Critical and Reflective Inquiry: Theme - Artistic Research

Research is often framed as a means to an end, assumed to result in clear and articulate texts composed according to predetermined forms and standards. This class will introduce, examine, and cultivate practices in artistic research, where research as an open set of investigative acts and commitments constitutes in and of itself artistic work. We will focus on artistic research to reveal some alternative methods and contexts for acquiring, producing, and transmitting knowledge, learning from a global survey of socially engaged artists and artist-run institutions. In this sense, our work together will circulate several fundamental questions: 1) How and why might research become art? and 2) how and why might contemporary artists create and honor alternative systems of knowledge within a specific context? Students will trace what happens when intuitive, experimental, traditional, and mundane witnessing, studying, dreaming, remembering, feeling, documenting, dwelling, intervening, and conversing come to manifest a layered artistic project.

Some of the projects and institutions we will study include the House of Taswir, an imaginary institute for artistic and diasporic thinking, informed by ancient and contemporary Jewish and Islamic traditions; artist Arjuna Neuman’s meditation on tenderness; Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research, a grassroots artist-run initiative in Bethlehem, Palestine; artist Althea Thauberger’s work in community research; and local artist and writer Kristina Lee Podesva’s book project on Nancy Holt’s 1977-78 sculpture at Western, Stone Enclosure: Rock Rings. Through the quarter, students will emulate the three artistic research projects they are most interested in, and during the last weeks perform and document their own specific research practice.