Artists with PhDs: On the New Doctoral Degree in Studio Art, opening

This is a chapter from a book that is forthcoming from New Academia Press, www.newacademia.com.

This is the first book on the new PhDs in studio art that is addressed to the North American academic system. It is intended as a comprehensive introduction to the subject, with chapters by a number of people who run such programs in Europe and elsewhere, and excerpts from studio art PhD dissertations. My own contributions are polemic -- not because I want to prevent the spread of such programs, but because I am wary of the administrative and theoretical discourse (really, jargon) that supports and justifies them in the U.K.

This file has the table of contents and preface. Two chapters from the book, and the Conclusion, are also posted on this page.

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[Note to readers: this is a chapter from a book that is forthcoming from New Academia Press, www.newacademia.com. This text is unedited (it is not the final version), and it was originally posted on saic.academia.edu/JElkins. I have also posted the other three chapters that I wrote for the book. If you have comments or suggestions, please send them to me at jameselkins@fastmail.fm. More information is also available on my website, www.jameselkins.com.]
    
    Artists with PhDs: Debates About the New Studio Art Doctoral Degree
    
    Edited by James Elkins
    
    ii
    
    Table of Contents
    
    Introduction....................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................... xii A Glossary of Terms ....................................................................................................... xiv
    
    Part One: Essays 1: Judith Mottram, “Researching Research in Art and Design” ........................................... 2: Timothy Emlyn Jones, “Research Degrees in Art and Design” ....................................... 3: Henk Slager, “Art and Method” ....................................................................................... 4: Mick Wilson, “Four Theses Attempting to Revise the Terms of a Debate” ..................... 5: Victor Burgin, “Thoughts on ‘Research’ Degrees in Visual Arts Departments” .............. 6: Timothy Emlyn Jones, “The Studio Art Doctorate in America” ...................................... 7: George Smith, “The Non-Studio PhD for Visual Artists” ................................................ 8: Hilde Van Gelder and Jan Baetens, “The Future of the Doctorate in the Arts” ................ 9: James Elkins, “On Beyond Research and New Knowledge” ........................................... 10: Charles Harrison, “When Management Speaks…” ........................................................ 11: James Elkins, “The Three Configurations of Studio-Art PhDs” ....................................
    
    Part Two: Examples 12: Jo-Anne Duggan (University of Technology, Sydney; DCA) ........................................ 13: Sue Lovegrove (School of Art, Australian National University, Canberra) ................... 14: Frank Thirion (School of Art, Australian National University, Canberra)...................... 15: Ruth Waller (School of Art, Australian National University, Canberra; MA)................. 16: Christl Berg (School of Art, University of Tasmania, Hobart) ....................................... 17: María Mencía (Chelsea College of Art and Design / University of the Arts, London)..........................................................................................
    
    iii 18: Uriel Orlow (University of the Arts, London) ................................................................ 19: Phoebe von Held (University College London / Slade School of Art) ...........................
    
    Brief Conclusions .................................................................................................................
    
    iv
    
    Introduction
    
    If you’re a young artist, and you are wondering about how to land a secure teaching job, there is an interesting—I should really say frightening—new possibility. It appears that before too long, employers will be looking for artists with PhDs rather than Masters or college degrees. For the best jobs, it will no longer be enough to have an MA or an MFA. The best universities and art schools will increasingly be looking for candidates with one of the new, PhD-level degrees, sometimes called “creative-art doctorates” or “practicebased doctorates.” It may even happen that the PhD degrees become the standard minimum requirement for teaching jobs at the college level. That may seem unlikely, but consider what happened in the United States after the Second World War: returning soldiers signed on for the new Master’s in Fine Arts degrees, and by the 1960s those degrees had become standard across the country. At first the MFA provoked resistance. It was said that it would lead to the academization of fine art, turning artists into scholars, and requiring that they produce impossible amounts of writing. Now, at the start of the twenty-first century, MFAs are ubiquitous and effectively devalued. A recent job search for a plum position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill attracted almost 700 candidates, the vast majority of whom would have had MFAs. The degree, by itself, has come to be little more than a requirement for competition on the job market, somewhat akin to the requirement of a high school or college diploma. To compete, job candidates need to have the MFA and something else, such as an exhibition record or a second field of expertise. If history has a lesson to teach here, and I think it does, then the PhD in studio art will spread the way the MFA did a half-century ago. The resistance to it will subside, and it will become the baseline requirement for a competitive job teaching studio art. The MFA will continue, and will still be sufficient for jobs in secondary schools and smaller
    
    v colleges, but the PhD will increasingly be a necessity for competition at the highest levels. As I write this, in the autumn of 2008, it hardly seems likely that the creative-art PhD will become a standard requirement in the United States and Canada. At the moment there are PhD-granting programs in Maine (the program started by George Smith, represented in this book), Virginia Commonwealth, University of California at San Diego, York University (Toronto), the University of Western Ontario at London, Texas Tech, Ohio University, Concordia, New York University (reviving an older program there), and Montréal; and programs are planned in Carnegie Mellon, CalArts, Ryerson University in Toronto, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Parsons, the University of Rochester, and elsewhere. (That is not counting design PhDs or music PhDs, which have been around for several decades and have different structures.) That may not seem like too many schools, but when I wrote the first draft of this Preface, in 2004, there were only two institutions on the list. At this rate there will be 127 programs by 2012. In fall 2003 there was a conference session in Los Angeles on the subject of PhDs in studio art. I gave a paper there, along with Timothy Emlyn Jones, two of whose essays also appear in this book. The audience, comprised of deans and presidents of North American art schools and art departments, was by turns astonished, unconvinced, dismissive, and paranoid. “How can you expect art students to write 50,000-word dissertations, when my students can barely write a short Master’s thesis?” one asked. “This is a horrible idea,” another person said, “it makes art into a hothouse flower. It makes it into philosophy, or literary criticism.” “Why should artists do research like scientists?” a third wanted to know. “That is simply not how art is made.” Others asked how students would pay for such degrees, and who would be qualified to assess them (surely instructors with MFAs could not supervise PhD theses). The audience in Los Angeles could afford to be skeptical, because the United States has no consistent history of PhDs in studio art. Since the 1970s there have been a
    
    vi handful of universities that offer such degrees, but in my experience they do not command much attention or turn out high on the lists of desirable programs. I have heard it said that they are just extensions of the MFA—two or three more years in the studio, to no clear purpose. (One person in the Los Angeles meeting said she thought the PhD would be a waste of time, a way of “hanging around” in school after the Masters is complete.) But the crowd in that conference in 2003 was unsettled, especially when they heard Tim Jones say that there were currently two thousand students in the UK enrolled in programs that could result in the PhD.1 Another panelist, David Williams, said that within two years, Australia would have ten universities that offer the PhD degree. Since then I have heard that in Malaysia, art teachers at college level are required to have PhDs. Clearly, in the UK and in countries influenced by their university system, the PhD is fast becoming a standard. Since that conference, there have been at least ten other sessions in the US on the subject. (Most are documented in the chapters of this book.2) So far, the PhD in studio art has two bibliographies: a scattered and (I think) mainly unhelpful series of papers published from the 1970s onward, principally aimed at justifying the creation of new programs in the UK; and seven recent books including this one. The seven books are, in order: (1) an Irish publication I edited called Printed Project, from which this book grew (that was the first publication on this subject) (2) Thinking Through Art, another edited volume (it is discussed in Chapter 9) (3) a collection called Artistic Research, edited by Annette Balkema and Henk Slager3 (4) Graeme Sullivan’s Art Practice as Research4 (5) an e-book called Thinking Through Practice: Art as Research in the Academy5 (6) a collection of essays on PhDs in Finland,6 and (7) this book.7
    
    vii So the literature is not difficult to master—a good thing, given the masses of administrative literature that are likely to be produced when this subject is seriously debated in the US. I predict that in twenty years most larger art schools and university art departments in North America will offer such degrees. The question is not whether the new programs are coming, but how rigorously they will be conceptualized. The philosophy of this book is simply that it is best to try to understand something that is coming, rather than inveighing against it.8 The PhD in studio art has many problems, and if the MFA is an indication they won’t all be solved before the programs are in place. (Or, if you’re cynical, the problems will never be solved, and the programs will be put in place anyway.) Students will have to pay more, and they will stay in school longer, and write more. There will be new pressures on the job market. Some kinds of art will probably be influenced by the new degree, and art as a whole may even become more academic and intellectual—more involved with theory, possibly even more alienated from skill and technique. But it is best to consider the new degree as a potential feature on the academic landscape, and try to understand it, rather than writing polemics against it. In this book, I offer several tools to promote discussion of the new degree. Part One sets the stage and gives relevant facts; Part Two, offers excerpts from studio-art PhD dissertations to show the kind of work that has been done. I begin with some homework. Judith Mottram’s essay, Chapter 1, is a mass of quantitative information that will help you see the shape of things in the UK, which is the place the new degrees got started. Mottram’s contribution may seem long and detailed if you are new to the subject, but it is the most accurate history of the degree in the UK: skim it, at least, if you’re coming at this subject for the first time. She meditates on what a PhD means in any field, and shows how certain influential models of the PhD, such as Christopher Frayling’s, began. (A note about Frayling: he wrote an influential paper distinguishing kinds of PhD research; it is alluded to and quoted in several chapters of this book. It is not reprinted here because it is available online, but it is useful background reading. If you are not
    
    viii familiar with it, you might want to download a copy before reading the chapters of this book.9 Alternately, Frayling’s claims are summarized in Chapters 8 and 9.) Chapter 2 is a revision of Jones’s paper from the 2003 conference. In this essay you will be introduced to the literature that has grown up in the UK to justify the new degrees. Again it’s a long essay, with detail that will be unfamiliar to US readers, but his meditation on research remains one of the best, and best-documented, defenses of the concept of research in the arts and advanced degrees “by research.” From there things get more polemical. In the 1990s a literature grew up that reacted against the stultifying terms proposed in the UK. Some of it is informed by poststructural ideas of dialogism that come from sources such as Levinas, Derrida, Deleuze, and Nicolas Bourriaud; and some is associated with subaltern studies and postcolonial theory (for example, essays on the PhD by Sarat Maharaj). In this book, I exemplify this tendency with an essay by Henk Slager, who directs the first PhD-granting institution in the Netherlands (Chapter 3). Slager draws on various poststructural paradigms to argue for a sense of art research that is transdisciplinary, post-humanistic, mobile, and unquantitative. This kind of argument is often made in support of the idea that art research is different in kind from other research, with its own often difficult and ambiguous characteristics. Writing about the studio-art PhD tends to draw on a shallow sense of its own history; it shares that historical amnesia, to some degree, with the sometimes allied field of visual studies. Mick Wilson’s contribution, Chapter 4, is a reminder that some central terms in the subject, such as the idea of research and the idea of the PhD, have deeper histories. Wilson draws on some of the literature of the history of European universities to remind would-be innovators that their apparent innovations spring from unseen roots. Victor Burgin’s essay, Chapter 5, is lucid and succinct on the problems of invoking research to justify the new programs. I wholly agree with the first three-quarters of the essay. His proposals for three kinds of PhD programs are brief but cogent. As he says, the real issue is how to assess the new programs: a problem no one knows how to solve.
    
    ix Tim Jones’s second essay, Chapter 6, gives some hints and instructions to US institutions interested in learning from the UK example. An earlier version of the essay was also published in the Art Journal, one of the CAA’s two official journals, in 2006: an early signal of the emerging interest in the new degree. Chapter 7 was written by George Smith, who started the first PhD program in the United States influenced by international developments.10 Smith has taken an unusual step, which is unique, I think, in the entire world: he has decided not to teach studio art in his program. Instead he wants to provide the theoretical instruction that he finds missing at the MFA level, and in universities. Chapter 8, by two scholars working in Leuven, reports on the collaboration of Belgian universities in practice-based PhDs. The essay is a wide-ranging, theoreticallyand historically informed article, which also includes a review of pertinent senses of research, and a speculative section on the possibility of PhDs for creative writers (which already exist in the United States) and even art critics. I am not a neutral editor here, and I will not hide the fact that I think a great deal of theorizing about research and the production of new knowledge is nonsense. I just don’t think it makes enough sense to say that art research is “mobile,” “dialogic,” “contextual,” “topical,” “unquantitative,” “between zones,” “nomadic,” or “implicated in poststructural paradigms” — to quote a few authors who have written on the subject. This kind of theorizing, I think, either tortures the concepts of research and new knowledge to make them answer to fine art practice, or abandons them for an uncertain celebration of complexity. Dialogic, Deleuzian, postcolonial, and other poststructural approaches could make the kind of sense that would allow the PhD in studio art to be accepted throughout the university, but at the moment they don’t, and I don’t think it helps the visual arts to be packaging their initiative in this way. Nor does it help to continue tweaking the UK ideas of research and new knowledge so they can continue to make sense. Chapter 9 is my contribution to the discussion of the concepts “research” and “new knowledge.” I have collected the principal meanings that have been given to the two concepts, and the major
    
    x attempts that have been made to get away from them. The chapter is polemic, but it is also intended as a reference to the current state of theorizing on the subject. What is needed, I think — and Burgin says as much in Chapter 5, and Jones in Chapter 6 — is a ground-up rethinking of the possible conceptualizations of the PhD in studio art that does not need to rely on notions of research or the production of new knowledge. Chapter 10 is a brief but wonderfully lucid essay on the same issue by Charles Harrison—one of his few forays into this subject. I include it here because its clarity and succinctness makes it especially amenable to discussion. Like Burgin and Wilson, I think one of the most interesting things about the new degree is the opportunity it affords to rethink the supervisor’s role. In a word, no one knows how to supervise these degrees. Chapter 11 is an attempt to consider the new degree as an abstract possibility: I want to know what could be made of it in the best of all possible worlds, aside from all its national historians, its conceptual entanglements, and its half-forgotten histories. This is my own “position paper,” and sets out my own interests in the field. (The two chapters I have contributed to this book take an unusual editorial license: I cite and comment on the other chapters in the book. I hope that will make the book more useful by bringing the contributors into dialogue.) That’s Part One. Then the book changes direction, and in Part Two, I have excerpted some examples of PhD dissertations and PhD-level artwork, to show what can be accomplished. Most of the examples comes from Australia, because the UK examples are more commonly seen and discussed. A great deal of interesting work is being done by students in the new programs in Australia; these are just a sample. The book ends with some brief conclusions and a challenge. Navan, Co Meath, Ireland—Chicago, Illinois—Ithaca, New York April 2004–December 2008
    
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    Acknowledgments
    
    First I owe thanks to Jason Oakley, who invited me, on June 22, 2004, to edit an issue of the publication called Printed Project, the occasional publication of the Sculptors’ Society of Ireland (now the Visual Arts Society of Ireland). Thanks to Jason and to Toby Dennett, then Director of the Sculptors’ Society, for putting in all the work on that publication. (For this book, I have added eight essays in Part One, and rewritten the Introduction and Conclusion, but Part Two remains the same.) Thanks, too, to the many people who advised me along the way: Tim Jones, Dean of the Burren College of Art in Ballyvaughan, Ireland, and my co-conspirator in studioart PhDs when I worked at the University College Cork, Ireland, from 2004 through 2006; Richard Woodfield, who shared many sources with me; Michael Newman in Chicago and Nigel Lendon in ANU Canberra, who recommended interesting recent PhDs for Part Two; and the many authors who participated (some of whom did not, for reasons of space, make the final book), including Michael Biggs, Sarat Maharaj, Anke Bangma, and Graham Eadie. Thanks, too, to Katy Macleod, Lin Holdridge, David Williams, Tony Jones, Christa-Mia Lerm Hayes, and Slavka Sverakova, for various kinds of help and encouragement. And thanks to the unruly crowd at that conference in Los Angeles in 2003: without a show of resistance like that, I might not have concluded this is a subject worth pursuing. A brief note to readers who may know my Why Art Cannot Be Taught (University of Illinois Press, 2001): I still think that art can’t be taught. But on the way to not teaching, a lot of interesting things can happen.
    
    xii
    
    A Glossary of Terms
    
    The UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia, where these degrees are most widespread, use slightly but confusingly different words for many of the concepts under discussion. The expression “PhD in studio art,” which I tend to prefer, is not neutral, and from a UK perspective it implies new possibilities. (Jones notes this in Chapter 6.) The usual expression in the UK is “practice-based doctorate,” and there are a number of variants, including for example the DCA or Doctorate in Creative Arts, the DFA or Doctorate in Fine Art (a more studio-based alternative to the PhD), “creative practice research,” and the “interdisciplinary creative-arts PhD.” For the DCA, see Chapter 6, point number 10. For some authors, those distinctions are at issue, and I have left them intact. In other places, I have substituted US for UK usage. I refer to the written component of the degree using both its US name, “dissertation,” and its UK appellation, “thesis.” A dissertation is assumed to be a “written dissertation,” as it is sometimes called. The artwork itself, together with its accompanying exhibition and statement, is also sometimes called the “thesis”: that is a radical possibility, which I mention in Chapter 11; usually a dissertation is a written text that follows some protocols of scholarly research. In the UK, a “dissertation” is usually a research paper written by an undergraduate, or a paper written on the way to another degree. a “thesis” is what is called a “dissertation” in the US: PhD students write them. One term that has no US synonym is the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), which appears many times in these pages, especially in Chapter 10. Mention it to someone in the UK, and you will probably get a big sigh, and then—if you’re unlucky— an excruciating litany of complaints. The RAE is a hugely time-consuming series of reports that quantify a department’s performance. It leads to meetings upon meetings, and issues in recommendations intended to improve the department, and in the allocation of
    
    xiii funds for such things as new lecturers. In Ireland in 2004, I prepared a 300-page report, followed by a 60-page abbreviation, followed by a 20-page survey about how I found the experience of writing the 60-page abbreviation, followed by two 3-page summaries; that took most of two years and entailed something over 20 meetings—all for a department with only 3.4 full-time faculty in it. The practical results of the report, as far as I can see, will be actually, absolutely zero. The starred recommendation on the final distillation of the Department’s response to the university’s response to the External Committee’s response—that the secretary have her Xerox machine moved to a different room—was not implemented. That’s an extreme instance, but the RAE is the albatross, or the whipping-post, of the UK academic system; its pale, harmless North American equivalent is the periodic departmental review. For the UK authors in this book, the RAE looms large, and shadows every aspect of departmental life, including the language used to justify the new PhD programs. Another such term with no parallel is External Examiner: a scholar signed by by every department in Ireland and the UK, whose job is to vet examination questions before they are printed, and later to visit the department in order to read borderline examination answers and essays, help with the adjustment of students’ grades, and comment on the teaching and organization of the department. No such thing exists, for better or worse, in the US. Some other terms: for “postgraduate student” (the UK usage for students who stay at university after their BA or BS) I use “graduate student”; for “postdoctoral” I use “postgraduate” (i.e., something after the PhD); for “module” I use “class” or “course”; for “course” “major”; for “programme” “program”; for “MPhil” nothing (no such degree exists in the US; it is an “untaught” graduate-level degree, done by tutorials, sometimes leading to the PhD). Such are some of the minor and major confusions of the two systems.
    
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    Notes For exact figures see the section “The Size and Shape of the Research Art Community” in Judith Mottram’s essay, Chapter 1.
    1 2
    
    See the notes in Chapters 1, 2, and 6, and in general, the Journal of Visual Arts Practice; further Thierry de Duve, “When Form Has Become Attitude—and Beyond.” in The Artist and the Academy, Issues in Fine Art Education and the Wider Cultural Context, edited by Nicholas de Ville and Stephen Foster (Southampton: John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton, 1994).
    3
    
    In the series Lier en Bloog [Dutch Society for Aesthetics], vol. 18 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), ISBN 90 420 1097-5.
    4 5
    
    Sullivan, Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts (London: Sage, 2005).
    
    Published online by RMIT University (Melbourne), October 2007, at search.informit.com.au/browsePublication;isbn=9781921166679;res=E-LIBRARY; published in printed form in 2008; ISBN 978-0-9804679-0-1.
    6
    
    The Artist’s Knowledge: Research at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, edited by Jan Kaila (Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, 2006). ISBN 951-53-2879-9. This is not counting Practice-based PhD in the Creative and Performing Arts and Design, edited by Hilde Van Gelder, e-publication (CD ROM), proceedings of an international conference on the subject at STUK, Leuven (10 September 2004); see Van Gelder and Baetens’s chapter in this book.
    7 8
    
    This is the burden of my “Ten Reasons to Mistrust the New PhD in Studio Art,” Art in America (May 2007): 108-9, which summarizes my take on the concerns voiced this book.
    9
    
    Frayling, “Research in Art and Design,” for example at www.constellations.co.nz/ index.php?sec=3&ssec=7&r=687#687, accessed September 2008. The essay is discussed in a wide range of sources, including Victor Margolin, The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 259; Darren Newbury, “Knowledge and Research in Art and Design” (Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, n.d.), online at www.biad.uce.ac.uk/research/rti/rtrc/pdfArchive/ da8.PDF, accessed September 2008; Roy Prentice, “The Place of Practical Knowledge in Art and Design Education,” Teaching in Higher Education 5 no. 4 (2000): 521–34; Nigan Bayazit, “Investigating Design: A Review of Forty Years of Design Research,” DesignIssues 20 no. 1 (2004): 16–29; and many others.
    
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    10
    
    As with all firsts, this one is contentious. It could be added that Virginia Commonwealth’s program, begun the year before, is the first program that was made with awareness of developments in the UK and elsewhere; and it could also be argued that Smith’s program is not a studio-art PhD at all, because it does not involve studio instruction. (More on this below, and in Smith’s chapter.)

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