Re: <nettime> What is wrong the 'Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research'?

[Max Herman <maxnmherman@hotmail.com>]

Hi Florian,

Interesting policy paper and commentary, many thanks for posting!

One oddity that caught my eye in the Declaration was the omission of literature and writing from the list of "all art practice disciplines."  Your mention of "conceptual poetry" perhaps relates to this.  Why exclude literature but include architecture?  To be sure, art schools generally omit literature from their definition of Art but the exclusion seems all the more arbitrary here in the context of "research."  

It seems pretty clear that this Declaration is designed for administrative control, or coherence, whichever one wishes to call it.  The goal seems to be mainly to define the funding, career path, standards and practices, etc.  This would probably only warrant policy attention if there was something undesirable about lack of control or the consequences of such lack.  What are they trying to pre-empt, and why?  I would imagine that splintering and extremism in the European Project are on their list, as well as economic stagnation.  In a way, are these not the longstanding goals of the Union?  They're far from perfect goals, drably mundane in many ways actually, but understandable and not necessarily always highly malevolent.  The art world, like many spheres of society, loves novelty but detests instability.

If one takes a skeptical view of intellectual institutions, along the lines of Thomas Bernhard's Woodcutters say, the role of artists in AR will clearly involve some irony and "programming the programmers."  There will probably be all kinds of AR along various spectrums -- conservative and liberal, corporate and local, traditional and reformist, free and for-profit, etc. -- and lots of camps and factions within the field.  Maybe this Declaration is a statement of "minimum and preferred qualifications"?  Artists may find their role to be acting as counterbalances to institutional myopia, or the gadfly as it were.

As always of late, I see many parallels to the work and time of Leonardo in which the same person would design both military fortifications and costumes for wealthy patrons' parties.  Machiavelli clearly took one approach to the ethics of "AR," i.e. to use art and science for power without regard for morality or "the golden rule."  However, there were other more cooperative and trust-based ethics as well during that time, many of which hoped to directly counter the Machiavellian system so obviously in the ascendant (both then and still now).  One such example is Leonardo's, which I believe to have been an evolution into the modern age of Dante's poetics of virtue as beauty and truth symbolized by Beatrice.  Leonardo modernized the guiding ideal of all art and science still further as "Esperienza" or Experience, a female personification with many attributes in common with Beatrice.

Leonardo expert Martin Kemp of Oxford University wrote in his book Mona Lisa (2017) that "A full study of Leonardo and poetry would be highly rewarding -- and very demanding" (p.143).  Perhaps such a study would fall under the rubric of Artistic Research?  In any case, it has quite possibly not yet been done.

Full disclosure, I co-lead a research group studying the relationships among meditation, neuroscience, and all the arts (including literature).

All best,

Max

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Subject: <nettime> What is wrong the 'Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research'?

 

With Nienke Terpsma from "Fucking Good Art", I wrote this response to
the 'Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research', a policy document written
by seven European art school umbrella organizations, two accreditation
bodies, a public arts sector organization and the Society for Artistic
Research (SAR). Although the Vienna Declaration will likely become a
future constitution and framework for artistic research in European art
schools - and thus affect the life and work of many people subscribed to
this mailing list -, no public debates of its content seem to have taken
place in the six months after its publication. To get an idea of its contents
and rhetoric, see the "Found Footage" section below. We thought that it
was time to speak up.

The piece has first been published by/on OPEN!, Platform for Art, Culture
and the Public Domain,
https://www.onlineopen.org/what-is-wrong-with-the-vienna-declaration-on-artistic-research


# What Is Wrong with the 'Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research'?
by Florian Cramer & Nienke Terpsma

## Found Footage

> 'Artistic Research [AR]) is practice-based, practice-led research in
> the arts which has developed rapidly in the last twenty years globally
> and is a key knowledge base for art education in Higher Arts Education
> Institutions (HAEIs).'
>
> 'AR is well suited to inspire creative and innovative developments in
> sectors such as health and wellbeing, the environment and technology,
> thus contributing to fulfilling the HEIs' "third mission". AR must be
> seen as having a unique potential in the development of the "knowledge
> triangle."'
>
> 'Within this frame, AR is aligned in all aspects with the five main
> criteria that constitute Research & Development in the Frascati
> Manual.'
>
> 'HAEIs operate predominately within a research context and have
> a responsibility to conduct AR. It is also common for HAEIs to
> interact with related enterprise Research & Development, and to
> contribute directly to the creation of intellectual property in arts,
> entertainment and media through research practice.'
>
> 'This environment requires funding for: educating the next generation
> of researchers through doctoral programmes; ensuring appropriate
> physical and virtual infrastructures as well as archiving and
> disseminating means; building links with business and enterprise in
> order to stimulate the impact of research.'
>
> 'AR is validated through peer review covering the range of
> disciplinary competences addressed by the work. Quality assurance
> is undertaken by recognised independent, international QA bodies
> and assures the standards described in the European Standards and
> Guidelines (ESG 2015) for Quality Assurance in the European Higher
> Education Area.'
>
> '[T]he establishment of AR as an independent category within the
> Frascati Manual, establishing the opportunity for harvesting research
> data and statistics from the AR field.'

This is not conceptual poetry; these are quotes from the _Vienna
Declaration on Artistic Research_ signed on 20 June 2020 by all
major organisations of European art schools. Of the many things
that rub one the wrong way, two stand out: next to the grotesque
neoliberal-bureaucratic language, art schools' land-grabbing claim to
own and define artistic research. Both, of course, done with the best
intentions to emancipate artistic research.

The _Vienna Declaration_ doesn't mention artists at all; they literally
don't exist in its text.


## From Artistic Research to AR; from Descriptions to Prescriptions

For future art education in Europe, the _Vienna Declaration_ may
become as influential as the _Bologna Declaration_ of 1999 (on whose
basis continental European higher education was reorganised into the
Anglo-American Bachelor and Master system). It dwells on the same shaky
grounds of not actually being a legal text or governmental policy
document. Factually, it is a manifesto for institutionalising artistic
research at European art schools, by intrinsically linking what in most
cases used to be two separate things: artistic research and doctoral
study programmes.[^1] Written in a language that reads like its own
parody, with its abundance of tacky logos reminiscent of spam messages,
the _Vienna Declaration _doesn't pretend any semblance to a manifesto
written by artists in support of artistic research. It is of course
(and, for its intended purpose, needs to be) a bureaucratic policy
document; but beyond that, it is a constructed foundation myth and
institutional power grab.

With the [research project job
openings](https://feinart.org/esr-programs/) associated with it, the
_Vienna Declaration_ reframes artistic research as a top-down practice
where projects, subjects and research questions formulated by academic
institutions and artists need to fit into pre-defined projects and
calls, forms, formats and methods.[^2] Artists ultimately won't have the
freedom of refusing to participate, because these programmes will be
among the few remaining opportunities to be paid for their practice. But
what is wrong with new openings for precarious practitioners?

The _Vienna Declaration_ claims that artistic research is 'still a
relatively young field', thereby ignoring the long history of artistic
research as artists' self-initiated and self-organised practices.
_Explicitly_ - that is, literally under the name 'artistic research' -
research as an artistic practice has existed for more than sixty years;
implicitly for centuries if not millennia.

To give only a few examples, with no pretensions of completeness or lack
of bias:

-   In his 1957 _Notes on the Formation of an Imaginist Bauhau_s, Asger
    Jorn wrote that 'artistic research is identical to "human science,"
    which for us means "concerned" [i.e., engaged] science, not purely
    historical science. This research should be carried out by artists
    with the assistance of scientists'.[^3] With Piero Simondo and
    Guiseppe Pinot-Gallizio, Jorn founded an artistic research lab in
    Alba, Italy, that eventually merged with the Situationist
    International. Simondo went on to found the 'International Center
    for an Institute of Artistic Research' (IRA) in 1962.

-   In 1976, the Swiss artist, experimental art educator and
    collaborator and translator of Marcel Duchamp, Serge Stauffer, wrote
    a manifesto 'Kunst als Forschung' (Art as Research) in which he
    demanded that 'art-research [...] has to avoid serving those in
    power' and 'requires its own methodology; it cannot use the
    scientific methodology but let itself inspire from it'.[^4]

-   Artistic research semi-explicitly existed in the
    UNOVIS collective founded by Kasimir Malevich in
    Vitebsk and the LEF journal edited by Vladimir
    Mayakovsky and designed by Alexander Rodchenko, in French surrealism
    and its 'Bureau de recherches surréalistes' established in 1925, in
    the _Acéphale_ group around Georges Bataille and André Masson
    founded in 1936; in the Situationist International (which worked
    under the moniker of a research group and published its periodical
    as a research journal), in conceptual art, feminist art and
    institutional critique, by Adrian Piper, Martha Rosler, Hans Haacke,
    Art & Language, Hito Steyerl and Andrea Fraser among many others.

-   Today, artistic and speculative research is the sometimes implicit,
    sometimes explicit basis of Afrofuturist arts (such as in the Black
    Quantum Futurism collective), of transdisciplinary artist-researcher
    collectives (such as Homeshop in Beijing, ruangrupa in Jakarta and
    Kunci in Yogyakarta, to name only a few). It is also the explicit
    basis of many artists' publishing initiatives (such as _Re / search
    Publishing_ by V. Vale and _Display Distribute_ in Hong Kong) and
    artist-run universities (such as Joseph Beuys' _Free International
    University_, the _Copenhagen Free University, Gudskul_ and _Floating
    University_, Berlin).

-   Musical composition was part of the Western scientific research
    canon for centuries (with music being part of the scientific
    'quadrivium' next to astronomy, arithmetic and geometry from the
    Middle Ages to the Renaissance), and doctoral degrees in music have
    existed for more than a century. Electronic music composers and
    practitioners organised themselves in research groups such as the
    French _Groupe de Recherches Musicales_ (Musical Research Group,
    GRM) in 1958, Natlab in the Netherlands and
    university-affiliated electronic music studios all over the world.
    They also created their own artistic research disciplines such as
    sonology. Outside the Western classical music tradition,
    practitioners such as the Sun Ra Arkestra understood their work as
    research.[^5]

-   Design research existed, as a Western discipline, at least since the
    Bauhaus, architectural research since the Renaissance.
-   Aside from these examples, artistic practices do and always have
    involved research: material research, field research, anatomical
    research, technological research and experimentation, to name a few.

By calling artistic research a 'young field', the _Vienna Declaration_
makes us worry that its authors weren't even aware of the history
sketched above, and unfamiliar with many if not most of the artists
and artistic research practices mentioned. At least, the _Vienna
Declaration _doesn't speak their language. We couldn't phrase it better
than the Swiss art researcher Michael Hiltbrunner who, reflecting on
Serge Stauffer, wrote in 2019:

"Academic priorities and the requirements of the PhD programme force
current artistic research into an unproductive formalism. Now, studying
art means conforming to a system with rules that are not defined in
the spirit of art.  Moreover, problems lie in the fact that a language
of art pedagogy and curatorship is used. [In the _Vienna Declaration_,
we should add to Hiltbrunner, not even that.] What is needed is a
vocabulary founded in the researching practices of artists themselves."

On top of burdening artistic research with 'an unproductive formalism',
PhD degrees as a new focus or centre of artistic research could,
in the worst case, mean a regression, since academic standards and
accreditation criteria require PhD research to be individually
identifiable and gradable, which is structurally incompatible to
collective (let alone anonymous-collective) artistic research (such
as that of Acéphale, GRM, the Black Audio Film Collective, the
Cyberfeminist International, Laboria Cuboniks, ruangrupa and many
more). The standard academic requirement for PhD research - independent
individual development of original research and original contributions
to knowledge - could even create a reactionary rollback within the arts,
back to the model of the hyper-individualist, heroic artist-genius. Even
without this extreme, we already know examples of artist research
collectives that disintegrated after their members went on to pursue
individual PhD degrees.

The _Vienna Declaration's_ pre-emptive obedience to established academic
norms (such as peer review and validation) conversely wastes a larger
opportunity - namely that of bringing artistic research into academia as
a critical trojan horse in order to rethink and revise the standards and
research culture of all academic disciplines.

For these and other reasons, we are not against the institutionalisation
of artistic research. To quote Hiltbrunner: 'It is important that
artists can conduct research with institutional protection and public
payment. Viewed in this light, doctoral study is important for the
autonomy of the arts and should therefore be designed in such a way that
it is in the interest of the artists.'[^6]


## The Emperor Is Naked

In its characterisation of artistic 'research practice', the _Vienna
Declaration_, however, does not refer to the interests of artists, but
to the task of 'HAEIs to interact with related enterprise Research &
Development, and to contribute directly to the creation of intellectual
property in arts, entertainment and media'. Firstly, this squarely
contradicts artistic research practices - such as those of the
Situationists - that questioned and even undermined intellectual
property.

Secondly, it positions the task of artistic research institutions in
neoliberal-technocratic terms as 'building links with business and
enterprise in order to stimulate the impact of research'.

Which artistic research projects then would still have a place in
the framework created by the _Vienna Declaration_? Would even widely
recognised, canonical examples of fairly scholarly artistic research be
admitted? What has been the 'validation' of Martha Rosler's _Semiotics
of the Kitchen_ (1975)? Would Adrian Piper's _Funk Lessons_ (1983) or
Hito Steyerl's _Liquidity Inc._ (2014) have passed peer reviews? Or
built links with business and enterprise? We shouldn't even mention the
experiments of the Surrealists, which in their time were attacked as
irresponsible by clinical psychologists - or the use of time travel as a
critical artistic research method in Black Quantum Futurism.

When Siegfried Zielinski - former director of the art school HfG
Karlsruhe and thus experienced in the managerial side of art education
- sketched the departments of a future academy, he demonstrated the
possibility of alternative visions:


> Faculties for an Academy of the 21st Century:
>
> Dignity  
> Hospitality  
> Unconditioned dialogue  
> Unusual activities  
> Paleofuturism  
> Phataphysik  
> Cultura experimentalis  
> Chaos pilots - Kairos-poets  
> Critical engineering  
> Non-censurable systems  
> Knowledge of the winds / Navigations  
> Scale / Skalierung  
> Sustainability  
> Projections  
> Variantology  
>
> Siegfried Zielinski, Shanghai Nov 26, 2019


In other words, policy documents, executive language and institutional
formatting do not need to be as impoverished and limiting as in the
_Vienna Declaration_. Just as any material, they can be tools of
self-critique, inspiring and imaginative, food for thought, starting
points for artistic imaginations and practices, broadening rather than
confining.


## 'AR' as a New (Institutional) Art System

> When an innovation develops a network of people who can cooperate
> nationwide, perhaps even internationally, all that is left to do to
> create an art world is to convince the rest of the world that what is
> being done is art, and deserves the rights and privileges associated
> with that status. At any particular time and place, certain ways of
> displaying work connote 'art,' while others do not. Work that aspires
> to be accepted as art usually must display a developed aesthetic
> apparatus and media through which critical discussions can take
> place. Likewise, aspirants to the status of art have to dissociate
> themselves from related crafts or commercial enterprises. Finally,
> aspirants construct histories which tie the work their world produces
> to already accepted arts, and emphasize those elements of their pasts
> which are most clearly artistic, while suppressing less desirable
> ancestors.
>
> - Howard S. Becker, _Art Worlds_, 2008 [1982]


What are the characteristics of the new system of institutional 'AR' as
opposed to previous practices of artist-run research?

With the _Vienna Declaration_ focussing on art schools, universities
and doctoral degree programmes, its concept of 'AR' closely resembles
institutional research lab art, or what has been known since the late
1960s under the name 'Art-Science'. Its origins lie in the journal
_Leonardo_, in electronic music composition at research studios such as
IRCAM or the State University of New York at Buffalo, new media and bio
art / bio design labs at ars electronica, MIT and elsewhere. Only
in such environments, 'AR' can deliver what is being promised in the
_Vienna Declaration_: 'AR is validated through peer review covering the
range of disciplinary competences addressed by the work', among others
after having been published in one of the 'international peer reviewed
scholarly journals in the discipline'.

While such an 'AR' system is already in place - and makes sense among
others for art school tutors who take temporary leaves from teaching to
deepen their research interests and research skills, or for artists who
want to pursue a particular research project in an academic environment,
with institutional support - it to date has made no monopoly or
ownership claims on artistic research. Instead, artistic research in
institutional projects has been defined as the individual research
contributions of participating artists; in other words, as their way of
working, not as something initiated or defined by the institution.

The focus of 'AR' on the PhD as an individual, validated degree is
doomed to boil down to the exclusion of collective and do-it-yourself
practices - and hence the most contemporary forms of artistic research
- unless these issues are being addressed from the beginning (which the
_Vienna Declaration_ doesn't).

With educational institutions now claiming ownership of artistic
research, and introducing their own quality and validation standards,
they factually create their own art system, as described above by Howard
Becker. As a result, artistic research will be split into two forms and
systems: 'AR' in art schools as opposed to artistic research in art
practice and art worlds at large.

Is this desirable? We don't think so. Instead of creating hospitable
spaces, infrastructures and institutional recognition for artist-run
research initiatives (from the _Bureau de recherches surréalistes_ to
the _Community Futures Lab_ of the Afrofuturist Affair in Philadelphia
or _Lifepatch_ in Indonesia), 'AR' is in danger of ending up as its own
self-referential system, with artistic researchers and projects that are
recognised only within that system, and the system serving the ultimate
purpose of preserving itself[^7]; in other words, a land-grab for an
ivory tower.

In its well-meaning attempt to achieve academic and governmental
recognition of, and budgets for artistic research, the Vienna
Declaration rehashes the worst of technocratic higher education jargon
and business rhetoric. Not only does this do, for the sake of short-term
political gains, a long-term disservice to artistic research, it also
amounts to the very opposite of what traditional scholars and academia
expect and hope to gain from artistic research - namely, a different
concept and imagination of research than 'the standards described in the
European Standards and Guidelines'.


## So What? Now What? Some Loose Ends & Dubious Ideas

-   Can we develop art with the new jargon: AR, HAEIs, HEIs, EUA,
    _Salzburg Principles_, _Florence Principles_, _Frascati Manual_,
    _Vienna Declaration_, _third mission_, _knowledge triangle_ - plus
    the words left out in the text: triple helix, quadruple helix and
    quintuple helix, track record, performance indicators, impact
    factors, knowledge valorization, brain parks?

-   Can the two art worlds - contemporary art and 'AR' -
    merge into a new, neoliberal conceptual art and capitalist realism?
    Can it be accelerated till it crashes? Can it be appropriated and
    twisted in a judo-move? Can it be rendered so abstract and absurd
    that it stops functioning?

-   Can we publish our illegitimate versions of the 'international peer
    reviewed scholarly journals in the discipline' (to quote the _Vienna
    Declaration_)? What is the recognition of artistic research that is
    not validated and, by today's academic standards, even invalid (but:
    made-up, dubious, pataphysical, perhaps even fraudulent)?

-   Can the 'opportunity for harvesting research data and statistics
    from the AR field' (to quote the _Vienna Declaration_)
    be made a humorous conceptual art practice?

-   Can academic peer review be judo-twisted, from gatekeeping back to
    the cooperative feedback it probably once was / is intended to be,
    not only for 'AR', not only for artistic research, but
    for whole academia - so that artistic research can repair a broken
    culture?




[^1]: With the notable exception of Sweden, Norway and Finland where
doctoral programmes in artistic research are now firmly established.

[^2]: This continues a development that had its origins in hard science
research groups and has trickled down to the continental European
humanities since the 1990s. In this new system, many if not most PhD
dissertations are no longer individually developed by the candidates,
but take place in larger funded research projects and thematic research
clusters. In the humanities and cultural studies, this has already
resulted in more conformity and hegemony of academic schools,
terminological fashions and imitation of hard science methodology for
the sake of meeting scientific research standards.

[^3]: Asger Jorn, "Notes on the Formation of an Imaginist Bauhaus" (1957),
[Bureau of Public Secrets](http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/bauhaus.htm).

[^4]: Serge Stauffer, "kunst als forschung", in _Kunst als Forschung:
Essays, Gespräche, Übersetzungen, Studien_ (Zürich: Scheidegger &
Spiess, 2013 [1976]), pp. 179-80.

[^5]: Among others, with the double album _Sun Ra Research_ (2006).

[^6]: "Künstler_innen sollen forschen können, mit institutionellem Schutz
und öffentlicher Bezahlung. Der PhD ist aus dieser Sicht wichtig für die
Autonomie der Künste und sollte so konzipiert sein, dass es im Interesse
der Künstler_innen ist." Michael Hiltbrunner, "Drop Out of Art School,
Research meant trying new things: The F+F School in Zürich around 1970
and artistic research today", _Fucking Good Art_ #38: What Life could
be or the ambivalence of success (Zürich: edition fink, 2019), pp.
124-27.

[^7]: Thus, as a textbook example of institutional autopoiesis as defined
in Niklas Luhmann, _Social Systems_ (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1995 [1984]).


___

[Florian Cramer](http://floriancramer.nl) is a reader at Willem de Kooning
Academy / Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam and volunteer for the Rotterdam-based
arts initiatives PrintRoom, De Player and Awak(e). 'When I worked in university
humanities, people were romanticizing the arts - as a realm of unrestrained
experimentation, freeing them from the constraints of academic research. When I
went on working in an art school, people were romanticizing research - as the
last resort of artistic autonomy.' He is author of the book _Anti-Media
Ephemera on Speculative Arts_ (2013) and co-author of _Pattern
Discrimination_ (2018).

Nienke Terpsma is an artist and book designer, co-founder and -editor of
[_Fucking Good Art_](https://www.fuckinggoodart.nl). From the beginning,
_Fucking Good Art_ was learning-by-doing, we founded our own MA and PhD
degrees, and at the same time we are the director, editor in chief, the
assistant, coffee lady/man, and toilet cleaner all rolled into one. Prof.
Leszek Brogowski, in a symposium on artistic research, stated: "In this joking
vein, Robert Hamelijnck and Nienke Terpsma are saying something quite serious,
which is that - at root - the form of their art is that of research, a thesis
to which I wholeheartedly subscribe. In consequence, I myself, Leszek
Brogowski, Professor at the University of Rennes 2, [with this paper] am
beginning the process of academic validation of the knowledge produced by
_Fucking Good Art_, by considering their work as part of the history and
sociology of contemporary art." (Leszek Brogowski, in "Art and Knowledge: a
scientific sharing of meaning. Understanding art worlds through _Fucking Good
Art_", Symposium _Art and Research, Shared Methodologies in Artistic Practice_,
Universitat de Barcelona, Spain, 4-5 december 2014.)


With thanks to: Kristoffer Gansing, Clara Balaguer, Rob Hamelijnck, Michael
Hiltbrunner, Renée Turner and Danny Giles for their comments, agreements and
disagreements.

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