Artesnet in Porto

Peer Power! The future of Higher Arts Education in Europe
ESMAE, Porto, 7-8 May 2010

www.artesnet.eu

In an ideal world this would have been posted ‘live’ as it happened … sometimes hotel broadband is not what it should be, even when you have to pay for it!!

Who judges?

Artistic Research: Evaluation and Canon Formation
Zurich University of the Arts, 29-30 April

There has been a recent shift in the debate about artistic research. The rhetorical battle over establishing PhDs in the arts seems to be largely fought: it is not that there are no doubts about them but they have become an institutional fact, even though it’s unsure how long the present exponential growth in PhD programmes can last. But now that people are doing it all around Europe, and there is a larger body of work to judge, the question is rather how to judge it, and how to build upon it. The initial discussion has been large in epistemological terms, raising the rather abstract issue how ‘art’ could count as ‘knowledge’ – if that was a question that makes sense at all. This had led to such an enormous theoretical over-determination, both of the work and the reflection upon it,  that it became almost impossible to say what was good work. And that seems the more interesting discussion.

Publics and purposes at GradCAM

The conference arts research: publics and purposes opened yesterday in Dublin, and to our eternal regret, we can’t be there. Organized by GradCAM, the Irish institute for research in the arts, it addresses a question that so far has rarely been asked: how are artist researchers going to find an audience? For who is this made? And why? Combining the search for a public with reflection on the purposes, and five days of sessions with a range of exhibitions and performances, the conference comes with the most concise rationale I have ever seen:

who for? what for?

This could well be a landmark event where the discussion gets beyond mere discussion. At any rate, the search for a public seems to be rather succesful, for almost every event of the week is fully booked.

www.gradcam.ie

Where do we go from here?

The artist as researcher, The Hague, 5-6 February

Yesterday’s discussion was largely about visual culture and embodied, de-centered modes of thinking. Today’s was much more about institutions and curating. Kitty Zijlmans, in her opening keynote, described how she got ten tons of textile scraps from China to Leiden for Li Haifeng’s The Return of the Shred. Stephan Dillemuth described his own Werdegang from artistic pubescence to bohemia to academia, which appears as a research career only in retrospect. Henry Jacobs, who is researcher in residence at the Rietveld Academy, spends his days there in a glass cube. And at the closing panel, course leaders sat next to curators, discussing where do we go from here.

The artist as speaker

The artist as researcher, The Hague, 5-6 February

When I started working for ELIA two years ago, I hadn’t heard yet of artistic research. That wasn’t uncommon then. Even two months ago, I still had to explain it to a group of philosophers and historians of science with an interest in discipline formation, unaware of this new department at their university. Since then, two large articles appeared about it in a national newspaper, announcing the first Dutch doctor of the arts and the Artist as Researcher conference, and that probably reduced the number of innocents in the Netherlands.

There are still not too many people directly invoved in it.  PhDarts, the visual arts programme of the Royal Academy in The Hague, has 6 PhD students; DocARTES around 30 but that’s coordinated from Ghent. Those numbers, however, don’t say everything. Today, the Artist as Researcher Conference started in The Hague, and the attendance was overwhelming.

What’s going on? (3) – An interview with Chris Wainwright

The CCW Graduate School, positioning research in the arts, and the role of ELIA

Last September, University of the Arts London officially launched the Graduate School at CCW  – integrating the MA and research programmes of Camberwell, Chelsea, and Wimbledon Colleges, and creating by far the largest institute for postgraduate arts education in Europe so far. As the Graduate School Launch Directory states, it currently consists of “over 80 research students, over 450 taught postgraduate students, 39 professors, readers and fellows” – in short, it’s huge.

Now it’s not just size that counts. Over the last few decades, there has been a steady but small-scale development towards a research culture in higher arts education – culminating, with the Bologna process, in the emergence of artistic research programmes and PhDs in the arts throughout Europe. The question is whether the launch of the CCW Graduate School also has an impact on these developments. So far, artistic research has not attracted very much attention from the wider public, and has been a somewhat marginal activity even within art schools. Apart from the sheer force of numbers, what does the launch mean for positioning research in the arts? How do these developments in arts education affect the role of art academies, and even the role of the artist?

And more modestly: if things are a-changing in higher arts education, what is the role of ELIA? This question is particularly pressing in interviewing Chris Wainwright, who is both Head of CCW and President of ELIA. (It has also been the topic of a 2008 position paper on artistic research, but the discussion does not end there.) And after arguing for the importance of artistic researchers making their voices heard, this is not merely an issue of facilitating discussion, but also of how ELIA can help making these voices heard.

An overview of artistic research meetings

Researchers at the Institute for Applied Research in the Arts (Instituut voor Onderzoek in de Kunsten, IvOK) have been attending a fair share of conferences on artistic research in the past year. On the IvOK site, you can find reports of meetings in Göteborg, Solstrand, Helsinki, Utrecht, Glasgow, Dresden, Venice, Zurich, Exeter, Aberdeen, and London. Two of them have also been covered on this blog and we hope to do more in the future, but the IvOK reports give a fair overview of what’s been going on.

http://associatie.kuleuven.be/ivok/engconferencereports.htm

“Wise words from a house-builder”

Urban Knowledge at the Dutch Artistic Research Event, and something about EUFRAD too

EUFRAD

It’s been three days since the European Forum of Research Degrees in Art & Design closed off in an athmosphere of enthousiasm and community feeling. Even for the odd artistic research sceptic, it was the sort of moment that makes you proud and happy to be there. Dame Janet Ritterman reviewed the state of artistic research now, and Stuart Evans described with characteristic wit how he arrived there.

EUFRAD at the Glasgow School of Art (2)

Live blogging from the European Forum for Research Degrees in Art and Design, Glasgow, 4-6 September

What’s the litmus test for what’s good artistic research? According to Johan Haarberg, coordinator of the Norwegian Stipendiatsprogrammet, it’s when teachers will tell their colleagues to go and see it. The Norwegian programme, he adds with a slight tone of irony in his voice, does not include a course on methodology. After all the headings ‘methodology’ that we’ve seen passing by over the last one and a half days, that’s a relief. When artists are supposed to add a header ‘methodology’ as a disclaimer to their work, and the content of that disclaimer is French thinkers in English translation, one senses that something has gone terribly wrong, particularly in the UK.

EUFRAD is a very friendly meeting of people that want to learn from each other and have a shared interest in art that’s difficult, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t grave controversies. One of them in particular is about entry level. We’re not too eager to have fresh MA graduates, people from Leuven and Bergen state. We want experienced artists that know what they’re doing when they embark upon a three/four-year project. That’s fine, the objection comes, but then we’re not talking about PhD level anymore. If the requirement for admission is international standing, then you’re hiring senior researchers. And also, who’s going to do the quality assurance? Should the supervisors be on a higher level than their pupils?

EUFRAD at the Glasgow School of Art

Live blogging from the European Forum for Research Degrees in Art and Design, Glasgow, 4-6 September

Every one in the art world now knows what artistic research is – or maybe no one knows, for why else would there be all these conferences about artistic research? As Klaus Jung said today, opening the EUFRAD conference at the Glasgow School of Art, we’re all guinea pigs. Actually, he meant something different by that: EUFRAD is not a conference meant to define artistic research, but to create an open discussion between people doing artistic research around Europe, with a full spectrum of disciplines and approaches.

EUFRAD stands for European Forum for Research Degrees in Arts and Design, and it’s one of the initiatives that artesnet is developing to keep track of what’s going on in higher arts education. Another, closely related, is the overview of artistic research programmes that will appear on the artesnet site later this year and gradually develop from there. But so far, we’re still in the informal stage.