A/r/tography: Conceptual Doings and Ordinary Tasks

Daniel T. Barney, an art education professor from Brigham Young University, explores the arts-based research methodology a/r/tography as a pedagogical strategy that has informed the author’s artistic practice and pedagogical experiments. The author tracks his own journey of entering into an a/r/trographic conversation where that entering has positioned him as an artist and educator. He then moves on to speculate a possible arts education as his a/r/tography contorts into conceptual doings. Ordinary tasks such as baking, eating, walking, dressing, and teaching are thought of as potentials for conceptual development or process methods to incite more conceptual investigation and new forms of understanding. This methodological framing gives rise to alternative pedagogical potential for students within art departments. Professor Barney offers illustrative examples of his curricular investigations using a/r/tography within the courses he gives at his university with both undergraduate and graduate students. Barney equates artistic concepts, like walking as mentioned above, with theoretical and philosophical arguments, assertions, and propositions. Even though scientific and social science research methodologies are systematic with precise and rigorous procedures to construct truth claims, artistic processes are equated here with systems of inquiry and knowing that are idiosyncratic. Barney suggests an art form can be understood in research terms as a type of research product or creation, that can be an event, performance, or a continuation of these as write ups, exhibitions, or presentations, that are shared with the general or a particular public.