Artistic Inquiry

The main theoretical-methodological construct with which I intend to engage during my PhD project is Robin Nelson’s “multi-mode epistemological model” (see Practice as Research in the Arts, p. 37) which expands Polanyi's and Ryle’s perspective on "knowing-that" and "knowing how" by adding “knowing-what” as the third main mode of knowing involved in artistic research. I will try to demonstrate that it would be beneficial for the advancement of Practice as Research (PaR) to shift more decisively the focus from the pluralization of epistemological frameworks (knowing-that, knowing-what, knowing-how) to the pluralization of modes of inquiry (standing back, getting close, taking part) across the macro activities of practice-based research (performance, documentation, exposition). I believe that a valuable contribution to PaR could come from trying to creatively express the tacit-embodied threads (what Nelson calls “clews”) across these three macro-activities and the different modes of knowing and inquiring involved. This requires also building bridges across the various ways of being a practitioner-researcher (participant, participant observer, observer participant, and observer) and the different sociocultural contexts in which certain modes of knowing and inquiring are more legitimately enacted than others (art-world, academic- world, personal-world and community-world).