Reflect is Produce: Theory as (Another) Epistemological Tool for Artistic Production

Abstract

Within university academies, the art theories have been part of the professional training of future artists. In this sense, these tehories have traditionally focused their function on teaching students to theoretically substantiate and justify their works. My own practice as a teacher of theoretical subjects in art  academies has led me to question what is the role of art theories is in relation to artistic practices; and, if this must be reduced to academic demands that tend to replicate and reproduce theoretical knowledge, but do not seek to generate their own knowledge that has emerged from the direct relationship between theory and practice. With this exercise I try to show that it is necessary to generate a theopraxis between the art theories and the artistic practices through an epistemological dialogue that rethinks the role of theory as a tool of artistic production through the dialectic between practical challenges (visual, plastic, auditory, corporeal) and the ways in which theories can help resolve them from the own artistic languages. On the other hand, I reflect on the need to distance epistemic thinking and the knowledge of art theories from the positivist perspectives of university academies, to formulate it from a situated perspective that subsumes the existence of other subjects and epistemic communities, but also affective and reflexive ones. In general, I examine the possibility that the realization of other artistic practices, in relation to an epistemic approach to theories of art, from the recognition of the position occupied by the subjects who generate knowledge (theoretical and artistic), contributes to the flowering of other discourses, other ways of making art and other ways of existing within the framework of the field of art.