Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: I will start from some doctrinarian claims followed by an outline of my ongoing artistic research project Modernity Retired, after which I will return to some more doctrinarian claims. The anthropologist Mary Douglas states in her How Institutions Think (1986) that for any discourse to take place the participants must first agree on some basic categories. She writes: “Nothing else than institutions can define sameness. Similarity is an institution”. She makes the claim that what institutions do is to assign similarities between themselves and what they define as ‘nature’. Institutions ground their identities, and the reason for their existence, by referring to ‘nature ’ (in that the formal structure of the institution corresponds to structures in non-human realms). That is; institutional decisions on artistic research and art texts must agree with the nature of art, and the natural identity of the artist. Knowledge is compartmentalised. I’m sure there must be a good reason for this. If we are to tell a story, to write a text and to form an artistic research narrative, it is impossible to know everything that is of importance, we need to leave that to experts. Right?
Author: Staffan Schmidt
Language: English
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1504908627