Research in the arts: practices, questions and problems

Since arts schools were included by universities as fields of training and academic research, it has been argued repeatedly that artistic research is a form of research different from that of scientific knowledge but equal in its specificity and contribution to the community of knowledge and experience to which it belongs. Today, research in art or design involves asking epistemological, ontological and methodological questions about what we call knowledge and its relationship with society. It inevitably involves questioning the relationship between the arts and knowledge. Therefore, we can distinguish between three types of artistic research, summarized in three simple formulas: research for the arts, research on the arts and, finally, research in the arts, defended as the most genuine type of artistic research.

For decades there have been artistic research doctoral degrees in most parts of the world, artistic research projects with private or public funding through competitive calls, researchers accredited by their productive practice as artists or designers, and so on, creating a university research ecosystem closely interrelated with the industrial, cultural and social sector and structured by a vast network of institutions. It is therefore a rich and diverse ecosystem, heterogeneous and complex, but at the same time not without tensions in its evaluation, accreditation and formalization processes, depending on where they are carried out.

Today, talking about artistic research means confronting many of the complexities currently involved in research, regardless of whether or not it is linked to the arts. In other words, negotiating the relationship with industry and society, with public and private funding, with transference and applied research, with the local and global environment, with the different methods of evaluation associated with each different context; in short, with its constitutive heterogeneity. Now that the term is being vindicated both in the universities and in the artistic practice and institutions, the institutional position from which the different approaches to the nature of artistic research are set out is even more relevant.

The challenge, and the reason why artistic research has recently been discussed so much, lies in the definition of the parameters according to which we define the place of the arts, not only in relation to themselves but also to knowledge, and especially scientific knowledge, and therefore in the framework of the university. The next issue of Artnodes, which this year celebrates its 15th anniversary as an academic journal, will deal with artistic research, its practices, questions and problems. The call for papers will be open until 1 September 2017 and can be consulted here.