Contents

Introduction vii
Acknowledgements xv
A Glossary of Terms xvi

Part One: Essays

1 Judith Mo�ram, “Researching Research

in Art and Design” 3
2 Timothy Emlyn Jones, “Research Degrees
in Art and Design” 31
3 Henk Slager, “Art and Method” 49
4 Mick Wilson, “Four Theses A�empting to Revise
the Terms of a Debate” 57
5 Victor Burgin, “Thoughts on ‘Research’ Degrees
in Visual Arts Departments” 71
6 Timothy Emlyn Jones, “The Studio Art Doctorate
in America” 81
7 George Smith, “The Non-Studio PhD for
Visual Artists” 87
8 Hilde Van Gelder and Jan Baetens, “The Future of
the Doctorate in the Arts” 97
9 James Elkins, “On Beyond Research and
New Knowledge” 111
10 Charles Harrison, “When Management Speaks…” 135
11 James Elkins, “The Three Configurations of
Studio-Art PhDs” 145
vi

Part Two: Examples

12 Jo-Anne Duggan (University of Technology,

Sydney; DCA) 169
13 Sue Lovegrove (School of Art, Australian
National University, Canberra) 181
14 Frank Thirion (School of Art, Australian
National University, Canberra) 199
15 Ruth Waller (School of Art, Australian
National University, Canberra; MA) 211
16 Christl Berg (School of Art, University
of Tasmania, Hobart) 227
17 María Mencía (Chelsea College of Art
and Design/University of the Arts, London) 243
18 Uriel Orlow (University of the Arts, London) 253
19 Phoebe von Held (University College London /
Slade School of Art) 265
Brief Conclusions 277

List of Contributors 283

List of Illustrations 290
 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, em-
ployers 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 “prac-
tice-based 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 a�er 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 aca-
demization 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 de-
valued. A recent job search for a plum position at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill a�racted almost 700 candidates, the
vast majority of whom would have had MFAs. The degree, by itself,
has come to be li�le 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
viii Introduction

continue, and will still be sufficient for jobs in secondary schools

and smaller 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, represent-
ed 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. In Latin
America there is a program at the University of São Paulo. (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 dra� 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 aston-
ished, unconvinced, dismissive, and paranoid.
“How can you expect art students to write 50,000-word disserta-
tions, 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, be-
cause the United States has no consistent history of PhDs in studio
art. Since the 1970s there have been a handful of universities that of-
fer such degrees, but in my experience they do not command much
a�ention 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
 Introduction ix

of time, a way of “hanging around” in school a�er the Masters is

complete.)
But the crowd in that conference in 2003 was unse�led, espe-
cially when they heard Tim Jones say that there were currently two
thousand students in the UK enrolled in programs that could re-
sult 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 be-
coming 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
sca�ered 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 Anne�e 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
So the literature is not difficult to master—a good thing, given
the masses of administrative literature that are likely to be pro-
duced when this subject is seriously debated in the US. I predict
that in twenty years most larger art schools and university art de-
partments 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 un-
derstand 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
x Introduction

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 Mo�ram’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. Mo�ram’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 distinguish-
ing 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 familiar
with it, you might want to download a copy before reading the
chapters of this book.9 Alternately, Frayling’s claims are summa-
rized in Chapters 8 and 9.)
Chapter 2 is a revision of Jones’s paper from the 2003 confer-
ence. 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 es-
say, with detail that will be unfamiliar to US readers, but his medi-
tation on research remains one of the best, and best-documented,
defenses of the concept of research in the arts and advanced de-
grees “by research.”
From there things get more polemical.
In the 1990s a literature grew up that reacted against the stultify-
ing terms proposed in the UK. Some of it is informed by poststruc-
tural 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 tenden-
cy 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
 Introduction xi

is transdisciplinary, post-humanistic, mobile, and unquantitative.

This kind of argument is o�en made in support of the idea that art
research is different in kind from other research, with its own o�en
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 innova-
tors 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 whol-
ly 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.
Tim Jones’s second essay, Chapter 6, gives some hints and in-
structions to US institutions interested in learning from the UK ex-
ample. 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 wri�en by George Smith, who started the first
PhD program in the United States influenced by international de-
velopments.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 col-
laboration of Belgian universities in practice-based PhDs. The essay
is a wide-ranging, theoretically- and 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 “im-
plicated in poststructural paradigms” — to quote a few authors who
have wri�en 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 cel-
xii Introduction

ebration 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 universi-
ty, 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 a�empts 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 pos-
sible 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 in-
clude 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 a�empt 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 histori-
ans, its conceptual entanglements, and its half-forgo�en 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–January 2009
 Introduction xiii

Notes

1 For exact figures see the section “The Size and Shape of the Research Art
Community” in Judith Mo�ram’s essay, Chapter 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 A�itude—
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 Sullivan, Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts (London: Sage,
2005).
5 Published online by RMIT University (Melbourne), October 2007, at search.
informit.com.au/browsePublication;isbn=9781921166679;res=E-LIBRARY; pub-
lished in printed form in 2008; ISBN 978-0-9804679-0-1.
6 The Artist’s Knowledge: Research at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, ed-
ited by Jan Kaila (Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, 2006). ISBN 951-
53-2879-9.
7 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.
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.constel-
lations.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.
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.)