Transmission in Motion

Transmission in Motion

Seminar Blogs

“Never the Twain Shall Meet” – Dennis Jansen

The contact points between art and scholarship are usually places where both realms face an irresistible challenge, a question: what makes one different from the other? At a time when local art galleries engage in ‘research’ projects and university professors increasingly seek to incorporate “practice-based research” (Nelson 2006) and “auto-theory” (Bal 2013) into their work, I find myself struck by the ways in which these fields—both in the business of knowledge production, both occupied to varying degrees with aesthetics and ethics—have been and are still being kept separate.

The difficulties that emerge at these contact points are manifold. On an institutional level, the Dutch context is an exceptionally telling case, as we have thought it wise to formalize and hierarchize the distinction between theory and practice. The universities of applied science and the universities of the arts engage mostly in vocational and artistic education, whereas the research universities primarily focus on theoretical education. Never the twain shall meet; and when they do, important aspects of either side are sacrificed. Practical lessons at the research university level frequently come at the cost of critical thinking for certain disciplines, and efforts to bring theoretical knowledge to the applied universities are met with collegial suspicion and confusion on the part of some students. The latter are never expected to be engaging with theory and critical thought because it is considered ‘below’ their level, and the former are kept away from practice in a way that only serves to alienate them from society at large. The body is seceded from the mind, and so Cartesian dualism becomes standard education policy.

What a shame, when there are so many possibilities that lay hidden underneath the challenge! Bioethicists, for instance, have transformed their scientific work into art, and subsequently completed the cycle by translating that art into scholarship (e.g. Zurr and Catts 2003), and critical reflections on how artistic practice influences one’s view on theories about such practice (e.g. Bal 2012) are some of the most exhilarating pieces of scholarship available. The explicit connections made between personal experience and academic debates in such writings illuminate the ways in which theory and practice are not mutually exclusive but mutually constitutive. For example, the translation of an idea into an artwork is surely a path riddled with obstacles and limitations that have a significant influence on the form and content of the final product. Yet, even those artists who willingly engage with academia often seem to be hesitant to discuss this—preferring instead to focus solely on how the final product does reflect their ‘original’ ideas, as Valery Vermeulen did in his recent TiM lecture at Utrecht University. What artists can truly bring to the scholarly community, however, is not just an ever-expanding archive of case studies to be appropriated and interpreted by academics (the archive is already big enough as it is), but also a dimension of insight and reflection that is exclusively beholden to those who created the case studies in the first place.

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