Frederic Jameson, foreword to The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, by Jean-François Lyotard, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xii.
Ibid., ix.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press), 30.
Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press), 61.
The most baldly instrumental prospectus I read came, naturally, from England – the country where cultural tourism policies have been pursued with the most vehemence. A call issued by the University of Northampton sought applicants for a praxis-based PhD analyzing public behavior to curated sites, one aim of which is "to investigate how experience and understanding of particular public spaces in Northamptonshire might be enhanced through interdisciplinary arts research." How can we read this aim other than as another palliative in countering the degradation of the English hinterlands by decades of neoliberal public policy, which have consistently championed cultural tourism and other forms of service-based remediation as a solution?
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 35.
Ibid., 35. The issue for Lyotard is that the passage from the denotative to the prescriptive is unintelligible: it does not necessarily follow that statements describing real situations of social iniquity are remedied by prescriptions based on those statements, or that such remedies will be just. If their combination is a type of linguistic operation, which “is also that of liberalism,” it is also one that conceals its difference, since plugged into the theoretical ordering of a denotative statement “there are some implied discursive orderings that determine the measure to be taken in social reality to bring it into conformity with the representation of justice that was worked out in the theoretical discourse….” See Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 21.
See Mika Hannula, Juha Suoranta, and Tere Vadén, Artistic Research: Theories, Methods and Practices (Gothenburg: Göteborgs Universitet/Art Monitor, 2005), 19. A presumably academic boilerplate that admits the impossibility of defining artistic research or at least complicating the possible definition through recourse to its impossibility—would not be an acceptable premise for comprising an academic discipline. Admitting this impossibility, however, might be one way of modulating the search for an adequate definition, since, as Derrida writes, “impossibility is not the simple contrary of the possible. It supposes and also gives itself over to possibility, traverses it, and leaves in it the trace of its removal. There is nothing fortuitous about the fact that this discourse on the conditions of possibility … can spread to all the places where performativity … would be at work: the event, invention, the gift, the pardon, hospitality, friendship, the promise, the experience of death, et cetera.”
From my parsing of the discussion, despite the imperative of Bologna, the European construction of the artistic PhD has failed to establish a uniform conception of theory, praxis, and methodology. By way of anecdote, a Romanian friend compelled to enter a PhD program in order to keep the teaching position she has held for the last nine years, related how in Bucharest, the department overseeing her PhD did not even consider the PhD in-art as necessitating any special formulation whatsoever. Accordingly, it has been constructed in line with the standard requirements for disciplines in the humanities—namely art history.
Hannula, Suoranta, Vadén, Artistic Research, 38.
Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster (New York: The New Press, 1998),131.
Hannula, Suoranta, Vadén, Artistic Research, 114; Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 38.
Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 5.
A cursory glance into the history of Western culture, in fact, reveals the quattrocento transformations of science and art were driven, on the one hand, by the Spanish Inquisition, which dispersed Jewish scholars of the Kabalist tradition into the centers of Western European commerce, and, on the other, this strand of theosophical thought was immediately linked by Christian scholars to a nascent Neoplatonic tradition. In both philosophies, one finds a conceptualization of the unity of human endeavors—arithmetic, geometry, harmonics, and architecture—wedded to a mystical notion of a divine correspondences between man, God, and nature. Historical research indicates both Kabalist and Neoplatonic traditions influenced the gradual development of autonomy within the different disciplines (architecture, music, representational art, technology, the sciences)—although from the fourteenth up to the eighteenth century these were not seen as separate disciplines but as different expressions of an underlying unity. (See the work of British historian Frances Yates who has written extensively on this topic.)
Denis Hollier writes: “Transgression does not belong to the same space as the idea, except as something that subverts it. That is why transgression is a matter not for theory but for practice.”
Nilsson quotes Arthur C. Danto to the effect that “art objects need discourse in order to become one.”
Per Nilsson, The Amphibian Stand: A Philosophical Essay Concerning Research Processes in Fine Art (Umeå: h:ström Texte & Kultur, 2009), 165.
Hito Steyerl, “Aesthetics of Resistance? Artistic Research as Discipline and Conflict,” MaHKUzine Journal of Artistic Research #8 (Utrecht, winter 2010).
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 118.
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 9.
Agamben, Man Without Content, 101.
Ibid., 101.
Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1999), 181.
Ibid., 155. Here he quotes Henry S. Dyer, “College Testing and the Arts,” in eds. Lawrence E. Dennis and Renate M Jacobs, The Arts and Higher Education (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1968), 89.
Thomas Crow, “Unwritten Histories of Conceptual,” in eds. Aleader Alberro and Blake Stimson Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2000), 564.
I still recall how when I arrived at CalArts in the fall of 2000, students still mythologized the attitude prevalent in the late 1990s, when graduate students had become so discursive they ceased producing objects altogether. We who came later, arriving with at least one eye on the burgeoning art market, did not participate in the ideological purity of this habitus. Nevertheless, we could still feel its absence as something that had passed.
The term “knowledge production” is generally associated with the cultural transformations that coincided with the emergence of a “knowledge economy” (a term first coined by Austrian-born economist Fritz Machlup in the early 1960s), and as such, reflect the conflicts arising in a society where knowledge, in the words of Tom Holert, “has become the source of social and economic value production, that is, the object of exploitation and class struggle.” My own familiarity with the term stems from its employment by Marxist oriented artists who considered the appropriate telos of artistic work as fundamentally rooted in an investigation of existence under capitalism. I once asked Michael Asher, my mentor at CalArts, if he considered art to have a function other than knowledge production. His response was “no.”
Jameson, foreword to The Postmodern Condition, ix.
Examples of such alternative practices could be based on the deployment of symbol systems to heal the social wound, or a Neoplatonism governed by the correspondence between number, architectonics, music, and the natural sciences, or a pre-Colombian ideology of expenditure—a world without art where things are made for use.
Ibid., 10–11.
Heiner Bastian and Jeannot Simmen, Joseph Beuys: Ziechnungen/ Tekeningen/ Drawings (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1980), 46.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 188.
Sande Cohen, Academia and the Luster of Capitalism (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 2.
Robert Smithson, “Cultural Confinement,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, 281.
Cohen, Academia and the Luster of Capitalism, 11.
Ibid., 3.
Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke (London: Penguin Books, 1989), 24.