What Is Wrong with the Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research?

‘AR is well suited to inspire creative and innovative developments in sectors such as health and wellbeing, the environment and technology, thus contributing to fulfilling the HEIs’ “third mission”. AR must be seen as having a unique potential in the development of the “knowledge triangle.”’

‘Within this frame, AR is aligned in all aspects with the five main criteria that constitute Research & Development in the Frascati Manual.’

‘HAEIs operate predominately within a research context and have a responsibility to conduct AR. It is also common for HAEIs to interact with related enterprise Research & Development, and to contribute directly to the creation of intellectual property in arts, entertainment and media through research practice.’

‘This environment requires funding for: educating the next generation of researchers through doctoral programmes; ensuring appropriate physical and virtual infrastructures as well as archiving and disseminating means; building links with business and enterprise in order to stimulate the impact of research.’

‘AR is validated through peer review covering the range of disciplinary competences addressed by the work. Quality assurance is undertaken by recognised independent, international QA bodies and assures the standards described in the European Standards and Guidelines (ESG 2015) for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area.’

‘[T]he establishment of AR as an independent category within the Frascati Manual, establishing the opportunity for harvesting research data and statistics from the AR field.’

This is not conceptual poetry; these are quotes from the Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research signed on 20 June 2020 by all major organisations of European art schools. Of the many things that rub one the wrong way, two stand out: next to the grotesque neoliberal-bureaucratic language, art schools’ land-grabbing claim to own and define artistic research. Both, of course, done with the best intentions to emancipate artistic research.

The Vienna Declaration doesn’t mention artists at all; they literally don’t exist in its text.

With the research project job openings associated with it, the Vienna Declaration reframes artistic research as a top-down practice where projects, subjects and research questions formulated by academic institutions and artists need to fit into pre-defined projects and calls, forms, formats and methods.2 Artists ultimately won’t have the freedom of refusing to participate, because these programmes will be among the few remaining opportunities to be paid for their practice. But what is wrong with new openings for precarious practitioners?

The Vienna Declaration claims that artistic research is ‘still a relatively young field’, thereby ignoring the long history of artistic research as artists’ self-initiated and self-organised practices. Explicitly – that is, literally under the name ‘artistic research’ – research as an artistic practice has existed for more than sixty years; implicitly for centuries if not millennia.

To give only a few examples, with no pretensions of completeness or lack of bias:

• In his 1957 Notes on the Formation of an Imaginist Bauhaus, Asger Jorn wrote that ‘artistic research is identical to “human science,” which for us means “concerned” [i.e., engaged] science, not purely historical science. This research should be carried out by artists with the assistance of scientists’.3 With Piero Simondo and Guiseppe Pinot-Gallizio, Jorn founded an artistic research lab in Alba, Italy, that eventually merged with the Situationist International. Simondo went on to found the ‘International Center for an Institute of Artistic Research’ (IRA) in 1962.
• In 1976, the Swiss artist, experimental art educator and collaborator and translator of Marcel Duchamp, Serge Stauffer, wrote a manifesto ‘Kunst als Forschung’ (Art as Research) in which he demanded that ‘art-research [...] has to avoid serving those in power’ and ‘requires its own methodology; it cannot use the scientific methodology but let itself inspire from it’.4
• Artistic research semi-explicitly existed in the UNOVIS collective founded by Kasimir Malevich in Vitebsk and the LEF journal edited by Vladimir Mayakovsky and designed by Alexander Rodchenko, in French surrealism and its ‘Bureau de recherches surréalistes’ established in 1925, in the Acéphale group around Georges Bataille and André Masson founded in 1936; in the Situationist International (which worked under the moniker of a research group and published its periodical as a research journal), in conceptual art, feminist art and institutional critique, by Adrian Piper, Martha Rosler, Hans Haacke, Art & Language, Hito Steyerl and Andrea Fraser among many others.
• Today, artistic and speculative research is the sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit basis of Afrofuturist arts (such as in the Black Quantum Futurism collective), of transdisciplinary artist-researcher collectives (such as Homeshop in Beijing, ruangrupa in Jakarta and Kunci in Yogyakarta, to name only a few). It is also the explicit basis of many artists’ publishing initiatives (such as Re / search Publishing by V. Vale and DisplayDistribute in Hong Kong) and artist-run universities (such as Joseph Beuys’ Free International University, the Copenhagen Free University, Gudskul and Floating University, Berlin).
• Musical composition was part of the Western scientific research canon for centuries (with music being part of the scientific ‘quadrivium’ next to astronomy, arithmetic and geometry from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance), and doctoral degrees in music have existed for more than a century. Electronic music composers and practitioners organised themselves in research groups such as the French Groupe de Recherches Musicales (Musical Research Group, GRM) in 1958, Natlab in the Netherlands and university-affiliated electronic music studios all over the world. They also created their own artistic research disciplines such as sonology. Outside the Western classical music tradition, practitioners such as the Sun Ra Arkestra understood their work as research.5
• Design research existed, as a Western discipline, at least since the Bauhaus, architectural research since the Renaissance.
• Aside from these examples, artistic practices do and always have involved research: material research, field research, anatomical research, technological research and experimentation, to name a few.

By calling artistic research a ‘young field’, the Vienna Declaration makes us worry that its authors weren’t even aware of the history sketched above, and unfamiliar with many if not most of the artists and artistic research practices mentioned. At least, the Vienna Declaration doesn’t speak their language. We couldn’t phrase it better than the Swiss art researcher Michael Hiltbrunner who, reflecting on Serge Stauffer, wrote in 2019:

Academic priorities and the requirements of the PhD programme force current artistic research into an unproductive formalism. Now, studying art means conforming to a system with rules that are not defined in the spirit of art. Moreover, problems lie in the fact that a language of art pedagogy and curatorship is used. [In the Vienna Declaration, we should add to Hiltbrunner, not even that.] What is needed is a vocabulary founded in the researching practices of artists themselves.

On top of burdening artistic research with ‘an unproductive formalism’, PhD degrees as a new focus or centre of artistic research could, in the worst case, mean a regression, since academic standards and accreditation criteria require PhD research to be individually identifiable and gradable, which is structurally incompatible to collective (let alone anonymous-collective) artistic research (such as that of Acéphale, GRM, the Black Audio Film Collective, the Cyberfeminist International, Laboria Cuboniks, ruangrupa and many more). The standard academic requirement for PhD research – independent individual development of original research and original contributions to knowledge – could even create a reactionary rollback within the arts, back to the model of the hyper-individualist, heroic artist-genius. Even without this extreme, we already know examples of artist research collectives that disintegrated after their members went on to pursue individual PhD degrees.

The Vienna Declaration’s pre-emptive obedience to established academic norms (such as peer review and validation) conversely wastes a larger opportunity – namely that of bringing artistic research into academia as a critical trojan horse in order to rethink and revise the standards and research culture of all academic disciplines.

For these and other reasons, we are not against the institutionalisation of artistic research. To quote Hiltbrunner: ‘It is important that artists can conduct research with institutional protection and public payment. Viewed in this light, doctoral study is important for the autonomy of the arts and should therefore be designed in such a way that it is in the interest of the artists.’6

Secondly, it positions the task of artistic research institutions in neoliberal-technocratic terms as ‘building links with business and enterprise in order to stimulate the impact of research’.

Which artistic research projects then would still have a place in the framework created by the Vienna Declaration? Would even widely recognised, canonical examples of fairly scholarly artistic research be admitted? What has been the ‘validation’ of Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975)? Would Adrian Piper’s Funk Lessons (1983) or Hito Steyerl’s Liquidity Inc. (2014) have passed peer reviews? Or built links with business and enterprise? We shouldn’t even mention the experiments of the Surrealists, which in their time were attacked as irresponsible by clinical psychologists – or the use of time travel as a critical artistic research method in Black Quantum Futurism.

When Siegfried Zielinski – former director of the art school HfG Karlsruhe and thus experienced in the managerial side of art education – sketched the departments of a future academy, he demonstrated the possibility of alternative visions:

Faculties for an Academy of the 21st Century:

Dignity
Hospitality
Unconditioned dialogue
Unusual activities
Paleofuturism
Phataphysik
Cultura experimentalis
Chaos pilots – Kairos-poets
Critical engineering
Non-censurable systems
Knowledge of the winds / Navigations
Scale / Skalierung
Sustainability
Projections
Variantology

– Siegfried Zielinski, Shanghai Nov 26, 2019

In other words, policy documents, executive language and institutional formatting do not need to be as impoverished and limiting as in the Vienna Declaration. Just as any material, they can be tools of self-critique, inspiring and imaginative, food for thought, starting points for artistic imaginations and practices, broadening rather than confining.

What are the characteristics of the new system of institutional ‘AR’ as opposed to previous practices of artist-run research?

With the Vienna Declaration focussing on art schools, universities and doctoral degree programmes, its concept of ‘AR’ closely resembles institutional research lab art, or what has been known since the late 1960s under the name ‘Art-Science’. Its origins lie in the journal Leonardo, in electronic music composition at research studios such as IRCAM or the State University of New York at Buffalo, new media and bio art / bio design labs at ars electronica, MIT and elsewhere. Only in such environments, ‘AR’ can deliver what is being promised in the Vienna Declaration: ‘AR is validated through peer review covering the range of disciplinary competences addressed by the work’, among others after having been published in one of the ‘international peer reviewed scholarly journals in the discipline’.

While such an ‘AR’ system is already in place – and makes sense among others for art school tutors who take temporary leaves from teaching to deepen their research interests and research skills, or for artists who want to pursue a particular research project in an academic environment, with institutional support – it to date has made no monopoly or ownership claims on artistic research. Instead, artistic research in institutional projects has been defined as the individual research contributions of participating artists; in other words, as their way of working, not as something initiated or defined by the institution.

The focus of ‘AR’ on the PhD as an individual, validated degree is doomed to boil down to the exclusion of collective and do-it-yourself practices – and hence the most contemporary forms of artistic research – unless these issues are being addressed from the beginning (which the Vienna Declaration doesn’t).

With educational institutions now claiming ownership of artistic research, and introducing their own quality and validation standards, they factually create their own art system, as described above by Howard Becker. As a result, artistic research will be split into two forms and systems: ‘AR’ in art schools as opposed to artistic research in art practice and art worlds at large.

Is this desirable? We don’t think so. Instead of creating hospitable spaces, infrastructures and institutional recognition for artist-run research initiatives (from the Bureau de recherches surréalistes to the Community Futures Lab of the Afrofuturist Affair in Philadelphia or Lifepatch in Indonesia), ‘AR’ is in danger of ending up as its own self-referential system, with artistic researchers and projects that are recognised only within that system, and the system serving the ultimate purpose of preserving itself7; in other words, a land-grab for an ivory tower.

In its well-meaning attempt to achieve academic and governmental recognition of, and budgets for artistic research, the Vienna Declaration rehashes the worst of technocratic higher education jargon and business rhetoric. Not only does this do, for the sake of short-term political gains, a long-term disservice to artistic research, it also amounts to the very opposite of what traditional scholars and academia expect and hope to gain from artistic research – namely, a different concept and imagination of research than ‘the standards described in the European Standards and Guidelines’.