What Do Artists Know?

What Might Artists Learn from Architects?

As was observed during the 2009 Stone Summer Seminars, there seems to be conceptual, epistemological chaos surrounding the new studio-based PhD programs in art, especially concerning the use of the term “knowledge.” Perhaps to help address this chaos, it would be advantageous to look to related artistic fields. My simple question in what follows is, What might artists learn from architects? I will point to some aspects of possible interest for further inquiry. Architects are as confused as artists when it comes to conducting systematic and reflected academic investigations based on specific architectural methods, whether such work is termed practice-based research, research by architectural design, artistic research, or artistic development work. The concepts overlap and are ill-defined; a taxonomy most certainly does not exist. Accordingly, assessment has proven very difficult when elements of design and artistic practice are introduced as part of research. Discussions of what is specifically architectural about architectural research have been around at least since the 1970s, but transparency in terms of methods and lines of thought is still lacking. The dichotomy between “artistic ” and “scientific” measures is profound, and to a certain degree it reflects the fact that schools of architecture are generally situated either in universities or atelier-based academies. At my own institution, the School of Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, attempts to deal with these issues have been made, and research is divided into the categories of scientific research and artistic development work. Both categories may function as the basis for doctoral projects and are often mixed and work from both categories is assessed as genuine research. But comprehensible standard definitions are by and large absent, and the few Danish schools of architecture do not yet fully agree on research criteria. The question of how meaning is embodied in visual expression is as difficult to handle in architecture as in art. As with studio-based artistic research (again, this awkward term seems unavoidable) in art, the question of how knowledge is transferred from an actual design into theory or reflection has gained some interest in architecture and hence presents itself as a real challenge. Donald Schön is commonly referred to, but although his concept of reflection-in-action as an intuitive occurrence taking place in creative practice, as well as the concept of tacit knowledge, might help us verbalize certain aspects of an expressive process dealing with physical matter, both concepts do not relate to a subsequent process of verbalized reflection and contextualization. In my opinion, translation and interpretation are needed. Examining Cy Twombly’s drawings, Gottfried Boehm has investigated the conceptual difficulties in transforming visual artifacts into WHAT MIGHT ARTISTS LEARN FROM ARCHITECTS? Martin Søberg 00i-228_Elkins_4p.indb 155 9/14/12 1:17 PM what do artists know? 156 1. Gottfried Boehm, “Remembering, Forgetting : Cy Twombly’s Works on Paper,” in Writings on Cy Twombly, edited by Nicola del Roscio (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2002), 181. 2. For an account of modern architects’ uneasy relationship with text, see Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000). 3. Robin Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (London: Architectural Association, 1997), 154–56. 4. Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building, 156–60. 5. Henrik Oxvig, “Lines,” in Cartography, Morphology, Topology, edited by Cort Ross Dinesen (Copenhagen: Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, 2009), 52. 6. Albena Yaneva, Made by the Office of Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design (Rotterdam: 010, 2009), 83. 7. Yaneva, Made by the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, 58. words—a process frequently naturalized in art history. The drawings are identified as possessing a speechless quality of ambiguity, but nevertheless point to a relation between the word and the image in their simultaneous “presentation and concealment, expression and silence.”1 Since the meaning and appearance of visual phenomena are indistinguishable, a precise and linear translation of the content of these drawings is futile, says Boehm; it is a fundamental hermeneutic challenge concerning the interpretation of most modern and contemporary art, or what Umberto Eco termed the opera aperta. Text is obviously a problem when trying to figure out what visual expressions mean or do, and operations of translation and interpretation might still prove difficult, but not impossible. We should consider how these operations in some ways are already part of architectural practice when moving between models, drawings, and buildings. Could text not be included in the same list?2 Concerning these issues of representation and...