The
debate on artistic research emerging worldwide in the field of
visual art for some five years now tends to focus on what
artistic research could be or should be. As a consequence
of that debate, artistic research as a yet undefined sanctuary
for creative experiment and knowledge production is prone
to the danger of being absorbed by an intellectually crippling
academic discourse on how the specificity of research-based
art as a novel modus operandi could be defined and framed.
That tendency is comparable to what happened in the 1990s
with the initially so radically formulated anti-disciplinary
cultural studies. Such academic debate that ultimately seems
to be focused particularly on institutional and managerial
results, and is, moreover, connected in Europe time and
again with the so-called Bologna rules, i.e. the introduction
of a bachelor, master, and PhD structure in art education
provides very little insight in the specific qualities of
the artistic research process as such. Therefore, it is more
than urgent to approach research practices from the perspective
of the artistic profession implying entirely different and
also more intrinsic views.
In that context, the project Nameless
Science aims at expanding the artistic research debate while
showing the concrete outcome of seven best artistic research practices
in PhD projects. These actual projects will demonstrate that the
form of research taking place through the practice of visual art
is, in fact, much more dynamic than is common within the traditional
academic bastions still characterized by distinct and clear fields
and disciplines. Visual art knows a different form of research
strikingly described during one of the first European conferences
on artistic research by Sarat Maharaj as “spasmic, interdisciplinary
probes, haphazard cognitive investigations, dissipating interaction,
and imaginary archiving.”(1)
A mode of research not focused purposefully on generating “expert
knowledge,” but specifically on expressing experience-based
knowledge. Such knowledge cannot be channeled through rigid academic-scientific
guidelines of generalization, repetition and quantification, but
requires full attention for the unique, the qualitative, the particular,
and the local. In short, a form of nominalist production of knowledge
unable to serve a retinal, one-dimensional worldview characterized
by transparent singularity, but rather creating—and if
necessary demanding—room for the undefined, the heterogeneous,
the plural, the contingent, and the relative. Such knowledge production
can only be the sole outcome of a researching practice characterized
at all times by an absolute open, non-disciplinary attitude and
an insertion of multiple models of interpretation. That mode of
research has been strikingly described in the 1970s by the philosopher
of science Feyerabend in a then utopian fashion as “anarchist
methodology” and “Dadaist epistemology.”(2)
In spite of much academic skepticism, there
is indeed today a visual practice satisfying the essential components
of widely accepted research. Research conducted by artists—similar
to research in the traditional sciences such as humanities, social
sciences and natural sciences—is as well guided by the,
since time immemorial, most important maxim of any scientific
activity: the awareness of the necessity of a transparent communication.
The artist as researcher needs to explain clearly why the domain
of visual art necessitates the research questions and, the other
way around, why those questions should necessarily be articulated
in the visual domain. In addition, the researcher should be able
to justify both the process and the chosen operational methodology
and trajectory. In that context, one characteristic turns out
to be specifically remarkable. A striking methodology in the topical
practice of artistic research appears to be the formulation of
a certain problem from a specific situation-based artistic process
and furthermore to interconnect that problem in an open constellation
with various knowledge systems and disciplines. Those artistic
research projects seem to thwart the well-defined disciplines:
They know the hermeneutic questions of the humanities (the alpha-sciences);
they are engaged in empirically scientific methods (the beta-sciences);
and they are aware of commitment (the gamma-sciences). Because
of that capacity and willingness to continuously engage in novel,
unexpected epistemological relations in a methodologicalprocess
of interconnectivity, artistic research could best be described
as a delta-discipline: a way of research not a priori determined
by any established scientific paradigm or model of representation;
an undefined discipline as “nameless science,”(3)
directed towards generating novel connections, flexible constructions,
multiplicities, and new reflexive zones.
That undefined non-paradigmatic discipline
as nameless science is indeed the curatorial departing point in
the exhibition Nameless Science. All seven presented
artistic research projects deal with an artistic reinterpretation
of representation(al) models, existing disciplines, comprehension
strategies, and academic classification systems. Consequently,
these research projects do not only produce fluent forms of interconnectivity
and methodology accompanied by different forms of knowledge production,
they also lead to novel artistic strategies and intensities of
perception.
In his project Photographing the Barents
Region (2008), Morten Torgersrud (Bergen National Academy of the Arts) deconstructs
a homogenizing geography from the paradigm of the nationstate
and a territorializing form of atlas-thought by focusing on the
complexity of a political, cultural, and economic interstitial
domain: the Barents Region determined by the spheres of influence
of both Norway and Russia. Torgersrud’s “essay installation”
consists of a creative atlas mapping a series of significant locations–not
from a centric perspective or a coherent narrative, but from a
passion for both the material history of the landscape and the
politics of space. The installation is accompanied by a series
of slide projections and textual reflections dealing with how
the medium of photography contributes ideologically to the historical
rise of the uniformizing concept of landscape.
Researchers Matts Leiderstam (Malmö
School of Art) and Jan Kaila (Helsinki School of Art) engage in
related research questions. In his project See and Seen
(2006), Matts Leiderstam investigates the conventions for the
ideal landscape developed as techniques of perception in 18th-century
painting (e.g. Claude Lorrain). A research trajectory consisting
of the investigation of historical reports and contexts and a
production of various artistic strategies (copying, tourism) leads
to the issue and implications of current spectatorship and how
to address that subject in artistic work.
The project Photographicality (2008)
by Jan Kaila focuses on the dominance of the photographic paradigm
in current visual communication. Such photographic perception
seems to manifest itself in an almost intermedial way as an artistic
tenet and attitude. The use of different media aiming at creating
pictures awakens perceptions, associations, and other meanings
similar to the working of photographic pictures. In an installation
consisting of photographic images mediated by video and text,
Kaila explores whether the photographic process of communication
might be related to a polar intertwining of a presentative, aesthetic
dimension (“the here and now”), and the photographic,
representative, and informational dimension (“the there
and then”).
Also Ronan McCrea (University of Ulster)
examines the photographic process of communication. In his School
Play Series (2008) project, he creates a series of markings
in a schoolyard suggesting an undefined game. Photographs appear
to demonstrate that the game is spontaneously played. However,
the photographs also force us to pose the ontological question
whether playing a game—as an anthropologically ambiguous
and in fact undefined phenomenon—could indeed be captured
in a decisive moment. For example, a moment where the child finds
out that the rules it developed for the game are similar to the
rules of daily life; a life lived outside the safe environment
of the school.
In Ricardo Basbaum’s (Universidade
do Estado do Rio de Janeiro) project NBP (New Bases for Personality),
a hermeneutic link is created between game and artistic experience.
The installation is a multifunctional metal structure, a set of
instructions for the participants, video registrations of a series
of games played, and a diagram with several layers depicting both
the original project and the transformations submitted throughout
history. That creates a series of rhythmic propositions, an awareness
of potential forms of social relations, and ultimately a topology
of a dynamic concept of identity surpassing the interpretative
framework of social science.
Do natural sciences allow an artistic intervention
and reverification of visual representation? That question is
the starting point for Irene Kopelman’s (MaHKU, Utrecht)
research project Space in-between Spaces (2008). Kopelman
investigates how various Natural Science collections used to base
their display system on 19th-century forms of categorization and
logics of identity, a classifying logos excluding differences
and singularities. In the form of a concentrated series of artistic
interventions and deconstructions of device systems, Kopelman
develops alternative forms of archiving and display for a number
of Natural Science collections.
Examining the logic of display and exhibition
is the subject of Sarah Pierce (Goldsmiths College, London) as
well. Pierce’s project Test Pieces, Ambivalence and
Authority (2006-ongoing) focuses on the paradox of the curatorial
characterized by a point of order but also by a point of pause.
In Eyes of the University, Derrida relates the concept of points
of pause, the hesitations and decisions that mark one’s
research. Pierce uses this insight to draw attention to the anticipatory
status of student work and the college campus as a tentative,
transitional site of speculation and deferral. Her apexart presentation
links moments of ambivalence to the authority of artistic research
as it occurs in the academy and includes a video registration
of the Nameless Science symposium and contributions by
students of various New York art academies.
Henk Slager
© 2008
PUBLIC SYMPOSIUM
Concerning the significance of artistic research for art education
December 12, 10am to 5pm
at The Cooper Union, Wollman Auditorium
The symposium involves a presentation of the Nameless Science
research projects by the artists, followed by a discussion with
critical referents from EARN (European Artistic Research Network)
members Mick Wilson (Dublin GradCAM), Gertrud Sandqvist (Malmö
School of Art), Felicitas Thun (Vienna School of Art), Tamar Zinguer
(The Cooper Union School of Architecture), and John Rajchman (Columbia
University).
Also keynote statements by Sarat Maharaj (Malmö School of
Art), Grant Kester (University of California) and George Smith
(IDSVA, Portland).
REFERENCES
1. Sarat
Maharaj, Xeno-Epistemics, in: Annette W. Balkema and
Henk Slager, Artistic Research, Amsterdam/New York, 2004,
p. 50.
2. Paul
Feyerabend, Against Method. Outline of an anarchistic theory
of knowledge, 1975.
3. Cf.
Giorgio Agamben’s Potentialities (1999). Here Aby
Warburg’s research is sketched as “unnamed discipline”:
a mode of being freed from a formalizing, academic disciplining.
The
Nameless Science exhibition and symposium are supported in
part by Bergen National Academy of the Arts; The Cooper Union; Dublin GradCAM;
IDSVA; FRAME Finnish Fund for Art Exchange; Malmo School of Art;
Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam; the Research Institute Art and
Design, University of Ulster, UK; Utrecht Consortium/Utrecht School
of the Art; Vienna School of Art. |
