Artistic Research (Lier & Boog Series, 18)

Artistic Research LIER EN BOOG SERIES, VOLUME 18

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Artistic Research Annette W. Balkema and Henk Slager (eds.)

CIP Artistic Research/Annette W.Balkema and Henk Slager (eds.) Lier en Boog, Series of Philosophy of Art and Art Theory, Volume 18. Editors: Annette W.Balkema and Henk Slager Translations: Global Vernunft Language Editor: Jennifer Nolan Design: Hein Eberson Lier en Boog, Series of Philosophy of Art and Art Theory P.O.Box 1718, NL-1000 BS Amsterdam E-mail: [email protected] Http://www.lierboog.dds.nl Advisory board: Mieke Bal (University of Amsterdam); Saskia Bos (De Appel, Amsterdam); Chris Dercon (Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam); Hubert Dethier (Free University, Brussels); Jos de Mul (Erasmus University, Rotterdam); Maarten van Nierop (University of Amsterdam); Frank Reijnders (University of Amsterdam). Lier en Boog was founded in 1975 by Jan Aler and Hubert Dethier as an official publication of the Dutch Society of Aesthetics. ISBN: 90-420-1097-5 (paper) ISSN: 0925-8191 © Copyright Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam/New York, NY 2004. http://www.rodopi.nl This project was also made possible by the financial support of N.W.O (The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research), ECI-NL (VCH De Brakke Grond, The British Council, Fins Cultureel Centrum, Goethe Institut, Maison Descartes, Instituto Cervantes, Istituto Italiano di Cultura), International Foundation Manifesta, The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture and The Mondriaan Foundation.

CONTENTS 9

Annette W. Balkema and Henk Slager Prologue

11

PRELIMINARY WORKSHOP, ART AND METHOD

33

SYMPOSIUM, ARTISTIC RESEARCH Henk Slager, Discours de la Méthode Sarat Maharaj, Unfinishable Sketch of ‘An Unknown Object in 4D’: scenes of artistic research Annette Balkema, Connecting Worlds Jan Kaila, What is the Point of Research and Doctoral Studies in Art? Mika Hannula, River Low, Mountain High. Contextualizing Artistic Research Tuomas Nevanlinna, Is Artistic Research a Meaningful Concept? Els van Odijk, The Luxury of Doubt Multipoint, Expectations Richard Woodfield, The UK Fine Art PhD and Research in Art & Design Santiago Eraso, Arteleku (in the Crisis of the Modernist Project) Leire Vergara, Front Line Compilation Anke Bangma, Observations and Considerations Koen Brams, Research, Production, Presentation, Discussion (Review) Jean-Baptiste Joly, Academy Schloss Solitude Gertrud Sandqvist, The Right to Think Massimiliano Gioni, Marta Kuzma, Manifesta 5 Curatorial Research

34 39 59 63 70 80 84 89 103 109 114 126 135 140 146 151

157

DISCUSSION

181

PARTICIPANTS

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page 9 L&B volume 18

PROLOGUE Annette W. Balkema and Henk Slager Currently, advanced art education is in the process of developing (doctorate or PhD) research programs throughout Europe. Therefore, it seems to us urgent to explore what the term “research” actually means in the topical practice of art. After all, research as such is often understood as a method stemming from the alpha, beta, and gamma sciences directed towards knowledge production and the development of a certain scientific domain. How is artistic research connected with those types of scientific research, taking into account that the artistic domain so far has tended to continually exceed the parameters of knowledge management? One could claim that the artistic field comprises the hermeneutic question of the humanities, the experimental method of the sciences, and the societal commitment of the social sciences. Will that knowledge influence the domain, the methodology, and the outcome of artistic research? Another major topic concerns not only the specificity of the object of knowledge of artistic research but above all whether and how artistic research and its institutional programs will influence topical visual art, its artworks and its exhibitions. The former, more or less transcendental, questions have been posited in a preliminary workshop Art and Method in De Rijksacademie voor Beeldende Kunsten (State Academy of Visual Arts) in Amsterdam, where a number of philosophers and artists exchanged thoughts on the concept of research as such. In that framework, various topics arose, such as the meaning and position of research in both a scientific and an artistic context; how the different, and as yet, distinctive forms of research could be related, and what a research attitude would imply for the definition of the concept of an artist. Furthermore, the methodological consequences emerging from such a particular approach toward the artistic domain of knowledge were discussed further. The results of the workshop were the launch pad for the international two-day symposium Artistic Research organized in co-operation with the European Cultural Institutes in the Netherlands (Maison Descartes, Goethe Institut, British Council, VCH De Brakke Grond, Instituto Cervantes, Istituto Italiana di Cultura, and the Finnish Cultural Institute), where similar methodological questions were addressed once more, albeit specifically focused on the institutional domain. These included: how could the developing research paradigm in topical visual art be part of the curriculum for advanced art institutions in Europe? And, vice

page 10 L&B volume 18 versa, how could an advanced art institution promote a progressive, artistic research paradigm? Would that be in the form of an institutional introspection? After a reformulation of the institutional framework? Or by an exploration and modification of existing teaching criteria and artists-in residence programs? These complex problematics with their various points of view and management models are mapped out through the contributions of theorists, curators, and institutions, from Belgium, France, Great-Britain, Italy, The Netherlands, Finland, Germany, and Sweden. May these contributions be a constructive impetus for a versatile debate which may influence the future role of advanced art institutions and the position of artistic research in the next decade.

PRELIMINARY WORKSHOP ART AND METHOD

page 12 L&B volume 18 METHODODICY Henk Slager In the topical practice of visual art, artists increasingly consider their activities a form of research. Moreover, the concept of research appears to play a crucial role in today’s redefinition of advanced art education, where similar to established, academic research schools and institutions - one started to think in terms of research projects and PhD degrees. Therefore, it seems to be urgent today to reflect on the specificity of artistic research, whether institutionalized or not. I believe that particularly differences and relationships with regard to other forms of - established - alpha, beta, and gamma research should be investigated. What are, however, the criteria defining the specificity of artistic research? The concept of research as such already connotes a certain expectation. After all, research entails an organized manner of approach, a systematic analysis of information, and a contribution to a knowledge economy. Research also implies, though, a certain ethical responsibility in the sense of investigation for the sake of a better understanding of the world or investigation for the sake of improving the world. But what is the specific meaning of research in the context of the practice of art? Let’s first attempt to define the core research activity in general. One could say that each form of research seems to focus on the formulation of a methodology. The research may or may not be driven by grand inspiration or accidental discovery, it will ultimately lead to a novel, methodologically formulated form of knowledge. Thus, the soundness of the method determines the value of the results, whereby continual control should demonstrate to what extent the conditions of the methodology have been applied adequately. While research methods obviously vary according to the field and subject of investigation, they all share the same basic principle: the methods of research are both concerned with formulating questions and providing the answers to those questions. Therefore, I believe that research can be most adequately described as methodic links between questions and answers or answers and questions - in random order. Today, a similar approach to research can be found in topical artistic activities. With that, an important shift has occurred in the modernist paradigm whereby the accent is no longer on practice as production. Rather, practice has turned into a dynamic point of reference for theorydriven experimentation in general. While the traditional academic, artistic model could be described as one where experimentation is embedded in experience, the topical model is one in which experience is embedded in experimentation. However, the research as conducted by artists today is not characterized by an objective, empirical approach, since art, obviously,

page 13 L&B Volume 18 does not strive for generalization, repeatability, and quantification. Rather, artistic research is directed towards unique, particular, local knowledge. In that sense, it seamlessly connects with Baumgarten’s classic definition of the aesthetic domain where aesthetic knowledge is knowledge about the singular. Although artistic knowledge cannot be generalized into laws since it applies to the singular and unique - it still is knowledge, says Baumgarten. However, the emphasis on the singular and unique in the aesthetic domain does not imply that research is impossible, as philosopher of science Karl Popper would argue. After all, artistic research does satisfy a number of fundamental research criteria, such as a focus on communication, a (self) critical attitude, and an emphasis on autonomous research. In contrast to academic research focused on the creation of professional knowledge, the domain of art seems to imply expression of understanding on account of experience. Furthermore, while academic research is characterized by purposeful uselessness, artistic research feels strongly about a committed, social, and non-academic destination. Yet, each artistic research project should be able to answer two questions. First, why should its research be conducted in the domain of visual art and, secondly, what is the nature of its methodological tools. The epistemological perspective of uniqueness and otherness demands a further methodological contemplation. Indeed, different from established forms of research, the methodological path of artistic research and its implied production of knowledge cannot easily be defined. For example, take the research of the Amsterdam artist Joke Robaard. Her artistic investigations in the domain between art and fashion resulted in foldlike contours and stylistic models elliptically moving between commodification and emancipation. “Garments are continuously presented in new constellations, but never really described. Where are the texts that map the progress of the everyday garment? S(T)OCK is a presentation of an investigation into “archetypal” everyday garments, in order to find a different informational language.” In collaboration with Joke Robaard, Gerrit Rietveld Academy students worked on an archive where garments and their surroundings are represented in series, maps, books etc. Garments show – in endless modulations – the behaviors of people; replace ‘garment’ with ‘feature’ and you will understand the extent to which people imbue clothes with identity. The archive is no static accumulation of forms, it rather aims to create a dynamic “garment cartography”. In Robaard’s research, a perpetual play emerges between containment and liberation. That play ultimately disrupts each definitive dominance of both the traditional, modernist art discours and the one-dimensional rhetoric of fashion while moving towards a third plane in the style of the interstitial space.

page 14 L&B volume 18 One could conclude that artistic research (and the institutions admitting such research in their curriculum) should continually insert a meta-perspective enabling critical reflection on both the position and temporary situation of the research project. Fascinatingly, such methodology could be considered a form of mapping - as, for example, Joke Robaard underlines. Such cartography could occur in line with a two-ax system, i.e., a twofold methodological perspective focusing on modes of enquiry. The first is exemplified by Merleau-Ponty’s argument that the artist is the one who sees what others leave unnoticed. That would identify artistic research with a search for the understanding of our existential conditions. The second perspective is illustrated by Lyotard’s maxim that the artist must pose the question of what art is. Such viewpoint identifies artistic research with our need to pursue a speculative mode of questioning for its own sake connected with the activation of imagination. Topical artistic research takes place within the domain of these two axes in an operational, process-based, and experimental way. Different from one-dimensional academic research, the perspective of artistic research cannot determined beforehand. What is at stake is rather a continuous self-reflective movement contemplating the situation while marking out a position with respect to the axes. In the domain of artistic research, it seems to be crucial to maintain an attitude of interrogation and prolific constructivism while openly facing the changes ahead. With that, the necessity of connectivity presents itself continuously in the form of temporary, flexible constructions revealing problems in need of novel methodological programs. Thus, artistic research could lead to a methodological map indicating how, why and where the research is progressing. Only afterwards is it possible to determine whether the methodological process deployed has been entirely mapped - similar to how philosophy in generating new concepts differs from other forms of research (Cf. Deleuze and Guattari What is Philosophy). It seems to me that artistic research should not be characterized by a rigid methodology. I would rather embrace a methododicy, i.e., a firm and rationally justified belief in a methodological result, whose existence ultimately cannot be legitimized apriori.

LIQUID KNOWLEDGE Annette Balkema In an interview in L&B 16, Exploding Aesthetics, Maria Lind - curator of the What If exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm - once mentioned that visual art generates a particular kind of knowledge. Most

page 15 L&B Volume 18 people working in the field of visual art would agree although no one, I believe, would be able to explain what that knowledge might entail. Lind now works in Munich where she continues her Think Tank projects with artists, urban planners and other professionals from the visual field. Does visual art need think tanks in order to elucidate the particular knowledge it generates? Professionals sensitive to what happens in the domain of visual art can do without them. After all, perception or the trained gaze is the main discovery tool in visual art. The gaze is indeed some sort of knowledge machine. However, think tanks, such as this workshop today, could indeed be interesting tools for generating new ideas. Visual art’s interest in urbanism - implying incisions in the urban environment together with architects and urban planners - is one of the forms of collaboration to have emerged in the visual art field during the second part of the 1990s with artists such as Appolonia Sustersic. In addition to new forms of collaboration, other themes appeared last decade, such as the search for new audiences in for example music festivals (Planet Art), researching the moving image in combination with other visual work (Tiong Ang), and examining the streaming image and novel technologies such as interactivity in media art-type work. Last week I saw in media art gallery The Kitchen in New York artists such as Camille Utterback and her Liquid Time Series - which has been present-ed as well in our own Montevideo in Amsterdam - and Scott Snibbe with Frames. The Kitchen announced these two works as the exploration of interactivity as a digital experience triggered by ordinary gestures such as pointing, walking and looking. Themes of The Kitchen’s lectures in February are Digital Happy Hour with filmmaker, author, and editor Grahame Wienbren, and Interactivity and Time, the effects of interactivity on the experience of time in hypertext, music and games. All of these themes mentioned are signals from the world of visual art staking out research areas. And I am sure every artist has in addition a particular individual theme or themes: I only have to think of the books I came across in artists’ studios with titles ranging from cartography, the mechanism of the human body, to Deleuze’s A Thousand Plateaus. Thus, it is quite amazing that urban planners, architects, film directors, physicists such as Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time, Julian Barbour, author of The End of Time, and physicists working on novel areas such as superstring theory, clinical psychologists specializing in perception, and Deleuzian and Merleau-Pontian philosophers do not give regular workshops and are not regular studio visitors at advanced art schools such as the Rijksakademie. Obviously, visual artists do not need to transform into architects, physicists or philosophers. I do believe, though, that the

page 16 L&B volume 18 field of visual art and the other fields I mentioned could be mutually inspiring while work-ing in new forms of collaboration and new forms of think tanks. Such collaborations could be the basis for experimental artistic research projects and produce liquid forms of artistic knowledge.

BEWARE OF RESEARCH Gerard de Vries In my view, philosophy is the business of making distinctions. That is exactly what I am going to do in this discussion on whether artistic work could be viewed as a form of research. There are several lines one could follow in such discussion. Of course, one could ask what art communicates, what its cognitive content comprises, and what one could learn from artistic productions. Another line of argument could go into certain similarities between the development in the sciences and the development in the arts. I decided, though, to start the other way around and to ask, “What is research”? Well, the least one could say is that not every experiment or every discovery is research. A kid experimenting with drugs is not doing research. A police investigation with many discoveries is still not called research. To me the paradigmatic case of research, the true example of research concerns, of course, the sciences. Having said that, the first problem one encounters is that there is a wide variety of sciences. Science comes in all kinds of sorts and modes. A physicist, a mathematician, a historian, and a biologist do not necessarily have much in common in their research. Nevertheless, I do think that in spite of the different conceptions of doing science, there is a vague though common concept: scientific research is connected, on the one hand, to what I would call a lofty epistemological ideal, namely the search for truth or the search for objective, certified knowledge, the goal one wants to attain if you will, and, on the other hand, the daily practice of working along in laboratories and archives. A theory about research is a theory about the connection between these two aspects of science. How does one link the daily practice of researchers in a laboratory to lofty ideals such as truth? One could assume that people work in laboratories because they want to know the truth. For a long time the philosophy of science took that same approach. The problem is that if one wants to attain truth, one has to follow certain rules. Departing from those rules, one arrives at a very poor idea of what people in laboratories really do. The other approach is to start with describing what people are actually doing in laboratories, archives and institutes and to try to account for the lofty ideals that, intended or

page 17 L&B Volume 18 unintended, emerge from that work. But how does that contribute to knowing the truth or to adding to objective knowledge - the general goals of scientific research? One could claim that research is a collective system of selection. In other words, emerging ideas only become good ideas when colleagues or peers select them, i.e. cite them in articles or employ them in their research. That is how scientific ideas circulate and are legitimized. In one way or another, scientists have to advertise what is good about their work. If one takes this angle of looking at research, concentrating on circulation, then anything that does not circulate is not considered research. If one does not publish one’s results, they simply fall outside the system of research. So, the first condition for contributing to research is that results need to be published, they need to be part of the system of circulation and citation. The second condition is that any result needs an argument as to what its value is. In the sciences, there is a structure of gate-keepers, of people who decide whether something should be published or not. In fact, there is a whole social system concerning research in the scientific world. If that is a broad outline of what research is, it might be interesting to look at the artistic world and ask under what conditions artists conduct research. Questions would be, then, how does artwork circulate, how does artwork contribute to a lofty ideal, and is there something like a lofty ideal in the world of visual art? I believe here one really runs into problems. First of all, for the sciences, from Aristotle up to the present day, there is a certain – albeit problematic – notion of truth guiding the scientific domain. I am not sure that there is a similar notion available for the arts. In Gombrich’s work, there is a tradition of the representation of nature which points at a similarity between the development of the sciences and the arts. However, it is no coincidence that the Gombrich line of thought, for example in Art and Illusion, ends at the end of the 19th century. As soon as you enter the 20th century, the notion of representation of nature and similar lines of reasoning explode. I doubt that anyone in our current postmodern era could pinpoint a lofty ideal and connect that to visual art as research. The second problem I see is the organization of the circulation of artworks. My impression is that there is a different kind of division of labor involved in the sciences than in the artistic world. In the sciences, those who produce are also those who argue about the work. In the artistic world, there is a division between those who produce artworks and those who argue about them, between artists, on the one hand, and curators and critics on the other. There are some artists who write about their own work, but these are seldom the most interesting texts. Thus, I am not sure

page 18 L&B volume 18 that art would improve if artists were forced to reason about their work. I do believe that one has to be cautious in disrupting that division of labor, that distinction between the production of art and the reasoning about art. Do postmodern architects, who read and discuss, for example, Virilio and Deleuze, design the kind of buildings we want to live in? So, I am a bit skeptical about talking about artistic production as a form of research. In my view, a similarity between the sciences and visual art would involve a different kind of circulation of artworks. In fact, one has to change the practice of the artist in order to get that similarity. Last but not least, I am not entirely sure what the urge is to classify artistic work as research. Why would the Rijksakademie hand out PhD degrees? Is it because of the prestige, is it because of the money? Well, the prestige and the money for the sciences is waning. So, if you want to go for success, go into sports or show business rather than into sciences. I want to stress once again that the circulation of artworks, the practice of art, and the relation between production and criticism has to change because of research and PhD degrees in the art world. I am not sure that is a good idea.

SEVEN CLAIMS James McAllister My remarks are going to be structured around seven claims or theses and the general conclusion that I am going to present is that I am in favor of the concept of artistic research, but that I am very skeptical about awarding PhD degrees for this research. 1. As a philosopher of science, I am in no way anti-science or anti-physics as, for example, sociologists of science sometimes portray themselves. I am a great admirer of the sciences, I am a great admirer of physics. At the same time, I am also properly, in a philosophical way, critical of these practices. Therefore, my first claim is that the sorts of things that are presented as great attainments in the preliminary statement “Methododicy” are relatively atypical for the natural sciences. The statement mentions “generalization, repeatability, and quantification.” It seems to me that when you fix your image of the sciences on the family of the natural sciences, you have a view of the natural sciences heavily dominated by physics, in fact, by a particular branch of physics such as particle physics. The natural sciences as a whole are very diverse. Particle physics is very atypical of what happens in the natural sciences. So, if we are trying to

page 19 L&B Volume 18 compare artistic practice with scientific practice and we want to suggest that these two things can be on a par we are making life unnecessarily complicated and difficult for ourselves by taking a relatively atypical image of the natural sciences. The whole point is that even in the natural sciences, there are very few practices that approximate particle physics. If you think, for example, even just remaining within the natural sciences, of such areas as evolutionary biology, of some forms of chemistry, or of the engineering sciences, you will find that notions such as generalization, repeatability, and quantification do not play a very large role. In fact, the whole idea of the mathematical laws of nature, which is behind these notions, is a product of physics. However, many scientists never produce laws of nature. So, philosophers of science have to maintain a critical and differentiating view of the natural sciences, before bringing in the other part of the comparison, which should be the artistic production. 2. The preliminary statement suggests further that art differs from the sciences because artists aim at unique, particular, local knowledge. That is not quite true. I think it is fair to say that many sciences, like the arts, aim at unique, particular and local knowledge. Many sciences, even natural sciences, aim not at structural knowledge organized in universal principles or laws of nature, but take a historical view. They regard the development of the universe not as an unfolding of possibilities already embedded in the fundamental laws of nature, but as a rather contingent succession of events for which it is very difficult to find a pattern. Since these events cannot be reduced to a simple pattern or law, you have to produce a differentiating description. That would then be a unique, particular, local knowledge. If you enter these considerations which could come from, for example, engineering science, where a lot of knowledge is in forms of knowledge of behavior of particular instruments, particular materials, or structures under very specific conditions, then you see once again that the focus on repeatability, universality, and likeness all fall away. So what I am suggesting with my first two claims is that the sciences and the arts are much more similar then one might realize. 3. There is a further respect in which the sciences and the arts can be said to be similar. This is the area of aesthetic factors in which I particularly work in my job as a philosopher of science. Aesthetic factors play an important role in the sciences in both shaping research and in evaluating the results of research. I am thinking of concepts such as mathematical beauty. Aesthetic criteria play an important role alongside logical and empirical criteria in the evaluation of scientific theories and hypotheses.

page 20 L&B volume 18 When scientists apply logical and empirical criteria and point out, for example, that a certain theory is logically consistent they do that in the form of an argument. When they apply aesthetic criteria, it is often not in the form of an argument, but in the form of a gut feeling, sometimes simply called the aesthetic taste of scientists. This is where I have to differ with my colleague Gerard de Vries who emphasized the idea that in the sciences the validation of results is based on arguments. He claimed that a scientist always has to have an argument for accepting or rejecting a theory. I believe he suggested that that differs from the arts, since in the arts what would count is whether one likes something or not. Leaving aside for a moment the question whether that is a good characterization for what happens in the arts - there is a lot of argumentation that goes on in the arts - what he says about the validation of scientific theories is only partly borne out by the historical record if you take aesthetic factors into account. It is very difficult in the sciences to produce an argument of the kind that Gerard de Vries has in mind for disliking a particular scientific theory on aesthetic grounds. You could ask yourself, for example, whether the resistance of people like Einstein against quantum mechanics is really argued. I do not think it is, because the arguments were all pointing the other way. Einstein was well aware of this and saw the validity of the arguments. Still he simply said that he did not like the theory. My third claim refers again to the similarity between sciences and the arts. Not just because aesthetics plays a part in both of them, but also because there is a limit to the extent preferences and validation can be argued. 4. My fourth claim is that artworks contain knowledge about the world. I am not sure to what extent it is necessary to argue for this claim in this distinguished context. If I had to argue for it I would present a historical argument going back to the Renaissance where the distinction between the sciences and the arts was much more fluid and vague then it is now. I would show illustrations of works that transcend the boundary between what we now see as the sciences and the arts: illustrations from anatomical works, botanical works, and astronomical works. They are beautiful and striking and from that point of view you could say that they count as works of art, but they also contain detailed knowledge claims. I would continue my historical argument by pointing to some of the graphic representation techniques of the 20th century and claim that it is difficult sometimes to draw a boundary between a work of art and a product of science. I hope to have got across so far the conviction that the distinction between the sciences and the arts is often not as strict as it might seem. There is much diversity in the scientific camp, which underlines the claim

page 21 L&B Volume 18 that there is a lot of communality between the sciences and the arts. One of them is that art works contain knowledge about the world. 5. That seems to open up for me the possibility of arguing that you can speak of artistic research. How would I embed that claim, how would I justify it? I would like to take a slightly different approach to the concept of research than my colleague Gerard de Vries did. I would say that research is possible if a network of validity exists. One thing that I like about Gerard de Vries’ approach is his insistence on the network as a property of the sciences. I think those network properties exist, maybe not exactly in the way De Vries claimed, but I do believe that networks enable research. I also think that these networks exist in the arts, which De Vries did not stress enough. Obviously, what is crucial in this claim is the question of what I mean with a network of validity. I do not simply mean that results should be published. I think of a network with different places and different contexts where one can judge the validity of the work which, therefore, legitimizes that work. The different contexts and different places which make up a network are very important. In the sciences, for example in physics, there is a network of laboratories, in particle physics there is a worldwide network of accelerators. The validity of the research is judged in these places. Furthermore, there is a sort of metaphysical methodological assumption implying that what holds inside the laboratory also holds outside the laboratory. Complicated rules of procedure and rules of translation apply results established in the laboratory to the world outside. That is a fundamental and fascinating area of science studies. Look for instance at how someone like Pasteur was able to produce certain vaccines in the laboratory under highly clinical and controlled conditions and the way he applied them to farmyards. This is an example of a network of validity. First of all there is a network of laboratories as centers of calculation and experimentation, but the network transcends the laboratory. The work goes out in the field in what is sometimes called applications. It seems to me that the same counts for the arts. In the art world, you also have an enormous network of validity with artists, gallerists, curators, critics, and so on. That is similar to the network of laboratories even with regard to the clinical conditions of white painted walls. But there is also a way in which you can transcend this network and go out, so to speak, into the field. 6. My claim of a network of validity suggests that there is a network of decentralized points in which the legitimacy of a contribution is judged. Then the obvious question is what the criteria are for that judgement. The following will help to fuse the sciences and the arts more closely together.

page 22 L&B volume 18 The criterion of quality in research is always empirical success, but that has to be interpreted broadly enough to fit everything into the tent. So, in the sciences, in physics for example, empirical success is interpreted very literally: it is the matching of theory with empirical data. Of course, empirical data are always empirical data of a certain kind. For physics and particle physics empirical data are caught in the outcome of big and complex experiments. The criterion of quality in research in artistic contexts would also imply empirical success on this view with the same scope for interpretation of that concept. So, the extent of, for example, communication of an artwork would also count as empirical success. 7. I have one more claim. I think artistic research exists. I do not think, incidentally, that artistic research consists of writing think-pieces to accompany works of art or exhibitions. Rather, the research exists in the works of art themselves. The artworks are the things that embody distinctive knowledge about the world. Somebody writing an art historical treatise about art is not doing artistic research. That is scientific research. However, I am very skeptical of the idea that you have to buy into the PhD system just because artistic research exists and because there are clear criteria for quality in artistic research. I think there is something wrong about this idea. One has to remember, as Gerard de Vries also hinted, that the PhD degree is part of a particular academic system, which is a relatively latecomer in, for example, Western Europe. Degrees like the BA and the MA which the Netherlands are now introducing in the universities are hundreds of years old - and I can congratulate the Netherlands on catching up - but the PhD degree is a recent invention. The PhD’s historical roots are tied up with the demands of the German chemical industry in the 19th century. So, the PhD degree is a manifestation of an arbitrary system of university organization. I cannot think of any good reason for carrying that over into a school like the Rijksakademie and into artistic research. If anything, such PhD degree will constrain and put your institute into a straitjacket since you have to accept the terms of duration and the expectations regarding output. Those established subjects are sufficiently unlike art. Especially when the PhD research has to be embedded in a department of the University of Amsterdam - a school which has not much affinity with the Rijksakademie - you will not only unnecessarily introduce a PhD program, you will also be harmed since such link would lead to a scholastic and uninteresting academic research experience for your institute.

page 23 L&B Volume 18 TRIGGERS FOR AWARENESS Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven In the beginning of the 1970s, I made exhibitions with intuitive drawings. People wanted to have those drawings explained. That is not the way my brain works, so I did not know what to say about those drawings. Then I started to make things up as explanations. Fortunately, the drawings and the explanations came from the same brain. At that point of making art, I was reading about science and philosophy as another way of dealing with the same problems. In the 1980s, when I was an artist in residence in the Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence, I found out that people there were thinking about thinking as a field of knowledge representation. At that moment in postmodernism, art was about art and the research in knowledge representation was about knowledge representation. So, on different levels and in different fields, everyone was dealing with their own problems in their own domain. I think that after postmodernism all these fields shifted their context again into a new norm. When I think about art institutes and PhD programs in the 21st century, I always wonder what will happen with the freedom to work as an artist. Of course, artists can choose a theoretical program, but I do hope that not every artist will start to be in need of a PhD degree. I know that new programs are in the process of being evaluated, but I am afraid that, as a result of them, academic forms of art will emerge without any connection to artistic freedom. What struck me in the course of today’s workshop is that if one looks at research areas in art and in the sciences it seems that always a certain amount of violence is involved. So, I think there are three domains of creativity: art is a creative force, science is a creative force, and violence is a creative force as well. As artists we provide triggers for awareness and new points of view that the world needs to go on. I believe that scientists work with a reality entirely different from ours. For that reason, there is no scientist or philosopher who can really talk about art and, similarly, there is no artist who can really talk about science or philosophy.

SEVEN REMARKS Hermann Pitz I have been working as a visual artist for more than twenty years now if I consider the date of the first “publication” of my work as a professional start. For me, it is indeed important that there is a public. I was struck by

page 24 L&B volume 18 James McAllister’s talk since it really corresponds to how I feel as an artist in the art world. Twelve years ago someone who is quite informed about the museum business wrote about me that I am an artists’s artist. And it is true, I have never been on the cover of a magazine for a mainstream audience: my audience consists of artists, there is nobody else involved. But, of course, people can look at the work if it happens to be in a public place. I am opposed to the idea that there is a separation of labor in the art world. There are curators who might pick up your work or not, but if they do not pick it up, you still do your work. My first experience with that was my first show in 1978 where I did not have more than 15 visitors. 1. My first statement is: audience and art is any accumulation of two people or more in the public sphere. You will not succeed in building up a body of work as a young artist if you aim for numbers, if you say that you need at least 1000 visitors at your show. It is interesting that James McAllister talked about scientists who isolate themselves and communicate from a Platonic island. I believe that as a young artist you will always be in that situation with or without a PhD degree. 2. The second aspect I should mention as a senior adviser of this institute is that at the Rijksakademie it is quite remarkable that we do not issue any diploma when students leave the institute. Our diploma is the admission to the institute. A large part of the teaching activity invested here - some of my colleagues like Luc Tuymans spend fifty percent of their teaching time on the admission procedure - consists of looking at some thousand files. Finally thirty people are selected who can enter the institute. So, basically the diploma we issue is the credit we give by saying these persons are at a point in their life where they could add to our artists’ project. That is, in fact, also where research comes in. But it is open to the artists to use the time here as a time of private seclusion or whether they try to employ this public institute for their career. You will see a lot of our former participants in this year’s Venice biennial. The output we want to have is young artists who find their own way of working in the professional, elitist system or in another new circuit or network of the art world. Of course, the question is whether we need a PhD system while focusing on that aim. 3. I do think that in non-English speaking Europe - not only in Germany but also in the Netherlands - my artist-colleagues who teach are mostly against PhD-forms of education, because they fear that some sort of school system will be put over us where everyone has to write theses and the pro-

page 25 L&B Volume 18 fessors have to read and judge them. The question we have is, is that really the core business of what art institutes should do? We tend to say no, that is not our core business. If we have PhD degrees here, we would only offer them to the few people who take the initiative themselves for getting such a degree. What has not been mentioned yet is the policy of the European community because of which there will be a PhD norm in the art sector all over Europe in 2009. If we as artists just boycott that, that will be a stupid thing to do, because then Brussels will tell us how to institute those degrees. I think that we as artists teaching today should do as much as possible in developing these structures ourselves, so that they fit what the art community needs. 4. There is another point I should add to the discussion. I have taught twice at MIT in Boston in the architecture department. What I did appreciate as a teaching artist in the American system is that people work very hard. When there is a seminar, for example, everybody is there. This might have to do partly with the costs of the programs in America where people have to invest much money themselves. I really liked the experience, though, of how people try to get everything out of a guest teacher. Here the atmosphere is mostly more relaxed and less competitive. There have been many good and important artists in America in the last 50 years. I do not know how much of that quality is due to the American school system or whether these artists would emerge anyway in any system. 5. The lofty ideal Gerard de Vries mentioned is something I would not want to do without in the art world. As artists we have something like an ideal in a very general form. In the context of the modern types of society we live in and the merchandise we produce, I would call that ideal individuality. It is about how the individual functions in modern society. Our customers, people who come and see our shows, come out of different contexts. On the one hand, we are of course leisure industry, which means mainly fun. But there are also 600.000 people who go voluntarily to Dokumenta since they want to see things which differ from what they find in their own context. So, I do think that, in our type of society and perhaps even more so in future ones, there is a need for articulating the individual. That is our market, that is what we sell. Our lofty ideal is linked to the individual and the position of the individual in modern society. 6. You could say, art is picture making. We create a visual product which is about the eye and the brain. – New brain research considers the eye as a part of the brain. - We also have competitors today such as CNN. At the

page 26 L&B volume 18 same time we have to admit that artists presently do no longer want to make the sort of classical images which exist in everyone’s consciousness such as Picasso’s Guernica. In fact, since Guernica there has not been a singular artwork with a similar impact on civilization. Of course, someone like Osama Bin Laden helps create those impact images today. Everybody has the image of the collapsing WTC buildings in their minds. We should not even consider competing with that. We are making pictures or images on an individual basis and those pictures are distributed in society on an individual level. That has to do with how society has changed and how picture makers have changed. There is (Hollywood) entertainment, there is infotainment, so we have all kinds of new picture worlds and new kinds of competition which art production did not have to face in former societies. 7. Sometimes young artists doubt whether what they are doing is worthwhile. My reaction to that is that such doubt is not an excuse for not making it. Considerations like that work differently for a commercial production. However, when you start working as an artist on a certain subject, you do not need a specific interest for commercial production. That is not how a legitimation for what you do as an artist works. This is very important, because if we go on with PhD programs as a norm to give quality to artworks, then we have a problem. If works are threatened to fall out of the norm of the school they will not be produced. Young artists would then tend to erase everything that is not “interesting” in their work. And then you would limit art production at an early stage in an entirely wrong way. That concurs with what James McAllister said about the communities in art. I think the art world has been, at least for the last 50 years, a tribal world. If an artist deals with a certain gallery or a certain curator, he or she is in a certain tribe and functions within this tribe. The exponents in this tribe and their careers also determine the public image of the artist’s work. Curators take “their” artists with them to shows whenever they have the opportunity to show work. Curators will not necessarily step out of their own tribe, because that is a lot of work. They have to start at point zero again and go to shows and really look at work. The latter hardly happens in the art world: one does not look at work, since the art world is about what artists are saying, about the work in some sort of reproduction. My personal theory is that artists became enthusiastic about video because that is already reproduction. So, they even do no longer have to deal with an original, they simply deliver the copy that works in the tribal structure right away. There is a point where a PhD degree could be interesting which is connected with my doubt whether it is good for institutes such as the

page 27 L&B Volume 18 Rijksakademie to be linked to these tribes. In that sense a PhD degree could be an interesting sort of emergency exit for young artists who decide by themselves - or through their work as it happens to be - to be an artist for artists only i.e. outside of the tribal success system. For those artists it could be interesting to say “why don’t I try to invent a new artistic personality.” Those new personalities could indeed be people who reflect on the work they make themselves or what they see in their community. That could be a new tool for this institute for fostering ideas that could not survive otherwise in the tribal structure of the art world.

ELEMENTS OF DISCUSSION Audience: I agree in general terms with what James McAllister said, but I do not understand what an aesthetic view of science is. James McAllister: When you read testimonies of scientists you will find that they react to theories in more ways than standard philosophy of science accepts. Standard philosophy normally takes a logical and empirical model of evaluation of theories. According to that model, scientists would have to evaluate the model on logical grounds such as logical consistency. However, scientists attach aesthetic value to properties of theories that have little to do with logical structure or empirical performance. They will attach aesthetic value to, for example, metaphysical properties of theories: whether they are consistent with determinism or whether they present a continuous view of nature. The examples I mentioned in my talk are indeed examples of that line of thought. Einstein’s resistance against the indeterminism of quantum theory was an expression of aesthetic dislike, not an expression of doubt for the theory’s ability to come up with good predictions. Aesthetic dislike entails that the theory simply is not elegant. Sometimes this is linked with the Renaissance idea of unity of the virtues where anything that is true must also be beautiful. The notion of beauty plays a small role in present art theory. It plays a slightly bigger role in scientific theory. Scientists are more ready to call a theory beautiful and mean something good then art critics to call an artwork beautiful and mean something good. Thus, beauty has a bigger profile as a concept among present day scientists than among present day art critics. But what do scientists mean by beauty? Often they mean the same things as art critics do in praising, for example, a painting: a certain form of coordination, simplicity, symmetry, or more generally a certain form of harmony. Many physicists think that the Maxwell equations are

page 28 L&B volume 18 beautiful since they present exceptional symmetry in a series of four equations. I do not want to throw a too tied net about those concepts, though, and then find out that the next scientific revolution shifts all of them again. However, I think it is fair to say that the complexity of aesthetic discourse amongst physicists is less sophisticated than that amongst art critics. Scientists are, in fact, not trained in this vocabulary whereas art critics are. So, you have to make some degree of allowance for a slightly schematic, superficial, naive view. If you hear physicists talk, they will often talk about beauty and elegance in regard to their theory. The underlying message is that scientists are not only seeking truth, but aesthetic value as well. They label that aesthetic value as beauty, because that is what they think it is. Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven: Could that have to do with the structure of the brain itself in the sense that if something is felt as beautiful in the brain it must be related to truth? James McAllister: I do not think that we are programmed to find particular things beautiful. If you look at the history of science, from 1600 to 2000, then you will see that standards of beauty change. That goes faster than evolutionary changes, so those standards are learned and socialized. Annette W. Balkema: You mentioned in the context of point three, the aesthetic factors, the notion of the gut feeling. I have the inclination to compare that with what we in the field of aesthetics call, in line with Arthur Danto, the trained gaze of the art world. For example during the Rijksakademie’s Open Atelier days, you always find works interesting which turn out to be the favorite works of other visitors as well. I assume that is similar to how physicists agree to call a mathematical equation beautiful or elegant. I have a tendency to connect the gut feeling or the trained gaze with what you called somewhat in passing the network of accelerators. I am not quite sure though whether I understood your notion of network accelerators in the right way. So, could you elaborate on that notion? James McAllister: Let me first add something to your first point. In physics, people within the same generation or within a similar scientific development normally agree on which theories are beautiful, but there is variation in time. By the way, it had not occurred to me that the aesthetic aspect of science would be a controversial point in this workshop. People who want to read more about that aesthetic aspect, should read my book

page 29 L&B Volume 18 Beauty and Revolution in Science which contains a lot of case studies. The network of accelerators is a special case of what I call the network of validity. In particle physics, there is a relatively small number of accelerators - experimental machines in Geneva and California and so on - which are machines for generating data. Any result established or claimed in one of these centers can only be replicated or legitimized in one of the other centers. So, these accelerators form in a very literal sense a network of machines. They form a pure world, almost a Platonic world, sheltered from the real world, because there are only a few of these particle accelerators, and the output they produce is not of daily relevance. So, the question in philosophy of science is what is the relationship between the results established within the walls of these accelerators, within the network, and the world outside? Physicists have a complicated, ultimately sensible, but nonetheless metaphysical and very particular account for explaining how the results can be applied to the universe as a whole. I like to think there is something similar to that in art. There is a network of material transfer consisting of artists, dealers, gallerists, curators, and critics, but there is also something about art that does not only exist in the network, but applies to the rest of the world as well. My main point is, that I would like to link the notion of research to the existence of the network of validity. So unlike my colleague Gerard de Vries, I believe that validity has not so much to do with publications as with the existence of this network. So if you can show that the network exists, then you have research. You have that in science, you have that in art. Henk Slager: How do you link the network of validity to the notion of empirical success? James McAllister: In a way, we have no choice but to say that the criterion of validity is empirical success. The link I make is that empirical success is tested and validated in the network. You often find that most of our precious human creations are not immediately ready for the outside world. They have to remain, at least for the first instance, in protected environments. That holds for scientific results and scientific theories which can only be verified in the special setting of a laboratory and for artworks which have their own requirements. So, the empirical success can only be judged initially within the network, within the structure of the protected environments, and once it has been validated there, it can be exported to the outside world. Look at, for example, the pharmaceutical industry and a new vaccine. You first test it and once it has proved its case and has been made more stable and resistant, it is taken out of the laboratory. I think that

page 30 L&B volume 18 happens similarly in art. Most artworks, at least in the first instance, simply cannot survive in the outside world. They need a special space provided by the art world network. Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven: Gerard de Vries mentioned that research needs circulation otherwise it would not be research. I think that is a false statement. Shouldn’t you have related that circulation to the results of research? Research itself seems to be a different thing. Gerard de Vries: In order to enter into the system of research, I think that you have to publish. So anything that is preparatory work for that - which may take on a lot of forms such as thinking, reasoning, reading books, experimenting and so on - remains a private affair as long as it is not public. I try to shift the word research from individual work to collective work. I could agree with you if you say, we artists are doing research in the sense a journalist is doing research. Then research is a very broad term for thinking, investigating, and so on. But if you want to draw similarities with the sciences, research is a different kind of subject. In the sciences, research is connected to justification and to the system which justifies results. As long as your work is not justified by your colleagues, it maybe very interesting what you are doing, but you are not contributing to the business of science. So, there is a difference between how artists and how scientists understand their own work. In the arts, at least in the last century, the artist considers him or herself a person who produces experiences and employs experiences. In the sciences, scientists understand themselves as a part of a collective business. There is no such thing as an individual scientist. You cannot do science on your own. The self-understanding of artists is connected to an idiosyncratic experience they want to spread and show. That attitude is different from the attitude of scientists who know they are a small part in an enormous machine producing a lofty ideal called truth. Annette W. Balkema: I do see similarities between the topical art world and the scientific world in your notions of recognition, selection and “publication.” In today’s art world, someone who is somewhere in an attic producing paintings nobody will ever see is not considered an artist in the strict sense, not according to how the international art community works. In other words, just as a scientist, an artist needs justification and recognition from fellow artists, curators, critics and “publish” his or her work in shows, in large international exhibitions. Perhaps you are partly right in saying that different from the scientific world, there is some division of

page 31 L&B Volume 18 labor in the art world since curators - and to a certain extent critics - play a role in the selection and recognition of work. However, particularly curators often have an art school background. At the same time, there is another connection between the scientific world and the art world. It seems to me that you passed the realm of creativity, the spark about which scientists talk when, for example, they see at once a solution in a mathematical equation and artists in discovering a solution for a problem in their work. Of course, artists are the pre-eminent creative minds. So, I do think that notions of selection, recognition, and creativity are somehow similar in the world of science and the art world. Gerard de Vries: Still, when you want to hand out PhD degrees in the art world you will have a problem. An interesting example to clarify this is the field of engineering. At the Technical University in Delft you can get a PhD degree for a construction plus an argument for why this construction is the way it is. You cannot say, I have a machine and it works, so give me the PhD degree. You have to argue about it. If you follow this model, if you need an argument for an artwork, that will affect the artistic practice. I do think that the art world is changing in the sense that the romantic idea of the solitary artist is obsolete. Nevertheless I remain opposed to artistic Phd degrees for reasons I gave earlier. Annette W. Balkema: Well, artists are not wordless creatures. Just like your Delft engineers, they could argue why the constructed work is the way it is. In that sense, the artwork is a contracted argument. Henk Slager: I would like to point out something to Gerard de Vries. You should realize that not every artist has to produce a PhD degree. However, it is important today that the specificity of knowledge that artists produce becomes emancipated as happened some hundred years ago in your example of the technical university. Emancipation means that a discourse will be established: it will become clear that there is a possibility and a necessity to discuss the produced work. But perhaps only a few people will ultimately realize a PhD degree. That degree is not the most important thing. What is important is the establishment and recognition of artistic research.

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SYMPOSIUM: ARTISTIC RESEARCH

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DISCOURS DE LA MÉTHODE Henk Slager Over the last decades, many art institutions have been stripped by deconstructivist zeal. In discussions, decisions, and actions, the aura of the moder-nist art museum dissolved, art itself lost its auto-nomy, and art history became revealed as ideology. However, one of the most significant bastions in the field, the art academy, the breeding ground for new artistic talent, succeeded for a long time in avoiding those phenomena. Thus, in many academies, the myth of the brilliant outsider, the individual as genius, could continue to be fostered far beyond the 1990s. And for that reason, it is indeed urgent now, as this conference claimed in its introductory statement, to critically reflect upon the position and role of the art school. The first predominant question is directed towards the locality and function of artistic practice in our current postindustrial economic world. Isn’t it true that the currently dominant culture of non-material production requires new types of artists, described by Negri and Hardt (Empire) as people flexible enough to organize their artistic activities ad hoc? Such artists produce work that can no longer be characterized and defined by mere medium-specific reflection. Based upon a critical and investigative attitude, they also search for novel media combinations and variable collaborations with different fields of knowledge. It is the task of advanced art education to adequately anticipate such significant developments. As a consequence, art education should break out of the (hermeneutic) paradigm of autonomous art. Departing from the current situation, it should, in fact, primarily focus on cultural preconditions, that is, the circumstances constituting topical visual art. Today, reflection on the visual field and its students should primarily aim at “political, social, and media-related conditions,” as Ute Meta Bauer puts it in Education, Information, Entertainment (Vienna, 2001). These components decisively determine the concepts and practices in art education. It turns out that, because of these variables, the concept of art is not a constant, essentialist given, but a phenomenon continuously affected by change and transformation. Therefore, artistic communication has to be regularly readjusted and reassessed. The modernist discourse, which disappeared along with art history, used to be the sole theoretical discourse tolerated within art education. However, that discourse proved unable to provide an adequate framework of concepts. Thus, in the 1990s, many new theoretical models emerged, such as media studies, cultural studies, and

page 35 L&B Volume 18 curatorial studies, all disciplines more adequately accounting for the topical process of artistic communication. In critical reflections on how to deploy these new models, the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York is particularly trendsetting. For more than twenty years now, it has encouraged critical study and theoretical inquiry into the practices, institutions, and discourses that constitute the field of culture. In this program, a continuous dialogue between artists, critics, and curators makes it “possible to question the categories and to experience the diverse approaches, which can call into question previous assumptions of authority about one’s so-called domain.”(Renee Green). This tripartite approach provides a setting within which participants engage in continuous discussions examining the historical, social, and intellectual conditions of artistic production. As a result of this, the Whitney Independent Study Program provides basic premises for each form of topical art education, i.e., a form of art education characterized by an unremittingly researching attitude. A similar attitude seems to be decisive in how the various European institutes of higher art education and residence programs organize their research programs. Perhaps the most radical version of this is the Erban school in Nantes (France), where the participants in the Multipoint research group determine entirely on their own the form and content of their artistic research program. In the Netherlands, a number of art schools seem to base graduate programs on a similar experimental curriculum - partly incited by the recently introduced BaMa structure. The Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam offers a truly intellectually challenging program. In thematic research projects, the program focuses particularly on notions such as context, site, situation, presentation, and interpretation, which implies that all aspects of the aesthetic process of communication – cultural studies, critical studies, and curatorial studies - are reviewed. In other Dutch graduate programs, however, one sees cooperations with the humanities departments in local universities. Take, for example, the MA program in Visual Art of the Frank Mohr Institute, in Groningen. In a seminar for both university and art school students, participants engage in developing ideas and strategies for the construction of a common discourse. Similar experiments occur at the Amsterdam Sandberg Institute - the MA program at the Rietveld Academy - in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam. Also the Amsterdam Rijksacademie - just like the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, a postgraduate program - focuses on a collaboration with the University of Amsterdam, albeit from a different perspective. The Rijksacademie curriculum emphasizes an individual research program by the students. Such research concentrates on artistic knowledge production, whereby relevant

page 36 L&B volume 18 academic disciplines are meant to help one arrive at a dialogue, a confrontation, or a collaboration. However, some critical questions arise when examining these art school programs. Could one claim that these institutes, in collaborating with traditional universities, open their doors somehow for a calculating or formatting reason so characteristic for academic research? Is it possible anyway for artistic research to be comprised in a bookish, monorational research program? With this question, we have reached a crucial premise of the Artistic Research conference. It is true, the conference’s initial goal is to map various forms of artistic research. At the same time, though, it intends to lodge resistance to the possible danger of academic hegemony in the form of a metaphysical logic of a dominant system of knowledge. Particularly the Nordic institutes, such as the Helsinki School of Art and the Malmö School of Art, are aware of such academic threat. Therefore, they have organized their PhD programs outside of the structure of academic schools. Posing the theme of independence during a European symposium taking place in Maison Descartes is, I believe, more than a happy coincidence. After all, in spite of a metaphysics claiming universality and superiority in the then-intellectually progressive Netherlands, it was Descartes who dared to question the boundaries and possibilities of knowledge production. Also today, in discussing a “discours de la méthode” of artistic research, one need question the boundaries and possibilities of this form of knowledge production. In other words, what actually is the content of the research artists conduct? Put differently, how and to what extent does artistic research distinguish itself from forms of academic research? It seems to me that, ultimately, topical, artistic research cannot be strictly subsumed under traditional alpha, beta, and gamma domains. Strikingly, art is somehow involved in all of these fields: it is aware of the hermeneutic questions of humanities, it deploys the empirical method of the sciences, and it is also familiar with the commitment of the social sciences. With that, art’s object of knowledge and its methodology seem to be defined. After all, “art as epistemological engine” (Sarat Maharaj, Dokumenta 11 catalogue) continually succeeds in claiming a critical viewpoint on the different, the irregular, and the other while stressing the intrinsic tension between resemblance and difference, regularity and discrepancy, and the familiar and the unfamiliar. It seems to me that such a research strategy could be specified as a differential iconography. A differential iconography reveals a world view which - partly due to the disruptive actions of the new media - no longer forms a transparent, monolithic unity. We cannot possibly escape relativity

page 37 L&B Volume 18 and contingency. The awareness of heterogeneity requires that artistic research explicitly appeals to a tolerant, open attitude and multiple, interpretative models. Deploying phenomena such as cross-overs and foundfootage, the perspective of the multiplicity and a poly-aesthetic attitude should always function as a regulating guideline. It is solely from these basic premises that artistic research is able to manifest itself as a meta-analytic activity, that is, as a critically novel reflection on the position of the artistic image in our topical visual culture. That is a form of research which withdraws the image from each possible one-dimensional anchorage such as, for example, the retinal rhetoric of the economic dictate. With that, probably the sole methodological point of departure of artistic research has been formulated: a way of research aware of difference without implying any dominance by any discourse - the latter used to be the case in the days of the modernist iconography as we all know. The awareness of difference carries indeed the critical capacity for this kind of research. It implies the capacity to mobilize an open attitude, an intrinsic tolerance for a multiplicity of interpretations, and, if necessary, to put those into action against the spreading excesses of one-dimensional contextualizing. In the present culture of acceleration and decay, the domain of freedom which art offers for a heterologous production of knowledge seems to be more important than ever. Therefore, artistic research needs a resolute, institutional emancipation. The graduate degree in visual arts should claim a specific context, similar to how technological graduate degrees have obtained their domain and their serious position in the academic world. That implies deploying an academic field of thought which unlike traditional academic research and its categories- enables a situational approach. Such research is characterized, then, by transdisciplinarity, teamwork, collaboration, and interactivity. It takes up a domain which, mostly simultaneously, demands attention for an ongoing critical reflection about what visual art means as an experimental domain of freedom. Moreover, in order to prevent artistic research from becoming caught in the rigid networks of a homogeneous, scientific reason, it must be - analogous to the above described Whitney Program paradigm - methodologically related to the previously mentioned triad of studio-based work, critical studies, and curatorial studies. While studio-based work and critical studies mainly focus on the moment of production and the moment of reception of the work respectively, the perspective of curatorial studies draws the moment of situation and presentation into the discourse. With that, the turning point of metamorphosis, the actual moment of transformation, the opening up of multi-dimensional windows (as Annette Balkema would call

page 38 L&B volume 18 it), has arrived. The moment of situation and presentation seems to offer the ultimate moment of artistic communication, connectivity, and entanglement. Each artistic research project should grant, I believe, an important contribution to experimental exhibition models. With that we have reached another premise constituting the objective of the current symposium: the point of view of a number of curators who explicitly work in the context of exhibition paradigms determined by the perspective of artistic research. After all, and this brings us back to the starting point of this conference, it is only through research-based art related to the specific situation of the work, and the (contextual) conditions of presentation, that artists will be able to provide a critical, nondisciplinary contribution to the topical debate on knowledge.

WEBSITES Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten www.rijksakademie.nl Jan van Eyck Academy www.janvaneyck.nl Malmö School of Art www.khm.lu.se Piet Zwart Institute www.pzwart.wdka.hro.nl Helsinki School of Art www.kuva.fi Gerrit Rietveld Academy www.gerritrietveldacademie.nl Sandberg Institute www.sandberg.nl Frank Mohr Institute www.mohr-i.nl Whitney Independent Study Program www.whithney.org/programs/isp.shtml Multipoint/Erban www.multipoint.free.fr Manifesta www.manifesta.org Arteleku www.arteleku.net

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UNFINISHABLE SKETCH OF ‘AN UNKNOWN OBJECT IN 4 D’: SCENES OF ARTISTIC RESEARCH

Sarat Maharaj 0000 Many of us must feel we’ve been doing ‘artistic research’ for years— without quite calling it that. Like Moliere’s Monsieur Jourdain stumbling over the fact he was indeed speaking prose all along, we too are taken by surprise. Fuss over the subject’s ‘legitimacy’ rumbles on. But it has not stopped doctoral programmes in visual art practice being steadily constituted all over. Whatever we feel about this, we cannot wriggle out of unpacking what we mean by research in contemporary visual art practices and art education. 0001 In everyday parlance, ‘art research’ is a blanket term taking in almost all in its path: processes of making artwork; art practices that probe and test experience; thinking-doing as visual art practices vis à vis other knowledge systems; modes of thinking through the visual that are with, athwart, beyond academic methods. This apparent mishmash is a scene of unwieldy, unorganized possibilities–something we should hang onto to avoid defining artistic research simply along institutional academic lines. This means focus on the singularity of how art practice-theory-history and other ‘disciplines’ intersect and coalesce in individual projects. As we cannot quite know beforehand what form this will take–each instance is different and unpredictable–we have to be wary about attempts to regulate artistic research, to knock it into shape of the academic disciplines, to make it a lookalike of their logic and architecture. What matters today is its ‘difference’–the distinctive modalities of its knowledge production. 0002 A side step: Aby Warburg had experimented with strategies of looking and with interpretative instruments at odds with the sober criteria of academic methodology. They were ‘scrambled, disordering’ modes not unrelated to Dada–associative, cognitive capacitors perhaps best summed up in the phrase ‘critique of pure unreason’. Georgio Agamben re-affirms this ‘nameless science’–the expanded zone of art history/theory/related visual practices and studies. We should see it as a scene without readymade object of study or technique. But artistic research is not just an unnamed activity–as though we already know what it is but are just fum-

page 40 L&B volume 18 bling around for the right label. It is, in Samuel Beckett’s word, more of an ‘unnameable’ because it has to invent its own methods each time rather than parrot pre-given ones. Mapping itself during take-off, it cannot be spelled out in advance of the processes of its making. 0003 Artistic research is ‘work in pregross’ where the echo-word ‘progress’ connotes succession, sequence, possible fulfillment. Joyce’s twister ‘pregross’ implies that some final, full bulk of the project is never quite attained, we are always at a ‘preparatory’ stage just short of its total gross state. The job at hand cannot be entirely scripted in advance–a vital part of artistic research today. Its procedures are ‘unsquarable’ with the more exactly chartered, pegged research protocols prevalent in the institutional academic sphere. 0004 The following on-going projects with students and participants are my various stabs at artistic research at the confluence of theory/practice/ history spanning several years: 1.Monkeydoodle.1994–1997.Goldsmiths College, London. A stretch of research covering theory/practice/curatorial activity. The period had seen the rise of critical theory in the British Art Schools– deconstructive analyses of visual art practices and discourse. Monkeydoodle sought to explore this at its limits–to probe the theoretical/textual/ verbal through the visual while continuing the critique of the visual. (Sarat Maharaj. Monkeydoodle. Art Journal.Vol.56. 1997) 2. Xeno-sonics. 1998–2000. Goldsmiths and Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht. Exploring through sound-image constructions how the visual is ‘shot through’ with the sonic. Also, sound as a probe for the visual. It looks at everyday image-sound coalescences, visual-sonic experience and the significance of ‘noise’ in the sound economy – its ‘outsider, foreign, unknown, other’ connotations. (Sarat Maharaj & Goldsmiths MA group. Mutations. Arc e Reve. Bordeaux.2001-02 and T& N Probe Vol 9 .2001 Japan) 3. Xeno-epistemics. 2000-02. Humboldt University, Berlin. Thinking Documenta & Doing Documenta examines modalities of knowing ‘the other’ and ‘other ways of knowing–visual art practice as a form of knowledge production and its ethics (Xeno-epistemics: makeshift kit for sounding visual art as knowledge production and the retinal regimes: Documenta X1 Platform 5. 2002. pp.71-84). In more traditional lingo, epistemological studies. Also, how visual art practices and performances interact with what

page 41 L&B Volume 18 Francisco Varela called the triple braid of phenomenology, neuroscience /brain studies and cognition/consciousness studies – ‘Art/Science’ interaction proposed for the ‘Ideas Lab’, Malmö Art Akademie /Lund University, Sweden. 0005 It is sticky business bandying about terms like ‘Art/Science’ and ‘artistic research’. These are all-gobbling, monolithic categories perhaps best put in ‘brackets’. Few scientists would feel at ease with our use of equivalent catchall terms to describe their activities. Yet, imagining we are taking our cue from ‘Science’–our touchstone for rigour, truth, systematic procedure–we persist with references to ‘Art’ and ‘artistic research’ as if its one sweeping thing. It is sobering to recall that the notion of a ‘unitary’ scientific method had been vigorously debated in 20century philosophy of science. Its upshot was to show that diverse, often crosshatched practices, incompatible models and criteria jostled under the umbrella ‘Science’. Karl Popper had come to set up ‘scientific thought’ or ‘critical rationalism’ as some single agenda, a cumulative narrative of progress and truth. At times it felt like an unwitting version of the very historicist iron laws he was knocking. As his criteria become tighter, more punishing, the joke was that little actual scientific activity could actually happen if they were strictly adhered to. By paring things down to examinable ‘research programmes’, Imre Lakatos, ushered the subject towards more piecemeal, less totalizing consideration. Lyotard’s critique of metanarratives is a not dissimilar corrective that unnerves the tendency towards one-track drives of grand categories like ‘Art/Science’ – cautionary tales for those chasing after a single ‘right’ method for a ‘unified thing’ called ‘artistic research’. 0006 From the ‘Popper et al’ spat we can perhaps see ‘scientific method’ in more differentiated, less absolutist ways – as enterprise that throws up propositions, rules and shifting models that are subject to constant evaluating, tinkering, chucking out. This is at odds with our everyday, larger-thanlife pop-myth of the fixed poles of ‘Science/Art’ in capital letters. For this reason, Duchamp– inspired most likely by Henri Poincaré’s reconnoitre of scientific conventionalism versus nominalism – mooted a ‘pictorial nominalism’ for plumbing the category ‘Art’, for breaking out of its limits and for stripping it bare of worn-out definitions. What if after each ‘art event’ there was no residual memory of it? By wiping the slate clear of habitencrusted assumptions about ‘Art,’ we would have to cook it up afresh each time. A nominalist dose such as this keeps ‘artistic research’ open as an ‘unknown’. Also, as globalizing forces churn up a spread of cultural ele-

page 42 L&B volume 18 ments and experiences, a scene of indeterminacy unfurls where we are hard put to decide ahead what ‘Art’ should look like to count as ‘Art’. 0007 During the 1990s debates on the doctorate Ute Meta Bauer was instituting in Vienna and, earlier on, Susan Hiller in Ulster–I had asked “what is artistic research’s ‘object of study’, how to identify it?” The formulation suggested a version of the ‘classic Enlightenment episteme’ or Kantian 3D conceptual system. It encouraged some to feel that ‘Art’ had a clear-cut, designated patch squeezed in between other well-thumbed epistemological territories and objects – ‘reason’ and ‘ethics’. ‘Art research’ would therefore ‘know its place’ even before its got going. It would simply plug into the 3 D conceptual system at hand. The snapshot is of an over-awed latecomer creeping through the university portals to take up an assigned place dutifully for processing established bodies of data and knowledge. 0008 Against this, it is better grasped as a contraption for generating knowledge – not simply for transmitting already-made information of a known ‘object ofstudy’. It is roughly modeled on the artist’s workspace– an ‘indeterminate’ zone not articulated by rigid 3D coordinates. It is a scene of maceration– a mixing of scraps of percept, feeling and concept, subjectivity, affect and object, without knowing what might happen. To call this ‘bricolage or assemblage’ is no more than a short-life nickname for what should remain nameless. 0009 Where art research is modeled exclusively on the 3D conceptual system, it is fenced in by what other disciplines mainly do. Hence the charge it is trying to ape philosophy or sociology or anthropology, at second-hand and without their expertise or internal rigour. Its ‘models’ more easily spring from inside art practice–from its singular think-feel-know modes for sussing the world. To assume it will in due course establish its credentials vis-à-vis the 3D academic corpus is to cast it as ‘cap in hand’ subordinate. It does grapple with this corpus, its canons and methodologies. But it also cuts across them, shreds them, tips them overboard–a detournement, a topsyturvy dynamic for producing a kind of knowledge it alone can muster.

0010 As a detournement of the 3 D academic corpus, art research has not a little in common with Paul Feyerabend’s views on science as an ‘anarchic enterprise’ –for which he tellingly used the shorthand ‘Dadaist epistemology’. Targeting Popper’s strangulating criteria, he was game for a methodological mishmash: ironic, experimental strategies, Brechtian V-effects, ludic modes, reversible states, ‘contradiction’, non-binary, nonlinear asso-

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Nicki Lees: Edible Essay. Monkeydoodle. 2000

page 44 L&B volume 18 ciations, paradoxes. He saw these exploratory, asystematic modes as truer to how ‘scientific inquiry and research’ happens than its stereotype as ‘system-locked, hard-hat’ procedure. 0011 In his swap-over, ‘Science’ is prodded into looking at approaches taken by ‘Art’. This reverses the normal demand that ‘artistic research’ can only be ‘proper’ if it mimes hard-nosed scientific method. Here ‘Dada’ flags up key elements of some contemporary art practices – a capacity to throw up an indefinite series of ‘self-raising-self-erasing’ models. Each vaporizes as soon as it is rigged out. This flies in the face of positivist notions of pre-given norms to which practice has to conform. It is a factor in today’s extra-rapid turnover of art events, works and projects – though, this is no less attributable to the insatiable consumerist appetite for evermore art-ware. The desire to make art again and again does elicit the moan that “there is too much art and art research, too many artists who should really become practical designers.” Some academies have toed the line. But this fails to recognize that creativity goes with a volcanic overturning, de-constructing, ‘self-de-Kanting’ where art practice becomes a ceaseless test and try-out. ‘Canonicals’ such as Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso and Duchamp amongst others described their practice more or less as ‘research and experiment’. In the postwar space this becomes intrinsic to art practices themselves so that today ‘research’ is the self-reflexive, self-dismantling’ 4th dimension ‘practice’ cannot shake off. 0012 A telegraphic account of factors in the scene of Xeno-epistemics detailed elsewhere: (Sarat Maharaj: Avidya: Non-Knowledge Production in the scene of Visual arts Practice in Education. Information. Entertainment. ed. Ute Meta Bauer. Vienna 2001) i. Visual art as knowledge production has to be distinguished from not only ‘knowledge transfer’ but also from the ‘knowledge economy’– media-communication circuits, info-infrastructures that are tied up with intensive copyright, patent and data control right down to genetic codes (Information Feudalism). From Seattle to Götenburg and Cancun, global protests relate not only to ‘agri-labor’ but also to ‘immaterial labour’– knowledge production and how it is shaping and carving up the world. ii. Internal developments in visual arts – in practice, curating, criticism, advertising and marketing – have been accompanied by heightened professionalization and managerialism now experienced as an ‘octopus’ institutional grip. Visual arts ‘doctoral studies’ is both in tune with this development–the art-culture industry has itself become the ‘indispensable ambient’ of ‘material’ production–and it is a refuge from it. It is part of the

page 45 L&B Volume 18 drive towards ‘professionalization’ and a recoil from it – with the potential for opening up reflexive spaces that ‘delay’ investment simply in churning out art-culture industry wares. iii. We tend to see PhD’s in music as more justified than those in ‘visual arts’ because it is felt music remains more of a ‘discipline’ with a recognizable ‘object of study’–’sonic systems and languages’. From Handel and Bach to Schönberg and Boulez, from ‘topsy-turvy sound orders’, atonal, asystemic, random explorations to today’s sonic shredders, the argument goes that they ‘make sense’ within the frame of music’s ‘object’– either elaborating or pulping it. Equivalent ‘disciplinary boundaries or limits’ in visual art now are hardly discernable or simply not applicable. This raises the issue: What exactly is today’s Art School all about, what is taught/learned there? How to assess this? A re-evaluation is essential as the academies have become less and less about sustained ‘training/teaching’ by ‘masters’ in the framework of a ‘discipline’. This is in contrast to their classical heyday. As a ‘friendship’ model of learning/teaching evolves, it is at odds with the ‘authorities, subject areas and prescribed objects of study’. Artistic research looms into view as an unscripted zone where engineering think-know-feel capacitors and transformers for oneself becomes the thrust of practice. iv. The art school and the art gallery-museum circuits add up to a star system in which the former is increasingly whittled down to a clearinghouse for the next crop of celebrities. In early 1990s Goldsmiths, the pressure to groom for the market and to gear up for visibility was almost palpable (New Contemporaries. Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Gillian Wearing, Sarat Maharaj.1997). However, credit is due to smart-thinking players of the time who did manage to keep this in check. Today the star league figures almost as the raison d’etre of art schooling. Whatever its thrills and rewards it marks a constricted view of ‘creativity’. It has distorting effects on art education. All practitioners are free to aspire to becoming ‘celebrity darlings’. But how many do achieve this goal– every five years, out of 140 students perhaps 5 or 10? Has the art school nothing to do with thinkingcreativity of the rest? It seems they are consigned to oblivion simply because they cannot clamber up the star ladder. Are they ‘losers’ or are they perhaps into something different? An expanded view of creativity is key to keeping art practice-research open to dimensions of the unknown. 0013 Visual art as knowledge production is about engaging with ‘difference and the unknown’ in both ‘artistic’ and ‘social-political’ terms. The latter concerns ‘writing the foreign’ or xenography. It touches on the ‘other, outsider, non-citizen–named asylum seeker, refugee, illegal, sans

page 46 L&B volume 18 papier, clandestini, detainee, deportee – who is increasingly now an object of xenophobia. Getting to know ‘the other’ is an ethical tussle: how to cope with the ‘other’s difference’ without imposing our epistemic frame? For this, we have to come up with ‘other’ think-feel know equipment–a quest in Duchamp’s paradox: ‘Can one make a work of art that is not of Art?’ It proposes a ‘delay’, a holding back from ‘known’ genres, keeping them at bay – circumventing known forms that reduce ‘difference’ to ‘sameness’. The ‘ready-made’, now commonplace, eventuated as a vehicle for the ‘unknown’, for articulating what ‘ordinary’ genres shut off. For Bergson, ‘readymade’ signaled the mechanical, repetitive, all-too-known– as opposed to dimensions of unpredictable possibility, the virtual. In a flipover, Duchamp floated the idea of the ‘readymade’ as a vehicle for raiding the unknown – ‘the mechanical’ itself becomes a medium for breaking out of auto-pilot artistic experience into ‘other’ conceptual spaces. Duchamp interacts with Bergson– not as academic commentary but researcher-practitioner– turning his ideas and terms upside down, fleshing them out as concrete images. Here knowledge production is about ‘epistemological contraptions’ such as the ‘readymade’–pervaded by a sense of the ironic, makeshift, DIY– improbable contrivances rigged up for the nonce without ‘proper’ tools or the ‘right’ parts. . 0014 By knowledge production I do not mean something conceived–Cartesian fashion–as ‘strictly’ mental but as spasms and episodes of the mind-body continuum. Joyce’s ‘false-meaning’ etymological chain dramatizes the point:

Gyana Gnosis – gnoseology Knowledge Visible-audible-noseable-edible. The Sanskrit word ‘Gyana’ or ‘Knowledge’ retains the link with the physical through ‘gyana-yoga’ practices. With ‘Gnosis’, knowledge is inflected as a more hived-off, mental affair– something Joyce trips up with his pun on ‘nose’: ‘knowing’ takes place through the smell-organ and olfactory sensation, ‘lowest’ of the faculties. ‘Knowing via the nose’ cuts across Cartesian mind/body divisions and dualisms. With brain muscle-mind circuits, Joyce telescopes eye-ear-mouth in a single digestive conveyer belt. These condense in Nicki Lees’s Monkeydoodle project (2000)–literally a rice paper eatable essay–studies in knowing through the experience of the

page 47 L&B Volume 18 hunger artists of the Northern Ireland Troubles and anorexia/ bulimia. To see artistic research as ‘embodied’ knowledge is to differentiate it from conceptual-speculative-computational circuits that tend to be seen as selfenclosed and detached from motor-sensory-somatic processes. (Francisco Varela et al. The Embodied Mind. 2000). From this perspective, art practice as ‘research’ seems well placed to venture beyond the ‘mentalist dimensions’ in which 3D knowledge systems tend to be locked. 0015 A common doubt expressed about the ‘practice-based’ researcher is whether they are at all equipped for ‘competent’ reading. We should scotch this by distinguishing between reading as ‘mapping’–a process that spawns a world– as against ‘tracing’– copying a given world-text. But these processes can also be intertwined. The Humbodlt/ Malmö classes (20012002) centred on a two-track-reading of the Rhizome section of A Thousand Plateaus (Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari.1980). At times, a deliberate back to front reading, with participants starting off not with the essay but with its battery of footnotes –that stamp of scholarship, bibliofetish or name-dropping. By reading ‘edgeways’ across the essay’s main body, a new text is tailored either to ‘fit’ the footnotes or to become metacommentary on them. Over the duration of the readings, participants would paste annotations, diagrams, sketches, doodles on an unfurling roll of paper across the Test Site wall (Roseuum. Malmö 2002). An image of worker-students in the Pergamon as in Peter Weiss’s ‘Aesthetics of Resistance’ (1972) – itself echoed in Andreas Siekmann’s ‘Die Krumme Pranke’ (2000)? These ‘sideways’ readings, all-over tracking, are unlike the reading regimes of classic scholarship tied to step-by-step explication. The idea was to trigger ‘loose-footed’ soundings. Artists are generally suspected of this kind of crazy-paving reading that makes them ‘dodgy’ from the ‘doctoral’ point of view. (On ‘reading’ also see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Death of a Discipline. 2003). David Hatcher, a Malmö participant, chased up Footnote 21– excavating Joëlle de La Casinière’s Absolument Nécessaire (Minuit.Paris.1973) and its ‘nomadic’ logic as cited by Deleuze/Guattari. He unearthed this somewhat overlooked inspiration of ‘Rhizome’, hunting down the artist to her boathouse lair on the Belgium river-networks. She would eventually contribute to a Test Site event (Roseuum. Malmö 2003). On the one hand, his detective work on ‘Footnote 21’ is a ‘tracing’ that pushes ‘scholarship’ to the extreme, parodic lengths by finding the ‘missing’ flesh and blood ‘source of sources’ herself. On the other, it is a mapping of the Rhizome chapter from which fresh events-thinking-publications-situations spill out. (David Hatcher& Astrid Mania. 2003-04).

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‘London is now even more PC’ street scene . PJ Mayers. 2003

page 49 L&B Volume 18 0016 The academic’s suspicion that the artist’s reading is ‘wobbly’ and their grasp of philosophical foundations ‘shaky’ should be turned against itself. Could it be the artist’s ‘lack of competency’ is index of quite another think-read-map – more in tune with ‘non-knowledge’? To name the later, I have used the ancient Sanskrit term Avidya. Its opposite, Vidya (to see-know) gives us the Latin cousin ‘video’. By adding ‘A’ to vidya – Avidya– signals not just its polar opposite ‘ignorance – its closer to the privative than to negation. It expresses the middle term as in moralimmoral or typicaluntypical– the ‘neutral gear’ of knowing that is neither that of the 3D disciplines nor its conventional opposite ‘ignorance’. Perhaps something approximating ‘crazy wisdom’? Avidya stands for that in-between space explored by a long line from Sankara backwards to the Buddha’s celebrated description by non-affirmation–’Neti, Neti, Neti’. The ‘no, neither, nor’ oscillations in Avidya ‘delay’ polar thinking involved in ‘knowing /not-knowing’. Let’s note this as the rough frame for John Cage’s ‘sonic research’– his ‘in-between’ noise-sound-silence constructions. 0017 To call art research/visual art ‘knowledge production’ by its apparent opposite term ‘Avidya’ or ‘non-knowledge’ might seem slightly perverse. But it is in the spirit of Duchamp’s provocation ‘a work of art that isn’t’. It is about adopting the pejorative to probe the ‘excluded’. Feyerabend touched on this when, on the publication of his translation of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, he realized that something had disappeared and gone quite dead in print. With Wittgenstein’s aphoristic, quasi-sutra form, was ‘knowledge’ to be found literally in the lines or words or fitfully in the gaps, hairline fractures, cracks between them–in ‘non-knowledge’ spaces? 0018 To speak of Avidya as the ‘other, the unknown’ dimension of knowledge is perhaps to risk seeing it less for its own sake than as the latter’s ‘shadow’ and ‘ghostly spume’. But ‘non-knowledge’ it pitted against global standardization induced by the knowledge economy because it speaks of difference, multiplicity, resistant alternatives. As globalizing drives try to mould the ‘other’ in ‘our’ image, today there seem to be few qualms about using armed force to pound the ‘foreign’ into the ‘familiar’– an intensifying crisis of management of difference. The ‘other’ becomes little more than an object of pacification: Pax Americana. Images of the Islamic world as the ‘terror-other’ in Samuel Huntingdon’s The Clash of Civilizations (2000): recasting Shelley’s Revolt of Islam (1817) for our time by Bernard Lewis (The New Yorker.19 November 2001): Pim Fortuyn’s De

page 50 L&B volume 18 Islamisering van Onze Cultuur (Karakter Uitgevers B.V. 2001) – signpost the pressure to ‘become like us or be consigned to the Axis of Evil. This ties in with the xenophobic low-growl ‘demand for assimilation’ of the ‘internal other and unknown’ across Europe and beyond. Let Shakespeare’s ‘something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ encapsulate these tendencies that are no less applicable to The Netherlands and Norway and other classic ‘democracies of tolerance’. Against the everyday crisis of the management of difference, issues of ‘knowing the other’ and ‘other ways of knowing’–non-knowledge modalities– loom large on the horizon as urgent, unexplored dimensions of research. 0019 Michel Houellebecq’s Platform (William Heinemann. 2002)– with its anodyne tone on sex and alleged defaming of Islam–jolts us into mulling over how to respond to the ‘other’ in a consumerist culture that breaks down ‘radical difference’ and re-spins it as a less troubling, nondescript commodity or ‘palatable exotic’. ‘The other’, the Muslim in our midst, he notes, is like a blood clot that clogs up the system causing meltdown or they are an alien factor to be broken down by the body politic’s immune system–to be gobbled up and assimilated. For Houellebecq, ‘unknown dimensions of difference’ represented by the great religions share this fate. The Virgin Mary celestial is rendered mundane as the sublime Madonna struts her stuff and SM gear. Nirvana becomes a street-corner transcendental trip eased along with a bit of dope and pop. Is the sensual paradise promised to the faithful by Islam now deliverable at massage parlours on the package holiday? Platform blandly records this post-Weberian ‘stripping bare’ – a violation of ‘otherness’ – as unrelenting everyday attrition. 0020 To explore the ‘breakdown of difference’, let us take a glance at D’Arcy Thompson’s ‘Cartesian Transformation’– device for the ‘reduction of difference to similarity and vice versa’. (Sarat Maharaj in Reverberations. Jan van Eyck Academy. 2000). He sought to demonstrate how creatures we take as ostensibly ‘diverse and divergent’ could be shown to be related and similar. By ‘tweaking’ their images within strict mathematical coordinates of the ‘Cartesian grid’, he graphically showed similarities where there appeared to be only teeming differences. The Cartesian Transformation, however, seems to operate on a see-saw principle of reversibility and equivalence. Differences can be boiled down to similarities: conversely, similarities express themselves in a welter of apparent differences, mutations, variants. We see differences morphing into similarities – as in those laminated postcards of George Bush that switch into Osama Bin Laden and vice versa. The fluent equivalence that

page 51 L&B Volume 18 the Cartesian grid generates might be described as a plane of tolerance. It exacts a steep price. Differences are put up with and accommodated as long as they pass through the grid’s epistemic filter. What it cannot stomach, drops out of sight. 0021 We might relate this to ‘global art’ curatorial projects and cultural difference – to a landmark show such as Magiciens de la Terre (1989). It sought to establish affinities, links, similarities between heterogeneous art works and cultural forms. In this sense it aspired to ‘ideal commonality’ where the mishmash of conflicting diversity is condensed to ‘sameness’ – a single structure or explanatory principle. The space of the show itself functions like a Cartesian grid rendering elements ‘the same’. The plane of tolerance, however, has to be distinguished from the critical idea of the ‘commons’ – a 4 D scene of interacting, ever-changing differences where each time a new element appears the whole of the ‘commons’ itself re-configures. (Sarat Maharaj. Fatal Natalities in Faultlines. Africa Pavilion. Venice Biennale 2003 and the network of Raqs Media Collective.New Delhi. 2002) 0022 This shows up the limits of the ‘plane of tolerance’–keystone of official EU thinking on how to manage difference or, in governmental-administrative jargon, its ‘cultural diversity policy’. I have called this ‘multicultural managerialism’–directives to put cultural differences on display but in regulated, stage-managed fashion as static, countable elements. Differences are seen not so much as processes and passages in translation. They are cast as icons and standstiff-signs that have to make it into the arena of representation. They are ‘retinalized’. They might be metamorphosing but ‘they’ are expected to conform to ‘our’ fast-freeze image of them. The ‘outsider’ has to play out our image of them for ‘us ‘– a convoluted, manipulative exchange. The inclusiveness of the representationalist approach turns out to be little more than a facet of the demand for assimilation. If the Somalians are deemed to be left out, the spectrum of cultural representations simply has to heave over to make room for them. Tolerance becomes a matter of head-counting to see if every culture is ‘on board’. ‘Access to representation’ is undeniably a crucial part of people’s attempts to make themselves heard. But it is no less a double bind for that. For ‘multicultural managerialism’ shares not a little of the formal ground of Apartheid logic. With the scramble for representation, it even-handedly places each and every culture in its own box for separate, equal attention. In reality, some boxes are treated more equally than others. The drive to equal, separate slots also encourages a sense of rivalry and resentment

page 52 L&B volume 18 between the spread of ‘cultural representations’ that now have to vie with one another for their day in the sun. 0023 As ‘the plane of tolerance’ narrows down to ‘putting difference on parade’ it gets tarred with the ‘political correctness’ brush. For multicultural managerialism ‘display’ is a control mechanism, part of the demand for assimilation though it might present itself in quite opposite terms as selfcritical, as capable of going beyond its limits and of laughing at its own ‘foibles and excesses’. For example, it ribs itself for its own ‘PC’ behaviour in the clever ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ Audi ad. Or in this ad for the London Metropolitan Police featuring a trio of police officers – Asian woman, White and Black–with the tag: ‘London is even more PC now’. On one level, the ad leads us on to suspect it of simply mouthing a PC line–precisely what gets people hot under the collar. On another, soon enough the penny drops that here PC can also stand for ‘Police Constable’ (let alone personal computer). PCs of an ilk perhaps less irksome than PC. The ad gets the viewer’s hackles up only to make them feel a little foolish for tilting at windmills for having imagined a ‘PC message’ in the first place. It gives us a glimpse into how managerialism remains one smart step ahead in promoting a representational strategy even as it appears to keep it at arms length–ruses and turns that a ‘critique of multicultural reason’ would need to unpack. 0024 The ‘retinal’, a Duchamp term, has several connotations that are also at odds with one another–a situation perhaps best comprehended by his phrase ‘oscillating density’. The term has both a positive and negative charge. The act of seeing, even perception-cognition, is understood not as a neutral ‘depiction’ of a given ‘out there’ but a construction – somewhat tottering and makeshift – pieced together under particular circumstances. These overlap with some of the conditions of seeing Joyce had ‘regarded’:

Tallowscope Pudendascope Farscope Doordekky Tallowscope: Joyce casts the telescope as scientific viewing apparatus, extension to the eye and male member. It is phallic blubber like a tallow candle with flaming wick. Pudendascope: These associations would telescope in post-1980s visual art studies by way of cinematic-psychoanalytic

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‘Theory of the Discursive Picnic 1. Artarbeiters Unwetter Group’. Kassel 2002. Dorothee Albrecht

page 54 L&B volume 18 theory and Lacanian inflections of the ‘spectatorial’, the ‘self-other’ relationship, the shame-subordination of the symbolic realm. Doordekky: Hindi for telescope or ‘Farscope’– instrument of conquest of ‘faraway places’. It is the means through which the colonial subject is captured, named, kept under surveillance. The act of seeing is understood as plugging into unequal sexual-colonial-symbolic relations of power–dimensions flagged up and explored in art practices often long before they were to become ‘objects of study’ in the academic sphere. 0025 Duchamp counterpoised two types of seeing experience: The ‘retinal’– where seeing is taken to be an affair purely of eye surface and nerve endings. Against this, he proposed a kind of seeing that involved the brain– the constitutive activity of the visual cortex in producing ‘what is seen’. The title of a celebrated essay “What the Frog’s Eye tells the Frog’s Brain” (1959) might be taken to signpost what he was prefiguring: the eye is not simply a flat receptor but active participant in constructing what’s seen. Matisse, it seemed, aspired to the opposite condition where the artist might almost be able to ‘detach’ the eye from its moorings in the body – a retinal zone that short circuits data-synthesis carried out by the brain. Duchamp countered this kind of ‘frisson of the eye surface’ by speaking of sight as part of a cortical circuit – giving us the glimmerings of his antiretinal stance and the idea of ‘grey matter’ art. Between Conceptualists and some Abstract Expressionists these positions were further played out in the post war space. Today his reflections on and experiments with ‘the retinal’ and its various registers add up to critical artistic research avant la lettre. 0026 An ‘anti-retinal’ stance was also taken by Ananda Coomaraswamy, the Indian art historian-philosopher who, like Duchamp, was ‘marooned’ on the US east coast. He had explored the ‘retinal’ around the same time as Duchamp if not earlier. His cross-cultural coordinates took in Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhardt, the Sahitya Darpana, Kama Sutra and the Visnudarmottram. He unremittingly interrogated mimetic-eye-frisson art against grey matter art. His anti-retinal perspective offered a re-evaluation of non-western art that had been deemed ‘non-retinal and inferior’ under prevailing colonialist views ‘through the doordekky’. His critique of the retinal opened up a fresh look at Gandhara sculpture– hybrid mix of Hellenistic and Indian forms and ideas– an episode of ‘cultural translation’. His critique was to embarrass both Indian nationalist and colonialist views of art-culture purity and their limited 3 D concepts of art. From his

page 55 L&B Volume 18 scholarly ‘tracing’ of the retinal to Duchamp’s ‘mapping’ of it, their analyses add to a sketch of how artistic research might take shape today. 0027 Coomaraswamy’s ‘critique of the retinal’ intersects with Duchamp’s – who sketches a visual-space-time experience that counters the static oneeye 3 D Cartesian grid. This is less about 360 degree vision than ‘engulfing sight’ where seeing feels like ‘holding a knife in the palm of one’s hand’. This kind of embodied viewing should be distinguished from the ‘tactile’ which is about the experience of fingering an object at oneremove, in the viewer’s mind or in virtual terms –’touching with the eyes’. Duchamp is outlining a kind of seeing that is an actual sight-touchembrace of what is seen–as visceral as two bodies locked in sexual intercourse or union. Flesh-vision, somatic–seeing? 0028 Multiplicity’s ‘Journey through a Solid Sea’ (Stefano Boerri et al. 2002. Kassel) looks at the tragic event that was at first ‘denied’ by the Mediterranean authorities and locals. Was it also simply ‘missed’ by the sophisticated surveillance satellite – today’s total retinal capture system –scanning the region? On 26 December 1996, a ship loaded with its human cargo of ‘migrants’ went down off the Sicilian coast, near Portopaolo. Against images of the ‘Mittelmeer’ of tourism, resorts, fun, Multiplicity maps it as the fatal shore. Those who do not make it end up as corpses and stiffs washed up on the beach. The zone is xenographic: as the doomed non-citizens pass through, their ‘identity’ solidifies: they become no more than ‘non-citizen, foreigner, outsider, intruder, other, clandestini, sans papiers, illegals, refugees, asylum seekers, stowaways’. Multiplicity calls this reductive classifying ‘hyper-identification’ – a process of retinalization. Rumours of the disaster circulating in the Mediterranean had been met with denials and outright disclaimers from the authorities. Was it a phantom ship, did its passengers really perish or was it simply journalistic sensationalism? Was there a governmental ‘cover up’ with which the coastal villagers colluded? Were the developing world families liars and deceivers when they insisted their relatives had drowned? A dogged search for ‘solid’ facts ends when the ID card of one of the dead, Anagopalan Ganesu, was fished out of the sea in the nets of fisher folk –’brute evidence’ of the tragedy. Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa might fleetingly cross the mind. But Multiplicity stages the investigation to plunge us into the congeries of facts, realms of evidence, differing accounts, versions, voices. From this sea of ‘raw data’ details have to be painstakingly teased

page 56 L&B volume 18 out in a process of scrutiny and evaluation before validation as a ‘solid fact’. As hard facts of the case emerge from the watery grave of the ‘noncitizens’ a tangle of dilemmas about truth-telling and its ethics has to be tackled. 0029 Solid Fact? To probe it, Feyerabend pushed it to the end of its tether almost altogether cutting it off from anchorage in anything. He weakens commonsensical assumptions that facts are ‘hard’ like a stone against which we might stub our toes. The ‘scientific fact’ is pieced together in the course of argument, in sorting out pros and cons of the data. This takes place in a discursive field, an uneven mix of theory and observation that can leave things subject to several interpretations. His drift is that the ‘scientific fact’, contrary to appearances, is not impregnably solid because it remains open to overhaul depending on changes in context, coordinates and controls. This is mirrored, from RG Collingwood (The Idea of History. 1986) to Hayden White (Meta-History. 1973) regarding ‘historiographical facts’: they are provisional constructs. The approach overlaps with the open-ended ways in which art practices handle facts –perhaps a curb on the hectoring Mr. Gradgrind whose demand is we stick to the ‘facts’. A science research programme has a definite cut off point: it has to settle on what is a ‘fact’ so as to press on with the larger inquiry. This is decided according to what survives the test of the most coherent prevailing evidence. The art practitioner, on the other hand, is not so constrained. In the thick of an indefinite testing and revising of facts, they can feel they are treading water. 0030 In the ‘Missing Lebanese Wars ‘ (Atlas Group. 2002. Kassel), Walid Ra’ad ponders methodologies he could deploy to do justice to research for an account of the shattered world of the Lebanon. This depiction has to take place with the barest, jumbled scraps of evidence and sources – with no regular data bank or storage centre, no corpus of documents at hand to dip into. To map the individual lives caught up in the civil conflicts, destruction and trauma, the terror bombings, invasions and attacks he has to contend with both the absence of an archive and with the possibility that if it existed all it might authorize a stilted official version of events. How to represent ‘missing’ historical experience, to voice the unspeakable? The dilemma he faces has some parallels with the problematic of ‘representing the Holocaust’. Lyotard looks at the impossibility of meeting Faurisson’s demand for ‘facts’ on the gas used to annihilate the Jews. Holocaust-deniers feel this therefore clinches their argument. The kind of

page 57 L&B Volume 18 ‘first hand evidence’ they want can only be provided by those who perished in the gas chambers. They are unavailable for the brute reason they were wiped out. The impossible demand is for the dead to speak to confirm the circumstances of their murder. Against this dead-end absolutism of the fact, Ra’ad devises startling, fresh ways of thinking history and memory – new methods of archiving. He takes ‘evidence’ here in a neutral-toned way as a factual-fictional construct. A hoard of 226 notebooks of Dr Fadl Fakhami, a documentation treasure trove of videotapes is found. This serves as a fictive device for probing the unthinkable of the strife-torn time, articulating what could not be said, sounding gaps and holes in the narrative. A catalogue is cited with dry, quasi-meticulous referencing. ‘Found-fictive’ videos, Tape 17 and Tape 31 refer to real life events –the American and British hostages are named and identified as real persons. To this is added a made-up character, an Arab hostage. The situation is staged as edgy, potentially explosive. It gives us a glimpse into the space of captivity, its psycho-atmospherics, its sense of claustrophobia and paranoia. In this fantasy-fact-fictive scenario, the Arab hostage, Souheil Bachar, reflects on the unspeakables of the Lebanon: how to know the other, implying perhaps the yearning for communication beyond the barriers of tribe, religion, nationality. In pondering this in A Passage to India, EM Foster answer was ‘Only Connect’ – ‘empathetic oneness with the other’ as a way of scaling the walls separating colonizer and colonized, self and other. How to give flesh to such an idealistic connection? Perhaps literally through body contact is a thought Souheil Bachar fleetingly toys with in a torrid interior monologue: ..”pressed myself against his ass…punched me in the groin. Why they wanted me to fuck them then to fuck me…” Could the momentary desire to break the taboo of body-flesh contact between males, to cuddle the other hostages, – the fullness of an all-enveloping 4 D embrace – deliver that authentic contact and coming together, that dissolving of self/other antagonism? The thought vanishes quickly in a mix of revulsion, loathing, fear of rejection. But the crucial lines of an ethics are faintly, tentatively drawn. In Ra’ad’s several stabs at finding a method for the ‘Missing Wars’ he strikes on the fictive device of ‘found documents’ on a Professor’s passion for horse racing. Each horse represents one or another methodological perspective: positivist, empiricist, historical materialist and so on. All perhaps have had their day in the arena of the Lebanese conflicts. Which one will be the winner or are they all deadbeat? Which can deliver a way of filling

page 58 L&B volume 18 in the gaps and lacuna in narrating the ‘Missing Lebanese Wars? The bets are open. His concern with inventing methodologies while critiquing existing ones, with the liquidity of ‘solid facts’, with eking out a kind of ‘non-knowledge’ from cracks and chinks in the knowledge systems – all touch on elements of what we call ‘artistic research’ but which is also doggedly no more than his singular art practice. 0031 With the projects, events, activities scanned above, the term ‘artistic research’ is placed in brackets from the start. The category as it has been handed down to us is made to ‘thaw and dissolve into a dew’. It is no more a taken-for-granted given. We have to proceed as if we haven’t a clue as to what artistic research looks like – to treat it as something unknown. Each project becomes a stab at fleshing out what it thinks is ‘research’ to see if it tests ‘positive’: each time the test proves both ‘definitively inconclusive’ and registers an allergic reaction to ‘research’. Today it is essential to broach ‘research’ in this wary, nominalist spirit in order to resist regulated, institutional-octopus versions of it. Particular instances and episodes come to count as ‘art research’ – and not the other way round where we imagine we know what it is and tailor art practice to match it. A striking example is the Artarbeiter group’s on-going Unwetter activities, a chain of Discursive Picnics (Berlin.2002-03): swarming around, walkabouts, displays, jabber, readings, text analyses, trips and tours. These pop up, fizzle out, gel again amounting to forays and drifts into the unknown– research-rambles into passages of everyday consciousness, into somatic modes of knowing. As a rough interim measure we might call this spread of events and experiments ‘artistic research’ or ‘nonknowledge’. It would be like sticking a nametag on an ever-changing, unknown object proliferating in uncountable dimensions.

Note:The title pays homage to Richard Hamilton’s introduction to his translation of Marcel Duchamp’s White Box Notes. A L’infinitif (1966) 2000. I see both MD’s Notes to the Large Glass (1911-21) and RH’s art practice, his MD translations and commentaries as ‘artistic research’ avant la lettre–amongst leading examples of what the term might signal today.

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CONNECTING WORLDS Annette W. Balkema “Line of Flight!” announced a sheet of paper stuck to the wall of a studio I visited the other day. “That is a reference to the line of flight mentioned in A Thousand Plateaus,” the artist told me. The book A Thousand Plateaus is where philosopher Gilles Deleuze, together with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, designs a vibrating image of constantly intermingling lines. Rigid molar lines have resonating segments, supple molecular lines boost flows of quanta while temporarily plugging flashing lines of flight in waves of deterritorialization and reterritorialization inscribed on planes. There are planes of consistency, also called Body without Organs or abstract machines, there are planes of reference, of organization, pumped up dimensions and intersections by abstract machines where both each concrete assemblage and the intersection lines are multiplicities. Those Deleuzian multiplicities and their related concepts of rhizomes and hybridization have been sources of inspiration for artists for years now. Many painters, photographers, video artists mention A Thousand Plateaus. Artists reading a philosophical work: is that an example of artistic research? Before answering that question, let’s delve into the history of the multiplicity. That investigation will not only show how artistic research could lead to a novel, fascinating discipline; it will also demonstrate how artistic research could be related to research conducted in the philosophical field. As a philosopher, what interests me in the concept of multiplicity or multiple connected space is both its capability to spark ways of analyzing figures of thought and its capacity to connect various worlds - or planes as Deleuze would prefer to call them. However, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are not the people who coined the term multiplicity. The term is carved from the world of mathematics and physics by the philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941). Bergson brilliantly introduced into the philosophical discourse a manner of dualist analysis as a two-line way of division, based on composites or multiplicities. However, Bergson’s twoline division does not move on in two infinite, parallel lines which never cross. The two lines do meet at a virtual point, leading to an actualized analysis to be continued at another plane, a movement similar to the modulation of key in music. Thus, Bergson escaped a rigid form of dualism where two terms merely remain opposed to each other. Bergson’s philosophical style, with its divisional dualism, its statement of correct problems through analysis of composites or multiplicities, while departing from

page 60 L&B volume 18 real experience, is incorporated into Deleuze’s image of thought as Bergsonism. Deleuze wrote a small book on Bergson and his philosophy called Bergsonism published in 1966 - A Thousand Plateaus was published in France in 1980. Those converging lines, as well as the notion of multiplicity, can be retraced to the work of the 19th-century mathematician George Bernhard Riemann. In his work, Riemann deals with curved space, higherdimensional space, multiple connected worlds, and wormholes or tubes connecting those worlds. While reading stories about Riemann’s life, about his poverty, his extreme shyness which made public speeches and performances almost unbearable to him and his early death in 1865 at the age of 39, one cannot but hope that heaven does exist. A heaven where Riemann is sitting in front of a computer screen connected to our world showing the continuous influence of his work. Riemann did not only push the mathematics and physics of his day further - and inspired Lewis Carroll, a pseudonym for the mathematician Charles L. Dodgson, to write his books Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass - he also helped philosophers such as Henri Bergson and later Gilles Deleuze in escaping rigid forms of thought such as dualism and dialectics with his notion of multiply connected space. Moreover, his work, albeit in a transformative and indirect way, still offers inspiration to various 21st-century artists and philosophers. How could the notion of multiple connected space play a decisive role in the world of visual art and artistic research? Multiple connected spaces could be viewed as parallel worlds or parallel planes which normally do not intersect. However, wormholes or tubes could be opening up between them, enabling a form of connection where multiple connectedness implies an arbitrary number of dimensions. What happens if worlds do not interact, if they are not connected by tubes, if they are not pumped up into multidimensions, if they become stuck in a flat, two-dimensional world? Let’s look at an exhibition where parallel worlds function without any connection of tubes. What kind of image does that produce? In May 2002, the Central Museum in Utrecht mounted the exhibition FFF - subtitled “video show.” Apparently, the curator of that show was convinced that screen work is screen work. Indeed, a rather analogous, parallel, and flat view. What could be seen in FFF? Next to numerous successful, that is funny, well-acted, and well-shot television commercials, there were video clips - good ones such as Inez van Lamsweerde’s Björk clip Hidden Place or Michael Jackson’s Thriller - and artworks from a number of decades. For example, Nam June Paik’s Button Happening (1965), Bruce

page 61 L&B Volume 18 Naumann’s Lip Sync (1969) General Ideas’ Shut the Fuck Up (1985), Dara Birnbaum’s Technology Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978), and Pipilotti Rist’s You Called Me Jack (1990). I believe one could only perceive the FFF exhibition with a deep sense of being compressed, of being stuck into a position without any possibility of escape. Why? The screenbased pieces from the art world, the funny commercials from the business world and the entertaining video clips from the music world seemed to be shown in a parallel fashion without any connection, without any tubes or tunnels between them. These worlds did not have multiple connectedness, but simply ran parallel to each other. They seemed to be glued together, warding off any dimensionality, any modulation to additional space. FFF seemed to follow Bergson and Deleuze in the difference they established between a quantitative and a qualitative world. Quantity plays a role in a flat, compressed, numerical, and parallel world. Parallel means repetition comprising serial movement without any modification. In the quantitative realm, an increasing number of impressions does not indicate anything else but pure substitution of the same. Such a quantitative world resembles a two-dimensional, compressed world where the laws of Euclid reign. Who wants to live in such a flat world where the shortest path between two points is a straight line, where a line has one dimension: length; where a point has no dimension at all; where a plane has only two dimensions: length and breadth; where a solid has three dimensions: length, breadth, and height; where parallel lines never meet. In such space, a lasso, a piece of rope can always be contracted to a point without any dimension. That seems so compressing that one could hang oneself - if there was only space for that. A qualitative world is different from a quantitative world. Here space is no longer flat. It can be curved positively as in a sphere where parallel lines always meet, or negatively in a saddle-shape or trumpetshape where an infinite number of lines can be drawn from one point. The qualitative realm implies wormholes and tubes tunneling to other worlds, to other dimensions, to different planes where all sorts of transformation takes place. One could cast anchor from one world into another world rather than carving out wormholes or tubes. However, casting anchors does not necessarily imply fascinating cross-overs. It could simply entail disgraceful, parallel clinging. How to envision worlds connecting in a transformative way? In such worlds, the skin of sharks or dolphins and its hydraulic properties are deployed in designing Olympic swimsuits and airplanes. Tents for refugees in desert environments become equipped with water sensors inspired by Namibian beetles. And shellfish and crustaceans help in producing hard,

page 62 L&B volume 18 ceramic substances and mineralization at low temperatures, for use in implants such as artificial bones. The world of multiple connection where these phenomena occur even became a new discipline called biomimetics, comprised of biology, technology, design and management. Biomimetics brought about shifts in problem solving where a technological problem is solved by an answer from the biological world. Philosophy has always looked to various disciplines for solving particular problems and opening up new dimensions. Philosophers have always dug wormholes and tubes and carved bits and pieces from particular bodies of work in order to deploy those in their own work. Let’s return to our initial question. Visual artists reading a philosophical work written by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: is that an example of artistic research? The answer is no. That activity in itself seems to involve a mere parallel gluing together of fields. Hermann Pitz, artist and senior adviser at the Rijksakademie, brought up the term “new artistic personalities” during the preliminary Artistic Research workshop. If these new artistic personalities succeed in creating novel lines, dig fresh tunnels, pump up peculiar tubes while connecting all kinds of worlds into different dimensionalities, then one could truly speak of a novel field. However, be aware of one dangerous wormhole, of one risky tube, artistic personalities! That is the wormhole, the tube to the academic world at large. They will attempt to cast anchor in your field in order to glue it firmly together with their own world. Deleuze once mocked Hegel in describing his dialectic thought and its movement as a series of concentric circles where nothing has changed when one looks up. I believe that, in spite of worshipping differential thought, the academic world still tends to look down from an ivory tower of concentric circles. Artistic researchers beware: do not embark with just anyone. Don’t let your lines, your wormholes, and your tubes be severed halfway to your goal.

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WHAT IS THE POINT OF RESEARCH AND DOCTORAL STUDIES IN ART? Jan Kaila When I applied for a doctorate study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 1997, it was important to me that the Academy had a clear policy on visual art research. According to this policy, visual art research should be viewed as a coherent whole, the major components being the student’s artistic work (artworks, exhibitions, etc.) and an investigation of the questions prompted by that artistic work. I did not consider it of primary importance or relevance that artistic research should fulfil scientific criteria. Instead, I was interested in how the aesthetic and conceptual knowledge characteristic of the visual artist could be further developed and externalized in works and texts, or in other forms of reflection. By the knowledge characteristic of the visual artist, I mean the authorial space made up of actions, conceptual thinking and knowledge acquisition – the space within which the works are made. The causes that have given rise to this space may be logical, or they may be absurd and haphazard, but they are all relevant. I decided at an early stage in my studies that the “demonstration of artistic skill and scholarship” that would earn me my doctorate (the Academy of Fine Arts does not require the production of a doctoral thesis) would consist of one or two exhibitions and two texts, one of which would be conversations and the other article-like appendices. The purpose of the conversations was to investigate fairly directly the origins and development of my works, while the appendices by revealing both the works of other artists and the theoretical texts underlying my work were also intended to link my research into a broader frame of reference within contemporary art. With this formal approach I was seeking to ensure that the “analytical section” of my research would be a credible reflection of my artistic practices. The “subject” of my demonstration of artistic skill and scholarship was gradually refined during the years 1997-2000. When it came to naming this subject, it posed a problem since I did not work exclusively on a coherent set of problems associated with a specific place or phenomenon, but produced quite disparate works difficult to list under a single common concept or heading. Conversely, I was increasingly interested, both in practice and on a theoretical level, in what happens when a photographer adopts means of representation other than photographs. This had long been a preoccupation of mine – I had been juxtaposing a variety of

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The Solarized, Video installation, three monitors with sound, 2000

page 65 L&B Volume 18 materials and photographs in my exhibitions since the beginning of the 1990s. As my research progressed I was able to name the set of problems I was addressing using the concept of photographicality, by which in practice I meant the projection of artistic approaches characteristic of the photographer onto other means of representation. In a text that was one of the outcomes of my research I characterized my use of various media as follows: “The videos I have produced are not based on the mainstream tradition of using moving images, in which a traditional linear story is generated using cameras or camera-runs to shoot the subject from various directions, and by cutting or editing. In my videoworks, the camera is static like it is when taking photographs (with any motion resulting solely from the movements of the objects being filmed), and I edit them primarily to produce simultaneity, not linearity.” The use of three-dimensional objects is also intended to achieve photographicality:”: I hope it evokes the contradiction between presentation and representation found in photographs, which arises from the way photographs refer to something that was already in existence elsewhere, while they simultaneously are themselves physically present “now”. It is thus significant that I have brought in used clothes and books, in other words objects in which past time is visible.” Meanwhile, the texts I use in my works are reminiscent neither of traditional literature nor, in their absurdity, of ordinary conveying of information. By producing text panels that register things in a way that resembles documentary qualities typical of photography, I try to reflect the traditional meanings generated by the physical juxtaposition and superimposition of ordinary writing and photographs. In 2000, I showed the “practice-based section” of my demonstration of artistic skill and scholarship research at the Amos Anderson Art Museum Helsinki, as an exhibition titled Kohteen Mysteeri – Mystery of the Object. The aim was to install works made out of photographs, clothes, soft toys, books, texts and videos as an integrated, albeit contradictory, whole, in a kind of dialogue between different materials and different informative contents. The analytical section of my demonstration of artistic skill and scholarship was completed in its final form at the end of 2002 and was published together with a portfolio documenting the “Kohteen Mysteeri” exhibition as the book Valokuvallisuus ja esittäminen nykytaiteessa – Teoksia vuosilta 1998-2000. (Photographicality and Presentation / Representation in Contemporary Art. Works from 1998-2000) I subsequently received my Doctorate in Fine Arts at the end of 2002 and since April 2003 I have been working as a substitute Professor in

page 66 L&B volume 18 the Department of Postgraduate Studies at the Academy. In the following, I consider some aspects of artistic research and artists’ doctoral studies in the light of what I have learned and experienced. With doctoral-level artistic research being such a fledgling field, it is difficult and questionable to reach wholesale conclusions that apply to the entire field. The main problems in doctoral studies nevertheless probably relate to the identity of artistic research – with how research is assessed, for instance, and how it is related to traditional (scientific) research. Can an artist’s doctoral studies constitute a completely new form of research or is it a question of transplanting for artists’ use models that work good in the sciences? It is impossible to create a totally new form of research, since that would mean stepping outside of verbal language. In other words, artists’ production and other things they do are always to some extent bound up, for example, with the tradition in art history, semiotics and aesthetics. It does not, however, follow that artists as researchers should plagiarize more traditional research as such, but rather that science traditions should be adapted to serve artists when they are studying their own activities and their own field as authors. Only thus, by using and at the same time breaking down existing familiar verbal means of articulation, can we gradually generate our own tradition. But generating our own tradition will take time, and requires that we be left to work in peace. Sometimes it feels like the very word “doctor” arouses needless, occasionally even comical passions, as well as unfounded expectations of something quite unprecedented appearing right away, right here and now. Artistic research is also bound to a tradition external to itself because, so far, there are not that many Doctors of Fine Arts around. This being the case, we are in the paradoxical situation that a large portion of the educators, supervisors and examiners involved do not have practical experience in the way artistic research functions, but are basing their thinking on traditional research or, in the best case, on a vision of what artistic research might ultimately be. This problem has emerged clearly in the examination of demonstrations of artistic skill and artists’ doctoral theses. Examiners representing different fields have often been capable of assessing, or have even sought to assess, only the practice-based section or only the writing (the written, analytical section), with the result that the goal of coherence set for the artistic research can, to the disappointment of the artist, break down and blur into the virtually mutually opposed components of practical production and analytical reflection. Of what use then are doctors of fine arts? The question is as speculative and as broad as the one about the usefulness of art, but I will nevertheless try to make some observations on it.

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To Turn Around, Installation, clothes, and 3-5 monitors showing DVDloops, 2000 To Turn Around, Installation, soft toys and one video, 2000

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What-Where-When, Installation, 320 books and 80 photographs, 1999

page 69 L&B Volume 18 Now that many of the European institutions that educate artists have become universities, it would be odd if it were not possible to study there for both Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees, and for doctorates, as elsewhere in the university world. Or should we ask then: Why have an academic education at all to become an artist? A much more difficult question relates to whether artistic research has something to contribute to artists or others interested in the subject, something that the already existing research, institutions or art world are unable to provide. I think it has. Artistic research at best involves going in depth into the special knowledge involved in artistic authorship and distributing it, both to the visual art field and possibly elsewhere, and only an investigative artist can do this. In practice, this distribution takes place via exhibitions, publications and teaching that result from artistic research. In recent decades there has been a shift in the division of labor according to which the artist makes works, the curator curates and the writer criticizes. Contemporary art circles accommodate an increasing number of activities, in which artists are expected to display expanded authorship – the ability to verbalize, analyze and interpret their own and other artists’ works, and other aspects of the art world. Nowadays, for many people, artistic authorship means making a commitment to projects and collaborative undertakings, organizing and doing other activities previously considered “extra-artistic.” In this situation, the tradition of knowledge and speech that emerges in artistic research is crucially important, while staying mute likely leads to exclusion or even invisibility. Note The Academy of Fine Arts’ Department of Postgraduate Studies was set up in 1997. In that same year six artists began their doctoral studies, two of them have already received their doctorates. During 1999-2003, a total of six new doctoral students were admitted. Every year, the Academy solicits applications for doctoral studies, accepting two or three new students.

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RIVER LOW, MOUNTAIN HIGH. CONTEXTUALIZING ARTISTIC RESEARCH Mika Hannula 1. Background Artistic research is a new area. It is a field within university studies that deserves to be called social innovation. Due to its freshness and newness, artistic research is both a possibility and a risk. However, so far it has proven to have a fair chance of survival. Thus, artistic research must be articulated and formed according to its own particular needs and challenges. Obviously, artistic research is an area which is yet to emerge as a full program. During the last 20 years, there have been different artistic research projects and experiments in various countries. However, there has not been enough internal scrutiny and definitely not enough fruitful comparison and constructive criticism among all the different approaches. (For a historical point of view, see Wallenstein 2002.) Since artistic research has been accepted and established as credible research within art education and art institutions, we have to keep its possibilities open and move towards a vision of artistic research which is self-critical and self-reflexive. Put differently, we must have the courage to be anarchistic and experimental. What actually is artistic research? It is a combination of artistic practice and theoretical approach while aiming at the production of knowledge. Within that combination of theory and practice, I would like to argue, we need some kind of common ground not implying strict rules, but basic guidelines for a continuously shifting methodology of artistic research. Methodology is the semi-solid base and the framework enabling outreach and experimentation. It is there to guide and to help, not to restrict or to limit. I believe that without such methodology, artistic research as an interdisciplinary field could become lost. Before going into the details of the basic methodological demands, requirements and possibilities, I would like to refer to a story that has functioned for me as a metaphor in reflecting on artistic research and theoretical approach and how they could be based on mutual respect and reciprocal recognition. It is a story I heard from a career diplomat, who took part in the historic peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt in 1976. The scene of the story is Camp David in the United States, where the final conversations between the two warring parties was mediated by American efforts. However, the depth of misunderstanding and suspicion had become so profound that it took six so-called “walks in the woods”

page 71 L&B Volume 18 before the deal could be closed. “A walk in the woods” is a common term in international politics. It refers to when both parties and the mediator call for a short break, during which the main negotiators of each party step outside the room or outside the tent, as was the case during this particular event. Then, symbolically, they go for “a walk in the woods” in order to prevent loss of face and have an informal exchange of thought. During the final phase of the peace talks, negotiations stopped six times before all parties could agree with the content and the rhetorics of the deal. It seems to me that combining artistic practice and theoretical strategy is like negotiating a peace agreement. Not in the sense of solving all the problems, but in the sense of reaching a compromise the parties involved can live with. As we all know, these deals are extremely difficult to reach and even more difficult to implement and to hold on to. They demand an incredible amount of commitment, time and energy in a process where both sides have to move carefully, smoothly and slowly, since collisions are bound to happen. At the same time, both parties must be willing to step out of their Weltanschauung, and question and doubt it. In line with Curtis Mayfield, one could say that one has to give in order to get, one must be prepared to lose in order to gain. 2. Methodological Questions Individual Level In Finland as elsewhere, artistic research is in a process of development, seeking its own particular field and methods. Therefore, we must accept its procedural nature, including its failures, mistakes and erroneous assessments. Instead of presenting a finished package, I shall try to bring out the necessary preconditions of the activity called research – whether it be social, political or artistic. One should note that the observations are fairly general and always insufficient. Only detailed knowledge of and familiarity with the practice and subject matter of a particular research project offer an opportunity for the clarification of local and detailed methodologies. The fundamental impetus of all research must perforce be communication: the desire to say something about something to someone. Preconditions always arise from the fact that the researcher and the text he or she produces is part of their environment, part of their world, on which they have an impact and which influences them in turn. It is important to bring out, with maximum openness and clarity, who researches, and why and what is being researched. That is a method different from merely listing distinct rules to produce the desired result. The method itself should remain flexible and evolve over the course of the investigation. An “umbrella” concept for artistic research could be a “method-

page 72 L&B volume 18 ological map of reflection” telling both the author of the research as well as its readers how, why and where the research has progressed. Such a map seeks to bring out the premises, progress and final result of the research, not in the form of a straightforward answer, but as the presentation of novel questions and a tentative, yet courageous, unraveling of failures. It seems to me that the fundamentals of artistic research must include at least the following six points. (See Hannula 2002) 1) Thorough exposition of research matter, premises, and motives. The researcher must explain what and why he or she is researching, its interest, and its purpose. The success or failure of an artistic research project is largely dependent on how carefully and meticulously this first step is planned and implemented. At this stage, the researcher should explain why the research is undertaken within the realm of contemporary art rather than in art history, or, for example, a field such as sociology. This first step sets off the rules of conduct for the chosen mode of research, while it seeks to discover what autonomous and meaningful artistic research is. That cannot be done without a fearless distance from earlier viewpoints and the courage to create novel modes and fields of research. Remember, research does not take place in isolation: close interaction with the research community is of utmost importance. Obviously, trudging through untrodden snow is difficult and seldom elegant. However, there is no other alternative. Artistic research is both a risk and an opportunity, since the field has no tradition or codes of its own. Sometimes the rules of research from neighboring fields seem indisputable. But of course, they are not. We must keep in mind that only thirty years ago researchers were earnestly arguing whether or not sociology should be considered a science. Nevertheless, the scientific validity of most disciplines are accepted as given. The question of validity is posed if the status of the discipline is uncertain, i.e., when it is still developing. That uncertainty of artistic research must be endured and accepted since it will not be resolved within the next five or perhaps even ten years. The discipline’s profile and tradition will only emerge – if ever – after the work of a few generations. 2) Exposition of inherent premises in research subject and approach. Point one implies that research is contextualized and linked with earlier writings and research. Although the tradition of artistic research itself is young, one should recall that, particularly during the 20th century, many artists have produced texts, statements, and views on their work. Thus, artistic research could refer to how and why artists have investigated their

page 73 L&B Volume 18 work in the past and, at the same time, develop such investigations further. Artistic research is situated, then, within a certain critical continuum, where it seeks to attain a locality of interpretation. 3) Appropriation of research tools and subject. First of all, one must demonstrate adequately how and why one has selected the tools in question, if necessary, in connection with previous use. In addition, the artistic researcher must show how her or his research viewpoint differs from research in other fields such as, for example, philosophy or art education. Appropriation of tools and subject is only possible if one is capable of justifying them in relation to earlier propositions and claims. 4) Artistic research must follow the classic modes of presentation of written research. One must present one’s research with consistency, honesty, and precision, i.e. as elegantly, carefully, and systematically as possible. Artistic research inevitably subjective - contains the danger of either turning into narcissism or ending up in an uninteresting “cul-de-sac.” Subjective experience coupled with a generally accepted linguistic expression could result in innovative and independent perspectives and become described as artistic research without restraint. 5) Assessment of final result. Towards the end of the methodological map of reflection, it is necessary to summarize the experiences which have emerged during the process. Clearly, artistic research cannot and must not provide absolute answers, but search for novel viewpoints of and connections with various themes. Questions and problems emerging during the research process must be presented in the final result as background for further investigation. Most importantly, the researcher must be able to report on the research process and present an opinion on both the research topic and its premises. In other words, he or she must take a stance and support it with arguments. 6) Reformulation of research practices of artistic research; evaluating criteria of adequacy. The field of artistic research is not only relatively new to its practitioners. It is also quite novel to its readers and critics. Therefore, the demands and conditions presented earlier apply with equal force to anyone operating in the field of artistic research. This calls for flexibility and a willingness to discover new criteria and opportunities in the field of artistic research.

page 74 L&B volume 18 Institutional level The perspective of individual agents needs to be expanded with an institutional point of view. Artistic research has been conducted at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki since 1997. Our experience is that the institution behind artistic research programs should focus at least on the following five points. 1) Create a platform for open artistic research allowing a broad type of interdisciplinary collaboration. 2) Provide room for taking risks, experimental styles and approaches, and creative uncertainty and failures. Avoid closing down possible horizons and frameworks with regard to research activities. What artistic research needs is institutional integrity and an institutional desire to be anarchistic, tolerant and open. 3) Encourage students to collaborate within the group, to question presuppositions, and to discuss the basics of doing research. Attempt to answer questions of what it means and why it is important to combine artistic activities with research. 4) Clearly articulate the aims and interests of the institution. In our academy, there is no scientific PhD available. We have a specific artistic PhD based on its own objectives, interests and criteria. This helps to structurally avoid misunderstandings, false comparisons and undue expectations. 5) Have faith in the course chosen, trust taking risks, keep the process open and self-reflexive. The practice of artistic research must develop itself. That will inevitably take time. It requires negotiations, continuously balancing and searching, and the creation of a common ground based on mutual recognition and respect. That implies the ability to unconditionally listen and criticize. There are two kinds of danger in collective activities within research groups. On the one hand, too much homogeneity where everything is accepted, but not debated. And, on the other hand, too much heterogeneity without a common basis for discourse, without a shared language or common goal. Both problems can be dealt with by addressing the need to find proper rhetorical and analytical tools in each individual case and project of artistic research. A lack of such tools is common in research areas without a long tradition. (For other methodological approaches, see Vadén 2002, and Varto 2002.) Questions of validity The starting point is qualitative research grounded on the belief that any

page 75 L&B Volume 18 kind of research is done by a subject, whose subjectivity is not a problem, but rather an important part of the research. In fact, the researcher is a core element in the research activity, aiming for comprehension instead of measurable results. One should acknowledge that research results become communicated in a personal style, enabling an open and transparent interpretation. However, there are important points to be clarified in order to be able to hold on to the communicative aspect of artistic research. Again, these points are not meant as limitations, but as guidelines in the process of articulating one’s project and its result. 1) Explain the context and articulate precisely the theme of the research. What is it about, what is the problem, and what does it expect to achieve and why? 2) Credibility and communication: research has to be conducted and communicated as transparently as possible, even if the research is based on intuition or artistic activity. 3) Coherence of research and how it is reported. 4) The adaptability and uniqueness of the results should be located and argued for. 5) The importance of the results for the research field and community should be stated. As a concluding remark on questions of methodology and validity of research, I would like to argue that we have to approach artistic research, in fact, any kind of research, with a healthy dose of both respect and skepticism. Artistic research should not be worshipped nor ridiculed, since it is simply a way to think through one’s work and its context. What is produced is a critical and self-reflexive activity, attempting to locate itself within a certain part of contemporary art and its discourse. 3. Possibilities of Open and Critical Research In a broader perspective, artistic research seems to be able to introduce methodological anarchism and experimentation. It is driven by a communicative impulse while opening up various forms of interdisciplinarity. From the view of methodological anarchism (following the credo and legacy of Feyerabend, see, for example, Feyerabend 1995) and experimentation, artistic research has two specific characteristics. Firstly, conscious scrutiny and reflection of the relationship between experience and research. That implies: a) strong awareness of the relationship of the researcher with his/her object or theme of research; interpretation and situation in a given context. b) articulation of presuppositions.

page 76 L&B volume 18 c) research as a gradually emerging process; reflection on the object of research and its surrounding context. The second characteristic deals with how to maintain and protect the uniqueness of experience. That could be labeled experiential democracy, implying that a) all activities are interwoven within language and the production of meaning; b) communication should keep its uniqueness, but still be accountable and reachable. What is experiential democracy? According to Tere Vadén (2003), its driving force is to oppose the either/or scheme of binary logics. It relies on two principles which cannot be overridden. The first principle claims that everything can be questioned, while the second one argues that the uniqueness of any kind of experience has to be respected and treated on its own terms. This leads to the basic definition of experiential democracy, maintaining that all areas of experience are equal. Therefore, all areas of experience can be criticized by other areas of experience. In other words, art can criticize science and science can criticize art. As a result, openness and critique will increase, while a critical attitude moving in various directions will push forward novel interpretations and points of view. At the same time, we should be aware of the danger in artistic research. The idea of equality of experience is completely forgotten when an artist first creates a painting, an installation or performance and then sets out to scrutinize it. That would be a case of dividing up the practical and theoretical sides of artistic research when in fact both sides need to bounce into each other and link in a genuine encounter. I would like to argue that is exactly what artistic research is. Artistic research is that interaction, where the two sides of practice and theory shape and shake each other. From this, a number of questions emerge. How does artistic research affect theoretical approaches and conceptualization? How do theoretical strategies affect artistic production? How does a theoretical approach participate in the process of the production of artistic meaning? What happens in the interstitial space of the encounter between practice and theory? The Ethics of Encounter Why emphasize the term encounter? I believe it refers to the clashing or colliding of two worlds. That does not imply a conflict or fight, but an element of incomparability within the two positions which both deserve respect and recognition. An encounter does not look for consensus, but rather a reasonable disagreement, as John Rawls put it. (See, for example, Rawls 1993) In this respect, I would like to connect critical hermeneutics with artistic research, where hermeneutics is not considered a philosophy, but an approach and an attitude. Hermeneutics is not restrictive, but strives

page 77 L&B Volume 18 for openness through interpretation. Rather than providing answers, it examines the sensibility of questions, integrates research and tradition, and produces new visions. Hermeneutics implies not only awareness of interpretation, but also where and how interpretation occurs. In that sense, I believe, hermeneutics is a collision waiting to happen, of which we suddenly become aware. Hermeneutics is always there, but we often fail to see or acknowledge it. Thus, interpretation is an idiosyncratic process of checking and balancing. That feature can be found in Gianni Vattimo’s work. For Vattimo, the main characteristic of interpretation is the chance of failure. Furthermore, interpretation never ends: it opens up the richness of being through the possibility of alternatives. The task of the interpreter is to take a stand and to locate arguments within the discourse – otherwise interpretation is irrelevant and unethical. “An interpretation is not a description by an ‘impartial’ observer, but a dialogic event, where the talkers participate equally and from which they leave changed; they understand each other to the extent they are both included in the third horizon, which belongs to neither, but where they have been placed and which puts them in their place,” says Vattimo (Vattimo 1999, 20) One should be aware of and accept the historicity of interpretation, and place approaches within the context of the past, since the past is ever present in the situation of the here and now. We should not denounce the tradition and development of forms of thinking, but seek a constructive and critical attitude. What is important is to bring out the conditions and requirements established by the interpreter and the situation. We are always simultaneously inside the world - part of it - yet seeking distance and perspective. That situation could be termed double-awareness. The nature of such awareness has been described by Juha Varto: “Things happen to me and I myself am happening, but there is no way to step outside, to place oneself further off, to see more clearly, to be wiser. I can only exist, in the way typical of human beings: in the middle, putting things in place, foundering”.(Varto 2000, 38) It is historicity and locality themselves which remove the danger of relativity with which hermeneutics is all too hastily branded. An interpretation conscious of its own premises and directions is the very opposite of a situation where anything goes. It is true that a hermeneutic approach requires a multiplicity of narratives and versions of reality. This, however, does not and must not mean that all versions are equally important. Rather, it leads to comparison and competition between versions. In the last analysis, the issue is which versions are supported and why. The hermeneutic approach emphasizes our being-in-the-world.

page 78 L&B volume 18 What basic principles does the hermeneutic approach offer and postulate for the ethical encounter of being-in-the-world? Our relationship to ourselves and to the external world can be summarized in two strategies: to listen and to criticize. Inevitably, such a relationship is based on mutual interaction and, above all, by revealing oneself, by listening to what the other wants and tries to say. In other words, the responsibility rests initially with the recipient, even though it is preceded by and impossible without the desire of communication by an other. Such a relationship is profoundly characterized by contextual and personal detail. On the level of visual art, encounter and interaction can be described as being touched in front of the work together with the work. Obviously, there is an endless need to present one’s point or one’s version of reality. Who has the stamina and time, though, to listen endlessly? However, a successful encounter could signal the beginning of the journey we call dialogue. It is a process of becoming, which, as Gadamer put it, “forces us to linger and offers an opportunity for participation.” A dialogue is a continuous process of “distancing and emerging, lingering and progress, but also movement side by side, alternate.” (Gadamer 2000, 43) The fundamental value of the critical hermeneutic stance can be crystallized in the principle of nonviolence and the message of love. (See, for example, Hannula 2001) Nonviolence is connected with an epistemological situation, without an objective way to distinguish between a correct or a faulty interpretation in a universal sense. Since there is no single, generally accepted way, something else is needed. In the position adopted here, that means that discussion must take place without resorting to violence. In other words, the only arguments allowed are verbal ones. If we really intend to face such tasks, I believe we all will need help in a situation on the verge of collapsing. In order to maintain the process as open-ended, constructive and as nonviolent as possible, we need to rely on something which can provide us with a rule of thumb while joining two unique experiences together in a spirit of mutual respect and recognition. What do we need “to keep on keeping on”, to paraphrase Curtis Mayfield again? That could be the message of love one finds, among other sources, in the New Testament. Curtis no doubt took up the words from Luke (6:31), “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Sources William Connolly: The Ethos of Pluralization. University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Paul Feyerabend: Killing Time, Autobiography, University of Chicago Press, 1995.

page 79 L&B Volume 18 Hans-Georg Gadamer: Kuvataide ja sanataide. In Elämys, taide, totuus – Kirjoituksia fenomenologisesta estetiikasta. Edited by Arto Haapala and Markku Lehtinen. Yliopistopaino, 2000. Mika Hannula: Kolmas tila – väärinymmärtäminen eettisenä lähtökohtana. Kuvataideakatemia, 2001. Mika Hannula: The Responsibility and Freedom of Interpretation, in Artistic Research, eds Satu Kiljunen & Mika Hannula, Kuvataideakatemia, 2002. John Rawls: Political Liberalism, Columbia University Press, 1993. Tere Vadén: Openness, Criticality and Language – Observations on the Methodology of Practice-based Experiential Research, in Artistic Research, eds Satu Kiljunen & Mika Hannula, Kuvataideakatemia, 2002. Tere Vadén: Kokemuksellinen demokratia ja tutkimuksen avoimuus ja kriittisyys, in Kohtaamisia taiteen ja tutkimisen maastoissa, eds. Juha Varto, Marjatta Saarnivaara and Heikki Tervahattu, Artefakta 13, Akatiimi, 2003. Sven-Olov Wallenstein: Art and Research, in Artistic Research, eds Satu Kiljunen & Mika Hannula, Kuvataideakatemia, 2002. Juha Varto: Investigating Bringing-Forth, in Artistic Research, eds Satu Kiljunen & Mika Hannula, Kuvataideakatemia, 2002. Juha Varto: Uutta tietoa. Värityskirja tieteen filosofiaan. Tampere University Press, 2000. Gianni Vattimo: Tulkinnan etiikka. Tutkijaliitto, 1999.

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IS ARTISTIC RESEARCH A MEANINGFUL CONCEPT? Tuomas Nevanlinna I work at the Helsinki Academy of Fine Arts. My job, along with Professor Jan Kaila at the Department of Postgraduate Studies, is to organize the philosophical and theoretical workshops that form part of the course of study. I have no formal decision-making power on the structure of or criteria for doctoral studies, although I certainly have something to say about their content. To begin with, a few words about the structure of the doctoral studies. At the Academy of Fine Arts the PhD degree is not a substitute for some pre-existing studio-based, quasi-residential system. The degree is simply an additional opportunity for artists who already have a career and who continue working with their own projects during the program. It should also be added that the school does not, at the moment at least, give grants to these students. The studies mostly consist of artists gathering together and discussing their work with colleagues. Then we have visiting speakers. Students are also required to write essays which are both edifying and help the artists in the ever-difficult process of writing. Our program is certainly “school-like” in the sense that it requires or demands something from the artists. Otherwise it would not be a degree. Do we need degrees, then? As an option, yes, but not as a universal model – no one wants art schools to be “the same everywhere”. Still I would like to point out that the so-called freedom of studiobased, no-curriculum art schooling is in many senses only apparent. One danger involved is this: while there is no agenda or any requirements on the part of the academy, as long as there is evaluation (otherwise it wouldn’t be an academy at all, would it, just a residence?), this freedom is directly subject to the star system. Nothing is demanded, yet on the other hand no possibility for a suspension, no open space, is left between the artist and the curators. The academy runs the risk of becoming an incubator built to meet the needs of star-seekers. This is analogous to neoliberal thinking: liberals want to get rid of all mediating communities and other horizontal relations oppressing the individual. The consequence is that the individual is subjected directly to the state, with no intermediate levels. In this sense I see our program as being more free, because it offers a space which does not directly submit to the trends and currents of the art market.

page 81 L&B Volume 18 I think, furthermore, that overreacting against curricula and educational demands is in many cases just a symptom of an inverted faith in the academy, a belief in its negative omnipotence. * In its original administrative embodiment, the idea of doctoral degrees probably embraced the notion that the easiest way of improving the status and esteem of art education would be to remodel it according to the structure and terminology of science education. Well, does artistic research,(1) then, imply a scientification of art education at the expense of the “essence” of art – whatever that may be? Is there any point in modelling the instruction in art academies on that of universities? Might there not be an underlying assumption that art studies and education are more important and high-class the more akin they become to “science”? (2) The more populist sceptics of artistic research will most likely suspect that this restructuring is yet another manifestation of the “crisis of contemporary art.” Because art these days often lacks the kind of gastronomic dimension that would attract wider audiences, it artificially invents all sorts of supposedly grand things (such as “conceptual art”, “artistic research” and other pseudo-scientific cover-ups) to justify its activities. Is an artist not first and foremost a craftsman who “needs no theory”? Transplanting the terminology of a science policy rife with “doctoral theses”, “dissertations” and “research” into another context is not and cannot be an innocent, value-free process. This is a risk that should be avoided. And it would perhaps have been better if new terminology had been created for postgraduate degrees in the arts. Nevertheless, and this is the most important point, the idea of artistic research also opens up opportunities and possibilities. That is to say, I am not writing the issue off as an administrative necessity or as a rhetorical-tactical mask assumed merely for the purpose of acquiring additional funding. * In the following I will outline one possible way of approaching the nature of artistic research. At least since Romanticism, art has had a reflexive relationship with itself and its tradition. Ever since, works of art have always posed explicit or implicit questions like: “What is art?”, “Is this still art?”, “What is the essence and what are the limits of my artistic medium?” and so forth.

page 82 L&B volume 18 One intuition is that, because art is necessarily “vague” and allows multiple interpretations, unlike the exact natural sciences, the model for artistic research should be sought in the humanities: following this example, artistic research would consist of free yet informed and analytical prose that communicates systematically with its sources. This is, in fact, the way that perhaps the great majority of the work completed under the title of “artistic research” has been done. We can, however, attempt a further clarification. * First of all, we should keep in mind the way that in artistic research the artist in question investigates her own works or, rather, through her own works. The danger here is twofold: with regard to the method used in the research, the artist may either “objectify” his works or “subjectify” them. In the first case, she investigates her works as if she were not their author at all. This line of work is a kind of art history in the present tense. In the second case he reflects upon them from an uninhibited first-person perspective. This latter approach does not necessarily bother itself with the “logic” of the works, it simply adds a kind of human-interest viewpoint to them. Although I find both these alternatives troubling, that does not mean that the artist’s self-understanding should be completely “bracketed” or suspended during the process of artistic research. The symbolic world the artist dwells in is, of course, part and parcel of the work she is doing. The point is rather that this self-understanding should be subject to testing. In this respect artistic research could, after all, take its cue from the natural sciences, at least in their experimental dimension. Does the art work (or a series of them) not occupy a position analogous to that of an experiment? The works offer a way by which the artist can seek an answer to some question. At the end of the research, conclusions are presented: How is the original question to be answered now, in the light of the “experiment” constituted by the work and works? The question may, for example, be: “How does the place of performance, `the space’ in which it is given, affect a theatrical performance?” This might be studied by producing different kinds of performances and by examining and writing about the experiences they yield. From this point of view it could be said that in artistic research truth “happens” in a singular and interpretative mode instead of in a general and exact mode. To put it rather crudely: mathematics is exact, general, and non-experimental. Theoretical physics is exact, general and experi-

page 83 L&B Volume 18 mental. Textual/hermeneutical research in the humanities is interpretative, particular and non-experimental. Could artistic research, then, not be thought of as interpretative, singular and experimental? Thus, artistic research might preliminarily be understood as a kind of experimental hermeneutics. The point is not that this scheme should be written down as a definition, criterion or “metanarrative” for artistic research. I am merely trying to situate it, sketch its original possibilities, mark out artistic research as something which denotes something particular [specific] and meaningful. The very thing that renders statistics uninteresting may make artistic research interesting: “When this or that was done or asked at such and such a place, these particular results were obtained.” But, even if artistic research were experimental in this sense, it would not be “empirical”, in so far as empirical knowledge aims, through induction, at the general. Perhaps artistic research is “aesthetic research” in a somewhat similar sense to the way the inventor of the term “aesthetics”, Alexander Baumgarten, saw it in the 18th century: aesthetic knowledge is knowledge about the singular. It cannot be generalized into laws in itself, and it applies only to the unique, but it is knowledge nevertheless and makes truth “happen” in a singular way. Maybe artistic research constitutes a-knowledge – where the “a” can be freely seen either as an article or as a privative particle, or both.

Notes 1. In Finnish, the word “tutkimus” (“research”) also includes the meanings “investigation” and “examination”. 2. This “prestige” of science is an ambivalent issue, however. Sarat Maharaj has pointed out that not only have the arts been “scientificized”, but the sciences also “artsified”. Maharaj refers to Feyerabend in this context, but could an analogous point not be made about Kuhn’s famous scientific revolutions? What do they exemplify, if not the “historicity of genius” (envisaged by Kant as applying to the arts, but not to sciences) transferred to the context of science? (Cf. Vattimo, Gianni: The End of Modernity (Polity Press 1984)). Another question could be: Has science also snatched from art some of its “aura”, its greatness (I refer here, of course, to the romantic notion of Great Art)? Is it not the case today that science, emphatically and instead of art, opens up the wondrous visions which we barely understand, but which are known to constitute the truth of the visible? In this sense it could even be said that if science is lending prestige to the arts, maybe the latter is simply getting its own historical prestige back in the process.

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THE LUXURY OF DOUBT Els van Odijk My job as director and senior advisor of the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam is to facilitate optimal conditions for young artists, that is, to offer an environment where (young) artists can delve more deeply into their subject matter and use of media through experimentation, advanced study, production and presentation. In that respect, one could say that the Rijksakademie is a place fostering artistic research. However, I want to add that the Rijksakademie has no intention of developing a PhD program, let alone of conferring doctorates. Could it really be true that a dialogue among artists, scientists and other theorists will bring about depth, innovation, and broadening of artistic questions? I believe that this symposium deals with a subject which is too vulnerable and too immature. In my view, what is needed now first of all is the creation of free space. Here, committed artists and scientists could perhaps enter into an exchange of thought with an openminded mentality and an atmosphere of unfocused searching. Here, they could perhaps explore and follow hunches while taking risks - and sometimes be lucky and make a worthwhile discovery (serendipity). We need a mentality which is prepared to bypass established rules and systems. That mentality is vulnerable, because one cannot be certain of achieving any expected result. Above all, it is an attitude that can only flourish and be successful in a free environment. I do not believe it is fruitful to insist on transparency by analyzing and defining boundaries or by listing pros and cons of artistic research. What is more, trying to treat a subject like artistic research in relation to scientific research squeezes it, in my view, virtually to death. Perhaps that would satisfy the participants in this debate, since they seem to miss its crux. To summarize, I think there are topics one should leave alone. They concern matters which must emerge in conditions of tranquillity, reticence and mutual trust. They are not served by the pressure of an external theoretical debate with its inevitable, a priori standpoints. Such debate, I believe, stifles latent qualities rather than brings them out. Real quality is frightened off by theoretical debate, whereas intellectual freedom and creativity are constricted. Perhaps it will help to take a broader perspective on the subject. Let’s consider two types of world view:

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World View I

Key figures and institutions deductive Intermediaries in art and sciences (universities) inductive Professional artists “Grass roots” artists: e.g. artists in training

Suppose we were to simplify our outlook on the field and compress it into this model. There are two ways of looking at it: deductively and inductively. Let’s take the deductive approach first. The broad parameters are set by the key figures and institutions; the intermediaries refine and adapt these parameters and define sharper critical standpoints; and artists seek to establish specific (modest or prominent) positions for themselves within the resulting context. This approach works quite well. At least, one could live with it, I think. What about the inductive approach of the model? That turns out to be more difficult. One first has to get a certain grasp of the total context of the model in order to say anything at all about the individual and his or her unique artistic position. One has to start with generalizations before getting more specific. That is quite complicated, if it works at all. One could conclude that the more pressure there is from outside (to the extent in which it is too early, too general or too prolific), the more the singular artist, openminded and vulnerable as he or she is, withdraws into his or her shell.

page 86 L&B volume 18 World View II Let’s turn the model on its head.

Key figures and Institutions

Inductive

Intermediaries in art and science (universities)

deductive

Individual artists

The central role is now taken by people who experience the world by gut feeling, create autobiographical documents by means of intensive self-contemplation, see themselves in perspective within their surroundings and, thus, arrive at statements. One could include the rare individuals who intervene in a specific domain and initiate things. Now one must focus on the artist as a key figure who, alone or with others, deals with matters in broader terms from a scope that goes beyond his or her own front door. Other people could become involved, and the artists’ world is magnified two or three times. Every step is in itself a huge amplification, but from the outside, especially looking topdown, there is hardly anything spectacular to see. Inductively, this model is reasonably useful. But it forces one into a position where one always has to take the artist as a starting point, and it becomes almost impossible to make more informative generalizations. A deductive approach to this model will become stuck. Once again, this is because the more pressure there is from the outside (to the extent to which it is too early, too general, too prolific), the more the singular artist, openminded and thus vulnerable as he or she is, withdraws into his or her shell. I hope that this model has clarified why I am so reluctant to speak about generating knowledge by artists, why I have my doubts about artistic research, the formal forms it might take, and the lines along which that process could be steered. I cannot say this often enough: the basis, thus the artist, of this (inductive) process is extremely fragile. It ultimately con-

page 87 L&B Volume 18 cerns the most individual, the most vulnerable and still unresolved, aspects of a personality. One cannot ride roughshod over them. One has to seek points of connection and create (optimal) conditions. My position as director and senior advisor at the Rijksakademie is a privileged one. I can permit myself the luxury of this kind of approach. I am part of an organization, which operates from a similar outlook. My interactions are mainly with artists, other professional specialists, and with the academy staff and management, who all share this view. As I said, the Rijksakademie is primarily concerned with creating conditions. Over and over again, the starting point is what happens in the individual studio. Artists working there are independent people who use research, production and presentation as a way of seeking to sharpen and clarify their position, their work, and their vision. It is our job, and thus my job, to create opportunities for this, to provide an infrastructure with a working budget, housing, grants for living expenses, a restaurant/canteen, and help with matters such as visas, residence permits, and travel. We trust artistic advice and guidance by visiting artists, theoretical advisors and technical specialists. That “theoretical”, by the way, does not necessarily mean people from the fields of art history or philosophy: it can cover whichever disciplines are relevant at that point in time. And it is the artist, not us, who ultimately defines what is relevant. Furthermore, our job is to provide individual studios (60), project studios (5), workshops for old and new media (about 10), a library, art collections, and artist documentation. Last but not least, we host a community of artists: young professionals who bring their experience from all corners of the world. They form a community where different cultural backgrounds, outlooks on art, and different approaches (both conceptual and technical) interact. I am in the enviable position of being able to do my work without miring myself in institutional or technocratic debates. I do not have to make everything transparent and communicate everything. That is real luxury. What is more, I am free to think tactically and anticipate what individual participants (artists) are likely to need, without generalizing it to a strategy. I am free to open lines of communication with the University of Amsterdam for the benefit of a single artist who is interested in developing a further, deeper dialogue with science - to help that artist flesh out his or her ideas about such interaction on an equal footing. Perhaps I could even permit myself the luxury to skirt around the broad debate and consider whether something like a PhD might benefit people’s perception of and interaction with the artistic process - a process where a PhD is recognized as distinct in its own right. I trust it is clear that

page 88 L&B volume 18 such an action would not be motivated by considerations of money or prestige. I hope it is clear too that neither I nor my colleagues at the Rijksakademie would be in the least motivated by a wish for personal credit or positioning. I do have doubts and reservations about the PhD phenomenon and about collaboration in a university context. These worries certainly do not come out of thin air. The academic formalities of the university system tend, in my view, to overwhelm personal artistic positioning and artistic processes. Still, modest, specific initiatives could be able to touch on larger issues. Let’s look and listen carefully. Maybe you know the African proverb, “When your mouth is full of words, your ears are closed.” So listening is crucial - including today and tomorrow during this symposium.

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EXPECTATIONS Multipoint 1. History 1.1. The concept and development of MultiPoint arose from an exchange among the members during the 2001-2002 postgraduate program at the art school in Nantes. 1.1.1. The postgraduate program at the art school in Nantes is ten years old and was one of the first in France. It was conceived to help young French artists, just out of school, transition painlessly from the guided and tutored life of an art student to that of an independent artist with a professional practice. 1.1.1.1. There are postgraduate programs in many of the art schools in France and, with some variation, they function primarily as promotional facilities where young artists(1) enter into contact with curators, critics, collectors, and directors of art institutions. 1.1.1.2. These programs were all originally conceived to support the efforts of decentralizing art and cultural politics in France, begun in 1983. For example, the postgraduate program in Nantes is financed primarily, as is the art school, by the municipality of Nantes and the Loire-Atlantique region. It is seen as one of the factors contributing to the cultural significance of the region. 1.1.1.3. For four years, the post graduate program in Nantes has been soliciting applications from young artists worldwide and has included participants from a wide range of European, American, and Asian countries. 1.1.1.4. Earlier, a director and an administrative staff managed the program in Nantes. The program included a grant for ten members, consisting of approximately 750 euros, a studio, access to school facilities, and a production budget for making a catalogue and a final exhibition. The high-profile European curators invited to direct the program made it a uniquely prestigious program in France. 1.1.2. The current members of MultiPoint 1 applied for the original postgraduate program in response to a proposal from then-director Clementine Deliss to investigate a project entitled Criminal Information.(2)

page 90 L&B volume 18 1.1.2.1. For the first time in the history of the program, applicants were responding to a specific research proposal, partially as a cooperative group. 1.1.2.2. It was still asserted that individual work would be part of the program and could/would necessarily develop separately from the proposed research program. While we were unclear about what the structure might be or the kinds of projects that would develop out of this “research”, we were ready to work on what seemed like an openended possibility. 1.1.2.3. Each member (ten in all) was chosen by Clementine Deliss and other school/art community representatives based on how their personal work related to the central proposition: how can information, which is central to our technocratic society, be criminal? Is it possible to make a sincere reconsideration of exhibition venues, visibility and dissemination, the precision of networks, and to challenge the way in which communication takes place under the auspices of art? 1.1.2.4. With this examination in mind, many of the members were perhaps concerned with questioning the way in which their works might be made public, but there was still an expectation of the kinds of entrees made possible by the traditional structure of a French post graduate program. 1.1.3. After three months, Clementine Deliss decided to withdraw her proposition and resigned her post. One of the members also resigned. So nine persons, some of whom had traveled far and made complicated arrangements to remain in Nantes for eight months, were left with finding some commonality in order to continue working together (which those of us remaining decided we wanted to do). 1.1.3.1. Chosen originally for its diversity, this group (which included a sociologist, some writers, some curators, some artists, and some people who had done a little of each) found that working with people with different backgrounds, levels of education, working methodologies, cultural experiences, and personalities, without a focal point or a director, to be quite problematic. Finding shared interests wasn’t as difficult as formulating the practical tasks involved in accomplishing (or even proposing) a project interesting to everyone. 1.1.4. By April 2002, with one more month to go in our program, we were just beginning to find a method for working together. So, we decided to propose a change to the director of the school.(3) We knew that

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Olive Martin, “Untitled (Gender Study)” Chicago/Nantes, 1999/2002

page 92 L&B volume 18 for a couple of years, the program had had difficulties developing communication and interaction with the school and the community. Directors had come and gone and the validity of the current structure was under scrutiny from various skeptical perspectives as to its feasibility, benefit, and continued success. So, we offered to formulate a project that could actually manage itself through a cooperative structure, while revolving around working relationships built through problem-solving and decision-making, rather than through responding/committing to a particular theoretical or artistic position. The proposed new structure would require a balance of priorities between personal practice and promotion and group requirements/needs. Success would depend on exchange of competencies, shared responsibility, some level of personal sacrifice and gain, and understanding diversity in a real functioning environment. 1.1.4.1. The basics of restructuring are as follows: * There is no director in charge of the program; the members and the goals of the program are the responsibility of active participants who drive the group through their involvement. The program will be open to a wider range of persons with different backgrounds. * This self-managed group is based on the idea of sharing competencies and networks. Responsibilities are mutually supported. * It has been decided that seven is a good number of participants to facilitate efficient decision-making, while still maintaining the international diversity that has become part of the Nantes program’s reputation. * The program has been extended from eight months to one year, beginning in June instead of October, in order to let the members settle into Nantes during the summer, find a place to live, get to know each other, and to meet the students and faculty of the school at a particularly active time of year. * The grant is 800 euros. * The production budget, which used to be managed by the director, has become the responsibility of the group. The administrative director approves the decisions. One part of the budget is allocated for inviting people, organizing workshops and events, and travel. Another part of the budget can be used for producing works, exhibitions, and publications. The method for distributing the budget is determined by the members of the group (individually or collectively, for example). * The current team is involved in choosing the team for the following year. With some participants invited from outside, they coordinate the applications, receive and review the portfolios, conduct the

page 93 L&B Volume 18 interviews, and make the final decision about the selection. For the group selected for 2003-2004, MultiPoint was joined by Robert Fleck, the director of the art school, and Yann Chateigné, a member of the French cultural administration and a curator working with artists in collaborative group situations. The involvement of the current team in the jury for selecting the next group assures a continuity of the process (as it evolves) from year to year. * At the request of the first MultiPoint, a cultural staff member was added to the administrative staff of the school to act as a parttime administrative assistant to the group. 1.1.4.2. The participants in this program necessarily have more responsibility with a project of this bearing and require a profile that will include some professional experience. So, the description of an ideal participant in this program might include some work experience, some self-managed projects, and a developed personal, creative art practice. 1.1.4.3. How the interaction with the art school and the city of Nantes unfolds is a goal that each group, or member of the group, can deal with personally. This interaction is something that contextualizes the experience in Nantes, as the support for the program is directly linked to the value-adding, cultural exchange between the group, Nantes, and its surrounding region. 2.

Structure

2.1.Our own experience of formulating MultiPoint (developing a structure for working, managing banal but fatal-if-ignored administrative details, and finding a supporting environment for daily production and long-term personal goals), includes a regular meeting schedule to discuss ideas, problems, and tasks; discussions about possible projects - often great discussion topics but never realized for one practical reason or another; and coordinating our invited seventh member (as we had only six, we were able to invite some guests to work with us for long-term projects);(4) and to develop a schedule for short-term (two days) guests such as cultural critics, writers, and other artists. 2.1.1. We were able to receive some critical feedback about the functioning of our group from members of the pedagogic and administrative team at the school, external invitees such as Brian Holmes and Frederic Maufras, and members of the French cultural administration such as Yann Chateigné from the DAP.

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page 95 L&B Volume 18 2.2. Formulating a new context for working as artists in relation to an art institution and, more specifically, a school in the wake of the French postgraduate program became a research goal for us, including experimentation, communication, and application elements. 2.2.1. Experimentation 2.2.1.1. We chose the name MultiPoint because the group does not have a single direction and does not come together or structure itself around a previously agreed-upon ideology (as with most collectives and artists’ “movements” in the past). Rather the direction(s) depend(s) on the individual and shared interests of the participants and necessarily evolve(s) based on rigorous negotiations and exchange about how possibilities can become realities. 2.2.1.2. At one point, we tried to state our expectations and find common “multiple points” to establish what kind of work we might expect to come out of our joint exchange and how we might articulate the notion of “research” to ourselves. Expectations: notes by Dessislava Dimova to group members on direction and possibilities for the year – November 2002 1) within the group: - exchanging information about our own practices – we all work in different fields and different points of interest; ideally I would like us to find a way to distribute interesting information we find along our “researches”... for example: circulating copies of texts, artworks, notes on our ideas, anything that is a clue to our practice ... we have a unique chance to get to know things that otherwise we might [not know existed] because they are not in our sphere of interest. - partage des competences – ideally (it might be also fun to do) we could try to find out what we are good for in a group situation. I guess special tests might exist, but it could be curious if each of us writes about the others, what we think they are most interesting and useful for .... This would also help us to know what the others might expect from us. Then we can ... see if there’s a sort of complementarity and if we can base some projects on that; or just use it to share responsibilities of the group more efficiently. 2) Multipoint projects - a common project – I don’t think an exhibition or a catalogue are the best possible forms. I still think we should document our experience. So I would rather propose a publication ... like the (Bulgarian) Annual of the Archeological Society – just a collection of documents to

page 96 L&B volume 18 present what has been going on during the year. To present the topics that have been discussed ... our personal projects and even some pure administrative information if necessary. - The website – is already another common project. - I’d like to propose that each of us present the personal projects we already have which include some of the group members or not and then to choose several of these projects to support as Multipoint [projects] in terms of visibility of the group and our work. - I think that a group with no leader can find a focal point only in a common goal. I don’t believe this goal should be too formal though: exhibition, catalogue. Maybe we can make some issues of “Survival Strategies” more precise and [find] ... a way each of us can contribute to the “research” of this problematic, by inviting people, by writing, by summarizing some experience, etc. Then we can decide what kind of form this can take, if any at all. So we have a thread that we know we follow and that prevents the whole thing from totally falling apart. Still it allows the group [a] freedom to exist mainly because of the experience than for a specific goal. 2.2.1.3. Some other ideas have included building professional and creative relationships; gaining time and money for working; organizing projects clearly based on our stay in Nantes; respecting the projects and responsibilities necessary for proper functioning of the group within the institution; and learning about being open and focused. 2.2.1.4. We proposed a loose topic of “Survival Strategies”, which implies addressing personal art-practice problems, group exchanges, or general public/art career complexities. This involves team reflection on changes in the postgraduate program, which are partly theoretical and partly empirical (for example, some people are more personally able to think about the needs of the group, some are able to focus more fully on their own practice, and some are unable to focus on themselves or on others). 2.2.1.5. Our own ideas about RESEARCH in our context includes the notion that we are not out to prove a hypothesis established in advance. Rather we establish a loose code for working on projects which includes: - preparing some basic and practical steps for getting what you need from the system you are engaged in (for example, money, time, space, support, equipment, technical expertise, networks, bureaucratic lubrication); - making personal work and fulfilling exhibition, publication, or performance demands whether predetermined or arising in the future;

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April Durham, “Film Stills from Cat Fur and Other Strange Stories”, 2002

page 98 L&B volume 18 - interacting with the knowledge, expertise, and interests of each other in order to expand the understanding of the individual (whenever possible and to whatever degree the individual is interested in this phenomenon)(5). 2.2.1.6. In these projects, then, our RESEARCH has embarked on the tradition of Marco Polo or Vespucci in seeking whatever could be found with the assurance that although the results might (probably would) be unexpected, they would nevertheless be something different from where we began. In documenting and communicating our search as interestingly and elaborately as possible, we hope others might find it a model for future endeavors.(6) 2.2.2. COMMUNICATION: this involves several levels of engagement including emails among group members, memos within the school and to relevant municipal parties, press releases or advertisements in magazines announcing forthcoming events, calls for proposals, and some public presentations. 2.2.2.1. For our group, we have established the following general parameters; the specific projects we worked on together(7) branch out from there. * Regular communication by email with a commitment to responding within a reasonable time frame. Since everyone has had a heavy travel schedule during the year, this has been the most efficient way to exchange information and make decisions. The easiest way, though, to share news or concerns was when everyone was in Nantes! * Meetings to propose and discuss possible invited guests to work with on projects, to present their work/research, or to develop a kind of workshop for all interested parties, including students and cultural supporters within the region. 2.2.2.2. Every project is potentially possible: it has to be presented, discussed, accepted, and organized. 2.2.2.3. We had an open studio presentation and invited students, faculty, and art and cultural supporters in the city/region. Each participant had a display of diverse information, both personal and cooperative. 2.2.2.4. We are currently participating in the publication of a special issue of 02, an art journal dedicated to art criticism and cultural promotion. This will be available at the end of June 2003 and is distributed via an established network throughout France.

page 99 L&B Volume 18 3. More About Research and Methodology 3.1. The members of MultiPoint all maintain an individual practice while participating in an open exchange (for a period of time) with the group. The context permits posing questions about what artistic research might entail(8) and to pose this question each time a new group begins, since each specific involvement must be articulated within the general framework of a self-managed team. 3.2. Invitations and Collaborations 3.2.1. Since MultiPoint is based on shared competencies, we have invited people who could work and exchange thought with us as peers. 3.2.1.1. Some guests were specialized in a particular field. Over a period of several months, we have built a strong relationship of exchange and dialogue, which began as a presentation of work, but became more experimental and questioning in the end. 3.2.1.2. Other invited guests proposed projects to us. Some were quickly completed, others extended over time. 3.2.1.3. Some guests could specifically create crossovers with the art school and exchange ideas with the students, faculty, and others involved in the school. 4. Profile of Members for 2002-2003: Engineers of Restructuring – MultiPoint, International Research Group (as always in alphabetical order)

4.1. Dessislava Dimova came to Nantes from Sofia, Bulgaria with a burgeoning career as a curator of contemporary art exhibitions in unusual places (like rooftops) and with unusual agendas (getting a tan or having a drink). She has decided to change her orientation a bit after two years in Nantes and is coordinating formalized events that could be artworks, maybe, called Parlors, where exchange takes place and the only requirement is that there are no requirements. She is interested in Nothing as a formal topic of contemplation and in esoteric systems (which may or may not work) for structuring knowledge. 4.2. April Durham is interested in constantly questioning her own borders. After living in Los Angeles for 10 years, she came to Nantes without a car to see what might collapse in her own ideas about Everything. She writes fiction, essays, and technical manuals. She makes strangely unscientific

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Douglas Park, “Loop & Pinhole Duct/Punctuation-Mark Crumb/LaserBeam Sewing Thread/ Mirror-Tile Picture Window/Brick-Wall ControlPanel Keyboard/ Parmaceutical Paramedic Plague”, 2002

page 101 L&B Volume 18 technological drawings of mesmerized animals and botanical finery. And she sometimes combines the story with pictures to make a deconstructed “film” with all of the trappings of a cinematic scenario and none of the real technology. 4.3. Christine Laquet hails from Lyon, France and has a MultiPoint practice that is truly flexible. She has curated several group exhibitions. She makes videos with abstractly unfinished neo-non-narratives and a poetic of movement and percussion that perplexes and enchants at the same time. Her watercolor drawings play a game with ambiance and misunderstanding as she acquires poetic clichés and misquotes them for an elegant awkwardness that does not go unnoticed. 4.4. Olive Martin is an impressive lover of cinema and literature. Her photographic “essays” are heavily influenced by her keen engagement with film (or any) narrative where communication is nearly impossible, but striving for it anyway is compulsory. She simplifies structure (rules of engagement) and follows faithfully her own guiding principles in order to give herself maximum leverage in the finessing of subtlety. She has spent some time in Paris and a hut in the woods outside Puycelsi. 4.5. Michelle Naismith came from Glasgow and has been making friends with some bizarre characters including a 2-meter tall black egg in Converse sneakers, and a curly haired Moodle Pozart piano-playing canish, with psychic powers and a generous inclination to dispense advice to any who might receive. She explores questions of origins and originality, the humorously pathetic pathos of everyday life when one’s notion of oneself is a bit grandiose, and the possibility for alchemical reactions when mixing powdered soup. 4.6. Douglas Park has a perfectly, beautifully bizarre reputation as an art critic, writer of sculptural prose, and natty bartender in London and Nantes (and plenty of other places as well). His texts range from critical expositions on various artists engaged in deconstruction, destruction, and drowning to prose-poems extraordinaire which he reads so that they become dimensional objects hovering in space, peculiarly light in their immensity. They have yet to disfigure anyone, although some have come close to causing blindness.

Notes 0. This paper is comprised of the notes of several members from the group MultiPoint

page 102 L&B volume 18 during their work together in Nantes, from June 2002 to June 2003. The contributors include Dessislava Dimova, Olive Martin, and Christine Laquet. This essay was organized and further annotated by April Durham. 1. Many of these programs are now international and include artists, curators, and other art practitioners from all over the world. 2. The title of this project as a research project is the original conception of an intellectual property of Clementine Deliss and is referenced here with her kind permission. 3. While every member of the group was involved in the decision to change the structure of the program, only 6 of 9 decided to finish the project during 2002-2003. 4. Invited 7th members of Multipoint included Damien Airault, a young curator who collaborated with us on an UFCAO (unidentified contemporary flying art object) which can be seen on http://multipoint.free.fr; Patrick Bernier, a web artist who designed and developed our website; Jean-Yves Petiteau, a sociologist whose research methodology is based on an intuitive model combining free-form interview and some kind of itinerary “dans la rue.”; and Stéphane Pauvret, scenographer who coordinated our final events in Paris and Nantes and our involvement in a special issue of 02, an art periodical published by Patrice Joly. 5. “You will find that notions such as generalization, repeatability, and quantification do not play a very large role.” - from Seven Claims by James McAllister, Rijksakademie workshop “Art and Method”. 6. Another important outcome of our research, theoretically at least, is that the future influence of our work would necessarily lead others to different places, different ideas, and different outcomes. Our model was not a sort of Marxist Dialectic that required singular resolution and fixed proof of Truth but rather one of “Thirdspace” an idea by Edward Soja in his book by the same name where possibilities are constantly opening up thans to questioning and problems solving: bi-polar opposition is not a limitation to discovery. 7. Projects we shared included contributing in various ways based on competencies and appearances to Au Revoir Moodle Pozart, a video work and exhibition in Edinburgh, Scotland by Michelle Naismith; a joint publishing venture between Olive Martin (photos) and April Durham (texts) called Common Objects due to be published by Joca Seria press in Autumn/Winter 2003; various Parlor experiences with Dessislava Dimova published in September 2003 by Curious Release, Antwerp; and Complétement a l’Ouest, a series of events including exhibitions, film screenings, and mega-installations in the city of Nantes in conjunction with the 20th year birthday celebrations of the FRAC regional contemporary art centers.

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THE UK FINE ART PHD AND RESEARCH IN ART & DESIGN Richard Woodfield The UK government is in the process of reorganising the structure of Higher Education and there is a prospect of there being a distinction between ‘research-led’ and ‘teaching only’ institutions. At the same time, it has recently recognised that research is underdeveloped in the Art & Design sector and has offered a measure of protection for it over the next three years. As I will explain, future prospects are bleak but it would be useful to back track to the 60s, when the movement towards our future really started. The story starts, in the early 60s, with the invention of the Dip.AD, which was intended to be the arts school equivalent of the university degree. It allowed for greater specialisation in the sector with diplomas being awarded in fine art and all the other design practices. Courses would be required to include 20% of study devoted to Complementary Studies including the history of art and design and that was what guaranteed them their degree status. Art historians were recruited from traditional university art history departments and in my own college, the then Nottingham College of Art and Design, they taught classical, medieval, renaissance and 19th & 20th century art history. I was recruited to teach the social history of art and later went on to organise a full-blown range of studies including art theory, child environment, drama, film studies, folk studies, literature, local history, music (taught by Michael Nyman), psychology, sociology, television studies and town and country planning. When the government started to radically increase student numbers and decrease the budgets for higher education, complementary studies was gradually phased out and then, finally, art history went as well. In the meanwhile Dip.ADs were changed into degrees and there still has to be 20% ‘academic’ study to justify the degree status. The logic of the early Dip.AD in Fine Art was fairly clear. The possession of the diploma meant that its holder could take up a career in teaching art as a specialist subject in secondary schools and could well be expected to offer art history to ‘A’ level. The current logic is equally simple: ‘academic’ subjects offer transferable skills that will offer the graduate a reasonably sophisticated level of communicative competency along with a sense of the location of the subject in the intellectual sphere. With the emergence of the Dip.AD also later followed a small number of Masters courses to complement the ARCA (Associateship of the Royal College of Art) and the Slade postgraduate diploma. Typically stu-

page 104 L&B volume 18 dents went on to take these courses as a first step into becoming art school tutors themselves. The Dip.AD and later the BA (Hons) were generally regarded as a satisfactory terminal qualification for graduates wanting to become professional artists and designers, though it was generally recognised that both the Royal College of Art and the Slade offered networking facilities that could fast-track success. The London colleges offered a special cachet as well. In the 90’s, art schools having merged into polytechnics and the polytechnics becoming universities themselves in 1992, the number of MA courses mushroomed and fine art PhDs began to emerge. The ability to offer a doctorate was seen as offering real university status. Arguments emerged over the nature of fine art PhDs and the arguments are still going on. My university, like the majority of others, does not exempt the fine art PhD from writing a dissertation but recognising the importance of ‘practice’ to the fine artist allows a reduction of the length requirement from 80,000 to 40,000 words. Mercifully it does not define the necessary content of the thesis except to say: “The PhD shall be awarded to ... a candidate who, having produced published work, artefact or performance that is accompanied by a written commentary placing it within its academic context resulting in an independent and original contribution to knowledge has presented and defended a thesis by oral examination to the satisfaction of the examiners.”(1) Mercifully again, the university is fairly flexible over who can be accepted as examiners and does not necessarily expect them to have PhDs themselves. The logic of the situation is fairly straightforward. Candidates presenting themselves for PhDs are not being rewarded for their work as artists but as artists aspiring to become academics. Some people argue that asking for a thesis is an unjustifiable demand or that it is not fair, being a so-called ‘double-whammy’ as artists don’t have to be experts at written communication to function effectively as artists. I do believe, however, that, certainly in the UK, this view is misguided. Chemistry graduates do not have to obtain PhDs to become practicing chemists; they have to obtain PhDs to become research chemists, either in industry or university. History graduates do not have to obtain PhDs to become historians though in universities the PhD is the measurable level of attainment for a graduate to teach the subject; the same is true for all of the other ‘academic’ subjects. The PhD is simply a requirement for getting a job in a university. There is a double reason for the emergence of PhDs in fine art. First, the changes brought about by the decline of modernism and the current role of ‘theory’ in fine art practices. From 1968, few artists in education could afford to be naïve in relation to ideology. Herbert Marcuse

page 105 L&B Volume 18 believed that students and women could become the prime movers in social change because of their alienation from the dominant economic structures. Radicalism emerged as a deep requirement of interesting artistic practice and as ideology has to be articulated verbally to become recognised. Grunt practice garnered no respect. More recently, post modern irony is not obviously recognisable from the object itself. If, as Arthur Danto argued, Warhol’s Brillo Box represented the philosophical end of art, it took Danto himself to point that out. Whether an image is a Baudrillardian simulacrum or an ironised reflection of its effect again is not obvious. One of my photography students caused an uproar by exhibiting visual bites of pornographic images along with decontextualised quotes from an antipornographic feminist writer. He fiercely argued that his work was about pornography but his fellow students would not let him off without a debate. In this context, prospective fine art tutors need to develop some sophistication over the debates that surround practice. The second reason is less healthy. The bureaucratisation process has led to a situation where artists have to explain themselves in order to gain institutional funding. The emergence of the Arts and Humanities Research Board in the UK means that in order to gain grants they have to demonstrate that they are engaged in “research” and this is defined in the following way: How does the Board define research? 1.The Board’s definition of research is primarily concerned with the definition of research processes, rather than outcomes. This definition is built around three key features and your application must fully address all of these in order to be considered eligible for support: - it must define a series of research questions or problems that will be addressed in the course of the research. It must also define its objectives in terms of seeking to enhance knowledge and understanding relating to the questions or problems to be addressed. - it must specify a research context for the questions or problems to be addressed. You must specify why it is important that these particular questions or problems should be addressed; what other research is being or has been conducted in this area; and what particular contribution this particular project will make to the advancement of creativity, insights, knowledge and understanding in this area - it must specify the research methods for addressing and answering the research questions or problems. You must state how, in the course of the research project, you will seek to answer the questions, or advance available knowledge and understanding of the problems. You should also explain the rationale for your chosen research methods and why you think

page 106 L&B volume 18 they provide the most appropriate means by which to answer the research questions. 2. This definition of research provides a distinction between research and practice per se. Creative output can be produced, or practice undertaken, as an integral part of a research process as defined above. Equally, creativity or practice may involve no such process at all, in which case they would be ineligible for funding from the Board. [My emphasis] 3. The Board’s primary concern is to ensure that the research it funds will address clearly-articulated research questions or problems, set in a clear research context, and using appropriate research methods. The precise nature of the outcomes of the research may vary considerably, and may include, for example, performances, films or broadcasts; exhibitions; monographs, editions or articles; or electronic data, including sound or images. Teaching materials may also be an appropriate outcome from a research project as defined above.(2) This paragraph must be read in the context of understanding that the paradigms for understanding research are drawn from the humanities and that no applications that do not apply the paradigms will, in the face of fierce competition, be successful. There’s no money for practitioners and only money for academics. While money is available to enable history academics to practice as historians and, through a different Research Board, chemistry academics to practice as chemists, there is no money available for fine art academics to practice as fine artists. Ironically, the government’s Research Assessment Exercise has allowed greater freedoms to artists in academia to practice as artists because their work is peer-reviewed by fellow artists and the intrusion of alien academics has been fiercely resisted. The RAE helpfully declared: “The definition of research which applies in the 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 and industry, as well as to the public and voluntary sectors; scholarship*; the invention and generation of ideas, images, performances and artefacts including design, where these lead to new or substantially improved insights [my emphasis]; and the use of existing knowledge in experimental development to produce new or substantially improved materials, devices, products and processes, including design and construction. It excludes routine testing and analysis of materials, components and processes, e.g. for the maintenance of national standards, as distinct from the development of new analytical techniques. It also excludes the development of teaching materials that do not embody original research.(3)

page 107 L&B Volume 18 Artists were invited to write a 300 word description of their work where its “research imperative” was not clear and a browse through the Art and Design returns(4) reveals the degree of variety that was possible.Having reported the good news, the majority of Art & Design having scored fundable 3a’s which means a significant and usable income, now is the time to report the bad. A combination of the government’s White Paper on Higher Education(5), the Roberts Report “review of Research Assessment(6) and the Higher Education Funding Council’s report “Improving standards in postgraduate research degree programmes”(7) would result, if implemented, in a dire setback to the UK fine art PhD and research in Art & Design. If the government gets its way there will be a distinction between ‘research led’ and ‘teaching’ universities. The post 1992 universities, the old polytechnics that included art schools, are destined to become ‘teaching only’ universities. No HEFC money would be made available to allow staff to actively engage in research; all they need to do is to engage in ‘scholarship’, ie. keep up with what other people are doing. The Roberts Report will require PhD supervisors to be active researchers and to gain quality approval there must be a minimum standard for critical mass of at least five research active staff or post-doctoral researchers and ten research students.” But, of course, if fine art staff are not allowed to become active researchers there is no way in which they will allowed to supervise PhD students. While the small minority of institutions that scored a minimum of 5 in the last RAE(8) will be allowed to supervise PhD’s, at least one will be ruled out on the grounds that RAE income is less than 2% of HEFC teaching income. And where will the lucky PhD graduates go on to teach? At institutions that are not allowed to award PhDs because staff are not allowed to actively engage in research for the RAE. Staff who are lucky enough to gain AHRB awards will have done so by playing the academic game and submit themselves to humanities’ paradigms for research. This will mean that artistic practice as such will be discouraged in the teaching universities, QED. In my experience, fine art tutors have been fairly clever at creating space for themselves within bureaucratic institutions. But with an increased emphasis on financial and academic accountability the space is quickly evaporating. One possible scenario for the future is independently financed art schools, but they will become the option for a privileged few. This is highly ironical since government policy declares the importance of “access” for the socially excluded.

page 108 L&B volume 18 Notes 1.http://www.ntu.ac.uk/registry/publications/unihandbook/section4.pdf 2.http://www.ahrb.ac.uk/ahrb/website/images/4_91249.doc 3.http://www.hero.ac.uk/rae/PanGuide/Guide/guideann.htm 4.http://www.hero.ac.uk/rae/rae_dynamic.cfm?myURL=http://195.194.167.103/submissions/Inst.asp?UoA=64 5.http://www.dfes.gov.uk/highereducation/hestragy/foreword.shtml 6.http://www.ra-review.ac.uk/reports/roberts.asp 7.http://www.hefce.ac.uk/Pubs/hefce/2003/03_23.htm 8.http://www.hero.ac.uk/rae/rae_dynamic.cfm?myURL=http://195.194.167.103/Results/ byuoa/uoa64.htm

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ARTELEKU (IN THE CRISIS OF THE MODERNIST PROJECT) Santiago Eraso The fine arts have always been an inseparable part of the modernist project which, in turn, has been created as a universe of forms and ideas within the humanist tradition. Presently, the various cultural policies that support contemporary creative activities are still inspired to a large extent by the principles of modernity rooted in 17th and 18th century Idealism and Romanticism. Thus, the modern discourse is organized around the artist as an individual – the artist as genius - who, from an autonomous space, works to produce pieces that form part of academic artistic disciplines such as painting, sculpture, and photography. Such pieces are usually displayed in galleries, museums and other art spaces, whereas their sacred nature as objets d’art is at the core of the discourse. Even today there are artists who follow the premises of a production system based on the irrefutable value of objets d’art, the reinforcement of creative individualism, and the permanent nature of artistic subjectivity. That category of artists, influenced by the idealist principles of the modern age, maintains that the world of art is independent from other economic spheres. Conversely, the economic domain views artists as non-alienated, solitary geniuses linked to the notion of authorship and unaffected by economic and social contradictions. However, that model is undergoing a severe crisis. Although at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s a few artists began to question the traditional values underlying the art system, during the last 20 years the model has changed most rapidly. José Luís Brea, professor of aesthetics at Cuenca University, notes “three important signs of our time that, over the last few decades, have created new rules for the world game which have also inevitably affected both the world of art and its constitutive system. First, a rapid geopolitical globalization process, whose exponential speed multiplies its effects beyond our capacity of adequate response. As a consequence, it has accelerated both the internationalization of habits and customs and the cultural organization of experiences, while affecting the processes involved in the construction of subjectivity. Secondly, the definitive, dominant consolidation of all image-based experiences has decisively determined how culture is produced and disseminated. And thirdly, the principles of the information and knowledge-based society have transformed labor in modern societies, where the immaterial

page 110 L&B volume 18 production and circulation of meaning and information have become the most important modes of exchange.” Art cannot survive when it ignores the changes taking place in a society with increasingly fluctuating cities and boundaries. Those phenomena require new construction and reconstruction tools as well as new theories to accompany, anticipate and reorient them. In the last few years, many artists and cultural participants have argued that the conditions of the art system should be revised. In light of the contradictions produced by the hyper-aesthetic city and its numerous public and private spaces, they proposed a moratorium to allow the development of novel formal and conceptual instruments for reflection on a future aesthetics. In the absence of solid answers to complex problems, these artists sought a transdisciplinary and intellectually committed dialogue between participants, bringing in all kinds of phenomena involved in cities’ construction. In so doing, they established the measures required to help revitalize artistic practices within the framework of the modern city. In their eagerness to develop novel formal and conceptual instruments, they questioned the validity of the aesthetic and stylistic approach of work constructed under the increasingly dubious authorship of the artistic genius. What they suggested is work which is more interconnective and, thus, less figurative; more interactive, and, thus, less evocative, i.e., artwork involved with interaction and information while shifting and modifying traditional instruments, resources, and technologies. The human landscape behind such projects seems to consist of people adaptable to any creative environment; people living in an increasingly less well-defined professional sphere; people subjected to a continual transformation process resulting from a constant interaction with other professional and economic spheres. The projects proposed are more connected with cultural, social, economic and political environments. Therefore, projects repeatedly appear to have been designed in a context of collaborative dynamics with other participants, while getting rid of the “single genius artist” and aesthetic subjectivity. At the same time, they are often produced with the aim of presenting them in an expanded context rather than within the framework of traditional art spaces. What is the sense of modern art museums in today’s society where contemporary images and icons have gone well beyond the limits of conventional museography and the map of conventional art? Advertising, communications, telematic systems, fashion, and popular culture make their presence clearly felt in the social fabric and in citizens’ networks. As a result, participants are often forced to think about network production models, i.e., to establish production formulas in collaboration with creative, public or pri-

page 111 L&B Volume 18 vate participants not necessarily connected with the art system. In my view, most artistic institutions do not criticize their working methods and formats profoundly enough. Again and again, they make the same mistakes in reproducing the same mediocre ways of working. They mimetically reproduce traditional ways of doing things without considering how to overcome the contradictions in their work formats or how to develop novel methods and different attitudes. Artistic institutions tend to organize projects guided by a sort of extreme hyperactivity and an organizational routine in creating programs which are superficial and devoid of any content. In the absence of solid answers to complex problems, there are curators, artists and other participants who do try to go beyond the conventional frameworks of traditional formats. They create novel ways of producing, presenting and disseminating cultural products and artistic projects. Arteleku tries as well to find smart formulas and make projects as efficient as possible. We propose a transdisciplinary and intellectually committed dialogue between participants and all other factors that play a role in constructing contemporary cities. ARTELEKU as a model of a network organization with shared authorship. The associated projects. Generational renewal, changes in the social fabric, and the emergence of new forms of cultural production question the effectiveness of the administrative structures of the art system. The challenges of the immediate future force us to reflect on reforms and place the entire public administrative apparatus at the disposal of future generations who demand novel ways of understanding the function of public institutions. The administrative procedures, the political structure and a hierarchical organization are too inflexible and cannot adjust to the rapid changes taking place today. However, the institutional framework that we have inherited from the past cannot always be adapted very easily. That makes it difficult to develop a great number of possible applications. Today, it is no longer possible to conceal the novel social relations that have emerged as a result of the dematerialization and deterritorialization of administrative bodies and companies. The novel economic spaces formed between the public and private sphere, the expansion of relational and contractual spaces due to a wide range of communication technologies (Internet, local television stations), the emergence of a new generation of entrepreneurs and social participants trained in decentralized management models, and the ongoing expansion of new formulas of social

page 112 L&B volume 18 and economic organization all force us to reflect on our traditional institutions and their obsolete operating mechanisms. Arteleku, with its organizational experience and capacity to adapt to new languages, is in an exceptional position to meet the challenges we are facing at the start of this century. After a detailed analysis of Arteleku’s present situation and its immediate future, we have been able to promote and propose significant modifications while responding to the inevitable changes in society and culture. Slowly but surely, new features and different profiles are emerging in how we shape projects. Above all, these projects are readily adaptable to the concerns, performances and attitudes of the latest generation of visual artists who joined Arteleku and who provide novel, original ways of establishing an art space. In this gradual process, our network of participants and our so-called associated projects are consolidating a system of reticular relationships, enabling us to work via cross-disciplinary collaborative activities rather than through hierarchical, obsolete business models. Individual authorship has become diluted and a novel model has emerged, based on the possibility of combining convergent ways of thinking, while the discourse created by our regular participants is an indispensable source of inspiration. Many programs and projects require a professional attitude closely linked to the effectiveness of the management of their resources rather than to how they are regulated by administrative bodies. Often we act on the basis of the inevitable, administrative requirements of the civil service and forget the social revitalizing function a project has. In the past, we have had problems in implementing certain projects in a way compatible with the requirements of the administration. At the same time, it is also true that the institutional and financial support the Provincial Council guarantees is vital for projects like Arteleku. Nevertheless, I believe that the growth of Arteleku requires an even more flexible management formula allowing us to connect our initiatives with complementary projects. The adoption of other working models based on networks, communication, shared authorship, and intellectual interdependence could stir and modify all creative and representative processes as well as the exchange and distribution of cultural resources. To me, the concept of a cultural network implies the organizational structure around a project emerging as a result of the cooperation between various individuals, or members of different public or private institutions, working together as a network throughout the duration of a specific project, reshaping their own networks while producing a project. In so doing, we are forced to think about the internal decentralization of our institutions and to adopt flexible

page 113 L&B Volume 18 cooperative structures and horizontal flexible areas of responsibility, where cooperation between small institutions can result in combining resources for reaching a broader and diverse range of citizens, not necessarily linked with the original structure itself. Thus, we have to transform the management of resources and deploy a variety of flexible cooperation, competence and activity frameworks depending on place, process and project, replacing the traditional dynamics of inter-institutional cooperation. In short, we should form active networks of committed participants in order to get projects off the ground, and stop signing mere political or administrative pledges. The Associated Projects are autonomous cultural initiatives run by active independent cultural participants, associations or companies whose concerns and proposals are similar to ARTELEKU’s. A similarity between the strategies to be followed is, to a certain extent, the departure point of these collaborative activities. So, associations are created based on some sort of mutual agreement, and close collaborations in the construction and production of activities permits us to enrich our programs. Each of us attempts to propose a variety of realities, forms of production, interdisciplinary relations, etc. There are projects such as D.A.E., CONSONNI, AMASTÉ or BIT.ART, with various approaches and starting points, geared toward constructing bridges between art, culture, society, politics, entertainment, etc; projects such as MUGATXOAN or OKUPGRAF, exploring the boundaries of disciplines such as dance or graphic art; and projects such as ARTE & ELECTRICIDAD and TESTER by the Rodriguez Foundation, offering a wide variety of proposals among which the relationship between visual art and technology. Through this strategy and the development of convergent collaborative courses of action, we act as a lookout for emerging talent. Moreover, we support initiatives that do not receive funding or cannot easily be exhibited in established display formats (galleries, exhibition halls, theaters) because of their specific nature or their critical attitude to the real world. We also encourage research in the form of a laboratory for novel experiences where active reflection processes interact with the development of those experiences. All in all, we try to expand the scope of knowledge and cultural activity as far as we possibly can, without ever forgetting that we form part of a society based on economic networks.

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FRONT LINE COMPILATION Leire Vergara New ways of collaboration between Arteleku and other local cultural institutions in San Sebastian resulted in 1999 in the art structure D.A.E. (Donostiako Arte Ekinbideak). It started as an initiative for developing art projects with the direct approach of intervention in the city. What also played a role was the necessity to think in different ways about art productions dealing with notions such as decentralization and the in-between concerning cultural landscapes. Thus, we could say that D.A.E. has always been driven by a continuous state of mobility producing dynamics of “art as activity” as a means to generate new forms of thought about the public space. Our program includes commissioned projects as well as other parallel activities such as presentations, video screenings, publications, etc. Presently, D.A.E. is not permanently based within any specific exhibition space, and it functions as a curatorial team consisting of Peio Aguirre and myself. Because Santiago Eraso and I are sharing the time to introduce our way of working, I decided to focus on one of our latest projects titled FRONT LINE COMPILATION. This project, developed in 2002 during a period of six months, is a good example of how we understand the public space and how we approach it in the form of art practice. FRONT LINE COMPILATION was born out of the intention to set up an encounter between art practices generated in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country. Our idea was to develop a project which would introduce a situation where Northern Ireland could function as a “case study” within the local context of the Basque Country. The purpose of the project was not to just discuss a cultural correlation, but to also analyze the relationship of the works of a number of artists and how they interact within a socio-political context. Thus, FRONT LINE COMPILATION started from exploring the asymmetries in how a constructed identification is installed between both cultural backgrounds, rather than proposing a process of equal exchange. Departing from the local framework of the Basque Country where Northern Ireland functions as the paradigm of political resolution, we were interested to see what would act as a reference and what as a deforming mirror. The project was organized in a limited period of time which introduced a certain discontinuity in the process of elaborating on activities. We attempted, though, to find new ways of working with the audience.

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Belfast Exposed Exhibition, at Egia Cultural Centre San Sebastián.6.

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Troubled Images Exhibition at San Telmo Museum San Sebastián.

page 117 L&B Volume 18 One of the most relevant challenges for us was the idea of combining artists’ projects with real archival material coming from Belfast-based organizations such as Belfast Exposed and the Linen Hall Library. The introduction of archival material emerged from the necessity to create a context that could work as a time-catalyst for all activities. We wanted to experiment through intervention in the cultural network of the city and introduce a disruption (if possible) in the narrative of a general cultural program. The first activity of Front Line Compilation was an exhibition of the photographic archive of Belfast Exposed. Belfast Exposed is an organization begun in the 1980s by a group of local photographers encouraging community members to use the photographic medium as a way of understanding and recording the city’s everyday life. Taking the communitybased work of this organization into account, we decided to show the archive in the gallery space of Egia’s community center based in one of the suburbs of San Sebastian. Black-and-white images and a slide projection worked together with a display of general and cultural information about the city of Belfast. Within the exhibition space we introduced the presentation of an art project, The International Language, that took place in Belfast the previous year. This was an art event commissioned by Grassy Knoll Productions and curated in association with the independent curator Annie Fletcher and artist Phil Collins. The artist Eoghan McTigue, who is a member of Grassy Knoll, did a presentation on the day of the opening. The video that documented the project in Belfast continued to be shown on a TV monitor. For us, this implied a mode of organizing the display even further in the sense that an exhibition was hosting another exhibition. It also made visible from the start that we were interested in producing a dialogue between the representation of a socio-political landscape and the way art projects interact with that representation. The idea of presenting art and non-art material reemerged with our next activity. This was a video programme in a local cinema space showing works by Northern Ireland-based artists such as Phil Collins, Seamus Harahan, Miriam de Burca, Daniel Jewesbury, Valery Smith and Basque artists such as Jon Mikel Euba, Iñaki Garmendia and Inazia Escudero. The video screening paralleled the presentation of one of the directors of Belfast Exposed. Karen Downey introduced another way of mapping the city not only in relation to the visual memory of the photoarchive, but also in relation to how the city interacts with memory on an everyday basis.

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Free Guinness a project by Asier Pérez González Poster for the project Free Guinness by Asier Pérez González

page 119 L&B Volume 18 Our next activity came about through the exhibition Troubled Images, an exhibition of posters from the political collection of the Linen Hall Library in Belfast. Since the beginning of the troubles, the Linen Hall library has been systematically gathering all kinds of political material including posters, pamphlets, stickers etc. coming from all political sides involved. The library has earned its reputation as “neutral ground” through its work as a source for any information and any opinion. In this sense, it offers the possibility of comparing material from each side and contributes to a beter understanding of the political situation in Northern Ireland. The exhibition showed sixty posters coming from all political sides to express the complexity of the entire social and political spectrum of the past four decades. It was also interesting to evaluate the poster as a medium of social and artistic representation of the Northern-Irish communities. Another perspective was how these posters were interacting with artistic expression. The Troubled Images exhibition was mounted in the San Telmo Museum, the anthropological and historical museum of San Sebastian. Concurrent with the opening of this exhibition, the Basque artist Asier Pérez González presented a project consisting of an invitation to share a free pint of Guinness at the Belfast Tavern, a local pub in the heart of San Sebastian. This invitation was spread through the distribution of posters and stickers in the public space whereby publicity strategies used in regular marketing promotions were deployed. Since the idea was to offer a free pint of Guinness to anyone who ordered it in Irish (Gaelic), you could read the appropriate Irish sentence on the posters and stickers. It was even phonetically written in order to promote the best possible Irish accent. In this project, Asier Peréz González’s goal was to activate a situation of cultural and commercial exchange using the pint of Guinness as a tool. As in previous projects, the artist was interested in gathering a group of people in a specific place in order to share a common action. He has repeatedly worked with mediating events in order to bring people together without implying that everyone should be aware of their participation in an artistic project. As an example of this, I should mention Kissarama a project by the artist that was part of The International Language in Belfast. His aim then was to beat the Guinness World Record for the most couples kissing simultaneously in the same place. In San Sebastian, we just got together for a pint of Guinness.

page 120 L&B volume 18 The Free Guinness project also commented on how the concept of a cultural border could simplify in relation to the global language of the branding culture. That language always deploys the most direct way in selling the “exotic” as part of trading a culture. The artist was interested in looking at the use of stereotypes and cliches associated with a country or region, in particular, how Guinness can work as a cultural ambassador for Ireland. Interestingly, the Belfast Tavern is not a regular global Irish pub one can find in any city. It is a local pub in San Sebastian entirely decorated with posters, photos, and flags all referring to Northern Ireland as a way of celebrating the intended brotherhood of both cultures. Starting from the local meaning of this scenario, the artist opened lines of thought where Guinness functions as a reference for sharing the Irish and the Basque culture. At the same time, the project produced a special meeting place for local and global exchanges. Using the time of the Troubled Images Exhibition as “background noise”, we presented Ainara García’s commissioned work Haircut, Orrazkerak, Friseur. Haircuts, Orrazkerak, Friseur consists of a low-budget publication that comprises a retrospective look at the subculture from the last two decades. Ainara García focuses on the evolution of hairstyles in order to offer a genealogy of haircuts from the beginning of the 1980s until now. In the publication, the artist creates a narrative of style in mixing images from the past with photographs she takes of herself and some of her friends. She also inserted images from several fanzines published in the 1980s. With this genealogy, the artist wants to go back to the times of the explosion of punk in the Basque Country what is known now as the start of the Radical Basque Rock phenomenon. At that time, the aesthetic approach of the revolutionary youth began to acquire its own style. A style that keeps on evolving and readapting until today. Different hairstyles sported by young Basques are compiled in a black-and-white publication melding the present with the 1980s. That combination shows cross-references and evolution through appropriation of other styles: dreadlocks and dyed mohawks narrate about subcultures, its various hybrid forms such as punk, reggae, skinhead, and “borroka” (Basque for fighter), and how these styles progress aesthetically in the current punk fashion revival. The publication manages to portray what we could call a “social aesthetics.” Social aesthetics allude to elements seemingly insignificant but ultimately organizing a specific community or group and their everyday life. Haircuts, clothes, certain ways of speaking

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Snapshots of some haircuts from the fanzine Haircuts, Orrazkerak by Ainara García

page 122 L&B volume 18 based on rituals compose these social aesthetics as a collection of everyday signs and key elements participating in local microsocieties and somehow resisting interpretation. The fanzine was launched in a hairdressing salon in downtown San Sebastian with the performance of an improvised haircut inspired by the pictures in the publication. The last two projects I would like to introduce are by Belfast based artists Susan Philipsz and Phil Collins. Susan Philipsz uses her voice as a source of exploring and inhabiting space. It is through the interpretation of chosen songs that she approaches public space not only alluding to its physicality but also to its interior cognition. The gaps of silences and the movement of her voice while performing borrowed lyrics create a tension between collective memory and individual response. For this commissioned work, the artist recorded a song, which, as part of a sound installation, could temporarily inhabit a specific site in San Sebastian. With her fragile voice, Susan Philipsz recorded an a capella version of David Bowie’s Wild is the Wind. The artist appropriated that tender pop song by seemingly singing it to herself rather than to an audience. Since the artist was struck by the natural landscape where the city is embedded, she decided to bring her installation to the seashore since she wanted to contrast the fragility of her voice with the sound of the ocean. In this work, she used trumpet speakers that are commonly seen in nautical environments to introduce a form of intimate singing in a public context. The sound piece was played during four days in one of the most emblematic sites in San Sebastian, The Comb of the Winds (El Peine de los Vientos) designed by the Basque artist Eduardo Chillida and the architect Luis Peña Ganchegi. The last commissioned project is Phil Collins’ REAL SOCIETY. The first “site visit” Phil Collins brought to San Sebastian ignited his interest in finding the best opportunity to meet the people of the city. He started wandering in the streets and taking photographs of anyone who agreed to pose for him. In that way, he collected images from all the different communities of the city. His intention was to surpass the first impression the city seems to radiate as a homogeneous belle époque tourist town by the sea. He wanted to arrive at what he understood as the city as the home of various communities. The name of the project Real Society is inspired by the local football team named Real Sociedad. In his work, Phil Collins manages to create the perfect atmosphere for a personal encounter and to produce new ways of portraying subjects. In Real Society, he decid-

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Wild is the Wind, a sound installation by Susan Philipsz Visual Notes for Real Society by Phil Collins

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Visual Notes for Real Society by Phil Collins

page 125 L&B Volume 18 ed to arrange a personal appointment with anyone who wanted to meet him in the Maria Cristina Hotel, the most symbolic and luxurious hotel in town. The project was announced through a press launch and an ad in one of the local papers. The ad announced an open photo session with anyone who wanted to show intimate postures in front of the camera. Real Society is connected with a previous series of photographs Collins made in Belfast entitled Beautiful Boys. In Beautiful Boys, Collins asked young men to take off their clothes for a photograph in public space. The work is based on his interest in the representation of young Northern Irish men in the printed media and how this connects with the depiction of violence in Northern Ireland. The artist also wanted to explore alternative values such as the delicate, the considered, and the vulnerable as parts of the same descriptive landscape. In San Sebastian, he started with the peculiarity of undressing in public space, but here the encounter with the personal counted as well. On the shooting day, there were more than fifty people who decided to participate and pose dressed or undressed in front of the camera. With each participant, Collins took the time needed for creating the proper moment of privacy. The dialogue between private and public invested in this project must be emphasized. What was most important to us was that the Maria Cristina Hotel agreed with the project. Although the hotel’s management was happy to host an international artist’s photo session in one of its hotel suites, they could not readily accept that the hotel open its doors to any possible behavior. However, to Phil Collins, that generosity was absolutely necessary for the shooting. He needed a private space temporarily behaving as public space where, at the same time, the shots of the participants could remain private and intimate. The entire session was structured as a free gift: the models could choose where, how and with whom they wanted to be photographed. In the hotel suite, everyone was offered a drink and was shown around. At the end of the day, the artist was overwhelmed because of the intense, private conversations and intimate moments he experienced while shooting the models. “An experience too delicate for expression in words”, he said. The photographs were shown (as part of a solo show by the artist entitled Real Society) in Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast.

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OBSERVATIONS AND CONSIDERATIONS Anke Bangma After some consideration, I have decided that I will not be speaking about art as research. I am very doubtful about any essentialisms. What is being called art is, in fact (as Sarat Maharaj also emphasized yesterday), a heterogeneity of practices, some of which are connected, some of which are fundamentally different or even conflictual (different, irreconcilable – Lyotard). Simply embracing (or rejecting) research as a label or definition of art easily runs the risk of becoming an attempt to regulate and fix this diversity into yet another unifying, essentialist category. And it runs this risk not only from the perspective of the standardized European BA/MA/PhD descriptors that follow the Bologna Declaration, but also from the perspective of our own idealism. In fact, this means that I am too becoming increasingly doubtful about talking at all about art in generalized and essentialist terms. We may sometimes opt to do this nonetheless, for strategic or political reasons. However, I think I should say from the start that what I care about, what I have an investment in, a passion for, is a specific set of artistic practices, while at the same time I could not care less about some other practices that go by the same name of visual art. Yet I do care a lot about some practices that would not be called art. And what I care about in the end is perhaps enhancing the possibilities of (temporary, specific) connections between them. I should stress that I do believe in diversity, and I believe in being self-aware and self-critical and open to reconsideration and change. But I also believe in taking a position. Frankly, I am very tired of, and at times even angry and aggressive toward, institutions which attempt to embrace “a broad range” of practices and approaches, as it is euphemistically called. Especially when this concerns art academies that claim that embracing critical practices can go hand in hand with commercial applications, or art institutions that do experimental projects (say in the basement, as in the new Van Abbemuseum) as well as cater to what they think will attract a large general audience. Against the odds of a large organization (such as an academy/polytechnic institute like the Piet Zwart Institute is part of), I attempt to navigate in such a way that I can stay away from that definition of diversity (which is hard, since my own institute encompasses, next to the fine art program and media program I will discuss, also a retail design program, which I consciously ignore). As a short detour, I would like to refer to a text by Stanley Fish

page 127 L&B Volume 18 (Boutique multiculturalism or Why liberals are incapable of thinking hate speech, 1997) in which he provocatively and quite persuasively argues that multiculturalism is impossible. He distinguishes between boutique multiculturalism, which subsumes all difference, all particularities, under a universal human identity, thus reducing matters of gender, race, ethnic origin etc. to superficial differences, basically, style; and strong multiculturalism, which is an attempt to tolerate differences in their core values but which turns intolerant when those core values become a threat to one’s own territory or identity. Bluntly put, the statement made is that we cannot individually inhabit the diverse positions which multiculturalism attempts to incorporate. Inhabiting certain positions creates friction with certain other perspectives. Multiculturalism is an abstract, not a lived, embodied position. I find it (as other insights of postcolonial theory) very useful in considering the pitfalls of any simplified discourse on essentialism or diversity which also pervades any attempts to define what art is, should be, or how it should be taught, presented, supported, etc. In fact, the very terms used, especially style, are directly translatable to discussions about art. So I inhabit a specific position, and I have an agenda, as I think we all do, whether we want to be transparent about it or not. Don’t get me wrong: I am not talking about a fixed, closed, predetermined position, but nonetheless about the necessity of taking a position and of acknowledging that I speak from a particular position (obviously, we should always keep in mind that such positions are always a combination of a conscious and reflected choice, and a consequence of an unreflected place from which we speak, from questions asked as well as questions unasked or beyond (as yet) my horizon). My position is not that of an artist. I am not an artist, and I cannot nor want to claim to speak for artists. I consider myself (at least in the part of my identity that matters here and now) as a producer of platforms and frameworks (which is deliberately different from facilitator, a very misleading term). I have, therefore, decided to speak from the different settings which have shaped my reflections on the possibilities and impossibilities of artistic research: 1. Cultural institution (Witte de With). 2. Educational institution (Piet Zwart Institute), postgraduate course in visual art (4+2, age 23-33), beginning of research fellowships (not coincidentally) in the field of media. Note: in the Netherlands this also means the system of the Hogeschool (academy) or professional training institute rather than the system of the university and academic training, i.e. a non- or even antiintellectualist, pragmatic and problem-solving paradigm.

page 128 L&B volume 18 3. Theory/cultural studies program (Cultural analysis, University of Amsterdam, Mieke Bal), which I understand in terms not of analysis but of dialogue and collaboration. This means that I speak as a curator, an educator, and an engaged theorist. Rather than taking research as a way of understanding or defining artistic practice, as a redefinition or revaluation of artistic practice, I would propose considering research as a particular institutional structure, or framework, in terms of a basis, setting, context or platform (institutional, physical, social, intellectual) which delineates well as limits and excludes certain possibilities for artistic practices. I think it is important to stress this last point. I want to explicitly step away from notions that would, intentionally or not, represent art as a field free from constraints, from paradigms, from power structures, and I know that we all slip too easily (probably with well-intentioned attempts to defend what we care about, have an investment in, have a passion for) into a language naturalizing art as a domain that is given as free and open, and that must be protected from, or liberated from, claims seen as foreign to it. As if artists would be a species with either a natural breeding ground, or natural enemies, rather than situated social beings with hybrid identities just like the rest of us. Maybe one of the reasons I am not so fearful of the research model, is because I think it is no less enabling or limiting than the autonomous art paradigm. It is simply enabling and limiting in different ways. So I propose to look at “research” as an institutional framework in which artists may or may not decide to work as a possible way out of this kind of reasoning. Secondly, it is also important to stress that I understand institutional structures in a performative sense, that is, as dominant structures or habits which acquire their authority and weight by the way in which we (artists, curators, educators, theorists) fill them in, act them out, reproduce them over and over. This performative understanding of institutional structures also creates space for change, for making a difference in the ways in which we act them out, inhabit them, by using our possibilities for identification, dis-identification, appropriation, mimicry, improper use, redirecting. So what would artistic research as a framework allow? Here is a first, very sketchy, list, based on my experience within three institutional settings. The points I am going to touch on are just hints of what might be worth looking at, and what is actually being examined already.

page 129 L&B Volume 18 1. Cultural Institution • Necessity to value and understand artistic practices in terms of processes rather than objects (art works) and events (exhibitions). • Importance of failure, change, questioning and learning (static and fixed nature of the exhibition; machinery of the ever new and singular, and its reproduction of the paradigm of the artist as a unique and isolated individual, even if s/he is engaged/collaborative etc, this never has consequences for the next show, when things go back to normal). • Necessity to find and support forms of presentation, distribution and display in addition to or instead of the exhibition format. Cultural institutions are now extremely limited in their field of action by their own institutional status and the demand for number of visitors; the model of the exhibition hall (the “house for art”) has become, in many cases, a straightjacket (see Kunstverein Munich, Casco, Utrecht; initiatives exist, but will need a different framework for support and understanding to be sustained). 2.Education • Break with the separation between education and the art world, between being a student (someone engaged in learning and exchange, open to questioning, reflection, vulnerability, doubt, change) and the professional artist, between a time of training to be completed and succeeded by the real thing. Artistic research would be a way to undo the separation between learning and doing, in both directions. • Opportunity for a radically different way of supporting artistic practices and forms of analysis and questioning; ways which are difficult to conceive within the parameters of the cultural institution. A way of supporting practices in terms of their processes, not (just) in terms of their material object-oriented outcomes. Let’s not forget that there is, still, no other income for artists than selling (object-oriented) work or having a project grant, but that there is in most of the art world no such thing as a honorarium. • This brings with it a need for rethinking ways of presenting and sharing the meaningful moments (temporary conclusions) with others. Such a moment may be an exhibition or object-oriented, but may very well take very different forms. This is where research could be modelled more closely to education, rather than the world of art institutions, and benefit from what it allows. 3. Theory • Artistic research is linked to a radical rethinking of the relation between artistic practice and theory, as well as (vice versa, but often ignored) the

page 130 L&B volume 18 relation between theory and artistic practice. Any discussion about artistic research should entail not only a rethinking of artistic practice and art institutions, but also of academia and its definitions of research. • Not only can we rethink the meaning and relevance of a very different theoretical training within art (rather than traditional art history teaching in academies, which ends up confirming the autonomy not only of art but also of art history as a discipline), but also the desperate need to bring insights from the perspective of artistic practices into the attempts to innovate cultural theory in such new (inter)disciplines such as cultural studies and cultural analysis, which have done invaluable work in relation to theory, but too often are fully ignorant of the world of contemporary art and either work with painfully outdated conceptions of visual art (in shocking contrast to their affection for and embrace of popular culture, i.e. television and Hollywood cinema). (See examples such as the theory department in the Academy of Zurich) • In the Netherlands, the position of art training (and thus any potential for art research) within the framework of the “hogeschool” rather than the university brings both possibilities and problems in this respect. Art is per definition bound to the parameters of vocational training, problem-solving etcetera. 4. Research • Need to redefine what understanding and reflection is. Problems of notions of transferability of knowledge and methodology on the one hand, and of notions of singularity, specificity, subjectivity on the other. Problem of avoiding the specific kind of individualism characteristic for an understanding of artistic practice and the autonomy of art that the notion of artistic research can help to deconstruct. (see 1: dialogue) • Problem of avoiding the idea that a discipline or field of research is given, of creating a new academic discipline. (see 2: interstitial institutions) Proposal 1: Move from transfer to dialogue. Think of the relation between flexibility/singularity and continuity through a common/shared ground. I strongly believe in building a program, in having an agenda, offering a context and content, in building an environment which has something to offer and to ask, but one aware of the pitfalls of creating paradigms and dogmas and open to questioning and change through the participants that make up the program – that is why I speak as

page 131 L&B Volume 18 a creator of platforms, creating a meeting place, a network, a situation in which there is some kind of building, continuity, sharing of insights, experiences, connections. This is indeed something other than the cultural institution as a stage for events and the equation of art and leisure. It is also something other than the educational institution as a factory for teaching and learning. It is definitely something other than the artist working individually and independently. And, finally, it involves a very different relation to what we define as audience and as the production and consumption of meaning. Proposal 2: In between I think it is about rethinking and redefining the limitations and potential of the different frameworks and their possible interrelations: art institutions, art schools, universities (as well as the spaces for artists I have not talked about because I am, literally, not at home in them: residencies and the studio). In many ways, these settings are already being rethought, by artists, educators, theorists, curators. I do not think it is necessarily about creating a new kind of institution or platform (though, being interested in platforms and institutional settings, I am always tempted to think about such a possibility), but rather about linking up, starting up a dialogue and collaboration, connecting and supporting others who are working in similar directions, to create shared space, temporarily and in relation to specific subjects or ways of working, especially since most of these initiatives are often small in scale, or manage to exist only for a short period of time in a particular constellation. Ideally, it is perhaps about creating different kinds of places for artists within a collaboration between different settings, but without ever fully inhabiting or belonging to one of them. These settings involve relations between different kinds of institutions (centers for contemporary art, academies, university departments, social organizations, etc.), but should also be situated in specific social and cultural contexts. How some of these observations are reflected in the PZI program. Visual art program Postgraduate: 4+2 (distinguish from Helsinki). International (European), 2 x 10 students. Mission: Art practice in a larger cultural and social context. Developed a program structure which could actually create a platform for that: conse-

page 132 L&B volume 18 quences for content and way of working. Art as way of relating to, understanding, being in the world. Context, site, situation, presentation and the relation to the audience are considered to be integral aspects of the artistic production process. In its emphasis on contextualizing artistic practice, our fine art program challenges the separation between the studio and the public realm. When cultural and social contexts, and questions of representation and reception, are interwoven with the process of visual production, we believe this division is no longer fruitful. PZI works with a combination of independent artistic research and an annually changing program of thematic projects, which function as a framework for joint exploration of issues that are relevant to contemporary culture and society. Our curriculum stimulates a working environment in which practice and theory are intertwined, and students actively participate in exploring the possibilities of artistic practice through critical reflection, collaborative research and experimentation. Core considerations of the program Not a fixed program, but reinvented every year. Different staff every year. Students have a choice (4 projects during their studies), both for content and method; and play an active role in deciding how they want to work within a project, and appropriate the questions raised. Decision to work with themes, rather than specific classes; themes are already cross-disciplinary. Collaboration (though still on small scale) with other art schools, cultural institutions, social organizations. Throughout the program specific themes and questions recur. It is important to stress that these themes did not simply develop from a predefined set of aims and objectives, but have developed through our work with students and our discussions with partners. It is only after four years, in retrospect, that I can be this clear about the guiding principles. 1. City, public space, public intervention and social commentary. Projects such as Sites and Situations (1999-2000), Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Cities so Different, so Appealing? (2000-2001), I Need the Truth and Aspirin (2001-2002), and Legal Space/Public Space (20022003). 2. Relations between the public and the private. Borderline between the individual body and the social body; analysis which cannot be distanced, but which touches on our very identities and ways of being in the world;

page 133 L&B Volume 18 embodiment, autobiography, (corporal literacy). Projects such as Public Possessions & Private Obsessions (1999-2000), Hygiene (2000-2001), Modern Experience and the Urban Public Domain (2001-2002), and The Organization of Private Life (2001-2002). 3. Questions around presentation and curating. By looking for example at institutional and self-organized structures, at context and site sensitivity, and at ways of constructing perspectives and addressing the audience. Projects such as Theater as a Paradigm of Cultural Practice (1999-2000), Medium/Message (2000-2001), What You Give Is What You Get /The Importance of Being Here (2001-2002), Re-inventing the Imaginary in the Age of Relational Aesthetics (2001-2002) and A Look Back to Now. Curating Artistic Positions (2002-2003). This program does not predefine a medium, a way of working, a subject. What participants have in common is, firstly, an interest in relating to/positioning themselves within a larger understanding of culture and society; secondly, an interest in developing their work through dialogue and exchange with others. Further steps would be to see how (parts of) this program could be opened up to others (project participants, from other disciplines). In addition, now (within new course in media design) research fellowships, temporary positions rather than PhD. Conclusion I would like to stress that I am more and more encouraged about possibilities for art as research in a certain respect, in some of the things it might allow, as I outlined before. I would also like to emphasize that I am increasingly concerned about the demands for art as research as they are being brought up through the European Gleichschaltung of art education through a uniform BA/MA/PhD system. There is a very concrete danger of standardized demands and outcomes, and the aim of EU policymakers is clearly not only to enhance the democratic chances for students throughout Europe to have a free choice of education and international exchange. It is clearly also about enhancing the grip on a territory that is to become more measurable, and thus more productive, through a predefined set of legitimations. It is about shaping up, and in a certain way about cleaning up. It is part of that difficult debate on multiculturalism I referred to earlier, about reducing differences to styles and coming up with universal core values or transferable skills. It is also about the hegemony of a particular educational model and cultural paradigm, since it is the Anglo-Saxon model (already criticized in the UK itself) that is adopted as the standard.

page 134 L&B volume 18 But, as I began my argument, we should be very aware that a strict refusal to be connected with or affected by (should we say infected by) other institutional frameworks is potentially equally about keeping things clean, about setting up a cordon sanitaire, creating a gated community. Actually, I think we should criticize and resist the reasoning behind a standardized education system, but at the same time I am not so worried that we will quickly arrive at a uniform European art education and artistic research. The extremely divergent positions we have already seen in this symposium point in a very different direction. My connections with European art academies tell me the same: French master’s, the Austrian distinction between a master’s and a European master’s (PhD), definitions of postgraduate technical training (Linz), anyone trying to map this terrain will see how incompatible the systems really are. Today, art education is about navigating, negotiating, about doing what you want to do and reconsidering, again and again, whether a specific structure is supportive or not, about being aware of its limitations and creative about using its possibilities, and about taking hybrid positions.

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RESEARCH, PRODUCTION, PRESENTATION, DISCUSSION* Koen Brams A major theme in Koen Brams’ talk is connected with how the term participant, employed for the artists/students at the Jan Van Eyck Academy (where Brams has been director for three years), has recently been replaced by the term researcher. Brams emphasizes that there are three workshop places in the Netherlands (Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht; Rijksacademie voor Beeldende Kunsten - State Academy for Visual Arts, Amsterdam; and Ateliers, Amsterdam) where people enrolled in the institution are called participants. In developing his argument, Brams poses questions such as, “What does an artist do while participating? Is he or she producing art? Is art produced during participation?” Brams seriously doubts that. In Brams’ view, the Jan van Eyck Academy should use a term different from artist or participant. Since 1992, not just artists can enroll in the academy’s program, but also designers and theorists. What is the history of the term participant? The artists, designers and theorists at the Jan van Eyck Academy used to take part in a program developed and executed solely by the heads of the three departments – Art, Design, and Theory - in cooperation with tutors and project tutors. Today, the program is designed by everyone present in the academy, including department heads, tutors, and project tutors, but also those formerly called participants, as well as the director and other staff members. In other words, participation of the artists, designers, and theorists has evolved into a form of contribution to the academy’s program, where the artists, designers and theorists do not only attend discussions, but also organize presentations and workshops. Another major change at the Jan van Eyck Academy relates to the disappearance of the closed program system once organized by the department heads, tutors and project tutors. Today, a system of programs open to the public has erased the distinction between the private and the public. That program is announced every week by e-mail and Web site, whereby the public is invited to attend lectures, seminars, presentations, exhibitions, and workshops. The only private areas are the studios, where artists, designers and theorists remain in charge. However, all other facilities, such as the library and the documentation center can be used by a broad public, through a library pass obtained at the Jan van Eyck, the City Library, or the University of Maastricht. In the context of the academy’s transformation into a space of contribution and openness, the term participant started to bother Brams.

page 136 L&B volume 18 Obviously, that term entirely contradicts the fact that artists, designers and theorists actively contribute to the academy’s program. So, how should the artists, designers, theorists, department heads, tutors and project tutors be addressed? “I had problems with terms such as tutors and project tutors that smacked of the classroom,” says Brams. After all, the Jan van Eyck Academy is not a school with courses and certificates. During a meeting, the idea arose to substitute the term participant with researcher. After a while, that suggestion was accepted by everyone contributing to the academy. Today, participants at the Jan van Eyck are called researchers, while department heads, tutors and project tutors are united under the umbrella term “advising researcher”. Brams points out that it has been difficult for people to adopt this change in terminology. Some tend to keep on using participant, and even terms such as student and school pop up from time to time. Although the Jan van Eyck evolved from a school or training center into an art academy many decades ago, remarkably enough, such school terminology still sneaks in. The terms researcher and advising researcher, no matter how striking they seem, are rather obvious choices for the academy. After all, the Jan van Eyck has made a point of being an academy for research and production for quite some time. Thus, not only the term researcher seems to be logically derived from the name of the academy, but also the term producer. Yet, two additional activities should be included, since the Jan van Eyck is also a bastion for presentation and discussion. Why was the term researcher culled from the series of researcher, producer, presenter, discusser? Obviously, a researcher is all of these. According to Brams, one should bear in mind that each activity implies both a discursive and a reflexive component. Precisely those components turn the figure of the artist conducting research into a pleonasm. However, the reflexive and discursive components in the production of art tend to become concealed. Brams maintains that in many parts of the art world, including popular art platforms, art’s reflexive and discursive character has been denied. Therefore, the Jan van Eyck should emphasize, and proudly, that it is an academy for both research and production, where researchers and advising researchers play a decisive role in the reflexive and discursive components of art. One cannot deny, though, that research does have a number of bad connotations. In the art world, the term research often opens up dual associations such as art and science, studio and laboratory, and artistic and scientific researcher. In such forms of dual associations, both the artist and the scientist are united as people who work with a process of chance and a similarity of method. Although making art and doing science are both

page 137 L&B Volume 18 open-ended processes, they not only differ in their implicit purposes, but also in their nature of experimentation. Another difference points to the economic domain. In a scientific experiment, research and development costs are budgeted beforehand. In producing an artwork, all one can do is speculate about costs. Brams shifts to how Sarat Maharaj - one of the other speakers in the symposium - once criticized the Jan van Eyck Academy. In “Avidya: Nonknowledge Production in the Scene of Visual Arts Practice”, Maharaj argues, “Across Europe, some version of RAE is afoot. Maastricht has tried to prepare, by calling all its participants ‘researchers’. But it will soon have to demonstrate what they are researching. How is this measured and funded? A ‘primeval soup’ type of place - of unscripted potential, possibilities and resources - for it, too, the idea of performance evaluated by an RAE measure is in the cards.”(1) “There are various reasons for an angry response,” says Brams. He states that “the reference to Maastricht is not so much to the municipality in the southern part of the Netherlands as to the Jan van Eyck Academy within this municipality.” According to Brams, Maharaj’s claim that the Jan van Eyck has replaced the term participant with researcher to placate inspectors and evaluation systems “is not true”. “The Jan van Eyck Academy is not an educational institution and the ‘output’ of the Jan van Eyck will not be evaluated as in other schools, tertiary education institutes, and academies or universities. In the Netherlands, the Jan van Eyck is regarded as a workshop place. Such workshop places are subsidized by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, in which system the Jan van Eyck falls under Culture. The policy of the Jan van Eyck has been assessed on a four-year basis for many decades and has been commented upon by the Council for Culture. The fact that the Jan van Eyck has developed a policy in 2000 where research, production, presentation and discussion are pivotal will indeed be a determining factor in the assessment. That does not mean that changes have been made in order to please the Council for Culture.” The Jan van Eyck was upgraded some time ago to an academy for research and production. There has not been a strategic decision. Brams fails to see why assessment of a policy dealing with researchers should be different from one dealing with participants. Brams concurs with Sarat Maharaj’s position, though, on several other points. That position is illustrated by parts of his texts quoted by Brams. “With the clearing up of the theory fog zone, a repository of nontechnocrat knowledge came to be dissolved - a de-legitimating of art knowledge with its ‘undecidables’, fuzzy and non-measurable intensities. We are now experiencing its re-legitimation along measurable managerial

page 138 L&B volume 18 lines.” “Within the technocratic frame of ‘managerialism’ the law of equivalence comes into play: art knowledge is seen not in its own terms, in terms of its ‘difference’, but for the extent to which it squares with and is at one with discursive disciplines.” “It is not theory that is the target but its assumption of a managerial role vis à vis visual arts knowledge - its dirigist tendency, its desire to want to oversee, explain, guide arts practice as if from a transcendent position.” Brams adds that “the danger does not lie in discursivity as such, but in the illusion that it could exhaustively describe all one wants to know about art.” He argues further that “the illusion of an exhaustive description of a discursive component in art is, in fact, a well-disposed variation of the desire to squeeze art into all sorts of shapes of knowledge production and knowledge transfer.” In Brams’ view, “a great deal of Sarat Maharaj’s text is a direct warning not to view art as simply another form of knowledge production” where its educational component is turned into the “equivalent of the usual form of knowledge transfer: school, tertiary institution, and university.” Brams concludes his position of accordance by quoting Maharaj’s statement that “Today’s calls for opening up the academies to university-style course work and degrees might, in fact, turn out to be the closure of modalities of thinking intrinsic to the art school.” However, art academies tend to co-operate with universities on the basis of financial arguments. “The awarding of titles - first and foremost the title of Doctor - has also been added as budgetary bait. All of this has been highly successful. Apart from Sarat Maharaj’s commentary on these events, it has been frighteningly quiet in the art world,” Brams claims. Another topic plays a role as well. “The equivalence of certificates and courses is a slogan the proponents of the BA/MA/PhD structure often use,” says Brams. In that system of equivalence, one could embark on a Master’s course in Ireland with a Dutch BA degree, since grade points and courses are all interchangeable. Do we want uniform art schools, though? Brams says no. That answer implies a rejection of the logic of the “Bologna” proposal. In summarizing his position, Brams stresses again that he is opposed to art schools wrapped up in the same package; he is not in favor of either certificates or PhD’s for artists. Brams quotes questions raised by artist and theorist Jon Thompson in “A Case of Double Jeopardy” in support of his view. Thompson asks, “Why should any fully engaged artist, worthy of the name, of whatever age, wish to return to university or art college in order to spend six years studying for a ‘practice-based’ PhD? Why should highly sophisticated forms of fine art practice require any support or justification from critical theory anyway? Why should we

page 139 L&B Volume 18 require any written element at an advanced level? Can we not set about trying to convince the academic world that there are different horses for different courses and that artists have their own built-in theoretical expertise and critical integrity; that those of us who know about such things can make sound judgements without recourse to written work?”(2) Jon Thompson continues to say that, “With the art departments in bed with the universities and the universities wielding fiscal sanctions and setting the regulations that govern the teaching of fine art practice, it is we, the practitioners, who have our backs to the institutional wall and it is the values implicit in practice that are being put to question.” Koen Brams concludes his talk by saying, “I have nothing to add to that.”

* This text, based on a talk by Koen Brams in the Artistic Research Symposium, has been compiled by the editors. Sources 1. Sarat Maharaj, “Avidya: Non-knowledge Production in the Scene of Visual Arts Practice”, in: Ute Meta Bauer (ed.), Education, Information, Entertainment - Current Approaches to Higher Artistic Education, Edition Selene, Vienna, 2001, 2. Jon Thompson, “A Case of Double Jeopardy” in: Antonia Payne (Ed.), Research and the Artist. Considering the Role of the Art School, University of Oxford, Oxford, 2000.

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ACADEMY SCHLOSS SOLITUDE Jean-Baptiste Joly Academy Schloss Solitude is not an academy similar to the academies we have discussed this morning. It is an academy in the sense of the Renaissance, thus, a place where artists share knowledge, experience and innovation which may spread to other parts of society. The institution was founded fourteen years ago and I am in the lucky position to be its founder. To begin with, I would like to give a trivial description of what kind of place the academy is. First of all, we are not part of an educational system, we have no teachers, we are not a museum, and we are not directly producing work. So, that is different from most cultural institutions. Academy Schloss Solitude is a residential art center, with 45 free studios hosting artists for six to eighteen months. The program is flexible enough to extend the stay of the people invited. We provide our young, professional artists - they are between thirty and forty years old - with grants of 1000 euro per month and we support projects they realize during their stay with us. Among the landscape of residential art centers in Europe, we are probably the only one with its own building, its own budget, and its own promotion and selection system. Let’s say a few words about the selection system, which distinguishes our academy from other art institutions. Gene-rally, we have only one jury member for each field every year. The art fields represented in Solitude are literature, music and sound, visual art, theater and performing arts, architec-ture and urbanism, design and visual communication, new media, video and film, and all the metadisciplines belonging to them. So, we consider the academy a construct of seven disciplines where each discipline has one jury member deciding whom to select while attaching their good name to the artists chosen. Right now, the artists in Solitude have been selected by Corine Disirens, the Swiss curator. Next year Hans Ulrich Obrist and Federico Nicolao will make the selection for literature, Carsten Höller and Akiko Miyake will make the selection for visual arts. For several months now, we have begun a new program with interdisciplinary work including scientists from all the disciplines and young managers. If this program turns out to be a success, we will open the house as well for young repre-sentatives of NGO’s, trade unions and political parties. So, there is a real opportunity for what I call an elite. To me an elite is connected with people who accept to take responsibi-lity in society. As you are probably aware, there is not only a crisis of public

page 141 L&B Volume 18 space, but also a crisis of public respon-sibility of state: people no longer want to be part of the elite. This poses a major problem for cultural institutions as well as how they will function within the frame of the public state and the public organization. After fourteen years of activities, we have housed more than 600 artists. The main rule of Solitude is that the time artists spend in Solitude belongs to them, not to the institution. What the artists do with that time is think, talk, and reflect, so it is a normal life albeit with better conditions for research. In Solitude, we have neither obligations of result nor of production, although at some point the people involved in the program like to participate in a public event or to be visible to an audience. I believe that, on the one hand, artistic research should not be the victim of the pressure of production, but, on the other hand, artistic research also needs an audience to recognize its own existence. The time of research cannot be compressed like the time of production: the time of research is undefined. That is why the stays of artists in Solitude lie between six and eighteen months depending on the research and the decision of the jury. It is difficult to have politicians and public administrators accept that public events and audience statistics are not the main purpose of a cultural institution. To me, reflection on the relationship between artistic research and cultural institution is necessary in order to remind oneself that cultural institutions are more than sites of cultural production. Cultural institutions are the very places in society where reflection and critique of society are possible. A public institution chooses between cultural production and social critique, between institutional power and public power. That is the game we have to deal with and that is also the tension which makes art possible. When Academy Schloss Solitude was established in 1990, the former prime minister of Baden-Würtenberg wanted to create a research institute for young artists comparable to the Max Planck Institut. That was quite a naive idea although he thought that creativity would be important in a leisure society, and that well-educated artists could play a role in this. At least we got the space to start working. We transformed the academy’s social task for Baden-Würtenberg and now define it as follows: Academy Schloss Solitude is the passage through which this part of Germany will be linked to the best elements of the artistic scene worldwide. That is an offer of to not lose contact to what is happening in the world. For a couple of years, terms like research and laboratory have been commonly used to describe the development of contemporary art and the space where it all takes place. I myself favor the term “atelier” to laboratory. L’atelier de Courbet, as you know, is a place of production, of meeting, of reflection on the most progressive tendencies of society. I am

page 142 L&B volume 18 always afraid of art research taking place in laboratories, because laboratories are not open to the public. Possibly, the artistic world is using the terms research and laboratory because it wants to imitate the sciences. In society, art suffers from not being taken as seriously as science, and from being considered a leisure activity. Obviously, art has to do with the sciences, but it is necessary as well to be reminded of their fundamental differences in addition to their common elements and tasks. Art, science and philosophy, Gilles Deleuze stated in What is Philosophy, are not like religions which invoke dynasties of divinities or the epiphany of a single God to paint like the figures of the Urdoxa from which we would abstract our opinions. Philosophy, art and science want us to tear up the heavens and to dive into the chaos. The philosopher, the artist and the scientist seem to come back from the kingdom of death. Fighting against opinions with the weapons they found in the chaos is the common strategy of art, science and philosophy. Art and science create a different correspondence between single occurrences and the universal. An artistic practice, a piece of art comparable with the language of magic expresses its self, but at the same time its otherness. And this expression of self and otherness counts at the same time for an ancient Greek statue, a classic painting, Duchamp’s pissoir, and an artistic website. Conversely, scientific knowledge creates a rational unity between an object of observation and a general law proving and confirming the continuity of the world. This is the reason why the difference between art and science is irreducible. I believe it is very important to underline the obvious difference between art and science and counteract the confusion possibly created by the term artistic research. Another reason why art does not compete with science is that art is free of any kind of practical use. Art differs from science insofar as it is an “intuition of a meaning”, says Adorno in Dialektik der Aufklärung. At some point art always escapes discursive or conceptual comprehension. It is an eternal mystery comparable with a picture puzzle, ein Vexierbild, Adorno says. Another way of thinking more precisely about the difference between art and science was indicated to me some weeks ago by Fabricio Gallanti when he reminded me of a 1970s text by Giorgio Manganelli. Fabricio explained the difference between vulgarization and simplification. In the 1970s, Manganelli praised the value of the diffusion of the results and contents of scientific research through the process of vulgarization. The vulgarization of science is considered a positive process of diffusion and information, reducing the difficulties of technical and specialized language and shifting the plan of communication towards a larger audience. Where vulgarization in science is evaluated as a fruitful operation of lin-

page 143 L&B Volume 18 guistic shifts, poetic and artistic works cannot be subjected to a similar process, since they are characterized by their impossibility to be reduced to a summary or a simplification that would loosen their immanent quality. Keeping those qualitative differences in mind is an important task when speaking about artistic research. However, art did use technology, that is, science as a tool since the beginning of art history. In the 20th century of industrial modernity, the Surrealists used anthropology as an example and psychoanalysis to develop new practices such as criture automatique and new aesthetic experiences. Surrealism is probably the most convincing example of aesthetic practices in understanding what artistic research could entail and what it could initiate. First of all, Surrealism abandoned the notion of a work of art. In the 1920s, they opened the famous Bureau de Recherche Surrealist or Office for Surrealist Research in Paris. I quote Maurice Nadeau in a text from 1925 called “The Surrealist Revolution”: “Through all appropriate ways, this office collects information related to all the different forms which the unconscious activities of the mind can take. For this concern, no field has to be specified apriori. The task of Surrealism is to collect the greatest possible number of experimental data. It does so for purposes which cannot appear right now.” The Surrealist revolution broke with the classical chain of the production of culture organized in three steps: production of a work of art, exhibition, reception and critique. The paradigmatic change of the Surrealist revolution has turned down the bourgeois chain of cultural production and has replaced it with the logic of a collective and interdisciplinary aesthetic practice, starting with the collection of information, and organizing and structuring it into a new meaning while creating a public debate as a political activity. There is no more difference between the producer and the spectator here. Following a comparable logic, many young artists today practice artistic research by gathering information, organizing it, and spreading it through the Internet while creating a public debate. One new element has been added over the last 30 years with regard to this, and that is the position of Situationism. Situationism renounces the notion of art and decides that “artistic” research is only taking place in a political space. As an example, I would like to describe the artistic research by two Lithuanian artists Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, who are in Solitude at the moment. Probably you saw their work Transaction as a website project in Dokumenta XI - it was also part of Manifesta. At the moment, they are preparing in Solitude a research project about the industrial production structure of the Soviet Union combined with the idea and the ideology of

page 144 L&B volume 18 internationalism and friendship. The research starts in Vilnius, where they returned, and will continue in Moscow. The first output will be visible in Solitude in October 2003 both as a work in progress and as an open-ended project. They mix documentary films, interviews with scientists and economists, and literary texts. For this, they employ the classic technique of montage, cutting and editing invented in the history of film by Eisenstein and considered by Jean-Luc Godard the very basis as well of artistic and scientific knowledge development. The proximity of two images creates a third, new meaning in between the two images. Both in the moment of creation and the moment of perception, the space of montage is a specific, paradoxical space where art and science coexist with their irreducible differences. While the art scene is looking to the scientific field for new methods of research, scientists from their side are looking at artistic activities and, specifically, at strategies of culture and arts concerning audience and public. In an article published some weeks ago in the scientific revue Nova Acta Leopoldina, the science historian Helga Novotny from the ETH in Zurich writes about science in search of an audience. I will summarize that article with some compressed quotes. “Science is in need of a wider audience. Scientific experts have never been asked more often for expertise as in the last decade whereas, at the same time, their expertise has never been so often criticized. Scientists have to overcome esoteric language if they want to be better accepted” - a critique we know from our side regarding artistic work. “Today the public wants arguments for debates that often go far beyond scientific content.” - I could say the same of the demand of institutions with regard to the discussion with the audience. - “It seems that society has the ability to talk back to science, but science never listens before it answers.” It is interesting to see how those arguments developed from the viewpoint of science could easily be used to describe the situation of art in our current society. Scientists envy “the audience of art as well as the artistic freedom which allows artists to explore modes of communication that scientists are unable to follow.” They also envy, “the remarkable mixture between high and low culture, which enhances creativity.” The article concludes by stating that, “art may have to offer something to the sciences and that something can be learned from the experience of artists.” Which is true in itself, but probably starts out on a wrong premise. The reason why it is wrong is that it entirely underestimates the difference between the vulgarization of science and the simplification of art. I am afraid that when people representing artistic institutions and practices speak about the need of science for the artistic practice, we have the same naivety as these science historians. Both sides are saying, as in

page 145 L&B Volume 18 the 17th century, that the moon is a world much like this one, where ours is its moon. Thus, in the fall of 2002, the Academy Schloss Solitude has started common projects, creating a common space of debates with scientists as well as with young people working in the field of business. One project concerns the question what good is an arrow, which focuses on the different positions in analyzing the system of references. From this, we are preparing a theater project about the fall of a dot-com start-up, which will be dramatized by a stage director from Berlin also participating in the project. Another project is dealing with the loneliness of networks, since a network has the capability for indefinite growth, while always ignoring the next network. Two artists are sent to each group member’s workplace in the network project, to make images and a sound installation of the different worlds connected inside the network project while ignoring each other.

Let me repeat as a kind of conclusion the eight points I attempted to make: - Artistic research has to be free of the pressure of production. - The duration of research is undefined and not compressible. - Artistic research is often (but not always) collective and interdisciplinary. - It is impossible to speak about artistic research without redefining the task of cultural institutions (which are in a crisis situation, like the public state) hosting it. - Speaking about art as research forces us to compare art and science and to look for differences and similarities. However, the differences are irreducible. - The aesthetic activities of the Surrealists as artistic research are a major paradigmatic turn of the 20th Century. These activities are still available for artistic research today. - Montage (like in cinema, Eisenstein and Godard) is a technique used by science as well as by art. It offers a paradoxical space where both can coexist. - While art looks at science, science is looking at art with the same naivety. Art and science need a real space of exchange where the permanent necessity of thinking non-art from the field of art and non-science from the field of sciences can be expressed and developed. Let me conclude with a quote by Gilles Deleuze from What is Philosophy, “Philosophy needs a non-philosophy which understands it, it means a non-philosophical comprehension, like art needs non-art, and science non-science. They do not need it neither as a beginning nor as an ending in which they would disappear while they realize themselves. No, they need it at any moment of their growth and of their progress and development.”

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THE RIGHT TO THINK Gertrud Sandqvist As someone who is not part of the Dutch community, one feels a bit like witnessing a drama of which one only partly knows the parameters. I can only wish you good luck. The combat reminds me of Jimmy Durham’s lecture a couple of years ago where he said in his characteristic and fiery way that the system keeps out three categories of people: women, artists and savages. During today’s heated discussions, I wondered why there is so much passion. What is it that we are talking about? Are we really talking about various ways of organizing artistic research or are we talking about something else? Of course, the “something else” is what interests me most. During feminist discussions, I learned that when we are all positioning ourselves rigidly, we are afraid. That anxiety can be connected with different things. In the case of feminist discussions, we have always the fear, on the one hand, of not being recognized as being different and, on the other hand, of not being recognized as being the same. In both cases, the hidden agenda is power. I do not know where the power is today, but it is somewhere around here. That is why we had such heated discussions. If you would allow me to continue with the feminist metaphor, then I would like to recall Simone de Beauvoir, who once claimed that we are all entering into discussions from different situations. That is an illuminating position in trying to understand a heated debate. I believe that our situation is not really focused on an essential difference between art and science. But, then, from what situation are we talking? In order to answer that question, I will now explain how we are doing artistic research and PhD programs at the Malmö Academy. What is the basis of my argument? What is the situation from which we emerged in Malmö? It was not only Hegel who argued in the late 18th century that art production necessitated reflection on art. The emergence of what we call art was a liberation strategy coming from, among many others, feminists and artists who said, “We have the right to think.” That is very different from the position of artists before the 18th century where artists were mainly working in someone else’s program. The struggle for the right to think for oneself can be observed throughout the history of art. That is why art practices are so diversified today. The right to think for oneself could be threatened, I think, when all of a sudden science moves in. Although I would say that the market moving in is a much bigger threat today. What is the situation in the Nordic countries? What is the situation at my school, the Malmö Art Academy? In Scandinavia we have a free

page 147 L&B Volume 18 university system for all institutions, which implies that the government decides how many students or how artists can be enrolled. Thus, the art academies in Scandinavia are very small, which in a way is a great advantage for us who are working in those academies. The Malmö Art Academy, which is part of the Lund University, was founded in 1995. I have had the privilege of being there from the beginning as the head of the school. We accept around two percent of the students who apply. That means that from the 600 applicants we accept only 12 students each year. We have a fiveyear program in which all students have their own studio space. We have a tutoring system, but also a varied program - that is a bit similar to the Piet Zwart institute. The final two years, though, is the Master’s phase of the program. We believe we do not need a Bachelor’s phase. Since we have so very few students from the beginning, we do not want the stress of having them take another, purely formal, examination. But the academy is open to people with Bachelors’ degrees from other institutions who want to enter the Master’s program. In the first two years of Scandinavian art schools, there is basic visual training: students need to know about their material before starting to think about what they would like to do with it. So, the Malmö Art Academy is fortunate in that its first year students have had a basic training in other schools. In our school, they have to learn things like working with video editing or whatever else they might want to engage in. We also have a general class where we discuss the changes in the artist’s role over the past 200 years. In addition, our students are able to participate together with students of Lund University in a rather varied program. The students choose themselves how and with whom they want to work. An important part of our program deals with theory, ranging from traditional art history to various overlapping projects with cultural studies, philosophy, and psychology. For this, we work together with the university. What I normally do with the students when I run one part of this theory program, the closereadings, is to have seminar sessions in a small group of about twelve students. We tackle difficult texts by Lacan, Deleuze, and Bataille. The choice depends on the interest of the students. Those sessions work really well. Then there are projects for which we invite mostly international artists and others in the art field to engage in projects with a group of students. They have a total freedom to do whatever they want to do. Parallel to this, we have a tutoring system with, right now, eleven different tutors where students sign up with whom they want to talk to or work. The school is open day and night all year long for everyone who wants to work - of course, there are workshops for all artistic techniques. I believe it is a great privilege for a young artist to be able to work in a

page 148 L&B volume 18 Scandinavian art school, because all of the schools have similar conditions. In Malmö, we do not have any specific departments. That does not make sense in such a small school as ours. There are 65 students total in the normal program, eight critical studies students, and two PhD students at present. We have just started the PhD program and we are extremely happy to work with Sarat Maharaj, as you can imagine after his wonderful talk in the symposium. The school’s program implies that we are able to work with students, or young artists, for a rather long period. At the same time, we can combine various practices. So, on the one hand, we have the normal art academy program with tutors coming from all over the world. And, on the other hand, there is the last year of the Master’s program which is sharply defined. In that year, students have to make a one-person show, write a five- to ten-page text either on their own work or on something related to it, and be able to give an artist’s talk for about half an hour. In addition, they have to take a class in economics and law for artists: the only compulsory class we have in the whole school. So, you see, there is nothing strange about the program. On the contrary, it contains rather practical things. If we are to offer young artists a Master’s degree, both we and the students must know what exactly we are offering. I am strongly in favor of transparency and truly believe that it is enormously important to tell young people, “We are doing this and this, because of that and that.” Otherwise it is almost impossible for a student or a teacher to argue and say, “I disagree, we should do things differently.” For me, transparency implies being able to make decisions and explain why. We have been struggling for a rather long time with the artist’s secret dream of being a star. That dream as such is fine, I do not have a problem with it. What counts is that there are also artists who say that they are not interested in that type of structure. Those artists are more interested in being able to think and reflect and do research as a continuation of some aspects of their work. They want to have people to speak with, they want tutors and resources enabling them to deepen their work in progress. We have been fighting for that need and we have been able to create the PhD program. I really would like to stress that the PhD program does not have anything to do with some kind of demand from the Lund University, quite the contrary. Now we have two PhD students. One is a well-known artist, Matts Leiderstam , and the other a young curator from Tokyo, Miya Yoshida Iwasaki. Matts is working on his project Seen and Be Seen, continuing his long-time work as an artist. It is a complicated project where he is trying to connect ideas about constructions and devices such as the tele-

page 149 L&B Volume 18 scope one needs to see the landscape, in order to get closer and to become the voyeur with, at the same time, himself being seen as both a sexual object and an artist. Matts Leiderstam has been working on that project now for one year and we have to wait to see what will come out of it. We do not demand an end result, but a situation where we can have a public discussion. So, we are working together with an institution called Rooseum, Center for Contemporary Art in Malmö. The young curator from Tokyo, Miya Yoshida Iwasaki, started with a topic rather close to common-sense art history and the notion of superflatness. Her research has changed quite dramatically, I would say, over the past one and half years. Now she is connecting mobile phones, superflatness, computergames, and a new model of Zen Buddhism, into a novel model of the ego. These are very practical examples of research. I prefer to talk about people doing research instead of topics we do and don’t approve, since that is not how the program works. In Sweden, the demand is that all research must be financed. That means that the school must be able to provide those accepted as PhD students, or in our case as doctors in art, with a salary of 2000 euro a month for four years. The university has to arrange that money. When we had a discussion similar to this one a few years ago in Sweden, a colleague of mine from another academy was extremely worried about the new academic art, as he called it, that would come out of the PhD programs. He was afraid that the new academic artists would spread out like grasshoppers all over the earth and eat everything. I said that if we are going to have a situation where we could give PhD grants to 200 or 300 artists, I am very willing to take that risk. I believe it would be absolutely wonderful to have that opportunity. The result would be so diversified that one would hardly be able to talk about academic research whatever that might be. Since we are not scientists, we tend to look upon science as something homogeneous and something unified, just as scientists look at art as something unified. I believe that it is totally useless to look for the essence of science or for the essence of art. That is quite simply the wrong track. Notice how the field of science has been established as all kinds of separate fields, how it is practiced, how it has developed. Look at the difference between a dentist and an art historian, between a mathematician and a medical doctor, between a musician and a sociologist. As we all know, there are entirely different practices behind all of these fields. Sarat has talked about the strange kind of bricolage that is the beginning of every scientific field. So, I think we should avoid talking about science with a capital S and art with a capital A.

page 150 L&B volume 18 One last subject I would like to remark upon is our critical studies program, a program we do together with the Rooseum, Center for Contemporary Art in Malmö. The critical studies program is designed for artists, curators, writers and others connected with the art field. It is an intense program where the group elaborates on novel possibilities of how to relate to an audience, and where they try out all kinds of misunderstandings and failures. These projects tend to be very experimental. We believe that it is dangerous to differentiate too strongly between the artist, the curator and the writer. We need to recognize the differences, but at the same time be able to exchange thought. There is not too much thinking, but rather too little thinking, going on in the art world. Generally, curators do not have the possibility to discuss the experimental part of their work with others. Let’s keep in mind that being a good curator does not mean being a good service person to the artist. It is something else. In Sweden at least, we need room for such discussions.

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MANIFESTA 5: CURATORIAL RESEARCH Massimiliano Gioni, Marta Kuzma Gioni: We would like to talk about artists’ research and research for an exhibition. Since we are not scientists, nor connected with an academy, we are in a peculiar situation compared to today’s other speakers. To start, let’s go back to the word research as such, check its etymology and play around with it. The most striking thing to me is how the term research in its own composition implies the act of repetition. The prefix “re” tells us that the search itself is never over. Another speaker earlier referred to the permanent reinvention of research. One could say that research prescribes its own failure since it admits that we will have to start again and again. Somehow that attitude relates to modernity, and the obsession of the avant garde with novelty and the failure to attain that. Two visual metaphors could be helpful in explaining that. The image of Yves Klein’s Jumping into the Void is a striking example of the myth of artistic research and the artist as a risk taker. The second metaphor refers to Bruce Nauman and the image of the artist as the self-absorbed researcher in a sort of onanistic research. These two models describe quite well how research has been developed and transmitted in contemporary art. I am afraid that when it comes down to the job of curator, the tables are turned, since curators are not expected to jump into the void, let alone simply play with themselves. Curators are in the service of the artist. Therefore, curators are caught in a double bind. They are the people responsible for keeping the freedom of the artist alive and allowing them to jump into the void if necessary, whereas at the same time they are directly held responsible by institutions, trustees, and other systems of control which tend not to be happy with artists jumping into voids. Those systems like to see research providing results rather than merely demonstrating a pure process. How can these two different currents play a role in shaping our own research for Manifesta? Kuzma: From the time we were hired as the two curators for Manifesta 5 three months ago, we have heard again and again that there is a repeating notion in what Manifesta is. People say that there is an obvious model in the Manifesta project. Even in San Sebastian - the host city of Manifesta 5 - there is already a notion of what Manifesta should be. However, when we speak about Manifesta 5, the only thing we can say is that there is no Manifesta 5 yet. In terms of our own research, we are in a phase of trial and error right now. I think that is good for how the project will ultimately

page 152 L&B volume 18 be constructed. In fact, Manifesta exists as a missed truth at this point. We were in Kiev last week, which was an interesting experience, because all of the systems that we have been speaking about at this conference - the academy, the studio, the privileged position of the artist supported by the government - do not exist there. We should be aware of the practice of artists in those areas and not forget that there are valid practices which might be difficult to place within the system of institutions or curatorial systems in Western Europe. We met an artist who wanted to show us the city rather than his portfolio. It turned out to be a valid way of understanding his work process. Our curatorial research in terms of building Manifesta is to a great extent related to San Sebastian, its architectonics, and its urban language closely connected with Basque autonomous territory. San Sebastian as such reflects Manfredo Tafuri’s notion of the city, itself reflecting Piranesi’s conception of the city as a project of accusation. On the one hand, San Sebastian is a project of development and progress attempting to be tolerant, while it still tries to deal directly with Europe in its relation to Spain and to the world. In that situation of being a Basque city it becomes accused. The notion of accusation holds within it terms such as the rational and the irrational, the functional and the expressive. In that framework, our curatorial point of departure lies as a way to learn more about the history of the region, its cultural tendencies, and the institutions that exist within San Sebastian. Gioni: Unlike what happened in the past editions of Manifesta, we decided to specifically involve the city of San Sebastian. We spent substantial time, three months, in San Sebastian and tried to observe the city. Many of the recent biennials emphasize “the curator as a frequent flyer” where research means hopping from city to city. What we wanted to do first of all was to get a sense of a place where all kinds of historical and cultural phenomena lead to a multiplicity of interpretations. I often remind people of the fact that San Sebastian is a city with two names: Donostia in Basque and San Sebastian in Spanish. You could say that I am obsessed with words. I believe, though, that words somehow hide interesting cultural meanings. The fact that a city is described in different languages already gives an idea of the complexity and the many layers overlapping each other. On top of these linguistic layers, there are many others. San Sebastian is a fantastic city which developed as a tourist resort in Spain during the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Next, the city became transformed through the Franco years and, more recently, through the appearance of a different kind of tourism representing the brighter side of a more

page 153 L&B Volume 18 complex, cultural struggle of understanding a Basque national identity. What we tried to do as well is to explore how the city is geographically and culturally linked with the region and the territories around it. That gives a peculiar picture which could be described as a conglomerate of different cities spilling over the borders of Spain and France. You could call it either cities without a state or states without capitals. So, San Sebastian is a city which spreads out while crossing different borders, describing different geographical areas, and implying different languages. Another issue we tried to address is how the conformation of that cultural landscape could guide us in researching other areas of Europe, since we attempt to bring local situations in each country to the surface. Ultimately, we do not only visit studios or academies. Rather, we find ourselves visiting bars, which are likely to be the most crucial places of exchange. Kuzma: When we try to define Europe in the context of the practice of European artists in Manifesta, I believe that we are not completely committed to the idea of an increasingly coherent Europe. Instead, we concentrate on the polemical space of the Basque region and what kind of practice could lead to a trajectory of constructing a project. Furthermore, we look at other systems in other areas which are equally polemical. In a way, we try to depart from the former models of Manifesta and break the category Manifesta as it has existed. We are not simply searching for emerging artists or a particular generation. We look at both young and old artists and try to evoke a dialogue between generations. Thinking of the dialogue created in the initial Manifesta in Rotterdam in 1996, where people tried to bring together the practices of Eastern Europe and Western Europe, we become fascinated with the idea of revisiting that relationship expressed and represented in Manifesta before. What we like to do lies not so much in selecting individual artists from one area, but in looking at constellations and territories such as the Black Sea area or the connections between Istanbul and Odessa. What kind of relationships of production existed in such areas in, for example, the 1990s? Gioni: Another sort of soft method we have adopted was to look for places that could be linked, directly or metaphorically, to the peculiar reality of San Sebastian and the Basque region. Part of our research will also lead us to places in which the notion of nation has been questioned or re-evaluated, which is particularly relevant now that Europe is still a schizophrenic and fragmented entity after the realization of the European dream of the Euro. Once again, the idea of involving artists from different generations might be a reflection of Europe as a territory of different layers of temporalities

page 154 L&B volume 18 and different forms of anachronism. Many of the recent discussions about biennials not only stress the curator as a frequent flyer, but also the spectacularization of contemporary art and the pressure to find the young and novel. What appears instead while looking at San Sebastian and other nations are stratified territories where different time zones coexist. Kuzma: Manifesta 5 is not going to be launched in a specific institution in San Sebastian, but rather in a political triangle. We began with offices in Arteleku, but spread out to urban planning offices. The consortium to which we report includes three separate parties: the nationalist party, the socialist party, and the Mayor’s office. That has created an enormous challenge. Since we are not developing Manifesta 5 within a contemporary art institution, we are literally launching the project within the city and within the political constructs of the city. Some people may criticize this, but I think that it provides us with an interesting case since it forces us to challenge politicians to do things differently. That takes a long time and, therefore, we really would like to start launching Manifesta as a project in September already. That is six months prior to the official Manifesta time. The project will entail a local program to serve the local community, and not only be a project representing Manifesta as “an international space of flows”, to quote Castell. We are subjected to the systems of the politicians and, therefore, in terms of space we are subjected to the elections in May. We cannot even identify the physical spaces of Manifesta until June, which forces us to consider creating an entirely public project. During our meetings with artists we look closely at the processes they employ and keep track of how they can integrate their work at various stages throughout the process. Gioni: In the context of people who commission a biennial, we heard a lot about the importance of artistic freedom and the importance of freedom in terms of research. If you look at the scientific community, you will also find that much of the scientific value of research relies on the fact that there is freedom. However, there are always agents and institutions responsible for limiting that freedom. Even within the space of contemporary art, we should be aware that whenever we are talking about freedom, we are actually talking about segmented freedom. It is time to evaluate and discuss these kinds of responsibilities. It should become clear that even the artist jumping into the void is probably only allowed to jump into the void because he knows he will never hit the ground. There is a kind of safety net, there is some kind of control.

page 155 L&B Volume 18 Kuzma: The most important thing for us right now is to create a basis for the artists to work from. We are interested in inviting artists to San Sebastian for a longer period of time throughout the process in order to also interact with those same politicians. So, besides researchers, they have to be negotiators as well. Someone told us that is really a lot to ask from artists. However, I do not believe that artists should be protected from such a process. We are in an international political situation where we cannot feel protected in any role whatsoever. It will be interesting to see what happens during the next few months. In developing this project, we spoke of the historical break between Franco and the emergence of a new government in Spain. Arteleku had an important role in that period. We are checking the archives to see whether we could excavate that material and place it within the context of Manifesta. We are also looking at movements which are not very well-documented, or outside the art system, such as the Basque punk movement, which was politically valid in the early 1980s. Gioni: So far, our research has consisted of looking, of getting to know. We have not invited any artists yet. The initial idea was to start researching both in San Sebastian and in Madrid and to let themes, issues, and trajectories emerge from the works of the artists themselves rather than starting with a theme, a format, or a title. We have taken the luxury of not closing off anything too soon. Kuzma: We look at collectives rather than at one particular sort of artist. In the Basque region, there is a very strong notion of the corporate collective. That is an interesting model and we might find ways to utilize that. There are discussions being held in the city about how Manifesta could provide satellite projects with other cities even though we have a project in San Sebastian. How can we as curators be catalysts in other places with other infrastructures? We have had discussions with the French institute in Kiev in order to see whether we can bring in people to that area and have some kind of satellite project happen. So, we are mapping out how we can begin to realize a process which people can actually attend. Since we are not trying to develop a concept, but rather a series of programs emerging specifically from the characteristics of San Sebastian, ETA can, thus, evoke models and notions of a dialectical cultural landscape holding within it forces of resistance.

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DISCUSSION

page 158 L&B volume 18 SARAT MAHARAJ Annette Balkema: I would like to go back to the beginning of your talk when you mentioned the project you are doing currently at the Malmö School of Art, called Xenoepistemics. If I understood you correctly, you are investigating models of consciousness in that project. I am interested to know what kind of models you deploy and how the artists or the practitioners as you call them are involved in that project. Sarat Maharaj: The project Xenoepistemics is something we are planning to set up; it has not actually happened yet. The reason for practitioners to turn to this issue within the field of what we call art is the dead-end experience by neuroscientists and philosophers in looking at the question of consciousness. Consciousness remains the least investigated topic of the 20th century. Therefore, cognition studies has taken off quite dramatically in many places. Perhaps you know the history of cognition studies where the great Macy Conferences in the United States, from the 1940s till 1952, brought together cybernetics and studies from the brain. From that group, I have taken the image of the frog’s retina. In the period after that conference, the field went entirely down the road of computers where computational consciousness or artificial intelligence took over as the object of study. Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, one felt that one could indeed deal with the field through the study of digits and computational systems, but that, in fact, did not lead to any major advances after the 1970s. In a swing back, the whole area of consciousness as it had been posed in the 1940s was reexamined. There are so many movements that have survived that we have never quite been able to computerize all of them in depth. That might be taken as an example of how crude the model of the computer as a brain is compared to the kind of questions that start being asked in the 1980s. For instance, Francesco Varella was renowned for having scandalized the science world by pointing out the dead-end resulting from taking consciousness entirely as modeled on the computer and computationalism. What he then calls for are two other strands of investigation. One from philosophy - he turns to Husserl - but then he reminds us of the limits in Husserlian phenomenology where everything about consciousness is ultimately known within a rational model of the mind, which is a very Eurocentric point of view. What is rational? How does the mind function? With these questions Varella turns to the great systems and technologies of introspection of the East, especially to yoga systems and the logical systems of Indian philosophy where ways of examining consciousness prefig-

page 159 L&B Volume 18 ure both phenomenological thought in philosophy and ways of dealing with embodied experience and embodied consciousness. What is interesting is to see how practitioners deal with embodied experience and embodied states of awareness and consciousness. That is why Lund University with its extraordinary set of researchers in cognition studies could begin to interact with the program of doctoral artistic research set-up in the art academy. So, comparable to what is happening in Paris and London, the attempt is to bring the ideal situation of research in Lund university to the institutional set up and new view of doctoral research in the Malmö School of Art. In that institutional structure, one hopes to mobilize Varella’s questions, which unfortunately are a bit neglected because Varella became ill and died. Varella was a scientist of such high order that he was fearless; he was like an artist. This is the point where you begin to see that terms like scientist and artist are interchangeable. One of Varella’s projects was shown in Barbara Vanderlinden and Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s exhibition Laboratorium. Art and art practitioners have already made a major contribution to this area, except that it never has been framed and discussed as consciousness studies. Now, it is just a matter of time to become more self-conscious about how the problem is posed and how the connections are being made. Audience: Could you elaborate on the work of Zarina Bhimji in the context of artistic research? Sarat Maharaj: To understand the visual in the contemporary world, we cannot shake off its interaction with sound and the sonic. I used Zarina Bhimji’s work in a very crude, instrumental, and illustrative way to make a point about how sound becomes one of the modalities of otherness and difference. In her work, we are looking at the landscape of Uganda, to which she returns twenty-six years after the expulsion of the Asians from Uganda. She goes back to visit the country and particularly to look at the house her father had built and where she grew up as a child. In a wordless syntax - to take a term from Adorno’s aesthetic theory - sound begins to provide the grammar through which you understand the colonial landscape, now seen as the site of violation. That landscape has always been seen through the prism of England, a lens which scatters and splinters the light. If you look at old postcards of this part of Africa, they all look like a lovely part of southern England. In many ways, sound is used by Zarina to tarnish this image and to connect it with the final element in the ethics of difference. I think the reason why art’s consciousness studies and artistic

page 160 L&B volume 18 research matters today - and why it is not just another university phenomenon - is that it is about creating the scenario in which we learn to listen to the other. This is where image and sound come together. It is in learning to listen to the other where the other will not be heard entirely as Spivak has put it. She is native, she is woman, she is other. How could the other be voiced? What sound will create the sonic construction which begins to produce that subjectivity, that feeling, that consciousness in which the engagement with difference and otherness begins? Zarina’s work is especially interesting, since it does not shy away from feeling, emotion and subjectivity. It is those very things that have been taboo. Audience: It seems to me that otherness, which is the unknown, and the ethics that comes with it show that self-knowledge has become very important. I believe that art can play an important role in that. But then, on the other hand, I keep on thinking of the Indian loss of the self or the ego. I wonder how self-knowledge and the ability to lose oneself - to accept the unknown - can be combined. Sarat Maharaj: The classical fields of Indian thought provide a very different vocabulary to draw upon in order to deal with contemporary phenomena. That is of great value today since we are posing the question in terms of experiments carried out by people who were delegitimated, who were into yoga and zen, which were all seen as soft chocolate things and mystical forms of thinking. The paradigm of the rational Enlightenment self delegitimated whole terrains of self and other, almost before you even got into thinking about them. The classical fields of Indian thought were seen as okay and nice to relax with: it is nice to have a few candles, get into a bath, and then listen to a bit of Zen chanting. But that is exactly the kind of delegitimation Varella was concerned with: by examining its experiments and its micro-modest moments we think of as everyday life, by sticking things together in a collage or assemblage, one produces forms of thinking, exploring and probing of what the self and the other are and how they are constructed. Of course, that could end up in a fixation with the ego. - Maybe we should introduce the psychoanalytical term here from contemporary theoretical work or from the ancient Indian yoga sutra which is fixated on the ego. - You think the journey into the self is also the journey to the other, but you are simply repeating and reemphasizing the points of fixation. That is the fixation on the ego and the fixation on the self Varella talks about. Then there is the moment one is able to release this fixation on the self and begin the openness to the other Levinas mentions. So, there are contemporary ways of going into this problem, which I

page 161 L&B Volume 18 do not want to flag up, because critical theory has run through these thinkers in many ways and digested them for us. Thus, we need to begin from practices that will be more demanding and more difficult to get into. We could perhaps start from a more bodily way through art practice, through Zen practice, through yoga practice. These might be routes into understanding what we mean by the scene of research between self and the other. So you are right in saying that annihilation of the other and reaching nirvana simply mean burning out consciousness. But burning out consciousness of what? Of fixation with the ego. It is not a matter of totally becoming nobody, it is a matter of that fluidity, that openness, that is sought after as opposed to that moment of rest. In Bergson’s language, open to the moment of duration or a constant streaming flow of the self as opposed to the concealed, fixated self. This is a long way of answering your question, so forgive me if it is not an answer, but ways of circling around it. Indeed, I do think that art practice has a place in investigating the self and the other. After abstract expressionism, maybe we got too embarrassed to talk about self, other and involvement, since all of that movement seemed like one big macho therapy session. It sounded like those pre-feminist critiques of art history and art practice where we had to go back to the studios of those rather troubled male artists, who wanted to paint their hot bestial selves. That could have alarmed us a bit about this kind of investigation. But I depute you to think this from other approaches and other angles, and see why art plays a very important role as a technology of introspection and a technology of production of subjectivity. Why should we be ashamed of that?

ANNETTE BALKEMA Henk Slager: How do you intend to define the activities of artistic research in your model of thought? Could you perhaps give some examples of artists that are inspiring for your way of theorizing? Annette Balkema: If artistic research is really going to be a new field, it should be different from today’s general system of studios and visits and some vague connection with universities. In that system, senior artists, thus artists who already have a background in art, enter the system of working in a studio where curators, theorists, and renowned artists pass by. I believe that if we want to create a new field of artistic research, the people who visit studios should concentrate on what the artists are theoretical-

page 162 L&B volume 18 ly interested in and could deploy for their work. What I see right now in most schools is that artists are indeed reading Deleuze’s A Thousand Plateaus without being able to connect it to other work. So, classes or workshops on certain subjects connected to working with artists individually on specific subjects they are interested in would be great for developing forms of artistic research. An example I could mention is Camille Utterbach’s video work called Liquid Time Series. In the context of such work, it would be very interesting to delve into the many theories and models of time developed in philosophy, read books such as Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and study topical time models developed in the field of physics. I believe it will be possible to produce fascinating cross-overs, various multiple dimensions, and theoretical metamorphoses in artistic research programs. In such form of production, artists’ specific way of thinking could contribute to other fields of knowledge - and vice versa - in a versatile way. Audience (Raoul Teulinckx): If we follow the line of thought developed by Deleuze through Bergson and its preference for another connection between time and space and notions such as world and subjectivity, how does that effect the structure of a philosophical text about a work of art? How is the narrative structure affected by this shift? Annette Balkema: Let me say first of all that I am not really interested in the notion of narrativity and its semiotic implications. That is not a line of thought which fascinates me. With regard to your remark about Bergson’s model, its two-way division, and its turning point, I would like to say that if you indeed go into such skeleton of thought, other ways of how to push notions and terms further will emerge, enabling a shift of that architectonic skeleton in other directions. Such shift could be connected with works of art and other forms of thought, while producing novel perspectives and dimensions with respect to both the artworks and the models of thought. Audience: As an artist I have difficulty with how we talk about the notion of research. In my view, artists always research, which implies that they investigate and work with analyses. In so doing, we are not producing knowledge, but rather creating it. Artists have always researched and created their knowledge. I do have the feeling that art lies beyond philosophy. You have art, then you are aware of what you have created, and next there is the attempt to “read” it.

page 163 L&B Volume 18 Annette Balkema: I absolutely agree with you that artists are always in a process of researching while making their visual work. In addition, I want to remark that artistic research as the subject of this symposium is based on how the structure of art education is going to change. In 2007, a new structure with a PhD/Ma/Ba system is going to be imposed on art education in Europe. In that sense, as we said in the initial workshop at De Rijksakademie, it makes sense to discuss with people who are part of the field how that could be done in the art world. That is why I argued in my lecture to connect the world of visual art and (non-academic) worlds of theory. I believe you mentioned that to see art beyond philosophy, philosophers should say something about art or “read” it. Well, philosophers could do that, but if you really want to create a new field of artistic research, it is interesting to have those new artistic personalities Hermann Pitz talked about spend time on theoretical research and really put their minds to that. That could produce - or create - interesting theoretical work both beyond and in connection with visual work.

HELSINKI SCHOOL OF ART Richard Woodfield: I was listening with great interest and the thought crossed my mind that in philosophy, when we write articles and do things in a postgraduate way, it is a bit strange actually to call it research. Philosophers do not do research, they just think. It seems to me that there is an analogy between the way in which the philosopher works - simply by doing - and the way in which the artist works by doing. Philosophers do not see themselves proceeding either in a scientific way, or in a way analogous to literary theorists or to historians. They just see themselves as thinking. So why shouldn’t art research simply be “doing”? Tuomas Nevanlinna: My subject in this presentation is artistic research, which, in my view, is not philosophy. I think artistic research is thinking and doing. Henk Slager: Perhaps you could elaborate on the productivity of the artistic output of the Finnish doctorate program. What is the impact of its research on the art world? Jan Kaila: Of course, it is hard to generalize. We can only think about what it should be, because we haven’t had much experience with it yet. In fact, I can only speak from my personal and very positive experience with

page 164 L&B volume 18 the program. I will not go into details about that since I want to stress something else. Let’s not mix things up. On the one hand, it is not the case that all good artists will find this kind of program useful. People seem to expect that if artists are enrolled in a doctoral program in art, they will turn into better artists. However, there is not that kind of hierarchy. Of course, it could be the case, but it is not necessarily the case at all times. So, we have to be very careful about that. On the other hand, but maybe I am too pragmatic here, I would not draw too much attention to traditional concepts around the doctoral program. I am working in an ongoing process where I can see things happen. If we stick too rigidly to words and terms of research and their tradition, that might be slightly problematic for such processes. We have to take into account, though, that we are not only dealing with art’s own institutions, but also with very complex questions of legitimation and with relations between the traditional academic art world and our world. Many compromises certainly have been made by us concerning the concepts we use in order to get the legitimation for the program. I am not saying that is good, but just that it happens. What seems to be important is to move beyond the mere use of concepts. Audience: For me, there is a difference between artistic research and research on art. It seems to me that research on art is something expected of art critics to justify and legitimate art. The word artistic research makes me wonder what kind of artistic principles could be brought into research. What is the artistic way of dealing with the analysis of topics, of going into a certain direction, of finding answers? In that sense, I am disappointed, because it seems that an artist only gets the chance to justify his or her own framework or context in artistic research projects. What I am missing is a more generous way of actually achieving information and sharing it in artistic research projects which are not specifically one’s personal work. Jan Kaila: This is what I meant earlier when I said that there are the socalled traditional models of writing about art called semiotics, art history, and aesthetics. When people write about their work, they cannot produce a completely new tradition on a blank sheet. That has already been proven in MFA programs. So, borders between different kinds of writings are not as absolute as we would like to believe. Therefore, when reflection in artistic research projects comes out in a textual form, I do not think we should expect that something revolutionary is going to happen. On the other hand, I believe that we should not stick to theoretical models either. All of us should carefully go through each new work that emerges and then make

page 165 L&B Volume 18 final judgments about what is happening in artistic research. We should not cling to the sketches we are now drawing theoretically about what is going to happen.

ELS VAN ODIJK Jan Kaila: Not being Dutch, it is difficult for me to understand the context of your talk. What surprises me is that I could not detect any problems in the model you seem to sympathize with. Your outlook fits in the PhD program model or doctoral program model I was talking about earlier. Therefore, I cannot identify with your fear of science. That is far from my experiences. This was my comment. Annette Balkema: As someone with a passion for discourse and visual art, what surprises me and what I do not understand is the rudeness and aggressive tone of voice of your talk. My colleague Henk Slager started the artistic research project inspired by the planned introduction of a new structure of the European art schools in 2009. The only purpose of both the Rijksakademie workshop and this symposium is to exchange ideas on a free floating think-tank level and to examine ways of how to install such a new structure. I have talked about that already this morning. I absolutely agree with you that the practitioners at your school should not be forced to enter a PhD structure, if they feel too vulnerable - to use one of your terms - or if they are not interested in such a degree. However, also at your school, there could be perhaps two or three students fascinated by writing a thesis and a more theoretical focus on their field of work. What’s wrong with that? Els van Odijk: I wonder - and this is probably going on in more places why advice and ideas should come from you as organizers of this debate. I wonder how relevant it is to discuss at this point in time these subjects with people from outside Rijksakademie. We already have many contacts with philosophers, architects, and filmmakers. But a PhD program cannot happen overnight and all those texts and discussions around it do not give it any room for gradual growth. I also wonder - and I am perhaps even a bit irritated about that why you should organize a debate like this at this point in time while coming from a philosophical background. Why is this debate today about the future? Why is there no reflection, for instance, related to why and how artists have reacted to 9/11? Why isn’t it about how people like Bush and

page 166 L&B volume 18 Saddam Hussein are using images of power and forms of communication with a very long history in culture? There are so many highly relevant subjects, so why step into something which is still so unclear and so complicated? There are a few small steps made at some places where they try to discover interesting possibilities of cooperation. Why not leave that alone and give it some time to grow and step into subjects which are much more relevant in this segment of time? Audience (Calin Dan): I think the discussion here is relevant beyond personal clashes or opinions. What strikes me - perhaps too early since we are just at the end of the first day - is that we have not delved into the structural reason of why we are here and debating what we debate. That structural reason - Annette has mentioned it twice - is the European decision about art schools. I find that interesting since my culture is on the left side of the spectrum. On that side, whenever something starts becoming European or global, it immediately comes under scrutiny. During the last couple of years, I have experienced, directly or indirectly, a sort of matter-of-fact embrace of the idea of having PhD programs for artists and putting Dr. before an artist’s name as one would before the name of a rapper. The thing is not bad in itself. Perhaps there are very clear reasons why we should say this is a good idea. It is not overwhelmingly pressuring us all over Europe, though, like Els van Odijk said, but it’s more of a free ride. People who want to step in, step in, people who want to stay out of it, stay out of it. But I think we are confronted with a sort of ambiguity. In a certain sense, the inductive model is a good model, but it becomes a bit tricky. Being yourself in a studio, being an intuitive artist, being a conscious artist dealing emotionally with your work is a sort of cliche. On the other hand, trying to reverse that cliche and make artists cross media and go into society dealing with other people while tagging a procedure to that is, in my point of view, a manifestation of a crisis of identity. There are many crossovers in art practices today institutionalized in loose networks. There are artist residencies, free academies, postgraduate studies, etcetera. What I find interesting is to see what is going to happen when someone from the art field enters a PhD program and tries to restructure it. Although I am not extremely fond of the artist as a buffoon, I am interested in the artist as a virus, as somebody who is entering an organism, and trying to challenge its capacities. Els van Odijk: I have not been totally negative in my text as you will have heard. In that sense, I have referred to the possibility of a virus. What I try to make clear is that the virus can only function if you give it a small place

page 167 L&B Volume 18 somewhere on the skin. While everybody is straining to see what will happen when the virus comes in, you would do better not to have it enter it all. A virus generally is small and modest. That is how it starts. Sarat Maharaj: Thank you for your rather rugged view on this issue. It is an extremely important one for us to bear in mind. If we are simply to remember what is understood by research and the doctoral program it is that they must always mean diverse forms of investigation and exploration. Listening to the program from Finland, for example, I was really quite surprised to hear how different the model is from anything in the AngloAmerican world. We need to encourage a multiplicity of approaches involved, and diversity and plurality of modes of thinking in how we understand this field as a whole. In trying to safeguard the position you have outlined, suggesting a level of abstract thinking which itself goes against the idea of the non-thinking artist, we need to bear in mind that there are differences in other parts of the world. Not only in Europe, but also on the other side of the English channel where, in addition to Great Britain, there is an even smaller island called Ireland. That island itself is divided into the North and the Republic, and the first PhD’s in this field of artistic research really came from Northern Ireland, from the University of Ulster. Those were the first PhD’s that were invented and created with great love, care and affection by a leading practitioner, Susan Hillers, as professor of visual art practice. She was the person who actually originated this in England. So, there is a long experience in England where the PhD for artists is seen as a fairly acceptable, ordinary thing. I think institutions like Slade and Goldsmiths held out for a few years and said we are not going to go down that vulgar road. But as time went on, we all could see the point of it. Just as there are pluralities of what we understand by doctoral work, there is a variety of art practitioners today. Some will find this sort of thing up their alley and others simply won’t. The point for us, as people involved in art education, is to provide as many possibilities as possible. I think that would be a slightly more English, pragmatic approach to take to this issue. Any doctrinaire, dogmatic view, on what we mean by artistic research or the model for PhD studies is really about local traditions. So, we are here not to preach about respective models to each other, but rather, I would hope, to share information and to learn how different models emerge. Even though ideas might have come from the Bologna declaration of the EU, we can always ignore those bureaucrats and invent something that is specific to the conditions and the histories in which we are working. We have long-established PhD’s, long-established traditions of artistic

page 168 L&B volume 18 research, so we should not think of this - at least I find it a bit difficult to accept - as a new area. In an intellectual sense it is deeply challenging, but structurally, educationally, and in terms of the way the art world has organized itself, this is now a bit of an old hat as you have noticed in Australia. So, the points you make about Australia are fair, although again, one does not want to make generalizations about any country. However, the real danger, you draw our attention to, is the gobbling-up effect of the traditional knowledge systems of the university. Anke Bangma: As per your question of how widespread the pressure of the Bologna declaration really is and to give a little specific Dutch background: all European educational institutions funded by their national or European ministries of education are going to have to deal with this question of PhD’s somehow. However, Holland has its particular tradition of free institutions - including the Rijksakademie - which are part of the Ministry of Culture. That makes quite a difference in this discussion. I want to make another remark. When we talk about diversity and about being afraid of the dogmatism and standardization that could come with the European understanding of research and PhD systems, what I see happen is that because of our fear of that, we tend to come up with dogmatic images of what the world of art is. I am really weary of understanding art per definition as the field of freedom, as something that would not already from the start be invested with all kinds of other pressures. Perhaps we no longer define them as pressures from the outside, or pressures that are alien, but there are pressures, there are definitions, and there are paradigms of what art should be. Thinking of the studio as a place free from external pressures could even enhance and reproduce other pressures we then would no longer question. So, I really think that in a way, for some artists at least, diversity is important. Retreating in the studio is already withdrawing into some kind of shell from the outside world. That is something to watch out for. Els van Odijk: I think that is true, but I did not specifically mean the studio. I was much more talking about mental freedom. The studio as such, I think, is a closed thing. I did not refer to the romantic view of the artist sitting in an isolated ivory tower. I was defending the possibility of mental freedom. Jan Kaila: I want to make one more comment on this question of power and about the problems between art education and other educational institutions. Comment number one is that there has been BA, MA, and MFA education around for decades. Somehow I am surprised why this transfor-

page 169 L&B Volume 18 mation or stepping up to PhD’s is experienced as so dramatic when there is already an academic system that has proved - and also was approved by artists - its function. The second comment is that - and I know I have to be careful here because legal positions of academies are different in different countries - in Finland when the doctorate programs were put into function, the university of art and design (another art school in Helsinki) immediately started to seek and look for legitimation from the field of science. It was psychologically very important for them to get that legitimation, although legally they had an independent status and could decide about their own things. My own academy took almost the opposite position. They also had a legal position to handle their things autonomously and needed no legitimation from the scientific field and did not ask for it. That functioned much better. So, how much of what actually comes from the inside do we imagine comes from the outside? Els van Odijk: One of the things that has amazed me over the years is the weight given to the BA/MA system. In the Netherlands, that system has not yet been included in art education, but probably will happen soon. As I said, I am in the luxurious position to be in a place focusing on artists who have finished art education. That is why I do not talk about students, but about participants. In opposition to Anglo-Saxon culture, studying in the Netherlands means that you go to school, whereas studying in the AngloSaxon tradition means that you keep on studying your entire life. The term student creates expectations about De Rijksakademie, which we cannot fulfil since we do not have a program or a clear structure. At the same time, besides the educational system, I do not know one place within the art market, if I might use that word, where they ask for papers. In general, people look at artists’ work: in a curriculum vitae you will hardly find whether someone has graduated or not. So, in that sense, I think that the importance of giving PhD credits is hardly relevant. It is much more a matter of a system one has to go through at this moment in time. Audience (Raoul Teulinckx): I am not sure that you can say that De Rijksakademie does not have a program. Maybe not explicitly, as you say, but implicitly it does. If you look at the professors, if you look at the participants that are invited, you see that is mostly based on the authority of the already existing art historical scheme. So what will you do with a participant who wants to question that? I am a bit worried because it seems that you want to exclude such a participant. Perhaps not initially, but when he or she is already in.

page 170 L&B volume 18 Audience: I am a current participant in De Rijksakademie. It is possible to be a member of a non-program, it is possible to be there without any structure. That is your own choice. I cannot say that there is a hidden program, rather it is a potential one. You can make something out of it, or you can make your own thing. Audience: You said you are in the luxury position not to have to make everything transparent, so that also says something about your agenda. I want to say that I appreciate very much that you refuse to jump into the tone of the Zeitgeist and adapt a theme and characterize De Rijksakademie as the modernist institute that is in touch with these themes. However, most interesting in your talk are the schemes you have drawn where you refuse to relate to themes dictated by key figures. In those schemes, the relevance of the individual artist is a very small pinpoint. I wonder whether it is a problem that in the upper part the key figures are so active at this very moment, because there are so little impulses coming from the lower levels?

MULTIPOINT Audience: Did you as a group of individuals find something common to work on? Did you define that explicitly while saying we are now going to focus on such or such leading theme for a short period? Multipoint: We have tried to avoid somehow considering everything we do a general topic. We work on small projects where we can collaborate, but we try not to have an overwhelming structure that imposes itself on the individual practices. Our main goal has been to restructure the school and we all agree with how it turned out. We hope that structure will be adopted by the next team. The research project we are doing for the end of the year has emerged from the context of living in Nantes. Nantes is a small city, which would not exist culturally if there had not been a TGV train linking Nantes to Paris within two hours. As artists we question our visibility in France today related to this year’s 20th century of FRAC, the regional cultural centers that decentralize the influence of Paris. To have a postgraduate program in Nantes is a product of this decentralization. People in Nantes often relate things they do to what happens in Paris or to the question how it could be visible in Paris. What we want is to link the fantasy of a location to the reality of that location. For this project, we need people to act as

page 171 L&B Volume 18 interlocutors. So, we have worked with an artist and a scenographer who act as curator and editor of the exhibition project where we visualize the trajectory or the in-between of Nantes and Paris. The project will start in an alternative space in Paris and will then move from Paris to Nantes in the form of an edition of a free train magazine, called 02. Finally, there will be presentations at different locations in Nantes for which we will invite different artists. Audience: It seems that you are not so much functioning as a temporary collective or a temporary artists’ initiative but rather as a research team. Do you think this is the adequate form for doing research or are you just looking for new forms of collaboration? Multipoint: We had an educational structure as a given and we tried to do something with that. Collaboration is another case since that happens because people know each other and then start to collaborate. Our group was special because we could get along. So, we do not know how the initiative is going to work out for the next group of artists. We set up a possible way of doing it, but they can change it if they find that necessary. Audience: In a way, you are dealing with a meta-postgraduate, since you have researched another shape based on the conditions available to you. Could you envision it continuing like that? Could it become a kind of think- tank for how a postgraduate education functions? Suppose the next group would restructure it entirely because they think that a postgraduate education should function in another way. Multipoint: That could be the case. But it is also possible that the next group will develop another form of research within the given structure. We set up something defined by the people who participated. That is the basis for how it is going to continue and how the notion of artistic research, which is not methodologically fixed, will be deployed and redefined.

ANKE BANGMA, KOEN BRAMS Tuomas Nevanlinna: It was nice to hear that I have been able to be a negative example to Mr. Brams and maybe a legitimate heir to Stalin. You think that our program is extremely bookish and even bureaucratic with carefully calculated credits and theoretical demands. Actually this is not the case at all. Mostly, the studies consist of artists gathering together and

page 172 L&B volume 18 discussing their works as colleagues. This so-called theoretical part consists of visiting speakers chosen on the basis of the themes they are going to talk about, which resonate the themes and problematics arising from the students’ work. Basically, this helps the students in the process of writing their essays. If you advocate such a rigorous view in that all writing and talking around art is somehow an activity essentially foreign to art, I cannot accept that. Koen Brams: I want to answer with what I said at the end. You have to choose for formatting or not. You showed a slide with all those credits and then you say we do not give credits. I just want to repeat something you said. At a given moment, you spoke about one of the artists who has many exhibitions and then suddenly your colleague Jan said, we are not sure yet which exhibition will be credited. I cannot believe I heard that. The exhibitions were there, so why should an institution want to credit one of these exhibitions? Jan Kaila: It is just a technical question, so you might have misunderstood me. Koen Brams: But the fact that you refer to it as a technical problem for your program is precisely what I refuse to go along with. Tuomas Nevanlinna: One comment. Our program of PhD degrees did not replace a free-studio based system. It is an additional opportunity for artists who have already a career and who apply for the PhD program. I see actually one danger in the free studio-based system which is that the so-called free activities are implicitly a subjection to the star system and the art market. The program we have is a kind of mediating force: it is a thinking-doing space for the artist and the possibility and opportunity to suspend the trends and demands of the curators and star-seekers. In that sense, it is a kind of independent space. I think the free studio-based individualistic system is basically and implicitly neo-liberal thinking, which has the same logic as all mediating communities and horizontal organizations between people, while being oppressive for the individual. Koen Brams: If you offer a space for doing and thinking why should there be a degree at the end of it? Why should there be a system of credits? That is something I do not understand. Artists always have been involved in doing, thinking, and producing. So, they do not need a PhD program for that.

page 173 L&B Volume 18 Jan Kaila: I think that somehow you have a strange preoccupation with names. Exhibitions have names, books have names, and the name monster here somehow seems to be university. It seems to me that the fear of the university is the context you are speaking from. Whatever goes under the name of the university seems to be bad. I want to raise the question whether there is a functional system where something good can happen under the cover of an academy itself being a university. We are an autonomous university with 600 students, without being dependent in any sense on other universities. Instead of taking your position, perhaps you might start wondering how it is possible that the form of a university could be a positive force. Yesterday, Sarat Maharaj talked about the other and otherness. So, I am very surprised to be put in the position of the other which seems to be, in your view, the university. Koen Brams: I see the university as a legitimate and interesting place for knowledge production. What I have sketched is the fact that art academies first have become part of large conglomerates, and that secondly these large conglomerates are now forced to cooperate with universities. Ten years ago, art academies were independent institutions, which could deal with art in their own way. Today, they are forced to deal with universities. That is why I problematize universities, not the university as such. Anke Bangma: Before I go to very different questions, I would like to rephrase what is happening in the debate here. The problem of art being forced into a predefined academic structure seems to be the pregiven measurement against which the quality of art or artistic practice becomes defined. I am curious to know how, in your own organization, you could create an environment where the quality of work could be debated and understood in a flexible way. In other words, there must be some kind of critical exchange going on, otherwise artists should not need to go to the Jan van Eyck Academy. Koen Brams: As I have explained earlier all we do is offer a critical environment. That critical environment is first of all shaped by the community of people working in the Jan van Eyck, and secondly, by opening up the Jan van Eyck to the outside world. This was and is new. It is also very important that everything that we do be confronted by people from outside. Why? When I came to the Jan van Eyck, I immediately felt that a consensual community had been established at the Jan van Eyck. For me, that was the reason to open up the academy as radically as possible.

page 174 L&B volume 18 Anke Bangma: But you still have researchers and advising researchers. Koen Brams: The most difficult process now is to invite the advising researchers to set up research projects in the academy itself. That is of course a key element in the whole structure. We started with discussions last year in order to establish that and I can say that it is starting to work. For instance, Suchan Kinoshita, who is an advising researcher at the Fine Arts Department, has launched a research project in a prison for which she was invited. She decided to open it up to the contribution of the researchers. So, it is her research project, but it is open to thoughts, ideas, and projects of the researchers. Anke Bangma: But then there still seems to be something like a hierarchy. Koen Brams: Of course, there is a hierarchy concerning two important decisions. First of all, the selection of the researchers. We will not go as far as Multipoint, where the participants are part of choosing the participants or researchers for the next year. Secondly, there are institutional bodies which only work with advising researchers. For instance, we have a body called the editorial board - an idiosyncratic term - and on this board we discuss projects which are more ambitious, not more important, and require financing. We debate that in the editorial board. Anke Bangma: As much as you try to work towards a different setting, I see both in how the academy is organized and from how it works now, that it seems to relate to a program-participants-learning-teaching kind of situation. That is comparable to my own program. I am not against that, but it is not entirely fair either to say that you have decided to do away with such a structure like Multipoint indeed did. Koen Brams: I do not agree. As I just said, there are two hierarchical moments in the organization and I believe they are needed. One is about the selection of the researchers and the second is about certain institutional affairs and content discussions. The interesting thing is that by creating the editorial board we manage to get a better view of what we are actually doing. There is a team to run the weekly program, to which everybody can contribute whatever he or she wants. The organization should be flexible enough to make that possible. But there are no credits, grades, certificates, or rules for what you should do. What the researchers do in their studio is their affair.

page 175 L&B Volume 18 Anke Bangma: How would you distinguish between something which is a contribution to others in relation to the Jan van Eyck and something which is being done and which is not a contribution? Or is everything a contribution no matter how it relates to other people at the Jan van Eyck? I am asking this, because we all know very well from very different kinds of art schools and research centers that one way of legitimizing yourself is continuously publishing the curriculum vitae of people connected to your program in order to show how you are linked with those careers. I am not saying that is your intention, but I do wonder how it is different at your academy. Koen Brams: The researchers work with our assistance within our framework and all of that is listed. It depends on the researcher whether it becomes listed. Audience (Calin Dan): In my own experience, what the Jan van Eyck is offering - besides the problem that it presents itself as an academy - is an artists-in-residence program. So, what I see is that the only problem is the term academy in the name Jan van Eyck Academy. For the rest, the institution, as far I could tell, is just providing a framework for people freely moving around and referring to other people in other positions. That is what we do in artists-in-residence programs.

JEAN-BAPTISTE JOLY Henk Slager: May I invite you to elaborate further on the Deleuzian perspective which seems to be connected with how you construct your argument? Jean-Baptiste Joly: We know since Hegel that there is no production of art without reflection. This was the very basis of the starting point of Academy Schloss Solitude. It is not only a place offering good material conditions, but really a place where matter is food for the mind. You cannot deal with art without entering the space of philosophy. There is no production without reflection. That is a clear statement by Hegel in his Introduction to Aesthetics. Audience (Christophe de Voogd): Your speech echoed very much the talk of Sarat Maharaj. There were very strong connections since you defined artistic knowledge as a non-knowledge. Would you say that the type of

page 176 L&B volume 18 knowledge that artistic research produces is a kind of non-knowledge? Jean-Baptiste Joly: The position of the postgraduate institutions all over the Western world deals with the question of the organization of academies of fine art. Is there an initial education or not and how does it work? All academies are interested in postgraduate levels, because there they can raise the question of a primary level of education. However, the question is much more complicated because academies in the late 1960s, at least in Germany and in France, had a real crisis of modernity. The definition of modernity is permanent reinvention, so academies have created spaces in which they could tell artists, “Feel free to reinvent your practice everyday, and feel free to reinvent art everyday. Please find your own tools for that.” Then the academy which should give knowledge is not able to answer the question of whether there is a primary level of education of art. What tools are necessary? Technical tools, tools for thinking, tools for adapting knowledge to practices of art? Ultimately, one started to emphasize postgraduate levels, because artists on that level have had a primary level of education and, thus, the problem disappears by itself. The question of knowledge is very complex indeed, and one has to be careful not to make the real question disappear. There is a basic education for an artist. There are things artists have to know. Audience: May I invite you to elaborate on your concept of montage. I do not understand how montage is in-between art and science. Jean-Baptiste Joly: Scientific discovery means that you bring two elements together. You can name them concepts. In art, we no longer speak about concepts, but about images. Let’s say you put two concepts next to each other and from the neighborhood of the two concepts in the scientific field you create a third one. In an interview of Serge Daney with Jean-Luc Godard, the latter describes how Copernicus opened the infinite space of the cosmos, while at the same time the infinity of the microscopic world was discovered. Godard said that those inventors discovered these things by putting two images together while creating a new image. That is how a discovery is made in science. Obviously, that is also what happens in art, especially in the field of cinema but also in other art fields. Thus, you put two images next to each other and their proximity creates a new, third image related to both. At the same time, that evokes another level of meaning and knowledge. Godard just says that the mechanism of artistic inventions and the mechanism of scientific discoveries are comparable with cinematographic montage. That is why I said, that the space of montage is the

page 177 L&B Volume 18 in-between. However, art and science differ as well with regard to their purposes. The scientific purpose is different from the artistic one. Audience: If you look at the history of science and the history of art, there were times when artists and scientists were the same individuals. For example, Goethe in his discussions with Newton on the theory of colors. However, there were also good reasons for the two fields to be divided and take different routes. It seems to me that you are trying to bring them together again. Isn’t it a bit naive to think that is possible? Jean-Baptiste Joly: Look to the ancient Greeks for the origin of art and sciences. Friedrich Kittler, the German media philosopher, describes this wonderfully when he remarks that with the invention of an alphabet you had the possibility of developing literature, science and mathematics. You could say that the very origin of arts and sciences is similar at some point. The differentiation between arts and sciences is related to the question of continuity, that is, the moment of society in the Renaissance where the continuity was given by God, which worked for both the arts and the sciences. The division comes into play from the moment you argue that only science is able to give the dimension of continuity to the world and that art is keeping itself on the side of the magic moment. I just reminded you of Dialektik der Aufklärung quoting Marcel Mauss’ theory of magic. That is the moment where the division starts. When you look at Dürer’s Melancholia, it seems to say that God is no longer ensuring the continuity of the world, but science is. So Dürer, as an artist, pointed out the difference between art and science.

GERTRUD SANDQVIST Richard Woodfield: One observation. In the UK the question of the relationship between art and science is becoming quite crucial within the context of funding of the Arts and Humanities Research Board. If you apply for a grant to pursue an artistic activity, you must be able to specify in advance your methodology. It is increasingly the case across the UK that you will not get any money, unless you have an methodology. I think the difference between art and science really has to be spelled out here. Science can proceed in quite a more hazardous way than art, but the basic difference between science and art is one of replication. When a scientist makes a discovery, that scientist has to describe the conditions under which the experiment can be reproduced with the same result. That is the

page 178 L&B volume 18 whole point of methodology in science. Works of art are particulars, and because they are particulars, they have no need of replication. So, I would argue very strongly that there isn’t actually the same sort of need for a methodology in art as there might be in science. Gertrud Sandqvist: I think that you are referring to the natural sciences and their possibility of repeating and experimenting. Of course, that is true for most of the natural sciences, but you do not have the same situation in the humanities or philosophy. So, there are different criteria, which is good since there are different kinds of knowledge, each with their own specific problems and possibilities. Richard Woodfield: I was very much interested to hear you use the expression “total freedom”, as far as your students were concerned. Does that mean that you do not make value judgments in relation to their work? Gertrud Sandqvist: People have come back to that several times. But indeed, where we really exercise our judgment and our power is in the selection process. We should not forget that it is 98% which we do not select. All of us have concentrated on the wonderful moments where we could talk about freedom and respect. But that is because we have not selected so many applicants. Audience: I am intrigued about why you are so happy to only choose twelve students in the initial phase. In the Netherlands, we have sixteen art schools each of which starts at least with sixty students. So, you can multiply and then know how many young artists start every year in our country. It has always been said that these numbers are necessary, because there has to be a sort of breeding ground where the good ones can pop up. Do you deliberately take a completely different position or did I misunderstand you?

Sandqvist: I will try to explain how historical circumstances create various possibilities and, of course, differences. In Sweden and Scandinavia, we have these breeding grounds in the preparatory schools. When artists come to the academy level, they have to go through a very tough selection procedure. You could say that is a luxury situation. I cannot deny that. For me, it is an extreme privilege to work in a small academy with quite a lot of freedom, a university that is totally benevolent towards us and calls us the jewel in the Lund University’s crown, where we have enough money to do what we want to do, and nobody really cares who we invite. That is

page 179 L&B Volume 18 an extremely luxurious position, particularly when surrounded by enormously talented, interesting, thoughtful young people.

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PARTICIPANTS Annette W. Balkema, philosopher, editor, curator, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Anke Bangma, MFA course director, Piet Zwart Institute, Institute for postgraduate studies and research, Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam. Koen Brams, director Jan van Eyck Academy, Postacademic Institute for Research and Production, Maastricht, The Netherlands. Santiago Eraso, director Arteleku, San Sebastian, Spain. Massimiliano Gioni, curator, curator Manifesta 5, Milano, Italy. Mika Hannula, director Helsinki School of Art, Helsinki, Finland. Jean-Baptiste Joly, director Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany. Jan Kaila, professor of Artistic Research, Helsinki School of Art, Helsinki, Finland. Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven, artist, advisor, Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Marta Kuzma, curator, curator Manifesta 5, London, United Kingdom. Sarat Maharaj, professor of Artistic Research, Malmö School of Art/Lund University, Malmö, Sweden. James McAllister, professor of Philosophy of Science, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands. Multipoint, Artistic Research group, Erban, postgraduate art program, Nantes, France. Tuomas Nevanlinna, professor of Art Theory, Helsinki School of Art, Helsinki, Finland.

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Els van Odijk, director Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Hermann Pitz, artist, senior advisor, Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Gertrud Sandqvist, dean Malmö School of Art, Malmö, Sweden. Henk Slager, philosopher, editor, curator, coordinator Artistic Research project, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Leire Vergara, curator, DAE, San Sebastian, Spain. Gerard de Vries, professor of Philosophy of Science, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Richard Woodfield, research professor, Nottingham Trent University’s School of Art and Design, Nottingham, United Kingdom.

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LIER EN BOOG Series of Philosophy of Art and Art Theory VOLUME 12, THE PHOTOGRAPHIC PARADIGM, ISBN 90-420-0121-6, 192p. This issue investigates the meaning of the photographic image for contempoary art. In Malraux’dream, photography offers the ultimate guarantee for a coherent presentation of art. However, as Douglas Crimp has stated, the appearance and enhancement of photography as a form among other art forms disrupted the center of the art world. What does this mean for art and philosophy in our time. Various artists and theorists delved into that question: Christian Boltanski, Benjamin H.D.Buchloh, Jean-François Chevrier, Douglas Crimp, Jos de Mul, Liza May Post, Johan Swinnen, Jeff Wall, a.o. VOLUME 13, THE ARCHIVE OF DEVELOPMENT, ISBN 90-420-0431-2, 188p. In the current debate on art, thought on time has commanded a prominent position. Do we live in a posthistorical time? Has objective art historical time and belief in a continual process shifted to a more subjective experience of the ephemeral? Has (art) history fallen away and, if so, what does this mean for the future of art? How does a visual archive relate to artistic memory? Philosophers and theorists explore the subject theoretically. Curators articulate the practice of art. Participants: Hans Belting, Arthur C. Danto, Okwui Enwezor, Kaspar König, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Barbara Vanderlinden, Gianni Vattimo, a.o. VOLUME 14, TERRITORIAL INVESTIGATIONS, ISBN 90-420-0606-4, 188p. Nowadays there are many spaces of fascination in visual art. Of course, installative space and contextual space have been on the art scene for awhile. However, they are now accompanied by other spaces such as urban space, architectural space, cyberspace, hyperspace, and screen-based space. In this volume, architects, artists and theorists attempt to find answers to questions such as: Could the architectonic study and/or deconstruction of space play a decisive role in the shift of attention to space? Which theoretical factors structure the current experience and meaning of space? Participants: Andrew Benjamin, Paul Crowther, Hou Hanru, Rem Koolhaas, Geert Lovink, Eran Schaerf, Peter Weibel, Mark Wigley, a.o. VOLUME 15, SCREEN-BASED ART, ISBN 90-420-0801-6, 186p. In the 21st century, the screen -the Internet screen, the television screen, the video screen and all sorts of combinations thereof - will be booming in our visual and infotechno culture. Screen-based art, already a prominent and topical part of visual culture in the 1990s, will expand even more. In this volume “the new media” will be the subject of investigation. How could screen-based art be distinguished from other art forms? Could screen-based art be canonized? What are the ideosyncratic concepts geared toward screen-based art? Participants: Raymond Bellour, Noël Carroll, Sean Cubitt, Chris Dercon, Annemarie Duguet, Arnout Mik, Jeffrey Shaw, Peter Sloterdijk, Siegfried Zielinski, a.o.

page 184 L&B volume 18 VOLUME 16, EXPLODING AESTHETICS, ISBN 90-420-1315-x, 188p. Today, many visual artists are giving the cold shoulder to the static, isolated concept of visual art and searching instead for novel, dynamic connections to different image strategies. Could the characteristics of an artistic image and its specific manner of signification be determined in a world which is entirely aestheticized? What would be the consequences of a variety of image strategies for aesthetic experience? Would it be possible to develop a form of cultural criticism by means of artistic activities? Participants: Mieke Bal, Liam Gillick, Martin Jay, Friedrich Kittler, Maria Lind, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Richard Shusterman, Wolfgang Welsch, a.o. VOLUME 17, CONCEPTS ON THE MOVE, ISBN 90-420-1269-2, 198p. In order to give an impetus to the production of an apparatus of artistic concepts, in line with Deleuze and Guattari’s claim to create new concepts for a changing world, this volume publishes statements and discussions of ten Concept on the Move workshops, as well as texts and discussions of the concluding Concept on the Move symposium. Participants: Daniel Birn-baum, Lynne Cooke, Anne-Marie Duguet, Thierry de Duve, Mark Gisbourne, Boris Groys, Hou Hanru, Lev Kreft, Sarat Maharaj, Bartomeu Mari, Patricia de Martelaere, Andrew Morri-son, Jos de Mul, Michael Newman, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Heinz Paetzold, Herman Parret, John Rajchman, Andrew Renton, Irit Rogoff, Jerome Sans, Apolonia Sustersic, Peter Weibel, Hiroshi Yoshioka. More Information: www.rodopi.nl