For many reasons, as Baecker (2009) succinctly describes, resentments toward

junctions of research and art begin primarily with their substantification; the
thought that artists are “researching” appears easier to accommodate within a
scientistic worldview than that some of the products of their work must logically
belong to “research.” Lesage suspects that underlying this are concerns about the
restriction of access to resources and thus, in the title of his article, posed the
question, “Who’s Afraid of Artistic Research?” (2009)
Before citing McAllister (“I think, artistic research exists,” 2004) as penultimate
argument in a potential dispute, a few points can often be saved by offering a
categorical distinction such as the tripartite one made by Jones (1980), Frayling
(1993) and Borgdorff (2009): the distinction between art based on (other)
research, art that uses research (or research methods) and, lastly, art that has
research as its products. Dombois (2009) extends this trichotomy via the following
chiastic complements: “Research about/for/through Art | Art about/for through
Research.”
Even natural scientific research alone is very diverse in its objects, methods and
products, as McAllister notes (2004). This applies all the more in view of research
in the humanities and social sciences as well as industrial, market and opinion
research. Not surprisingly, this is also true for artistic research. Among the authors
cited here, there is agreement that this diversity must be preserved against efforts
fostering their canonical restriction.
Art without research just as equally dispenses of its essential foundation as does
science without research. As cultural developments, both live from the balance
between tradition and innovation. Tradition without research would be blind
takeover, and innovation without research would be pure intuition. Wherever
scientists do not research but instead teach, judge, carry out, advise, treat, apply
or talk more or less telegenically (hence “PUSH” – the button), they might still be
undertaking science – but were they to undertake all this without research, they
would not be quite true to their cause. The same can be said of artists. On the
other hand, it becomes clear that – in same measure as is the case for science – by
no means does all art count as research.
The most important diagnosis, however, is that the term “research” designates
something as little homogenous as “science” or “art”; they are collective pluralities,
assembling highly diverging processes that often trespass the categories of
boundaries such as disciplines to be more closely related there than with some
other members of their own faculty, subsequently grouping together more easily
under their common interdisciplinary denominators, such as topics, methods and
paradigms. This “urge toward singularization” is probably the strongest root of the
“opposition” – as stubborn as it is alleged – between art and science; Baecker
(2009) calls this the “organizing principle of the functional difference,” the
emergence of which Mersch & Ott (2007) trace back to the 19th century.
Art and science are not separate domains but rather two dimensions in the
common cultural space. This means that something can be more or less artistic
even as nothing is stated regarding the degree to which it is scientific. This is also
true for many other cultural attributes, among them the musical, philosophical,
religious and mathematical. Some of them are, however, more dependent on each
other than they are isolated. In this respect, Latour’s diagnosis applies here mutatis
mutandis: “There are no two departments but only one, their products to be
distinguished later and after joint examination” (1991, p. 190). However, at the
very least, not everything that is considered to be art must therefore be
unscientific, and not everything that is regarded as science must be unartistic.
Dombois proposes five criteria for “Science as Art” (2006). A wealth of examples –
space constraints here do not allow for their listing – show that the artistic and
scientific content of objects, activities and events allow themselves to be mixed,
one independent of the other, to varying degrees of intensity. Research is not
artistic when or even only when it is carried out by artists (as helpful as their
participation may often be) but rather earns the attribute “artistic” – no matter
where, when or from whom it was undertaken – on its specific quality: the mode of
artistic experience.
Artistic Experience
In the mode of aesthetic sensory experience, perception becomes present to itself,
opaque and able to be sensed. Artistic experience can be prescribed similarly, as
the perceptory mode of the sensed interference of frames (for details, see Klein
2009). According to this diagnosis, to have an artistic experience means to look at
oneself from outside a frame and simultaneously enter into it. Frames, which in this
way cross through our perception, are also comparably present and able to be
sensed (Fischer-Lichte 2004 calls this a “liminal state”). The artistic experience as
well as the aesthetic sensory experience are modes of our perception and as such
constantly available, even outside the works and places of art.
Within an “experience,” the subjective perspective is included constitutively,
because experience, by its very nature, cannot be delegated, and only secondarily
can it be intersubjectively negotiated. This is a major reason for the conception of
the singular nature of artistic knowledge (Mersch & Ott, 2007, Nevanlinna 2004,
McAllister 2004, Busch 2007, Bippus 2010. Dombois 2006 refers to Barthes’ 1980
proposal of a “mathesis singularis”). Artistic experience is particularly dependent on
and inseparable from the underlying goings-on. Artistic experience is an active,
constructive and aesthetic process in which mode and substance are inseparably
fused. This differentiates artistic experience from other implicit knowledge, which is
generally able to be considered and described separately from its acquisition (see
Dewey 1934, Polanyi 1966, Piccini and Kershaw 2003).
Artistic Research
If “art” is but a mode of perception, “artistic research” must also be the mode of a
process. Therefore, there can be no categorical distinction between “scientific” and
“artistic” research – because the attributes independently modulate a common
carrier, namely, the aim for knowledge within research. Artistic research can
therefore always also be scientific research (Ladd 1979). For this reason, many
artistic research projects are genuinely interdisciplinary, or, to be more exact,
indisciplinary (Ranciery in Birrell 2008, Klein & Kolesch 2009).
Against this background, the phrase “art as research” seems somewhat inaccurate,
because it is not art that somehow evolves into research. What exists, however, is
research that becomes artistic; hence, it should actually be called “Research as
Art,” with the central question being, “When is Research Art?”
Over the course of a specific research undertaking, artistic experience can occur at
different times, differ in duration and vary in importance. This complicates the
categorization of the undertaking while on the other hand allowing for a dynamic
taxonomy: At what times and in which phases can research be artistic? First, in its
methods (such as searching, archiving, collecting, interpreting and explaining,
modeling, experimenting, intervening and petitioning); but also in its underlying
motivation, its inspiration, in its reflection, its discussion, in the formulation of
research questions, in its conception and composition, in its implementation, in its
publication, in its evaluation, in the manner of discourse – just to name a few.
These phases can only be summarized and categorized post-hoc, such as in the
customary triad of object, method and product. This sequence, however, is
important in order to avoid falling into the normative restriction of a canonical
system within the discussion on artistic research (Lesage 2009).
At what level does the reflection of artistic research take place? Generally, at the
level of artistic experience itself. This excludes neither a (subjective or
intersubjective) interpretation on a descriptive level nor a theoretical analysis and
modeling on a meta-level. However, “It is a myth that reflection is only possible
from the outside” (Artega 2010). Artistic experience is a form of reflection.
Artistic Knowledge
Who are we? How do we want to live? What do things mean? What is real? What
can we know? When does something exist? What is time? What has causality?
What is intelligence? Where is sense? Could it also all be different? These are
examples of interests common to art and science. Their treatment does not always
lead to secure and universally valid knowledge (with regard to the history of
science, only in very few cases, no?). The arts are granted the authority to
formulate and address such basal and yet complex issues in their specific ways,
which must not necessarily be less reflected than those of philosophy or physics,
and which are in a position to gain specific knowledge that could not be delivered
in any other way.
Whether an artistic thirst for knowledge is acceptable as a reason for also calling
an investigation “research” obviously depends on the question as to what types of
knowledge fall under the concept of cognition, or which types of cognition count
toward knowledge. Even if we could agree that knowledge is “justified true belief,”
we still would not have won our case, because we would have to come to a
common understanding as to when an opinion is a belief and exactly what can be a
justification for this – not to mention the concept of truth. This path, no matter
how we travel it, leads to final arguments, which either appear acceptable to us or
not (see Eisner 2008). The following applies to those kinds of terms that, in the
end, are part of a meta-language such as knowledge: The more we try to proscribe
them, the more we are constrained to normative judgments, at their core
supported only by what we want them to mean. Then it is equally feasible to posit
that knowledge also includes experience as a third species in addition to cognition
and skill or that knowledge and experience stand side by side as forms of cognition
– they should at least be considered equivalent.
Some authors require that artistic knowledge, notwithstanding it all, must be able
to be verbalized and thus be comparable to declarative knowledge (e.g., Jones
1980, 2004 AHRB). Many say it is embodied in the products of art (e.g., Langer
1957, McAllister 2004, Dombois 2006, Lesage 2009, Bippus 2010). Ultimately,
however, it has to be acquired through sensory and emotional perception, through
the very artistic experience from which it cannot be separated. Whether silent or
verbal, declarative or procedural, implicit or explicit, artistic knowledge is, in each
and every case, sensual and physical, “embodied knowledge.” The knowledge for
which artistic research strives is a felt knowledge.