creative-practice researchers. Through novel and creative approaches, the chapters in the book offer ways in which creative-practice researchers may negotiate their own ethical stance when supervising creative practitioners or undertaking their own research and, as such, offers a generous hand to those who will follow the path that Australian Universities have laid.

The Australian context offers a unique perspective on the relationship of creative practice, creative-practice research and institutional ethics. First, Australia has a single national and unified code of ethics for research involving humans – the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (National Health and Medical Research Council, Australian Research Council and Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee 2007 (Updated 2018) (National Statement)³ – and animals – the Australian Code of Practice for the Care and Use of Animals for Scientific Purposes, (NHMRC, 2004) – and these codes are applicable to all research and all researchers including creative-practice researchers and their research projects.⁴ Second, Australia now has a documented history and archive of creative practitioners negotiating the terrain of institutional ethics dating back to the early 1990s when creative arts education/training first became incorporated into the academy.⁵

The policy changes around education and training in Australia that occurred in the 1990s transformed the professional training of the creative arts, shifting it from the vocational sector, specialist independent art schools, performing arts academies, conservatoires and private education institutions into the academy where the focus was education and research training.⁶ At the undergraduate level, education rather than training became the focus and at the graduate level, creative practice was reframed as creative-practice research. Under this new research regime, creative practice was transformed into creative-practice research and artists, designers and other creatives became creative-practice researchers.⁷ As creative-practice researchers, artists and designers became subject to the university’s research ethics processes and to research protocols that are applicable to all university researchers.

These principles and protocols embedded in the National Statement specify that all research involving humans must be conducted in accord with the following principles: the research must have merit and integrity; be designed and conducted according to the principle of beneficence (that is, maximize benefits and minimize risks to participants); and be in accord with principles of justice and demonstrate respect for human beings (National Health and Medical Research Council, Australian Research Council and Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee, 2007, 2018: 12–13). Research involving human and animal participants is scrutinized by university ethics committees before a researcher is given the authority to proceed with a research project.⁸ With a focus on researcher integrity, justice and beneficence, the role of university ethics committees is to manage risk in a research setting in order to balance the benefits of research against the potential risks. According to the National Statement, the likely benefit of the research must justify any risks of harm or discomfort to participants (National Health and Medical Research Council, Australian Research Council and Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee, 2007, 2018: 13).

While for the broader university research community research ethics is a well-established if often contested part of the research process (Guillemin, Gillam, Rosenthal, and Bolitho, 2008; Wiles, Coffey, Robison, and Prosser, 2010), creative-practice researchers still come to the research table without a strong history or strategies to negotiate the university’s ethics processes, and frequently with a strong antipathy towards it. In the creative disciplines, where many creative practitioners are still coming to terms with their status as researchers, the time consuming and complex processes, procedures and protocols of the university ethics process are alien.⁹ Similarly, ethics administrators and ethics committees are often faced with creative-practice research projects that at first sight appear to be at odds with the requirements of national standards for ethical research. Thus, the ‘challenge’ and role of ethical regulation in creative-practice research raises many questions that remain unexamined and poorly understood amongst creative-practice researchers and also within the broader university research culture.

As the ‘new kid’ on the research block, creative-practice research remains contestable both within the established research traditions and also within its own ranks. Amongst creative practitioners there remains a strong tension between two models: art and art-as-research.¹⁰ Many creative practitioners who are academics hold the conviction that art should maintain a social critical role at the ‘edge’ and continue to test and trouble society’s ethical and moral boundaries, a role that seems to stand in conflict with the fundamental precept of beneficence that underpins the National Statement (Bolt et al., 2010: 1). Herein lies the seemingly incommensurable tension or discomfort embodied in Lautréamont’s (1869, 2004) phrase ‘as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table’.

The relations between art and ethics are never neutral, and even less so, to paraphrase Max Ernst, when the two realities of aesthetics and institutional ethics, which are seemingly irreconcilable in appearance, are coupled upon the institutional plane of the academy, a context that does not appear to suit them. Jacques Rancière (2009, 2010) distinguishes between an aesthetic practice and an ethical practice, arguing that an ethical practice demands that individuals are treated according to the dominant ethos of the community in which they live. This demand for an ethical practice can come into conflict with questions of aesthetic freedom. Despite the fact that Australia has neither a constitutional nor a legislative bill of rights, aesthetic freedom continues to be considered a fundamental principle of a democratic society. Aesthetic freedom has been encapsulated in the notion of the ‘aesthetic alibi’, a principal that provides a defence or legitimation, and justifies art as a privileged zone that allows artists exemption from normal social and legal constraints (Julius, 2002). In Australia, the aesthetic alibi has been used to refer to defences that protect works of artistic merit that would otherwise be deemed illegal (for reasons of obscenity, pornographic content, or racial and religious vilification) and is implicitly invoked when contributors to public debate argue for the sanctity of a work on the basis that it is ‘art’. This claim of artistic freedom has been defined as:

a special case of freedom of speech, which raises it to a more purified level … what would be libelous or offensive in everyday life is granted special dispensation, if it is understood to take place within the protective shield of an aesthetic frame.

(Jay, 1998: 110–111)

Within this protective frame, artistic practices can play the role of provocateur, relatively comfortable in raising ethically sensitive issues and, potentially, assisting in the ongoing process of adjusting our collectively held values.

The aesthetic alibi has been important given that many aesthetic practices, particularly those that draw from the avant-garde tradition, see provocation of the dominant ethos as central to the task of art. Creative bio-researchers Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr (2013) see their role as artists as contesting accepted notions, provoking and questioning what is ethical in order to create uneasiness and discomfort noting that:

As artists, we hope that we have a different ‘contract’ with society – we ought to provoke, question and reveal hypocrisies through different tactics: whether aesthetic, absurd/ironic or subtle confrontation. Making our audience uneasy is an outcome of our own uneasiness, perusing the very things that make us uncomfortable.

(Catts and Zurr, 2013: 75)

The notion that one of art’s key roles is to act as a conscience for society, to provoke, to test boundaries and bring its audience into crisis remains strong in the arts community and also amongst many creative-practice researchers (Bolt and Kett, 2010: 1).

However, the claim that there is something unique about artistic activity that sets it apart from ‘everyday life’ and hence immune from ethical judgement, cannot be taken for granted, particularly amidst relatively recent shifts in legal, cultural and economic frameworks. Many contemporary art practices sit precariously on the boundary of art and life, and it is these areas of artistic practice that are particularly vulnerable to assertions of unethical conduct and to public hostility. Debates about sexism, hate speech, and ‘political correctness’ in Australia and elsewhere have often focused on controversial artistic works (Sparrow, 2002, 2004). Across the history of art and design, there are many significant examples of art practices that have tested those boundaries between art and life, provoking anxiety and generating ethical contemplation. For instance: relational art practices that incorporate the viewer into the work (Marina Abramovic); the use of animals in art (Marco Evaristti, Ondrej Brody and Kristofer Paetau); concerns relating to artworks that utilize surveillance techniques and appear to impinge on personal freedom and/or privacy (Sophie Calle, Willem Popolier); and, instances of self-harm on the part of artists (Mike Parr, Monika Tichacek, Orlan). Design practitioners have a long-related tradition of ethical provocation through highly speculative design projects. In the contemporary sphere, the work of designers Antony Dunne and Fiona Raby and biological artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr through SymbioticA, involves laboratory based and speculative approaches in the academy to question and test the limits of technology and life.¹¹ Dunne and Raby’s methodological approach generates speculative, ethically provocative scenarios with the explicit aim of stimulating debate about the cultural, social and ethical implications of technology and to imagine possible futures (Dunne and Raby, 2013). Their adoption of speculative futures is approached by presenting scenarios in ways that feel as ‘present’ as possible, testing the boundaries between art and life in a particular way. SymbioticA also involves speculative approaches that investigate and stimulate debate about the nature of ‘life’ and the ethics of manipulating living systems for both utilitarian and speculative ends (SymbioticA, 2019).

The notion of artistic freedom is a legacy of avant-gardism that runs through contemporary art and sees art as a necessary challenge to the status quo. As Kieran Cashell notes: ‘Associated with the cultural project of postmodernism, transgressive art … continues to constitute an important aesthetic force in post-twentieth-century vanguard culture’ (Cashell, 2009: 1). A belief in the provocative role of art goes hand-in-hand with the notion of aesthetic freedom and the aesthetic alibi. However, increasingly, and perhaps no more so than in the academy, the spirit of avant-gardism must now be reconciled with the requirement that creative-practice research or artistic research operates within ethical codes of practice. The claim that there is something unique about artistic activity that sets it apart from ‘everyday life’ can no longer be taken for granted and is not a defence when undertaken within the confines of the regulated academy.

The disjuncture between what happens in the academy and what happens in the professional world is a key challenge for creative practitioners once they have graduated and also for the educators who are preparing them for the world of practice. While graduate researchers working in university are required to observe the university’s code of conduct for research and adhere to the guidelines provided by national or university codes of conduct, artists working in the community are not similarly constrained. Once creative-practice researchers graduate and leave the academy, they are no longer subject to institutional ethics processes nor are they required to gain ethics clearance for any projects that they engage in. Further, in contrast to res...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The meeting of aesthetics and ethics in the academy
• 2. Research ethics in the risk managed university
• 3. Ethics and the infrastructure of artistic research: Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument
• 4. Re-imagining conceptions of Indigenous youth: working toward an ethical scholarly engagement with textual and artistic representation
• 5. Stories of freedom: a reflexive account of collaboration and ethics in documentary filmmaking
• 6. Negotiating uncertain agency: the ethics of artistic collaboration and research in the context of lived trauma
• 7. What could possibly go wrong?: the role of supervisors in ethics training for creative practice researchers
• 8. Just tick the box: a Koorie woman’s experience of negotiating the university’s ethics process
• 9. The question(s), the material(s) and the ethics of creative practice research methodologies
• 10. Applying ethical standards when creative practice involves deception
• 11. How ethical is a ball of string?: the embodied ethics of a creative practice bricoleuse
• 12. Beneficence and contemporary art: when aesthetic judgment meets ethical judgment1
• 13. Touch and trace: ethical creative practices for a phenomenology of skin
• 14. Journalism as a research methodology in the academic context: public interest, risk and beneficence
• 15. Six troubling things: cultivating ethical know-how through creative practice research
• Index