We Say: A work of Art

THROUGHOUT HISTORY INTERPRETATIONS of the exact work an artist is responsible for have changed dramatically. And yet what audiences expect from art and from artists may not have changed as much as theories about art and its relationship to work have. Audiences like to see an artist’s skill, but they also like to see an artwork which looks as though it has come into being of its own volition. ‘It’s a work of art.’ It’s as if the active subject of art is capable of producing that something – that ‘it’– into being. Then what, we might wonder, would the artist’s role be in this kind of process? An aide? A witness? A conduit perhaps? And if so, where would the artist’s work lie? It’s been an old chestnut at least since Plato’s time. In the present era questions about the kind of work involved in making art resurface in tertiary institutions the world over. The extent to which the processes of making art are capable of being corralled within the perimeters of traditional approaches to ‘research’ has been one such discussion. That particular question hasn’t posed any difficulties to justify. However, in terms of expecting that research contributes to ‘new knowledge’, the more elusive aspects of the processes of artmaking are – and should be – difficult to shackle to metrics and templates.