Peter Greenaway: A Demonstration of Research-Based Art With an image essay by Amir Avraham

Does artistic research differ from scientific research? And if so, how? In an attempt to answer these questions, my starting position is that when it comes to artistic research, we should use 'research' to achieve a specific goal—i. e., making better art. But at the same time, when we use 'art' in 'scientific research,' the goal will always be science. By that I mean science defined as the search for truth, and art as the search for the aesthetical. I am, of course, aware that this is an extremely binary categorisation, but I do hope it gives us some didactic clues to work in the domain of art research. By introducing research-based art as a concept, I even hope to narrow the gap. In examining research-based art as a method that uses research for the purpose of making art, I use Peter Greenaway's film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) as a case study. Here, we see both the artist as a researcher and art research as research-based art—an artist-researcher who creates an independent artistic composition by using at his own discretion the accepted results of research.