Does Artistic Research Produce Knowledge? A Five-Fold Distinction

Abstract

[Paper was presented at the annual conference of the European Society for Aesthetics, which took place in Dublin in June 2015. It was part of the results of the funded research project FFI2012-32614 “Aesthetic Experience and Artistic Research: Cognitive Aspects of Contemporary Art”]

“Artistic research” is the buzzword that seems to bring contemporary art practices
to new forms, which are more academically respectable and closer to the
empirical and social sciences and humanities. The introduction of doctorates
in art schools and the normalisation of school curricula in Europe because
of the Bologna Process have been crucial here. Such urgencies have created
enormous confusion over the meaning of “artistic research”. I would like to
help bring some order to these often-contradictory voices. The value of art
lies in what sets it apart from religion, science, philosophy and all other forms
and products of human thought, and I believe that anyone who seeks academic
recognition and the erasing of differences is confused. In this paper, I distinguish
between five different concepts in the use of the expression “artistic
research”:
1. Research for art, i.e. for the production of art.
2. Research on social, historical or anthropological subjects, which runs in
parallel to research in the social sciences and humanities.
3. A kind of curatorial research.
4. Artistic research through art or in the medium of art, as a production of
disturbances of knowledge and sensibility.
5. Last but not least, the fifth meaning is eminently philosophical and refers
to the consideration of the work of art as a device for the emergence
of what is not thought or said and aims to create new ways of thinking,
to produce a place for what is not yet thought or said.