Private Investigations

For some time now, one aspect of contemporary art has been en vogue in theoretical discussions: art as a field of, and medium for, the production of specific knowledge. Especially in relation to the discipline that the academic establishment calls “artistic research,” the persistent need for a stable basis for artistic knowledge production has been continually emphasized—above all in academia; knowledge production in art, so the mantra goes, must go hand in hand with a socially critical (self-)reflexive approach toward art and its producers. In the globalized knowledge-based society of the twenty-first century, we are told, art must position itself quickly in order to assert its own social relevance and insure itself in the long run. With such arguments, the academic standardization of artistic criticality is aided and “tenured” by national educational policy. Yet can this top-down criticality, standardized through academic curricula, have any real impact outside a self-referential framework? Despite all its good intentions, does this not rather serve to entrench existing hegemonies and (distribution) economies of knowledge? And what alternative strategies might be used to counter an increasingly dominant discourse on the theory and practice of “artistic research?” This book is not primarily intended as a formulation of a theory in opposition to the hegemonic idea of “artistic research.” Instead, the practitioners — who because of their respective practices are hastily shelved as “artistic researchers”— are given the opportunity to speak up for themselves. An integral commonality among the artists and cultural producers presented here is that their investigative practices are able to resist this categorization. These are private investigations, artistic practices that attempt to infiltrate hegemonic discourses of knowledge, like those found not least of all in the art context itself, while simultaneously proposing individual paths for acquiring and processing knowledge.