Introduction to Part I

Shaun McNiff
Lesley University

Opportunities and challenges

in art-based research

Abstract keywords
An introduction to Part I which defines art-based research as the use of artistic art-based research
expression by researchers as a primary mode of enquiry, and discusses the need artistic knowing
for applied arts and health disciplines to understand, support and perfect methods applied arts in health
of artistic enquiry, thus applying their unique resources to realizing the opportu- research
nities proffered by the arts as ways of understanding and communicating human arts therapy research
experience. art and science
artistic intelligences

The biggest opportunity and challenge facing art-based research today is

getting the people with the most to gain from the discipline to believe in it,
become involved, perfect the process and realize the advantages it offers. But
even if we are committed to art making as research there are many challenges
and issues encountered in practice.
We use the term art-based research to affirm a community of art and
artists including all of the arts (McNiff 1998). Art-based research in this
respect contains and embraces the related terms of arts-informed research
(Knowles and Cole 2008), arts-based research (Barone and Eisner 2012;
Leavy 2009; Liamputtong and Rumbold 2008; McNiff and Speiser 2004) and
artistic enquiry (McNiff 1999; Wadsworth Hervey 2000).

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 Shaun McNiff

Over the past decade art-based research has generated considerable atten-
tion and many publications, all of which indicate significant progress in rela-
tion to the first of two concerns we raise here. The literature now available
makes the case for how artistic knowing can complement scientific analysis
that may not fit all human situations and especially complex problems. These
publications also offer many examples suggesting future directions. In this
first part of the book, we invited authors who have been part of the formative
phases of art-based research within the arts therapy community to speak to
the unique opportunities and challenges of practice.
As art-based research establishes itself, the use of artistic intelligences by
applied arts professions to solve problems and understand experience makes
complete sense and suggests endless possibilities. However, the excitement
tends to be accompanied by trepidation that researchers face when making
decisions about whether or not they will pursue art-based studies, even within
institutions recognizing their value. Doctoral students and faculty intrigued by
art-based research and wanting to make contributions to existing systems and
be recognized by them, often feel pressure to accommodate to more conven-
tional professional and public standards. In my experience, many, perhaps
even a majority within the applied arts professions, do not yet see the links
between artistic enquiry and formal research. Consequently, challenges are
plentiful and this is reflected in the following articles.

The charge to authors

The defining quality of art-based research, as described in the Call for Papers
for the special issue of the Journal of Applied Arts & Health (3:1) which became
the basis for this book, is the empirical use of artistic experimentation by
the principal researcher/s as a primary mode for both the process of enquiry
and the communication of outcomes. Art-based researchers might comple-
ment this first-hand experimentation with art made by co-researchers and/
or subjects but without the researcher’s direct involvement in art making, the
study of artistic data generated by others is consistent with past practice in
psychology and other disciplines.
Among the challenges presented to authors were:

• How do researchers minimize one-sided self-absorption when personal,

often intimate, art making is a core element of research? Might stand-
ards of usefulness to others assure practical outcomes and complement
the subjective aspects of artistic knowing?
• What areas of research require and do not require media skill? Does virtu-
osity both enhance and limit enquiry? Can unschooled and authentic
artistic expression further invention in certain areas?
• How can structure, planning and the systematic functions of research be
adapted to support the individual, infinitely variable, spontaneous and some-
times even chaotic nature of artistic experimentation where the best outcomes
often ‘happen’ contrary to all preconceptions through a process of emana-
tion and struggle? How might art-based research further focus and guard
against obfuscation without being constrained by standardized and formulaic
research procedures from other disciplines and conceptual frameworks?
• How can the arguable necessity of written academic language, verbal
interpretation and analysis, and discursive/linear thought both advance
and possibly constrain the process of artistic enquiry?

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 Opportunities and challenges in art-based research

• Articulations of art-based epistemology as a basis for practice and partner-

ship with psychology and science are needed. What are the advantages
and disadvantages of art-based research’s relationship with social science
research systems?

These issues and questions were presented to spark the authors’ reflections
on the challenges they face and envision for the future. I would like to reflect
on two of the challenges.

Primary or adjunctive?
Professions involving the arts in therapy, health care and education base their
relevance on expanding the process of knowing, communicating and trans-
forming life situations through artistic expression and understanding but
yet when it comes to the formal process of conducting research to advance
the work, we paradoxically rely on other disciplines. A positive outgrowth
of this tendency has been an exemplary history of interdisciplinary coopera-
tion, particularly with psychology. However, when the arts collaborate with
psychology in health and educational studies they tend to take on a secondary
role of supplying data for studies where the psychological discipline assumes
the lead with little likelihood of shifting roles. Psychology is not at fault. It is
the applied arts fields themselves that reinforce adjunctive status by failing to
perceive and implement their unique ways of knowing and communicating as
primary modes of research.
In the short term there may be advantages to these choices as the work
grows by attaching and explaining itself to the dominant scientific paradigm.
But long-term productivity cannot be furthered by the persistence of an
adjunctive mindset. Ultimately, the tools of exploration and their skilful use
have a reciprocal influence on the questions asked in every field. Since the
instruments of research define the discipline and its capabilities, the poten-
tial of applied arts professions is linked to perfecting their unique methods of
enquiry.
I have urged applied arts professions to adopt an inclusive and
trans-discipline definition of research as a process of systematic enquiry that
includes experimentation and seeking out information with the objective
of answering questions, solving problems and generating new understand-
ing. The particular research design needs to be developed in response to the
nature of the question, not the other way around.
As interdisciplinary fields there are countless situations in which applied
arts professions appropriately use research methods from social science as
the best way of addressing problems and questions where interviews, focus
groups, questionnaires, historical data and observations of human behaviour
are the methods of choice. But when it comes to the issues of artistic practice
that are fundamental to the development of applied arts disciplines, there is a
need for first-hand involvement by the researcher in the material being exam-
ined. Since virtually all of the research within the applied arts today is done
by practitioner-researchers there are again links to social science traditions
involving participant-observers in ethnology and action research as inspired
by Kurt Lewin (1946). Art-based research is closely related and informed
by these practices. But like the chemist in the lab, the art-based researcher
conducts direct experimentation with the materials of expression and imagi-
nation in creative writing, dance, dramatic improvisation, drawing, paintings,

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 Shaun McNiff

performance, playing musical instruments, singing and working with photog-

raphy, video, digital technology and other media. The study of the effects of
these experiences with artistic processes and objects is what distinguishes art-
based research from other traditions.
As a student once said to me, how can I ask someone to do something
that I am not willing to do myself? How can we know something and develop
expertise with it unless we experience it in the most comprehensive way?
And as educators, what is the message that we give to students when our
teaching, supervision and research stays clear of artistic enquiry and when
we communicate exclusively with psychological language and concepts that
exclude what we do?
If we, in the applied arts disciplines, are willing to use research methods
from related fields like psychology when appropriate, why have we been so
reluctant to use our own primary ways of knowing when the enquiry might
call for this? In no way does this suggest that art-based research is appli-
cable to every feature of practice. But it can be asked whether applied arts
researchers adequately represent their fields if they do not understand or are
unwilling to explore particular problems with art’s unique ways of knowing
and communicating.

The role of the personal

Do we dare imagine that artistic enquiry can not only address questions and
methods of practice in the applied arts professions but perhaps help other
disciplines deal with difficult problems in keeping with the transforma-
tive role of the arts through history? Just as mathematics has played a key
role in science and other disciplines while keeping its essential nature, the
same applies to art. What holds us from seeing the obvious contributions that
artistic enquiry can make to human understanding? I think it is tied to our
inability to appreciate how personal enquiry can serve others and transcend
introspection for its own sake.
The research industry in health, education and psychology has been exclu-
sively identified with scientific methods and their quests for impersonal and
objective knowledge. We are easily put on the defensive when confronted
with the personal aspects of art-based enquiry and told: ‘You are just looking
at yourself, talking to yourself, and this is not research’. The suggestion of self-
absorption is so unacceptable to fields that have worked hard for decades to
establish professional status that we tend to overcompensate by shying away
from anything personal, which of course includes our artistic expressions.
When I asked questions about artistic enquiry to Rudolf Arnheim, the
leading authority on the psychology of art, in 1971 when he became a super-
visor and mentor, he said that the decisive factor about the value of research
based in artistic enquiry is whether or not the work is useful to other people.
I call this the standard of usefulness and apply it to everything we do in art-
based research and feel that if the utilitarian aspect takes hold it can result in
ensuing phases of creative contagion and professional change.
Everything about these artistic enquiries is empirical and our attempts to
understand the material and psychological aspects of art experiences involve
researchers in relating to things other than themselves, even when studies
never go beyond individual enquiry. C. G. Jung models this in Liber Novus,
The Red Book (2009) that is perhaps the best, now public, example of art-
based research. It is also the premier illustration of the challenges faced by

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 Opportunities and challenges in art-based research

researchers since Jung never published the work or showed it publicly during
his lifetime for fear that people would see him as mad. His heirs followed suit
and locked it away in a Swiss safe deposit box after his death in 1961.
Within the applied arts profession there has been a similar reluctance to
show personal artistic expressions. When I published Depth Psychology of Art
(1989) and used my own art as the basis for the study it was the first time this
was done in the arts therapy literature. Since the field was historically prone to
identify psychopathology in expressions, not many were willing to submit to
dissection. I was not derided, at least not publicly, and Bruce Moon followed
soon after showing his paintings in Existential Art Therapy (1990) and subse-
quent books. I continued with this art-based research in Art as Medicine (1992)
and Pat Allen followed with Art Is a Way of Knowing (1995). I like to think
of these books encouraging the emancipation of artistic expressions in the
applied arts literature. The only way to move beyond the psycho-diagnostic
analysis of expressions, always characterized by the interpreters’ often florid
projections, was to show our own art and offer more creative and useful ways
of relating to it. I think that we all, including Jung, acted like artists do out of
necessity. There were of course risks but I could no longer continue to use art
made by others to advance my ideas, a practice that not only felt indirect but
increasingly like misappropriation.
In Jung’s lifetime he clearly felt that the time was not right. He strug-
gled as we do today with his reputation as a scientist and thinking-type but
felt he had to move beyond science to engage and understand the depths of
experience and the ‘wealth of the soul’ that presents itself in images (Jung
2009: 232). In terms of personal enquiry being dismissed as self-indulgence,
Jung insists upon the autonomous nature of images and how the personal is
the access to universal phenomena and what he called the objective psyche.
In the arts therapies we have also learned how artistic images are intimately
related to but separate from the people who make them.
Jung would not call his personal expressions art, even though they are strik-
ing drawings, paintings, poetic writing, imaginal dramatizations and dialogues.
No doubt having problems with the idea of art he called it ‘nature’, and this is
yet another illustration of the challenges we face with language, terminology
and translation. We can take heart today in the many challenges Jung faced
in his enquiry. He probably did not call what he did ‘research’ but explicitly
says that it is the basis of everything in his later psychological writings. In this
respect a primary challenge of art-based research is to see, claim and formalize
what we are already doing as Mitchell Kossak suggests in his article.

Like a force of nature

While respecting science and the achievements that account for its primacy, we
can appreciate that art offers different and complementary ways of knowing.
Art shares many qualities with science but where the latter follows repeatable
procedures and laws, the former celebrates an infinite variability of outcomes
even when people use the same materials in the most structured ways. Just as
artfulness permeates scientific invention (Beveridge 1953), art can be pursued
scientifically but it will always assert its unique nature through the spontaneous
emergence of discovery, often contrary to plans and the most carefully developed
strategies. The process can even be chaotic. In this respect the artistic intelligence
cannot be encapsulated within scientific methods and this is the most compel-
ling reason for revisiting its relationship to the process of human understanding.

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 Shaun McNiff

In Part I of this book thought leaders in the arts and therapy field were
invited to reflect on the opportunities and challenges they experience in the
practice of art-based research. I confess to a personal need for this material
since I deal daily with the doubts, questions and hesitations that accompany the
opportunities of art-based research. As much as I am drawn to experimentation
and argument, students need to hear from others, ideally in a tersely organized
presentation of the merits complemented by an honest assessment of difficul-
ties. This critical enquiry will motivate those who seek challenge and innovation
and a better understanding of how the spontaneous processes of artistic discov-
ery can sometimes trump fixed methods of research like a force of nature.

References
Allen, P. (1995), Art Is a Way of Knowing, Boston: Shambhala Publications.
Barone, T. and Eisner, E. (2012), Arts Based Research, Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage Publications.
Beveridge, W. I. B. (1953), The Art of Scientific Investigation, New York:
Vintage.
Jung, C. G. (2009), in S. Shamdasani (ed. and trans.), The Red Book (trans. M.
Kyburz and J. Peck), New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Knowles, J. G. and Cole, A. L. (eds) (2008), Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative
Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples, and Issues, Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage Publications.
Leavy, P. (2009), Method Meets Art, New York: Guilford Press.
Lewin, K. (1946), ‘Action research and minority problems’, Journal of Social
Issues, 2: 4, pp. 34–46.
Liamputtong, P. and Rumbold, J. (eds) (2008), Knowing Differently: Arts-Based
and Collaborative Research Methods, New York: Nova Science Publishers.
McNiff, S. (1989), Depth Psychology of Art, Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas.
—— (1992), Art as Medicine: Creating a Therapy of the Imagination, Boston,
MA: Shambhala Publications.
—— (1998), Art-Based Research, London: Jessica Kingsley.
—— (1999), ‘Artistic inquiry: Research in expressive arts therapy’, in S. Levine
and E. Levine (eds), Foundations of Expressive Arts Therapy: Theoretical and
Clinical Perspectives, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, pp. 67–85.
McNiff, S. and Speiser, P. (eds) (2004), Journal of Pedagogy Pluralism and
Practice, 9, Fall, Special Issue, http://www.lesley.edu/journals/jppp/9/index.
html. Accessed 29 December 2011.
Moon, B. (1990), Existential Art Therapy: The Canvas Mirror, Springfield, IL:
Charles C Thomas.
Wadsworth Hervey, L. (2000), Artistic Inquiry in Dance/Movement Therapy,
Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas.

Contributor details
Shaun McNiff is an internationally recognized authority on the arts and
healing, creativity enhancement, and art-based research that was formu-
lated in his 1998 text on the subject. He is an exhibiting painter and author
of many books that include Art Heals, Trust the Process, Art as Medicine,
Creating with Others, Depth Psychology of Art, The Arts and Psychotherapy and
Integrating the Arts in Therapy. Many of these and other writings have been
translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian,
German and other languages. McNiff has received various honours and

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 Opportunities and challenges in art-based research

awards for his work including the Honorary Life Member Award of the
American Art Therapy Association and in 2002 Lesley appointed him as its
first university professor.
Contact: University Professor, Lesley University, 29 Everett Street,
Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
E-mail: smcniff@lesley.edu

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