Research with Body and Senses: Arts-based Research and Research-based Art (Part 1)
Kukiko NOBORI
This paper is a self-translation of an article originally published in Journal of Tokyo Zokei University 25 (issued on March 31, 2024). The author gratefully acknowledges the Editorial Committee of the Research Report of Tokyo Zokei University for granting permission to publish the English version.
本論文は東京造形大学研究報25（2024年3月31日発行）に掲載された登久希子著『身体と、感覚と向き合うアート：アート・ベースド・
0. Introduction
This paper explores research methods described as arts-based research or creative research. These methods emphasize embodiment, creativity, and imagination in both the research process and the sharing of results, and are frequently carried out in collaboration between researchers and non-researchers. Focusing on anthropology and visual art, the paper first considers how growing interest in these methods can be understood through discussions of the senses. It then turns to case studies to reflect on how embodiment shapes the conduct of research.
Arts-based research (hereafter, ABR) is a research method that has been widely used since the 2000s in fields such as sociology, education, design, and art therapy (Ito 2018: 203). It is also referred to as “creative research” or “sensory research,” or sometimes positioned as a type of these research (Kara 2020: 5). In Japan, the term “creative research” is rarely used outside of marketing contexts, and the term “arts-based research” has gradually become established in the field of humanities and social sciences. Thus this paper will use ABR as a general term1. The methods of ABR vary widely, ranging from drawing, painting, theater, installation, and music to cross-genre and more difficult-to-classify forms such as collaborative performance art and workshops. ABR practices encompass the entire research process from preparation to output. ABR reevaluates the conventional model of research in which the researcher, as a transparent subject, conducts an objective and scientific “disembodied” study (Kara 2020: 21). In recent years, the possibilities of ABR have been discussed by researchers in Japan, particularly in the fields of sociology and art therapy (Okahara et al. 2016; Okahara 2017; Ito 2018). Sociologists such as Okahara et al. define ABR as “a style of research in which, throughout the entire academic research process, especially in the final output, the primary medium is not text-based, but rather art forms such as photographs, video, performance, dance, theater, as well as visual arts including sculptures, installations, and art projects, sound and music, or even literary works such as novels, poetry, and plays” (Okahara et al. 2016: 65). In other words, ABR is understood as the incorporation of art into various dimensions of academic research2.
According to Okahara et al., “both sociological practice and artistic practice can be understood as acts that generate a metaphorical world—an analogical reconstruction of the “lived world” by the self and by others (Okahara et al. 2016: 76). They then question whether it is art or sociology that can provide a better understanding of not only verbalized experiences but also layers of experience that cannot be fully expressed in words, such as senses and emotions. They suggest that ABR, which utilizes artistic methods rather than traditional sociology based on “verbalization” through written papers, offers the potential for a deeper understanding (Okahara et al. 2016: 76).
The discussions on ABR are directly connected to the field of cultural anthropology that emerged after the “Writing Culture Shock” of the 1980s. In Writing Culture (1986/1996), George Marcus and James Clifford revealed the ways in which power structures enable the representation of others, and exposed the politics behind these representations. Their arguments provided a major “shock” to anthropologists and made them reconsider the legitimacy of their academic practices. The reflections gained from the “Writing Culture” and how they were overcome can be seen in the subsequent debates in anthropology and the exploration of experimental ethnography, which resonate with ABR3. In other words, anthropologists, when confronting issues such as how to go beyond the one-sided and “objective” descriptions based on the binary opposition of researcher vs. non-researcher, and how to present the polyphony and interactive perspectives of the field, as well as how to convey the embodiment and sensory experience in the field (which will be examined in more detail in the next section), find common ground with ABR to aim for a more “embodied” approach to research presentation. In fact, although not always explicitly labeled as ABR, various experimental ethnographic approaches—such as ethnographic films, literary methods in ethnography, and exhibitions or installations created by anthropologists (Niwa and Yanai 2017; Daniels 2020)—have already been explored within the discipline. The potential for presenting the lived experience of the field on a physical level, and the thoughts that arise from it—possibilities that cannot be achieved through text alone—have been identified in these experimental methods in cultural/ social anthropology.
1. Artistic Research and Research-based Art
A related term to ABR is “research-based art” (hereafter, RBA), which is made possible through “artistic research.” The latter refers to research conducted by artists themselves or collaboratively with experts from other fields. However, neither in Japanese nor in English is it strictly defined in the context or practice of the visual arts4. In ABR, as I discussed in the previous section, the research subjects can include anthropologists, sociologists, artists, or other experts and students. In contrast, with artistic research, the research subjects are often limited to artists or collaborations between artists and other experts working within the discipline of visual art (particularly contemporary art )5 . The forms of RBA based on artistic research are diverse. Art Historian Claire Bishop describes them somewhat cynically as follows:
POSTCARDS, FAXES, AND EMAIL PRINTOUTS lie wanly in a vitrine. A plywood shelving unit holds rows of informational leaflets. One gallery wall is plastered with graphs and charts. Another is covered in hundreds of seemingly identical photographs. On a bank of video monitors, talking heads are explaining something. In a darkened corner, a slide projector clunks slowly through a carousel of images. Nearby, a 16-mm film whirs alongside a soporific voice-over. An illuminated table is covered in papers and newspaper clippings marked up with Post-its. Every object on display is accompanied by a lengthy explanatory caption written by the artist, also available as a pamphlet (Bishop 2023).
Bishop identifies the characteristics of RBA in its reliance on a vast amount of materials and information, as well as the texts and contexts that organize them. As she points out, this kind of exhibition style has become familiar in contemporary art, yet comprehensive discussions on the subject remain scarce (Bishop 2023)6. This tendency in RBA stands in contrast to the situation in Europe and North America, where numerous papers and specialized journals on ABR and creative research have been published, and active discussions have been conducted from various perspectives by researchers and practitioners from diverse fields7.
Bishop’s study aims to classify RBA into three forms associated with the development of digital technology and the knowledge those RBA works produce. Her objective is to analyze the shifts in how people have received information through contemporary technologies such as the internet and how knowledge has been formed as a result8. From a cultural anthropological perspective, what is particularly noteworthy in her argument is what kind of research and output by artists Bishop considers to be the ideal form, and how she discusses the role of “senses” in this context.
2. Focusing on the Senses
Bishop contends that RBA extends the boundaries of academic research in two ways: “first, by allowing personal narrative and challenging an objective relationship to truth via fiction and fabulation (Bishop 2023)”. The second is that it presents “research in aesthetic forms that exceed the merely informative (Ibid.)”. Bishop sees the potential of artist-led research particularly in the way a work can evoke “the pleasure of a well-crafted story; connections and juxtapositions that surprise and delight (Ibid.). It is important to note here that her emphasis is heavily placed on human sensory experiences, such as “pleasure,” “surprise,” and “joy.”
As a prime example of RBA, Bishop highlights the work of Anna Boghiguian. Since the late 1970s, many of Boghiguian’s works—created while leading a nomadic life across the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the Mediterranean—have explored how history is connected to the present. Bishop appreciates how Boghiguian’s research is “embodied and durational,” which, in turn, makes the viewer’s engagement with the work inherently “somatic”. This is precisely why the experience of her work becomes a “digested, lived, and sensuous encounter” (Bishop 2023). Bishop contrasts Boghiguian’s work with those that appear to merely present information, emphasizing its ability to offer a more immersive and experiential engagement with research (Bishop 2023).
In the context of visual arts, both the creators and the viewers/participants engage their senses and sensibilities to the fullest in the process of making or experiencing a work. Artworks, in turn, evoke various emotions and sensations. This understanding of visual art is not unusual. Even when discussing Boghiguian’s research, Bishop does not seem to place particular emphasis on the fact that her work generates “pleasure,” “surprise,” or “joy.” Confronting artworks or phenomena sensorially, engaging one’s sensibilities, and facing the emotions that arise within oneself can be considered fundamental aspects of both the experience of viewing and the creation of visual art.
On the other hand, in the field of social sciences, senses and sensorial experience have long been marginalized and avoided as topics of study. This has also been the case in anthropology. As cultural anthropology established itself as a “science”, little attention was given to phenomena related to the senses. Likewise, ethnographic methods that appealed to sensory experiences were dismissed as unscientific. This was despite the fact that fieldwork—often conducted in environments vastly different from one’s own—engages all of a researcher’s senses, intuition, sensibilities and emotions. Nevertheless, “the process of perceiving the world through the senses and undergoing bodily transformations has been excluded from ethnography as something fleeting and unreliable” (Ishii et al. 2022:2). In other words, for many cultural anthropologists striving to establish their discipline as a science, human sensibility and sensory experience—viewed as “subjective” elements—were long considered unnecessary. It was not until the late 1980s that “the senses” became a major subject of analysis in cultural anthropology (Miyasaka 2019: 170–171). Around that time, research focusing on the senses, known as an anthropology of the senses, began emerging. Since the 2010s, approaches such as sensory anthropology and sensory ethnography, which explore sensory experiences throughout the entire research and analytical process, have become well established. Initially, the field was dominated by cross-cultural discussions based on the analytical framework of distinct sensory modalities—namely, the Western classification of the five senses (hearing, sight, smell, touch, and taste). However, research later evolved toward a more holistic understanding of sensory experience, as indicated by the adoption of the term “multi-sensory experience” (Miyasaka 2019: 173–174; Pink 2015: 8–11).
One of the leading scholars in this field, Sarah Pink, argues that the senses should not merely be the subject or objective of ethnographic research but should instead be naturally integrated into all ethnographic practice, including fieldwork (Pink 2015: 13). According to Pink, many forms of sensory ethnography challenge the dominance of language and, as a result, often take forms that go beyond traditional textual descriptions. This has led to an increasing number of collaborations with various media and artistic practices (Pink 2015: 163). Following Pink’s argument, the exhibitions, installations, films, and experimental ethnographies incorporating literary techniques—such as those mentioned in the introduction of this paper—can be positioned as forms of sensory ethnography. Likewise, the work of Boghiguian, which Bishop praises, can also be seen as a kind of sensory ethnography and even as a form of ABR.
The richest possibilities for research-based installation emerge when preexisting information is not simply cut and pasted, aggregated, and dropped in a vitrine but metabolized by an idiosyncratic thinker who feels their way through the world. (Bishop 2023)
While Bishop characterizes the artist as “an idiosyncratic thinker,” this perspective risks being too easily associated with the modern conception of the artistic “genius.” However, Bishop’s emphasis on an artist who “feels their way through the world” also resonates with the anthropologist Thomas Csordas, who argues that the body should not be understood merely as an object of thought but rather as “an experiencing agent” (Csordas 1994: 3). Csordas argues against the anthropological focus on representation, emphasizing instead the need to grasp the immediacy of existence as “being-in-the-world” (1994: 10). Bishop, in her discussion of Boghiguian’s work, appears to identify a similar mode of embodied existence.
Since the “Writing Culture” shock, both cultural anthropology and contemporary art, following the “ethnographic turn,” have been considered to share concerns regarding the “politics of representation” (Schneider and Wright 2006: 19). However, it is crucial to recognize that they do not only share concerns about representation but also about embodiment. The most significant impact of ABR is not merely that art can visually illustrate or diagram the results of research in a comprehensible manner, but rather that this “comprehensibility” is achieved through embodiment9. As we have seen, the intersection of research and art has drawn increasing attention in both academic fields such as sociology and anthropology and in the context of contemporary art. The emergence of ABR, sensory ethnography, and research-based art as overlapping practices is rooted in a critical reflection on the traditional exclusion of “senses” and “emotion” from the style and process of research in the social sciences10. In response to such reflections, there has been a growing interest toward more embodied forms of research and understanding. In the next section, I will further explore the process of ABR and its relationship to embodiment through case studies.
Endonotes
1 The relationship between creative research and ABR is conceptualized in diverse ways—at times the two are treated as interchangeable terms, while in other cases ABR is understood as a specific form of creative research.
2 In this paper, the terms art, contemporary art, and visual art are used differently depending on the context. The term art is employed as a local term to refer to a broader range of practices than those encompassed by visual art or contemporary art in the narrow sense.
3 Following the “Writing Culture” controversy, the 1990s witnessed a proliferation of artworks that engaged with cultural “Others” through fieldwork, a development shaped in part by the accelerating processes of globalization. These projects were frequently undertaken by itinerant artists and marked the emergence of practices that incorporated ethnographic methods—what art historian Hal Foster famously termed the “ethnographic turn” (Foster 1995). However, it was not until the 2000s that critical attention began to shift toward the effects produced by such practices: both the artworks created by artists and the new forms of ethnography developed by anthropologists. Prior to this, the dominant concern had been with the “politics of representation” (Schneider and Wright 2006: 19), primarily as enacted by artists and anthropologists.
4 For example, the website of Sapporo Tenjinyama Art Studio, a residency facility that supports artistic creation in Sapporo, describes research art as “collaborative research activities between artists and individuals from other fields such as academia and design, as well as original research methodologies developed by artists themselves.” (Accessed September 15, 2023)
5 Kara (2020), in her pioneering study on creative research, outlines various models of research, including those conducted collaboratively by artists and scholars.
6 Although several articles can be found in art-related journals, notable examples include critical analyses of the academicization of research-based art within the context of neoliberal higher education (Steyerl, 2010), as well as discussions on its relationship to institutional critique in contemporary art (Moon, 2023).
7 While the importance of research has been increasingly recognized—particularly in socially engaged art and social practice in the West, and in what are referred to as “art projects” in Japan—the research aspect itself has rarely been the central focus of scholarly discussion.
8 Of course, even before the 1990s, there were works in which research played a central role. As precedents, Bishop cites the work of Lewis Hine—a photographer and sociologist who documented child labor and poverty in early 20th-century America in an effort to advocate for social reform—as well as the essay films defined by Hans Richter and the artists influenced by his approach. She also points to the interdisciplinary conceptual art practices of the 1960s and 1970s by artists such as Susan Hiller and Hans Haacke.
9 Moreover, it is essential to recognize that the “clarity” achieved in such instances differs fundamentally from mere information acquisition or comprehension.
10 From the perspective of art, is the academic institutionalization of art the sole reason? This question warrants further examination.