Artistic Research in the Future Academy

First published in the UK in 2017 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2017 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2017 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by

any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the

British Library.

Cover designer: Alex Szalbot

Copy-editor: MPS Technologies

Production manager: Richard Kerr

Typesetting: Contentra Technologies

Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-790-9

ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-791-6

ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-792-3

Printed and bound by Gomer Press Ltd, UK.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Transformation of the University

Chapter 2: The Art School

Chapter 3: Artistic Research: Defining the Field

Chapter 4: Science and Critical Suppression

Chapter 5: Critique, Artistic and Aesthetic

Conclusion: Exiting Artistic Research

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

Researching this book over the last decade has solidified its grounding principle: knowledge only transpires in communities of support, and behind the authorial signature of every creative effort lies a specific and extensive social world. In this case, I too owe many people a range of debts that cannot be repaid or fully acknowledged.

The research underpinning the early chapters of the book was undertaken as doctoral study at the University of Melbourne, under the supervision of Sean Cubitt and Scott McQuire, who have been sensitive readers and fine examples of the lineage of interdisciplinary critical work I hope to continue. The book was finished with the assistance of an Early Career Research Fellowship at the Research Unit in Public Cultures at the University of Melbourne, under the direction of Nikos Papastergiadis. All three have inspired with their support for younger scholars and their commitment to institutional battles that allow such care to be made meaningful. Suneel Jethani, Audrey Yue, Alison Young, Peter Rush, Meredith Martin, Robert Hassan, Robbie Fordyce, Tom Apperley, Dan Edwards and Daniella Trimboli have all provided important support at the university in different ways.

The Centre for Cultural Partnerships (CCP) at Victorian College of the Arts, and The Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland provided venues where research into the university-based art school has been grounded in my own teaching and supervision. At CCP I enjoyed the leadership and collegiality of Lachlan MacDowall, James Oliver, Marnie Badham and Dean Merlino, all of whom galvanised the political commitments of this book. In the broader VCA the support of Su Baker, Barb Bolt and Richard Frankland has made the institution seem humanisable and thinkable. At Elam, Jon Bywater has led a critical studies programme of vision and integrity. Departmental heads Derrick Cherrie, Nuala Gregory, and the late Jonathan Mane-Wheoki at Elam and Jon Cattapan at VCA provided valuable support. At both venues, Tania Cañas, Léuli Eshraghi, Jen Rae, Amy Spiers, Taarati Taiaroa, Anna Gardner, Shannon Te Ao, Karena Way, John Ward-Knox, and Cat Auburn have been fantastic co-teachers and fine artist-academics in their own right from whom I learned a lot. Conversations with all the faculty and students have been important for this project. Time teaching in the Department of Media Arts at Waikato Institute of Technology, and a residency at the Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster organised by Ned Rossiter were also important to the genesis of this project.

An ongoing collaboration with Rachel O’Reilly has specifically shaped the argument in the latter chapters, and from her engagement I am continually challenged to reassess my own thinking and writing. Abbra Kotlarczyk worked with me on the developmental editing of the text, and her sharp eye for what makes the historical relevant in the contemporary was critical to the book achieving its final form. Thanks are also due to Jessica Mitchell and Richard Kerr at Intellect for their care and support for the book.

Robert Hutchinson, my partner at Suma Media Consulting, and Claude-Yves Charron, former Secretary-General of ORBICOM, have been central to my understanding of institutional dynamics in ways that cannot be academically cited, but have been central to the project.

Too many collaborators to mention here have shaped the intellectual work of this book. Particular thanks are due to my MA thesis supervisors 2000–2005, McKenzie Wark and Graham Meikle. The Fibreculture group provided my first home for critical writing as an academic, and a schooling in collaborative work during this period. The members of the Intranation residency at Banff Centre for the Arts, especially collaborators Hemi McGregor and Natalie Robertson and advisors Ashok Mathur and Shirley Bear, provided an initial insight into the potential for creative enquiry within the colonial frame. Leora Farber at the University of Johannesburg invited me to Africa for the first time, where many threads in this research were clarified. Conversations with Huhana Smith, Luke Willis Thompson, David Haines, Joyce Hinterding, Sarah Waterson, Charlie Sofo and David Hatcher sharpened my sense of the issues at stake later in the project. Along with fellow organisers Jon Bywater and Nova Paul, participants in the Cultural Futures symposium (2005) at Hoani Waititi deepened my understanding of and connection to the specific currents underlying artistic practices in the Asia Pacific region: thanks go to Albert Refiti and Lemi Ponifasio; Amanda McDonald Crowley; Cheryl L’Hirondelle; Charles Koroneho; Creative Combat; Fatima Lasay; Jenny Fraser; Lisa Reihana; Rachael Rakena; and Raqs Media Collective. Raqs, along with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, have provided both generous hospitality and inspirational models for practice. Acknowledgements are also due to Lauren Berlant, Robert Nelson and David Garcia for their generosity and example.

A number of people provided their homes and venues for writing – particular thanks are due to Xavier and Carolyna Hart-Meade; Edwin and Ivy DeSouza; Bev and Ian Robertson; Jim and Velda Berghan; and Mick and Coco Butt, who also introduced me to Pulau Banyak, Aceh where much of this work was completed. Acknowledgements are also due to the Boon Wurrung, Wurundjeri, Ngāti Whātua and Tainui peoples on whose lands I have lived while undertaking this project. My parents, Les, Rhonda, Val, and Peter, have always provided love, encouragement, and support.

The other members of the Local Time collective (Jon Bywater, Alex Monteith, Natalie Robertson) have taught me that work is both more rewarding and more exacting with long-term collaborators. The book is dedicated to them and the whole Omaewa whānau, in support of a kaupapa that makes all institutional constraints seem available for transformation.

Finally, for Ruth DeSouza, without condition or reserve.

Parts of the Introduction have appeared in The Art of the Exegesis, Mute (2012) and Theses on Art and Knowledge, un Magazine 7.1 (2013). Other sections of the book have appeared in Whose knowledge? Practice-led research after colonial science in On Making: Integrating Approaches to Practice-Led Research in Art and Design (2010) edited by Leora Farber, and Neo-liberal and future universities, in the zine We are the University, published to accompany the Nationwide Day of Student Action, University of Auckland, 26 September 2011.

Introduction

At the end of the eighteenth century, Nazarene painter Eberhard Wachter rejected a position on the staff of the Stuttgart Academy, noting that there is too much misery in art already; I do not want to increase it.¹ Wachter uttered his sullen epigram on art education well before the development of postgraduate programmes in studio art, but the weariness of his tone would have only increased if he had to read research proposals, ethics applications, exegeses and all the other written requirements of the university-based art school. Duchamp did his best to dissuade us from pursuing research as a mode of artistic thinking, noting that there is no solution, because there is no problem.² Yet, since the integration of art schools into the university sector and the rise of creative practice Ph.D.’s and other research degrees, the need to define problems to satisfy a demand for academic rigour has become a problem of its own.

Art students often evade supervision of written research reports – perhaps hoping that the requirement might slip away unnoticed. Not because they can’t write: visual artists can be formally gifted and inventive writers. But we expect contemporary artists to be reflexive critics of form in the most expanded sense, and they are often unhappy with any institutional dictation of genre from above. As Dieter Lesage has argued, to require an artist to adopt a particular form of writing is precisely to fail to recognize their status as an artist.³ Students also seem to recognize that scholarly writing yields little aesthetic or professional reward: the market seeks the artist as a producer of mystery, rather than as an explainer of it. In Foucauldian terms, art points to the emergence and decline of stable discourses, zones where the seeable moves into or out of the realm of the sayable. After all, if a concept can be captured clearly in academic writing as a research question, what would be the point of making art with it? While scholarly writing undoubtedly assists the art education process, the actual written products associated with artistic research seem to have limited force both in the university and in the art world, existing primarily to allow a bureaucratic calculation of the student’s acceptability for an awarded degree.

Works of art always escape such constraints – whether set by curators, dealers, historians, academicians or, most critically, the artist themselves – in a future encounter with an audience. Artworks have a certain operationality. They work in the domain of J. L. Austin’s performative acts – they make something happen directly in the meeting between work and viewer. The materiality of the aesthetic work invites our interest as a boundary object, combining sensations, concepts and affects that are both generically familiar and singularly unknowable. As a form of hybridization, artistic works draw us outside ourselves and into it, while we, in turn, ingest the aesthetic experience of the work. The secret in the work is that which cannot be fully incorporated into ourselves or transmitted to another: the work is an index to the multiplicity of realities that become a motor for further discovery – more looking, more listening, more learning, more work. Art is always, in David Joselit’s memorable phrasing, beside itself, decomposing stable identity into possibility.⁴

It is true that in light of institutional critique the audience is not some fully permeable and neutral entity, ready to respond to whatever the work creates. There are banal sociological and political-economic parameters that construct an audience for which the work can work. However, the work itself is never quite readable from these constraints. There is something childlike or childish about the relation of contemporary artists to rules, but this is not a lack of seriousness – adults learn to forget that for the child play is completely serious, a way of crossing lines between the known and the unknown. The deconstructive critiques of literary criticism and the question of artistic research here share a fundamental truth: knowing the rules of the game is not the same as being able to play.⁵

Since Alberti in the fifteenth century, this instability in visual arts production has been erratically theorized as a form of world-making that can be classed as writing, in the broad sense. After Derrida, we understand reading and writing as terms that can be used for the operation of sign and trace across all media: oral, alphabetic, audio-visual, biological – production and reproduction. Spivak defines writing as a place where the absence of the weaver from the web is structurally necessary.⁶ The work is created for a reader who will take it up and make it their own, remaking themselves with the work. Therefore, in departure from the tradition of scientification that makes an individual responsible for their own knowledge, a writer is inevitably dependent on a suitably prepared reader, and it is this other reader, not the writer, who can account for the knowledge-effects generated.

Respect for the reader or viewer’s role in creating the scene of knowledge requires that the work be available for independent critical interpretation – a freedom and independence that since Kant has been essential to the operation of the aesthetic. Exegetical writings that seek to explain or account for the artist’s activity in the scientific paradigm run counter to knowledge-production in the work except as far as they enhance or constitute the freedom and independence of the work. If we took the actual role of the artist in relation to knowledge seriously, we could suggest that the artist who wants to obtain a doctorate should not only have the academic freedom to choose their own medium, but be evaluated on the contribution to aesthetic knowledge that this choice entails. Even then, it would still be possible that they choose text or even academic genres of text as the most appropriate medium for their artistic purposes.⁷

The relationship between the textual and the visual has a long, complex history in the arts that could be considered more carefully in the forms of university-based inquiry that bureaucratically constitute artistic research. This book does not attempt to cover the vast literature on this subject, but rather to identify the institutional histories that constitute this conjuncture in the English-speaking university setting and the conceptual frames and ideologies that have underpinned those histories. The broad narrative is that the emergence of modernist European capitalism led to the usurping of the theological university by the technoscientific one, and produced the possibility of disciplinary autonomy, which allows the integration of the fine arts into the university. However, since the 1960s, in accord with the tenets of neo-liberalism, the idea of the university has been replaced with the bureaucratic model of one. The philosophical or technoscientific university replaced the theological university with a sharpened concept of disciplinarity, yet chemistry and anthropology, for example, have little in common in their genre of writing, despite both conceiving of themselves as sciences. The justification for transformation in university disciplines today is primarily financial in nature. This is not simply due to national government policies lamented by many critiques of higher education cuts, but is more fundamentally due to a changed role for the state, the market and the conception of public benefit. This means that the debate about artistic research is no longer primarily about whether art does or does not constitute a university discipline – in the age of leisure studies and mining engineering programs this question is moot: a discipline is a market segment. Instead it is possible to understand artistic research as a form of inquiry that may fundamentally question the university’s role. Explanatory writing by the artist in the traditional critical traditions of the academy may still be useful in resisting the synchronization of the artwork to the art sales market, but this perhaps comes at the expense of synchronizing the artistic practice with the university market through the research degree as industry. This book suggests that the radical growth and rationalization of university teaching in the creative disciplines now allows the global art education market to exert a larger torque on artistic production than the traditional art sales market. In order to resist these constraints, a new locus of critique is required that sees capital’s operations not outside but within the university.

This book proposes that the most important knowledge-making in the visual arts is precisely – ironically – a performative institutional critique of these new constraints of artistic production: the research university’s knowledge-making practices. The archive of university knowledge is figured in the technoscientific paradigm as a smooth globe of knowledge to be contributed to by an appropriately defined research enquiry: an open-access database in the cloud. We know, however, that the idea of knowledge in the world gained through an expanded European university system is a contradictory historical tangle, resting on the material and political assumptions of colonial capitalism. Universities were established in the colonies to bring a missionary light to the dark corners of the earth and make them safe for occupation and exploitation. These institutions of secular enlightenment have a Christian-heritage not too far in their past, even as the state-sanctioned market displaces the nation state as the primary university-sponsoring institution. It is a culturally specific mode of knowledge that is being sustained as the reach of university knowledge is globalized. Yet, there are many ways of knowing that exceed the narrow parameters of techno-scientific knowledge in a globally validated form that dominate the university sector under capitalism. The visual arts perhaps collectively senses these constraints in the university, because the most influential criteria that delineate its own disciplinary boundaries have until very recently been held outside the university, in a quite different (though no less constraining) version of official culture expanded into a neo-liberal market. This book attempts to trace a history of the shared culture of these two markets – art world and university – to better understand the forces shaping art education today.

Research and Secularization

In traditional theological practice, the exegesis carried God’s word to the world, a mission reflected in the term’s Greek etymology (ex – outward; hegeisthai – to lead or guide). God’s final word could not be directly accessed by humans, and so biblical lessons required interpretation so they could be applied to everyday life. During the medieval birth of the university, the scholastic methods of disputation and interpretation developed this analytical method of the critic, eventually extending from the holy book to other works, including works of art. The small, fixed stock of artistic examples copied in the academy reflected God’s design for the world, and these also required interpretive commentary to reach an imperfect broader society. Interpretation in the critical tradition relies on dialogue and debate – even today it is not customary for a contemporary artist to secure the interpretation of their own work. Such attempts – increasingly demanded by research and educational institutions – position the artist’s discourse in an authoritative mode it has not traditionally sought in writing, and imposes upon the viewer’s freedom of appreciation that Kantian aestheticians have understood to be at the centre of the art experience. This is not to say that the artist lacks critical knowledge of their work, but theirs is merely the first in a chain of interpretations that run from artist, to curator, to audience and beyond. Once the work reaches a public, the correct interpretation can no longer be the artist’s property if the audience is to find their own experience of the work.

Science is an obvious culprit for the proprietization and individualization of interpretation in the university art school. Foucault described how the Renaissance era brought about the conditions for the spread of scientific thinking, where relations between name and order – how to discover a nomenclature that would be a taxonomy – became the preoccupation of the day.⁸ As we see in Chapter 2, for Giorgio Vasari, at the birth of the Italian visual arts academy, disegno would formalize classical proportion as a ratio of judgement that functioned independently of content in God’s design of the world. The fact that disegno could be an intellectual activity performed by men demonstrates the emergence of new technical processes for discovering truth. By the time we reach the modern universities from Berlin in 1810, secular science began to replace theological scholasticism as the dominant European means of stabilizing the natural world for analysis and calculation.

In this era, access to truth was democratized, or more correctly transposed from the institution of the church to the bourgeois gentleman through the scientific and artistic academies. Today, we think of science as opposed to religion, but for historian of science Robert Merton the transition from scientia as knowledge of God to scientia as knowledge of nature was not a revolutionary shift. Instead, under the Protestant ethic, scientific experimentation developed as a method for the pious discovery of God’s world, while the religious conception of nature’s truth moved from public to private language.⁹ In the nineteenth century, for example, it was impossible for the average scientist to suggest that scientific knowledge was incompatible with Christian thought. Natural philosophy was seen as a pious (if not religious) activity, proper for a gentleman precisely because it avoided the bitter arguments of scholasticism. Avoiding the interminable arguments about life and death, good and evil; the forward looking sciences bracketed such questions while pursuing ever more highly specialized modes of investigation, whose resulting knowledge of what is would be held with the expert individual.

As discussed in Chapter 4, historians of science such as Shapin have shown that the written account of experiments in the Republic of Letters became an exercise in the rhetoric of truth, which could be asserted by the writer without the transcendental-theoretical problems of theological argument.¹⁰ The scientific report would not be a set of instructions to be replicated or a set of arguments to be deconstructed, but a claim to significance by what Donna Haraway calls a modest witness, who must firmly position themselves in what Traweek calls a culture of no culture.¹¹ Lorraine Daston vividly describes this culture as reliant upon a moral economy of gentlemanly honor, Protestant introspection, [and] bourgeois punctiliousness.¹² In this mode, the written report must be seen to guarantee the validity and transferability of knowledge as a unit of truth. Ironically, this transferability would be obtained through the suppression of both the written rhetorical skills of the creator and their tacit experimental knowledge. Science would philosophically appropriate writing as a supposedly neutral container for knowledge in general. To achieve credibility the scientist must suppress the subjective conditions of production to construct a blank neutral facticity, guarding against the dread errors of idolatry, seduction, and projection that might compromise objectivity and breach decorum.¹³ What Galison calls the conditions of possible comportment for the scientific researcher were emblematic of colonial patriarchy, with its well-documented fears of the feminine body.¹⁴ The scientific appropriation and regulation of the self takes on a moral flavour that is reflected today in science’s hierarchical modes of industrial organization.

One proposition in this book is that scientific forms of knowledge, including the more scientific classifying tendencies of modern art history, do not help us much when it comes to considering the contributions of artistic research. The stable conceptual frames that scientific innovation seeks to propose, stabilize, renovate, extend and consensually advance are largely absent: even historical taxonomies of the avant-garde seem only made by the art historian to be broken by the artist. Works of contemporary art can only be engaged in the moment, where one gives oneself over to the work or moves with the work to some other perspective. To adopt a formulation from Irit Rogoff, the goal of the critical viewer is to singularize the work through the experience of the work.¹⁵ The scientific model of knowledge, by contrast,