Hi, Johan,

You might find some early material on different approaches to research by artists in the 1960s with the work of artists involved in Fluxus, and in the Experiments in Art and Technology project sponsored by Bell Labs.

Robert Filliou was one of the early artists to explore the question of research by artists. I use the phrase “research by artists” because we talked about artists engaging in research – the phrase “research art” came up from time to time, but not the phrase “artistic research.” The idea was that artists had something to contribute to the larger world to which all research must ultimately contribute. The issue was not whether artists could do research, but ratherthat art could make some form of contribution to human knowledge in a way that was parallel to but different than research in fields such as physics, engineering, psychology, or economics.

Robert Filliou is an exemplar of this tradition. Originally trained as an economist, Filliou, who studied economics at the University of California Los Angeles before working as an oil economist for the United Nations. Filliou lost interest – or hope – in other approaches to knowledge and knowledge production. Giving up on science and philosophy, Filliou approached knowledge and knowledge production from an optimistic perspective anchored in art practice. I was never convinced that the situation is as hopeless as Filliou believed it to be. I may, of course, be wrong. The geo-political events of the past fifty years give evidence for either position, and the likelihood of catastrophic climate change may already be irreversible.

Robert Filliou’s (1971) Research at the Stedelijk involves the intersection of knowledge production and research methodology, not the study of specific research methods but the comparative study of methods in the larger framework of a philosophy of science. Filliou’s project, as Allen, Kerr, and Thompson (2005: unpaged) once described it, “was a self-reflexive inquiry into research methodology: essentially research about research. Instead of beginning the research process with a specific topic in mind, he set out to develop over the course of several weeks a research agenda that would permit him to discover what was worth researching, and to invent a methodology that would help him to determine what a useful methodology would be for researching research.”

Filliou sent me Research at the Stedelijk when it was published back in 1971. It was a marvelous poetic work, filling an important niche in the literature of intermedia and concept art. For all its interesting properties, though, it did not help anyone to discover “what was worth researching” to any greater degree than any other normative poesis helps us to discover or determine what we should do.

Neither did Research at the Stedelijk offer a useful methodology for researching research in a sense larger than the poesis of discovery. It helped us to think about what we could think about in the same kind of way that philosophy of science did. In shifting the ontological grounds of his inquiry, however, Filliou transformed the metaphysical and epistemological outcome. In some ways, this was good. In others, it opened gaps that his methodological inquiry could not remedy.

I explored related issues in my 1972 book, The Aesthetics (Friedman 1972, 1973). Again, the word research appears, along with discussions of how artistic experimentation and thinking could contribute to a broader framework of knowledge creation. Ultimately, I came to understand that it would be impossible to work with the problems that interested me by approaching these kinds of questions only through research art – including some forms of what might now be described as artistic research. To answer some kinds of questions requires deeper understanding in the philosophy of knowledge and the philosophy of science, along with comparative research methodology to permit methodological triangulation. That’s one of the reasons I went back to university to get a PhD.

You can get an overview on Fluxus and find some useful resources at the Hood Museum of Art, where an exhibition was recently mounted to celebrate the 50th anniversary. URL:

http://hoodmuseum.dartmouth.edu/exhibitions/2011fluxus/index.html

For Experiments in Art and Technology, the Daniel Langlois Foundation maintains a web site with a large archive of resources and documents. URL:

http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=306

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art mounted a major project between 1967 and 1971 in art and technology as well. You’ll find the web site – and a complete downloadable copy of the exhibition catalogue and several reports – at URL:

http://collectionsonline.lacma.org/MWEB/archives/artandtechnology/at_home.asp

Richard Feynman (1986: 252-253) wrote about his experience with the LACMA art and technology exhibition. It’s interesting to get a sense of how one of the great physicists of the century saw the conjunction between art, science, and technology. The one artist who made a deep impression on Feynman was Robert Irwin. There is a new and expanded edition of Lawrence Wechsler’s (2009) book on Irwin’s work and thought. This book – the first edition appeared in 1982 – is a model of philosophical clarity and subtle thinking.

You’ll find some approaches to research by artists back in the 1960s, without necessarily finding the term “artistic research.” For that matter, the idea went even farther back – for example, the Surrealist Research Bureau in the 1920s.

I’ll see if I can find further documents and references. If I can, I’ll send them to you off-list.

Yours,

Ken

Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Dean, Faculty ofDesign | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Ph: +61 3 9214 6078 | Faculty www.swinburne.edu.au/design<http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design>

--

References

Allen, Gwen, Iain Kerr, and Chris Thompson. Personal Correspondence. October 13, 2005.

Feynman, Richard P. 1986. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” Adventures of a Curious Character. New York: Bantam.

Filliou, Robert. 1971. Research at the Stedelijk. Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum.

Friedman, Ken. 1972. The Aesthetics. Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada: University of Saskatchewan.

Friedman, Ken. 1973. The Aesthetics. Devon, England: Beau Geste Press.

Weschler, Lawrence. 2009. Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Expanded Edition, OverThirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin. Berkeley: University of California Press.