Sullivan, Graeme. Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts.

Crandall, Heather

Sullivan, Graeme. Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 2005. Pp. xxii, 265. ISBN 1-4129-0536-2 (pb.) $54.95.

Graeme Sullivan's book, Art Practice As Research, is a comprehensive resource. Sullivan clearly discusses historical context, contemporary issues, and future directions of visual arts in higher education. He overviews methods of inquiry in the sciences and what cognitive science offers visual art research. Overall, Sullivan contends that art practices are as much a form of research as what currently counts as research, and beyond this, art practices as research have transformative potential to reshape traditional iterative pursuits of knowledge. The book could be useful in upper division undergraduate courses but ideal for beginning graduate studies in disciplines of visual communication.

Sullivan begins with contexts and argues that, historically and culturally, visual arts have been shuffled into different configurations in higher education. Art Practice moves through a description of accepted methods of research in the sciences. Aperson interested in art research would be well-served by the foundation Sullivan provides. However, his interest extends beyond situating art research within this foundation. In his words: "To continue to merely borrow research methods from other fields denies the intellectual maturity of art practice as a plausible basis for raising significant theoretical questions and as a viable site for applying important cultural and educational ideas" (p. 72). Studio artists, art writers, art educators, and those interested in the study of art, in Sullivan's clear argument, have important roles to play in the practice of art research for the future of knowledge itself. Sullivan's book inspires possibilities and proceeds to give practical direction to accomplish the goals of art inquiry.

The second section in Sullivan's book offers an orienting framework. It is necessarily flexible for research in visual arts. The framework sets art practice in relation to empirical, interpretive, and critical paradigms; it includes discursive, dialectical, and deconstructionist inquiry and responsive practices (understanding, reflexive, post-discipline, and visual systems). Visual systems include descriptions of complexity theory, self-similarity, scale-free networks, and perspectivalism -all positioned in what Sullivan calls the theoretically transformative, braided relationship of art practice as research. Sullivan illustrates ways the framework can be used by suggesting and describing possible combinations available within it.

Sullivan creates three more frameworks. One involves visual arts knowing, which is comprised of visual cognition from the cognitive sciences and the role of context in that domain. The phrasing on the visual cognition framework for conceptualizing cognition involves thinking in a medium, thinking in a language, and thinking in a setting. Another framework Sullivan creates for those who wish to design art research projects includes ideas and agency, forms and structure, and situations and action. Within these ends of the continuum of the framework are making in communities, making in systems, and making in cultures. All are situated in relationship to artist as theorist. For the final framework-ideas and agency, forms and structure, situations and action-are still used to define the structure. However, the framework is used for visual arts research projects and includes ways to make use of the previous frameworks. According to Sullivan, "[by] taking on the challenge of research within the framework of the academy, and doing so according to the integrity of visual arts practice, perhaps the artist-theorist can claim the right to create and critique issues of human significance on arts' terms" (p. 221).

Sullivan uses the work of artists to accompany his written descriptions about theory and research. In so doing, the reader experiences what Sullivan argues should happen in the practice of art research, expanding what is available to know. The volume includes a reference list and an index.

Heather Crandall

Gonzaga University