five - How does arts practice inform a community development approach to the co-production of research?

Summary

Introduction

Kate Pahl

At the heart of this chapter is a recorded conversation between four people working at the interface between art and research. This Introduction, along with the Conclusion, is designed to situate the conversation within the wider context of arts practice and co-produced research.

Contemporary art practice has experienced a paradigm shift from the idea of art as sitting within the gallery to a more diffuse concept of art as collaborative and participatory (Bishop, 2012). These approaches involve people building knowledge together, and rely on a de-centring or de-materialising of the art object to suggest something new. This chapter sits within a tradition of dialogical approaches to knowledge production and draws on the tradition within contemporary art practice of the conversation as a form of engagement (Kester, 2004, 2011). Kester (2011, p 67) writes about such art projects:

What is at stake in these projects is not dialogue per se but the extent to which the artist is able to catalyze emancipatory insights through dialogue. This requires an acute understanding of the many ways in which these insights can be constrained and compromised.

The conversation that follows is between an artist (Steve Pool), a chief executive of a museum service (Kim Streets), an arts educator (Natalie Walton) and a researcher (David Bell). All worked on the ‘cultural’ part of the Imagine project. This dialogue reflects their concerns about how they respond as individuals to a co-produced project, Imagine, with its focus on imagining better futures.

As a conversation, it explores the dialogic form (Banks and Armstrong et al, 2014). This enables the authorship to sit with more than one person, and be composed of multiple viewpoints. This situates a community development approach to the co-production of research within a conversation that lets in multiple viewpoints and points of difference (Mouffe, 2007). The discussion is personal but also political. Reading it provides a different kind of lens. The conversation reflects the lived reality of the project, the aspirations and pragmatic decisions, and it makes visible the problems and opportunities of bringing people together from different backgrounds, histories and expectations to try and build something together.