The pleasure of research

Summary: Henk Slager shows how the discussion on artistic research delving into issues such as knowledge production, artistic thinking, medium-specificity, context-responsiveness, and counter-archival display has affected the current state of art and education. He concludes that today’s debate on art education and artistic research echoes the semiotics debate in the 1970s, in which a formatting, academic order tried to discipline semiotics into a traditional, academic domain. Therefore, a consideration of artistic research is currently required; a reconsideration in line with Roland Barthes’ former response to a semiotics in the process of becoming static. In Henk Slager’s view that requires a stance where artistic research is considered a gaya scienza: a temporary autonomous activity focusing on the intellectual pleasure of an experimental method and an implicated form of artistic thought.