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Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts by

Graeme Sullivan

Article  in  Studies in Art Education · January 2006

DOI: 10.2307/25475808

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Charles Garoian
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 Copyright 2006 by the Studies in Art Education
National Art Education Association A Journal of Issues and Research
2006, 4S(1), IOS-112

BOOK REVIEW
Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts
Graeme Sullivan (2005), Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
265 pages. ISBN 1-4129-0536-2

Reviewed by Charles Garoian

The Pennsylvania State University

Correspondence For over four decades, art education scholars have been advocating
concerning this review
for the visual arts within the context of K-12 education by arguing
should be addressed
to the reviewer at their cognitive and affective significance as a discipline-specific area of
crg2@psu.edu inquiry and across school curricula, Beginning with the establishment
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of the professional field of art education in the mid-1960s to the devel-

opment of Discipline-Based Art Education, to Visual Culture studies
in art education, and most recently, the growing literature on Art-Based
Research, the field has reinvented itself in order to clarify its positioning
and to gain agency and credibility within the larger context of educa-
tional research and practice in the U.S. and internationally. Depending
on the political climate surrounding schooling, these efforts at bringing
the visual arts to the center of curricular and pedagogical concerns have,
for the most part, fallen on deaf ears.
While there is little disagreement about the importance of visual arts
education among the populace, when push comes to shove within the
political economy of schooling, art is the first area of content to be
questioned, then reduced, if not eliminated, from the curriculum. As
post-Sputnik education and now No Child Left Behind has shown us,
the visual arts are the first to suffer when politics enters the picture of
what constitutes basic education in the U.S. If the larger role that the
visual arts can play in the education of children is going to be taken
seriously, then it is arguments like those found in Graeme Sullivan's
recent book, Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts (2005),
that can ensure a broader appreciation and understanding of how the
visual arts constitute significant research and contribute in significant
ways to children's creative and intellectual development.
Given its research-on-art-as-research focus, Sullivan's book makes a
significant contribution to the literature in the field of art education.
His arguments place art-based research in the center of educational
practice as they clearly establish the visual arts as a significant form of
creative and intellectual inquiry. While creativity has long been touted
as the major contribution of the visual arts to new knowledge, it has not
been central to a pragmatic understanding of art's intellectual value in
knowledge acquisition, as Sullivan clearly demonstrates.

108 Studies in Art Education

 REVIEW: Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts

While in the past, research methodologies were borrowed from the

hard sciences and social sciences to study and argue for the curricular
and pedagogical relevance of art making in classrooms, Sullivan has
mined existing methodologies and compared them with the ways in
which the visual arts are constitured as research. What is unique about
his approach is that he does not rely solely on external research method-
ologies to validate the importance ofvisual arts practice for creative and
intellectual development.
Instead, he provides an in-depth perspective on the inherent value of
visual arts practice as research and the robust possibilities that it offers
when interconnected with wider research systems and methodologies
that are constituted by the other disciplines.
In Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts, Sullivan begins
with "Part 1: Contexts for Visual Arts Research," in which he estab-
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lishes the conceptual, historical, and educational foundations of visual

arts research, arguing that if it is to have any impact at all, it must
be grounded in visual arts strategies, challenge existing paradigms of
institutionalized knowledge, and adapted to other systems of research,
theory, and practice. In "Part 2: Theorizing Visual Arts Practice," he
develops and establishes the visual knowing of the artist-as-theorist,
and the idea that complex systems of inquiry in art practice are robust
and boundary-breaking in their methodologies, and proposes that their
cognitive and transformative processes enable new insights, criticalities,
and understandings to occur. Finally, in "Part 3: Visual Arts Research
Practices," Sullivan provides strategies for visual arts research that are
useful within cultural, institutional, digital, and informational contexts
without being prescriptive in their methodologies. In doing so, he
provides readers with opportunities to extrapolate from his strategies
and to conceptualize theories and practices that emanate from their
own visual arts research and practices.
Research parallels between the visual arts and the sciences are clearly
evident when we consider that in scientific research the process of
replicating existing phenomena precedes the introduction of a variable
during experimentation. In other words, the development of new
knowledge in the sciences is predicated on repeating and challenging
existing assumptions and paradigms with variables that then enable
critical deconstruction processes to occur, which casts existing knowl-
edge into a state of uncertainty and reconsideration. This process of
experimentation, exploration, discovery, and innovation is evident in
Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) by virtue of
anomalies and crises that throw existing paradigms into conflict.
As Sullivan clearly argues, research in the visual arts is predicated on
a similar process of critical repetition and variation as experimentation
with visual forms enable differences in visualization to occur. Similar

Studies in Art Education 109

 Charles Garoian

to Sullivan's positioning of arts research in a complementary relation-

ship with scientific research, science philosopher Robert Crease (1993)
calls for a theatrical analogy to overcome the "failure of traditional
philosophy of science to break free of habit and adopt a sufficiently
new perspective on its subject matter to reconstruct its own outdated
topology" (p. 13). The very change in topology that Crease is looking
for in philosophy by using a theatrical analogy is what Sullivan offers by
way of art-based research. For Sullivan, however, it is not only philoso-
phy that gains from an arts perspective, but scientific experimentation
and exploration overall. A5 such, he is calling for a change in topology
of research in general to include the arts in a complementary relation-
ship with other forms of research.
"Research," "knowing," and "practice" are the concepts that underlie
Sullivan's three triangulated frameworks and represent the basic premise
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ofhis book. The first, "Framework ofVisual Arts Research," is composed

of three domains, the "interpretivist," "empiricist," and "critical," each
of which are positioned around "art practice," the central domain (p.
95). "Agency" in visual arts research is enabled through the dialectical
and constructivist processes of the interpretivist. For agency to occur,
the researcher is engaged in networking and interdisciplinary dialogue.
For a "structure" to evolve in visual arts research, the exploratory and
reflective processes of the empiricist are necessary. Here, the researcher
delves into the discipline-specific inquiries yet keeps a watchful eye for
emerging visual and conceptual patterns. The "critical," Sullivan's third
domain of visual arts research, takes place through a positioning and
repositioning of images and ideas in contexts other than those that
are familiar in order to challenge existing assumptions and enable new
ideas and images to emerge from the process.
The three domains in Sullivan's second triangulation, "Framework
of Visual Arts Knowing," correspond organically with those in his first
triangulation. They include "thinking in a language," "thinking in a
medium," and "thinking in a context," all of which revolve around
and constitute the transcognitive characteristics of visual arts knowing
(p. 129). "Ideas" are generated through visual arts thinking when the
making of images is understood as a linguistic process. The creation
of visual art "forms" requires domain-specific inquiry for perception,
conception, and the creation of symbolism to occur. And, contextual
thinking exposes and examines "situations," namely how images and
ideas are mediated through their placement and displacement in visual
arts research.
In his third triangulation, "Framework of Visual Arts Practice,"
Sullivan conjoins the two former frameworks through the "making"
processes ofart practice. "Making in communities," "making in systems,"
and "making in cultures," constitute the three domains of this frame-

110 Studies in Art Education

 REVIEW: Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts

work (p. 153). Hence, in this configuration, "making in communities"

through communications, connections, and interpretations enables
"ideas and agency," which are Sullivan's foci of the interpretivist
thinking in a language in the two former frameworks. Similarly, the
conjoining of "forms and structure," which are the desired outcomes
of the empiricist's thinking in a medium are made possible through the
interactions and intersections of "making in systems." Finally, the situa-
tions and actions, which are the foci of critical thinking in a context,
are made possible through dissonance and collaboration of "making in
cultures."
Each of these three frameworks, which are effectively illustrated in
the book, represents for Sullivan strands of inquiry that when flexibly
folded upon, around, and under one another origami-like, create
complex yet complementary "dimensions of theory" and "domains of
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inquiry" (pp. 98-99). He argues, cc ••• although [the] conceptual barriers

[of these strands] help to define areas of interest, they are permeable
barriers that allow ideas to flow back and forth" (p. 94). For Sullivan,
this flexible folding constitutes a "braiding" (p. 105) process in which
the differentiated strands of art-based research function as separate and
distinct lines of inquiry, yet are intertwined, thus enabling a network of
perspectives and understandings to occur.
Furthermore, Sullivan uses his "braided metaphor" to describe the
interconnected and interactive characteristics of visual arts practice
as "complex and dynamic systems, self-similar structures, scale-free
networks, and perspectivalism" (p. 104). The complexity and dynamic
of visual arts research yields creative outcomes and new understand-
ings. The self-similarity of visual arts research reveals relationships and
patterns among and within ideas and images. Uninhibited by existing
structures of knowledge, visual arts researchers seek scale-free networks
to re-position themselves to see, discover, and understand "both unique
and universal characteristics" in the other (pp. 104-109).
Sullivan's writing is cogent and accessible, and his arguments about
the relevance of art-based research compelling. In particular, he concep-
tualizes the multifarious intersections and interconnections of visual
arts research for the field of art education and in general, he argues its
contribution to the larger context of social and scientific research. The
complexities and contradictions of his arguments and series of concep-
tual frameworks for art-based research should not be taken lightly. They
require delving into on the part of readers to better understand and to
relate to their own artmaking and teaching practices.
Hence, Sullivan's book is important on many levels. As assigned
reading, it provides art education graduate students with historical and
contemporary perspectives on visual arts research. It provides them with
an understanding about the value of visual arts education within K-12

Studies in Art Education III

 Charles Garoian

education and pre-service art education. Similarly, it provides college

and university professors and administrators with ways of arguing,
positioning and advocating for the visual arts within the larger context
of research and scholarship in higher education. In doing so, it moves
visual arts research from the margins of scholarship that it currently
occupies into a network that interconnects its unique research capabili-
ties with wider systems of research, theory, and practice.

References
Crease, R. P. (1993). The play ofnature: Experimentationasperformance. Bloomington: University
of Indiana.
Kuhn, T. S. (1962). Structure ofscientificrevolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago.
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112 Studies in Art Education

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