Imperfecting Practice, Implicating Theory

In his lecture, London-based art historian and theorist Adrian Rifkin will engage with some histories of art making and theory and and making art as research in different mainly UK institutions over the last four decades. The strange relations of intentions and outcomes, theoretical suppositions and eventual forms of practice, innovatory programmes and formation of bureaucratic norms will be discussed anecdotally, historically and critically in a broader context of the evolution of the international art world. Rifkin will address specific examples of PhD projects and pedagogical programmes as well as some more general issues of philosophical coherence.

Adrian Rifkin is professor in art writing at the art department of Goldsmiths, University of London. His extensive CV and bibliography (including landmark books such as “Street Noises: Parisian Pleasure 1900–1940”, Manchester 1993, and “Ingres then, and now”, London 2000) can be consulted on his website: http://www.gai-savoir.net There you’ll also find a link to the MAF in Art Writing program at Goldsmiths where Rifkin is teaching: http://www.gold.ac.uk

Rifkin is currently working on a book length text provisionally titled “Losing myself”. This is a series of engagements with and against the autobiographical as the figure of an archive – whether historical, theoretical or imaginary. Each section will be an attempt to map or interrogate moments of Rifkin’s own life against their determinants, conditions or outcome, but in such a way as to secure diffusion rather than focus, dispersal against coherence and logic, complex series of uncontrollable ‘events’ rather than sensible narratives. In doing this Rifkin wants to explore how what we call cultural theory becomes possible in a description of living, but as if living is not what belongs to oneself.

"Troubling Research. Performing Knowledge in the Arts" is a research project that responds to the 2009 WWTF Art(s) & Sciences call by interrogating the very conditions of the current upsurge of the art/research articulation. The project shifts attention from defining (and eventually solving) a problem to that of rendering a 'problematic.'

A core feature of this problematic concerns the fact that place, status, and function of any claim to 'research' are discursively and socially produced and therefore ultimately contestable. The insight in the "ubiquitous, taken-for-granted, and axiomatic quality of research" (Arjun Appadurai) enables to question the "strange and wonderful practice" known as research, its "cultural presumptions" and its "ethic".

Following on this track of reasoning and aligning with the Institutional Critique tradition in the arts, Troubling Research aims at unsettling any existing consensus concerning the nature of arts-based research and the art/science relationship. It achieves this through establishing a - deliberately - diversified cluster of artistic and research practices (represented by the participating researchers) the commonality of which will be constituted by working through the potential of the problematic to be excavated and/or developed in the course of the project.

Accounting for a multiplicity of diverging perspectives, the participating researchers will work, independently and as a collaborative entity, towards a reconsideration of an alleged interdependence of the categories of art and research assumed by the current politics and economy-driven research orientation within the European system of higher education in the arts.

The project is based at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and funded by the WWTF - Wiener Wissenschafts-, Forschungs- und Technologiefonds (Vienna Science and Technology Fund). During a period of 18 months (March 1, 2010 - August 31, 2011), the transdisciplinary project team, comprised of artists, curators, theoreticians, will generate and stage various kinds of discussions around the issue of the very (im)possibility of research and its particular performativity in the arts. Participating researchers of "Troubling Research" are Gangart (Simonetta Ferfoglia, Heinrich Pichler), Johanna Schaffer, Johannes Porsch, Tom Holert, Stefanie Seibold, Carola Dertnig, Axel Stockburger and Diedrich Diederichsen.