What are the ways and means of conducting research at art academies? How do art students learn to weave research activities into their craft? Which kinds of intellectual struggles and practical concerns occur in the creation of a research-based work of art? And what are the political stakes and cultural issues that have undergirded the emergence of artistic research?
In some quarters of academic life, the norms and forms of conducting research are being expanded by a variety of transdisciplinary endeavors today. Artistic research is one of them. At art academies in Switzerland and abroad, advanced art students are increasingly trained in using (and challenging) received ideas and methods from the humanities, the social sciences, and even the natural sciences, in addition to a more conventional education in the arts. Academized Artists addresses this development with an ethnographic exploration into the field of artistic research and its epistemologies.
Based on qualitative interviews with lecturers and students in master's and PhD programs, participant observations in classes, studios and exhibitions, as well as analyses of canonical texts, manifestos, and curricula, this project explores the characteristics of research concepts and research techniques prevalent at art academies in Switzerland. It approaches the »thought styles« (Fleck) of artistic research as well as its relationship to long-standing academic ideals from an outsider's perspective which draws on the tools and concepts of Science Studies.
Art academies (or Kunsthochschulen/Hautes Écoles d'Art) are exemplary institutions for observing the unfolding of ideas on how research could be done differently. Comprehensive studies that examine this side of art institutions are rare, though. To date, there is a lack of ethnographically-minded materials on the workings of artistic research and on the enculturation of students within that field. This is also due to its ongoing differentiation and institutional consolidation. Hence, the project aims at wildly tentative, albeit concrete, insights into how artistic research establishes an intellectual tradition of its own, how it fosters the academization of artists, and what kinds of problems arise in that process.
By shedding some light on conceptions of research in a developing field, this study delves into current changes in the structure of academia, the disciplinary order of which is supplemented and in part replaced by interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and postdisciplinary practices. A case study on artistic research may help develop some heuristic tools for grasping these processes at the cutting edges of art academies on the one hand and universities on the other.