The question i’m searching for relates to that which is similar in art and science. What are artists and scientists doing, how are they the same, or different. Perhaps this relates to research, the definition of research.
Fraying (1993) investigates just this and begins with a definition of research. ‘the act of searching, closely or carefully. for or after a specified thing or person’ - used of royal genealogy in 1577. It has been used with a little r for hundreds of years to describe art practice in therms of searching, personal quests, clues and decoding.
Research with a big R is often used with ‘development’, according to the OED, ‘work directed towards the innovation, introduction, and improvement of product and processes’. Its usage is linked with professionalism and professions. its linkage with the humanities in terms of discovering new perspectives, or new information, is actually a very recent formulation. (Frayling, 1993)
'In Alice Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty has strong views about how words come to mean what they do.
"There’s glory for you", said Humpty Dumpty.
"I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory’” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don’t - till I tell you. I mean ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument” Alice objected.
“When I use a word” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less”
“The question is” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things”
“The question is” said Humpty Dumpty, “Which is to be master - that's all”'.
‘"In my opinion" said Picasso, "to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing. Nobody is interested in following a man who, with his eyes fixed on the ground, spends his life looking for the pocket-book the fortune should put in his path...
Among the several sins that I have been accused of committing, none is more false than the one that I have, as the principal objective in my work, the spirit of research. When I paint, my object is to show what i have found and not what I am looking for. In art intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish, love must be proved by facts and not by reasons…
The idea of research has often made painting go astray, and made the artist lose himself in mental lucubrations. Perhaps this has been the principal fault of modern art. The spirit of research has poisoned those who have not fully understood all the positive and conclusive elements in modern art and has made them attempt to paint the invisible and, therefore, the unpaintable.”'
Stereotypes have largely dictated the public perception of artists and scientists. On the filmic idea of the irrational, expressive, temperamental artist John A. Walker has written:
“the idea that art might be a construction… rather than an expression, or that it might be the consequence of a host of social factors, is alien to the ethos of Hollywood."
The pop depiction of a scientist by Georges Mélies in The Institute of Incoherent Geography is quite close to the contemporary expectation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS5ULeg2Ws0
“Where the artist has difficulty persuading people of the connection of art with research, the scientist (whose research expertise has until recently been taken for granted) has exactly the same problem with creativity - which is generally seen as the prerogative of the artist rather than the scientist. The is partly why the process of discovering has been virtually ignore until recently.”
There is readjustment needed in both directions, scientists must be creative, however looking at the work of artists and the research necessary for their work its evident that artists are cognitive as much as they’re expressive. Some art counts as research, some doesn’t.
John Constable from a lecture to the Royal Institution in May 1936:
“I hope to show that ours is a regularly taught profession; that it is scientific as well as poetic, … and to show by tracing the connecting links in the history of landscape painting that no great painter was ever self-taught… Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments.”
The popular image of artists as expressive lunatics, designers as style warriors and scientists as critical rationalists are equally wide of the mark. This doesn’t allow for art as a cognitive activity, designers working as tacit researchers. “if recent researches into he philosophy and sociology of science are any guide. Doing science is much more like doing design.”
Frayling criticises the stereotype of 'the practitioner’. “As if action which follows reflection, or reflection which follows action, can be put in a box exclusively marked ‘practice’. Research is a practice, writing is a practice, doing science is a practice, doing design is a practice, making art is a practice. The brain controls the hand which informs the brain. To separate art and design from all other practices, and to argue that they alone are in a different world, is not only conceptually strange, it may well be artecidal (to use Stuart Macdonald’s word).. Yes, art and design have been taught separately from the mainstream, ever since 1837. But that is an institutional accident, not a conceptual statement.”
Frayling details three suggestions of what types of research artists and designer do:
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Research into art and design
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Research through art and design
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Research for art and design
I primarily have always aimed at the last of these, what Frayling calls research for art and design, where the thinking is “embodied in the artefact, where the goal is not primarily communicable knowledge in the sense of verbal communication, but in the sense of visual or iconic or imagistic communication."
Material research, development work and action research have become core parts of my work. As a sculptor at heart that final object is key, but i’m also seeing that the journey, process and the artefacts created along the way as something core to the experience too.
“How can I tell that I think till I see what I say?”
“How can I tell what I think till I see what I make and do?"
“How can I tell what I am till I see what I make and do?”
Quoted, then modified by Frayling from E.M. Forster’s aunt.