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Project

Artistic Research: Definitions and the quest for paradigms

Artistic research—against the generalized opinion in the field—is a discipline that has left its pre-paradigmatic state due to its acceptance of an epistemological metaphysics and its generation and assimilation of two universally-recognized research paradigms. Based on an examination of the historical origins of the metaphysics of modern art, the dissertation formulates a definition of artistic research and of artistic research paradigms as elements inherent to the project of modern art. On a second phase, the research project charts the different interdisciplinary forms of artistic research, including the appearance of art research as a wholly new discipline derived from the collaboration of artistic research with scholarly research in the arts. Finally, the dissertation examines the emergence of practice-based research and science-based artistic research as new modes of inquiry in the arts that seek to leave behind the historical metaphysics of modern art and to generate completely new research paradigms.    

The metaphysics that has grounded art production in the modern period is what Jacques Rancière has called the “aesthetic regime of art,” which he traces back in his essay on “The Aesthetic Revolutions and its Outcomes” to Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind. The early Avant-Gardes assimilated the aesthetic regime of art through Friedrich Nietzsche’s artist’s metaphysics, initially outlined in 1872 in The Birth of Tragedy. Developed further by Henri Bergson, this vitalist metaphysics provided the epistemological foundations of the Bauhaus and Duchampian research paradigms. The definition of these two paradigms allowed the development of artistic research as a historical phenomenon inherent to the project of modern art. A further and key hypothesis in the dissertation is that artistic research can be defined fundamentally as a hypothetico-deductive process, a system that underlies also the modern scientific method. However, artistic research differs from the hypothetico-deductive process of the sciences in that while the latter hypothesize an order about a pre-existing reality, the former assumes there are no independent, pre-existing phenomena and proposes instead a whole new empirical world. The hypothesized artistic intentions are tested for their possibility through the artwork, which becomes in this sense a unique form of the experiment. With this perspective, it is then possible to outline the specific nature of artistic research in its relation to other forms of research, describing the conditions under which artistic research is possible nowadays, both within and outside academia, and either in purely disciplinary endeavors or in multidisciplinary research projects. The dissertation ends by pointing out the potential platforms from which artistic knowledge can be located within the larger cultural fields of society. 

Date:1 Oct 2013 →  16 May 2017
Keywords:artistic research, Paradigms, Research
Disciplines:Visual arts, Art studies and sciences
Project type:PhD project