The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

Contexts

or not. With this, questioning the essence of art implies questioning the concept of art.
That is, ‘a work of art is a kind of proposition presented within the context of art as a
comment on art.’ if this perspective is implemented too extremely or too one- sidedly,
then art risks becoming the equivalent of its definition.

art has evolved in such a way that the philosophical question of its status

has almost become the very essence of art itself, so that the philosophy of art,

instead of standing outside the subject and addressing it from an alien and

extended perspective, became instead the articulation of the internal energy

of the subject.

(danto 2005: 37)

however, the creation of a third line, a flashing line of flight constituting a zone
of reflexivity, seems to be of immense, topical interest in today’s visual art (deleuze
and guattari. 1988 [1980]: 293). after all, artistic research as an operational process
is ‘an open- ended work- in- pre- growth’ (maharaj 2004: 53). in artistic practices, it is
by definition impossible to research the artistic process in a manner different from a
form of operational process. Therefore, in artistic research, a self- reflexive movement
continuously questions shifting situations and also determines shifting positions in a
constant process of interacting, intermingling, and traversing of its lines and domains of
analysis. as a consequence, artistic research continually produces novel connections,
accelerations and mutations in temporary, flexible, and open systems. These systems
run up against problems, but rather than creating solutions, novel methodological
lines are created that enable the production of various metamorphoses in the research
process.
it is for that reason that it is only possible at the end of an operational artistic
research to determine whether the trajectory of the proposed methodological process
has indeed produced novel insights. artistic research could be described as a methodice:
a strong belief in a methodology founded by operational strategies which cannot be
legitimized beforehand. artistic research is a form of mapping, it constantly produces
novel lines of thought and novel lines of research. indeed, those are the essential
characteristics of artistic research.

Medial matters

in such a dynamic methodological context, several research questions come to the fore:
questions only to be posed in the domain of visual art; questions only to be investigated
from the domain of visual art; and most of all questions to only be responded to
adequately by the artistic strategies and methodologies described above. What are
those questions? They are questions such as, ‘how is the (experience of) current reality
medially constructed?’, ‘What premises and limitations occur when people interpret
their environment artistically?’, ‘What is the effect of specific technology on temporal
conceptions?’, ‘is perception medially disciplined? What is the role of remediation and
hyper- mediation?’, ‘how do novel media transform the visual vocabulary?’, ‘Could
artistic media create novel concepts and percepts?^3