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Being able to carry out doctoral research in the arts has for years been a self-evident academic pursuit in the Scandinavian and English-speaking countries, but in The Netherlands, it seems as if the phenomenon is newly being invented. The NRC Handelsblad newspaper recently printed an article of no fewer than three pages, one-sidedly honing in on the doctoral course for visual artists developed by PhDArts, a collaborative programme between the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague and Leiden University. The article did not refer in any sense to other initiatives already under way in Amsterdam and Utrecht. Its descriptions of the specific research projects did not exactly give the impression that this was a necessary and meaningful phenomenon. All this was at a point in time when, especially in art education, there is a truly pressing need for a ‘best practices’ overview that is as multiform as possible. This need has moreover grown because of the fact that in recent years the nature of the discussion at the institutional level about the implications of the Bologna Declaration (the introduction of the Bachelor’s, Master’s and Ph.D. structure in European art education) has been almost exclusively meta-theoretical, and is about the way in which artistic practice can make a significant contribution to the production of knowledge. In a response to this, the European Artistic Research Network (EARN) recently determined that all of its activities, including Nameless Science (New York), Becoming Bologna (Venice), Critique of Archival Reason (Dublin), Tables of Thought (Helsinki) and As the Academy Turns (Murcia) will be entirely focused on the presentation and discussion of current research projects.The concrete charting of the practice of artistic doctoral research is in my opinion precisely what needs to take place in the Netherlands. In addition, a number of mid-career artists for whom research is a more or less self-evident starting point and result should be given the opportunity to conduct and demonstrate their research. In this perspective, the constructive initiative of the NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research) and the Fonds BKVB (Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture) could be viewed. This year, they are together making two grants available in the form of a pilot project for outstanding doctoral research. Hopefully, this is just the beginning of a further growth of initiatives in this area. For only if we are able to rely on some twenty completed and highly advanced doctoral projects in the next ten years will we be in a position to decide whether such research is relevant for the Dutch art world.It seems as though we have lost sight of the latter in the heated rhetoric in the debate about doctorates in the fine arts. In what is virtually an indiscriminate copying of university guidelines and regulations, there does not seem to lurk any imagined danger in forcing the unique character of the artistic investigation to conform to a restrictive academic norm. This assumes a certain hierarchical arrangement, such as the way in which, in the current system, artistic doctoral researchers always seem – like odd wards of the court – to be incorporated under established university disciplines, presuming the institutional hypothesis that artistic research at the art academies is not a real or full-fledged form of research. It is, however, precisely here that the emancipation must take place. In the same way that technical universities were first granted doctoral programmes as they were being established in the 1930s, the Dutch art academies must now bring about their own jus promovendi.To this end, the art academies might consider working with foreign partners. Independent art universities (as in Finland) and independent university art departments (as in Sweden and England) are not, as such, bound to the established academic order’s framework of norms. We can learn from the early developmental problems experienced by these programmes, such as over-academicizing in England, where artists sometimes received doctorates when they had never set foot in the art world, and by then, thanks to their rigid academic training and the resulting estrangement from that art world, were no longer able to do so, or the escape route and social succour that the doctoral programmes in Scandinavian countries seem to have offered over the last decade to primarily mediocre artists. In any case, we must make sure that artistic doctoral research does not manifest itself as a form of organized mediocrity. We must also put an end to the incorporation of artistic researchers in isolated, hyper-academic doctoral ‘classes’. Conducting artistic doctoral research must never become an end in itself. Artistic PhD research – as ‘pure’ artistic research – is primarily justified by its capacity to continuously actualize the debate within the institutional environment of art education: the debate about the specificity of artistic research and its implementation in a curriculum. The researchers and their projects should relate in such a way to the structure of the graduate art education, that over a brief period of time, a self-evident research environment could be created. That environment must be one that is supported by the unique norms and hypotheses of art education. In other words, it should be a research environment that does not allow itself to be seduced into pseudo-scientific behaviour, into para-curatorial activities, or into any other kind of knowledge production under tutelage. A research environment guaranteeing reflection on how the academy as a sanctuary for experimental research and multiform artistic thinking could be continuously rearticulated. Henk Slager is professor in Artistic Research and Dean of the Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design (maHKU). He is also Chairman of EARN (European Artistic Research Network). translation: Mari Shields

Henk Slager

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