Artistic Expositions within Academia: Challenges, Functionalities, Implications and Threats

Summary

Higher arts education in Europe, like other disciplines, is strongly affected by what is known as the Bologna Process. The main issues that the higher education institutions are facing in this context are the implementation of the third cycle (with the obligation to deliver bachelor's degrees, master's degrees and doctor's degrees) and the necessity of linking teaching to research, or the ‘embedding’ of arts education in a research environment (Lesage 2009). As a consequence, an increasing emphasis on ‘artistic research’ in its various appearances, and on its output, can be seen both in literature and in the policy of many European countries. It also results in a need to report formally on a broader range of output, other than textual material, which leads to an array of practical questions facing research management on how to deal with the capture, evaluation and storage of artistic research output (Dickinson, Sefton, Lee, and Hunter 2011). Indeed, the emergence of artistic research has raised questions within research management contexts on what counts as research output and more importantly, on how to certify quality. The traditional flow of peer-reviewed, mainly textual, publishing has shown itself to be limited, as have the institutional databases built to keep track of publications, projects and patents.

In the academic community, research results are mainly shared through presentations at conferences or by publications in journals or books. A process of peer review is instituted to guarantee scientific quality. Artistic research, however, offers a different approach from this classic scientific research paradigm, since it allows the explicit acknowledgement of the material and the material processes as ‘acteurs’ of research. Artistic research can be described as a particular type of artistic practice in which many different perspectives can be present (aesthetic, hermeneutic, performative, mimetic, expressive, emotive), but through which artefacts become an artistic ‘argument’ (Borgdorff 2007), a potential carrier and medium of knowledge and understanding. ‘Artefact’ here is meant to cover any form of artistic expression, whether an art object, performance or exhibition (Candy and Edmonds 2011). In the process of artistic research, ontological and epistemological transformations take place. For this reason, it is difficult to streamline artistic research output along the traditional publication formats. Textual explication, if present or existing, finds its way into journals related to art history or musicology, but artists will often use different channels to share their work with the outside world.