Vol 34, No 1 (2024)

The article examines the specifics of Russian artistic research. First, with the help of historical analysis of the phenomenon in the international context, the essential characteristics of artistic research are deduced. They consist in the intertwining of ontology, epistemology and methodology of a work or a process, which is enacted through a problem beyond the issues of art. Art in this situation acts as an “epistemic thing” (Henk Borgdorff), a “theoretical object” (Hubert Damisch), or an enactive environment. This boundary, or the interdependent intertwining of the subject, method, and purpose of the work, manifests itself in different ways in the various apparatuses of knowledge production in art, varying from context to context, despite the globalization of the art scene of the twenty-first century. The Russian art of the late noughties and early tens was just approaching the use of the research paradigm. Its application is conditioned by a range of reasons, including the need to construct a work of art as a complex reflection on a socially acute topic, such as issues of national identity and historical amnesia. The art segment under consideration tried to avoid merging with the common media imagery, moving away from both the dominant rhetoric and its ironic interpretations by artist predecessors and fellow contemporaries, while bypassing straightforward activist strategies. The kind of knowledge such art dealt with was often non-knowledge, the ungraspable, the erased, and the camouflaged. This knowledge found its elusive manifestation in traces of absence, scattered authorship, failures, and other forms of distancing, yet sometimes revealing through such embodiments its own communicative limitations.

This article presents an overview of the origin of the concept of “artistic research” and the discussions around it that unfolded in the artistic and academic environment. Artistic research emerged within the framework of the academy, but at the same time, as many critics emphasize with whom the author of the article agrees, it should not be colonized by it.

The article examines the models of conducting artistic research with reference to the Mika Hannula’s, Juha Suoranta’s and Tere Vadén’s Artistic Research Methodology and identifies general patterns that characterize this practice in all its diversity. The basic formula presents artistic research as an artistic process to which contextual, interpretative and conceptual work is added, aimed at argumentation of a point of view. In any case the practices of artistic research are supposed to be performative.

The author of the article offers a look at the course of artistic research as a process extended over time, including alternating phases and various “points of visibility”. Artistic research can be presented in the institutional space if it coincides with the program and objectives of a particular institution, but at the same time it can be carried out independently. The finished project demonstrated within the framework of the institution may be preceded by a long research period remaining “behind the scenes”, or some intermediate research results may be presented in a variety of formats.

The article addresses the problems of the methodology of artistic research, which is seen as the production of a specific form of knowledge related to aesthetic experience. The field of artistic research emerges in the last decades of the 20th century as a result of the convergence of the art world and the academy under the influence of conceptual art and the interdisciplinary turn. Research appears as a methodological bricolage in which the aesthetic is no longer displaced in opposition to the cognitive, but rather complements it. The importance of aesthetic knowledge production increases in the situation of revision of the linguistic paradigm. The factors of multiplicity, complexity and uncertainty are beginning to play a key role in how the subject of research reveals itself: it is becoming less and less predictable and understandable from a linguistic perspective. Its limitations are overcome by shifting the focus of attention from the research method to the subject. Actor-network theory and its philosophical implications are a natural ally here. By rediscovering the subject as an activated non-self-identity, a network-centered quasi-subjectivity, the research methodology acquires similarities with the strategy that Karen Barad calls ethico-onto-epistemology. Artistic research turns out to be a territory where scenarios of response to the crisis of imagination provoked by digital capitalism are produced. This makes the field of artistic research part of a broad process of experimental cultural production and thought that can be called a permanent cognitive revolution.

In the article the assumptions, strategies and possibilities of Art & Science (A&S) are considered through the prism of three types of metaphysical thinking. These types are defined by the answers to the question: why is there something rather than nothing. Thus, the analysis of classical metaphysics makes it possible to identify the basic assumptions of many A&S projects. These assumptions are borrowed by art from the public self-presentation of science and from Western common sense: there is an autonomous and definite nature, it is successfully known and mastered by science. So nature is nature, and nothing more. These assumptions are disputed by post-Kantian transcendental ontology. It opens up for A&S the opportunity to reflect upon the givenness of nature in the experience mediated by science, namely the constitution of science’s own objectivity, the social and political factors involved, as well as naturalization processes that turn scientific objects into nature things by way of erasing their origin. Nature is in the eye of the beholder. Empirical metaphysics (a number of projects from STS) sheds light on laboratory practices of nature enactment and the role of non-human actors in these processes. Nature is not only in the eye of the beholder, but also in the hands of the doer. It is assembled gathers, among other things, from the tissues of society, politics, culture, so does not oppose them from the outside. Among other things, this move allows us to define Art & Science as the enactment or performance of technoscience, since the laboratory-technical aesthetics inherent in this art is a reenactment of the part of the technoscientific network of practices and actors.

In conclusion, by means of Pierre Bourdieu’s critical sociology, a hypothesis is formulated explaining why an alliance with STS may be problematic for A&S artists, and why posthumanism and new materialism are assimilated in this art in a cliched form. The technoscientifically formed world requires technoscientific enlightenment based on STS and philosophy, and A&S in alliance with them can be its art.

The article considers the issue of the “coincidentalist turn” in contemporary art — a radical change in the mode of functioning of a work of art. Based on the onto-economic turn carried out by the materialist dialectic of coincidence, which asserts the holding-together of the divided as a substance, the coincidentalist turn allows to liberate art from the “reservation of the aesthetic” and make it a technique of clarifying and transforming of the real that extends to all areas of life. The article places the “coincidentalist turn” in the context of the art history of the last decades. The theoretical sections of the article outline the main provisions of the coincidentalistic theory in their relation to the problems of art.

Practical sections are dedicated to the description of specific types of activities that have appeared in recent years and are the first experiments in the construction of “clarification machines” based on calculus methods made possible by coincidentalist theory. They are based on the analysis of real experimental data of the moderation of extended seminars “K-fitness” and “The door doesn’t open from this side” by the Council of the Coincidentalist Institute. The form of the presentation coincides with the basic metaphysical formula of coincidentalist ontology: 2/4 (two divided by four). The theoretical and practical sections are divided into comments by a philosopher and an engineer.