The Postresearch Condition (2021)

“After an omnipresent “Research Decade,” the concept of artistic research currently seems to be in need of a recharge. Pressing questions are: Should we talk about a postresearch situation or a postresearch condition? Could this be compared with how poststructuralism relates to structuralism as its philosophical comprehension and the elaboration of its consequences? And how could a postresearch condition address contemporary art practices?

To answer these questions, it is important to start from the three conceptual spaces that fundamentally determine what we mean by research: creative practice (experimentality, art making, potential of the sensible); artistic thinking (open-ended, speculative, associative, non-linear, haunting, thinking differently); and curatorial strategies (topical modes of political imagination, transformational spaces for encounters, reflection and dissemination) – and to comprehend these spaces in their mutual, dynamic coherence as a series of indirect triangular relationships.

From whatever conceptual space one departs, an artistic research practice could signify a transversal constellation – as a creative proposition for thought in action. Yet, that mode of research could never be reduced to a method of one of the three constituents. Thus, artistic research cannot be equated with creative innovation, disciplinary knowledge production, or political activism. It seems urgent now to profoundly challenge and question the issue of how to articulate and present the condition of the intersection between the three conceptual spaces.”

With contributions from Peter Osborne, Hito Steyerl, Vytautas Michelkevičius, Florian Cramer, Terike Haapoja, EARN Working Groups, Rachel Armstrong, Amanda Beech, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Irit Rogoff.

Editor Henk Slager
Final editor Annette W. Balkema
Publisher Metropolis M Books, Utrecht, September 2021
ISBN 9789081830270
71 pages

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