Current Issue

The new issue of MaHKUscript will rearticulate the discussion about the situation and position of artistic research. Not only as a critical examination of the findings of the present “Research Decade,” but specifically as a quest for future scenarios and associated parameters and definitions. To give an impetus to such reflection, MaHKUscript will take the conceptualization of a post-research turn as point of departure.

Similar to how Paul Feyerabend once questioned the dominance of rational knowledge in Farewell to Reason, this publication will in turn question the dominant trend of academisized research that has reigned now for at least ten years. Today as well the danger lurks that “artistic research” will be encapsulated by academic and institutional stereotypes which will seriously impede creativity and artistic reflection. Could a “farewell” to such gentrified research produce novel forms of articulation while proceeding from the perspective of fine art?

MaHKUscript’s editorial proposal intends to provide a clear and constructive contribution to such re-thinking and re-evaluation. It departs from the assumption that the current ontological impasse – the continued repetition of the academic question “What is artistic research?” – could be overcome by formulating a proposition based on a recomposition of three conceptual spaces (creative practice, artistic thinking, curatorial strategies) that intersect when artistic research takes place.

By using such a characterization the publication clearly takes a distance from a series of misconceptions that have accumulated around the concept of artistic research over the past decade. Through preformed, static categories, these misconceptions seem to reduce research in the arts to a noun, whereas the above-described dynamics and the related provisional quality rather ask for the dynamics of a verb. But above all, these misconceptions result from the absolutization of one of the three – intrinsically and inseparably connected – conceptual spaces.