Chris Wainwright and Søren Kjørup summing up after the last keynote session on Friday 25 September 2009.

The last keynote on friday 25 September 2009 was held by Chris Wrainwright, thus marking the end of numerous sessions and group presentations. The participants had time for lunch before boarding transports to their home destinations.

Many participants expressed satisfaction with the way the conference was organised and gave praise to the level and content of the group discussions. Expectations are high for a seventh conference.

Click here to read about the Key Note Speakers

The first bus leaves for the Airport (Flesland) at 14.15.

• Michéle Noach
• Florian Dombois
• Chris Wainwright

Themes

Michéle Noach: In 2004 I clambered onto a 100-year old Dutch schooner and sailed North, as far North as you can before reaching the Arctic ice-cap. I sailed into the ice and in some ways I never came back.  The voyage was part of Cape Farewell’s programme of taking artists and scientists to climate change ‘front-line’ areas. Thus we cannot only see, feel and record what is happening, but there is also the inevitable cross-pollination of science and art. This is valuable as both parties learn something beyond the exchange of data: about approach, presentation and perspective.

Florian Dombois: Art as Research, Artistic Research, Research through Art etc.: many new terms for something, that seems to be new and still in the growing. But really? Is the idea of research in the arts as new as it seems to be? In my talk I will present a few historic examples from different art disciplines (fine arts, music, architecture, theatre, design) and propose to read them as possible predecessors of our today’s discussion. Furthermore the examples shall be used to sharpen our understanding, which categories might be helpfull in announcing an artwork as a research result.

Chris Wainwright: For my keynote contribution I will propose and illustrate a series of questions, assumptions and challenges for art education in order to stimulate discourse and future agenda-setting around the notion of cross-disciplinary, thematic lines of enquiry. In my role as an artist, educator and curator I want to explore some of the debates surrounding the future direction, agendas and what constitutes a legitimate curriculum and research context, for the modern art school and a question the role and relevance of artists who evidence a commitment to engaging with thematic enquiry involving other disciplines and agencies. I intend to critically question the relationship between subject disciplines and a wider set of parameters of social and cultural conditions that affect, and are in turn affected by cultural practice.

About the Key Note Speakers

Florian Dombois: As an artist, Dombois (born 1966 in Berlin) has focused on the study of tectonics and related phenomena, and on their various representational and media formats.
Read more about Dombois here

Michèle Noach: australian born artist based in London.
Read more about Noach here.

Chris Wainwright: Professor, Artist, Head of Colleges,  Camberwell,  Chelsea,  Wimbledon (CCW), President of ELIA.
Read more about Wainwright here

Discussion during plenary sessions.

Key Note speaker during SK4, Åsa Sonjasdotter

 SK6 presenters

In addition to the key note speakers, we have a number of presenters in the group discussions.

Group presentations for SK6

“Public Art in the City of Zurich” is an interdisciplinary, cross-institutional, and practice-oriented research project dedicated to exploring public art in the City of Zurich. Till 2007 Zurich had neither a public art concept nor a coherent strategy for contemporary art in public space. Moreover, concepts of art and the public sphere have been undergoing fairly dramatic changes in the past 25 years. Analysing the overall situation, the project on the one hand aimed to achieve reorientation and on the other hand tried to position the issues on a local and international stage.

In a first project phase (2004 – 2007) the research group (steared by the “Institute for Contemporary Arts Reseach”) developped and realised ten art pilot projects as well as an innovative strategy (mission statement) for public art in the City of Zurich. The research outcome was published in 2007 by launching the book “Kunst und Öffentlichkeit” by JRP|Ringier Publishers.

Thanks to the broad survey of the Hardau area the “Institute for Contemporary Arts Research” (IFCAR) was given the commission by the City of Zurich to design a competition for new art projects in a new school building and a new public park in the so called area of Hardau. Being in charge of the whole competition, the Institute designed the remit and selected both local (Sabina Baumann, Nic Hess, Zilla Leutenegger, Julika Rudelius, Loredana Sperini) and international artists (Maja Bajevic, Marko Lulic, Adrian Paci, Ayse Erkmen, Sislej Xhafa) of whom we thought could cope with the task of drafting sustainable and meaningful art projects.

In our perspective artworks in public sphere which create reference to relevant urban factors are of growing social importance. In the Hardau area, factors relating to social space and urban development have turned out to be of particular importance.

We provided the invited artists with any background information that could be helpful in order to develop their project entries for the park and the school. Both of them function as places of encounter and exchange, where cultural diversity and the resulting conflict will become manifest. While the park, used by a heterogeneous group of people, will become a place where diverse values (attitudes to life and everyday behaviour) may come together, the secondary school will be a place where the shared individuation of young students takes place as well. Two sets of issues are relevant to the competition: the coming together of culturally diverse values, and the value shifts during this process of individuation. The aspect of cultural identification thus constitutes a type of pivot between the sets of issues described above.

The jury (various members of the City authority, members of the Institute, artists and architects) has recently taken the decision to commission an art work by Zilla Leutenegger in the school building and one by Sislej Xhafa in the park. At the moment the Institute is closely involved in the realisation of these two art projects which also means conveying the ideas and meanings of the projects to the residents of the Hardau area and the public of Zurich.

During the projects duration the research team had to address various problems in the field of the politics as well as in the communication toward the public. We became aware that the communication with various stakeholers has became crutial for success the whole project. Therefore we developed a customised strategy for the artist‘s needs, as well as for the need of the University and the City of Zurich.

The presentation will include the following parts:

- explain the pilot projects in the Hardau area
- discuss the context of the art in public space with focus on Zurich todays practice
- show the used interdisciplinary research methodologies to gather a dense knowledge about the site and the various contextes
- discuss the competition program and the remit
- show the two selected projects and discuss the decision of the jury
- explain the communication strategy

The discussion will focus on the following questions:

- How can research results be applied to a practical question?
- How can art in public space been supported by a research framework?
- How can artists been involved in a research oriented process in order to develop a) a pilot project and b) to design a significant work of art in a given context (which may be unfamiliar to the artist)?
- How can different research processes been syncronised and the gathered knowledge been bundled towards an artistic outcome?
- How can researchers advise authorities in the process of commissioning art works (competition, communication, public relations, planing processes, documentation etc.)?
- How can the research outcome be transfered to a pragmatic knowledge which can be used further on for similar problems?

Download the presentation

SK6 presentation – Christoph Lang

Christoph Lang
Research associate at the Institute for Contemporary Arts Research.
Zurich University of the Arts, Institute for Contemporary Arts Research

Florian Dombois is one of three key note presenters.

Art as Research, Artistic Research, Research through Art etc.: many new terms for something, that seems to be new and still in the growing. But really? Is the idea of research in the arts as new as it seems to be?

In my talk I will present a few historic examples from different art disciplines (fine arts, music, architecture, theatre, design) and propose to read them as possible predecessors of our today’s discussion. Furthermore the examples shall be used to sharpen our understanding, which categories might be helpfull in announcing an artwork as a research result.

Florian Dombois, Prof. / Head of Y (Institute of Transdisciplinarity)
Bern University of the Arts (CH)

One of three key note speakers at the  Sensuous Knowledge conference.

For my keynote contribution I will propose and illustrate a series of questions, assumptions and challenges for art education in order to stimulate discourse and future agenda-setting around the notion of cross-disciplinary, thematic lines of enquiry.

In my role as an artist, educator and curator I want to explore some of the debates surrounding the future direction, agendas and what constitutes a legitimate curriculum and research context, for the modern art school and a question the role and relevance of artists who evidence a commitment to engaging with thematic enquiry involving other disciplines and agencies. I intend to critically question the relationship between subject disciplines and a wider set of parameters of social and cultural conditions that affect, and are in turn affected by cultural practice.

I want to use the opportunity to present a case for higher arts education to consider a thematic-orientated structure as a relevant axis for creative education, and question the subject-specific practices that currently characterise the majority of our institutional approaches to curriculum construction.  It is arguable that informed and critical cultural practices draw their momentum more from a response to current pertinent social and cultural debates than from the core subject traditions. This is not to propose that there is a lesser value in exploring tradition, history or the lineages of artistic practice, but that these are enhanced by an informed contemporary research culture. Neither will I argue that artistic practice should abandon its unique position of promoting the raising of questions more than providing answers that also require the artist still to legitimately engage in practice that is often speculative, provocative and reflexive rather than being overly didactic or illustrative.
I think it is time to revise the map of relationships both within the art institution and outside it, and place a greater emphasis on learning and cultural practice as a reflexive process that is both inclusive and proactive in addressing the notions of context, quality, the relationship between theory and practice. Equally important is how we respond to the potentially instrumentalising and bureaucratic post Bologna rhetoric of ‘knowledge generation’ and research with reference to the subject specific characteristics of the arts.

The recent debates surrounding the importance of research, the function of discourse, the importance of experimentation and the recognition of process as a form of practice and the role and purpose of the artifact, are well articulated and continually critically interrogated within the academic institution. There is a danger, however, of these debates becoming hermetic, and that opening up a dialogue, and engaging with context and partnerships are important in freeing up and expanding these debates outside the formal institutional education sectors.
This, of course, raises further questions about how the art school is both populated and supported. How we develop pedagogic models that embrace Reflection, Relevance and Responsibility: that contribute to and influence society and give voice both individually and collectively on important and increasingly pressing social and political issues affecting our lives How we achieve this, whilst retaining our independence and promoting experimentation, critical dialogue and originality, is arguably one of the most important challenges for the future.

The title of the presentation ‘Fishing With John’ refers to the 1991 cult American TV series hosted by actor and musician John Lurie who invited a range of musicians, artists, and other creative individuals on fishing trips. Neither he, nor his guests were expert fishermen and his expeditions became dialogues and encounters that ranged from dramatic to supernatural, giving thought to new possibilities of looking at the world.

Prof Chris Wainwright

Artist, Head of Colleges, Camberwell, Chelsea, Wimbledon (CCW) President of ELIA.
University of the Arts London

One of three key note speakers at the  Sensuous Knowledge conference.

In 2004 I clambered onto a 100-year old Dutch schooner and sailed North, as far North as you can before reaching the Arctic ice-cap. I sailed into the ice and in some ways I never came back.

The voyage was part of Cape Farewell’s programme of taking artists and scientists to climate change ‘front-line’ areas. Thus we cannot only see, feel and record what is happening, but there is also the inevitable cross-pollination of science and art. This is valuable as both parties learn something beyond the exchange of data: about approach, presentation and perspective.

For me there was the envy of the science: the empirical way they worked. Everything was calibrated, measured, charted, timed, collected, preserved, counted and logged. Whereas I stood on deck and thought: this is too beautiful, too terrible (in the sense of instilling terror), too ‘other’ to be able to represent. So I decided to make pseudo-scientific graphs and charts to measure how the Arctic felt: the one thing that the scientists could not measure. These works, The Arctic Feel-O-Graphs were a series of lenticulars that have since been shown at the London Natural History Museum and in similar venues internationally.

During the summer of 2009 I travelled to five Norwegian glaciers (Briksdals-, Kjenndal-, Suphelle-, Bøya- and Bondhusbreen) to archive their retreat. I have been collecting Norwegian postcards of these glaciers, circa 1890-1930. The postcards represent an accurate, and more interestingly, unintentional record of the position and condition of glaciers a century ago, mostly captured in a desire to replicate and communicate the romanticism of the area, for tourists, travellers and those abroad who could not reach these places. They seem to hint at nostalgia for a lost ice world before we even knew we were losing it. The anonymous photographers cannot have known they were creating brilliant semi-scientific data that would be of immense interest to geographers, scientists, climatologists and artists of the future.

Given the speed that the ice caps are melting, both Antarctica and Arctic, with also Greenland, Iceland and South America losing their glaciers, there is urgency. Can we stand by, amused at the dynamics of a wilful earth, posing in front of glaciers in our modern day fineries?

Michèle Noach, Artist

Read more about the other Key Note Speakers

Artistic research as ‘boudary work’ between the art world and academia articulates in its own way who we are and where we stand. This gives the lie to the idea of art as an autonomous sphere and opens the possibility of a ‘metaphysics of art’ – after its fall.

Henk Borgdorff is a professor of Art Theory and Research at the Amsterdam School of the Arts, and research fellow at the Royal Academy of Art and the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague.

Borgdorff is the author of two of the Sensuous Knowledge editions:

• The Debate on Research in the Arts
• Artistic Research within the Fields of Science