Reasoning through Art
In his Inaugural lecture of February 10th Prof. dr. Henk Borgdorff advocated positive understanding of artistic research, of reasoning in and through art, within academia.
“People often claim that research in the arts is equivalent to other forms of scientific research,” comments Borgdorff, Professor in the Theory of Research in the Arts. “For me, that's an unfortunate assumption. By stressing this equivalence, you are claiming in the same breath that they are not the same. Even more so, it suggests an implicit hierarchy between serious and second-class research - and that while art research belongs in science, and is even one of the front lines of research.”
"The focus of artistic research is placed, as I have mentioned, on embodied and enacted forms of knowledge and understanding – forms of knowing and understanding that are intimately bound up with practice and that cannot easily be translated into or transmitted by language. The idea of non-conceptual, non-propositional knowledge – as we now call it – has been a subject of philosophical thought since ancient Greece, starting famously with Aristotle’s distinction between theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge." […]
You can now read the complete lecture .