Creative arts, screen research, neo-liberalism, and a dance

ABSTRACT

This essay employs personal biography to illustrate larger questions regarding global transformations in the creative arts and tertiary education sector. With a focus on how neo-liberalism has impacted professional screen practices in Australia and those in the contemporary Academy, this paper also provides two screen-arts case studies to illustrate what poietic research forms can uniquely bring to scholarship.

KEYWORDS:

• Creative-arts
• research
• neo-liberalism
• poietic methods
• documentary
• research creation

Acknowledgements

This paper is dedicated to Ross Gibson, a generous and genuinely thought-provoking scholar. Thanks to the two anonymous reviewers of this paper, and to my colleagues in the Creative Documentary Research Centre, in particular Kate Rossmanith, Karen Pearlman and Bronwen Neil. Also, much gratitude to those pioneering creative-arts adventurers who set forth on the scholarly quest, fought the demons and charmed the high priesthood of the Academy in order to forge the path that many of us have followed. Praise also to my good fortune in holding a food-in-the-fridge and art-making occupation: a rare opportunity that these mentors have forged. For this and much more, a humble thanks.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Dhakiyarr vs the King (2004) was selected in International Competition at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.

2 In My Father’s Country (2008), see: www.inmyfatherscountry.com

3 Full disclosure: I pitched a company that was shortlisted for the ‘Enterprise’ scheme (but ultimately not selected). A professional sliding-doors moment!.

4 This refers to the Australian tertiary educational reforms initiated in 1988 under Education Minister, John Dawkins, and the reforms under John Major et al in the UK. For an extended account of the Dawkins Reforms and its impact on creative arts as research, see Murray and Rossmanith (2022).

5 Kälvemark (2010, 11, 13) has explained why the European experience was less disruptive than the UK and Australian examples.

6 See the two European Artistic Research Network (EARN) projects: The Postresearch Condition, including a 2021 book of the same title; and the 2021 Bucharest Biennale project: Farewell to Research.

7 These terms are not exclusive to these territories. The Irish artist-scholar Desmond Bell argues for the value of the term ‘artistic research’ for example (2022, 100).

8 See also Murray and Rossmanith (2022) for a more expansive description of the different terms used by creative practice researchers globally. In Australia ‘practice’ is often employed as part of the term. See, for example: Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry (Barrett and Bolt 2014), Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts (Smith and Dean 2009), or more recently in the field of screen-arts, Screen Production Research: Creative Practice as a Mode of Enquiry (Batty and Kerrigan 2017).

9 This statement assumes that there is sufficient intellectual labour and new knowledge produced within a given creative work that it justifies equivalence with more ‘traditional’ scholarly outputs such as a journal article or book.

10 Poietic is here taken from the Aristotelian concept of poiesis, a transformative making or bringing-forth, often understood as crafting or producing. For a fuller discussion of this usage as creative method see Murray and Rossmanith 2022.

11 See Mees and Murray (2019).

12 Full disclosure (and without claiming any credit for its conceptual innovations), I was a co-producer of this film.

13 Note the lineage of ‘research’ as a progressively re-defined concept originating from within two European directorates concerned with science and economics. The current Australian Research Council definition of ‘research’ is taken from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and was initially developed to quantify the economic value of science. This definition was formalised within successive editions of the highly influential Frascati Manual. For a fuller discussion see Murray and Rossmanith (2022).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [grant number FT19100687].

Notes on contributors

Tom Murray

Tom Murray is a writer/director/producer in screen and audio documentary. He is Professor in Screen Media and Creative Arts and an ARC Future Fellow at Macquarie University, Australia. His award-winning feature documentaries include: Dhakiyarr vs the King (2004), In My Father’s Country (2008), Love in Our Own Time (2013), and The Skin of Others (2020). This work has won major screen and scholarly awards and been selected in some of the world’s most prestigious festivals. He has written widely on screen research practices in history, anthropology, cultural studies and creative arts, and is the Founding Director of the Creative Documentary Research Centre.