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diFFeRenTial

iConogRaphY

Henk Slager

The content of artistic research can be understood as a non- philosophical articulation of
how various media – such as photography, public space, and scientific models – present
the world visually in the form of perceptual regimes and strategies. artistic research
stands up critically against each mode of visual reduction and cultural disciplining in
the form of a dynamic mapping of a series of heterogeneous, open- ended rearticulations,
thus showing different forms of knowledge production. in so doing, artistic research
deals intrinsically with the crucial question of the artistic image’s role and its medium-
specific position in current visual cultures.

Prolegomena

our current artistic decade is filled with an excess of rhetorical moments: crisis,
change, but most of all challenge. one of the challenges in today’s art world concerns
the Bologna process that started ten years ago as a reconstructive trajectory focusing
on rethinking and reformulating the paradigm of the art academy. slowly but surely, it
becomes clear that the romantic model of master- pupil education has definitely reached
its final stages and now makes room for a variety of course- based programs demanding
space for critical and contextual studies, collaborative and interdisciplinary projects,
experimental productions, and above all communication and presentation skills. at
the same time, it turns out that gratuitous production of artefacts for a neoliberal art
market directed towards speculation and financial profit must end with an academy
regaining its traditional connotation of giving room for debate and research.
however, when looking at the present situation of european art education, one
discovers a dramatic devaluation: the critical autonomous space of art as once put
forward by adorno, has evaporated greatly in the practice of many art academies.
no more than a ‘Temporary autonomous zone’ is what has remained, i.e. a fleeting
experience of freedom in a world drowning in an iconography of visual culture and
the opportunistic rhetoric of the creative industries. one- dimensional strategies of
signification seem to directly derive their implicit structure from a formatting awareness