Introduction

Summary

Over the last two decades, the relationship between art and academia – under the heading of ‘artistic research’ – has been widely discussed. The border between these two domains, constantly renegotiated and transgressed, remains unstable and contested. Although art now contributes to academic knowledge, and academia in turn offers forms of knowledge that may be interwoven with or based on art practices, their relationship is far from settled. Because of the need for a constant renegotiation, one might say that ‘artistic research is an activity for border-crossers’ (Dombois et al. 2012: 11), who, while violating boundaries, create new relationships and knowledges. Lacking established languages and disciplinary frameworks for the multiplicity of possible crossings, it seems that each and every artistic proposition needs to have the capacity to ‘expose’ itself as research in order to create a link to academia. The contributions in this volume address, from different perspectives, the consequences of this relationship between art and academia for the publishing of art as research, as well as looking at how artists have been engaging with publishing in order to make epistemic claims.

As a new term with a comparatively short history, ‘artistic research’ may signal a shift in the practice of art. However, it is one that many commentators do not perceive or value. Indeed, before art academies reinvented themselves as research institutes and, as a consequence, began to advertise and fund artistic practice as research, the notion did not have much currency either in the art world or the world at large. It may thus be speculated that ‘artistic research’, rather than defining practice, simply announces the arrival of the art academy into academia. This is seen by some (Cf. Sheik 2006; Busch 2011) as the integration of art into the ‘knowledge economy’, threatening the autonomy of both art and the academy. In Europe, for example, discussions around ‘artistic research’ coincided with the development of what is known as the ‘Bologna Process’, which attempts to implement a particular educational model that is striated into bachelor, master and doctoral programmes within the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). Using a notion such as ‘artistic research’ may thus express compliance with a contested development.