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\begin{document}

\hypertarget{artistic-phd-research-at-a-crossroads}{%
\section{artistic {[}PhD{]} research at a
crossroads}\label{artistic-phd-research-at-a-crossroads}}

\hypertarget{between-an-academic-institutional-and-an-artist-run-societal-practice}{%
\subsection{{[}between an academic-institutional and an artist-run
societal
practice?{]}}\label{between-an-academic-institutional-and-an-artist-run-societal-practice}}

\hypertarget{section}{%
\subsection{2}\label{section}}

\begin{quote}
``The debate about Artistic Research lost me a couple of years ago, when
it became clear that that debate tended to be much more about creating
an academic/ bureaucratic discipline, then {[}sic{]} attempting to
figure out something for an artistic discipline.'' Hito Steyerl,
response to Peter Osborne, in: Henk Slager (ed.) The Postresearch
Condition, Utrecht, 2021, p.~13
\end{quote}

I find it rather disturbing, perhaps even alarming, when an artist who
had a vital role in shaping and embodying today's concepts of artistic
research, gives up on it. (To use an analogy: this may be comparable to
a composer like Pauline Oliveros giving up experimental electronic music
composition with the argument that it has become ``an
academic/bureaucratic'' rather than an ``artistic discipline''.)

\hypertarget{section-1}{%
\subsection{3}\label{section-1}}

Hito Steyerl's work is a still-new example of an art practice that
developed into its current form, and received its full public
recognition, only after the artist obtained a PhD title, at the Academy
of Fine Arts in Vienna (in 2003). Steyerl's art has even been called
``research art'' by critics. This could be cited as a textbook example
of how artistic research and a PhD degree can help an artist becoming
the world's ``most influential person in contemporary art'' (a title
given to Steyerl, as the first female artist ever, in 2017 as part of
the ``Power 100'' ranking list of the periodical ArtReview).

\hypertarget{section-2}{%
\subsection{4}\label{section-2}}

Steyerl has actively contributed to developing the concept of artistic
research, not only with her audiovisual art works, but also as a
theorist and writer. This is an essay she wrote in 2010. Her new essay -
also published by our colleague Henk Slager in Utrecht - thus describes
her ultimate disappointment with the discourse.

But how correct is Steyerl's diagnosis that the ``debate around artistic
research'' ended up creating ``an academic/bureaucratic'' instead of
artistic discipline?

\hypertarget{section-3}{%
\subsection{5}\label{section-3}}

Here we see a Creator Doctus project that took place, for the most part,
outside academia, and inside a contemporary art museum where it was
validated by its curators and the participants in its ``daily practice''
of physical exercises. In other words, the project first of all got
recognition within the art discipline. Only its final review and defense
were in an academic institution. (This is similar in structure to the
concept of the ``practice-based PhD'' as it exists in the UK, and with a
bit of luck also the ``professional doctorate'' in the arts that is
about to be introduced at Dutch art schools and design polytechnics.) Of
course, I'm not telling you - the people here in this room - anything
new. So is Steyerl's perception mistaken?

\hypertarget{section-4}{%
\subsection{6}\label{section-4}}

But the reality of higher education artistic research programs can be
quite different from Jaël Davids' ``Daily Practice''. This is a funding
call of the Dutch Research Council. I need to stress here that it was
created by truly open-minded, caring and well-meaning people working at
the Research Council. This program also financed the symposium and
publication in which Hito Steyerl voiced her critique of artistic
research. But even the most engaged people at research councils have, in
the end, to fit their programs into governmental research and
development agendas, which in this case was the creative industries
sector development agenda of the Dutch Ministry of Economy.

This agenda clearly ends up framing and determining the kind of artistic
research that can be done - which by the way includes one project that I
am conducting myself in collaboration with Janneke Wesseling from Leiden
University, and which involves one PhD candidate, Anja Groten from the
Hackers \& Designers collective here in the neighborhood of
Amsterdam-Noord. Although I do not regret this project and hope that
Anja feels at home in it, too, the reality is that its original theme -
Critical Making - was derived from the given ``Smart Culture''
framework. Anja in turn had to make her research interest - a critical
reflections on her experience with collective work forms and alternative
technologies - fit our given theme. So, in the end, even this individual
research could only exist in relation to a government agenda.

\hypertarget{section-5}{%
\subsection{7}\label{section-5}}

Here is another example from the late 1990s: ``Theory and Practice of
Artistic Creation Processes'', a joint PhD research cluster by Freie
Universität Berlin and UdK Berlin. One half of the PhD candidates in
this cluster were practicing artists, the other half university
humanities graduates.

While this program, and its title, had been tweaked to be maximally open
to diverse practices and research perspectives, it yielded a strange
effect: the PhD candidates in the cluster eventually stressed themselves
out thinking that they needed to elaborate the ``artistic creation
process'' into a cultural theory, and ended up referring to it as
``ACP'' - completely against the intentions of the professors who had
initiated the project.

Please forgive me for further indulging in his autobiographical
flashback (because back then, I was a PhD candidate and staff lecturer
at the university department that had co-initiated this project, and I
contributed to its publications).

In 1998, this cluster had already achieved a lot of what we are still
struggling for today, particularly here in the Netherlands, and at least
if I speak for my own school Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam. Back
then in Berlin, however, I had mixed feelings about the project. Funded
research clusters had just been introduced into the humanities. While
they greatly increased opportunities for PhD candidates to obtain paid
positions, they also ended up creating a two-class system. PhD
candidates who were in the clusters and projects had to fit their
research into the overarching cluster themes and were highly dependent
on everyone else in the project; people whom they hadn't initially
chosen to collaborate with. People like me, on the other hand, who wrote
their PhDs outside those clusters, as regular university department
tutors, still could write their PhD thesis on self-chosen subjects, had
less pressure to conform to academic fashions, and in most cases ended
up having the better careers.

{[}For practicing artists, the value of defining one's own PhD research
project rather than conforming it to a predefined theme, may even be
greater than for people in the humanities.{]}

\hypertarget{section-6}{%
\section{8}\label{section-6}}

The ``Vienna Declaration'' as the example of institutionalizing artistic
research in the EU, 2020

After the Vienna Declaration, with the creation of doctoral studies in
continental European art schools, there is a concrete risk of creating
one's own genre of academic research art, in an art system run by art
schools. I know that this is a typical and frequent critique by art
conservatives, but I would like to rethink it from a pro-, not
anti-artistic research perspective. There's the risk of a
self-contained, self-referential, self-gratifying system. (Which,
admittedly, wouldn't be the first self-referential and self-gratifying
system in the arts or in academia.)

And, to be very outspoken, I am worried by the recent development of
ELIA - as an umbrella organization of European art schools - now
creating its own artistic research events, publications and co-authoring
a position paper on artistic research: because it violates a principle
that is firm if not sacred at universities, namely the strict separation
of research practice and university management. For example, the Modern
Language Association as the roof organization of American humanities is,
for good reasons, strictly separate from the Association of American
Colleges \& Universities, the roof organization of university
management. ELIA now acts as both, probably out of a weakness of
artistic researchers to self-organize.

\hypertarget{section-7}{%
\section{9}\label{section-7}}

In the Vienna Declaration, we also see how a policy document frames the
epistemology and thus - ultimately - the possibilities of artistic
research, including future PhD projects. It reads quite similar to how
the Dutch governmental economic development agenda has trickled down to
the Dutch Research Council project call.

\hypertarget{section-8}{%
\section{10}\label{section-8}}

Attached to the ``Vienna Declaration'' were job openings for PhD
candidates. These opening not only required artists to fit their
projects into existing thematic clusters, but even the titles of those
PhD projects were predefined by the institutions. Which, of course and
on the other hand, meant new opportunities for artists to get paid for
artistic research, and hence a good thing?

\hypertarget{section-9}{%
\section{11}\label{section-9}}

Nevertheless, this begs the question: which of the above - partly
historical and canonical, partly contemporary - artistic research
projects would fit today's frameworks, clusters and research agendas?
Surely, this is not an issue (as far as I can tell) of the Creator
Doctus program. But isn't it an issue, and isn't Hito Steyerl's critique
proven right, elsewhere?

{[}Footnote: similar issues have proliferated in, and changed, the
humanities and social sciences, where in the course of the later 20th
and early 21th century many speculative approaches - psychoanalysis in
psychology, critical theory in sociology, continental
{[}non-analytical{]} philosophy in philosophy, hermeneutic
interpretation in literary studies - became marginalized and/or replaced
by empirical, quantitative and logical-positivist approaches. This has
made transdisciplinarity between artistic and university research rather
more difficult than easier. But it conversely means that traditionally
educated university academics who struggle with these developments have
high hopes in artistic research; see Rogoff and others.{]}

\hypertarget{section-10}{%
\section{12}\label{section-10}}

This boils down to the (perhaps old, but still urgent) question: who
validates artistic research? In the past, these were only art
communities and larger society. They could even include - as in the
above example - Internet memers who confirm that, for example, Pauline
Oliveros' Deep Listening research had lasting impact.

Will institutional artistic research PhD programs still consider
Internet memes as validation? Or will, as is the standard for sciences
and humanities, artistic research retract to the comfort zone of only
academic peer-review?

The strength of the Creator Doctus is, IMO, that it addresses exactly
this issue by structurally involving art world partners in every CrD
project.

{[}Footnote: typical forms of external validation for university
academia include a non-university press publisher publishing a PhD
thesis as a book; a non-academic periodical reviewing a research book.
But all these only amount to validation \emph{after} the fact,
respectively after the completion of a PhD project.{]}

\hypertarget{section-11}{%
\section{13}\label{section-11}}

Which academic institution would have validated the above work {[}Adrian
Piper's \emph{Funk Lessons}{]} in 1984? (It was created, by the way, by
an artist who had a university PhD degree in philosophy.) Which research
agenda and which call would it have fit? Since Jaël Davids' PhD project
has some commonalities with it, the Creator Doctus might have given it a
space. But still the question remains: would the ``Funk Lessons'' have
been accepted as an artistic PhD project if such programs had existed in
1984? And conversely: how can we make sure that we accept projects into
our doctoral programs that are as uncommon for contemporary art
discourse today as the ``Funk Lessons'' were four decades ago?

Or to put it differently: will institutional artistic research programs
still allow artists to set their own research agenda?

\hypertarget{section-12}{%
\section{14}\label{section-12}}

But the opposite is also true: when granting artists the autonomy to set
their own research agenda, do we meet the high academic standards that
Piper herself demands from artistic research? {[}See her above,
too-little-known lecture on YouTube.{]}

And just as important: how can PhD programs allow, be inviting and
nurturing to the research work of existing artist collectives? That
means, inviting artistic research projects developed, proposed and done
by already existing, self-organized artists collectives (such as Black
Quantum Futurism), rather than tearing these collectives apart by
requiring their members to pursue individual PhD research paths and
collaborating with fellow candidates that were chosen by the
institution, not by the artists? (It should be noted that this model,
which stems from hard science lab research, is already problematic in
the humanities!)

In other words: there is, I'd argue, value in artistic research as
autonomous research, despite the fact that the concept of autonomy is
now being seen more critically in the arts. Such autonomy is also
desired for other, established fields of academic research, and makes
artistic research attractive for scholars in among others the
humanities, social and technological sciences. Transdisciplinary
research - where artists collaborate with such researchers - then would
not mean to give up autonomy and conform to established formats of
research lab work, but rethink the forms and epistemologies of research
for everyone.

To sum up, I indeed think that `we', as the ones who make up a part of
the discourse and institutions of artistic research, are at a
crossroads, at this very moment. The paradox we need to solve, or
rather: keep alive, is the following:

How can artistic research (including doctoral research) remain an
experimental structure when, after its institutionalization, it no
longer is an experimental structure? How can it be made an artist-run
practice?

\end{document}