The question or questions which have to be asked are: “What types of knowledge are you trying to disqualify when you say that you are a science? What speaking subject, what discursive subject, what subject of experience and knowledge are you trying to minorize when you begin to say: ‘I speak this discourse, I am speaking a scientific discourse, and I am a scientist.’ What theoretico-political vanguard are you trying to put on the throne in order to detach it from all the massive, circulating, and discontinuous forms that knowledge can take?” (Foucault 2003)
The recent conception of art as research within academic institutions has been problematic. As Adam Geczy noted, art is not research, art is art. He states that this ‘is not some gratuitous solipsism, for it recognises the discourses about what art means, which are a whole lot more venerable, productive and accurate than the definition that art is research’ (Geczy 2009).
Hanne Darboven, Kommentierte Darstellung der Quersummenkonstruktionen 27-28-20-21-22-23-24-25-26-27 in Zahlen (1968 - 77)
Framing art with the term research, a term that has been, perhaps unjustly, bound by a scientific method that requires the acquisition of new knowledge through observable, empirical and measurable evidence (Newton 1687), conceptually limits the unique ability of art to transcend boundaries of discourse. Despite this, the propagation of a ‘research culture’ within universities has compelled the art colleges subsumed by these academic institutions to adopt the terminology. Although the introduction of this terminology within the art college may have been instigated primarily by financial incentives, it cannot and should not be carelessly discarded as nought but the necessary newspeak required to function within the institutionalised art realm.
Research provides a new operative mode in which artists can practice, and is best approached as a new medium that artists can use, rather than an all encompassing framework that artistic practice should be subject to. Art itself already is a thoroughly tested all encompassing framework. Geczy is correct to proclaim that art is not research, it isn’t. Yet research can be art.
Foucault, M. (2003). Society must be defended: Lectures at the collège de france, 1975-1976. Picador.
Geczy, A. (2009). Art is not research. Broadsheet (Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia), 38(3), 206-209.
Newton, I. (1687). Rules for the study of natural philosophy. Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.
