Artistic Research and the Doctorate in the Arts
First off, I’d like to say that, on the one hand, I consider the Bologna Process with its re-organization of the entire university and academic educational system more a lamentable development than a welcome one. Along with many other contemporary educational policy measures, it’s a development that works to replace an emancipatory and cultural ideal of education with criteria best applied to economic efficiency. For decades, the original, indefinite length of university studies has been more and more rigidly regulated and hardly anyone fights against that anymore. But what neo-liberal educational policies are particularly grinding down is the last refuge of exceptions. A well-developed bourgeois society has always allowed for exceptionalism for academics and, most especially, for artists, not least of all to keep a subsidized spot free for the classic concept of the novel that follows the development of a character. The more that contemporary, post-bourgeois culture gets bogged down in the biography fetish, where real people and bodies seem to have become the non plus ultra on the media stage, the more that real spaces where biographies can actually unfold and, above all, take unexpected turns, is destroyed. It makes sense to me to defend the remaining spaces and constellations, even if it is a katechonic task. But that defense will fail if it orients itself solely to the false romanticism of the old model and doesn’t take an active role in shaping exceptionalism.
So I consider it necessary to participate in those events; in particular in the moments that remain to be shaped, no matter how few they may be. This makes sense to me not only to prevent worse things from happening and to establish the best possible interpretations of the guidelines. It makes sense, above all, in the case of artistic research to so develop and be proactive in defending the aspects of exceptionalism at the art academies that are worthy of support – including as a safe harbor against the other consequences of the Bologna Process, so that they meet the current standards not only of the critical discussions on education, but also of art itself. This is particularly important since at the moment, many opponents of the Bologna Process at the art academies are simply trying to preserve reactionary structures like the master class system. Exceptionalism of the art academies means that they are the places where you have a chance, in the old sense of a life plan, to step outside of time and suspend your self-exploitation for at least a couple of years. And to do it even in times of an art market that has become completely cannibalistic. It doesn’t mean orienting towards the time management structures of even older business organizations such as guilds and brotherhoods. But that’s what the master class system does. It isn’t a policy of exception, but of regression.
Among the few opportunities contained in some of the developments linked to the Bologna Process, are the enhanced value of research and theory at the art schools, which provides a chance to use complexity to shape and justify exception. In my opinion, we should not surrender to the illusion that we can treat the idea of artistic research purely as a special area, locking it away as a kind of second tier exceptionalism – i.e. as an academic exception from the artistic exception from the normal art college – in the relatively rarified air of the dissertation or the Ph.D., by practice or in practice. For instance, in the hope that few would choose that path. As the highest degree that an art academy or an art university can bestow, its introduction, and the introduction of preparatory programs for it, will exert a normative influence on the entire academy. So we must concentrate on influencing and determining the content of the normativeness meant to be linked to the terminology.
In principle, there are two directions. The first stems from whatever practical training already exists that can be called artistic research – above all, project and process oriented, reflexively post-conceptual actions, often critical of institutions, which have been around since the early 1990s and often revolve around the construction and critique of teaching, knowledge production and its architecture. The second direction links the term to the challenge of not starting from the familiar, but rather expanding the new terminology of artistic research to include the discussions of new and overdue art terms. Traditionally, a dissertation has always included the demand to explore new territory. Given that argument, continuing with an existing style of research, albeit ennobled by a title, would be doing too little.
Of course, we should not forget that higher education institutions can influence the form of their products (theses etc.), but they cannot impose art terminology. They can only connect themselves to what already exists, albeit in the sense that they take a position and are dynamic with regards to current debate. But above all, they can draft frameworks in such a way that unexpected developments can be incorporated into them. However, the obvious choice of making the framework as broad as possible, seems to me to be precisely the wrong one. Given the already extant danger of “anything goes”, that kind of vague title would lead to a false (because unfounded) and not particularly spirited exceptionalism. What I think would be more appropriate would be a mesh of descriptions and frameworks that could do justice to the expected unexpected and to complexity without giving up the expectation that arises from an art doctorate like that. On the pragmatic level of higher education policy, it could be described thusly: set up an opportunity to work at a high artistic level, free of the constraints of the market and self-exploitation. This would include the opportunity to work for years before having to deliver full-blown results, while at the same time working in a community of peers, counseled by academics and artists, in surroundings more marked by joint goals than classic competitiveness. And not because that situation would mean better people, but rather because, in contrast to the production of marketable goods, the prevailing conditions in research allow it.
(1) In the first case, in the sense of the distinction cited above, i.e. an orientation of the term artistic research to practical training, for which this term already seems accurate, one would have to introduce an additional distinction. On the one hand, there are artists and other practitioners who integrate artistic actions into projects, whereby their ambition is first and foremost to seek contact to a public in academia, the social sciences, humanities or, more rarely, the natural sciences. These practitioners merely integrate or supplement with artistic processes and artistic knowledge, without according it a fundamentally different status or a fundamentally different way of expression. Or at least, even if they do accord it a different way of expression, it is still subsumed in a result, the validity of which is determined by the rules of academic discourse. Therefore from a manner of speaking that doesn’t reverse itself, that doesn’t recognize the possibility of speaking in brackets or allowing ambivalence to stand.
(2) On the other hand, there are artists who do research, and definitely adhere to demanding, academic procedural rules, but do so only as a last-ditch measure as part of an artistic project that, in the end, is meant to remain art and, therefore, bracketed in a certain sense. Academic discourse rules – such as those governing the exclusion of opposition – just don’t apply. Although in some defined areas, discursive coherence does prevail and is meant to prevail, the project as a whole is art, intended as an aesthetic experience. There is no way to set up criteria for its success that could be institutionalized. But that bracketing and utilization of the discursive and of text segments and research fragments generated according to academic processes is precisely what makes for an interesting opportunity for artistic research. So within the framework of an art doctorate, it has to be about the artistic framing of academic work within an art project in turn being framed scientifically – in other words, it must be explicit, so that in the end, it could be incorporated into an argumentational discourse that could name the conditions of its truth.
(3) That kind of additional academic framing would also be the condition for the approval of totally different artistic research that would not, at first, correspond to the category of either research incorporated into art or art included in research projects, in each case in post-conceptual training programs, but rather would appear inherently to be projects of “pure” visual arts. The bon mot that all satisfying artistic work of any genre always includes research anyway could be countered with the argument that in the final instance, the translation of an initially purely artistic research action into an ambitious, arguable thesis is a condition of accepting such projects as artistic research. Such works and the discursive elements that are connected to them or attached to them can only be meaningful when the artistic quality (novelty, advancement) is the subject of the academic discussion, which, like in a laboratory setting, actually presents a new situation for the debate on aesthetics and can demonstrate that.
(4) Like both its predecessors, the last form of artistic research also sets as a criterion the issue of how it can be linked to other discussions in arts and humanities. It incorporates in one way or another artistic production as a practical/experimental side of humanities work. In this case, art practice takes on a role similar to that of experimentation in natural sciences research. A different model, meanwhile, would look less for the link with humanities. Rather it would work the other way around, by examining to what extent research at an art academy or university can really be directly linked to artistic practice.
For some time, a split has been developing at the art schools between the theoretical and practical divisions, or at least that’s the widespread impression. There are repeated efforts to organize a way to bring the departments and events where there are discussions and where plain language is (or should be) spoken into a meaningful relationship with art. But the difference is often not between theory and practice, but rather between the reception aesthetic and the production aesthetic. In the decades of conceptual and post-conceptual, cross-media and performative arts, that latter has given rise to a completely new knowledge of artists. Because that phenomenon is unconventional, it has not been well documented and remains unsystemized and locked in the oral culture of master classes wherever it did not completely adopt discursive and artistic forms. In the arts and humanities, however, cultural and aesthetics theories are almost all, genealogically speaking, characterized by a reception aesthetic. By contrast, the production aesthetic artists’ knowledge would be, in some ways, a buried treasure. Integrating it into new artistic research would differentiate that research from art theory at regular universities and lead to a different structure of the so-called theoretical and practical disciplines within the academy.
So something is to be gained from all of these models. Something that would strengthen the academies’ special position and, at the same time, through a stronger link with self-defined discursive formats, bring about a more intense exchange between their different forms of knowledge. The result would be a more solid academy. But in order for that to succeed, it is also important to precisely describe the varying models and their internal architecture of artistic and argumentative elements, as well as to achieve clarity on the differences of ways of expression and their status. Currently, we can observe an unpleasant tendency to confuse political themes with political action, bracketed with unbracketed comments and participation in art with democratic participation. There is also a tendency, by voluntarily equating artistic with non-artistic practice, to gamble away the specific chances of necessarily bracketed, artistic speech in favor of vulgarized desires for political directness. All that makes it necessary to obligate artistic research to practice formal, politically discursive self-reflection.