A/r/tographic Making as a Radical Philosophy While Walking the Southwestern United States

• In Event: 63.054 - Mapping A/r/tography: Walking for Place-Conscious Pedagogies of Practice

Abstract

Objectives or purposes:
This investigation invites foundations students enrolled in a university art course to develop their own lines of inquiry by redescribing (Rory, 1989) walking as an arts-based educational research method for generating artistic making, critical reflection, and scrutinizing temporality within a community of practice of artists/researchers (Wenger, 1998). This type of studio is a mobile pedagogical site that is inherently dynamic via ambulatory movement through space as the artist/researcher leverages walking as a systematic method for data gathering, concept construction, and situated learning. The main purpose of this study is pedagogical, to provoke and support art and art education students in constructing their own paths or lines of inquiry in relation to those currently available.
 
Perspective(s) or theoretical framework:
The primary theoretical and methodological framework for this study is a/r/tography. However, Ian Bogost’s (2012) notion of philosophic carpentry, which “entails making things that explain how things make their world” (p. 93) is also utilized to delimit the research conceptually, and to create “earnest entries into philosophical discourse” (p. 93).

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry:
Various artistic methods and practices, both traditional and contemporary will be used to create the type of “radical philosophies” called for by Bogost (2012) as he declares real radicals, “make things” (p. 110). Hence, the primary modes of inquiry will be artistic practice in relation to the conceptual framing of walking, as noted by the work of artists such as Carmen Papalia’s 2017 Blind Field Shuttle, Janine Antoni’s 2000 Touch, or Francis Alÿs’s 1995 The Green Line.
 
Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials:
Field research within the ambulatory studios of each research participant will produce artworks as the objects of evidence. These will consist or photographs, performances, sound pieces, video, socially engaged works and interventions, drawing, paintings, sculptures and installations and be presented to the public in exhibitions, as public works, and as visual essays.
 
Results and/or substantiated conclusions (or warrants for arguments/point of view):
Walking as inquiry within an a/r/tographic frame extends Pinar’s (1975) re-conceptualization of curriculum as a method, or currere, with the focus of inquiry placed not on the course itself or on one’s intention concerning the design of the course to be run, but instead, on the runner’s experience while running the course (1978, see p. 318). This study emphasizes the embodied experiences of the participating researchers who are also learners and developing artists, thereby contributing to the growing discourse of arts based education research.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work:
This study offers a strategy for art students to both engage with and engage in the creation of theory within an artistic practice. The scholarly import of the work is advanced through questions such as: How are issues of replicated structures of knowledge (canonized research methodologies) critically challenged or appreciated in relation to student-developed idiosyncratic artistic methodologies created within a community of artists and educators? How might philosophy be created in the making of work as Bogost (2012) suggests?

Author

• Daniel T. Barney, Brigham Young University