Denna text finns endast tillgänglig på engelska
This text was presented as a talk by Senior Lecturer / Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research at the Royal Institute of Art, Axel Andersson, at the CAPIm launch October 23, 2024. Text slightly revised for publication.
You might think that we are gathered here for the birthday of a Centre of Excellence, the first Swedish Centre of Excellence in Artistic Research. I would like to invite you to instead imagine this occasion as celebrating the coming of age of a discipline.
In 2006, the first three art-based PhDs were awarded to researchers at a higher education institution in Sweden, Malmö Art Academy (part of the Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts, Lund University). If we take this only slightly arbitrary date as the national birth of a formalized discipline of artistic research within an educational structure, it is now turning eighteen. Artistic research is coming of age. It is reaching maturity. What could this mean?
But first, the beginnings. There is a prehistory here, of course. Or a prolonged period of conception, and gestation. How prolonged is up for discussion. One could go as far back as German Romanticism or even further beyond on Western shores, to the mytho-poetics of other cultures. But these would be ancestral roots and diving into them would be a study of “historical imaginary”. Let us instead focus on the perspectives adjacent to past art-political imaginaries here in Sweden. The institutional history of the discipline in other words. And while we do this, of course, stress that what we might call research practices in art, with the same historical roots, continue and thrive outside of these very recent disciplinary frameworks (titles, journals, conferences, centres etc).
The Swedish Government, in its 1992 “Higher Education Act” stated, in Chapter 1, Paragraph 2, that “the Government shall establish higher education intuitions for the provision of […] research and artistic research”. This replaced the older definition of the law from 1977 where research was defined as being for “gaining further knowledge and to find scientific ground for education and other activities.” It is the nature of legal documents that we are not introduced to motivations: what is, is. But here we get very little in terms also of definition. Even though “artistic research” in many ways was a new term in the Swedish context, it was unclear what the authors of the 1992 law meant that it was and how it differed from just “research”. Or even how it differed from earlier used terms in contexts like “artistic development work”. Sticking to the law itself “artistic research” seemed essentially to be something that those hired to work in higher education with “artistic competence” (as it was now called, replacing the older formulation “artistic skill”), would do in their capacity as researchers. The only clue lay in that those hired on the grounds of “artistic competency” would be selected by a group made up by a majority of those with the same “artistic competency”, in a neat institutional circularity.
One institutional interpretation is that artistic research in Sweden grew out of further defining a higher education employment format for artists at the art academies. It was made clear that such personnel did not need a traditional academic research background, but they did need some kind of background that seemed to suggest something that went beyond what had been contained in the notion of “artistic skill”. If they had a competency to teach art in higher education, it made sense that they had competency to do artistic research. This would thus have to be a type of research judged through the same prism of “artistic competency” as the pedagogical skill.
It would take about a decade until this bureaucratic insemination resulted in substantive institutional actions by the Swedish Government. From the year 2000 the Swedish Research Council started offering institutional development support for artistic research, and from 2003 also project support. By this time more and more international influences had started arriving to our shores. In other countries artistic research was now slowly being lifted from the imaginary to the real. There, as here, it was the result of a long march through the institutions by intrepid trailblazers to whom we owe so much. The Nordic countries followed comparable paths in this development stage, with Finland being the exception as an early adopter and pioneer.
Given the importance of the international influences in this first phase it was perhaps no surprise that it was the art academy in our most European city, Malmö, that put forward the first art-based PhDs in 2006 – my suggested Swedish birth date for the discipline. And two years later, in 2008, the Swedish Government made it possible to formally award PhDs on artistic grounds. In the following years the progress was to become phenomenal. In less than a decade more than 100 new artistic academic doctors had defended. A new field was passing through childhood and into adolescence.
Please indulge me now as I continue to labour my metaphor of the coming of age. What does maturity entail? It is a process of literal emancipation from the hands of the guardians. Who were then the guardians of “artistic research”? In Sweden the Government was maybe its institutional mother, but the foster parents became by default the arts on the one side, and academic scholarship on the other.
To come to maturity is, as we all know, a difficult process. Reflecting over the early days of artistic research it is easy to feel pity for something brought up by such guardians. It would have been one thing if the parents had only criticized each other, but that they also constantly lay into their offspring was more serious. This they did it to such an extent as to sometimes raise the question if the guardians, the arts and academic scholarship, had not maybe showed themselves to be mature in name only.
Constant rows at home makes for a less than ideal holding environment of nurture and guidance. Yet who has had an ideal upbringing? It is also the idiosyncrasies of our unhappiness that constitutes our specificity, as Leo Tolstoy states in Anna Karenina.
The liberation from the guardians takes place in a performative investigation into different positions. This is the period where we want to be nothing like our parents and with insistence proclaim our alterity. It is a common impulse in any coming-of-age story. It is also an impulse that is turbo-charged when there is already a conflict between the guardians, forcing the immature into more or less neurotic positions of defence.
Artistic research promised to bring a way of working in third cycle higher education where form inspired content and content inspired form, but it was putting much of its early efforts into trying to come up with formulations that would defend it regardless of the context. As is familiar, so many discussions and debates about artistic research as a discipline have pivoted around what it is, not around what it does. It has existentially had to defend itself from infancy – again, with less-than-ideal help from the dysfunctional relationship between its guardians.
But there happily comes a time where we with excitement and giddiness are put in the position of taking responsibility for ourselves, as per the Enlightenment promise formulated by Immanuel Kant. The mature individual does not have make various attempts at being something in the world at any cost. She is no longer merely the promise of something that will be, but something that now effectively is. She is also responsible to herself and therefore also responsible to criticize all authorities, including those that previously served as its guardians.
This does not mean that a mature discipline of artistic research will give up talking about itself and become artistic research for the sake of artistic research. There is space for a mature discipline of artistic research to develop its own introspective and classificatory wing, much like how historians constantly revert to historiography for a greater disciplinary resonance. But this will happen in tandem with artistic research being able to move and operate without also constantly identifying, defining, and defending itself.
Coming of age is a process, of course, above and beyond the calendarity of birthdays. Maturity not only something we – hopefully – gain, but also, as already Kant noted, something we can lose. We see this clearly in the political situation we inhabit today in the world. There is generalised immaturity in human societies, including among its leaders. Were we not to fight for our maturity, we would be reducing ourselves to flocks of sheep following erratic man-children of both sexes.
Humans and why not institutions and disciplines, sustain maturity through their responsibility for their interactions in the world, interactions with other humans, systems, disciplines, techniques and technology – and works of art of course. Responsibility means two things. First comes an ethical dimension. To be responsible is to: criticize authorities, as we said before, and to care for those that are too young to be mature themselves. Second is a developmental dimension. To be responsible is to respond to our context in such a way that we are open to be changed ourselves.
Defined in this way, maturity is a quality we must work towards maintaining. It will also always look a bit different depending on the situation and context. The constant is that it takes work to maintain. Hard work. Hard emotional work in open dialogue with a world we are expecting to change and to be changed by.
All of this makes it a bit difficult to come up with the perfect birthday gift for an eighteen-year-old. It has to be festive, of course, this formal marker of maturity is after all worth celebrating. It also has to be practical at the same time, for all the real-world challenges that one as an adult invariably will have to face and respond to in order to stay mature. Equally, it cannot be too festive or too practical, too mindless or too serious. Becoming legally mature, rarely equals becoming wise. Maybe you, just like me, understood some things about the past when you learned that the prefrontal cortex, central for decision-making and maintaining social appropriateness, develops until the age of 25. The gift should be something that ideally trains such skills and burns off the explosive edge of youthful energy.
I hope you will concur with me in thinking that the perfect gift for artistic research in Sweden on its eighteenth birthday is its very first Centre for Excellence, why not in Art and the Political Imaginary to stress its role in the future of our societies? In a piece of imaginary history writing, I would like to suggest that this is already unconsciously what Natasha Marie Llorens and Mick Wilson thought when they first formulated the idea for the Centre of Art and the Political Imaginary. And that it was for the same reasons that Jyoti Mistri and I joined and what made both Kungl. Konsthögskolan / Royal Institute of Art and HDK-Valand, Gothenburg University, support the application, and, ultimately, why the Swedish Research Council allocated funding for it.
So, the eighteen-year-old has gotten its perfect gift. We have been working hard at making it into a responsible adventure, but also need all your help. As Mick is fond of saying, ”Come play with us!” We have begun working with the first external projects associated with the centre and expect many more over the coming years. CAPIm belongs to all of you. And this goes not only for you that are established professionals in the field, but also you who are students. Here at KKH we are especially proud that we through CAPIm have been able to add a course on research methodologies in our advanced instruction for our master’s programme. The link that so often is lacking between second- and third cycle teaching in the field has for us been made for the first time. And this is one of the important remits of the Centre, to develop artistic research pedagogically as well as a scholarly. This will also play out across HDK-Valand’s doctoral programme.
There is a lot of work in front of us. We will succeed to the extent that we manage to embody artistic research in the world and do things, not to the extent we become good at arguing for that something like artistic research is necessary – or even has the right to exist. In a dream scenario we can be a part of transitioning the discipline into maturity. If we think of artistic research as a responsible actor in dialogue with other responsible actors, it will have the potential of changing the world it inserts itself in. And this is surely – a political imaginary.