Richness and density are prerequisites. When there is richness and density, unexpected things can happen that are traces of material practice not fully directed by an author. In contrast, a propositional text is poor, and so are images and media files that only serve as illustrations. When it comes to artistic research, again and again, artists are asked to impoverish their work at the site of communication leading to floods of utterances and ‘art speak’ that fail to engage.

Expositions are full of portholes into specific material complexities. When we start to understand, we become involved – and when we become involved, we experience both potentials and limitations. These are not just in front of us, but also within us, which is to say, expositions really are challenges that ask of us to see and know a world from specific vantage points and in specific ways.

Expositionality, hence, undercuts discourse, which has been stifling research in the arts by demanding scientific standards of communication. However, if we look at the current attack on the sciences and discourse in certain parts of the world, we find ourselves at risk of being seen as part of antirational tendencies that serve the specific interests of a few. While this is deeply upsetting, it would be problematic to respond by defending discourse outright, since we know, it is not only limited but has also been complicit in all sorts of injustices.

A better way of responding would be built on an understanding that artistic research has historically appeared during the last stages of an epistemic crisis, which has since accelerated into an avalanche. This avalanche has, by the looks of things, already passed by us. There is a sense now that what may have looked like the most irrational of arts in today’s world, appears as the last bastion of rationality, that is, of meaning not in service of power.

On this basis, it may be time to reverse the perspective and to compare artistic research not so much to forms of knowledge established in institutes of higher education, but to seek its epistemic work in social and material contexts where it already competes with alternative epistemic offerings below discourse’s radar. Situated in this way, we can be guided by the work of many artistic researchers who rather than juxtaposing art and discourse, enact new relationships between them where one does not categorically dominate the other. Without such a reversal, academia – as well as ‘contemporary art’ with its own developed forms of discourse - can hold artistic research back, removing it from a context where it matters.

At stake seems to be the question of what research can offer to life beyond cycles of innovation (‘progress’), that are increasingly understood as decline. Here, then, is a link between deteriorating environmental conditions, global warfare and the lowering of social cohesion in post-industrial communities: that new knowledge and understanding makes less and less sense without a fundamental re-evaluation of our epistemic frameworks, which are still built on inequality and epistemic abuse.

If we were to take art as a model here, we have to say that yes, there has been progress, and yes, every artist carves out a new and unique space, or spaces. However, art working does not invalidate what others are doing or what was done before them, nor what is done by those for whose work we still lack artistic concepts. Could it be that our presuppositions keep holding us back from being true researchers?

If we were to apply the concept of expositionality to the kind of rich material complexity that is our current life, our work would still consist of adding new things to the world. However, it would also consist of configuring anew what is there already, and ultimately consist of developing a sensitivity towards the effects all of this has on emergent life. The experience of expositionality, on all levels, is one of affirmation, which may precisely be what we have most been lacking.

Michael Schwab
Editor-in-Chief