Texte zur Kunst Issue No. 82: Artistic Research:

With artistic research, the June 2011 issue of “Texte zur Kunst” addresses a theme that has been increasingly discussed in the past two decades, particularly at the level of policies on higher education. In university and academic education, there are currently signs of a trend determining art as a field of “research” — artistic research is thus a highly controversial point of reference for initiatives related to educational and research policies, even though the historical and systematic preconditions of this type of “research” are still to a large extent unclear. However, among practitioners — artists, university teachers, curators etc. — the debate on the obvious question of the century-old relationship between art and science has long been abandoned. References to the historical differentiation processes of the two disciplines and their rejection by modern avant-garde movements are not neglected, but it is now much more about — and that is the main focus of this issue — elucidating the specificity of artistic research practice and the conditions of its possibility, rather than again and again spelling out the dialectics (or synthesis) of “art” and “science.”