Supervising the unknown

Among the key themes which emerge in Simon Waters’s presentation, which draws on 25 years of supervision of research students in artistic practice, is an anxiety about the creeping codification of the relationship between supervisor and supervisee. This is particularly evident currently in UK higher education, but also in initiatives to ‘benchmark’ provision and expectations across Europe, and is frequently couched in terms of improvement in the student experience. In reality such moves are more often motivated by institutional self-protection, and administrative mistrust of academics. Such initiatives, often also betraying an institutional anxiety or equivocation about the status of artistic or practice-based activity, may also serve to constrain the value and integrity of that activity, particularly in their prioritising of linguistic articulacy over other forms of knowledge-making, and in their methodological fixity. In general, an artificial consensus about the nature and methods of artistic practice is regarded as potentially antithetical to the value-richness and diversity of that practice.

Waters argues that it is crucial for a supervisor of artistic research to understand that a researcher’s rationale for undertaking a practice-based PhD may not be primarily academic. He suggests that it may also be productive to avoid being too ‘disciplinary’ in a world where much genuine research happens at the periphery of a given practice. Similarly, it is useful to acknowledge that the focus of a research project may change, as genuine research may also emerge at the periphery of the planned project. In this regard the writings of Lucy Suchman, on the manner in which plans transmute into ’situated actions’ in the improvised reality of human conduct, are apposite.

Waters also notes a change in the locus of ‘expertise’, acknowledging that “in many, even most cases now, I am, as supervisor, at the disadvantage of being less skilled, less knowledgeable, less familiar with the core area of the supervisee’s research than they are.”  The key role of the research community, in which expertise may be distributed among all the participants: research students, RAs/post-docs and supervisors – is emphasised, though of course the supervisor may nevertheless bring a capacity for distance, and for the anticipation of problems.

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