Trust

The Trust roundtable was moderated by Peter Peters of the University of Maastricht and included pitches by Jenny Picket-Ottavi (Ecôle national Superior d'Architecture, Nantes, Cyprus University of Technology), Paula Crutchlow (University of Exeter), Luca Vanello (LUCA School of Art) and Claire Rebecca Waffel (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar).

Doing artistic research requires creating collaborative environments in which experiment and risk-taking are valued. Collaboration across disciplinary boundaries, both within the arts as well as between arts institutions, higher arts educational institutes, universities, and other research institutes raises  the issue of value in a specific way. How to work in a way that focuses on mutual understanding and respect, while also allowing constructive dissent and debate? How to thoughtfully navigate the going together of different criteria and traditions? Questions such as these revolve around trust and during this roundtable, four conference delegates reflected on their collaborative projects from this angle. We discussed Do It With Others (DIWO) methodologies for artistic production and education and ‘commoning in dynamic environments’ as a way of establishing non-hierarchical spaces; researching and writing on a social art project as a collaborative form of ethnographic research; collaboration as the reciprocal actions of maintaining affectual, material and behavioural support; and finally how trust is about agency and control as well as self-trust, e.g. in one’s own artistic strategy. In the general discussion, one participant pointed out that, in collaborative projects, the division of labour often is asymmetrical: artists are doing the lion’s share of the work. Funding schemes often build on asymmetries in trust, where the applicant has to go through highly regimented forms of establishing their trustworthiness. This is problematic when the outcome of artistic processes is difficult to predict, and estimating the promise of success is often a matter of trust. Trust is a practice.

On EARN

EARN (European Artistic Research Network) was established to share and exchange knowledge and experience in artistic research; foster mobility, exchange and dialogue among art researchers; promote wider dissemination of artistic research; and enable global connectivity and exchange for artistic research.

On Working Group Value

Modernity brought a sense of Order and Progress to our existence through a supposed divine right to control and dominate nature as we please. With such narrow values framing Western industrial society, the relentless pursuit of economic growth and technological advancement have come at a price of rampant inequalities, irreparable exploitation of the living realm and the exaltation of humanity over all other creatures. This malignant “Age of Man,” or Anthropocene – a Frankenstinean beast built from grand ambitions via naive design – has unleashed a monster of boundless consumption. But this same monster has now turned on us, leaving an unmitigated toxic scar on the world through our wastes, poisons, industrial fossils (plastics, concrete) – turning everything in its wake into a toxic soup, the antithesis of Charles Darwin’s life-giving “warm little pond.” We pay lip service to ethics, to greening, to decarbonisation, to a rhetoric that endorses all the things that we know and value—in the hope that this somehow makes something better. Our values, meanwhile, stay the same since alternative perspectives have no place in the reality we have constructed for ourselves. The only way we can escape this trap of our own making is to re-think our value systems from first principles – from what we pay attention to, exchange and reward, to the practices of our communities, the very nature of our kith and kin. To discover alternative values we must learn a practice of care and attention, make ourselves ‘leakier’ to “others” and be bolder in working with change by engaging with infiltrations and searching for more equitable relations with the world – even at the expense of our assumed sense of identity, authority, security.

Artistic research, and its transdisciplinary offspring, is likely our best guide for undertaking such a process and renegotiating such values.

Recognition

The Recognition roundtable was moderated by Rolf Hughes of KU Leuven and included pitches by Anne Julie Arnfred (Roskilde University and Goldsmiths, University of London), Jennifer Clarke (Gray's School of Art, Aberdeen), Liv Kristin Holmberg (Norwegian Academy of Music, Arne Nordheim Centre for Artistic Research), Ida Falck Øien (National Academy of the Arts Oslo) and Alexandra Crouwers (LUCA School of Arts).

Addressing the dual contributions of artistic research as art and research, this roundtable explored how these should be recognised. Typically recognised by fellow practitioners the research contribution of artistic research is frequently assessed by those from outside an established community of practice. This means that different hermeneutic models are at work in ‘drawing forth’ and articulating artistic research contributions so they can be engaged by different knowledge constituencies. What recognition, then, is involved in simultaneously appreciating the specificity of the artistic contribution and its wider application of the research contribution. The question arises—who can appropriately evaluate artistic research output? This was explored through the work of contemporary practitioners whose work embodied a diverse range of artistic research approaches.

Each of these practitioners from different backgrounds reflecting on the concept of recognition invoked multiplicities of value with the possibility to create new economics of exchange and new ways of being. The nature of artistic research through the provocation of recognition is, in itself, very hard to recognise as it’s something that exists as a whole. Fundamentally ecological, protean, contextual, practices resist the very categories that institutions seek to understand them by. The powerful perspectives presented provided critiques for transformation, generating the possibilities of new values operating through different kinds of “economies” of exchange. Cross boundaries beyond the realms traditionally associated with the arts and becoming entangled with other disciplines, artistic research practices create new tensions and boundaries that complicate the general and fundamental principles for artistic research practices. Needing to inhabit its contradictions and multiplicities, the question of recognition was both potent locally through the reception by targeted audiences, while also contributing to global issues through a new “category” of research—which is both a transformer, and also part of “us”.

Preferences

The Preferences roundtable was moderated by Peter De Graeve of LUCA School of Arts and included pitches by Sandy Claes (LUCA School of Arts), Yana Dimitrova (Parsons School of Design, LUCA School of Arts) and Jana Franziska Unmüßig (University of the Arts, Helsinki)

The Preferences roundtable focused on the individual relation to ‘value’ in arts and artistic research. The partaking artistic researchers were invited to reflect on what is ideally their strongest personal – as opposed to ‘cultural’ (Value) or ‘institutional’ (Recognition) – relation to the (art)work – viz. the research – in progress. What kind of energies are we to take on (or are we invested in)? The following (softly) provocative questions were offered to the participants as ‘mental nudges’:

-Artistic preferences are not about the future, they are about the past.

-Artistic preferences are not about contingent choices, they are about ultimate beauty.

-Artistic preferences are not about cultural values, they are about human existence.

-Artistic preferences are not about matter, they are about spirit.

-Artistic preferences are not about individuals, they are about the community.

Sandy Claes pointed out that the importance of ‘open design’ when reflecting on value. The value of openness can and should be integrated in an artist’s manipulation of matter, facilitating the ‘spirit’ to emerge from the work as an aesthetic statement on the fundamentally ‘unfinished’ state of affairs in the world. For Yana Dimitrova, personal ‘preferences’ about artistic value include classical ideas such as ‘love’, ‘caring’, ‘solidarity’ and ‘offering’. These ancient values should be considered and handled as an art-to-be-practiced: embodied love, harvesting communities, human stories as modern offering. The aim of the artist – as Yana sees it – is to create and/or help others create a ‘hyperlocal ecosystem’. Jana Franziska Unmüßig experiences her work as an artistic researcher as an interesting personal struggle with this very concept of value. The focus is on the precarity of the process in (and also of) this world we live in. Self-fragilization seems to be an accurate translation of both values and preferences (reference: Bracha Ettinger).