Abstract
This article will examine the role of the artist as a researcher in the context of a highly specialized and complex information and network society. Following structural changes in the relationship between art, research, and society at large, including higher education, and their impact on contemporary practitioners, it will establish art practice as a privileged spot to produce both unique knowledge and cultural agency. The metaphor of the threshold, interstice, or liminal space will serve as a descriptor for how the practice of an artist can be understood and used as a device for knowledge production. The article will be tied closely to my own artistic practice.
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Notes
- 1.
Frayling (1993), McNiff (1998), Friedman (2000, 2003), Balkema and Slager (2004), Sullivan (2005), Holly et al. (2008), Liamputtong and Rumbold (2008), Hickman (2008), Varto (2009), Barone and Eisner (2011), Biggs and Karlsson (2011), Ritterman et al. (2011), Daichendt (2012), Jagodzinski and Wallin (2013), Nelson (2013), Rolling (2012, 2013); et al.
- 2.
- 3.
These spaces can be similar or very different. The threshold lies at the foundation of our definition of neighbor. Depending on the adjacent population and their hospitality, the threshold becomes a barrier or passage; a no-mans-land, a well-trafficked, or heavily controlled border.
- 4.
By turning the threshold into a swing, one sees its function amplified – as a connector, not a barrier, and no longer just a juncture, but an interstice, a space in its own right in between spaces.
- 5.
Victor Turner has described how the experience of liminality in small-scale societies occurs only for short periods of time before it needs a stabilizing structure. Yet, during the period of the ‘rite of passage’, a new identity is formed and the system gets reconfigured.
- 6.
Following George Spencer Brown’s Forms of Law, which starts out with the drawing of a distinction, constituting two spaces, Niklas Luhman has developed an epistemology of ‘second order observations’.
- 7.
Meskimmon (2011, p. 5). And in this, the artist “is not just a transcriber of the world, but he is its rival” as André Malraux has pointed out.
- 8.
Hereby further developing a concept by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. For Turner, liminality implies both instability and re-orientation.
- 9.
Like research, art practice can be seen as problem-driven.
- 10.
Nietzsche’s perspectivism, Derrida’s concept of iterability and Kierkegaard elaboration about repetition relate to this type of research. See Zalina A. Mardanova, http://www.inst.at/trans/16Nr/02_1/mardanova_bericht16.htm
- 11.
It needs to be said: the best scientific thinking has these features as well. Many leaps in knowledge have been made by people who do not think in traditionally constrained ways.
- 12.
A useful reference is Ken Friedman’s paper, Friedman (2000).
- 13.
Citizen science does something similar and speaks of a widening and democratization of research in which laymen now compete with labs for funding. See http://www.scientificamerican.com/openinnovation/ and Rogers (2011).
- 14.
See Jochum (1998).
- 15.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
… as well as the ‘unattainability of truth’, a fact that keeps feeding the quest.
- 18.
“The only ones who don’t get trained for specialization are artists, they want to be whole,” “It is the artists who keep the integrity of childhood alive until we reach the bridge between the arts and sciences.” From a keynote address by Allegra Snyder-Buckminster.
- 19.
Stenhouse (1981), p. 103.
- 20.
Friedman (2003), p. 512.
- 21.
“Artistic research is that interaction, where the two sides of practice and theory shape and shake each other.” Mika Hannula, In: Balkema and Slager (2004, p. 76).
- 22.
Part of a recent project called Richard, curated by Marco Antonini, containing readymades.
- 23.
For example: one of the critics on display invited a colleague and together they produced a critique of the project projected onto a screen live in front of the audience. Another exhibit, a curator, invited fellow curators for a lavish meal and onlookers had to make do with the fact that the nice dinner was taking place inside the vitrine while they were standing outside, excluded.
- 24.
He seemed to have little interest what this critic wrote about his work, except for that it was a well-known one.
- 25.
See Groys 2008, p. 111: “The art commentator’s role is entirely misconstrued if one expects him to be clear and comprehensible.”
- 26.
“Literary intellectuals at one pole – at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension – sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding.” Excerpt from Snow (1993, p. 64).
- 27.
Margot Meraner and Gerti Hopp, Bregenz, 2000.
- 28.
dis-positiv started as an artistic statement, which - by virtue of the context in which it operates - made it become a research project. The underlying questions were presented as: What does art produce beyond a discourse that confines the production of art? What does the discourse produce, other than more of its own?
- 29.
To run down a list of such changes, is nothing new; yet, institutionalized discourse often disregards the consequences this has for the practice and – subsequently – research.
- 30.
The widening debate about post-studio can be found, for example, in Jacob and Grabner (2010).
- 31.
- 32.
Art education in the U.S., but in Europe as well, seems to have caught up with of these changes only recently.
- 33.
Critics were inclined to judge art works within two extremes: either in terms of their morality: good versus bad; or their place within history: old and repetitive versus new. The advent of visual culture has flattened some of these extremes and introduced new categories, for example postmodern versus modern.
- 34.
- 35.
Some of these thoughts are taken from the original concept of dis-positiv from 1998, which incorporated hyperbolism in order to take intellectual command over a timely topic that needed to stand its ground as to entice the curators and philosophers to participate in their display.
- 36.
And the curator an artist of sorts.
- 37.
Bibliography and footnotes are expressions of this phenomenon.
- 38.
dis-positiv, the exhibition project was copied a few times, including by prominent artists such as Jochen Gerz, who misappropriated the credits. Plagiarism is taken very seriously in academia, but is rarely acknowledged in the arts, where appropriation has made itself a name as an artform of its own.
- 39.
As Morris Weitz was pointing out, see Cahn (2002). Or as Howard Becker said it aptly: “The title ‘art’ is a resource that is at once indispensable and unnecessary to the producers of the works in question. It is indispensable because, if you believe art is better, more beautiful, and more expressive than nonart, if you therefore intend to make art and want what you make recognized as art so that you can demand the resources and advantages available to art – then you cannot fulfill your plan if the current aesthetic system and those who explicate and apply it deny you the title. It is unnecessary because even if these people do tell you that what you are doing is not art, you can usually do the same work under a different name and with the support of a different cooperative world.” Becker (1984, p. 133).
- 40.
This sometimes happens unprovoked and from outside, the Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald being one example, Cindy Sherman’s ‘Untitled Film Stills’ another. Or it happens because artists team up, following the lesson of Matthew Barney, and collaborate with writers, curators, critics, and theorists to build strategic partnerships or real collaborations. These cases are the exception and of little illustrative value for the tectonic changes that I am interested in pointing out.
- 41.
“… Science has become blind in its capacity to monitor, foresee, even to conceive its social role, in its capacity to integrate, articulate, reflect on its own knowledge. If the human mind cannot effectively apprehend the enormous entirety of disciplinary knowledge, then something must change-either the human mind or disciplinary knowledge.” Morin (2008, p. 32).
- 42.
Serres et al. (1983).
- 43.
Jochum (1998).
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Jochum, R. (2015). Crossing Thresholds: Artistic Practice in Times of Research. In: Bast, G., Carayannis, E., Campbell, D. (eds) Arts, Research, Innovation and Society. Arts, Research, Innovation and Society. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09909-5_6
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