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Research:
PrC au crtaittoironer
Educator

1

4

Table of
Contents

Series Introduction 5
L olita Jablonskienė

and Ieva Pleikienė
p. 8
Introduction
Research:
Practitioner
Curator
Educator
Marquard Smith
p. 10
Art in the Knowledge-
based Polis
Tom Holert
p. 26
The National Gallery
of Art: Curatorial
Philosophy and Practice
Lolita Jablonskienė
p. 54
Research in the Art
Museum: Shifting
Priorities and Purposes
Emily Pringle
p. 68

6

Breaking the Black Box: 7
Modalities of Practice
Research in the Art and
Design PhD
Tom Corby
p. 76
The Case of Donelaitis
Žygimantas Augustinas

p. 84
Research as a Field of
Disputation Between
Different Stakeholders
and About Competing
Concepts
Vytautas

Michelkevičius
p. 98
Discussion
p. 114
Afterword: ‘Art in the
Knowledge-based Polis’,
ten years on
Tom Holert
p. 136
Biographical notes
p. 142
Colophon
p. 158

Series
Introduction

Lolita Jablonskienė and
Ieva Pleikienė
8 Almost ten years ago, in 2011, Vilnius Academy of
Arts began its practice-based doctoral studies
programme in visual arts and design. From the very
beginning the Department of Doctoral Studies raised
questions around what it means for artists and
designers to do research alongside their creative
practice. And, when we say ‘alongside’, we’re asking
what it means for research to be in addition to or in
dialogue with creative practice, but also and more
importantly what it means for that creative practice to
emerge from and be shaped by research?) What’s the
point of doing it? And, what might this kind of research
look like, be, and do? We are still asking these
questions genuinely and openly.
This book series comes out of the Academy’s ongoing
commitment to debating research from different
perspectives. The titles of the four books in the Series

are (1) Research: Practitioner | Curator | Educator (2)
Decolonising: the Museum, the Curriculum, and the
Mind (3) Do The Right Thing, and (4) What If? The
Future of History in Post-Truth Times.

The Series as a project is born of a desire to listen to,
learn from, and extend the horizons of ‘local’ academic
knowledges via a course entitled ‘Research as Praxis’
for PhD students led by prof. Marquard Smith who in
turn invited Vilnius-based curators, practitioners, critics,
academics, and educators to be in public dialogue with
international guests from the arts and humanities.

The National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Vilnius, which 9
has many long-term associations with the Academy,
was invited to join the initiative with a view to opening
up a debate on our shared interests in urgent topics
concerning research and praxis to a wider public
beyond academia including artists, designers,
researchers, curators, and museumgoers.

NGA served as a site to host the majority of these
discussions, and contributed to the discourse by
necessarily transforming more exclusively academic
concerns through the perspectives of curatorial
and educational research and practice. Arguments
proposed and debated during the events confirmed the
critical potential of ‘learning in public’ as prof. Marquard
Smith aptly called this joint endeavour between the
Academy and the Museum. This series of books
consolidates and shares the diverse knowledges
generated through such a collaboration.

Introduction
Research:
Practitioner
Curator
Educator

Marquard Smith

10 As artists, designers, curators, critics, educators, and
academics, what is ‘research’ for us in the second
and third decades of the 21st century? Do we conduct
research? What do we do when we do it, how do we
do it, and what makes up this doing? What is done, and
what needs to be done? As practitioners, do we think
about practice-as-research, and about research-as-
practice, and if so, how so? Is research perhaps even
a praxis; which is to say, is it an act, a doing action, an
embodying and enacting of ideas, an act of engaging
politically and ethically? What is the nature (or what are
the modalities) of the work that we as researchers do,
if indeed we consider ourselves researchers, and, if
not, why not? And how have recent shifts in paradigms
of knowledge generation and distribution – in the
art and design school, the museum and gallery, and
the creative and cultural industries more generally –
transformed profoundly what we as researchers

do, how we do it, and to what end? Ultimately, 11
given our shared interest in practice, practice-led or
practice-based research, research-led or research-
based practice, and in artistic research, how might
research – and research as a process – be embodied
in and articulated by way of art, design, history/theory,
writerly, and curatorial projects? And, how might such
research give rise to new knowledges, engender
knowledge differently, and precipitate things divergent
from or other than knowledge?
The questions raised by the contributors to Research:
Practitioner | Curator | Educator, and with which they
engage here, were broached initially at the first of five
events in a public programme organized by Vilnius
Academy of Arts in the academic year 2018-19; three
of the five events, including the one on research,
were collaborations with Lithuania’s Nacionalinė dailės
galerija, the country’s National Gallery of Art in Vilnius.
The events, in chronological order, were:
•  ‘Research: Practitioner | Curator | Educator’
•  ‘ Decolonising: the Museum, the Curriculum, and

the Mind’, also a symposium at the National
Gallery;
•  ‘ Do The Right Thing’, a project composed of an
exhibition of work by 21 PhD students in the
5,000-square foot Titanikas Gallery at Vilnius
Academy of Arts, a catalogue, a pirate radio
broadcast, debates and workshops, a club
night, and a poetry slam, all led by the students
themselves;
•  ‘ Writing: Academic, Critical, Performative’, a
‘conversation’ at the Vilnius Book Fair; and
•  ‘W hat If? The Future of “History” in Post-Truth
Times’, another symposium also at the Gallery.1

1  Apart from the event on ‘Writing’, all of the others appear in book
form in this Series.

These events were the public-facing components of a
course I began teaching in 2018-19 entitled ‘Research
as Praxis’ with PhD students in the Department
of Doctoral Studies at Vilnius Academy of Arts,
Lithuania’s premier (and in fact only) art and design
school. The course is structured as four two-day
thematic Intensives, each including lectures, seminars,
workshops and the events themselves. Each Intensive
is an occasion for students to work closely together,
and with visiting practitioners, academics, curators,
and educators (who also contribute to the events) on a
particular theme common, germane, and pressing for
their studies. This first Intensive on ‘PhD-ness in the art
school’ circled around the deceptively simply question:
‘what is research?’
(Each Intensive takes as its starting point a ‘key text’
around which activities congregate, and for the theme
of ‘research’ that text was ‘Art in the Knowledge-based
12 Polis’ by Tom Holert, the writer, curator, artist, former
editor of Texte zur Kunst, and recent co-founder of the
Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin.)
The course encourages students to think explicitly
about situating or orienting themselves, and their PhD
projects in relations with:
•  Practices (art and design practices above all, but

also histories and theories of art and design, art
and design education, and practices of pedagogy)
•  Institutionally (in relation to the art school, the
classroom, the studio, the gallery, the public/civic
domain, the art world and design industries, etc.),
and
•  Planetarily (in relation to ecologies or networks of
practitioners and practices, curators and curating,

critics and criticism, institutions and audiences,
the market/economy, publics and their own
communities of practice).2

It’s instructive, I think, to include here the formal
‘guidance’ from the Handbook on the course’s
objectives because the supposed banalities of such
rules and regulations are always telling - pedagogically,
ideologically, and institutionally. The objectives of
‘Research as Praxis’ are to work with students on:

•  Familiarizing them with the idea of a research 13
project within the context of an art school

•  Introducing them to research as itself a subject of
research

•  Facilitating an understanding of their PhD as a
research project

•  Developing their awareness of key historical/
theoretical concerns that underpin all research
projects in the art school, and embed them in their
PhD project

•  Advancing their ability to articulate their PhD project
as research to their peers, supervisors, and their
artistic, intellectual, and professional communities

•  Rooting in their project and their practice (as
artists, designers, historians, theorists, curators,
etc.) a clear sense of how their PhD project as
research contributes to and advances knowledge
and understanding in their field of study/research/
practice

•  Beginning to establish their PhD as an independent
research practice

By the end of the course, the Handbook informs us,
doctoral students are expected to be able to:


2  I borrow the word planetarily from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
Death of a Discipline, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

Qualifications that Qualifications that At the end of the
signify completion signify completion of the course a doctoral
of the third cycle doctoral studies program student is expected to
are awarded to in art / design in VAA be able to:
students who: are awarded to students Understand their
who: PhD as a research
project within an art
Knowledge and •  Must have knowledge school context; and
understanding: at the highest demonstrated this
have demonstrated international level understanding by way
a systematic within the research of spoken, creative,
understanding of a field. and text-based
field of study and contributions.
mastery of the skills •  Must have made a
and methods of significant contribution
research associated to the development
with that field;. of new knowledge
and understanding
within the research
field based on artistic/
scientific research.

Applying knowledge •  Must master the Be familiar with
and understanding: scientific methods research as a subject
have demonstrated and tools as well as of research (including
the ability to other skills related issues of PhD-ness,
14 conceive, design, to research and research as praxis,

implement and development tasks knowledge, history,
adapt a substantial within the field. materiality, etc.);
process of research •  Must be able to and evidence this
with scholarly participate in the by ‘translating’ the
integrity; field’s international course’s concerns into
discussions and their work and words.
disseminate scientific
results and advances
to a wide audience.

Making judgements: •  Must be able to Contextualize their
have made a analyse, assess and PhD project (as a
contribution develop new ideas, research project)
through original including designing and their practice (as
research that and developing new research), and ‘speak
extends the frontier techniques and skills on its behalf’ in these
of knowledge within the field. terms; so that it can
by developing be understood (by
a substantial them and others) as an
body of work, original contribution to
some of which knowledge.
merits national
or international
refereed
publication; are
capable of critical
analysis, evaluation
and synthesis of
new and complex
ideas;

Communication: •  Must be able to Speak compellingly 15
can communicate organise and carry about their PhD project
with their peers, out research and as an independent
the larger scholarly development tasks research practice
community and with in complex and to their cohort,
society in general unpredictable contexts. staff at VAA, and
about their areas of wider artistic/design
expertise; •  M ust be able to communities of
independently practice both nationally
initiate and form and internationally.
part of national
and international
collaboration about
research and
development with
scientific integrity.

I share this guidance because the aims and objectives
and outcomes of a course are indicative of what
institutions such as art schools often understand
their roles and responsibilities to be, and how
they root, carry, and communicate these roles
and responsibilities, in the context of the ongoing
neo-liberalisation of higher education, and its
instrumentalising of knowledge, and of knowledge
production.3 Such guidance is indicative of an
institution’s ethos in which practices of art and design –
what such practices are and do – are ‘purportedly
render[ed] intelligible’ by way of regimes of validation
and legitimation such as supervision, evaluation,
accountability, and judgement, as cultural critic Tom
Holert writes in his foundational article entitled ‘Art in
the Knowledge-based Polis’.4
Originally published in e-flux (issue #3) back in
February 2009, and reproduced here, in that text
16 Holert points to a congealing of the concept of
‘knowledge production’ in general, but also at the
same time takes to task the idea that practice or
artistic research or artistic knowledge might somehow
circumvent (rather than re-affirm) such discursive
regimes.5 Rather, he makes it clear that institutions
themselves embody and articulate the dynamics
of power-knowledge, in which the two are always

3  In this regard, and in such a context, I would like to think that the
‘guidance’ in my course document is not necessarily ‘better’, but
certainly not ‘worse’ than similar documentation being used in PhD/
doctoral programmes in art schools across the UK, continental
Europe, the US, and elsewhere.

4  Tom Holert, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/03/68537/art-in-the-
knowledge-based-polis/
e-flux, Journal #03 - February 2009.

5  The neo-liberalisation of higher education is of course simply
the latest power-knowledge regime at work in the art school –
discourses of freedom, creativity, inspiration, experimentation,
originality, failure, professionalization, skill, efficiency, participation,
collaboration, risk, and so forth, are no less regimes of power-
knowledge, and are themselves often allied to neo-liberalisation.

already inextricably related, as Michel Foucault
knew all too well, thereby shaping and dictating what
comes about within them; which includes the figure
of the practitioner itself, and our practices also. In
the art school, then, much like in the public museum,
the commercial book fair, and numerous other
manifestations of the creative and cultural industries,
by way of their structures, infrastructures, behaviours,
and mentalities, we as practitioners are both subjects
of and subject to them.

Relating to such dynamics of power-knowledge,
specifically as they congregate around and are
provoked by the idea of the PhD by practice in the art
school, back in 2008 I asked a series of connected
questions at an event I co-organised at the Clark Art
Institute in Williamstown, USA, that appeared in the
event’s subsequent publication thus:

What is practice-led research? What is a practice- 17
led Ph.D.? How to conceive of such a project?
What kind of research training is useful and
appropriate for a project such as this? Should
an artist or designer be familiar with existing
published academic research that pertains to his
or her practice, and why should he or she need to
demonstrate this familiarity? How and why should
his or her practice develop a position in relation
to that research? What counts as ‘investigation’
and ‘evaluation’ and an ‘independent and original
contribution to knowledge’? How is this project
meant to ‘demonstrate’ its original contribution
to knowledge - can it or should it have to, even?
(And is this knowledge as a means to an end, or
knowledge as an end in itself?) Should the practice-
led Ph.D. be accompanied by some kind of written
supplement? And, if so, should it be a commentary,
an explanation, or a contextualizing that enables

it to ‘demonstrate’ the research? Or should it
have another kind of written accompaniment that
is somehow ‘alongside’ or ‘in dialogue’ with the
practice? All of which is to say, how does practice-
led research make explicit – if it should even have
to – the process of research that is integral to its
practice?6
Most of these questions are still worth asking, I
believe, especially in the context of a publication on
research as it relates to practitioners, curators, and
educators operating in and between the art school,
the art gallery or museum, and the creative and
cultural industries. For sure these questions were,
and still are, complicit inadvertently with (perhaps
even a capitulation to?) the instrumentalisation of
knowledge and knowledge production by way of the
neo-liberalisation of higher education, but they are
also a purposeful challenge to it. While there is still no
18 consensus on the ‘status’ of ‘knowledge’ in practice-
led research, what is even more true now than it was
back in 2008 is that such instrumentalizing all too
often ossifies institutions and their practices – whether
these practices are artistic, curatorial, exhibitionary, or
educational.
That said, while industries such as higher education
and those in the museum sector might be overly-
regulatory in their authority and control, they also
institute: they inaugurate the conditions of possibility
for curiosity, experimentation, failure, conversation,
procrastination, incomprehension, care, learning,
righteousness, disagreement, dissent, protest and
activism, and dissensus, initiating counter-institutional

6  Marquard Smith, ‘Introduction: Asking the Question: Why “What is
Research in the Visual Arts? Obsession, Archive, Encounter”?’, in
Michael Ann Holly and Marquard Smith, eds., What is Research in
the Visual Arts? Obsession, Archive, Encounter, Clark Studies in the
Visual Arts/Yale University Press, 2009, x-xxvi, xiv.

platforms, and so much more. Art schools as regimes
of discipline and control are, then, also always and
already environments in which to have a practice, and
to think through what it means to practice, and to do so
in practice; they are environments where any and every
practice ought to flourish. Given this flourishing as a
process that’s not determined in advance, it is for the
institution, and for those of us that are ‘representative’
of the institution, to be asking of practice not ‘how can
we grade this?’ but ‘how can we [as individuals and as
an institution] change to meet this?’7

Holert knows institutions institute such conditions of 19
possibility. So while his article begins with concern
for practice in the knowledge-based polis, where
knowledge – which includes practice as knowledge – is
institutionalized, instrumentalized, and commodified,
at the same time he’s interested in the potentialities
of how ‘art might be comprehended and described
as a specific mode of generating and disseminating
knowledge’, and ‘the particular kind of knowledge
that can be produced within the artistic realm by the
practitioners or actors who operate in its various places
and spaces’. [emphasis added]

Against the values of knowledge-based economies
(efficiency, etc.) then, Holert highlights the forever
changing structure, status, and shape of knowledge
and knowledge formation, foregrounding practitioners
working in the realms of, for instance, emergent
knowledges, situated knowledges, informal
knowledges, practical wisdom, and non-knowledge.
With the influence and importance of feminist,
queer, subaltern, and post-colonial epistemologies
looming large, he argues for Foucault’s idea in his The

7  This is a question asked by Adrian Rifkin, in discussion at a
conference on research entitled ‘Encounter, Curiosity and Method:
The Making of Practice’ that I programmed at Tate Britain in October
2006.

Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) of a ‘positivity
of knowledge’, which might be embodied in and
articulated by way of ‘discursive practices’ that
themselves may well ‘refuse any such discursivity’.
The promise and prospect of such practices and
refusals is why it’s so vital to begin from the idea of
‘research’ as a subject of research, and specifically the
subject of the figure of the researcher (you, me, us) as
itself the locus for the discovery of knowledges (and
things other than knowledge too perhaps) by way of
the processual acts of searching, gathering, making/
producing, decision-making, and disseminating.
Here I think it is worth being reminded that research,
as I’ve written elsewhere, etymologically from the
Old French, recercer, and in its verb form, is both ‘to
search’ and ‘to search again.’ It is thus bursting with all
of the instigating and reiterating that this implies. As a
20 verb, research is ‘to roam while digging’ and ‘to look
for with care,’ and what is stressed etymologically is
the very act of searching and researching.8 Research is
then always and already action, process, praxis.
This is why it matters to foreground, celebrate, and
question the idea of research, and especially as
it relates to the figure of the practitioner, curator,
and educator as researcher (as well as to practice,
curating, and educating themselves as research
and as praxis).

8  Marquard Smith, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History: The Work
of Research in the Age of Digital Searchability and Distributability,’
Journal of Visual Culture, Vol 12(3), 2014, 375–403. See also
Marquard Smith and susan pui san lok, ‘Journeys, documenting,
indexing, archives and practice-based research: A conversation with
susan pui san lok.’ Art Journal 65(4), Winter, 2006, 18–35.

For it is these practitioner’s ways of doing (research)
that renders possible words imaginable. Their activity.
Their acts. It is their practice, as a practice. Their
labour. Their sensibility. Their choices and decisions.
Their compulsions, fixations, obsessions, and
repetitions; their cravings, longings. It is their curiosity.
It is their curiosity as a will, as the root of inquiry,
as the desire to learn and know. It is curiosity as a
modality of encounter driven by a will-to-learning and
a will-to-knowing which also indicates the reasoning
behind their very desire to be curious, linked as it is to
a sense of wonder, the excitement of discovery and
the pleasures and dangers therein. Their coming-to-
know by way of their practice-led research becomes
an invitation to further curiosity, wonder, thinking, and
change. This is why curiosity, as Foucault writes in ‘The
Masked Philosopher’, ‘evokes “concern”… the care
one takes for what exists and could exist.’

In their curiosity, these practitioners are self-reflexive, 21
self-conscious of their own subjectivity and positionality
as a necessary and inescapable (and even welcome)
starting point for research. They are aware of the
extent to which this impacts upon their approach to
and engagement with their visual, material, spatial, and
textual cultures, their primary and secondary sources,
their documents and archives, and the ‘theoretical’
questions that they might engender. Likewise, they
are attentive to the challenges of how to make out
and describe such encounters, and why it is so vital to
attend to the specificities of such encounters in their
singularity. For it is the distinctiveness of such interests
which offer up narratives, and alternative structures
of narrative, that tell us something interesting about
the order (and disorder) of things, of our arrangement
and re-arrangement of such documents, images,
objects, and environments, of their relations to us,
and thus of ours to the world. In all of this, latent

questions, documents and archives, primary and
secondary sources, visual, material, spatial, and textual
cultures emerge. Such particular convergences are
not determined in advance. They do not belong to
anyone. They emerge as they come into being, as
they take shape, and are enacted. Such particular
convergences – each and every PhD student’s
practice – are distinctively ‘institutive’.
Each manifestation of such instituting (which is the
basis for each PhD student’s project) emerges by
way of testing and trying, curiosity and speculation,
investigation and inquiry, creativity and techné, process
and practice, and risk and failure. As such, we must
be attentive to how the researcher – the artist, the
designer, the writer, the curator, the educator –
produces knowledge, produces new knowledge,
produces something other than knowledge; and how
their research utilizes (and invents their own) models
22 and methodologies. We need to be attentive to the
kinds of knowledges that art and design and writing
and curating and pedagogical practices produce, the
ways in which they do so, and to what end; as research
is embodied in and articulated by way of art and
design and writing and curating and pedagogy visually,
materially, and spatially.
For at its heart, instituting itself is born of the
experiment as methodology, and thus each PhD
project (along in fact with all decisions in the art
school as an institution) is a case study towards a
nascent taxonomy, cartography, and morphology of
experimentality.

* 23
Research: Practitioner | Curator | Educator tries
to identify where we’re at and where we might be
going vis-à-vis the idea of research in the art school,
higher education, museums and galleries, and the
creative and cultural industries more generally. By
way of this book, in particular we want to ask why
and how specific modes of practice (artistic practice,
curating, and practices of pedagogy) operate, and
what particular kinds of knowledges artistic research,
the curatorial, and the educator as ‘practitioner
researcher’ generate and disseminate.9 (These same
questions must also be asked of the PhD by practice
in the art school – whether that practice is Fine Art,
Design, Curating, Writing, Criticism, or a melding of
some or all of these practices.)
For this book, contributors to the original event, all
here, were asked to ‘set the scene’ with regards
to their ‘take’ on ‘research’, to raise fundamental
questions and concerns, and to begin to map a
few directions for further consideration, and offer
thoughts, however provisional, on future potentialities
for research itself. That event, along with the
extended discussion contributed to so actively by the
audience at Lithuania’s National Gallery of Art, was
captured and has been transcribed, edited carefully,
and forms the bulk of this publication. It is topped
and tailed by Tom Holert’s writing. His article is the
key compulsory reading for the first Intensive on
the ‘Research as Praxis’ course in the Department
of Doctoral Studies at Vilnius Academy of Arts, as
I’ve noted, and was a provocation and springboard
for those contributing to the event at the Gallery.

9  I take this phrase from Pringle, Emily, ‘Developing the Practitioner-
Researcher Within the Art Museum Context’, 2018 (and https://
practitionerresearchintheartmuseum.com)

Tom has been kind enough to write an Afterword
to Research: Practitioner | Curator | Educator, and
I thank him warmly here, along with all the other
contributors, and the active participation of audience
members at the National Gallery of Art.10
Research: Practitioner | Curator | Educator is
hopefully useful for PhD students in art schools
internationally, and those working across the Arts and
Humanities in institutions of higher education, as well
as additional publics engaged critically with the arts and
culture.
I hope it offers food for thought on pressing issues
around ‘research’ in our ‘knowledge economy’. I hope
too that it offers an instance, a model even, of how a
collaboration between an art school and a museum/
gallery might create a public-facing context exploring
matters of concern that are priorities for diverse if
24 often overlapping and inter-animating communities of
practice.
We have tried, and we are trying to go beyond the
institute of higher education figured as an ‘ivory tower’
or as an arts factory, and to model the possibilities
of further reciprocal relations between an art school,
a national gallery, a book fair, between students,
academics, practitioners, and publics, in ways that
spill out beyond higher education’s architectures of
pedagogy, and that enable, demand even, that the
world spill into academic discourse, transforming it
anew.

10  Thanks also need to be extended to the invisible hands that
are so often instrumental in turning ideas into realities whether
through labour, guidance, or rubber stamping, so thanks to Marius
Iršėnas, Lolita Jablonskienė, Audrius Klimas, Joanne Morra, Julija
Navarskaitė, Alfreda Pilitauskaitė, Gailė Pranckūnaitė & Marek
Voida, Ieva Pleikienė, Ieva Skauronė, and Julijonas Urbonas.

Research: Practitioner | Curator | Educator is
evidence of the activities of the students and staff
in the Department of Doctoral Studies at Vilnius
Academy of Arts, and the National Gallery of Art,
of working closely with students, their interests and
concerns, and how one develops a curriculum for
them, from them, which leads (it’s practice-led after all!)
to conversations, public-facing events, and publications
such as this. The book is a contribution to what a PhD
community is and does; in fact I think of it as a PhD
seminar in book form, and I think it can be used as
such. Hopefully it will circulate widely (as printed matter
but also and especially electronically) to other art and
design schools internationally.

Hopefully it will be shared amongst PhD students 25
who – by way of their own PhDs by Practice, their
practice-led or practice-based, or practice-related
artistic research – are themselves today being
challenged by, and in turn challenging engagingly
and unremittingly their own institutions’ complicity in
the neo-liberalisation of higher education and their
instrumentalising of knowledge in order to imagine
instituting alternative, progressive ways of being, doing,
and knowing for tomorrow.

Art in the
Knowledge-
based Polis1

Tom Holert

26 Lately, the concept of ‘knowledge production’ has
drawn new attention and prompted strong criticism
within art discourse. One reason for the current
conflictual status of this concept is the way it can be
linked to the ideologies and practices of neoliberal
educational policies. In an open letter entitled ‘To the
Knowledge Producers’, a student from the Academy
of Fine Arts Vienna has eloquently criticized the way
education and knowledge are being ‘commodified,
industrialized, economized and being made subject to
free trade.’2

1  Tom Holert, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/03/68537/art-in-the-
knowledge-based-polis/
e-flux, Journal #03 - February 2009, This essay was a revised and
abridged version of a talk given at the conference ‘Art/Knowledge.
Between Epistemology and Production Aesthetics’ at the Academy
of Fine Arts Vienna, November 11, 2008.

2  [email protected], ‘To the Knowledge Producers’,
in Intersections. At the Crossroads of the Production of Knowledge,
Precarity, Subjugation and the Reconstruction of History, Display
and De-Linking, ed. Lina Dokuzovic, Eduard Freudmann, Peter
Haselmayer, and Lisbeth Kovacic, Vienna: Löcker, 2008, p. 27.

In a similar fashion, critic Simon Sheikh has addressed
the issue by stating that ‘the notion of knowledge
production implies a certain placement of thinking,
of ideas, within the present knowledge economy, i.e.
the dematerialized production of current post-Fordist
capitalism’; the repercussions of such a placement
within art and art education can be described as an
increase in ‘standardization’, ‘measurability’, and ‘the
molding of artistic work into the formats of learning and
research.’3 Objections of this kind become even more
pertinent when one considers the suggestive rhetoric
of the major European art educational network ELIA
(European League of Institutes of the Arts), which, in a
strategy paper published in May 2008, linked ‘artistic
research’ to the ‘EU policy of the generation of “New
Knowledge” in a Creative Europe.’4

I am particularly interested in how issues concerning 27
the actual situations and meanings of art, artistic
practice, and art production relate to questions
touching on the particular kind of knowledge that
can be produced within the artistic realm (or the
artistic field, as Pierre Bourdieu prefers it) by the
practitioners or actors who operate in its various
places and spaces. The multifarious combinations of
artists, teachers, students, critics, curators, editors,
educators, funders, policymakers, technicians,
historians, dealers, auctioneers, caterers, gallery
assistants, and so on, embody specific skills and
competences, highly unique ways and styles of
knowing and operating in the flexibilized, networked

3  Simon Sheikh, ‘Talk Value: Cultural Industry and Knowledge
Economy’, in On Knowledge Production: A Critical Reader in
Contemporary Art, ed. Maria Hlavajova, Jill Winder, and Binna Choi,
Utrecht: BAK, basis vooractuele kunst; Frankfurt am Main: Revolver,
Archiv für aktuelle Kunst, 2008, pp. 196-7.

4  Chris Wainwright, ‘The Importance of Artistic Research and its
Contribution to “New Knowledge” in a Creative Europe’, European
League of Institutes of the Arts Strategy Paper, May 2008, http://
www.elia-artschools.org/publications/position/research.xml.

sphere of production and consumption. This variety and
diversity has to be taken into account in order for these
epistemes to be recognized as such and to obtain at
least a slim notion of what is at stake when one speaks
of knowledge in relation to art – an idea that is, in the
best of cases, more nuanced and differentiated than
the usual accounts of this relation.
‘Far from preventing knowledge, power produces
it,’ as Foucault famously wrote.5 Being based
on knowledge, truth claims, and belief systems,
power likewise deploys knowledge – it exerts
power through knowledge, reproducing it and shaping
it in accordance with its anonymous and distributed
intentions. This is what articulates the conditions of
its scope and depth. Foucault understood power
and knowledge to be interdependent, naming this
mutual inherence ‘power-knowledge’. Power not only
supports, but also applies or exploits knowledge.
28 There is no power relation without the constitution
of a field of knowledge, and no knowledge that does
not presuppose power relations. These relations
therefore cannot be analyzed from the standpoint of a
knowing subject. Subjects and objects of knowledge,
as well as the modes of acquiring and distributing
knowledges, are effects of the fundamental, deeply
imbricated power/knowledge complex and its historical
transformations.

5  Michel Foucault,  Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,
trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Vintage, [1975]1995.

29

Figure 1. Kim Howells
(speaking) and Alex
Roberts during a sit-in
meeting. Photograph
© John Rae.

1.  The Hornsey Revolution

On May 28, 1968, students occupied Hornsey College
of Art in the inner-suburban area of North London. The
occupation originated in a dispute over control of the
Student Union funds. However, ‘a planned programme
of films and speakers expanded into a critique of all
aspects of art education, the social role of art and the
politics of design. It led to six weeks of intense debate,
the production of more than seventy documents, a
short-lived Movement for Rethinking Art and Design
Education (MORADE), a three-day conference at
the Roundhouse in Camden Town, an exhibition
at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, prolonged
confrontation with the local authority, and extensive
representations to the Parliamentary Select Committee
on Student Relations.’6
30 Art historian Lisa Tickner, who studied at Hornsey
College of Art until 1967, has published a detailed
account of these events and discussions forty years
after the fact. As early as 1969, however (only a few
months after the occupation of Hornsey College of
Art had been brought to an end by pressure from the
above-mentioned local authority in July 1968), Penguin
released a book on what had already gained fame as
‘The Hornsey Affair’, edited by students and staff of the
college. This paperback is a most interesting collection
of writings and visuals produced during the weeks
of occupation and sit-ins, discussions, lectures, and
screenings. The book documents the traces and signs
of a rare kind of enthusiasm within an art-educational
environment that was not considered at the time to be
the most prestigious in England. Located just below
Highgate, it was described by one of the participants

6  Lisa Tickner, Hornsey 1968: The Art School Revolution, London:
Frances Lincoln, 2008, pp. 13-14.

31

Figure 2. Poster from
Hornsey Occupation,
1968, artist
anonymous.

as being ‘squeezed into crumbling old schools and
tottering sheds miles apart, making due with a
society’s cast-offs like a colony of refugees.’7 One
lecturer even called it ‘a collection of public lavatories
spread over North London.’8
But this modernist nightmare of a school became
the physical context of one of the most radical
confrontations and revolutions of the existing system
of art education to take place in the wake of the
events of May ’68. Not only did dissenting students
and staff gather to discuss new terms and models of
a networked, self-empowering, and politically relevant
education within the arts, the events and their media
coverage also drew to Hornsey prominent members of
the increasingly global alternative-utopian scene, such
as Buckminster Fuller.
However, not only large-scale events were
32 remembered. One student wrote of the smaller
meetings and self-organized seminars:

It was in the small seminars of not more than
twenty people that ideas could be thrashed
out. Each person felt personally involved in the
dialogue and felt the responsibility to respond
vociferously to anything that was said. These
discussions often went on to the small hours
of the morning. If only such a situation were
possible under ‘normal’ conditions. Never had
people en masse participated so fully before.
Never before had such energy been created
within the college. People’s faces were alight
with excitement, as they talked more than they

7  T.N., ‘Notes Towards the Definition of Anti-Culture’, in The
Hornsey Affair, ed. Students and staff of Hornsey College of Art,
Harmondsworth, London: Penguin, 1969, p. 15.

8  Ibid., p. 29.

had ever talked before. At least we had found
something that was real to all of us. We were
not, after all, the complacent receivers of an
inadequate educational system. We were actively
concerned about our education and we wanted to
participate.9

From today’s standpoint, the discovery of talking as a 33
medium of agency, exchange, and self-empowerment
within an art school or the art world no longer
seems to be a big deal, though it is still far from
being conventional practice. I believe that the simple-
sounding discovery of talking as a medium within
the context of a larger, historical event such as the
‘Hornsey Affair’ constitutes one of those underrated
moments of knowledge production in the arts – one
that I would like to shift towards the center of a manner
of attention that may be (but should not necessarily
be) labeled as ‘research’. With a twist of this otherwise
over-determined term, I am seeking to tentatively
address a mode of understanding and rendering
the institutional, social, epistemological, and political
contexts and conditions of knowledge being generated
and disseminated within the arts and beyond.

The participants in the Hornsey revolution of forty
years ago had very strong ideas about what it meant
to be an artist or an art student, about what was
actually at stake in being called a designer or a painter.
They were convinced that knowledge and knowledge
communication within art education contained
enormous flaws that had to be swept away:

Only such sweeping reforms can solve the
problems... In Hornsey language, this was
described as the replacement of the old ‘linear’

9  Ibid., pp. 38-7.

34

Figure 3. Buckminster
Fuller speaking at
Hornsey College of
Art, June 29, 1968.
Photograph © Steve
Ehrlicher.

(specialized) structure by a new ‘network’ (open,
non-specialized) structure... It would give the kind
of flexible training in generalized, basic creative
design that is needed to adapt to rapidly changing
circumstances – be a real training for work, in
fact... the qualities needed for such a real training
are no different from the ideal ones required to
produce maximal individual development. In art
and design, the choice between good workmen
and geniuses is spurious. Any system worthy of
being called ‘education’, any system worthy of
the emerging new world, must be both at once.
It must produce people whose work or ‘vocation’
is the creative, general transformation of the
environment.10

To achieve this ‘worthy’ system, it was considered
necessary to do away with the ‘disastrous
consequence’ of the ‘split between practice and theory,
between intellect and the non-intellectual sources
of creativity.’11 Process held sway over output, and 35

open-endedness and free organization of education
permeated every aspect of the Hornsey debates.12 It
was also clear that one of the most important trends
of the mid-1960s was the increasing interaction
and interpenetration of creative disciplines. ‘Art
and Design’, the Hornsey documents argued, ‘have
become more unified, and moved towards the idea
of total architecture of sensory experience’; England
underwent ‘a total revolution of sensibility.’13

The consequences of the intersecting developments
within the rebelling body of students and staff at
Hornsey (and elsewhere), as well as the general
changes within society and culture, had to become

10  Ibid., pp. 116-7.
11  Ibid. [Document 46], p. 118.
12  See ibid. [Document 46], p. 122.
13  Ibid., [Document 46], p. 124.

manifest in the very conceptual framework not only
of art education, but of art discourse as such. Hence,
there was a widespread recognition that in future all
higher education in art and design should incorporate
a permanent debate within itself. ‘Research’, in this
sense, came to appear an indispensable element in
education:

We regard it as absolutely basic that research
should be an organic part of art and design
education. No system devoted to the fostering
of creativity can function properly unless
original work and thought are constantly going
on within it, unless it remains on an opening
frontier of development. As well as being on
general problems of art and design (techniques,
aesthetics, history, etc.) such research activity
must also deal with the educational process
itself... It must be the critical self-consciousness
36 of the system, continuing permanently the work
started here in the last weeks [June, July 1968].
Nothing condemns the old regime more radically
than the minor, precarious part research played in
it. It is intolerable that research should be seen as
a luxury, or a rare privilege.14
Though this emphatic plea for ‘research’ was written
in a historical situation apparently much different than
our own, it nonetheless helps us to apprehend our
present situation. Many of the terms and categories
have become increasingly prominent in the current
debates on artistic research, albeit with widely differing
intentions and agendas. It seems to be of the utmost
importance to understand the genealogy of conflicts
and commitments that have led to contemporary
debates on art, knowledge, and science.

14  Ibid. [Document 46], pp. 128-29.

37

Figure 4. 6137
McKeldin Library
at the University of
Maryland

2.  An Art Department as
a Site of Research in a
University System

Becoming institutionalized as an academic discipline
at the interface of artistic and scientific practices at
an increasing number of art universities throughout
Europe, artistic research (sometimes synonymous
with notions such as ‘practice-led research’, ‘practice-
based research, or ‘practice-as-research’) has various
histories, some being rather short, others spanning
centuries. The reasons for establishing programs and
departments fostering the practice-research nexus
are certainly manifold, and differ from one institutional
setting to the next. When art schools are explicitly
displaced into the university system to become sites
of research, the demands and expectations of the
scientific community and institutional sponsorship vis-
38 à-vis the research outcomes of art schools
change accordingly.
Entitled ‘Development and Research of the Arts’, a new
program of the Austrian funding body FWF aims at
generating the conceptual and material environment for
interdisciplinary art-related research within, between,
and beyond art universities. Thus far, however, the
conceptual parameters of the FWF appear to be the
subject of debate and potential revision and extension.
One should be particularly careful of any hasty grafting
of a conventional image of a ‘scientific’ model or mode
of research (whatever it may be) onto the institutional
context of an art academy. This is not only a matter of
epistemological concern, but of education policies and
of political debate as well.
One only has to look at the history of the
implementation of practice-led research in Art

and Design in Great Britain. In 1992 the Research
Assessment Exercise (RAE) of the Higher Education
Founding Council for England (HEFCE) began to
formulate criteria for so-called practice-based/practice-
led research, particularly in the field of performance,
design, and media. By 1996 the RAE had reached
a point where it defined research as an original
investigation undertaken in order to gain knowledge
and understanding. It includes work of direct relevance
to the needs of commerce and industry, as well as
to the public and voluntary sectors; scholarship;
the invention and generation of ideas, images,
performances and artifacts including design, where
these lead to new or substantially improved insights;
and the use of existing knowledge in experimental
development to produce new or substantially improved
materials, devices, products and processes, including
design and construction.15

The visual or fine arts of that time had yet to be 39
included in this structure of validation, though in the
following years various PhD programs in the UK
and elsewhere did try to shift them to an output-
oriented system of assessment close to those already
established for design, media, and performance arts.
‘New or substantially improved insights’ as well as
‘substantially improved materials, devices, products
and processes’ are the desired outcomes of research,
and the Research Assessment Exercise could not be
more explicit about the compulsory ‘direct relevance to
the needs of commerce and industry.’

PARIP (Practice as Research in Performance) is
a research group that supervises, assesses, and
discusses the ongoing research in the new art and

15  Angela Piccini, ‘An Historiographic Perspective on Practice as
Research’, PARIP (Practice as Research in Performance), http://
www.bristol.ac.uk/parip/t_ap.htm.

design environment initiated by the RAE and other
organizations concerned with higher arts education in
the UK. A 2002 report by Angela Piccini repeatedly
focuses on the relation between research and (artistic)
practice, and on the subjects and subjectivities,
competencies, and knowledges produced and required
by this development. After having interviewed various
groups of researchers and students from the field of
performance arts and studies, it became clear that
both concepts assume specific meanings and functions
demanded by the configuration of their new settings.
One of the groups Piccini interviewed pondered the
consequences of the institutional speech act that
transforms an artistic practice into an artistic practice-
as-research:

Making the decision that something is practice as
research imposes on the practitioner-researcher
a set of protocols that fall into: 1) the point that
40 the practitioner-researcher must necessarily
have a set of separable, demonstrable, research
findings that are abstractable, not simply locked
into the experience of performing it; and 2) it has
to be such an abstract, which is supplied with
the piece of practice, which would set out the
originality of the piece, set it in an appropriate
context, and make it useful to the wider research
community.16
It was further argued that ‘such protocols are not fixed’,
that ‘they are institutionalized (therefore subject to
critique and revision) and the practitioner-researcher
communities must recognize that.’ The report also
expressed concern about ‘excluded practices, those
that are not framed as research and are not addressing
current academic trends and fashion’, and it asked,

16  Ibid.

41

Figure 5. Board
Room at the African
Leadership Academy.

‘what about practices that are dealing with cultures not
represented within the academy?’17
When articulated in terms of such a regime of
academic supervision, evaluation, and control (as
it increasingly operates in the Euroscapes of art
education), the reciprocal inflection of the terms
‘practice’ and ‘research’ appears rather obvious,
though they are seldom explicated. The urge among
institutions of art and design education to rush the
process of laying down validating and legitimating
criteria to purportedly render intelligible the quality of
art and design’s ‘new knowledge’ results in sometimes
bizarre and ahistorical variations on the semantics of
practice and research, knowledge and knowledge
production.
For applications and project proposals to be steered
through university research committees, they have to
42 be upgraded and shaped in such a way that their claims
to the originality of knowledge (and thus their academic
legitimacy) become transparent, accountable, and
justified. However, to ‘establish a workable consensus
about the value and limits of practice as research both
within and beyond the community of those directly
involved’ seems to be an almost irresolvable task.18
At the least, it ought to be a task that continues to be
open-ended and inevitably unresolved.
The problem is, once you enter the academic power-
knowledge system of accountability checks and
evaluative supervision, you have either explicitly or
implicitly accepted the parameters of this system.
Though acceptance does not necessarily imply
submission or surrender to these parameters, a

17  Ibid.
18  See Anna Pakes, ‘Original Embodied Knowledge: The Epistemology

of the New in Dance Practice as Research’, Research in Dance
Education, 4, no. 2, December 2003: p. 144.

fundamental acknowledgment of the ideological
principles inscribed in them remains a prerequisite
for any form of access, even if one copes with them,
contests them, negotiates them, and revises them.
Admittedly, it is somewhat contradictory to claim a
critical stance with regard to the transformation of art
education through an artistic research paradigm while
simultaneously operating at the heart of that same
system. I do not have a solution for this. Nonetheless,
I venture that addressing the power relations that
inform and produce the kind of institutional legitimacy/
consecration sought by such research endeavours
could go beyond mere lip service and be effective in
changing the situation.

3.  Art in the Knowledge-
Based Polis

43

I would like to propose, with the support and drive
of a group of colleagues working inside and outside
the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, a research project
bearing the title ‘Art in the Knowledge-based Polis’. The
conceptual launch pad for this project is a far-reaching
question about how art might be comprehended
and described as a specific mode of generating and
disseminating knowledge. How might it be possible to
understand the very genealogy of significant changes
that have taken place in the status, function, and
articulation of the visual arts within contemporary
globalizing societies?
With reference to the work of French sociologist
Luc Boltanski, the term polis has been chosen
deliberately to render the deep imbrications of both the
material (urbanist-spatial, architectural, infrastructural,
etc.) and immaterial (cognitive, psychic, social,

aesthetic, cultural, legal, ethical, etc.) dimensions
of urbanity.19 Moreover, the knowledge-based
polis is a conflictual space of political contestation
concerning the allocation, availability and exploitation
of ‘knowledge’ and ‘human capital’.
As a consequence, it is also a matter of investigating
how the ‘knowledge spaces’ within the visual
arts and between the protagonists of the artistic
field are organized and designed.20 What are the
modes of exchange and encounter and what kind
of communicative and thinking ‘styles’ guide the
flow of what kind of knowledge? How are artistic
archives of the present and the recent past
configured (technologically, cognition-wise, socially)?
In what ways has artistic production (in terms of the
deployment and feeding of distributed knowledge
networks in the age of ‘relational aesthetics’)
changed, and what are the critical effects of
44 such changes on the principle of individualized
authorship?21
The implications of this proposal are manifold, and
they are certainly open to contestation. What,
for instance, is the qualifier enabling it to neatly
distinguish between artistic and non-artistic modes
of knowledge production? Most likely, there isn’t
one. From (neo-)avant-garde claims of bridging the
gap between art and life (or those modernist claims
which insist on the very maintenance of this gap) to

19  See Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, De la justification. Les
économies de la grandeur, Paris: Gallimard, 1991; Luc Boltanski
and Ève Chiapello, Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme, Paris:
Gallimard, 1999.

20  See Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Michael Hagner, and Bettina
Wahrig-Schmidt, eds., Räume des Wissens: Repräsentation,
Codierung, Spur, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997.

21  See Caroline A. Jones, ‘The Server/User Mode: the Art of
Olafur Eliasson’, Artforum International, 46, no. 2 (October
2007): pp. 316-324, p. 396, p. 402.

issues of academic discipline in the age of the Bologna
process and outcome-based education, it seems that
the problem of the art/non-art dichotomy has been
displaced. Today, this dichotomy seems largely to
have devolved into a question of how to establish a
discursive field capable of rendering an epistemological
and ontological realm of artistic/studio practice as a
scientifically valid research endeavor.

As art historian James Elkins puts it, concepts
concerning the programmatic generation of ‘new
knowledge’ or ‘research’ may indeed be ‘too diffuse
and too distant from art practice to be much use.’22
Elkins may have a point here. His skepticism regarding
the practice-based research paradigm in the fine
arts derives from how institutions (i.e., university and
funding bodies) measure research and PhD programs’
discursive value according to standards of scientific,
disciplinary research. For Elkins, ‘words like research
and knowledge should be confined to administrative 45
documents, and kept out of serious literature.’23 In a
manner most likely informed by science and technology
studies and Bruno Latour, he argues instead that the
focus should turn toward the ‘specificity of charcoal,
digital video, the cluttered look of studio classrooms
(so different from science labs, and yet so similar), the
intricacies of Photoshop… the chaos of the foundry,
the heat of under-ventilated computer labs.’ I think this
point is well taken.

However useless the deployment of terms such
as ‘research’ and ‘knowledge’ may seem, such
uselessness is bound to a reading and deployment
of the terms in a way that remains detached from

22  James Elkins, ‘Afterword: On Beyond Research and New
Knowledge, in Thinking Through Art: Reflections on Art as
Research, ed. Katy Macleod and Lin Holdridge, London/New York:
Routledge, 2006, p. 243.

23  Ibid., p. 246.

46

Figure 6. Art
Classroom at The
Calhoun School.

the particular modes of discourse formation in art
discourse itself. The moment one enters the archives
of writing, criticism, interviews, syllabi, and other
discursive articulations produced and distributed within
the artistic field, the use of terms such as ‘research’
and discussion about the politics and production
of ‘knowledge’ are revealed as fundamental to
twentieth-century art – particularly since the inception
of Conceptual Art in the late 1960s. After all, the
modernists, neo- and post-avant-gardists aimed
repeatedly at forms and protocols relating to academic
and intellectual work – of research and publication, the
iconography of the laboratory, scientific research, or
think tanks.

Administrative, information, or service aesthetics, 47
introduced at various moments of modernist and
post-modernist art, emulated, mimicked, caricaturized
and endorsed the aesthetics and rhetoric of scientific
communities. They created representations and
methodologies for intellectual labor on and off-
display, and founded migrating and flexible archives
that aimed to transform the knowledge spaces of
galleries and museums according to what were often
feminist agendas.

Within the art world today, the discursive formats of
the extended library-cum-seminar-cum-workshop-cum-
symposium-cum-exhibition have become preeminent
modes of address and forms of knowledge production.
In a recent article in this journal on ‘the educational
turn in curating’, theorist Irit Rogoff addresses the
various ‘slippages that currently exist between notions
of “knowledge production”, “research”, “education”,
“open-ended production”, and “self-organized
pedagogies”,’ particularly as ‘each of these approaches
seem to have converged into a set of parameters for

some renewed facet of production.’ Rogoff continues,
‘Although quite different in their genesis, methodology,
and protocols, it appears that some perceived
proximity to “knowledge economies” has rendered all
of these terms part and parcel of a certain liberalizing
shift within the world of contemporary art practices.’
However, Rogoff is afraid that ‘these initiatives are in
danger of being cut off from their original impetus and
threaten to harden into a recognizable “style”.’ As the
art world ‘became the site of extensive talking’, which
entailed certain new modes of gathering and increased
access to knowledge, Rogoff rightly wonders whether
‘we put any value on what was actually being said.’24
Thus, if James Elkins is questioning the possibility
of shaping studio-based research and knowledge
production into something that might receive
‘interest on the part of the wider university’ and be
acknowledged as a ‘position – and, finally, a discipline –
48 that speaks to existing concerns’,25 Rogoff seems to
be far more interested in how alternative practices of
communality and knowledge generation/distribution
might provide an empowering capacity.

Artistic Knowledge
and Knowledge-based
Economies

Since the neo-avant-gardes of the 1960s (at the
latest), knowledge generation within the visual arts
has expanded through the constitutive dissolution (or
suspension) of its subjects and media. Meanwhile,
however, its specific aesthetic dimension has continued

24  Irit Rogoff, ‘Turning’, e-flux journal, no. 0 (November 2008), http://
www.e-flux.com/journal/view/18.

25  Elkins, ‘Afterword’, p. 244.