Practice, research and the visual arts.

This article provides an historicisation of the concept of practice and acts as an introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Visual Art Practice, 'Histories and Theories of Practice'. Using the method of historical epistemology, it questions the claim to contemporaneity underlying the understanding of practice. This claim impels studio programmes to embrace an 'insistent presentness', as it has been called by the art historian Howard Singerman. The article's argument is that three moves validate this temporality: the falling away of medium-specificity, the elevation of the visual, and the commitment to research. This presentness derives its authority from a proposed break with the past, which is imagined as being composed of modernist antecedents in art and design education and academic traditions. The article shows how techniques of subject-formation—especially through compulsory childhood education—developed over the course of empiricism's long rise before and after the European Enlightenment. Terms popular in definitions of practice (including creativity, non-propositional knowledge and tacit knowledge) are thus historicised. The article ends by describing how each of the issue's essays reconfigure the temporality within which practice is currently sited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]