ART&RESEARCH

The title of my essay, borrowed from a film by Luis Buñuel¹, seems to me to be an apt description of my profound interest in the doctoral studies of artists and in artistic research, and also of the preconceptions many people seem to have about artistic research. In this essay, I discuss artistic research conducted at the Department of Postgraduate Studies in the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 1997–2008, which I have participated in both as a doctoral student (1997–2002) and as Professor of Artistic Research and Head of the Department (2004–). I also discuss artistic research more generally, especially the status of the work of art as part of doctoral research projects.

The Beginning (1997–1999)

When I began my studies in the Department of Postgraduate Studies in 1997 among the first batch of doctoral students, everything seemed to be simultaneously fascinating and confusing. We were a small group in a new situation: Satu Kiljunen as director of the programme,² Tuomas Nevanlinna and Juha-Pekka Hotinen as senior contracted lecturers of theory, the Advisory Board for Doctoral Studies as the coordinating background group,³ and six students.⁴

Postgraduate studies were already at the time organised into monthly seminars usually lasting three days. Our work resembled, and still does, the post-doctoral schools funded by the Academy of Finland. The mood in the group was good, but not overly convivial; we hardly saw each other outside the school. In work seminars in particular, we had at times quite heated discussions about the students' new works and their relationship to artistic research. Our department seemed to provide a place for a critical open-mindedness that one hardly saw anywhere else in the world of art.⁵

The starting points of our education were radical, perhaps even Utopian; we had no practical experience of where it would lead, except to a formal degree and title. Subsequent events have shown, however, that had the Academy stopped to consider and wait instead of charging ahead with speed and taking risks, doctoral training in the Academy would not today be an internationally recognised institution and trailblazer for art universities setting up doctoral programmes of their own.⁶

For us early students, however, the situation was quite demanding: there was hardly any instruction in academic writing, for we were assumed to have adequate skills, learned at some earlier stage, for producing theory within artistic research.⁷ Nor was there any systematic instruction in scientific research methodology, as individual methods for the production of new knowledge were assumed to emerge automatically in the production of artwork within the research projects.

When I travel abroad, people often ask me how doctoral training in the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts was established; how was it possible, within a university framework, to set up a unit where creative work and art are the most important aspect of research? The absolutely crucial thing in the planning of the doctoral programme in the Academy of Fine Arts was the independent status of the school.⁸ This autonomy allowed us to take the visual way artists explore the world as the starting point for the development of our curriculum and the standards of our demonstrations of knowledge and skills. The artist Satu Kiljunen was invited to design the doctoral curriculum, assisted by the philosopher Tuomas Nevanlinna and theatre researcher and director Juha-Pekka Hotinen.

Subsequent Experiences of Artistic Research (2000–)

Upon entering the new millennium, the Department of Postgraduate studies changed a great deal. New students began to be admitted annually into the programme, and our group was joined by artists from an ever-increasing range of artistic disciplines. Already the first group of postgraduate students was cross-disciplinary: painters, a sculptor, a moving image artist and a photographer. Now the group was complemented by a community artist and a sound artist, as well as by an artist working in the intermediate ground between visual art and architecture.⁹

The decision to place postgraduate studies in a (cross-disciplinary) department of its own instead of being spread out between other programmes focusing on different genres, has proved to be useful. For example, I personally found it rewarding and a radicalising experience to participate in seminars that dealt with artistic approaches and traditions that were foreign to my own practice.

On the other hand, the ever-increasing cross-disciplinarity means that it is becoming more and more difficult each year to plan the curriculum. The principle, which has always been the aim of general studies, namely that seminars should include both specific information serving the needs of individual students, as well as more general information that involves the entire field of visual art, has been increasingly difficult to follow.

The question of cross-disciplinarity has been important and challenging also in the selection of new students to the programme. People applying to the postgraduate programme have typically been artists working with moving images, painters, and artists working with several media. It has been a difficult task for the admission evaluation team to find the best possible group of artists who would also represent the broadest spectrum of artistic approaches.

The first Doctor of Fine Arts graduated in 2001. Jyrki Siukonen's demonstration of knowledge and skills, consisting of three exhibitions and the publication Uplifted Spirits Earthbound Machines, explored the relationship between painting and flying, and seemed very ambitious and challenging to us other postgraduate students.¹⁰ The sights were set high at the outset. The public examination of the research was also demanding for all participants: the auditorium was filled to capacity, the examiners were an artist and a theorist of science, and the languages used were Finnish and English.¹¹

Siukonen’s publication contains an amazing amount of historical information about the relationship of artists and art practice to airplanes and flying. As a writer, Siukonen has distanced his own role in the traditional way of scientific writing, although he at times takes even rather great liberties with the conventions of academic writing.¹² In the book, Siukonen does not discuss his own works at all, analysing them only in the executive summary of the research. Many people were perplexed by the separation of the demonstration of knowledge and skills into two methodically different parts (works – theory) instead of consisting of an intermingling of verbal and visual elements. In other words, Siukonen’s work, just like so many university theses in visual arts, contains a split.

Is it possible to avoid such a split, even in principle? Should it be avoided at all? Can a mode of operation based on the split, with the artist making works of art and producing separate reflective material, be a meaningful and productive way of doing artistic research?

The original aim of postgraduate education and the demonstration of knowledge and skills was to merge theory and art. This idea proved to be so hopelessly Utopian, however, that when I was elected Professor of Artistic Research in 2004, I suggested that the demonstration be split into two separate components, a theoretical part and a production part. My purpose behind such a division was not to have doctoral students split themselves into two different researchers, with one making art and a separate “other” who would write “objective” theory. It was a formal solution: verbalisations of the artistic production and/or research topic were henceforth called the theoretical part, and the larger component, the creative productions, was called the production part.

Although the theoretical and production parts are today defined as separate entities, even as regards the credits earned from them, they nevertheless remain productions of the same person, and therefore have a mutually intensive influence. Preventing the split, merging the theory and the works into one whole, would call for the creation of a set of standards for artistic research that would favour artists who make only textual works (in practice, texts). This would be absurd for Finnish art.¹³

The doctoral demonstration of knowledge and skills at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts remains, in spite of its dual nature, a research entity that cannot be considered solely on the basis of either the productions or the theory that it comprises. The works themselves are a form of research (instead of being just its starting point or theme or topic), but they can be that solely and exclusively in a demonstration of knowledge and skills that contains a theoretical element. Theory, on the other hand, is a research medium for the works of art, and it does not have the status of artistic research without the works that go with it.

Latest Changes

The Department of Postgraduate Studies has grown rapidly in the last few years. There are currently 26 doctoral research students in the department, and three professors (two of them part-time). The department has also a post-doctoral researcher who enjoys funding from the Academy of Finland, a part-time theory teacher, an assistant and a planner.¹⁴ The greatest changes in recent years have involved the continuous improvement of writing instruction, increasing international cooperation in artistic research, and the founding of a Preliminary Evaluation Board that operates independently of the department.

The teaching staff became international in one fell swoop in 2007 when two new professors in artistic research were appointed to the department: Jan Svenungsson, a Swedish artist based in Berlin, and Ray Langenbach, an American artist living for the most part in Malaysia. Svenungsson, an interesting artist working with multiple media, is an experienced teacher and an expert in writing and texts produced by artists. He has specialised in instructing postgraduate students in writing skills, and at the end of last year he published a book that analysed texts by artists, An Artist's Text Book.¹⁵ Ray Langenbach is a PhD as well as a versatile artist-teacher. His greatest contribution to the department has been his lectures on international contemporary art, and the supervision of several doctoral students’ research projects. Langenbach is also a specialist in art theories of the past few decades, such as post-colonialism.

The department’s international character has also been strengthened by the admission of foreign students. There are currently three foreign artists studying in the department, from Malaysia, Japan and Canada.

Cooperation between the Department of Postgraduate Studies and other European postgraduate programmes has increased rapidly in recent years. When in the end of the 1990s and early 2000s it seemed quite natural to meet professors and doctoral students from abroad maybe once or twice a year, it is today a given and even a necessity that teachers and students in the department take part on an almost monthly basis in some international seminar or conference held somewhere in Europe.