Anne Tallentire, "A Pursuit of Happiness", Pearse Street Library, Gallery 3, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 2006

Notes of a Conversation between Anne Tallentire and Uriel Orlow

Artists who teach are required to manage the fine balance between autonomy and the demands of the academy. Uriel Orlow and Anne Tallentire who practice as artists, teachers and researchers, explore in conversations how they perceive the role of studio practice and critical writing within the context of this ‘balancing act’.
They draw upon their individual practices, experience of supervising, and working together in an undergraduate context to suggest how the parameters of academic research might be expanded through practice to create a ‘third space’ of speculation, reflection and critique – a space that opens up practice to the demand of writing itself as practice.
The conversation further considered the role of dialogue – between supervisor and researcher – as an important method to negotiate the relationship between art making and art writing and as a locus where visual arts knowledges often first enters articulation.

Some of the questions addressed were:
-The relationship between practice and theory with regards to questions of scale  and timeframe within the context of long-haul practice / short-haul PhD.
-Humanities model of research versus science model as more appropriate to practice based research (lab, studio as verb, PhD as report).
-Anxiety re producing writing that does not stand on its own academically.
-Practice that is too academised.
-Paradigms of supervision e.g. studio visits, collaboration, different forms of generative aspects of dialogue.
-PhD research within context of artwork and academia.
-How does research feed into cultural discourses at large?