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A Terminal Degree: fine art and thePhDSally J. Morgana

a “As I'm writing this paper from two perspectives, I would liketo begin by putting myself into context. I studied fine art at theRoyal Academy of Fine Art in Antwerp, and I am a practisingartist. However, I also have an MA in History from Ruskin College,Oxford and I publish and practise as a historian. Having thishybrid background has allowed me to make informed comparisonsbetween these different disciplines, and this, in turn, has beenuseful when considering the development of the PhD in fine art:a development that raises questions on the nature of research,knowledge, and art itself.” — Sally J. MorganPublished online: 03 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Sally J. Morgan (2001) A Terminal Degree: fine art and the PhD, Journal ofVisual Art Practice, 1:1, 6-15

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jvap.1.1.6

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A Terminal Degree: fine art and the PhD

Sally J. Morgan*

AbstractThis article examines the historical development of the PhD in the discipline of history,and its Frankenstein-like transplantation into the body of fine art. It also examines thebackground of European iconophobia that, I shall argue, has made the assimilation ofthe visual arts into the modern university so problematic. Leading on from that, a majortheme in this paper is examination of definitions of knowledge. Drawing on the works ofphenomenological philosophers such as Croce, Dewey and Ricoeur, I argue that theartwork is a text or work that is equivalent to the written text, and, as such, it should beseen as the appropriate form for a fine art doctoral thesis.

A Basic ApprenticeshipWhat is a PhD? It is not the Nobel Prize. It is not a professorship. It is the last stageof studentship, no more and no less. In most subjects students go straight onto itfrom BA or BSc and achieve a doctorate before many of them are 24 years old. Thiskind of advanced degree is designed to set people off on a professional path. It is abeginning rather than an end; a set of driving lessons before you can take the carout by yourself.

Discussions on the status of the PhD often concentrate on the requirement ofresearch and the requirement to contribute to knowledge. Whilst the PhD has beenseen as research training since its inception, it is important to remember that, in thehumanities at least, its publishability very quickly became the paramount objective. Itwas only later that the requirement that it be an original contribution to knowledge wasadded.1 One might argue that this is an inevitable outcome of the goal of publishing,since it would be unlikely that anyone would want to put anything into print that simplywent over old ground. Hence it should never be forgotten that in many ways (asidefrom epitomising the scholarly ideal of undertaking rational research towardsobjective knowledge) the PhD – particularly in the humanities – is a straightforwardliterary training. It is about how to write a book and, not surprisingly, the task reflectsthat. PhDs in the humanities from established ‘old’ universities such as Sheffield,Warwick, Birmingham and Exeter, are 80,000-word dissertations that would, hopefully,become the candidate’s first publication. Birmingham University’s prospectus sellsthe History PhD as the basic entry qualification for professional historians. This beingthe case, we might consider its achievement merely as a sign of potential.

1 John Kenyon, TheHistory Men, London:Weidenfeld andNicolson, 1983, p. 197.

6 JVAP 1 (1) 5– 15 © Intellect Ltd 2001

* “As I’m writing this paper from two perspectives, I would like to begin by putting myself intocontext. I studied fine art at the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Antwerp, and I am a practisingartist. However, I also have an MA in History from Ruskin College, Oxford and I publish andpractise as a historian. Having this hybrid background has allowed me to make informedcomparisons between these different disciplines, and this, in turn, has been useful whenconsidering the development of the PhD in fine art: a development that raises questions onthe nature of research, knowledge, and art itself.” – Sally J. Morgan

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It is useful, when considering what a PhD should or might be, to remember thatit is not only a recent phenomenon in the visual arts, it is a relatively new ideaaltogether. Yale was the first university to award a degree under that title in 1861,basing it on the three-year research doctorates that had been developed in Germany.Until this time established scholars, at least in the anglophone world, had beenawarded doctorates retrospectively as an acknowledgement of a substantial body ofpublished work. In England a consortium of Redbricks first adopted research-doctorates in 1917. Oxford established its own version, the DPhil, in the same year,but Cambridge resisted instituting a research doctorate until 1920.

What, then, should be the equivalent in the world of the visual arts? It might beargued that the equivalent of publishability is, in fine arts case, exhibitability. Thisisn’t too revolutionary a thought; in the terms of the Government’s ResearchAssessment Exercise, exhibiting is already the recognised equivalent to publishing.

The terminal degree of a subject should reflect the professional aims of thatsubject, and as yet fine art does not seem to have resolved that issue. Most fine artPhDs are strange, dislocated things being done by artists, but being judged byscholars from other disciplines. One consequence of this is that the tasks set arenot clear nor, perhaps, are they appropriate. Many students are being asked to dotwo equally enormous tasks, i.e. make exhibitable artwork and write a publishabledissertation. In one extreme case a student was cited in the Guardian newspaper(12 September 1998) as having spent nine years on her PhD, producing frescoes, anexhibition, and a 100,000-word dissertation. I believe that such research overkill is asymptom of a lack of confidence in the face of a scholarly establishment thatassumes (out of habit) an empirical model of knowledge for all subjects. It is also asymptom of a lack of clarity about the status of the artwork, which is, I will argue,not a piece of preliminary fieldwork nor an experiment done in controlledconditions, but an intelligently constructed text that embodies meaning andknowledge.

Mechanical Arts and Men of LettersIn the conservative academic’s mind, research and its manifestation, i.e. thecommunication of that research to an informed audience, are inextricably linkedthrough the literary form of the book. The problem arising from this for artists anddesigners is that the natural outcomes of their research are, quite properly,manifested and communicated to an informed audience through non-literary means.Much current theory coming out of the new fields of visual and material culturesupport the notion of the visual or material text. However, to the un-informed, orthe disinterested, an artwork is merely an image or an object, and there is atendency to see these things as standing outside the world of systematised ideas.For the traditional scholar, apparently, the artwork is not a text; it is the thing thattexts are written about.

Intellectual disdain for visual artists and their work has a long history. JeanGimpel reminds us that, in European society, there has traditionally been ahierarchical division between manual and intellectual labour:

The distinction between the Mechanical Arts, which implied physical labour

directed to the shaping or transforming of materials, and the Liberal Arts, which

were highly intellectualised and concerned with thought and the manipulation

of pure concepts, was an inheritance from antiquity.2

2 Jean Gimpel, AgainstArt and Artists,Edinburgh: Polygon,1991, p. 25.

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The credibility of artists has long suffered from their association with themanipulation of material. As Peter Burke points out, we can trace a prejudiceagainst those who work with their hands back through the Greeks to ancient India.3

Like the Indo-Europeans before them, the Greeks placed labourers at the bottom ofsociety’s ladder. Plato associated three social classes with three of our faculties. Atthe top was the philosopher, associated with reason, in the middle was the warriorassociated with anger, and at the bottom was the manual worker (the artist wasincluded in this category) who was associated with the basest of all emotions,appetite.4 If that wasn’t enough of a disadvantage, there was the furtherpredicament that the visual was identified with mimesis. Plato, once again,condemned the painter for being a mere imitator and therefore ‘at third removefrom…the throne of truth’.5 For him the artist imitated reality, and as reality was onlyillusion then images were less than illusion, they were impersonations of illusions.If we add to this potent mixture of iconophobia the Judaeo-Christian proscription ofthe graven image, along with the association of the image with idolatry, then artists’woes are further compounded. In England we are unfortunate in having anespecially iconophobic tradition stemming from the Puritan iconoclasm in theseventeenth century, when statues were destroyed and the interiors of churcheswere lime-washed to rid them of wall-paintings, thus leaving the traditional centresof knowledge and learning image-free.

This, then, is our inheritance: we live in a society that has customarily privilegedthe literary over the visual. An association with the wrong class of people and anancient idea of mimetic untruthfulness tarnishes art. The visual, we are told,represents reality, but does not explain it. It depicts but does not argue: it indicates,but does not reveal. In some cases it is even confused with reality itself, causing theunwary to believe that their responses are responses to the world rather than toideas about it. For the conservative scholar visual artefacts would appear to be theobject, rather than the product, of intellectual enquiry engendering, rather thanmanifesting, thought.

It is clear that contempt for visual communication runs deep in the scholarlycommunity and has not decreased with time: indeed it may have become morewidespread. The Princeton professor of art history, Lionel Gossman, in a papergiven in 1996, spoke about the modern (post-enlightenment) State’s lack ofunderstanding or respect for art.6 Similarly Martin Jay has suggested that muchrecent French theory carries within it suspicion of the visual due to its perceived rolein surveillance and state-control through spectacle.7

This schism between the visual and the literary once meant that they existed intwo distinct and separate spheres of influence. Although they were not equal instatus they were acknowledged as different kinds of cultural action. Art was taughtin academies that had their own traditions and their own teaching agendas. TheRoyal Academy of Art in London was founded in 1768 and is at least a hundred yearsolder than most English universities, with only Oxford, Cambridge and Londonbeing senior. My own Alma Mater, The Royal Academy of Fine Art, Antwerp, wasfounded by the artist David Teniers the Younger in 1664 and was modelled on itsFrench predecessor, instituted in Paris in 1649, which in turn was based on Vasari’sFlorentine Academy of 1563.

If you’re looking for a respectable lineage, then, in any terms, art and design hasone – going back through the academies to the ateliers and guilds of theRenaissance and beyond. However, in the last decades in England and Wales, art

3 Peter Burke, [M.L.Bush, editor] ‘TheLanguage of Orders inEarly Modern Europe’,Social Orders and SocialClasses in Europe since1500, Longman, 1992,p. 5.

4 Burke, Social Ordersand Social Classes inEurope since 1500, 1992,p. 5.

5 See Plato, [H.D.P. Lee,translator] TheRepublic, London:Penguin, 1955, p. 347.

6 Leonard Gossman,‘Kulturegesichte,Kunstgesichte, Genuss:History and Art inBurckhardt,’ Historyand the Limits ofInterpretationSymposium, 1996 RiceUniversity,www.ruf.edu~culture/interp.html.

7 See Martin Jay,Downcast Eyes: TheDenigration of Vision inTwentieth CenturyFrench Thought,London: UCL Press,1993.

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has gone through a strange displacement that has giving rise to the erroneousimpression that it is somehow new. The careless and thoughtless urge towards thehomogenisation of higher education in Britain has meant that the tradition of theAcademy has been dismantled from without, rather than evolving from within, andart has been absorbed into the University proper via the back door of thePolytechnic. This gradual British process of academicising or, strictly speaking, de-academicising the artist, began when the DipAD, the first qualification to be degree-equivalent in art and design, was established in the mid 1960s. As John A. Walkerand Sarah Chaplin put it:

Those charged with reforming art education thought that some intellectual

stiffening was required to make practical, studio-based courses academically

respectable, that is, worthy of degree status. Naturally enough painters and

sculptors often resented (and still resent) the fact that their practices were not

considered intellectual activities in themselves.8

Now, thirty years later, a familiar scenario is being acted out. Once again intellectualstiffening is being painfully inserted into the art school curriculum in order to makea PhD in Art and Design similarly respectable.

The Director of Research at a respectable English art college said, in theGuardian newspaper, in September 1998, that she doubted whether her institutionwould ever allow a non-written PhD because:

A doctorate needs theoretical back-up to explain what students are doing and

put that in a broader theoretical and cultural context. It’s a modern romantic

view that art is all about a spontaneous outpouring.9

Now, it may well be that the director in question has been misquoted, ormisrepresented, and if that is the case then I apologise for highlighting thisstatement. However, as it stands, it deserves closer examination.

I don’t know, for example, how the second sentence, ‘it’s a modern romanticview that art is all about a spontaneous outpouring’, supports the contention in thefirst sentence that ‘a doctorate needs theoretical back-up’. They seem like twoentirely separate assertions. The juxtaposing of these two sentences seems to implythat the alternative to theoretic back-up (does this mean a dissertation?) is somesort of messy spontaneous outpouring. In this binary there appears to be nomiddle-ground, the alternative to written text being mindless, visual spontaneity. Onfurther inspection the argument begins to turn in on itself by simultaneouslymaintaining that the artwork is not an unstructured, theory-free zone, therebyimplying that it is a readable product of research.

The above statement seems to be both complacently certain and deeplyambiguous. The speaker knows that thinking is important. The speaker is againstromantic spontaneity – but she suspects that, if you leave artists to themselves,romantic spontaneity is exactly what they will try and get away with. The statementimplies that art is unreadable and must therefore be explained through the writtenword. It betrays a deep distrust of both art and artists, and it reveals that thespeaker cannot imagine any intellectual outcome other than a written dissertation.

In these requirements we see ‘a symptom of a teleolog(y)’ which Ricoeur wouldtypify as being ‘ruled by the mind’s thrust towards...scientific knowledge’.10 I wonder

8 John A. Walker & SarahChaplin, Visual Culture:An Introduction,Manchester:Manchester UniversityPress, 1998, p. 36.

9 The GuardianNewspaper:12 September 1998.

10 Paul Ricoeur, [Mario J.Valdés, editor] ‘NelsonGoodman’s Ways ofWorldmaking’ ARicoeur Reader:Reflection andImagination, Toronto:University of TorontoPress, 1991, p. 201.

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whether this approach is appropriate in an art school? Although, as BenedettoCroce says (see below), art has moments within it that are like science, it is not, andshould not be, identical to science in terms of its rules of engagement. Art is acultural mode that incorporates, for very good reason, those things that rationalscience disallows. It is the place where the intellect merges with the sensual andemotional, and where these things are structured into meaning.

Art, then, is a sophisticated cultural code, not simply a spontaneous outpouring,and all cultural codes must be learnt, including those that are visual. John Dewey hassaid that in order to read an image, that is, to properly perceive it, the viewer mustengage in some serious, hard, work: in an act of re-creation, and that without this:

The object is not perceived as a work of art...in both (the making and reading of

art) an act of abstraction, that is, of extraction of what is significant, takes place.

In both, there is comprehension of its literal significance – that is a gathering

together of details and particulars physically scattered into an experienced

whole. There is work done on the part of the percipient as there is on the part

of the artist. The one who is too lazy, idle, or indurated in convention to

perform this work will not see or hear.11

Pierre Bourdieu was a little less judgmental, but argued that one was able tounderstand an artwork only if one had access to the relevant codes.12

To try to read an artwork, then, is to embark on a process as difficult anddemanding as reading a written work. Although one might see at a glance, as Deweyhas shown us, one does not comprehend at a glance. Art is not an unstructured,spontaneous outpouring in the way that the quotation above asserts; neither can itbe explained, as the speaker seems to demand. It is in itself an exposition with, asone of my MA students put it so admirably, ‘no exact linguistic corollary’.13 I wouldagree with the desirability of a doctorate having a theoretical framework, but I alsobelieve that in many cases the best expression of that theory should be through theartwork. Theory should support, not distort, an artist’s practice. As a writer primarilywrites, so an artist should primarily make art. These are both theorised practices.

A Victorian TeleologyIn the early years of the twentieth century Benedetto Croce, the Italianphenomenological philosopher wrote:

Knowledge has two forms: It is either intuitive knowledge or logical knowledge;

knowledge obtained either through the imagination or knowledge gained

through the intellect. (...) There exists a very ancient science of intellectual

knowledge, admitted by all without discussion, namely, logic; but a science of

intuitive knowledge is timidly and with difficulty asserted by but a few. Logical

knowledge has appropriated the lion’s share.14

He reminded us that ‘the highest summits of intuitive and of intellectual knowledge(...) are called, as we know, art and science’ and he argued, in Donald P. Verene’swords, ‘that each area of man’s cultural activity actively constitutes a kind ofknowledge’.15

In Croce’s view, although art and science are different, they are linked and ‘everyscientific work is also a work of art’.16 His theory of aesthetics recognised

11 John Dewey, Art asExperience, New York:Capricorn Books, 1958,p. 54.

12 Pierre Bourdieu,[Carolyn Korsmeyer,editor] ‘FromDistinction’, Aesthetics:The Big Questions,Oxford: Blackwell,1998, p. 151.

13 Garreth Hughes,unpublished paper,2000.

14 Benedetto Croce,[Donald P. Verene, edi-tor] ‘The Form ofKnowledge in Culture’,Man and Culture, NewYork: Dell, 1970,pp. 137–138.

15 Verene, Man andCulture, 1970, p. 7.

16 Croce, Man andCulture, 1970, p. 149

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simultaneous modes of knowing and expressing that occurred separately, andtogether, across all intelligent human action. His ‘intuitive’ stood for the intelligenceof perception: a synergic reading of ontological experience, while his ‘logical’ stoodat the other end of the spectrum as rational, epistemological intelligence. But whenhe wrote this he was arguing against the received wisdom that had established amethodology and set of values, for most academic subjects in universities acrossthe world, that was based on the latter definition of knowledge.

The nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke, who wasinfluenced by von Humbolt’s approach to natural science, is credited as the founderof modernist research methodologies in the humanities. Paul Thompson tells usthat he began to develop this as a direct reaction against Walter Scott’s historicalfictions.17 which moved him to found a research methodology based on his famousdeclaration that history should tell the facts as they ‘actually happened’.18 In doingso he attempted to remove all subjective and fanciful influences from the historicaltext, and to present the world with a stable, unchanging, ‘true’ version of historybased on meticulous archival research. This was, of course, a conscious effort tomove historical discourse from what Croce has called ‘intuitive knowledge’, and toplace it firmly within the realm of rational knowledge.

It might be said, then, that the research degree that he inaugurated, the directancestor of the modern humanities PhD, was conceived as a riposte to art; as ascientific antidote to the imagination; to Croce’s ‘intuitive’. The structure ofconventional PhD research then, arises from an ideological construct realised in theform of one side of a moral binary, in which science represents truth and artdelusion.

By 1848 Ranke’s research methodologies had formed the basis for historicalscholarship throughout Germany.19 and it was this that informed the humanitiesPhD as we know it today. Until 1853, when Oxford established its School ofJurisprudence and Modern History, the only recognised, examined, subjects at thatuniversity were mathematics and classics.20 History, as a subject, has only existed inEnglish universities for 145 years. Nevertheless it is the most senior of thehumanities subjects and has provided a blueprint for those, such as art history andcultural studies, which followed. Unfortunately, perhaps, it was established at a timewhen a particular kind of scientism was on the ascendancy. In 1859 (the same yearthat Darwin published The Origin of Species) Professor Goldwin Smith, in hislectures to Oxford history students, attempted to hold back the tide of this scientificrevolution with arguments which still seem relevant today, saying that:

I see no impossibility, but an extreme likelihood, that physical science having

lately achieved much, should arrogate more than she has achieved, and that a

mock science should thus have been set up where the domain of real science

ends.21

However, by the early years of the twentieth century, this fetishisation of scientificthought had become widespread. John Kenyon quotes the French scholar, PierreLeguay, as saying in 1900 that:

While the Barbarians have no love for the humanities, they have a superstitious

respect for science. Hence, in order to save themselves, the humanities will

have to be disguised or transformed into sciences.22

17 Paul Thompson, TheVoice of The Past,O.U.P., 1988, p. 50.

18 Leopold von Ranke,[Frederick Stern editor]‘The Ideal of UniversalHistory’, The Varietiesof History – FromVoltaire to the Present,London: Macmillan,1970, p. 57.

19 Georg G. Iggers,Historiography in theTwentieth Century: FromScientific Objectivity tothe PostmodernChallenge, Hannover,USA: WeslyanUniversity Press, 1997,p. 25.

20 Kenyon, 1983, p. 150.

21 Goldwin Smith,Lectures on ModernHistory Delivered inOxford, 1859–61, NewYork: Books ForLibraries Press, 1861,(1972 reprint) p. 44.

22 Cited in Kenyon, TheHistory Men, 1983,p. 183

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A number of contemporary historians and historiographers would agree that manyof our scholastic conventions, including those of the PhD, are the inheritance of thisVictorian respect for a certain kind of empirical knowledge. Leguay’s prediction haslargely come true and we continue, mistakenly in my view, to apply a pseudo-scientific approach across all fields of intellectual endeavour, whether or not this isappropriate.

The humanities model, complete with its inheritance from von Ranke and hisempirical method, has provided an almost unquestioned model for the researchdegree in fine art. However, many contemporary historians and historiographerscontest this model of empirical truth within their own practice. In America HaydenWhite23, Robert Berkhoffer24, and Linda Orr25, amongst others, have argued againstthe Rankean approach. In the UK similar arguments have been heard fromhistoriographers such as Raphael Samuel26, Keith Jenkins27 and CarolynSteedman28. If the empirical approach may be considered problematic in a subjectsuch as history, how much more inappropriate may it be for the visual arts? Weshould not forget that:

The difference between a scientific work and a work of art, that is, between an

intellectual fact and an intuitive fact, lies in the difference of the total effect

aimed at by their respective authors. This it is that determines and rules over

the several parts of each, not these parts separated and considered abstractly in

themselves.29

As Croce reveals in that statement, the essence of an artwork lies in its structure –in a sense in its homogeneity. The contemporary French philosopher Paul Ricoeurasks the question, not ‘what is art?’ but ‘when is art’;30 and he then contends that itis in that moment when there is ‘integration and interaction of multiple andcomplex references’.31 There is art, he says, ‘when the symptoms of what counts asart are there’.32 This analysis is, of course, at odds with a linear, empiricalconception of truth or knowledge, which is the one that we have inherited from theVictorians.

The Visual Text: a Work, an UtteranceSince John Berger wrote Ways of Seeing in the 1970s we have been generally aware ofvisual artwork as deliberate constructions of meaning. Berger’s work popularised anotion of visual imagery as rhetoric, an idea further disseminated by authors suchas Judith Williamson, whose book, Decoding Advertisements, became standard art-school reading during the 1980s. The current literature on the subject of the visualtext represents a growing, and important, body of work. Whatever the nuances ofargument, the thrust of contemporary visual culture theory largely accepts NormanBryson’s assertion that there is such a thing as ‘visuality’, i.e. ‘seeing socially’:

Between the subject and the world is inserted the entire sum of discourses

which make up visuality, that cultural construct, and makes visuality different

from vision, the notion of unmediated visual experience...When I learn to see

socially, that is, when I begin to articulate my retinal experience with codes of

recognition that come to me from my social milieu(s), I am inserted into

systems of visual discourse which saw the world before I did.33

23 See Hayden White, TheContent of the Form:Narrative Discourse andHistoricalRepresentation,Baltimore, JohnsHopkins UniversityPress, 1987.

24 See Robert F.Berkhoffer, [FrankAnkersmit and HansKellner, (eds.)] ‘A Pointof View on Viewpointsin HistoricalDiscourse’, A NewPhilosophy of History,London: Reaktion,1995, pp. 174–194.

25 See Linda Orr,‘Intimate Images:Subjectivity andHistory – Stael,Michalet andTocqueville’, Ankersmitand Kellner, A NewPhilosophy of History,1995, pp. 89–107.

26 See Raphael Samuel,Theatres of Memory,London: Verso, 1994.

27 See Keith Jenkins, ThePostmodern HistoryReader, London:Routledge, 1997.

28 See Carolyn Steedman,Past Tenses, London:Rivers Oram, 1992.

29 Croce, Man andCulture, 1970, p. 139.

30 Ricoeur, A RicoeurReader, 1991, p. 206.

31 Ricoeur, A RicoeurReader, 1991, p. 206.

32 Ricoeur, A RicoeurReader, 1991, p. 206.

33 Norman Bryson, [HalFoster, editor] ‘TheGaze in the ExpandedField’, Vision andVisuality, Seattle:Seattle Bay View Press,1988, pp. 91–94.

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It follows from this that visuality is at the heart of our understanding of imagery. IritRogoff captures the complexity of visual understanding when she says that:

What the eye purportedly sees is dictated to it by an entire set of beliefs and

desires and by a set of coded languages.34

I have heard it claimed that the eye is always subjective and that therefore visualmeaning is elusive and transitory. We are so used to using the words ‘subjective’and ‘intuitive’ to mean solipsistic, or irrational, that we are sceptical of the notionthat it can be a useful part of any enquiry and so it must, we believe, be removedfrom the frame. The issues surrounding notions of subjectivity versus objectivityhave been rigorously examined in terms of both the written text and the visualimage, as may be seen, for example, in the work of Derrida35 and Rorty36. Indeed,the very term subjective is now heavily contested, as is its binary opposite, objective.Rorty has said that it is a ‘mistake’ to believe,

That some sorts of truths are ‘objective’ whereas others are merely ‘subjective’

or ‘relative’ – the attempt to divide up the set of true sentences into ‘genuine

knowledge’ and ‘mere opinion’, or into the ‘factual’ and the ‘judgmental’.37

As Rorty’s statement implies, it is possible to see the two as being so interlinked asto make such a binary impossible.

Roland Barthes, in his work on photography Camera Lucida, speaks of the‘studium’ (the public, or culturally constructed meaning in the visual artefact) andthe ‘punctum’38 (his theory of private meaning in relation to the image) as twodistinct, but simultaneous, elements in our understanding of the visual text. The‘studium’ is a code and therefore has a shared meaning. The ‘punctum’ is the detailthat undermines it by producing emotional, and thereby personal, readings of theimage. Critics like Burgin39 and Mitchell see an essential incongruity in thisconstruction, which Mitchell takes to mean that photography ‘both is and is not alanguage’.40

However, dissonance does not equal paradox. It does not seem problematic tome that both these, and other meanings, exist simultaneously in the visual ‘text’.The idea of the ‘punctum’ does not deny or disprove ‘sharable’ meaning; it simplyindicates, as with all texts, that meaning is layered and is, simultaneously, privateand public, idiosyncratic and culturally coded. As Croce has shown us, both theintuitive and the rational are at work in cultural works, and Dewey reminds us thatacts of perceptual filtering are as important in the percipient’s understanding of anartwork as rational filtering is to other acts of knowledge-gathering. In turn, Ricoeur,developing phenomenological theory towards post-structural hermeneutics, wouldcall this dense configuration of meaning a ‘work’. In this sort of production authorsor artists attempt to make, e.g. write, paint, or in some other way compose,meaning; and an audience tries to recover, i.e. read, meaning from the work, and inthis process significance is attributed to events through narrative (either implicit orexplicit). This constructing of significance is something that is done both by the‘writer’ and the ‘reader’, resulting in a proliferation of meanings arising from asingle text or ‘work’.41

What is of interest to us here is that Ricoeur does not differentiate between aliterary work and a visual or material work in this respect.42 The problem of

34 Irit Rogoff, [NicholasMirzoeff, editor]‘Studying VisualCulture’, The VisualCulture Reader,London: Routledge,1998, p. 22.

35 See Jacques Derrida,The Truth in Painting,Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1987.

36 See Richard Rorty,Objectivity, Relativism,and Truth: philosophicalpapers, volume 1,Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1991.

37 Rorty, Objectivity,Relativism and Truth,1991, p. 37.

38 Roland Barthes,Camera Lucida,London: Vintage, 1993,p. 26.

39 Victor Burgin, The Endof Art Theory: Criticismand Postmodernity,London: Macmillan,1986, pp. 90–91.

40 W.J.T. Mitchell, PictureTheory, Chicago:University of ChicagoPress, 1994.

41 See Paul Ricoeur,Hermeneutics and theHuman Sciences,Cambridge UniversityPress, 1981.

42 See the discussion ofCezanne and van Goghin Ricoeur, A Ricoeur,1991, pp. 200–215.

13A Terminal Degree: fine art and the PhD

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meaning, of knowledge, of ‘truth’, in a text is taken to apply equally to all culturalproduction. All cultural artefacts, including the written word, may be read, but all areon some level volatile. Nevertheless, as Ricoeur makes clear, a process of intentionand interrogation towards agreed meaning, however temporary or ‘contingent’43, ispossible through the production and reception of artworks.

The artwork is not the prelude to theory, to knowledge, or to constructions ofmeaning. It is not the fieldwork, the preliminary data, from which conclusions aredrawn and meanings made. It is, as Dewey says in Art as Experience, the realisation;the place where the ‘material of reflection is incorporated into objects as theirmeaning’.44

Art-making, then, is practice only in as much as writing is practice. It is notseparate from thought or theory. It is, as Croce once said, ‘an essential theoreticfunction’.45 This is to say that art is a way of both perceiving and theorising theworld, of sensing and allocating meaning, in a synthesis of the sensuous, theintellectual, and the emotional.

ConclusionAs somebody who functions as both an artist and a historian I am particularly awareof necessary differences in methodological approaches between the two disciplines.When an artist says that they are trying to achieve ‘truth’, are they saying somethingdifferent to a historian using the same words? I think that they are, or at least a lotof them have been since history decided that it was a science rather than a branchof rhetoric or literature.46 In art, I might suggest, the artist invites the viewer toparticipate in the structuring of a symbolic, metaphoric or analogous ‘truth’ bymeans of an ‘open-ended’ enquiry. In this kind of narrative meanings are ‘signalled’rather than made explicit. As Croce put it in 1913,

Certainly, art is symbol, all symbol, all significant.47

On the other hand, ‘truth’ in ‘scientific’ historiography is, supposedly, proven; thatis, made explicit through the ordered presentation of material, (i.e. of non-symbolic‘facts’), in an exposition which is consciously argued and ‘concluded’ by the authorin an attempt to avoid ambiguity. So, if in art ‘truth’ is implied rather than overtlyproposed, then in scientific ‘history’, since at least the nineteenth century, ‘truth’, or‘meaning’, has been constructed explicitly, each historical work aiming to achieve a‘closure’48 in which a conclusion has been drawn from the evidence. In this‘scientific’ narrative all the processes of deduction are made visible within the text.The distinguishing feature of this is that it allows no variations of meaning apartfrom the ‘named’ meaning that is designated by the author. In art, meaning isconstructed through a complex and sophisticated synthesis of sensual andintellectual allusion. It does not deduce, it endlessly proposes. This posesenormous problems for defining a process of artistic enquiry against the criteria forhumanities or social science research, especially at doctoral level. I would argue thatthe conclusion we should draw from this is not, as often seems to be the case, thatartistic enquiry does not constitute research, but that that the criteria applied fromother disciplines are inappropriate.

The history student embarks on a PhD in order to learn, and apply, the ‘correct’methodology of historical discourse. This methodology fits the student for the roleof historian and can be argued as the appropriate culmination of the historian’s

43 See Rorty, Objectivity,Relativism and Truth,1991, for his discussionon the ‘contingency’ of‘truth’.

44 Dewey, Art asExperience, 1958, p. 15.

45 Croce, Man andCulture, 1970, p. 151.

46 See Iggers,Historiography in TheTwentieth Century,1997, p. 29.

47 Croce, Man andCulture, 1970, p 151.

48 See Iggers,Historiography in theTwentieth Century, 1997p. 29.

14 Sally J. Morgan

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course of study. However, as I have shown, this empirical, scientific approach doesnot provide a suitable model for art, or artists.

The increasing expectation (imported from the USA) that all universityacademics should hold the ‘terminal qualification’ of their subject area has meantthat there has tended to be a blanket requirement across the university sector for alllecturers to possess research doctorates. What has not been imported is theAmerican understanding of the difference between the kind of terminal degreeappropriate to a creative visual art form, and the kind appropriate for a textuallybased academic subject. In America it has long been the case that the terminaldegree for fine art has been the MFA (a qualification above that of MA) where studiopractice plays the major part in assessment. In Europe our highest qualification hasbeen an MA, or a qualification arising from an equivalent period of postgraduatestudy at one of a number of internationally respected institutions (ARCA, SladeHigher Diploma, etc.).

In my view, the terminal qualification for an artist should be one that makestheorised artwork the primary outcome. A substantial one-person show,accompanied by a viva, adds up to the same thing as a publishable dissertation plusviva. Whatever we want to call it, be it PhD, DPhil, DArt, DFA, or even MFA, thisshould be our form of doctorate, our terminal degree.

Let us not, as fine artists, in our scholastic insecurity and our urge for academicrespectability, be guilty of donning the ‘emperor’s new clothes’. Art should not try tobe science. Art should try to be art. If that means that we have a different kind ofterminal degree than other subjects, then we should not see this as a failing. If weinstitute the wrong kind of final qualification for our field then we bear theresponsibility, potentially, of skewing that field, of ‘un-arting’ art, and of denying thepower and importance of a whole sphere of human activity, namely art itself.

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