On measuring artistic research output1 Dieter Lesage

Transcription

Who’s Afraid of Artistic Research? On measuring artistic
research output1
Dieter Lesage
In the Fall of 2006, I was invited to participate in the exhibition Academy. Learning from Art,
to be shown at MuHKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp.2 The Antwerp
exhibition was part of a larger project, developed by Angelika Nollert (Siemens Arts
Program), Ylmaz Dziewior (Hamburger Kunstverein), Charles Esche and Kerstin Niemann
(Vanabbe Museum Eindhoven), Irit Rogoff (Goldsmiths College, University of London), Bart
De Baere and Dieter Roelstraete (MuHKA). A first Academy show had already been put on in
2004 by the Hamburger Kunstverein, and simultaneously with the 2006 Academy exhibition
at MuHKA, the Vanabbe Museum Eindhoven presented Academy. Learning from the
Museum.3
Although the curators’ focus for both the exhibitions in Antwerp and Eindhoven was on
learning, with my contribution to the Antwerp exhibition I wanted to draw attention to that
other task of the Academy after Bologna, which is research. For the catalogue that
accompanied the exhibition I wrote a polemical essay entitled ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a
Researcher’, in which a fictitious character criticised in a quite unacademic way the attempts
by universities and public authorities to get a grip on the emerging field of artistic research,
among others by trying to define the criteria for the evaluation of artistic research output.4
My contribution to the A.C.A.D.E.M.Y. catalogue would mark the beginning of a more
theoretical and collective approach to the problematic of artistic research as a key task of the
Academy after Bologna. Indeed, since Bologna, time is ticking for the Academy as a space of
learning, research and production, not determined by market imperatives, nor by heteronomic
academic standards. Therefore more allies and more arguments for the recognition of the
specificity of artistic research were needed.
During the preparation of the 179nth and last issue of the Belgian media magazine AS, which
conveniently borrowed its title from my short contribution to the A.C.A.D.E.M.Y. catalogue,
and which I realised in cooperation with Kathrin Busch, I had the opportunity to meet a great
number of highly respected ‘allies’ all over Europe, who each in his or her own way,
sometimes polemical, sometimes ‘academic’, sometimes poetic, sometimes scientific,
sometimes philosophical, sometimes pragmatic, developed a multitude of arguments for the
recognition of the specificity of artistic research.5 These meetings with fellow-minded
European artists, writers, curators, critics, sociologists, philosophers, etc., took the form of
two conferences, one at a small, but ambitious German university, another at a big, and
famous Austrian art academy, as well as of an exhibition and a lecture series in the Austrian
capital.
http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n2/lesage.html
ART&RESEARCH: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods. Volume 2. No. 2. Spring 2009
Indeed, with Kathrin Busch, philosopher and professor at the Institut für Kulturtheorie of the
Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, I organised a conference on Verflechtungen zwischen
künstlerischer und kulturwissenschaftlicher Forschung on 11-12 May 2007 at the Leuphana
Universität Lüneburg, during my stay at this university as a Visiting Professor in the summer
semester 2007, with a Eurolecture grant from the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F.V.S. (Hamburg).
To this conference we invited theoreticians with well-known positions on artistic research,
such as Elke Bippus, Sabeth Buchmann and Mika Hannula, but also Eva Meyer and Eran
Schaerf, two artists whose artistic practice we would describe as artistic research, as well as
Hans-Christian Dany, an artist whom we thought might have a very different take on the
emerging discourse on artistic research. All their lectures at the conference in Lüneburg, as
well as Kathrin Busch’s and my own contribution to it, entitled ‘Who’s Afraid of Artistic
Research?’ are published in the volume of AS. The reader of the AS#179 volume may
appreciate, as much as ‘we’ did, the degree to which ‘the artists’ at the Lüneburg conference,
refused to speak in a way one might have expected in an ‘academic setting’ such as a
conference at a university, and maybe, for that very reason, have addressed the central
question regarding the specificity of artistic research much more poignantly than ‘we’,
‘theoreticians’, probably did. At the Lüneburg conference, there was a tangible tension
between those who practise artistic research, but are rather skeptical about the development of
a meta-discourse on that practice, and those who, as theoreticians or as critics, reflect on
practices of artistic research. One of the characteristics of the emerging discourse on artistic
research that seems to alienate some artists - even if their own practice is often described by
critics as a form of artistic research - is that the discourse on artistic research tends to be very
much embedded, either in a critical, deconstructive or constructive way, in the contemporary
debate on the reform of higher art education in general, and of the Academies in particular.
And it should be clear that most artists have a love-hate relationship with the Academy. If one
isn’t so sure whether the Academy should exist at all, it is difficult to feel very passionate
about a discussion on its reform. This tension in itself deserves proper attention in all further
reflections on artistic research.
Nevertheless, the second conference on Artistic Research and the Bologna Process, which I
had the pleasure to organise with Prof. Sabeth Buchmann at the Academy of Fine Arts in
Vienna on 1 June 2007, turned out to be a lively and engaged debate on reform. Here all the
participants felt very concerned about the impact of the Bologna Process on the Academy.
The reason for this was the particular setting of the conference itself. The conference seemed
to be a long-awaited event in the life of one of Europe’s biggest, most important and
influential Academies. Students took it as a brilliant occasion to discuss the Bologna Process
with Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, the newly re-elected Rector of the Academy, and some of the
Viennese Academy’s many well-known professors, such as Marion von Osten, Felicitas
Thun-Hohenstein, Elisabeth von Samsonow, Diedrich Diederichsen, Christian Kravagna and
of course Sabeth Buchmann, who diligently moderated the delicate debates. Other
participants at the conference in Vienna were Beatrice von Bismarck, Hedwig Saxenhuber,
Ina Wudtke, Ulf Wuggenig, Klaas Tindemans and myself. Most of the statements that have
been presented at this conference in Vienna are equally to be found in the AS reader. At the
Vienna conference, Marion von Osten presented a lecture on a future project. In this reader
however, she is represented by a documentation of one of her former projects,
<reformpause>, which she realised in cooperation with the Kunstraum at the Universität
Lüneburg in 2006, and which reflected very specifically on the Bologna Process.
Who!s Afraid of Artistic Research? On measuring artistic research output
2
As if there were not enough exhibitions, during the summer of 2007, we decided to put up a
little show ourselves. The exhibition A Portrait of the Artist as a Researcher (12 July – 26
August 2007), which Ina Wudtke and I curated at the Freiraum, quartier21/MQ in Vienna,
questioned the ideology of the Bologna Process. On the one hand, it showed works that are
the result of artistic research, on the other hand these works commented, circled around or
criticised the discourse on ‘mobility’ and 'flexibility’ that is characteristic of the Bologna
Process. In his film Capsular, Herman Asselberghs addresses the question how much
mobility Europe effectively supports. In Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in Morocco, he filmed the
European wall which is supposed to stop African immigrants. The two architects of Office,
Kersten Geers and David Van Severen, too, questioned the ‘state of exception’, exemplified
by Ceuta. Their work - such as their plans for the new capital of South-Korea – is
characterised by a critical reflection on the political circumstances of the architectural plan.
The questionable philosophy of mobility was the theme of two German artists. The work of
Annette Wehrmann reflected the use of public space in the MuseumsQuartier in Vienna. As in
many other places in the western world, there are some ‘artist’s studios’ in the
MuseumsQuartier. ‘Artist’s studios’ often correspond with a concept of artistic support,
which sees the artist as a hypermobile nomad, who changes constantly between places and
spaces. The film A Portrait of the Artist as a Worker (rmx.) of the Berlin artist Ina Wudtke,
aka DJ T-INA, is an ironic self-presentation as mobile and flexible artist, moving constantly
between cities and projects. In our flexible ‘project society’, we change so often between our
different professional identities, that every rigid identity dissolves and it becomes unclear,
what criteria quality control agencies should check. Our society is not only a ‘society of
control’, as Foucault wrote. It is a ‘quality control society’. ‘Self evaluation’ – universities
and academies know this quite well — is as much an instrument of this ‘society of control’ as
surveillance cameras. With the work Output (rmx.) I had the ‘output’ of my research
activities, all my publications, photographed. In this way, the publication list, one of the most
well-known instruments of academic control, became a work of art, and yet another (artistic)
publication. This volume also contains visual essays by Ina Wudtke and Herman Asselberghs,
which document their works in this exhibition, as well as contributions by Stephan Dillemuth
and Jan De Pauw, who in July 2007 presented lectures during the exhibition.
This symposium Who is Afraid of Artistic Research? comes at a time when continental
European higher education undergoes a far-reaching transformation. This transformation
process, announced by the Sorbonne Joint Declaration of the Ministers of Higher Education
of France, Italy, Germany and the UK in Paris on May 25th 1998, and launched by the Joint
Declaration of European Ministers of Higher Education in Bologna on 19 June 1999, has been
dubbed ‘the Bologna Process’.6 Every two years European Ministers of Higher Education
gather to establish the progress made by the Bologna Process, to determine additional goals of
the Process, to impose accellerations on the Process and to welcome new countries who join
the Process.7 The actual number of countries participating in the Bologna Process is now 46.8
The Bologna Process is supposed to lead to the establishment of a European Higher Education
Area in 2010, which should, in accordance with the Lisbon Strategy, contribute to establish
the European Union as the world’s biggest knowledge economy from that same year on.
‘Innovation’, ‘creativity’ and ‘research’ are some of the buzz words that figure in every report
on the progress made towards that goal. After Prague (in 2001), Berlin (in 2003) and Bergen
(in 2005), where at each time the Ministers issued a Communiqué, the last meeting of the
Bologna Follow-Up Group, which also includes the European Commission and a number of
organisations with consultative member status, was held in London, on 17-18 May 2007.9
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If conforming to certain academic standards, study courses at European higher education
institutions will be accredited to deliver academic bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees and
doctor’s degrees.10 European higher arts education too was invited, obliged or forced to take
part in this procedure. In many European countries and regions, higher arts education
committed itself to implement the Bologna Process, willingly or unwillingly. As a
consequence, since a few years, the obligation to become ‘academic’ is what all the fuss in an
important part of European higher arts education is about. As the classic representative
institution of higher arts education has often been called an ‘academy’, the question became
how to understand the obligation that academies should become academic. By ‘academies’ I
will refer to all institutions of higher arts education, whether they teach visual or fine arts or
film or drama or music, and whether they are indeed called ‘academy’ or not. Particularly
confusing for these ‘academies’ was that many of them had precisely engaged in pedagogical
efforts to assure that learning and teaching at ‘academies’ would become less ‘academic’ than
it used to be. Whereas at universities, the adjective ‘academic’ sounds like a generic quality
label, at academies ‘academic’ had already for quite some time become an insult, a signifier
of a lack of artistic quality. And so it happened that, at the very moment that many European
academies had become very anxious not to teach their students to produce ‘academic art’,
they were told they had to ‘academize’ in order to get accreditations for their artistic study
courses.
Of course, this is not the only reason why the academization process launched by the Bologna
Declaration and its various national and regional implementations have met with a great
variety of resistances and critiques I cannot thoroughly address at this time. Obviously, many
important critics, such as Stephan Dillemuth, already addressed in a rigorous way the issue of
‘Bologna’’s hidden and not too hidden neo-liberal agenda.11 Although in postwar Italian
political history, Bologna had been notorious as a bastion of communism, in more recent
European political history, ‘Bologna’ became the signifier par excellence of the imposition of
a neo-liberal agenda in educational matters. As a reply, ever since its meeting in Prague in
2001, the Bologna Follow-Up Group has at least been paying lip-service to this criticism both
by stressing the social dimensions of higher education and acknowledging the public
authorities’ responsibility for higher education.
In my contribution to the reader A Portrait of the Artist as a Researcher, I develop the
hypothesis that the Bologna Process, in a way that is completely unintential, may eventually
contribute to the end of the hegemony of the natural sciences in the field of research. What we
are witnessing today, at least in those regions and countries where institutions of higher arts
education, willingly or unwillingly, committed themselves to take part in the Bologna
Process, is the beginning of a fierce battle for the definition of research. In many German
Länder, where higher arts education, partly due to the efficient opposition by the
‘Rektorenkonferenz der deutschen Kunsthochschulen’ was allowed not to engage in the
Bologna Process, this battle is probably only postponed.12 Indeed, the exemption from the
obligation to organise bachelor’s and master’s degrees in an internationally compatible way
doesn’t necessarily imply the exemption from the obligation to invest in research.
A brief outline of the history of this battle for the definition of research goes as follows. One
of the most important maxims accompanying the various national and regional
implementations of the Bologna Process is the idea that teaching in higher education should
be based on research. As a logical consequence of this ‘research maxim’, in higher arts
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education too, teaching in the arts should be based on research. As an interpretation of this
logical consequence of the research maxim, institutions of higher arts education have put
forward the idea that teaching in higher arts education should be based on artistic research.
With the growing formation of a discourse on artistic research, the universities, who claim a
monopoly on the definition of research, were confronted with an attack on their hegemony in
research matters. More precisely, the attack on the university’s hegemony in research matters
is an attack on the internal hegemony of the natural sciences within the university.
As soon as a hegemony is under attack, one will witness fear among those who cherish their
hegemony. As a hegemony is always the product of an alliance between different groups, the
answer to the question “who’s afraid of artistic research?” will have to describe those
different groups and the way in which their hegemonic alliance is constructed. As an eventual
counter-hegemony will also be based on an alternative alliance between different groups, one
could then try to describe what kind of alliances may have counterhegemonic potential. It is
my hypothesis that the concept of artistic research and the formation of a discourse on artistic
research is feared both by groups within the academy and the arts world on the one hand, and
by groups within the university and the scientific world on the other hand. It goes without
saying that, where the opposition between academies and universities no longer makes any
sense, either because some academies have become universities – as is the case in Hungary
and Austria – or because some academies have been integrated into universities – as is the
case in the UK – fear of artistic research hasn’t necessarily disappeared.
First of all, the obligation for teaching in higher education in general — and thus also in
higher arts education — to be based on research, has been at first understood by many as the
obligation for academies to engage in scientific research. Although some may have genuinely
misunderstood the sense of the obligation to engage in research — given indeed the
hegemony of the natural sciences regarding the definition of research —, it is my hypothesis
that others deliberately (mis)understand the obligation for academies to do research as the
obligation to do scientific research because they are actually afraid of... artistic research. The
stubborn rhetorical identification of ‘research’ with ‘scientific research’ allows them to get rid
of every form of research within the academy. Art is different from science, artists are not
trained as scientists, nor should they be trained as scientists, and therefore the obligation for
art academies to engage in research makes no sense. Among the proponents of this position
one may find most of those who think of art as the product of genius, some of those who think
of the arts as a set of technical skills, as well as some of those who think of the arts as a
combination of genius and technical skills.
However, within institutions of higher arts education which committed themselves to the
Bologna Process, some have been defending the position that science has not the monopoly of
research, that art too can be described as having research as an important component and that
the commitment to the Bologna Process for academies implies a commitment to the
development of artistic research, not scientific research. The notion of artistic research
implies that artistic practice can be described in a way more or less analogous to scientific
research. An artistic project, then, begins with the formulation, in a certain context, of an
artistic problem, which necessitates an investigation, both artistic and topical, into a certain
problematic, which may or may not lead to an artwork, intervention, performance or
statement, with which the artist positions himself/herself with regard to the initial artistic
problem and its context.
5
Whatever its merits may be for an attempt to argue for a pluralist concept of research, this
analogy argument should be handled with care. The argument that artistic research is
analogous to scientific research has already prompted some to the idea that, in this case, one
should measure the artistic research output of an academy in a way analogous to the way in
which the scientific research output of a university is measured. Academies, then, could be
asked not only to count their artistic publications, but also to dress up a categorisation of
different types of artistic publications, categories which should be attributed different weights,
according to their importance for the artistic research community, analogous to the way in
which scientific publications are valued according to whether they are published in A, B or C
journals. Such a development would be as problematic for artistic research, as it is already for
quite some time for the humanities in general and the cultural studies in particular.
Insofar as the official recognition of artistic research will be made to depend on the
acceptance by artistic researchers of outrageous criteria of research output evaluation, dressed
up in analogy to scientific research output criteria which seem to suit the natural sciences, but
not the humanities, artistic researchers in search for the recognition of a pluralist concept of
research that would include artistic research as well may find allies among their colleagues
working in the field of the humanities in general and cultural studies in particular, many of
whom also struggle with reductionist criteria of output evaluation. Many researchers in the
humanities in general and in cultural studies in particular contest the idea that articles in
international, peer-reviewed academic journals are to be considered as the most important
academic publication format, as is the case in the natural sciences. Representatives of the
natural sciences tend to impose the view that books, op-eds, articles or critiques in
newspapers, essays in journals of a more general character, are to be considered of almost no
academic value, although, for instance, many of the most important philosophers of the last
decades, on which hundreds, if not thousands of articles in international, peer-reviewed
academic journals have been published, haven’t published themselves almost anything in
international, peer-reviewed academic journals at all. As a matter of fact, within the scientific
community itself, the normative character of ‘double blind peer review’ has already been
under attack for many years. A number of high-profile scientific journals, such as the British
Medical Journal, have made the decision, motivated by scientific studies, to abandon blind
peer review in favor of open review, where the name of the referee is known to the author of
the article under review.13 Today, it seems a scientifically proven fact that the quality of open
review is as good as the quality of blind review.14
Citation analysis as a criterion to measure research output, is equally considered by many in
the scientific community as a very flawed procedure to measure research output. Ever since
Eugene Garfield published the first Science Citation Index in 1964, it has been a very
controversial instrument, the eventual misuses of which were recognized from the very
beginning by leading scientists, such as Nobel Prize winner Joshua Lederberg. Lederberg,
while promoting it as a tool for research, fiercely rejected it as a tool for measuring research
output.15 Not only are all known citation indexes far from complete, they are also terribly
biased in favor of articles and against books. To that one might add that the Science Citation
Index and the other citation indexes are products sold by Thomson, a media corporation
which also owns a lot of academic journals. To me, this sounds very much like a conflict of
interests. Nevertheless many research managers continue to consider citation analysis, based
on the use of Thomson’s citation indexes who enjoy an absolute commercial monopoly, as a
useful tool to measure research output. In discussions on measuring artistic research output, it
is often suggested that academies should invent ‘analogous’ tools for measuring artistic
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research output. And thus it happens that some people are beginning to dream of an Art
Citation Index, while others are talking about the need to classify artistic venues in the same
way as academic journals are classified according to their ‘impact factor’. It might not take
long before somebody invents the new science of ‘artometrics’.
The worst thing that could happen to the emerging field of artistic research is that
international, peer-reviewed journals of artistic research, such as this venerable Art &
Research, would become the only academically accepted forms of artistic research output.
Journals for artistic research which intend to promote the emerging field of artistic research
and to discuss all the questions that relate to this emergence are of course perfectly legitimate,
but it would be wrong to restrict the notion of artistic research output to publications in these
journals. I believe these journals should be very careful in thinking how they position
themselves in respect to academic journals and all the rituals that characterise them, and be
very precise about the way in which they intend to be different from those journals. Rather
than imitate the academic boosterism of the natural sciences, the emerging field of artistic
research should open itself up to those within the humanities and cultural studies who are in
desperate need of allies for the recognition of other types of research output than the classic
article in the international peer-reviewed journal. An exhibition, for instance, should also be
recognized and valued as a possible research output. In any case, this is obviously the position
defended by academies newly committed to research. Insofar as academies defend a pluralist
concept of research, including artistic research, and a pluralist concept of research output,
including exhibitions, performances, artworks, artistic interventions, etc., it is clear that
academies are potential allies of researchers in the cultural studies who prefer academically
unconventional formats for the presentation of their research.
Secondly, the obligation for teaching in higher education in general — and thus also in higher
arts education — to be based on research, has been understood by some as the obligation to
have more theory in the curricula of the study courses at the academy, and to have less
practice. This may be seen as a variation of the first position. However, its focus is mainly on
the distribution of courses, — and thus also of teaching jobs — between theoreticians and
artists within the arts academy. The proponents of this position tend to see a strong opposition
between theory and practice, expressed by the idea that research is not the responsibility of
the artist, but of the theoretician. This position allows for different variations. There are the
very few who believe there is no place whatsoever for theoreticians at an arts academy. There
are those who believe that a limited dose of theory in an arts academy curriculum is a
necessary evil. There are those who think there should be a right balance between some
theory and much more practice. And among these one will find those who appreciate that
their academy has some theoreticians, involved in research, so that the academy is safe when
it comes to the question whether the academy is doing any research at all. These are the
people who believe that the academy needs some theoreticians because the authorities
nowadays always ask academies if they are doing any research. These proponents don’t
understand (yet) that research is a responsibility of academies to be shared both by
theoreticians and artists, and that it can take the form of common projects with mixed
methodologies or of individual projects with distinct methodologies.
The proponents of a manicheistic vision on the relationship between theory and art practice
also feel very uncomfortable with hybrid figures, such as artists who also develop theories, or
theorists with an arts practice. As far as the concept of artistic research precisely allows for a
valorisation of these figures of artistic hybridity, the concept of artistic research is feared by
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those who would like to keep a clearcut division of academic labor between artists and
theorists. As far as they themselves are artists without any interest for theory, they tend to
prefer not only other artists without any interest for theory, but they also tend to prefer hard
core scientists without any interest in artistic practice that would go beyond the naive
admiration for the genius of the painter, rather than the philosophers, sociologists and other
KulturwissenschaftlerInnen, who constantly embarrass the artistic geniuses with their
discursive contributions to artistic projects, which seem to contest implicitly or explicitly the
aesthetics to which they themselves adhere to.
Institutionally, the implementation of the Bologna Process for higher arts education took very
different forms. In some countries, certain academies would receive the status of university. It
would allow them to deliver doctor’s degrees in the arts. In other countries, academies were
forced to become part of universities. And in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, the arts
academies which had already been obliged to become a department of ‘hogescholen’, are now
participating in a process whereby these ‘hogescholen’ are obliged to become part of an
association with a university. Within this construction, universities claimed the right to deliver
the doctoral degree in the arts, because they alone have a long-standing experience of
delivering doctoral degrees. However, this unquestionable experience of universities in
delivering doctoral degrees is coupled with a questionable inexperience in delivering degrees
in the arts. The format of the new doctorate in the arts has been the subject of heated
discussions between universities and academies. Although universities did pay attention to the
demand that the new doctorate in the arts should respect the specificity of an artistic
education, in that they accepted the idea that artists present a portfolio of their work as a
doctorate, universities fiercely defended the idea that a doctorate in the arts would be
inconceivable without a written supplement. As a result, the format of the new doctorate in
the arts often requires both an artistic portfolio and a written supplement. The insistence of
universities on the obligation of a written supplement seems to demonstrate the university’s
lack of confidence either in the capacity of the arts to speak in a meaningful, complex and
critical way in a medium of their choosing, or in the university’s own capacity to make sound
judgments on the meaning, complexity and criticality of artistic output as such. What might
happen now is that juries will mainly base their judgment on a reading of the written
supplement, because it complies with a long-standing format of the doctorate, as if it were the
doctorate itself, while at the same time being tempted to consider the artistic portfolio merely
as a supplementary illustration. Contrary to this, the evaluation of a doctorate in the arts
should focus on the capacity of the doctoral student to speak in the medium of his or her
choice. And if this medium is film, or video, or painting, or sculpture, or sound, or ‘new’, or if
the doctoral student wants to mix media, it will obviously require from a jury other ways of
reading, interpretation and discussion, than those required by an academic text. To impose a
medium on the artist is to fail to recognize the artist as an artist. An artist who wants to obtain
a doctorate in the arts should be given the academic freedom to choose his or her own
medium. Even then it would still be possible that he or she chooses text as the most
appropriate medium for his or her artistic purposes. Therefore universities should prepare
themselves for the moment that a writer will present a novel as a doctorate. I believe they
aren’t. According to the format of the doctorate in the arts, the writer will be asked to
supplement his novel with a text. However, would one seriously want a writer who presents a
novel as a doctorate in the arts to supply a written supplement? What should that written
supplement say?
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The formation of a discourse on artistic research, the multiple formats for the presentation of
research which are made acceptable through this discourse, the networks of educational and
artistic institutions that disseminate this discourse, the alliances they may begin to form with
sections and representatives of the humanities in general and the cultural studies or cultural
studies in particular at universities, all this could eventually provoke the end of the hegemony
of the natural sciences, which is apparent in the dominance of its extremely reductionist
valorisation of research output, on which the distribution of research funding heavily relies. If,
as an unintended side-effect, thanks to the strategic alliances between researchers in the arts
and researchers in cultural studies, the Bologna Process destroys the hegemony of the natural
sciences, then we will have had one good reason to appreciate the Bologna Process, namely
that it has the strange capacity to defeat itself.
1
A version of this lecture was delivered at Verflechtungen zwischen künstlerischer und kulturwissenschaftlicher
Forschung, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, 11-12 May 2007
2
Academy. Learning from Art, September 15 November 26, 2006, MuHKA, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst
Antwerpen, Belgium, http://www.muhka.be
3
Academy. Learning from the Museum, September 16 November 26, 2006
Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, info@vanabbemuseum.nl
4
See Dieter Lesage, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Researcher’, in Angelika Nollert, Irit Rogoff, Bart De Baere,
Yilmaz Dziewior, Charles Esche, Kerstin Niemann, Dieter Roelstraete, A.C.A.D.E.M.Y. (Frankfurt am Main:
Revolver Verlag, 2006), p. 220-222.
5
Kathrin Busch and Dieter Lesage (eds.), A Portrait of the Artist as a Researcher. The Academy and the
Bologna Process, (AS#179) (Antwerp: MuHKA, 2007).
6
All official European documents related to the Bologna Process until May 2005 can be downloaded from:
http://www.bologna-bergen.2005.no.
7
In order to be accepted as a participating country in the Bologna Process, nation states don’t have to be a
Member state of the European Union. According to the Berlin Communiqué of 19 September 2003, all European
countries who signed the European Cultural Convention and who accept the basic premises of the Bologna
Declaration and strive to implement the Process on their national level, can become participating countries in the
Bologna Process. The actual number of participating countries in the Bologna Process is 46. Three more
countries who signed the European Cultural Convention are not (yet) participating in the Bologna Process: San
Marino, Belarus, and Monaco. San Marino and Monaco may definitely not be interested for lack of higher
education institutions. So one may expect that only one more country may join the Bologna Process in the next
few years, and that is Belarus. Although this is quite unsure, as it is a ‘non-aligned country’, the only one
geographically situated in Europe.
8
All participating countries in the Bologna Process are supposed to do so of their own accord. Unlike an
Intergovernmental Treaty, the Bologna Declaration is not a legally binding document. What drives the whole
process aren’t European sanctions, but what some have called “international peer pressure”.
9
On 18 May 2007, the Bologna Follow-Up Group issued its so-called ‘London Communiqué’. ‘Mobility’,
‘employability’, ‘compatibility’, ‘comparability’, ‘flexibility’ are some of the buzz words that figure prominently
in this ‘London Communiqué’. Interestingly enough, one should add that the London Communiqué announced
that the next meeting of the Bologna Follow Up Group will be held in Louvain-la-Neuve and in Louvain, in
April 2009. This meeting of what one could be tempted to call the E46 could be the right time to finally voice
some protest against the more problematic aspects of the Bologna Process.
10
The Berlin Communiqué of the Ministers of Education, on 19 September 2003, included for the first time the
third cycle or doctorate in the Bologna Process, whereas the ‘Bologna Declaration’ of 19 June 1999 only referred
to the first two cycles.
11
Stephan Dillemuth, ‘Old and New Monsters. The Academy and the Corporate Public’, in annette hollywood
and Barbara Wille (eds.), Who is afraid of Master of Arts? (Berlin: Internationale Gesellschaft der Bildenden
Künste, 2007), p. 73-84. A shorter English version of this text is published in AS #179.
12
Karin Stempel, ‘Zum Stand der Dinge’, in hollywood & Wille (eds.), Who is afraid of Master of Arts?, pp. 2332.
13
For a motivation of this change in editorial policy of the British Medical Journal: Richard Smith, ‘Opening up
BMJ peer review. A beginning that should lead to complete transparancy’, British Medical Journal, vol. 318, 2
January 1999, pp. 4-5.
9
14
Sandra Goldbeck-Wood, ‘Evidence on peer review – scientific quality control or smokescreen?’, British
Medical Journal, vol. 318, 2 January 1999, pp. 44-45. On this issue, see also: Susan Van Rooyen, Fiona Godlee,
Stephan Evans, Nick Black, Richard Smith, ‘Effect of open peer review on quality of reviews and on reviewers’
recommendations: a randomised trial’, British Medical Journal, vol. 318, 2 January 1999, pp. 23-27.
15
On the history of the Science Citation Index and of scientometrics, see the excellent PhD thesis by Paul
Wouters,
The
Citation
Culture,
University
of
Amsterdam,
1999.
http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/wouters/wouters.pdf
10
6
ARTISTIC
RESEARCH AND
ACADEMIA:
AN UNEASY
RELATIONSHIP
Henk Borgdorff
82
83
ÅRSBOK KONSTNÄRLIG FoU 2008
REFLECTIVE
PRODUCTIVE
UNEASE
AGITATION
RADICAL REALISM
NON-CONCEPTUAL
NON-DISCURSIVE
QUASI-UNIVERSALISTIC
ISOLATION
RESEARCH
SUPERFICIAL
INTELLECTUAL LIFE
Artistic research and academia1
There is something uneasy about the relationship
between ‘artistic research’ and the academic
world. This has led some people largely to exclude
artistic research from the realm of higher education and research and assign it, instead, to art
institutions that serve art practice directly — such
as funding bodies, postgraduate artists’ laboratories or exhibition venues. It has prompted others
to work from within to expand or redefine the
prevailing conception of academic or scientific
research from the perspective of artistic research.
Both these strategic and political agendas have
their merits, but also their shortcomings.
In the former strategy, artistic research is in
danger of becoming isolated from the settings in
which society has institutionalised thinking,
reflection and research, in particular the universities. Under a guise of artistic nonconformity
and sovereignty, some people put up resistance
to the supposed disciplining frameworks of higher
education and research. Let us not get into arguing about whether the word ‘research’ can justifiably be used here, or whether the idiosyncratic
undertakings and appropriations that are so peculiar to the artistic quest might better be called
explorations and discoveries. It is not uncommon
to see superficial, theory-meagre borrowings from
what happens to be on offer in intellectual life
being put to use in artistic production.
In principle, of course, there is nothing wrong
with that. After all, much is permissible in the
context of artistic discovery that would not withstand the test of academic justification (the same
can, incidentally, be said of mainstream research
as well). Yet the logic and the internal dynamics
of art practice do, in fact, differ from those of most
academic disciplines — which at least keep up the
pretension that explorations, findings and insights
need to be somehow connected to theoretical justification or further thought.
The question that needs addressing now is
whether this type of ‘research’ (whatever one may
think of it otherwise) does not actually prosper
best in educational settings — in this case, institutions of higher education in the arts. The insistence with which some institutes claiming to conduct artistic research are positioning themselves
85
practices and teaching practices at the academies.
A fine example of such productive alliances may
be witnessed in the research fellowship programmes now operating in the uk and in Norway. A modest start has been made in the Netherlands, too, by enabling artists to hold research
posts in arts institutes.2
THE SECOND STRATEGY of positioning artistic
research in academia is similarly problematic.
Hypothetically, the introduction of artistic research into an academic environment could
broaden and enrich our conception of what academic or scientific research truly is.3 On the face
of it, universities would potentially benefit from
the methods and perspectives characteristic of
artistic research. To give an example, university
research traditions as a rule devote little attention to the haphazard manner in which research
paths are navigated and research results actually
come about. In terms of both methodology and
knowledge dynamics, the focus on the creative
process that is characteristic of research in the
arts, as well as the characteristic linkage and interpenetration of artistic practice and theoretical
reflection, of doing and thinking, would be a valuable asset to universities. Furthermore, in artistic ‘knowledge production’, the emphasis lies on
non-discursive modes of world disclosure embodied in concrete artefacts. Hence, in an epistemological sense as well, artistic research would provide a benefit, or even a correction to what many
people regard as the doings and dealings in mainstream science and research.
But this positioning of artistic research also has
its shortcomings. By this I am not referring to the
understandable resistance in certain academic circles (interestingly enough, notably in disciplines
such as art history) to the introduction of practices and mores that, at first glance, violate the
received forms of scholarship and academic craftwork. It might take some getting used to for certain people, but the history of science shows that
new research objects, methods and claims always
meet resistance. One just needs to steer a middle
course between assimilating with what is already
there and stressing one’s own particularity. In this
respect, the current institutional advance of artistic research does not differ in essence from the rise
of disciplines like sociology, the technological sciences or, more recently, cultural studies.
No, in referring to the shortcomings of university artistic research I mean something more
fundamental — a fundamental deficiency that
seems immanent in the relationship between art
and the university. In a certain sense, this is even
true of the relationship between artistic research
and higher education as a whole, hence including institutions of arts education. It is a deficit in
the relationship between the artistic and the academic. Thus, it almost seems as if the isolationists I was criticising earlier will turn out to be
right after all.
This deficit is best described as a certain unease,
a restlessness, an agitation that arises because the
contingent perspectives offered by artistic research practice are rather at odds with the quasiuniversalistic knowledge claims of the academy,
and even seem irreconcilable with them. Or are
they? This is the question I want to address here.
Practice-based doctoral programme in music
86
outside the sphere of education (often driven by
an unfounded, hyped-up Bolognaphobia) leads
one to suspect that more is at play than mere
opportunistic protectionism. The vehement resistance to the ‘education system’ and ‘academisation’ seems also to be fuelled by a limited understanding of what higher education in the arts
really is, or could be.
This educational field does have trouble constantly reinventing itself in confrontation with
the state of the art in practice; ‘academism’ is
always a lurking danger. But at the same time,
higher education in the arts is — or ought to be —
the place where the cultural past meets current
practice, and the future is prepared; questions are
asked that have no answers yet; and respect for
the continuously reassessed wealth of cultural tradition joins with a keen sense of the urgent and
with the exploration of the uncharted.
Artistic research benefits when carried out in
such a context. Arts education also — fully consistent with Humboldtian ideals — benefits from
the inspiration and impulses it receives from
developments in artistic research practices. One
already distinguishing feature of arts education
(especially compared with what is customary
inmost of the higher education system) is its inhouse integration of training with practice, as
artists make their current work into part of the
educational subject-matter. These bonds with art
practice can be tightened further (a constant
need) by creating links between artists’ research
Since 2002, I have been involved in developing
and implementing docARTES, a practice-based
doctoral programme in music. It is a cooperative
arrangement involving the Conservatory of Amsterdam, the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague
and Leiden University (in the Netherlands) and
the ku Leuven Association and Orpheus Institute,
Ghent (in Belgium).4 The doctoral programme is
designed for musicians, both composers and instrumentalists, whose research combines artistic
practice with theoretical reflection, and whose
artistic and theoretical research results are intended as a contribution both to art practice itself
and to the discourse about it.
In developing the programme, we have made
use of insights developed elsewhere in this field.
Reports published by the uk Council for Graduate Education5 on practice-based doctorates in the
creative and performing arts and design were particularly helpful to us as we designed the research
environment, put together the programme and
constructed the curriculum, determined the admission and assessment procedures, and arranged
for the students’ supervision and guidance.
87
88
As it now operates, the programme starts with
a two-year research training course as part of a
pathway to the doctorate lasting four to six years.
Meeting ten times a year in monthly sessions of
two to three days, the students report on their
work in progress and attend colloquia with guest
artists and/or researchers. Seminars on the philosophy of science and artistic research and the
aesthetics of music are held, and there is a handson seminar on research in and through music.
Students also learn how to collect data and to present and document their research. The programme is now in its fifth year, and 20 students
are enrolled. The first degrees should be awarded
in 2008.
One matter that requires constant attention is
the doctoral candidates’ lack of academic training,
particularly in writing skills. As a rule, their practice-based masters courses at the music colleges
have prepared them inadequately for doing
research. This problem is linked to a more general issue I would like to turn to now: the amount
and kind of reflection that ought to be part of a
practice-based doctoral course. How much attention should be devoted to ‘theory’? And what do
we mean by ‘theory’? What kind of theoretical
reflection should we expect from researching
artists? And how does that relate to their artistic
practice?
At a meeting of the European midas (Music
Institutions with Doctoral Arts Studies) network
in Tallinn in May 2006, a central topic was ‘How
much theory can practice bear?’ One participant
remarked, provocatively, ‘We’re not trying to
train the students as philosophers and make them
into some kind of Derrida, are we?’ We teach
artist researchers the apa rules for reference lists,
footnotes and other style elements. We teach
them to write and present academic papers. We
introduce them to the standards of systematic
research and the principles of philosophy of science. But could we be starting at the wrong end?
And aren’t we asking too much of our students?
Are they meant to develop into fully-fledged
scholars, as well as reflective artists?
At the root of these continuing concerns are
questions that seem inextricably bound up with
the practice of artistic research — the issue of discursivity, the role and meaning of language in
research; and the issue of the relationship between
theory and practice. Before I discuss these further, let me highlight two recent occurrences that
illustrate these issues.
Text and theory
In October 2007, the Arts and Humanities
Research Council (ahrc) in the uk launched a
new research programme called ‘Beyond Text’.
This five-year, £5.5-million scheme provides
funding for research projects whose primary focus
is on visual communication, sensory perception,
orality and material culture. The programme
bears the subtitle Performances, Images, Sounds,
Objects. Here, it seems, we have an initiative
‘The kind of reflection that artistic
research is, the contingent perspectives it delivers, its performative power and the realism it
brings to bear — all these make
artistic research into a distinctive
instrument that will not readily
conform to the established mores
and conventions in the more
traditional academic world.’
89
and symposia, but wonder if those within the old
parip communities might feed in? Particularly
in the rae run-up and following the summer’s
ahrc consultation “Beyond Text” it is a little
surprising to see that people feel as though there
is still a significant battle to be won to convince
the academy of its validity.’7
I am unsure how to read this, but one thing is
clear: people (the parip community) think
either that all the work of convincing academia of
the validity of practice-based research in the arts
has already been done (by them?) and the battle
is now won, or that the battle has been lost. Either
way, the sense of unease — the uneasy tension
between artistic research and the academy — has
seemingly vanished. Peace has been restored, and
the feeling of dissonance overcome.
SECOND OCCURRENCE. Also in October 2007.
We organised a two-day international conference
in Amsterdam entitled ‘The Third Cycle: Artistic Research after Bologna’.8 During a panel
debate, one of the conference speakers, Johan
Haarberg, founder of the Norwegian Programme
for Research Fellowships in the Arts, was challenged to explain the relationship between theory and practice in the programme. ‘No theory!’
was his provocative assertion. ‘Reflection? Yes.
Some degree of contextualisation can be expected.
But “theory”? No!’
The central issue addressed at the Amsterdam
conference was whether and how research
opportunities for artists could be created in the
Netherlands after the masters degree. One of the
talks at the conference described the creation of
a Graduate School at the Berlin University of the
Arts (UdK Berlin), which offers a post-masters
course. Neither the Berlin third-cycle course for
artists nor the Norwegian programme awards a
doctorate (PhD). At the Berlin graduate school,
that degree is reserved for more traditional disciplines like art history or music education. Practice-based research by artists such as musicians is
not eligible for recognition as PhD research. This,
of course, reconfirms once more the separation
of theory from practice, and of research on the
arts from research in and through the arts. Effectively, artistic research is not regarded here as
‘real’ research (‘Forschung’), or is seen as a lesser
form of it. The Norwegian programme, in contrast, views artistic research as a fully-fledged,
legitimate type of research at the third-cycle level.9
The programme is independent of university
frameworks and sustained by the arts colleges.
Although it does not culminate in a doctoral
degree (PhD), it is nonetheless deemed by the
state to be of equal standing. The distinguishing
feature of the Norwegian research fellowship programme is that it is founded not on the criteria
for third-cycle research as set by the academic
world, but on the question of what artists, as
‘reflective practitioners’, need for successful
research practice. And the answer? Well, to start
with, no theory…
Research and knowledge
What do these two illustrations tell us? To begin
with, we can at least gather from them that a
debate is still in progress about the issues of discursivity and the relation between theory and
practice — topics that generate a certain apprehensiveness and agitation both inside academia
and outside it, in the world of art. Is this merely a
temporary feeling of nervousness and unease that
will dissipate once the struggle is over? That is,
will it go away as soon as practice-based research
in the arts — research in and through art practice
— has become a well-respected academic instance
of an ‘original investigation undertaken to gain
knowledge and understanding’?10 No, in my view
there are good reasons to maintain that we are not
dealing here with a transitory sense of unease. But
before I say any more about the reasons why we
should actually preserve a degree of restlessness and
unease in the relations between artistic research
and academia, I would like to make a few comments on why, after 15 years of debate about
research in the arts and about its institutional context, there are also good reasons to argue that some
things have changed.
First there is the concept of research. Gradual
but noticeable liberalisation has occurred in
recent decades in terms of what is understood by
‘research’ in the academic world. Recent evidence
for this is seen in the definition of research given
by the European Joint Quality Initiative in its
‘Dublin descriptors’ for third-cycle education:
ÅRSBOK KONSTNÄRLIG FOU 2008
90
directly derived from the intentions of artistic
research — a programme that, by ‘going beyond’
text and taking artistic practice as its point of
departure, assumes a clear stance on the issues
addressed in this essay. Yet as we delve further
into the programme specifications, we read that
beyond text does not mean without text. Indeed,
‘while the creation… of performances, sounds,
images and objects…is the central concern, their
translation …through texts remains key to their
investigation.’ Further on, the writer describes
‘Beyond Text’ as aiming ‘to enhance connections
between those who make and preserve works and
those who study them.’6 So in spite of its focus
on practice, this scheme seems to do more to
deepen the gulf between theory and practice than
to bridge it. The governing principle in ‘Beyond
Text’ is still the ‘humanities perspective’, which
elevates research on practice above research in and
through practice.
On 15 October 2007, the e-mail discussion
forum of parip (‘Practice as Research in Performance’, a Bristol-based project earlier supported by the ahrc) carried an announcement
for a forthcoming event at the University of Manchester entitled ‘The Big Debate: “That’s Not
Research, It’s Art” ‘. The forum moderator appended the following comment:
‘In Bristol we have noted an increasing number of these events and are somewhat concerned
that the terms of reference are not moving forward. I will not be attending these conferences
91
92
of research. Mode 2 research is characterised by
being carried out in contexts of application; it is
predominantly interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary; it has no epistemological core and is
methodologically pluralistic; and the direction
and quality of the research is not determined by
disciplinary peers alone.14
At a more theoretical, philosophical level these
broader conceptualisations of research, and the
accompanying shifts in research policy, have coincided with the liberation of knowledge forms
and research strategies that are also capable of
grasping what takes place in artistic research. At
an epistemological level, one notices a growing
interest (also in some ‘traditional’ knowledge
domains) in the implicit, tacit knowledge that
plays a part in our interaction with the world, in
our actions and speech. Many scholars in such
divergent disciplines as the cognitive sciences,
phenomenology and philosophy of mind consider the embodied (sometimes even bodily) nonconceptual or preconceptual forms of experience
and knowledge to be a kind of a priori that underlies the ways in which we constitute and understand the world and reveal it to one another. And
precisely these forms of experience and knowledge are embodied in art works and practices, and
play a part in both their production and their
reception. Artistic research is the deliberate
articulation of such nondiscursive forms of experience and knowledge in and through the creation of art.
‘How much theory does artistic
research need? Well, we should
not say ‘Here is a theory that sheds
light on artistic practice’, but ‘Here
is art that invites us to think.’
‘The word [research] is used in an inclusive way
to accommodate the range of activities that support original and innovative work in the whole
range of academic, professional and technological fields, including the humanities, and traditional, performing, and other creative arts. It is
not used in any limited or restricted sense, or relating solely to a traditional “scientific method”.’11
Research institutions and funding bodies, such
as the Higher Education Funding Council for
England (hefce) and the ahrc, maintain similarly ‘inclusive’ definitions of research, which
ostensibly allow room for research taking place
outside the established parameters of the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities.12 In
practice, however, the situation is more difficult,
especially in the rat race for research funding,
where such ‘newfangled’ activities as artistic
research still tend to lose out. A further sign of
the changing research landscape is the diminishing authority of the hierarchy of basic research,
applied research and experimental development,
concepts defined in the Frascati Manual, a publication of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (oecd) containing
standards for surveys on research and development.13 Changes like this are partly attributable
to the emergence and recognition of other forms
of knowledge production. In particular, the
phenomenon known as Mode 2 knowledge production has upset the traditional ways of thinking about the social and intellectual organisation
93
of action and interpretation. And it is precisely
this type of methodology — which allows for the
intertwinement of researcher and researched,
object and objective, and practice and theory —
that seems the most suitable framework for conducting artistic research.
The broadening of what we understand by
research, the emancipation of nondiscursive
knowledge contents and the growing appreciation of unconventional research methods all
point to a more open and encompassing understanding of what science, university and academia
are. This ‘liberalisation’ is reflected in the fact
that the highest degree in higher education, the
PhD (which up to the 19th century, incidentally,
was reserved for practice-oriented, protected professions in theology, medicine and law) is increasingly no longer understood in terms of the fulfilment of specific academic criteria, but as a manifestation of a level of competence, irrespective of
its domain and with due regard for the specific
nature of the research objects, claims and methods
that are prevalent in that domain.16 And although
resistance to this ‘liberalisation’ is still evident in
some quarters, the expectation is that there, too, the
awareness will dawn that research in and through
art is a legitimate form of doctoral research.
In sum, after 15 years of debate on the institutional and theoretical place of research in and
through the arts, it now looks as if no fundamental obstacles exist to admitting this type of
research to the ranks of the higher education and
research establishment, and no longer any reason
to feel uneasy about how artistic research relates
to academia. At least, so it would seem.
Contingency and realism
What I am arguing here, though, is that the sense
of unease and concern is more fundamental, and
somehow inextricably bound up with the relationship between the artistic and the academic.
There is something about the arts, and hence also
about artistic research, that generates this uneasy,
apprehensive feeling. In conclusion, let me focus
on that ‘something’.
Artistic practices are reflective practices, and
that is what motivates artistic research in the first
place. And this is not just because artists are now
increasingly forced by external circumstances to
position and contextualise their work and, as it
were, justify it to funding bodies and to the public. The reflexive nature of contemporary art also
lies enclosed in contemporary art itself. This art
accepts no natural law; cannot base itself on an
aesthetic foundation; has lost its normality; and
makes its own rules. It is an art that continuously
starts anew at every level, from the organisation
of the material to the reality presented. This art
is not only caught in the grip of autonomy and
loss of function (Peter Bürger), but has also
necessarily become transcendental. And this
theme of art’s conditions of possibility is not only
an aberration from an introverted modernism,
which was bid farewell as postmodernism made
its merry entrée — but has been characteristic of
all contemporary art since Hegel’s time. This is the
inescapably abstract and reflexive quality of all
art — that it (even behind the artists’ backs) traded
its overemphatic representations, created in the
naivety of imitation and expression, for the contingent perspectives that stir our thinking in everchanging ways. Art (not only conceptual art) is
also thinking, albeit of a special kind.
This kind of matter-mediated reflection has
much in common with philosophical reflection.
And that is a more compelling justification for
the title of Philosophiæ Doctor than merely arguing for ‘research equivalence’ for a doctorate in
the arts — the idea that practice-based research
in the arts is just as PhD-worthy as any other academic discipline. But the philosophy involved
here is one that sees itself as an un-academic philosophy, as speculative philosophy. This artistic
reflection, like philosophy, is a quasi-transcendental undertaking because it bears upon the
foundations of our perception, our understanding, and our relationship to the world and other
people. Art is thought, not theory. It actually seeks
to postpone ‘theory’, to reroute judgments, opinions and conclusions, and even to delay or suspend them indefinitely. Delaying, pausing, suspending, waiting — this ‘modesty’ now even
necessarily characterises those unambiguous
forms of art that want to be understood like this
and not in any other way. Art says: ‘It can also be
different…’ Artistic research is the deliberate
94
The intertwinement of ontological, epistemological and methodological perspectives — the
circumstance that defining an object is always at
once both an epistemic act and an indication of
ways to gain access to it — suggests not only that
artistic practices and creative processes are themselves the most suitable instruments of artistic
research. It also implies that the most effective
way of articulating, documenting, communicating and disseminating the research results is not
the dominant discursive one, but the way that
uses the medium itself as its mode of expression.15
One need not deny the inescapability of language
to still give primacy to the art itself in the research
process and as the research outcome. Discursive
expressions may accompany the research, but they
can never take the place of the artistic ‘reasoning’. At best, they can ‘imitate’, suggest or allude
to what is being ventured in the artistic research,
or can be employed in a post hoc reconstruction
of the research process.
It has meanwhile become a philosophical commonplace to say that there is no ultimate epistemological ground for our beliefs and knowledge claims, and that the edifice of science and
research has been built on unstable ground. This
is mirrored in a methodological pluralism and
fallibilism whereby no rule has the final word,
and where research pathways have been liberated
that — without sinking into scepticism or relativism — have taken leave of the rigid opposition
of subject and object of research, of fact and value,
95
96
articulation of this unfinished material thinking.
This reinforces the contingent perspectives and
world disclosures it imparts. In the debate on the
epistemology of artistic research, an antithesis
repeatedly surfaces: between explicit, manifest
knowledge and implicit or tacit knowledge, and
between knowing that something is the case and
knowing how to do or make something. I propose to add a third side to this: not knowing. ‘I
don’t know…’ This is the more interesting position: not to know, or not to know yet. It creates
room for that which is unthought, that which is
unexpected: the idea that all things could be
different … This is what we may call the radical
contingency of artistic research.
How much theory does artistic research need?
Well, we should not say: ‘Here is a theory that
sheds light on artistic practice’, but ‘Here is art
that invites us to think.’ Immanuel Kant described the aesthetic idea as a ‘representation of
the imagination which induces much thought,
yet without the possibility of any definite thought
whatever, i.e., concept, being adequate to it, and
which language, consequently, can never get quite
on level terms with or render completely intelligible.’17 This 18th-century expression of what the
philosophy of mind would now call ‘nonconceptual content’ encompasses more than just the tacit
knowledge embodied in the skilfulness of artistic
work. That ‘more’ is the ability of art — deliberately articulated in artistic research — to impart
and evoke fundamental ideas and perspectives
that disclose the world for us and, at the same
time, render that world into what it is or can be.
If some form of mimesis does exist in art, it is
here: in the force, at once perspectivist and performative, by which art offers us new experiences,
outlooks and insights that bear on our relationship to the world and to ourselves. This articulation of the world we live in is what we may call
the radical realism of artistic research.
The kind of reflection that artistic research is,
the contingent perspectives it delivers, its performative power and the realism it brings to bear
— all these make artistic research into a distinctive instrument that will not readily conform to
the established mores and conventions in the
more traditional academic world. This is the fundamental uneasiness and restlessness that haunts
relations between the artistic and the academic.
But if the university, if academia, is willing and
able to incorporate these unstable, uneasy attributes into its midst — along with the nondiscursive
artistic research practices — then we can say that
progress has been made. Hence, the question is
not ‘What is artistic research?’ but ‘What is academia?’ Christopher Frayling recently made the
following appeal: ‘It is timely, in my view, to redefine and re-evaluate the academy — to emphasise
the radical nature of some of its elements.
Towards a radical academy.’18 This radical academy, to be sure, will always, to some extent, be
characterised by restlessness — by a reflective, but
also productive, state of unease and agitation.
Konstnärlig forskning och
akademin: en obekväm relation
Sammanfattning
Utgör dagens känsla av obehag, otålighet, till och med
upphetsning i förhållandet mellan konstnärlig forskning och
akademin bara ett övergående stadium eller är det ett strukturellt tillstånd?
Denna artikel inleds med en redogörelse för vissa av författarens erfarenheter med att utveckla och genomföra en
internationell praktikbaserad forskarutbildning i musik.
Artikeln kommer in på två ofta förekommande debattfrågor:
diskursiviteten och dikotomin mellan teori och praktik. Fokus
flyttas därefter till den särskilda typ av reflexivitet som
kännetecknar konstnärlig forskning – en forskning som är
såväl radikalt tillfällig som performativ och realistisk. Artikeln
avslutas med att argumentera för att den centrala frågan inte
är så mycket ”Vad är konstnärlig forskning?” som ”Vad är
akademin?”
97
Kapitel 3 – Matts Leiderstam
Notförteckning
Kapitel 5 – Maria Engberg
Källor
1. Larry Shiner, ”The Invention of Art – A Cultural History”,
The University of Chicago Press, 2001, Chicago
2. ibid, sid. 128
3. Jag utbildades bland annat på Birkagårdens folkhögskola i Stockholm. Där hade jag lärare som hade
varit elever till Ragnar Sandberg på ”Mejan” (idag
Kungliga Konsthögskolan i Stockholm). Undervisningen byggde på Matisse, Cézanne och Léger som
de stora förebilderna för bildbyggande.
4. Exempelvis Konstfack som omvandlat sin magisterexamen i fri konst till ett mer specialiserat område,
”Konst i offentlighet”, som ”tar sin utgångspunkt i
samtidskonst men är också tvärdisciplinär med
utblickar mot andra konstnärliga discipliner som till
exempel arkitektur, design, film och nya medier.”,
http://www.konstfack.se/
Konsthögskolan i Malmö har skapat ett magisterprogram i Critical Studies som vänder sig till konstnärer,
konstvetare och skribenter och som hålls på engelska
eftersom studenterna kommer från hela världen.
5. Konsthögskolan i Malmö har fyra professorer i fri
konst och ingen av dem har heltid.
6. Min fria översättning från Maria Linds text i ”Words
of Wisdom – A Curator’s Vade Mecum on Contemporary
Art”, Independent Curators International, New
York, 2001, sid. 98–101.
7. Se hemsida, Konsthögskolan i Malmö:
http://www. khm.lu.se/forskar/forskar.html
Bolter, Jay och Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. mit Press, 1999.
Born Magazine. http://www.bornmagazine.org
Cayley, John: http://www.shadoof.net/in
Darley, Andrew. Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and
Spectacle in New Media Genres. Routledge, 2000.
Dworkin, Craig. Reading the Illegible. Northwestern
University Press, 2003.
Funkhouser, Chris: http://web.njit.edu/~funkhous/
Genius. Thomas Swiss: http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/
swiss/directory.htm
Hansen, Mark. New Philosophy for New Media. mit
Press, 2004.
Hayles, Katherine N. “Translating Media: Why We
Should Rethink Textuality.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 16.2 (2003): 263–290.
Knoebel, David: http://home.ptd.net/~clkpoet/ cpwis.
html
Leaved Life, Anne Frances Wysocki:
http://www.hu.mtu.edu/~awysocki/leavedlife/leave
dLife.html
Memmott, Talan. “Beyond Taxonomy: Digital Poetics
and the Problem of Reading.” Morris and Swiss,
New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories.
mit Press, 2006. 293–306.
Memmott, Talan: http://www.memmott.org/talan/
index.html
Poems That Go. http://www.poemsthatgo.com
Rosenberg, Jim: http://www.well.com/user/jer/
Stefans, Brian Kim: http://www.arras.net/
Strickland, Stephanie: http://www.stephaniestrickland.
com
Waber, Dan: http://www.vispo.com/guests/ DanWaber/
Chapter 6 – Henk Borgdorff
Notes
1. This article is an expanded version of a contribution
to ‘Music and Ideas Worldwide: A Symposium on
Practice-Based Research’ held at the Royal College
of Music, London, 24 October 2007.
2. I refer here to the Arts and Humanities Research
Council Fellowships in the Creative and Performing Arts, www.ahrc.ac.uk/, and the Norwegian
Programme for Research Fellowships in the Arts,
www.kunststipendiat.no/. A Dutch example is the
Artists in Residence programme in the research
group Art Practice and Development at the Amsterdam School of the Arts, ahk.nl/ahk/lectoraten/
praktijk/.
3. I use the words ‘academic’ and ‘scientific’ interchangeably here, and both refer to the traditional
university setting. ‘Academia’ and ‘academy’ refer
in this essay to the entire field of higher education
and research. Terminological questions like these
are not without import. Science in English has a
much more restricted meaning than the Dutch
wetenschap or the German Wissenschaft, as the latter
also encompass the humanities. The German
Forschung, by contrast, is more likely to refer to the
mores of the natural sciences than is the case with
the Dutch onderzoek or the English research.
4. See www.docartes.be for information on the
programme and the various doctoral projects. A
broader doctoral course is now in preparation with
support from the European Community; it also includes the Royal College of Music, Royal Holloway
(University of London) and Oxford University (see
www.documa.org).
5. ukcge (1997), Practice-Based Doctorates in the Creative and Performing Arts and Design; ukcge (2001),
Research Training in the Creative and Performing Arts
and Design, www.ukcge.ac.uk/publications/
reports.htm.
6. See http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/images/beyond_text_
programme_specification.doc, pp. 3–4.
7. rae = uk Research Assessment Exercise. See
www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?
a2=ind0710&l=parip&t=0&o=d&p=428.
8. For an online streaming video recording of the
conference, see ahk.nl/ahk/lectoraten/theorie/.
9. For political reasons, however, the programme
avoids using the word forskning (research) in its
Norwegian texts, employing instead the term kunstnerisk utviklingsarbeid (artistic development work).
The Swedish Research Council, in comparison, has
been supporting research projects under the designation konstnärlig forskning och utveckling (artistic
research and development) since 2003. See also my
observations in note 3 about variations of meaning
between different languages.
10.The definition of research used by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (hefce) in its
Research Assessment Exercise is: ‘“Research” for
the purpose of the rae is to be understood as original investigation undertaken in order to gain knowledge and understanding. It includes work of direct
relevance to the needs of commerce, industry, and
to the public and voluntary sectors; scholarship; the
invention and generation of ideas, images, performances, artefacts including design, where these lead
to new or substantially improved insights; and the
use of existing knowledge in experimental development to produce new or substantially improved
materials, devices, products and processes, including design and construction.’
11. See www.jointquality.nl/content/descriptors/CompletesetDublinDescriptors.doc.
12 See note 10 for the hefce’s definition of research.
13 See www.oecd.org, or www.oecdbookshop.org/
oecd/display.asp?cid=&lang=en&sf1=
di&st1=5lmqcr2k61jj.
14. Gibbons, Michael et al. (1994), The New Production of
196
Referenser och litteraturförteckningar
197
Kapitel 7 – Maria Hellström Reimer
Fotnoter:
1. Se Geddes (1915).
2. Sassen (2003), sid. 15.
3. Augé (1992/1995), Non-places: Introduction to an
Anthropology of Supermodernity.
4. Se Keiller (2003).
5. Deleuze (1983/1986:4–8). “Any-instant-whatever”
är den engelska översättningen av det franska originalets ”l’instant quelconque”. Se också LuomaKeturi (2003:128–129).
6. Benjamin (1935/1969:85)
198
7. Elsaesser (2004); svensk översättning M. Hellström.
8. Se Nyhetsbyrån ap, 9 mars 2007 och The Simpsons
Archive, www.snpp.com/guides/springfield.list.html,
nedladdningsdatum 2007-03-13.
9. Jonathan Brown (2007), “Father Ted fans invade as
fight for real Craggy Island is settled”, i The Independent, 24 February 2007. Se onlineversion på
new.independent.co.uk/Europe/article2300383.ece.
Nedladdningsdatum 2007-03-13.
10.”Come friendly bombs, and fall on Slough/It isn’t
fit for humans now/There isn’t grass to graze a
cow/Swarm over, death!” John Betjeman, 1937. Se
vidare också artikel om Slough i Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slough.
11. The Office (2001–2003), brittisk tv-serie i bbc:s
regi, skapad av komikern Ricky Gervais. Se
http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/theoffice/.
12. Slough Local Development Framework 2006–2026, sid.
16 o 22. Se också “Slough to celebrate its ‘beauty’”;
artikel på bbc News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/
hi/england/berkshire/6761065.stm; nedladdningsdatum 2008-01-09. Värt att notera är också att
Slough på tv-seriens officiella hemsida förärats
med en av huvudrubrikerna, en rubrik som till
skillnad från de övriga dock inte är ”klickbar”.
13. I Wallanders fotspår, broschyr producerad av Ystad
kommun. http://www.ystad.se/ystadweb.nsf/
wwwpages/2fab0aeafdc7df34c1256b6f004ad
622/$File/wallander_pdf_svenska.pdf. Nedladdningsdatum 2007-10-18. Se även Ystad Studios’
hemsida, http://www.ystadstudios.se/.
14. ”Kenneth Branagh blir Kurt Wallander”, artikel av
Sara Ullberg i Dagens Nyheter, 11 januari 2008.
15. ”Arnfilm ska locka turister”. Artikel av Peter Sandberg i Dagens Nyheter 19 december 2007. Se också
http://www.arnmovie.com/
16.”Skottland hoppas på ’Arn’-turister”; notis i Dagens
Nyheter, 9 januari 2008.
17. Skillnaden mellan ”representativity” and ”representability” diskuteras av Fredric Jameson, se Jameson (1992:4).
18. Redan 1970, i boken Arbetarna lämnar fabriken. Filmindustrin blir folkrörelse diskuterade Carl-Henrik
Svenstedt filmmediet som politiskt och kulturellt
betydelsefull kommunikation snarare än som upphöjd konstform.
19.Jameson, Fredric (1992) The Geo-Political Aesthetic:
Cinema and Space in the World System.
20.Det här är en skillnad jag tidigare utvecklat i min
forskning, som behandlat gränsen mellan estetik
och urbanism. Se Hellström (2006).
21. ofc är en icke vinstdrivande organisation som bildades 2003 på initiativ av regionala aktörer, som
Københavns och Fredriksbergs Kommune, Region
Skåne och Malmö Stad, delvis finansierat också
med eu-medel för regional utveckling. Kommissionens uppdrag är ”att verka för regionen som en
internationell filminspelningsplats och att bistå
internationella film- och tv-produktioner som spelas in i regionen”. Se vidare www.oresundfilm.com.
22.Enligt Ulrik Bolt Jørgensen, kommissionens danska
representant, har man i utformningen av platsdatabasen och vid urvalet av bilder inspirerats av en
mängd liknande platsdatabaser (Rotterdam, Berlin,
London, Malta, ibland kopplade till platsentreprenörer, som t.ex. Locamundo, se nedan, och Salt, se
www.saltfilm.com), men också byggt på en samlad
erfarenhet av vad som efterfrågas från producentsidan. Ulrik Bolt Jørgensen i mailintervju, 2007-0312.
23. Rotterdams platsdatabas är till skillnad från ofc:s
kopplad till den globala databasen Locamundo, som
inte erbjuder samma möjlighet att själv botanisera
bland platsbilderna. Locamundo arbetar aktivt med
att skydda platsernas identitet och på så sätt stärka
den egna och de bidragande fotografernas ”upp-
hovsrätt” till platsen. Man tillåter t.ex. inte serier av
bilder eller fotografers logotyper i bilderna; inslag
som kan ge användaren av databasen en klar indikation på var platsen är belägen för att därmed ”filma
utan fotografens medverkan, skicka sin egen platsscout etc…” Locamundos kommersiella idé är alltså
att utvecklas till en geografisk entreprenör, som på
samma sätt som de ekonomiskt framgångsrika
webb-hotellen mot betalning upplåter plats i
medie-geografin. Se www.locamundo.com.
24.Kategorin ”city looks” innehåller till exempel totalt
268 bilder, varav 140 är tagna i sol, mestadels blå
himmel mot 24 i mulet väder. 22 av bilderna är
nattbilder, 30 visar människor, 41 är inomhusbilder.
25.I vårt samarbete sammanställde Annelie Nilsson de
bilder som hittades i databasen med filmade utsnitt
från samma platser. Filmen kombinerades sedan
med det muntliga föredrag, I väntan på berättarrösten,
som jag höll på Nordisk Arkitekturforsknings symposium Landskap och landskapsarkitektur på Arkitektskolan i Århus, Danmark. Den färdiga filmen bygger på denna föreläsning. Se I väntan på berättarrösten (2007–2008) dvd. Stillbilder från The Øresund
Film Commission Location Database. Filmade miljöer, Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet – Alnarpsgården:
kontorsbyggnad; Slottet: administrationsbyggnad;
Elevenborg: Växtinspektionen, Jordbruksverket;
Jordbrukets biosystem och teknologi, jbt; slu
omvärld, partnerskap Alnarp; och från Lunds universitet, Palaestra et Odeum.
26.En standardförklaring i platsproduktionssammanhang har länge varit begreppet genius loci, platsens
ande eller själ; i arkitektoniska och landskapsarkitektoniska kretsar ofta använt som ett sätt att signalera en yrkesmässig codex. För en kritik, se Sandin
(2003) och Hellström (2006).
27.I detta avseende kan hänvisas till det förnyade
intresset i metoder för landskapskaraktäristik och
Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in
Contemporary Societies, London/Thousand Oaks/New
Delhi: Sage. I have written more about this in ‘The
Mode of Knowledge Production in Artistic
Research’, in Sabine Gehm, Pirkko Husemann,
Katharina von Wilcke (eds.), Knowledge in Motion.
Perspectives of Artistic and Scientific Research in Dance.
Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007, pp. 73–80.
15. More about the philosophical issues involved in the
debate on artistic research is found in Henk Borgdorff, The Debate on Research in the Arts (Sensuous
Knowledge No. 02), Bergen: Bergen National
Academy of the Arts; also in Dutch Journal of Music
Theory 12, 1 (January 2007) pp. 1–17.
16.Cf. ukcge (1997).
17. The Critique of Judgement (Kritik der Urteilskraft),
para. 49. ‘… Unter einer ästhetischen Idee…
verstehe ich diejenige Vorstellung der Einbildungskraft, die viel zu denken veranlaßt, ohne daß ihr
doch irgendein bestimmter Gedanke, d.i. Begriff,
adäquat sein kann, die folglich keine Sprache völlig
erreicht und verständlich machen kann.’
18. Christopher Frayling, ‘Foreword’, in Katy Macleod
and Lin Holdridge, Thinking Through Art: Reflections
on Art as Research. New York: Routledge, 2006, pp.
xii–xiv.
199
Artistic Research and the Poetics of Knowledge
Kathrin Busch
One of most intriguing aspects about art today is its entanglement with theory. In fact,
contemporary art practice is now so highly saturated with theoretical knowledge that it is
becoming a research practice in and of itself. Artists have not only taken up art criticism and
negotiations, they now also integrate research methods and scientific knowledge into their
artistic process to such a degree that it even seems to be developing into an independent form
of knowledge on its own. If this tendency is reinforced by the growing transfer of theoretical
knowledge in the course of restructuring art academies and establishing so-called artistic
research projects, such a blurring of the lines between art and theory could no longer live up
to the classical philosophical notion that art is ultimately a sensual form of truth.
Artistic appropriation of knowledge evokes different, independent forms of knowledge, in
order to complement scientific research with artistic research. With regard to the relationship
between philosophy and art, this implies that artistic practice is more than just an application
of theory and that theory is more than a mere reflection on practice. Deleuze perceives this
unique relationship as “a system of relays within a larger sphere, within a multiplicity of parts
that are both theoretical and practical.”1 Art and theory, in effect, are nothing more than two
different forms of practice interrelated through a system of interaction and transferences. In
this constellation, philosophy neither brings the arts to the point nor does art sensualize
philosophical truths; philosophy serves a knowledge-based artistic practice as a point of
reference, similar, conversely, to how art might affect theoretical practice.
This constellation of chiastic conditions has not yet seemed essential to the art academy
restructuring program of the Bologna Accord, nor should it be confused with the appeals of
the so-called information society, which have now reached art and artistic production. Instead
of a reciprocal referencing of theory and practice, the call to put art on a scientific basis is
asserted. The preparation and establishment of a theoretical basis for art education, now
required for the academies, are rapidly developing into the questionable claim to have
canonistic knowledge at one’s disposal. It’s now the turn of artistic research to respond to this
knowledge imperative.
Initially, the justified attempt to anchor a theory-derived and practice-based concept of art
within an academic curriculum was a response to a changed notion of art, as well as to a
significant trend in contemporary art that focused on the production of knowledge rather than
of artworks. In contemporary art practice, especially that which belongs to the tradition of
artistic institution criticism or contextual art, the explicit recourse to philosophical or
sociological theories and the integration of scientific research methods is a common and
recognized process that critically analyses both the commodity aspect of artworks and their
purely aesthetic impact, as well as the power structures of the art world. The resulting art
productions are characterized by an interdisciplinary procedural method, in which artworks
are created within a broader, theoretically informed framework. The art world seems to have
http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n2/busch.html
become a “field of possibilities, of exchange and comparative analysis” in which different
“modes of perception and thinking” are investigated.2 Because this changed concept of art
now touches upon developments of processes and capacities that are very different to those
traditionally taught at art academies, the wish to institutionally anchor work methods based on
investigation or research to new curricula is fully justified. However, it is still debatable
whether the Bologna reform is suitable for research art.3 Yet it can be assumed that a muchlamented need to economize in education is at the root of the present academic restructuring.
If institutional-critique rejected the notion of producing art works due to the commodity
aspect of art objects, then these days the commodity aspect of knowledge production is
equally open to criticism.
The spectrum of that which can be substantiated under the term artistic research is very broad
and not in the least homogeneous. It ranges from the simple integration of philosophical or
scientific knowledge, to the establishment of artistic research as a form of institutionalized
self–examination and scientification of artistic practice. For this reason, it is advisable to
explore the different heterogeneous forms and diverging goals of what has been categorized
under the term “artistic research.”
I. The use of research in the visual arts or using theoretical knowledge to develop artistic
work is by no means a contemporary phenomenon. Scientific knowledge, such as optics,
colour theory, anatomy, natural science, physics, geometry, and physiology are absorbed by
artists as a matter of course and are reflected in their artwork. Relevant contemporary theories
and discourses re-emerge in artistic production and influence its forms of presentation, as well
as its content.
Referencing science was also common in the twentieth century, in, for example, the reference
to psychoanalysis in surrealist painting, to phenomenology in minimal art, or to linguistics in
conceptual art. In the sense of a recursion to scientific results, the term artistic research simply
refers to the theoretical references finding their way more or less explicitly into works of art.
The artworks do not need to be a kind of research themselves, nor do they have to adhere to
certain scientific standards. The concept describes art with research - not in the sense of art
understood as research, but rather by recourse to scientific research.
II. This first form of artistic research, understood as a conscious reception of contemporary
theory, has to be distinguished from art about research. It includes works that focus
thematically on research and its genuine procedures and conclusions, such as when scientific
instruments and research situations are depicted in classical painting or when scientific
experiments or medical interventions are the subject of art.4 Research, in this sense, is the
object of an art practice that does not restrict itself to functioning as an object of science. This
implies a certain symmetry between art and science: just as there is the science of art, there is
also the art of science. The latter subscribes to a genuine artistic explication of a scientific
appropriation of the world and its systems of representation. This phenomenon also exists in
contemporary art, insofar as it makes science its object and practices an art about science by
reflecting on the systems of classification and experimenting that is characteristic of scientific
research.5 Here, science is translated into art and artistic knowledge is generated about
sciences — without admitted scientific methods being claimed for art, to the extent that
scientific claims to truth and objectivity are qualified by artistic reflection. Seen from the
viewpoint of art, one might recognize the contingency and fictional quality of knowledge, or
the aspects of oppression and exclusion inherent in knowledge structures.
2
III. Another form of artistic research is art that understands itself as research, in that scientific
processes or conclusions become the instrument of art and are used in the artworks. This
refers to a particular phenomenon in contemporary art, in particular in institutional-critique,
whereby research is considered a part of the artistic process and is carried out by the artist
herself. In this case, art is in fact a form of knowledge. It becomes the site of knowledge
production and does not restrict itself to integrating previously known concepts. This can be
considered a radicalization of the first constellation of art and science mentioned above,
whereby theory is now interpreted as a constitutive element of the artistic practice itself, and
scientific methods of research and knowledge generation enter into the artistic process. This is
where art and science begin to blur, insofar as scientific argumentation and artistic criterion
are seamlessly intertwined, and artistic work does not claim to produce a “work” in the classic
sense of the term, but rather (often critical) knowledge, so as to use artistic means to analyze
the present day and its social conditions and their structures. The required research is neither a
preliminary work phase of art production nor is it a means to an end, rather it is the aim of the
work itself. This is not about researching in order to produce an artwork; the work is the
research. And the result of this research can assume such diverse forms as symposia, services,
publications or interventions. Here, artistic research and its product are one and the same.6
These might not claim to be scientific methods, but rather to be an enlightening and critical
production of knowledge.
IV. It is important to draw a distinction, firstly, between the above forms of artistic research
and, secondly, art as science in the sense of an academic scientific discipline. These artistic
research study programs are focused specifically on putting art on a scientific basis. The art
educational program is intended to convey knowledge about society and culture, the field of
art, as well as art history and art theory. The declared aim is to establish a theoretical,
informed artistic practice that considers the claim of scientific methods through methodic
rigor and the transfer of basic knowledge. Art’s capacity for self-reflection and autotheorizing is referred to as the core aim of turning it into science, which will above all be
reflected in PhD programs.7 It assumes that art is based in theoretical knowledge, that art can
be learned, and that it can be further developed through scientific practice.8
It’s possible to articulate criticism of this constellation of art and research. The supposition
seems problematic that canonistic knowledge exists, can be integrated into art practice, and
can serve as its basis. This is problematic because it neglects the fact that theory itself touches
upon research practice and is not available in the form of an export product or of a stable
theoretical construction. Knowledge is compacted into information that can be acquired.
There is the suspicion that “theory input” is a product of the pressure to economize, because
scientific justification could increase the usability and market efficiency of cultural products
created by art school graduates.
This particular objective of putting artistic research on a scientific basis is also founded on the
problematic assumption that art can only be considered a form of knowledge if it conforms to
scientific standards. Knowledge and research are hastily equated with scientific methods and
thereby abridged. This tendency is obviously based in an idealization of the sciences and of
academic structures. Andrea Fraser, whose work involves art as research in the sense of
institutional critique, referred to this danger when she argued that “the critique of art
institutions and the art market seemed to precipitate an idealization of academia”.9 In view of
the unquestioned idealization of the sciences, “a critique of academic institutions and
intellectual markets” would be urgently necessary.10
3
V. According to Fraser’s objection, the increase of artistic research with recourse to theory or
even the claim of scientification must lead to a deeper reflection and examination of scientific
knowledge production and its institutions. It would need to always practice an art about
science with critical intentions, rather than practicing a mere scientification of art that has
subjected itself to the forces and power structures of academia or the universities. Because
why should the assumption that art is a form of knowledge already include turning it into
science? On the contrary, has not artistic research as research practice earned its right to be
taken seriously enough without subjecting itself to the norms of scientific research?
According to Foucault, art is valid as an independent form of knowledge without obeying the
criteria of scientific methods. From the philosophical perspective, the appeal of artistic forms
of knowledge consists of their ability, because of diverse forms of presentation, to evoke other
knowledge. In reference to painting, Foucault emphasizes the irreducibility of the visible and
the speakable and that art has a genuine reference to knowledge. Hence it is not necessary to
classify art as sensual and emotional, in order to voice skepticism about the present trend of
founding art on science.
VI. According to Foucault, it is the specific artistic form of knowledge that enables us to refer
to that which cannot be presented or narrated within a historic structure of knowledge. Art as
a different form of knowledge permits, therefore, a subversion of science when it refers to the
exclusions inherent in scientific knowledge production. According to this, its significance is
less about “…showing the invisible, but rather showing the extent to which the invisibility of
the visible is invisible.”11 Art can thus reveal the concealed, flipside of knowledge. While the
various orders of knowledge necessarily produce exclusions and restrict the scope of the
knowable, art seems to be able to refer to that, which cannot be articulated within the
respective fields of knowledge. Art is given the additional role of referring to the nonrepresentational, and of helping to participate in the fissures and new formation of knowledge
structures. This different knowledge, one that questions the tight limitations of modern
rationality by articulating — in contrast to objective, absolute, consistent scientific knowledge
— knowledge that is equally ambivalent, incommensurable, and singular. Or, formulated in
another manner, science and theory are also part of a power system, and not an apparently
neutral point of reference for science-based culture production.
In “The Discourse on Language,” Foucault expresses the clear-sighted fear that the
scientifically institutionalized “will to knowledge…tends to exercise a sort of pressure, a
power of constraint upon other forms of discourse”.13 He refers to this will to knowledge that
makes the arts seek to base themselves in science — “in short, upon true discourse”14 as a
powerful system of exclusion.
VII. Conversely, this implies that a turn can be made against knowledge within art production
in order to manifest the hidden conditions of knowledge and the unconscious transferences
with regard to claims of scientification. Foucault writes that the intellectual must “struggle
against the forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of
‘knowledge,’ ‘truth,’ ‘consciousness,’ and ‘discourse’”.15 In other words, in view of a steadily
growing knowledge imperative, it is necessary to recall the theoreticians who refuse to restrict
themselves to functioning as suppliers of knowledge, who view knowledge itself with great
skepticism, and who see even their own theories as an inherent practice of knowledge
criticism. On the basis of such skepticism about basing art on science that idealizes academic
standards, an art or a poetics of knowledge can emerge that questions the actual construct of
the sciences. This applies to the inventive and fictional parts of science as well as the aesthetic
dimensions of scientific visual presentations. It is rooted in the view that the creation of
4
objects of knowledge is not to be separated from their representation, that visualizations, or
the construction of models possess knowledge-generating significance. Owing to the so-called
‘crisis of representation,’ a performative effectiveness is ascribed to the representation of
knowledge itself, even in the philosophy of science. The systems of representation are
considered the framework and conditions for the genesis of knowledge and the
representations are seen as constitutive for the respective products. The relevant visualization
processes do not only imply the exclusion or restriction of the knowable; they also generate it.
This also means that science is not the only place where knowledge is produced, but rather
that knowledge is articulated in the historical forms of representation in the sense of relevant
“problematization methods”, that it is also expressed in a particular era’s conventions of
presentation for literary texts and visual artworks.16 Conversely, the aesthetic decisions and
artistic conventions of presentation that are predetermined by the arts flow into scientific
knowledge. Nietzsche had already referred to the poetic-rhetorical character of all knowledge
and hence enlisted the sciences in the arts.17
VIII. In view of artistic research and knowledge criticism, the sciences also show their
limitations and restrictions, because the open and discursive quality of the artistic articulation
of knowledge cannot be surpassed. For this reason, it must be emphasized that knowledge
generated through art cannot as easily be brought to a precise point, as might be implied by
the phrase “art as science”. It is much more about formulating doubt from the perspective of
art about certain forms of knowledge production. The oft-proclaimed usability and
capitalization of knowledge in today’s so-called information society goes hand in hand with
an abbreviated view of theoretical practice and philosophical research. If theory were to be
reduced to the function of a supplier of knowledge, then any recourse to contemporary
philosophy, according to Oliver Marchart, would run the risk of becoming mere “theoretical
ornaments attached to art projects”.18 Heidegger once stated, “Science does not think”. And,
with that, formulated a strict distinction between, on the one hand, sciences that were subject
to objectification and the logic of representation, and thought that forms a specific reference
to reality, on the other.19 A comparison has to be drawn to a concept of thought or theoretical
practice, which is not about accessible knowledge, but, for instance in the sense of Derrida’s
deconstruction, allows the incommensurable and the singular to remain open in theory
construction.20 It becomes interesting when artistic forms of knowledge do not restrict
themselves to applications of theory, but rather begin to develop into hybrid formations of
knowledge, or when they intervene in theoretical discourses, or have an impact on them, and
thus contribute to theory construction. This summarizes a hybridization of art and research
that could present itself as the most significant challenge for cultural sciences today. In other
words, with a project of artistic research, which decidedly places itself within close proximity
of scientific territory, the fraying of the art genres that Adorno noted in the 1960s would fall
just as short as the interdisciplinary aspect of the sciences, and, namely, benefit a chiastic
overlapping of art and cultural sciences.
IX. Art’s proclaimed conversion to the sciences did not culminate in the scientification of art,
but rather in the development of an intermediary zone where both the arts and the sciences
should each be able to mutually interconnect. Foucault’s above-mentioned compulsion to put
it on a scientific basis, which the “true discourse” applies to art, is to restrict and respond by
marking a threshold between art and science as a point of orientation for hybrid research.
According to the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, the “poorly-delineated boundaries” between
the sciences — one could also add between art and science — would not only display the
most urgent problems, but would also be the place for the still “unknown”.21 This
5
intermediary zone is characterized by the fact that the actual object of research is still
undetermined, therefore “the knowlegde of certain facts not being yet reduced into
concepts”,22 by the fact that the methods are merely provisional and the knowledge structures
and their categories and criteria are still in the making. In this liminal sphere of “wild”
knowledge that is still unstructured, non-conceptual, and uncanonized, knowledge can
flourish that was once termed “event” in philosophy, and which is characterized by the fact
that it does not occur within the space and framework of the expected. Derrida himself spoke
out against this orientation toward the unexpected even for academic research in “The
University Without Condition,”23 and emphasized that the above-mentioned performative
condition of the production of knowledge, which exceeds the traditional representational
model of epistemological presentation and becomes actual generating, fails because it
neglects the moment of involuntary that is inherent in the new. The fact that performative,
institutionalized knowledge belongs to “the order of the masterable possible”24 and touches
upon the notion of a sovereign possession of the object, precisely excludes the advent of the
unexpected. That – which research needs to constitute, however - which should be inventive
to the extreme, is a fundamental openness to anything that oversteps the framework and
conditions of the previously possible, in other words, an openness to experience the unknown,
or the impossible.25
It is not a coincidence that Derrida repeatedly refers to the arts in the text; the fact that art is
dedicated to phenomena that cannot be ruled by scientific-experimental classification is, of
course, an inevitable topos in art theory. Traditionally, art is committed to representing the
ephemeral forces and manifestations that emerge spontaneously and involuntarily. This
opening for the unknown, yet the imminent and the yet to come, means that cultural sciences
are making a step in art’s direction.
1
Gilles Deleuze in “Intellectuals and Power: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze”, in
Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: selected essays and interviews, edited by Donald F.
Bouchard, translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press,
1977), p. 206.
2
Simon Sheikh, “Spaces for Thinking. Perspectives on the Art Academy”, in: Texte zur Kunst 62 (2006), p. 191196: p. 192.
3
See Stephan Dillemuth, ‘Old and New Monsters. The Academy and the Corporate Public’, in annette
hollywood and Barbara Wille (eds.), Who is afraid of Master of Arts? (Berlin: Internationale Gesellschaft der
Bildenden Künste, 2007), p. 73-84.
4
Rembrandt’s The Anatomy of Doctor Tulp (1632) or Joseph Wright of Derby’s An Experiment on a Bird in the
Air Pump (1767/68).
5
For example, Mark Dion who is interested in the exhibition forms of scientific research, or Fiona Tan whose
artistic research is based on the scientific categorization of ethnology, Ines von Lamswerde who refers to the
issue of gene manipulation in her photographic works, or Paul Etienne Lincoln who simulates the structure of
scientific experiments.
6
Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser, Marion von Osten, or Ursula Biemann are among those artists who represent this
position.
7
See Mika Hannula, Julia Suoranta, and Tere Vadén (eds.), Artistic Research – theories, methods and practices
(Gothenburg: Göteborgs Universitet, Art Monitor & KUVA, 2005).
8
See Eva and Attila Kosa, “In Praise of Normalization”, in: Ute Meta Bauer (ed.), Education, Information,
Entertainment. Current Approaches on Higher Artistic Education (Vienna: edition selene, 2001), p. 91-98.
9
Andrea Fraser in an interview with Yilmaz Dziewior, in Andrea Fraser. Works: 1984 to 2003, edited by
Yilmaz Dziewior, Kunstverein in Hamburg (Cologne: Dumont, 2003), p. 93.
10
Ibid.
11
Michel Foucault, “The Thought from Outside”, in Foucault/Blanchot, translated by Brian Massumi (New
York: Zone Books 1997), p. 55.
6
13
Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language”, in The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on
Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 219.
14
Ibid.
15
Michel Foucault in “Intellectuals and Power”, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, p. 208.
16
Joseph Vogl, “Einleitung“, in Poetologien des Wissens um 1800 (Munich: Fink 1999).
17
See Friedrich Nietzsche, “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne” (‘On Truth and Lies in a
Non-moral Sense’) in Kritische Studienausgabe, volume 1, edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin/ New
York: dtv/ de Gruyter 1988), p. 873-890.
18
Oliver Marchart, “The Cultural Turn to the Academy and Back. Cultural Studies under the Influence of
Institutionalization, Interdisciplinary and the Theory/Practice Gap” in Ute Meta Bauer (ed.), Education,
Information, Entertainment, p. 149-165: p. 163.
19
Martin Heidegger, ‘What Calls for Thinking?’, in Basic Writings from Being and Time (1927) to The Task of
Thiniking (1964), revised and expanded edition, edited by David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1993), p.
373.
20
See Irit Rogoff’s defense of theory construction that allow for obscurity, for facts and fiction to mix, that
assess themselves according to scientific criteria, and are not sufficiently supported. Irit Rogoff, “Academy as
Potentiality”, in Academy, edited by Angelika Nollert et al., (Frankfurt am Main: Revolver 2006), p. 13-20.
21
Marcel Mauss, “Body Techniques”, in Sociology and Psychology: Essays (London: Routledge 1979), p. 95123: p. 97.
22
Ibid.
23
Jacques Derrida, “The University Without Condition”, in Without Alibi, edited and translated by Peggy Kamuf
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 202-237.
24
Ibid., p. 234.
25
See ibid., p. 236.
7
Tom Holert
Art in the Knowledge-based Polis
Kim Howells (speaking) and Alex Roberts during a sit-in meeting.
Photograph © John Rae
Buckminster Fuller speaking at Hornsey College of Art, June 29, 1968
Photograph © Steve Ehrlicher
Poster from Hornsey Occupation, 1968, artist anonymous
Lately, the concept of “knowledge production” has drawn new attention and prompted strong
criticism within art discourse. One reason for the current conflictual status of this concept is
the way it can be linked to the ideologies and practices of neoliberal educational policies. In
an open letter entitled “To the Knowledge Producers,” a student from the Academy of Fine
Arts Vienna has eloquently criticized the way education and knowledge are being
“commodified, industrialized, economized and being made subject to free trade.”1
In a similar fashion, critic Simon Sheikh has addressed the issue by stating that “the notion of
knowledge production implies a certain placement of thinking, of ideas, within the present
knowledge economy, i.e. the dematerialized production of current post-Fordist capitalism”;
the repercussions of such a placement within art and art education can be described as an
increase in “standardization,” “measurability,” and “the molding of artistic work into the
formats of learning and research.”2 Objections of this kind become even more pertinent when
one considers the suggestive rhetoric of the major European art educational network ELIA
(European League of Institutes of the Arts), which, in a strategy paper published in May 2008,
linked “artistic research” to the EU policy of the generation of “‘New Knowledge’ in a
Creative Europe.”3
I am particularly interested in how issues concerning the actual situations and meanings of art,
artistic practice, and art production relate to questions touching on the particular kind of
knowledge that can be produced within the artistic realm (or the artistic field, as Pierre
Bourdieu prefers it) by the practitioners or actors who operate in its various places and spaces.
The multifarious combinations of artists, teachers, students, critics, curators, editors,
educators, funders, policymakers, technicians, historians, dealers, auctioneers, caterers,
gallery assistants, and so on, embody specific skills and competences, highly unique ways and
styles of knowing and operating in the flexibilized, networked sphere of production and
consumption. This variety and diversity has to be taken into account in order for these
epistemes to be recognized as such and to obtain at least a slim notion of what is at stake
when one speaks of knowledge in relation to art—an idea that is, in the best of cases, more
nuanced and differentiated than the usual accounts of this relation.
“Far from preventing knowledge, power produces it,” as Foucault famously wrote.4 Being
based on knowledge, truth claims, and belief systems, power likewise deploys knowledge—it
exerts power through knowledge, reproducing it and shaping it in accordance with its
anonymous and distributed intentions. This is what articulates the conditions of its scope and
depth. Foucault understood power and knowledge to be interdependent, naming this mutual
inherence “power-knowledge.” Power not only supports, but also applies or exploits
knowledge. There is no power relation without the constitution of a field of knowledge, and
no knowledge that does not presuppose power relations. These relations therefore cannot be
analyzed from the standpoint of a knowing subject. Subjects and objects of knowledge, as
well as the modes of acquiring and distributing knowledges, are effects of the fundamental,
deeply imbricated power/knowledge complex and its historical transformations.
Kim Howells (speaking) and Alex Roberts during a sit-in meeting. Photograph © John Rae
Buckminster Fuller speaking at Hornsey College of Art, June 29, 1968. Photograph © Steve Ehrlicher
Poster from Hornsey Occupation,
1968, artist anonymous
1. The Hornsey Revolution
On May 28, 1968, students occupied Hornsey College of Art in the inner-suburban area of
North London. The occupation originated in a dispute over control of the Student Union
funds. However, “a planned programme of films and speakers expanded into a critique of all
aspects of art education, the social role of art and the politics of design. It led to six weeks of
intense debate, the production of more than seventy documents, a short-lived Movement for
Rethinking Art and Design Education (MORADE), a three-day conference at the Roundhouse
in Camden Town, an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, prolonged
confrontation with the local authority, and extensive representations to the Parliamentary
Select Committee on Student Relations.”5
Art historian Lisa Tickner, who studied at Hornsey College of Art until 1967, has published a
detailed account of these events and discussions forty years after the fact. As early as 1969,
however (only a few months after the occupation of Hornsey College of Art had been brought
to an end by pressure from the above-mentioned local authority in July 1968), Penguin
released a book on what had already gained fame as “The Hornsey Affair,” edited by students
and staff of the college. This paperback is a most interesting collection of writings and visuals
produced during the weeks of occupation and sit-ins, discussions, lectures, and screenings.
The book documents the traces and signs of a rare kind of enthusiasm within an arteducational environment that was not considered at the time to be the most prestigious in
England. Located just below Highgate, it was described by one of the participants as being
“squeezed into crumbling old schools and tottering sheds miles apart, making due with a
society’s cast-offs like a colony of refugees.”6 One lecturer even called it “a collection of
public lavatories spread over North London.”7
But this modernist nightmare of a school became the physical context of one of the most
radical confrontations and revolutions of the existing system of art education to take place in
the wake of the events of May ’68. Not only did dissenting students and staff gather to discuss
new terms and models of a networked, self-empowering, and politically relevant education
within the arts, the events and their media coverage also drew to Hornsey prominent members
of the increasingly global alternative-utopian scene, such as Buckminster Fuller.
However, not only large-scale events were remembered. One student wrote of the smaller
meetings and self-organized seminars:
It was in the small seminars of not more than twenty people that ideas could be thrashed out.
Each person felt personally involved in the dialogue and felt the responsibility to respond
vociferously to anything that was said. These discussions often went on to the small hours of
the morning. If only such a situation were possible under ‘normal’ conditions. Never had
people en masse participated so fully before. Never before had such energy been created
within the college. People’s faces were alight with excitement, as they talked more than they
had ever talked before. At least we had found something which was real to all of us. We were
not, after all, the complacent receivers of an inadequate educational system. We were actively
concerned about our education and we wanted to participate.8
From today’s standpoint, the discovery of talking as a medium of agency, exchange, and selfempowerment within an art school or the art world no longer seems to be a big deal, though it
is still far from being conventional practice. I believe that the simple-sounding discovery of
talking as a medium within the context of a larger, historical event such as the “Hornsey
Affair” constitutes one of those underrated moments of knowledge production in the arts—
one that I would like to shift towards the center of a manner of attention that may be (but
should not necessarily be) labeled as “research.” With a twist of this otherwise overdetermined term, I am seeking to tentatively address a mode of understanding and rendering
the institutional, social, epistemological, and political contexts and conditions of knowledge
being generated and disseminated within the arts and beyond.
The participants in the Hornsey revolution of forty years ago had very strong ideas about what
it meant to be an artist or an art student, about what was actually at stake in being called a
designer or a painter. They were convinced that knowledge and knowledge communication
within art education contained enormous flaws that had to be swept away:
Only such sweeping reforms can solve the problems . . . In Hornsey language, this was
described as the replacement of the old “linear” (specialized) structure by a new “network”
(open, non-specialized) structure . . . It would give the kind of flexible training in generalized,
basic creative design that is needed to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances—be a real
training for work, in fact . . . the qualities needed for such a real training are no different from
the ideal ones required to produce maximal individual development. In art and design, the
choice between good workmen and geniuses is spurious. Any system worthy of being called
“education,” any system worthy of the emerging new world, must be both at once. It must
produce people whose work or ‘vocation’ is the creative, general transformation of the
environment.9
To achieve this “worthy” system, it was considered necessary to do away with the “disastrous
consequence” of the “split between practice and theory, between intellect and the nonintellectual sources of creativity.”10 Process held sway over output, and open-endedness and
free organization of education permeated every aspect of the Hornsey debates.11 It was also
clear that one of the most important trends of the mid-1960s was the increasing interaction
and interpenetration of creative disciplines. “Art and Design,” the Hornsey documents argued,
“have become more unified, and moved towards the idea of total architecture of sensory
experience”; England underwent “a total revolution of sensibility.”12
The consequences of the intersecting developments within the rebelling body of students and
staff at Hornsey (and elsewhere), as well as the general changes within society and culture,
had to become manifest in the very conceptual framework not only of art education, but of art
discourse as such. Hence, there was a widespread recognition that in future all higher
education in art and design should incorporate a permanent debate within itself. “Research,”
in this sense, came to appear an indispensable element in education:
We regard it as absolutely basic that research should be an organic part of art and design
education. No system devoted to the fostering of creativity can function properly unless
original work and thought are constantly going on within it, unless it remains on an opening
frontier of development. As well as being on general problems of art and design (techniques,
aesthetics, history, etc.) such research activity must also deal with the educational process
itself . . . It must be the critical self-consciousness of the system, continuing permanently the
work started here in the last weeks [June, July 1968]. Nothing condemns the old regime more
radically than the minor, precarious part research played in it. It is intolerable that research
should be seen as a luxury, or a rare privilege.13
Though this emphatic plea for “research” was written in a historical situation apparently much
different than our own, it nonetheless helps us to apprehend our present situation. Many of the
terms and categories have become increasingly prominent in the current debates on artistic
research, albeit with widely differing intentions and agendas. It seems to be of the utmost
importance to understand the genealogy of conflicts and commitments that have led to
contemporary debates on art, knowledge, and science.
6137 McKeldin Library at the University of Maryland
2. An Art Department as a Site of Research in a University System
Becoming institutionalized as an academic discipline at the interface of artistic and scientific
practices at an increasing number of art universities throughout Europe, artistic research
(sometimes synonymous with notions such as “practice-led research,” “practice-based
research,” or “practice-as-research”) has various histories, some being rather short, others
spanning centuries. The reasons for establishing programs and departments fostering the
practice-research nexus are certainly manifold, and differ from one institutional setting to the
next. When art schools are explicitly displaced into the university system to become sites of
research, the demands and expectations of the scientific community and institutional
sponsorship vis-à-vis the research outcomes of art schools change accordingly.
Entitled “Development and Research of the Arts,” a new program of the Austrian funding
body FWF aims at generating the conceptual and material environment for interdisciplinary
art-related research within, between, and beyond art universities. Thus far, however, the
conceptual parameters of the FWF appear to be the subject of debate and potential revision
and extension. One should be particularly careful of any hasty grafting of a conventional
image of a “scientific” model or mode of research (whatever it may be) onto the institutional
context of an art academy. This is not only a matter of epistemological concern, but of
education policies and of political debate as well.
One only has to look at the history of the implementation of practice-led research in Art and
Design in Great Britain. In 1992 the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) of the Higher
Education Founding Council for England (HEFCE) began to formulate criteria for so-called
practice-based/practice-led research, particularly in the field of performance, design, and
media. By 1996 the RAE had reached a point where it defined research as
original investigation undertaken in order to gain knowledge and understanding. It includes
work of direct relevance to the needs of commerce and industry, as well as to the public and
voluntary sectors; scholarship; the invention and generation of ideas, images, performances
and artifacts including design, where these lead to new or substantially improved insights; and
the use of existing knowledge in experimental development to produce new or substantially
improved materials, devices, products and processes, including design and construction.14
The visual or fine arts of that time had yet to be included in this structure of validation, though
in the following years various PhD programs in the UK and elsewhere did try to shift them to
an output-oriented system of assessment close to those already established for design, media,
and performance arts. “New or substantially improved insights” as well as “substantially
improved materials, devices, products and processes” are the desired outcomes of research,
and the Research Assessment Exercise could not be more explicit about the compulsory
“direct relevance to the needs of commerce and industry.”
PARIP (Practice as Research in Performance) is a research group that supervises, assesses,
and discusses the ongoing research in the new art and design environment initiated by the
RAE and other organizations concerned with higher arts education in the UK. A 2002 report
by Angela Piccini repeatedly focuses on the relation between research and (artistic) practice,
and on the subjects and subjectivities, competencies, and knowledges produced and required
by this development. After having interviewed various groups of researchers and students
from the field of performance arts and studies, it became clear that both concepts assume
specific meanings and functions demanded by the configuration of their new settings. One of
the groups Piccini interviewed pondered the consequences of the institutional speech act that
transforms an artistic practice into an artistic practice-as-research:
Making the decision that something is practice as research imposes on the practitionerresearcher a set of protocols that fall into: 1) the point that the practitioner-researcher must
necessarily have a set of separable, demonstrable, research findings that are abstractable, not
simply locked into the experience of performing it; and 2) it has to be such an abstract, which
is supplied with the piece of practice, which would set out the originality of the piece, set it in
an appropriate context, and make it useful to the wider research community.15
It was further argued that “such protocols are not fixed,” that “they are institutionalized
(therefore subject to critique and revision) and the practitioner-researcher communities must
recognize that.” The report also expressed concern about “excluded practices, those that are
not framed as research and are not addressing current academic trends and fashion,” and it
asked, “what about practices that are dealing with cultures not represented within the
academy?”16
When articulated in terms of such a regime of academic supervision, evaluation, and control
(as it increasingly operates in the Euroscapes of art education), the reciprocal inflection of the
terms “practice” and “research” appears rather obvious, though they are seldom explicated.
The urge among institutions of art and design education to rush the process of laying down
validating and legitimating criteria to purportedly render intelligible the quality of art and
design’s “new knowledge” results in sometimes bizarre and ahistorical variations on the
semantics of practice and research, knowledge and knowledge production.
For applications and project proposals to be steered through university research committees,
they have to be upgraded and shaped in such a way that their claims to the originality of
knowledge (and thus their academic legitimacy) become transparent, accountable, and
justified. However, to “establish a workable consensus about the value and limits of practice
as research both within and beyond the community of those directly involved” seems to be an
almost irresolvable task.17 At the least, it ought to be a task that continues to be open-ended
and inevitably unresolved.
The problem is, once you enter the academic power-knowledge system of accountability
checks and evaluative supervision, you have either explicitly or implicitly accepted the
parameters of this system. Though acceptance does not necessarily imply submission or
surrender to these parameters, a fundamental acknowledgment of the ideological principles
inscribed in them remains a prerequisite for any form of access, even if one copes with them,
contests them, negotiates them, and revises them. Admittedly, it is somewhat contradictory to
claim a critical stance with regard to the transformation of art education through an artistic
research paradigm while simultaneously operating at the heart of that same system. I do not
have a solution for this. Nonetheless, I venture that addressing the power relations that inform
and produce the kind of institutional legitimacy/consecration sought by such research
endeavors could go beyond mere lip service and be effective in changing the situation.
Board Room at the African Leadership Academy
3. Art in the Knowledge-Based Polis
I would like to propose, with the support and drive of a group of colleagues working inside
and outside the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, a research project bearing the title “Art in the
Knowledge-based Polis.” The conceptual launch pad for this project is a far-reaching question
about how art might be comprehended and described as a specific mode of generating and
disseminating knowledge. How might it be possible to understand the very genealogy of
significant changes that have taken place in the status, function, and articulation of the visual
arts within contemporary globalizing societies?
With reference to the work of French sociologist Luc Boltanski, the term polis has been
chosen deliberately to render the deep imbrications of both the material (urbanist-spatial,
architectural, infrastructural, etc.) and immaterial (cognitive, psychic, social, aesthetic,
cultural, legal, ethical, etc.) dimensions of urbanity.18 Moreover, the knowledge-based polis is
a conflictual space of political contestation concerning the allocation, availability and
exploitation of “knowledge” and “human capital.”
As a consequence, it is also a matter of investigating how the “knowledge spaces” within the
visual arts and between the protagonists of the artistic field are organized and designed.19
What are the modes of exchange and encounter and what kind of communicative and thinking
“styles” guide the flow of what kind of knowledge? How are artistic archives of the present
and the recent past configured (technologically, cognition-wise, socially)? In what ways has
artistic production (in terms of the deployment and feeding of distributed knowledge networks
in the age of “relational aesthetics”) changed, and what are the critical effects of such changes
on the principle of individualized authorship?20
The implications of this proposal are manifold, and they are certainly open to contestation.
What, for instance, is the qualifier enabling it to neatly distinguish between artistic and nonartistic modes of knowledge production? Most likely, there isn’t one. From (neo-)avant-garde
claims of bridging the gap between art and life (or those modernist claims which insist on the
very maintenance of this gap) to issues of academic discipline in the age of the Bologna
process and outcome-based education, it seems that the problem of the art/non-art dichotomy
has been displaced. Today, this dichotomy seems largely to have devolved into a question of
how to establish a discursive field capable of rendering an epistemological and ontological
realm of artistic/studio practice as a scientifically valid research endeavor.
As art historian James Elkins puts it, concepts concerning the programmatic generation of
“new knowledge” or “research” may indeed be “too diffuse and too distant from art practice
to be much use.”21 Elkins may have a point here. His skepticism regarding the practice-based
research paradigm in the fine arts derives from how institutions (i.e., university and funding
bodies) measure research and PhD programs’ discursive value according to standards of
scientific, disciplinary research. For Elkins, “words like research and knowledge should be
confined to administrative documents, and kept out of serious literature.”22 In a manner most
likely informed by science and technology studies and Bruno Latour, he argues instead that
the focus should turn toward the “specificity of charcoal, digital video, the cluttered look of
studio classrooms (so different from science labs, and yet so similar), the intricacies of
Photoshop . . . the chaos of the foundry, the heat of under-ventilated computer labs.”23 I think
this point is well taken.
However useless the deployment of terms such as “research” and “knowledge” may seem,
such uselessness is bound to a reading and deployment of the terms in a way that remains
detached from the particular modes of discourse formation in art discourse itself. The moment
one enters the archives of writing, criticism, interviews, syllabi, and other discursive
articulations produced and distributed within the artistic field, the use of terms such as
“research” and discussion about the politics and production of “knowledge” are revealed as
fundamental to twentieth-century art—particularly since the inception of Conceptual Art in
the late 1960s. After all, the modernists, neo- and post-avant-gardists aimed repeatedly at
forms and protocols relating to academic and intellectual work—of research and publication,
the iconography of the laboratory, scientific research, or think tanks.
Administrative, information, or service aesthetics, introduced at various moments of
modernist and post-modernist art, emulated, mimicked, caricaturized and endorsed the
aesthetics and rhetoric of scientific communities. They created representations and
methodologies for intellectual labor on and off-display, and founded migrating and flexible
archives that aimed to transform the knowledge spaces of galleries and museums according to
what were often feminist agendas.
Within the art world today, the discursive formats of the extended library-cum-seminar-cumworkshop-cum-symposium-cum-exhibition have become preeminent modes of address and
forms of knowledge production. In a recent article in this journal on “the educational turn in
curating,” theorist Irit Rogoff addresses the various “slippages that currently exist between
notions of ‘knowledge production,’ ‘research,’ ‘education,’ ‘open-ended production,’ and
‘self-organized pedagogies,’” particularly as “each of these approaches seem to have
converged into a set of parameters for some renewed facet of production.” Rogoff continues,
“Although quite different in their genesis, methodology, and protocols, it appears that some
perceived proximity to ‘knowledge economies’ has rendered all of these terms part and parcel
of a certain liberalizing shift within the world of contemporary art practices.” However,
Rogoff is afraid that “these initiatives are in danger of being cut off from their original
impetus and threaten to harden into a recognizable ‘style.’” As the art world “became the site
of extensive talking,” which entailed certain new modes of gathering and increased access to
knowledge, Rogoff rightly wonders whether “we put any value on what was actually being
said.”24
Thus, if James Elkins is questioning the possibility of shaping studio-based research and
knowledge production into something that might receive “interest on the part of the wider
university” and be acknowledged as a “position—and, finally, a discipline—that speaks to
existing concerns,” 25 Rogoff seems to be far more interested in how alternative practices of
communality and knowledge generation/distribution might provide an empowering capacity.
Art Classroom at The Calhoun School
4. Artistic Knowledge and Knowledge-based Economies
Since the neo-avant-gardes of the 1960s (at the latest), knowledge generation within the visual
arts has expanded through the constitutive dissolution (or suspension) of its subjects and
media. Meanwhile, however, its specific aesthetic dimension has continued to be marked by
elusiveness and unavailability—by doing things, “of which we don’t know what they are”
(Adorno).26 A guiding hypothesis of the “Art in the Knowledge-based Polis” conceit is that
this peculiar relationship between the availability and unavailability of artistic knowledge
production assigns a central task to contemporary cultural theory, as such. This not only
concerns issues of aesthetics and epistemology, but also its relation to other (allegedly nonartistic) spaces of knowledge production.
To advance this line of reasoning, the various reconfigurations of knowledge, its social
function, and its distribution (reflected within late modernist and post-modernist
epistemological discourse) have to be considered. From the invocation of the post-industrial
information society27 to the critique of modernist “metanarratives”28 and the theorization of
new epistemological paradigms such as reflexivity, transdisciplinarity, and heterogeneity,29
the structure, status and shape of knowledge has changed significantly. Amongst other
consequences, this has given rise to a number of specific innovative policies concerning
knowledge (and its production) on national and transnational levels.30
A point of tension that can become productive here is the traditional claim that artists almost
constitutively work on the hind side of rationalist, explicated knowledge—in the realms of
non-knowledge (or emergent knowledge). As a response to the prohibition and
marginalization of certain other knowledges by the powers that be, the apparent
incompatibility of non-knowledge with values and maxims of knowledge-based economies
(efficiency, innovation, and transferability) may provide strategies for escaping such
dominant regimes.
Michel Foucault’s epistemology offers a hardly noticed reasoning on artistic knowledge that
appears to contradict this emphasis on non-knowledge, while simultaneously providing a
methodological answer to the conundrum. In his 1969 L’Archéologie du savoir (The
Archaeology of Knowledge), Foucault argues that the technical, material, formal, and
conceptual decisions in painting are traversed by a “positivity of knowledge” which could be
“named, uttered, and conceptualized” in a “discursive practice.”31 This very “positivity of
knowledge” (of the individual artwork, a specific artistic practice, or a mode of publication,
communication, and display) should not be confused with a rationalist transparency of
knowledge. This “discursive practice” might even refuse any such discursivity. Nonetheless,
the works and practices do show a “positivity of knowledge”—the signature of a specific (and
probably secret) knowledge.
At the heart of “Art in the Knowledge-based Polis” would be a recognition, description, and
analysis of such “positivity”—as much as an exploration of the epistemological conditions in
which such positivity appears. Just as the forms and discourses through which artists inform,
equip, frame, and communicate their production have become manifold and dispersed, so has
a new and continuously expanding field of research opened up as a result.
In many ways, the recent history of methodologies and modes of articulation in the visual arts
is seen to be co-evolutionary with such developments as participate in the complex transition
from an industrial to a postindustrial (or in terms of regulation theory: from a Fordist to a
post-Fordist) regime. However, the relationship between art and society cannot be grasped in
terms of a one-sided, sociological-type causality. Rather, the relationship must be seen as
highly reciprocal and interdependent. Hence it is possible to claim that in those societies for
which “knowledge” has been aligned with “property” and “labor” as a “steering mechanism,”
the visual arts dwell in an isolated position.32 The pertinent notion of “immaterial labor” that
originated in the vocabulary of post-operaismo (where it is supposed to embrace the entire
field of “knowledge, information, communications, relations or even affects”) has become
one of the most important sources of social and economic value production.33 Hence, it is
crucial for the visual arts and their various (producing, communicating, educating, etc.) actors
to fit themselves into this reality, or oppose the very logic and constraints of its “cognitive
capitalism.”34
Amongst such approaches is an informal, ephemeral, and implicit “practical wisdom” that
informs individual and collective habits, attitudes, and dialects. Moreover, the influence of
feminist, queer, subaltern, or post-colonial epistemologies and “situated knowledges” is of
great importance in relation to the visual arts.35 Thus, for the purposes of inquiring into “Art
in the Knowledge-based Polis,” the array of artistic articulations (both discursive and those
deemed non-discursive) will be conceived as reaching far beyond common art/science and
theory/practice dichotomies, while a careful analysis of the marks left on artistic
epistemologies will be pursued throughout.
The relocation and re-contextualization of the knowledge issue create room-for-play absent in
traditional research designs. The socio-spatial dimension of knowledge production within the
visual arts should constitute another essential interest. Urban spaces are understood today as
infrastructures of networked, digital architectures of knowledge as much as material, built
environments. The contemporary knowledge-based city is structured and managed by
information technology and databases, and the new technologies of power and modes of
governance they engender (from surveillance strategies to intellectual property regulations to
the legal control of network access) demand an adapted set of methodologies and critical
approaches. Much of the work to be done might deploy updated versions of regime analysis
and Foucauldian governmentality studies (which would by no means exclude other
approaches). This urban “network society” displays features of a complex “politics of
knowledge” that cannot be limited to stately and corporate management of biotechnological
knowledge, because it is also actively involved in sponsoring the so-called creative industries,
universities, museums, etc.36 By this token, it also becomes important to investigate and
explore the social, political, and economic shares held by the visual arts in the knowledgebased polis.
What is needed is a multifocal, multidisciplinary perspective with a fresh look at the
interactions and constitutive relations between knowledge and the visual arts. The specific,
historically informed relations between artistic and scientific methodologies (their
epistemologies, knowledge claims, and legitimating discourses) should play a major role.
However, as deliberately distinguished from comparable research programs, research will be
guided onto an expanded epistemic terrain on which “scientific” knowledge is no longer a
privileged reference. Internal exchanges and communications between the social/cultural
worlds of the visual arts and their transdisciplinary relationalities will be structured and
shaped by those very forms of knowledge whose legitimacy and visibility are the subject of
highly contested epistemological struggles.
An adequate research methodology has to be developed in order to allow the researchers
positions on multiple social-material time-spaces of actual making and doing—positions that
permit and actually encourage active involvement in the artistic processes in the stages of
production before publication, exhibition, and critical reception. I would suggest that notions
of “research” motivated by a sense of political urgency and upheaval are of great importance
here. As can be seen in what took place at Hornsey in 1968, positions that are criticized (and
desired) as an economic and systemic privilege should be contested as well as (re)claimed.
Otherwise, I am afraid that the implementation of practice-based research programs and PhDs
in art universities will turn out to be just another bureaucratic maneuver to stabilize
hegemonic power/knowledge constellations, disavowing the very potentialities and histories
at the heart of notions of “practice” and “research.”
Notes
R0370126@student.akbild.ac.at, “To the Knowledge Producers,” inIntersections. At the Crossroads of the Production
of Knowledge, Precarity, Subjugation and the Reconstruction of History, Display and De-Linking, ed. Lina
Dokuzović, Eduard Freudmann, Peter Haselmayer, and Lisbeth Kovačič (Vienna: Löcker, 2008), 27.
2
Simon Sheikh, “Talk Value: Cultural Industry and Knowledge Economy,” in On Knowledge Production: A Critical
Reader in Contemporary Art, ed. Maria Hlavajova, Jill Winder, and Binna Choi (Utrecht: BAK, basis voor actuele
kunst; Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, Archiv für aktuelle Kunst, 2008), 196-7.
3
Chris Wainwright, “The Importance of Artistic Research and its Contribution to ‘New Knowledge’ in a Creative
Europe,” European League of Institutes of the Arts Strategy Paper (May 2008), →.
4
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, [1975]
1995).
5
Lisa Tickner, Hornsey 1968: The Art School Revolution (London: Frances Lincoln, 2008), 13-14.
6
T.N., “Notes Towards the Definition of Anti-Culture,” in The Hornsey Affair, ed. Students and staff of Hornsey
College of Art (Harmondsworth, London: Penguin, 1969), 15.
7
Ibid., 29.
8
Ibid., 38-7.
9
Ibid., 116-7.
10
Ibid. [Document 46], 118.
11
See ibid. [Document 46], 122.
12
Ibid., [Document 46], 124.
13
Ibid. [Document 46], 128-129.
14
Angela Piccini, “An Historiographic Perspective on Practice as Research,” PARIP (Practice as Research in
Performance), →.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid.
17
See Anna Pakes, “Original Embodied Knowledge: The Epistemology of the New in Dance Practice as
Research,” Research in Dance Education 4, no. 2 (December 2003): 144.
18
See Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, De la justification. Les économies de la grandeur (Paris: Gallimard,
1991); Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1999).
19
See Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Michael Hagner, and Bettina Wahrig-Schmidt, eds., Räume des Wissens:
Repräsentation, Codierung, Spur(Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997).
20
See Caroline A. Jones, “The Server/User Mode: the Art of Olafur Eliasson,” Artforum International 46, no. 2
(October 2007): 316-324, 396, 402.
21
James Elkins, “Afterword: On Beyond Research and New Knowledge,” in Thinking Through Art: Reflections on Art
as Research, ed. Katy Macleod and Lin Holdridge (London/New York: Routledge, 2006), 243.
22
Ibid., 247.
23
Ibid., 246.
24
Irit Rogoff, “Turning,” e-flux journal, no. 0 (November 2008), →.
25
Elkins, “Afterword,” 244.
26
Theodor W. Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 16, (Frankfurt/Main:
Suhrkamp, 1978), 493-540.
27
See Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).
28
See Jean-François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Minuit, 1979).
29
See Michael Gibbons et al., The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in
Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 1994).
30
See Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, The Knowledge-based Economy (Paris:
Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, 1996); “Putting Knowledge Into Practice: a BroadBased Innovation Strategy for the EU,” communication from the Commission to the Council, the European
Parliament, the European Economic and Social Committee, and the Committee of the Regions (September 9,
2006), →.
31
Michel Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).
32
Nico Stehr, Wissenspolitik: Die Überwachung des Wissens(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 30.
33
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt,Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004),
126.
34
Yann Moulier-Boutang, Le capitalisme cognitif: La Nouvelle Grande Transformation (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam,
2007).
35
See Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial
Perspective,” Feminist Studies14, no. 3 (Autumn 1988): 575-599.
36
See Stehr, Wissenspolitik.
☁
This essay is a revised and abridged version of a talk given at the conference “Art/Knowledge. Between Epistemology and Production
Aesthetics” at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, November 11, 2008.
Dieter Lesage
A Portrait of the Artist as a Researcher
You’re an artist and that means: you’re a dreamer, you’re a clown. That is what
some people think. It’s a great excuse for not paying any attention to all the
thoughts you have. So what happens is that you, as an artist, put ideas into
projects that others will show in their museum, in their Kunsthalle, in their
exhibition space, in their gallery. So you are a thinker. You develop
reflections nobody really cares about. You take intellectual risks. You
speculate about artistic problems, you critically kick ass. You’re a
transcender. You cannot put all your research efforts into one kind of artistic
problems. So you interdisciplinarize your reflection. You link the reflections
you make. You would say it differently. I know. You say you work within the
framework of cultural studies. Within which all over the world you have many
buddies. You are a video maker, but also a writer. You have a magazine, you’re
an editor, but you also organize conferences. You make videos of interviews with
intellectuals. You organize a conference when you present a journal, you insert
video stills of interviews with intellectuals in your journal, you organize
conferences and you’re the host. You’re part of this little think tank, you walk
around at your conference, you talk to people and ask if they want to contribute
to your reader, you’re an editor and co-editor, you’re a research coordinator
and co-coordinator, you co-edit and coordinate all the time. You want your
readers to attend your lectures, you want your conference participants to read
your texts, you invite those who contribute to your reader to come to your
conference, you make installations with interview videos. You meet people in
order to interview them and you interview people in order to meet them. You
distribute flyers announcing your conference in the bars near the skyscrapers
where you meet people for an interview. You buy second-hand books on flee
markets, you distribute flyers announcing your conference in the bar next to the
Academy where you meet a DJ who’s distributing flyers too, and you talk to her
about a project that one day you might work on together. You make photographs of
the library you made from the books you bought at the flee market, you liberate
your continent from its philosophical prejudices, you publish the photographs in
a publication and you’re a speaker at a conference to which you invite people
who wrote for your journal. You invite other speakers to speak after you, you
are a master of ceremony and someone else is the speaker, you welcome the people
who came to the conference, you introduce people to one another. You’re making
art and you’re doing research, your research is practice-based and your practice
is research-driven. You’re doing research on the concept of artistic research,
you aren’t an artist yourself, they say, but yes you are. You make books that
bear your name, you send your books to people who write, you quote their books
and they quote you, you write about them and they about you. You are everywhere
and you make people wonder where you are. You are abroad, you’re working on one
of your laptops, you’re getting back to all your e-mail conversations, you’re
updating people on your research projects, you’re doing research projects all
the time. You buy flight tickets on the web, you call for a cab, you wear your
excess baggage full of research documents from the cab to the plane. You work in
different places. You move. You move from one workshop to another, from one
conference to another. You take another cab, it takes hours to find your place
in Lissabon. You prepare a publication and you negiotate with the layouter to
have your text printed the way you want it. You distribute flyers announcing the
presentation of the publication in a theater where you attend a performance, you
distribute flyers announcing a performance for which you were the dramaturge at
the presentation of the publication in a bookshop, you announce another
presentation of the same publication in another bookshop, you thank people for
being there, you introduce people you interviewed to one another, you invite
them to come to the performance. You organize exhibitions, you invite people to
present their work, you work with people on the presentation, you explain the
curatorial concept of the exhibition in an announcement for the media. You
publish in order not to perish and you perish for having published too much. You
write new stuff and you rewrite old stuff. You watch the news. You’re doing
research on the blues. You’re peer reviewing for journals and your journal is
peer-reviewed. You’re an artist and that means it would be nice to get some
understanding for the specific kind of research you’re involved in. You write
for subsidies, you apply for research grants, and in every commission over and
over again there are these academics who don’t understand a thing about artistic
research. You organize dinner for people you introduce to one another, you
discuss research plans over dinner. You ask people to contribute to your
catalogue, you tell them how you work, you show them all. You explain them the
basic facts of an artist’s life. That you are an artist and that it means:
you’re a dreamer, you’re a clown. That is what some of these people think. It’s
a great excuse for not paying attention to all the thoughts you have. So what
happens is that you, as an artist, put ideas into projects that others will show
in their museum, in their Kunsthalle, in their exhibition space, in their
gallery. So you are a thinker. You develop reflections nobody really cares
about. You take intellectual risks. You speculate about artistic problems, you
critically kick ass. You’re a transcender. You cannot put all your research
efforts into one kind of artistic problems. So you interdisciplinarize your
reflection. You link the reflections you make. I would say it differently. You
know. I say your work is characterized by transdisciplinarity. That it is
impressive by its methodological variety. You remix the work of others, but you
also remix your own work. You’re very profound but you have a vulgar side too
that indulges in scatological remarks. Just kidding. You distribute texts to the
visitors of your exhibitions. You consider exhibitions as an excuse for a
publication — kidding again — you even consider an exhibition in itself as a
publication, you consider every work of art as a publication. You curate an
exhibition: it’s like editing a book. You co-curate an exhibition: it’s liking
co-editing a book. You participate in a group exhibition: it’s like publishing
an article. You participate as a member of a collective in a group exhibition:
it’s like co-authoring an article. You make a solo exhibition, hey, it’s like
publishing a monograph. You make a solo exhibition at Tate Modern: it’s like
publishing a monograph at Oxford University Press. There’s got to be some method
in this mess. So let’s be more specific. You participate in a group exhibition
at Tate Modern: it’s like publishing an article in an A-journal. You participate
as a member of a collective in a group exhibition at Tate Modern: it’s like
publishing a co-authored article in an A-journal. You curate a group exhibition
at Tate Modern: it’s like editing an issue of an A-journal. You co-curate a
group exhibition at Tate Modern: it’s like co-editing an issue of an A-journal.
You are a member of the advisory commission for a group exhibition at Tate
Modern: it’s like being a peer reviewer of an A-journal. You are the director of
Tate Modern: it’s like being the editor-in-chief of an A-journal. You have a
solo exhibition at Tate Modern: it’s almost like presenting and defending a
Ph.D. To be published at Oxford University Press. Still what a mess. What about
the B? If you’ve got an A, you’ve got to have a B too. You participate in a
group exhibition at Whitechapel: it’s like publishing an article in a B-journal.
You participate as a member of a collective in a group exhibition at
Whitechapel: it’s like publishing a co-authored article in a B-journal. You
curate a group exhibition at Whitechapel: it’s like editing an issue of a
B-journal. You co-curate a group exhibition at Whitechapel: it’s like co-editing
an issue of a B-journal. You are a member of the advisory commission for a group
exhibition at Whitechapel: it’s like being a peer reviewer of a B-journal. You
are the director of Whitechapel: it’s like being the editor-in-chief of a
B-journal. And I don’t mean to be negative about the B, you know what I’m
saying? Coz’ there’s lots of them journals that aren’t even A, B or C, dig it?
Then to have a solo exhibition at Whitechapel is almost like presenting and
defending an M.F.A. To be published by Edinburgh University Press. It’s like a
real fucking publication, man. It ain’t an A, it’s a B, but it counts. It counts
a lot, if you compare it to an exhibition in the gallery of your niece. Coz’
that gallery doesn’t even have a C, if you know what I mean. It’s just a
gallery, and it’s your niece, so she’s much too close to be a peer and all.
That’s what becoming academic is all about. That you have those people who are
called peers and who are totally objective and who know the shit and who can
determine if your artwork and your artistic research meet all the scientific
standards and all. And so you’d better thank God for peers who are objective and
scientific and neutral and anonymous. And so you’d better thank God for the
University who helps you to find peers who are objective and scientific and
neutral and anonymous and competent. Coz’ the University academizes you, with
the help of God Almighty. You’re stubborn but God is patient. So slowly you’re
getting academized. The University academizes you and your Academy is being
academized. So you’d better praise the Lord for all the good people at Research
& Development. So thank you God for the R&D parties to which you are invited
now, and who redeem you for all the years that you’ve been listening too much to
sinful R&B. Now you go to parties with objective music, neutral drinks, and
scientific conversations, in order to meet anonymous people. Now you’re part of
this little think tank, this artistic platform, this network, this research
group, so you walk around at the parties of R&D, and offer validated cocktails
to the members of your peer group. But the party is just so fucking boring that
you’re getting drunk. You’re getting provocative, you’re using unacademic
language. You’re pointing at the president of the research commission. You’re
shouting, you’re getting loud. You’re much too loud man. People are getting
embarrassed. And while they’re looking away, sipping at their Bama on the Beach,
you tell them with a grim smile on your face: I’m an artist and that means: I’m
a dreamer, I’m a clown. That is what some of you guys think. It’s a great excuse
for not paying any shitty attention to all the thoughts I have. So what happens
is that I, as a fucking artist, put fucking ideas into fucking projects that
others will show in their fucking museum, in their shitty Kunsthalle, in their
sexhibition space, in their gutter gallery. So I am a thinker. I develop
reflections none of you really cares about. I take intellectual risks. I
speculate about artistic problems, I critically kick ass. I’m a transcender. I
cannot put all my research efforts into one kind of artistic problems. So I
interdisciplinarize my reflection. I link the reflections I make. You would say
it differently. I know. You say I don’t have a method. You say I mix things up.
While mixing is my method. Do I tell you how to construct a machine? No. So
don’t tell me how to work as an artist. Coz’ you don’t have a clue. Don’t you
tell me that I should publish, that I should publish more, that I should publish
there, or publish then. I publish where I want, when I want and how I want.
Don’t tell me that meaning only appears in text. Don’t tell me that without a
written text on my work, my work doesn’t have any meaning. Words don’t have the
monopoly of meaning, you know what I’m saying? Images can speak. So I give you
images, and you give me that fucking doctorate. Coz’ my images develop
hypotheses. My images ask questions. My images write history. My images
interpret and reinterpret history. My images defend propositions. My images
refute arguments. My images criticize misconceptions. My images are comments. My
images are theses. My images speak as much as words can speak. And therefore to
all those who speak in images, I say: rize! Rize against the image of the artist
as a dreamer. Rize against the image of the artist as a clown. Rize against what
some people think. And make them pay attention to all the thoughts you have. But
continue to develop your thoughts your way. Beyond the Academy.

On measuring artistic research output1 Dieter Lesage

Transcription

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