Artistic Research in the Future Academy - Hardcover

Butt, Danny

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1783207906 ISBN 13: 9781783207909

Publisher: Intellect, 2017

Synopsis

The rapid growth of doctoral-level art education challenges traditional ways of thinking about academic knowledge and, yet, as Danny Butt argues in this book, the creative arts may also represent a positive blueprint for the future of the university. Synthesizing institutional history with aesthetic theory, Artistic Research in the Future Academy reconceptualizes the contemporary crisis in university education toward a valuable renewal of creative research.

About this title

About the Author

Danny Butt coordinates the Master of Arts and Community Practice at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.  

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Artistic Research in the Future Academy

By Danny Butt

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2017 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78320-790-9

Contents

Acknowledgements, 
Introduction, 
Chapter 1: The Transformation of the University, 
Chapter 2: The Art School, 
Chapter 3: Artistic Research: Defining the Field, 
Chapter 4: Science and Critical Suppression, 
Chapter 5: Critique, Artistic and Aesthetic, 
Conclusion: Exiting Artistic Research, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Transformation of the University

Eric Ashby described the modern idea of the Anglophone university as a hybrid, with a "heredity derived from Germany, Britain, and America." The assumption of a stable form among all universities is a recent phenomenon and a suppression of the many varieties of institution past and present; however, the Anglo-US model for the university is – through the forces of colonialism and globalization – now the default model for the university worldwide outside of Europe. While every culture has had its forms of knowledge and higher learning – the twelfth-century European recovery of Greek philosophy took place through translations from Arabic kept by Islamic scholars – it is the European university form that has either displaced, incorporated or settled atop other traditions of learning through the capitalist mode of exchange. To make an analogy, the European nation state is now the globalized form of the nation: its borders and external interfaces are relatively harmonized globally along the European model, but this masks sometimes radical heterogeneity in arrangements within any particular state. Similarly, how universities understand themselves and how they are organized is diverse within a shared logic and structure. Far from a utopian unbroken lineage stretching back to the twelfth century, universities can be seen as what Foucault calls "heterotopias," distinguishable as an exceptional zone from a broader society, yet an assemblage of institutional forms that overlay and interpenetrate each other historically and geographically. The emergence of the singular university platform was always a partial enterprise, based from the start on competing agendas between various institutional and political interests; often awkwardly appending new initiatives to historical institutional formations with uneven effects, and for less than laudable motives. Derrida describes the paradox of the university as precisely that it has been founded, always by political forces external to the university, and the foundings of the universities reflect the political and intellectual situations of their time and situation.

"Defining the university is a difficult task," notes Riddle, making the mandatory qualification of every historian of the university. As such, this chapter does not seek to account for a totalizing definition of the university, but instead reviews figures, syntheses, resonances in some of the well-known and lesser-known histories of the development of universities. Its purpose is to establish the historical lineage in which the institutional forces opening the university towards artistic practices can be discerned, with the suggestion that the emergence of research-based studio art programmes may turn out to be one more of the historical points where new forms of the university emerge as older ones slip away. Artists worry that the normalizing force of the university will suppress creative practices; and on the other side of the coin, traditionalists are concerned that the unruly forces of the creative arts will disrupt the university's academic integrity. In tracking the university's mongrel heritage, we can move with Foucault towards understanding artistic research as a dynamic disruption that points towards both possibility and repression.

History of the European University

In his History of Universities, Perkin claims that the history of the European university can be told in five stages: 1. the rise of the cosmopolitan European university and its role in the destruction of the medieval world order at the Reformation (twelfth century–1530s);

2. the "nationalization" of the university by the emerging nation states of the Religious Wars, and its decline during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment (1530s–1789);

3. the revival of the university after the French Revolution and its belated but increasing role in Industrial Society (1789–1939);

4. the migration of the university to the non-European world and its adaptation to the needs of developing societies and the anticolonial reaction (1538–1960s); and

5. the transition from elite to mass higher education and the role of the university and its offshoots in post-industrial society (1945–present).

Perkin describes the opportunistic and multidimensional character of the origin of the university in schematic terms:

In the mutually destructive strife between empire and papacy, power was "up for grabs" and fractionated out in a hierarchy of competing authorities: king and archbishop, duke and abbot, free county and free city, manorial lord and parish priest. In the interstices of power, the university could find a modestly secure niche, and play off one authority against another. Unintentionally, it evolved into an immensely flexible institution.

Universities emerged from the western European urban schools (studia) of the twelfth century. They formed in response to the demand for an educated elite and to serve the complex needs of church and state in the economically thriving cities after the end of the German and Viking invasions. Such training for the emerging professions of the clergy, medicine and law would be the basis of the European university for many years. The seven liberal arts of university teaching consisted of the trivium (Latin grammar, rhetoric and dialectic); and the quadrivium (music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy) – success in these arts qualified one as a magister, "a master qualified to teach others and to proceed to the higher faculties of theology, law, or medicine." The largest and most influential studia received imperial or papal charters to become studia generalia, which trained the masters in the higher faculties and were open to all in Christendom. Such charter institutions could also receive jus ubique docendi, the right of its masters (in guilds) to teach anywhere in the Christian world; and permission for those teaching and learning to retain their church income.

The first major universities of Paris and Bologna were established schools that grew without close direction from public authorities, and in the twelfth century they became influential models for other universities to follow. A decisive moment is the establishment of a Parisian school by Peter Abelard, a Breton canon whose followers used the recently recovered Greek philosophy to establish scholasticism as a tool for "understanding the visible world of men and things and the invisible worlds of Christian revelation and Platonic ideas." Derrida places the birth of the professor at the symbolic moment where the charismatic Abelard turns his back on military glory to develop the new "army" of scholars. These universities would become the intellectual centre of Christianity, receiving scholars from all over northern Europe. In the thirteenth century, the Parisian "House of Sorbonne" would provide the model of the residential college that would later be copied by Oxford and Cambridge and eventually become the foundation for the liberal undergraduate education of today. Meanwhile, the founding of the University of Bologna established a unique funding model where for over two centuries groups of students organized to pay teachers on the basis of their performance. This legacy of autonomy is still reflected in the Italian system to this day. While a full account of global university development would need to account for the influence of French and Italian systems throughout their respective colonies, it is the development of the English and German models that I concentrate on within this chapter, due to their eventual fusion in the US graduate school that has become the dominant model for university research.

Once public authorities saw the power held by the universities, they wasted little time in actively taking on powers to regulate privileges to teach and learn. The University of Naples was established by Emperor Frederick II in 1224, and in 1229 Pope Gregory IX founded the first papal university at Toulouse, "at the request of the secular government" to "assist in the eradication of heresy." These were the first public universities, with Naples considered the first "state" university: Frederick II barred his own subjects from studying elsewhere, while retaining a healthy industry of foreign students, all the while denying them equal rights. State intervention into the previously cosmopolitan form would be repeated elsewhere, with even the University of Paris losing its autonomy as it came under the control of the French Parliament: Louis XI demanded an oath of allegiance in 1470, resulting in the expulsion of over 400 scholars, and the crown confiscated their possessions. The university became particularly critical in reproducing the Protestant social order. Queen Elizabeth, for example, enabled the founding of Trinity College in Dublin (1592) in part to stop her subjects traveling to continental Europe where they would become "infected with Popery." While the spread of the Protestant ethic and secular power in the absolutist territorial states in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century certainly produced an ever-growing demand for university- educated lawyers, the religious nature of the University was still central to its mission. Indeed, the Reformation prompted a new demand for clergy, and the religious wars required ideological support on both sides.

The English Universities

The development of the English university form is instructive when understanding the contemporary university. Oxford emerged around 1167 in the classical European pattern, out of an arts studium, after English students were expelled from France. After riots in 1209, Cambridge was born from a splinter group migrating to a new location. Backed by king and pope, these two universities would squash the founding of any competition through to the nineteenth century. This politically-backed duopoly accrued large endowments in their colleges, which remained the source of academic authority and power on the French model; and "Oxbridge" became the main distributors of the Parisian residential college model to the rest of the English-speaking world, as well as becoming two of the most powerful brands in academic life.

The ethos at Oxbridge provided liberal education as the production of cultivated men to serve church and state, rather than intellectuals advancing knowledge or the economy. As Ashby succinctly describes it, "it was assumed that it was more important for university graduates to be civilised than learned; not thinkers but doers, not theologians but bishops, not philosophers but statesmen, not scholars but schoolmasters." The students were taught in general by poorly paid recent graduates as tutors rather than professors, tasked with reproducing men rather than reproducing knowledge.

The Tudor Revolution in the sixteenth century exposed the English gentry to a potential loss of political power to "ambitious and humbly- born clerks," fed with understandings gained from the wide-ranging "courtesy literature" on how to become an effective gentleman, which included appropriate forms of study. This threat revived the gentry's interest in university education at Oxbridge, which until the mid-sixteenth century had been largely a seminary for education of servants of the church. The universities themselves shifted their offerings in response, introducing more modern subjects.

The next two centuries saw repeated gentlemanly attacks on the scholarly pedantry of the universities, in order to secure the importance of "appropriate" learning that would be the hallmark of the political class' hopes for the English university. The French scholar Montaigne agreed "that the pursuit of learning makes men's hearts soft and effeminate more than it makes them strong and warlike." For Thomas Hobbes, "school philosophers" were essentially treasonous: "the Universities have been to this nation, as the wooden horse was to the Trojans." Yet "men may be brought to a love of obedience by preachers and gentlemen that imbibe good principles in their youth at the Universities [...] [W]e shall never have a lasting peace, till the Universities themselves be [...] reformed." As Phamotse and Kissack note, "the gist of the humanists' critique of scholasticism was that it was too abstract and detached from the concerns of the common individual, failing to guide him/her through the moral challenges of daily life towards the goal of personal salvation, which was the distinctive promise and telos of the Christian faith."

There were few political mechanisms for the desired reform however, and as the religious wars faded during the mid-seventeenth century, universities in Europe entered a period of decline. At 1400, there were 40 universities in Europe, of up to one or two thousand students. Two centuries later, it was 170 institutions. But by the 1680s Oxford had "fewer students than at any time before the Civil War." In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the number of universities actually declined. Generally, university students had been "members of the elite, and directed to these careers by familial rather than personal choice, few were interested in study for its own sake." By the mid-eighteenth century, universities were no longer the preferred educators of the wealthy elites, having been supplanted by private tutors and the popular "grand tour" of the European Continent. Most universities, unlike the monasteries, were not supported by an endowment, and they had few resources to adapt to the changing market. They were private institutions, where masters hired their own classrooms, and students found their own lodgings in the city, or at the houses of enterprising masters offering a house-study package. Once the elites took their education elsewhere, the financial footing of the university suffered. However, the decline had little impact on the overall structure of social reproduction in the powerful Oxbridge colleges, and it would not be until the nineteenth century that the introduction of new universities – often led by Edinburgh graduates – would allow the full incorporation of scientific knowledge into the English university system.

Scottish Universities

To the north of England would emerge one of the dynamic centres of scientific learning in the eighteenth century and an important precursor to the modern university. In an early example of local authority input into university education, the 1582 charter of James VI vested management of the University of Edinburgh in the Edinburgh Town Council, who had the right of appointment to all posts. The new university became characterized as an opportunity to leave behind religious disputes that were credited to Aristotelean scholasticism, dogmatism, disputation and pedantry. It would educate in the name of Lockean gentlemanly civic virtue, polite conversation and broad training in natural philosophy and the useful sciences. Thomas Reid's reforming committee at King's College thus claimed that

instead of dwelling on "the Logic and Metaphysic of the Schoolmen, which seem chiefly contrived to make Men subtle Disputants, a Profession justly of less Value in the present age", the college would in future devote itself to "teaching those parts of [natural] Philosophy, which may qualify Men for the more useful and important Offices of Society."

The moral rectitude of practical knowledge would become a key theme in the UK's university development. As Perkin points out, the developing industrial society required specialists and would eventually enforce specialization on higher education, but the form of the specialist professor took hold in Scotland in advance of widespread industrial capitalism, eventually becoming the model for the new English universities of the nineteenth century. Edinburgh was the first to switch to individual specialist chairs in 1707, followed by Glasgow in 1727. This fragmentation of knowledge also allowed the formation of independent sciences such as chemistry.

The Scottish universities held some of the most cosmopolitan campuses in Europe in the eighteenth century. While professors took an oath of allegiance to the Church of Scotland, most classes outside the theological faculty were taught by laymen, making them appealing to religious dissenters from throughout the British Isles and colonies. Edinburgh's decision to foster specialist knowledge in medicine and philosophy/natural philosophy also provided an agreeably broad suite of courses compared to Oxford and Cambridge. This secular cosmopolitan atmosphere contributed to a large international student population: almost 45% of Edinburgh's distinguished eighteenth-century alumni were English. Scottish professors such as Adam Ferguson, David Hume, Adam Smith and John Millar became the most famous practitioners of sceptical philosophy and social science in the Protestant world. Henry Brougham, Thomas Campbell and other Edinburgh graduates went on to form University College in London in 1826.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Artistic Research in the Future Academy by Danny Butt. Copyright © 2017 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Intellect
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1783207906
• ISBN 13: 9781783207909
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 185