Texts that nobody reads: on Writing at Universities of the Arts. Report to the Department of Film and Media at Stockholm University of the Arts.

NILS CLAESSON

TEXTS THAT NOBODY READS

ON WRITING AT UNIVERSITIES OF THE ARTS

RREPORT TO THE DEPARTMENT OF FILM AND MEDIA AT STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS

N IL S C L A E SS O N T E X T S T H A T N O B O D Y R E A D S

Has Sweden suffered from excessive academicisation? Even children in primary school are to write in subjects such as theoretical gymnastics and handicrafts. A view of knowled- ge that benefits those who are good at writing but not at kicking a ball or crafting with their hands. In higher artistic education, the demands on young aspiring artists to express themselves in text increase.

How do art academies handle the requirements for an aca- demicisation of a learning internship based on supervision, experiments and production? Are there methods to become friends with text and writing? Why not write to be read?

Does writing tasks have to be an art dentist’s visit?

Nils Claesson was commissioned to investigate what the teaching of writing and theory looked like in higher artis- tic education in Sweden. Educations that are also research preparatory. The result was a report with proposals to the Department of Film and Media at Stockholm University of the Arts.

Nils Claesson is an artist, writer and filmmaker with a doctorate in artistic research. He has written reports on animated film (2009) and film scenography (2013) which led to new subjects and educations at Stockholm University of the Arts.

Cover image from the work Peering into the Black Box (2020) by Nils Claesson

isbn: 978-91-88407-22-1

issn: 2002-603x

X Position nr 15

TEXTS THAT NOBODY READS

NILS CLAESSON

TEXTS THAT NOBODY READS

ON WRITING AT UNIVERSITIES OF THE ARTS

REPORT TO THE DEPARTMENT OF FILM AND MEDIA AT STOCKHOLM

UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS

PUBLISHED AS ISSUE 15 IN THE SERIES X POSITION.

ISSN: 2002-603X

© 2021 NILS CLAESSON

GRAPHIC DESIGN & TYPESETTING: CARL EHRENKRONA ISBN: 978-91-88407-22-1

PUBLISHED BY RUIN, WWW.RUIN.SE

PRINTING: TIPOGRAFIJA DARDEDZE HOLOGRAFIJA, RIGA, LATVIA

Contents

INTRODUCTION ... 1

SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS ... 7

EMPAPERMENT ... 10

THE BANALITY OF COMPLIANCE AND THE NEED TO TRAIN DISSIDENTS ... 12

THE VIRTUE OF COURAGE ... 13

PEOPLE SEE THEMSELVES AS GOODS IN A MARKETPLACE ... 18

THE FREEDOM AND BOUNDLESSNESS OF ART PROVOKES ... 19

THE ACADEMIC DUNCE CAP ... 21

PUBLICATION FORMS AT STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS: EXPOSITION ... 24

THE ROYAL INSTITUTE OF ART: WRITING AS ART’S POSITIVE DENTIST’S APPOINTMENT ... 26

ANYTHING GOES IN STOCKHOLM ... 29

TEXTS THAT NOBODY READS ... 31

THE INSTITUTE FOR FUTURE STUDIES INVESTS IN DISSEMINATING ITS RESEARCH RESULTS ... 32

PROPOSALS FOR VARIOUS METHODS AND MEASURES THAT CAN CONTRIBUTE TO CREATING A THINKING AND WRITING RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT ... 35

PROPOSAL FOR LONG AND SHORT COURSES FOR MEDIA AND FILM ... 36

EPILOGUE ... 38

HERE IS MY TEXT – AN ESSAY ... 39

“ I believe that the aim should be to write well, but provisionally. A finished text is already dead and buried.”

From an email from John Swedenmark

“Why should we care if people don’t read the text?

Nobody can write these days. Not even journalism graduates.”

Anonymous manager

“Writing is the unknown. Before writing one knows nothing of what one is about to write.”

Marguerite Duras in Writing

1

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this report is to propose various approaches and methods to create a better climate for writing and thinking together at the Department of Film and Media, and indeed at other departments of Stockholm University of the Arts. The goal is to reinforce thinking, reading, writing, and dialogue as part of an effort to construct an artistic research environment.

The focus has been on studying writing at second cycle, given that this is the preparatory level for those considering a career in artistic research, which is of course a distinguishing feature of the university’s operations.

My method involves long conversations with those responsible for writing and thinking at various universities of the arts, as well as with teachers, researchers, administrators and, perhaps most importantly, people who work with text: from poets, playwrights, and authors to theoreticians. The measures proposed in the report are applicable at a departmental level, university-wide, Stockholm-wide or nationally. It might also be worth identifying those physical locations in which teaching and research meet, or have opportunities to meet, at a university of the arts: libraries and laboratories. Here, I would like to refer to another text Labbtanken:12 röster om laboratorium och bibliotek [The Laboratory Concept: 12 voices on the laboratory and library] by Nils Claesson and Mirko Lempert ¹ . Please feel free to read this report alongside Labbtanken.

1

2013, Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts. Available to download at http://www.diva-

portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1139775&dswid=814

2 Can we discuss art, film and the meaning of life with a machine?

Talking to Ingmar About Art (2001) is an electronic artwork created in collaboration with the programmer Rolf Lindgren. From the exhibition CRAC at the Liljevalchs gallery, 2000.

Talking to Ingmar About Art Photo: Nils Claesson

3

Drawing: Nils Claesson

4 It is the beginning of 2020 and a day-long writing course has attracted 73 students in groups of two to ten over a few hectic weeks of January and February. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic is only weeks away. As I write this, it seems long ago.

The one-day writing workshop was designed for students and professional artists wishing to apply for a doctoral studentship. The concept is simple: the course was open to all applicants on the condition that they agree to turn off their mobile phones and work without internet access for the entire day. The purpose of this analogue day was to establish a temporary artistic research environment and to help participants hone their doctoral projects and research questions. On Tuesdays, the workshop was in Swedish and on Fridays, English. There was also one other unspoken requirement: that everyone in the room would share, participate in the discussion, listen to others, and offer their thoughts on their ideas and projects. Participants in the course included film directors, assistant lecturers from Konstfack, radio producers, dancers, screenwriters, documentary filmmakers, circus aerial rope artists, poets, choreographers, filmmakers, authors, textile artists, visual artists, and political activists from Peru who work with street theatre and performances. The majority of course participants were women and many were migrants. Discussions proved to be generous of spirit as the various artistic disciplines mixed within the group, one possible explanation being that they did not see one another as competitors and were able to vent their curiosity.

As there were no native English speakers in attendance, Fridays were often more spontaneous, with the English language being mistreated and mutilated and communication at its pinnacle. Some participants had come from far away, travelling up from Malmö or taking a flight from Tallinn or Lisbon. Master’s students from the Departments of Film and Media and Performing Arts at Stockholm University of the Arts excelled, being accustomed to articulating their practice and able to refer to other artists and researchers. This initiative to create a writing and thinking group of students seems to have paid off. At the conclusion of the courses, I wrote an email to Maria Hedman Hvitfeldt, head of the Department of Film and Media, who had commissioned me to design and hold the writing course for prospective doctoral candidates.

Dear Maria,

[...] I see a need for a discussion on research that offers the opportunity to ask the simplest questions. Awareness is low regarding how to obtain available dissertations and degree projects. It is difficult to gain an overview of the field, something that I consider remarkable considering that there are some 50 PhDs in Artistic Practices in Sweden ² and that relatively large funds are allocated to artistic research every year. It would make life easier for those applying for a doctoral position or artistic research placement if some kind of guide existed. I have often been required to explain in my course how to access dissertations and that one of the basic research methods is to learn to refer to the work of other researchers. [...]

There is a fear of saying the wrong thing and appearing stupid. This primarily applies to those with a long professional practice. I get the impression that they do not really trust their own practical experience but believe that some kind of theoretical ingenuity is required to take a doctorate. [...] In my opinion, there is a great need to conduct open discourse regarding research as a phenomenon, rather than simply explaining and informing.

2

NB: This figure is wrong; in fact, there are approximately 200 PhDs in Artistic Practices in Sweden, equating to

800 years of education.

5

Maria’s response to my email was to task me with studying the need and opportunities to create

an environment more conducive to writing and contemplation at the Department of Film and

Media, to propose measures and courses, and to investigate possible collaborations with other

schools.

6 Above: Wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt/How to Explain

Pictures to a Dead Hare, action by Joseph Beuys, 1965 © Joseph Beuys/Bildupphovsrätt 2020

Below: Feldhase or Young Hare painted by Albrecht Dührer in 1502.

7

SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS

For many artists who are not themselves authors, writing is an intermediate form. An artist uses text in their professional practice to explain what they are doing: they may write the occasional debate article, but most of their writing is done in project descriptions, scholarship applications, and various proposals for projects that will be something other than simply a text. Writing becomes a transitional form.

The text is comparable to the floorplans for a new building. It outlines a film, a play, or an art project. This transitional form is interesting in that it reflects hierarchies, a range of values, and the limits of what is possible to accomplish, whether artistically, politically, or economically. But the status of a text varies: a film script is unequivocally an intermediate form, except in exceptional cases such as Ingmar Bergman’s script for Fanny and Alexander, while a play is an artwork in its own right. A drama. What is or is not art is a matter for constant investigation, discussion, and renegotiation. The transitional form is sister to the sketch and the model. The phenomenon of the intermediate form is clear in architecture, which has a tradition of paper architecture: visionary proposals for buildings that will never be built, often designed to provoke a discussion along the lines of building a skyscraper in the middle of Riddarfjärden.

For today’s artists, writing as a transitional form is completely digitised.

The majority of funds, foundations, and institutions that support the arts and artistic research projects only accept digital application forms. These digital forms are relatively similar and are usually divided into fields such as project idea, goals, purpose, budget, target group, timetable and any project partners. The artist/project owner is also expected to upload a CV, examples of their work, and references. The digital forms used to apply for support for the arts are relatively similar to the digital forms used to apply to higher education in the arts. The ability to complete a digital form is crucial to benefiting from the various forms of support and education currently available in Sweden and Europe as a whole. The relationship of artists to these digital forms is almost as powerless as that of farmers to the weather and climate. It is no longer possible, as it once was, to redraw the form to accommodate your own boxes and comments ³ .

3

In the 1990s, artist and film curator Anna Linder applied for funding to curate various projects and with the

help of a ruler was able to add her own boxes to her application, thus securing support! Today, this would be

impossible.

8 Sune Jonsson’s debut book The Village with the Blue House is based

on documentary photographs and a semifictional literary text that recreates rural life in northern Sweden before depopulation took hold.

By the time he produced his work, the village Sune Jonsson describes no longer existed. The text reconstructs a lost world with the help of photographs.

Albert and Thea Johansson, Nordmaling Municipality, 1956.

Photo: Sune Jonsson/Västerbotten Museum

9

Poster by Mårten Medbo and Nils Claesson.

10

EMPAPERMENT

There is an increasing tendency in the world of arts, its support systems, and education administration to place greater significance on text-based forms, to allocate more and more time and energy to documentation and control, and to allow the administrative apparatus around digital forms to occupy a growing proportion of the density of the artistic and educational system. This is most apparent in the number of employees of the Swedish Arts Grants Committee, which had six employees a decade ago but now has over 30, or the Department of Law at Stockholm University, which deals with laws and regulations and is the first-cycle programme with the largest number of applicants in Sweden.

Growing bureaucracy is not only a problem for the arts and academia but for society as a whole, something that philosopher Jonna Bornemark describes as empaperment in her 2018 book Det omätbaras renässans: En uppgörelse med pedanternas herravälde [The Renaissance of the Unmeasurable: Coming to terms with the world domination of the pedant].

This is a formula with a tendency to reproduce. So-called New Public management (NPM) is a battery of methods for evaluating and controlling the machinery of public authority using ideas borrowed from the market. The easiest way to grasp the scope of NPM is to think about all of the digital forms that you, the consumer, student or professional, must complete in order to grade an experience, performance or product, such as the grading and evaluation a teacher receives through an anonymised course evaluation. In one way, this zest for forms and the lush flora of evaluation and feedback acts as an equaliser in the national and international “likes”

economy. It connotes the spread of market logic. The logic of the market is to create instant gratification. Satisfied customers. This is achieved through short-term thinking and a common currency of “likes”. But pressing a like button or filling in a digital form cannot replace an understanding of a complex knowledge process through which students can emotionally move between extremes. To create, to be creative, is no simple linear transaction but rather something an artist must come to terms with during their training, something that can be described as sitting both inside and outside a rollercoaster on which strong emotions are often confused and jumbled. A creative process almost always involves feelings of loss, euphoria, despair, and joy that combine with meaning and then, in the next moment, meaninglessness.

It is precisely this complexity in the creative process that makes higher education in the arts so specialised and demands such a large measure of personal guidance by other artists in the guise of a teacher. It is the method itself, of propagating from mouth to mouth and person to person, that creates continuity in artistic practice.

This is why the view of students and pupils as customers is so detrimental to an artistic

higher education. In a shop, the customer is always right. In a shop, the customer must always

be satisfied with the service offered. In a university of the arts, however, admission as a student

is an invitation to become a stakeholder, not a consumer of goods and services. An artistic

education is also an invitation to test yourself and to be tested by your creations.

11 What would happen if everyone did this? Elin Wikström, 1993. The work

originally took place in the ICA Malmborg supermarket in Malmö in 1993 but this photograph was taken when it was recreated as part of the exhibition Svensk konceptkonst [Swedish Conceptual Art] at Kalmar Konstmuseum in 2010.

Photo: Oscar Guermouche

12

THE BANALITY OF COMPLIANCE AND THE NEED TO TRAIN DISSIDENTS

Democracy is founded on the idea of defending minorities, not on allowing minorities to govern.

Freedom of the press, freedom of association, academic freedom and the laws that defend these freedoms are the very backbone of a democratic society. It should therefore be a stated goal that in the process of writing and thinking we train dissidents. When we talk about dissidence, we often think of the tradition of resistance against totalitarianism that emerged in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, in which the visual arts, literature, poetry, cinema, performance and the actions of courageous individuals played a crucial role in overthrowing a corrupt and incompetent system. Dissidence expressed through various disciplines in a constant struggle against forces intent on censorship and control. This was a struggle that was about both protecting the integrity of art but also a defence of art for art’s sake: through songs, books, plays, films, exhibitions in people’s living rooms, photographs, smuggled art magazines, VHS cassettes, concerts in impossible venues, and performance art that infiltrated everyday situations. For years, literature copied on typewriters stood for resistance to a totalitarian system where there was constant interaction within and outside the established institutions.

In Sweden, there is every reason for concern about the compliance of the artistic and scientific community in the face of new directives concerning digital forms. The fact that so many adapt so easily and smoothly to new rules and regulations handed down from those in power is a threat to democracy, even if those requirements are written with the best of intentions.

A democratic society is based on the existence of opposing interests. The ongoing struggle for political and financial power and influence and an open and free public discourse are society’s vaccine against corruption, misrule and decline.

Democracy is hard work because it forces people to engage themselves in the big issues.

13

THE VIRTUE OF COURAGE

An education in critical thinking and reflective practice has been present in the courses in the philosophy of knowledge and knowledge through reflection given by Ingela Josefson, Barbro Smeds, and others at the Departments of Film and Media, Performing Arts and Acting at Stockholm University of the Arts and its predecessors.

These courses have highlighted philosophers such as Hannah Arendt as examples.

Aristotle’s ideas on the virtue of courage are used as course literature and a moral drama such as Antigone is updated some 2,500 years after its premiere. It is in the meeting between practicing artists, texts, and committed course coordinators that a climate of writing and thinking is created. Course participants are trained to give their experiences and feelings linguistic expression. In a practical knowledge tradition, the point of departure is to encourage participants to write about their feelings rather than research questions; about an itch, that something seems amiss, that something isn’t right, a stone in the shoe. This is called dilemma writing. Simple comparisons may also lead to big questions. In preparation for his doctoral thesis Clay-Based Experience and Language-Ness (HDK 2017), Mårten Medbo began by asking himself why certain ceramics enjoy high status as edifying works of art, while others are considered handicrafts of lower status. This became the point of departure for the thesis and Medbo’s continued research and experimentation.

The practical knowledge tradition’s practice originates not in the art world but in working life, first and foremost in a meeting between workers in the healthcare sector and graphic industry during the 1970s and ‘80s. The radical thing about the method is that it challenges professionals to change their own working situation – if they have the power to do so.

Knowledge becomes the agent of change.

This method for encouraging professionals to express their knowledge and experience has also been proven to work very well in practice for artists as a route to language: to words, reading, their own thoughts, and writing. The great advantage of this method is that it creates space and time to put language to something through dialogue in small groups; an active dialogue in which course participants engage closely with one another’s texts and are read themselves. The course literature is carefully selected, including for example a book by Hans Larsson, Intuition: några ord om diktning och vetenskap [Intuition: A Few Words About Poetry and Science], which attempts to put into words that gut-feeling that allows quick decisions – commonplace in so many occupations from healthcare to painting – as well as in thought.

Kommenterad [A1]: I assume that the comma as a separation is intentional, and this was not meant to say

“reading their own thoughts” (which would also make

sense)?

14 Why should certain ceramics enjoy high status as fine art, while

others are considered handicrafts of lower status even though they look the same? This was the question that Mårten Medbo asked himself and that became the starting point for his research.

Photo: Nils Claesson.

15 Samson is a work by Chris Burden consisting of a 100 ton jack

connected to a gear box and a turnstile. The jack pushes two large timbers against the walls of the gallery incrementally for each visitor passing through the turnstile and could theoretically bring down the building. In his work, Chris Burden (1956-2015) sought out uncertain and dangerous situations.

© Chris Burden / Bildupphovsrätt 2020

16 It should be emphasised that different artistic disciplines have very different relationships to words and pictures. Perhaps the most distinct boundary runs between mimes, dancers and actors. While the mime and the dancer relate to images, rhythm and flow, the actor

traditionally relates very closely to the details of the written word – down to the last semicolon and comma. This creates fruitful misunderstandings and a conflict as old the performing arts.

There is a constant struggle going on within artistic education and research between acolytes of the written word, and images, respectively. In practice, this means that different higher education institutes interpret preparation for research and the documentation of artistic practice in different ways.

The idea of training in critical thinking and writing also runs through the courses arranged by the Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking (ITW) that were available to teachers and researchers at the Departments of Film and Media, Acting, and Performing Arts during summer 2014. The methods developed at ITW are based on thinking and writing as a collective, participatory, and liberating intellectual process. The methods draw strength from resistance as action: in an interest for counterpublics and counternarratives and making space for the voices of minorities and the oppressed. The term counterpublic comes from an analysis that the public sphere and the public discourse in a society are dominated by a single narrative and that there are explanatory models and analyses in circulation as an alternative to the cultural hegemony: voices that seek to and need to be heard. Theories on counterpublics are often linked to the Italian philosopher and Marxist activist Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. In Gramsci’s analysis, social order and the authority of the ruling class are not simply secured through violence but through ideological domination of societal institutions:

the state, the family, the Church, schools, universities, and the mass media. Ideas about power and counterpower, hegemony and various forms of public have inspired many political movements, and not only on the far left. In Sweden, similar ideas lay behind the emergence of free theatre groups, the radical press, Folkets Bio [The People’s Cinema], and other counterculture organisations during the 1970s and ‘80s, many of which still play a role in Swedish film, theatre, artistic life, and the media. Back to Bard: some of the methods used by ITW are taken from traditional school teaching and from anthroposophy. Course participants read and write by hand in special exercise books. They read texts and discuss them with the group. Computers and smartphones are removed from the equation, initially creating a sense of being alone and naked. Course participants write in their own exercise book and are trained to discuss, to converse with one another, and to share. This is a return to writing and reading as a physical and spatial experience that may stimulate renewed interest in both reading and writing. Paradoxically, withdrawing from the digital world and electronic networks may prove to be an act of liberation. It is possible to write without a machine. It is possible to discuss and see things without digital cookies and electronic tentacles registering everything you like, dislike, read and don’t read. It is emancipation from algorithms designed to measure your desires and inclination to buy.

A return to writing by hand also actualises the written word as symbols, sounds and

images, and body as material. Not only that, but your hand remembers. Your handwriting or

drawing will take up where you left off last time you wrote or drew by hand.

17 Artist Dan Lageryd creates a new narrative about the city of

Stockholm, about people and their identities, through a close reading of pizzeria menus. Pizza Moon is a large square from which a grey moon with dark shadows emerges. The moon consists of the names of Stockholm pizzerias and the pizzas they serve. It contains over 300,000 characters that Dan has copied by hand from some 505 pizza menus. It becomes a kind of concrete poetry about longing and the spirit of place:

Pizza Moon © Dan Lageryd

18

PEOPLE SEE THEMSELVES AS GOODS IN A MARKETPLACE

The logic of the market dictates that all human relationships be reified. People describe themselves and their loved ones in terms of goods in a marketplace. This is most clearly expressed in the various digital services used to search for love and new sexual partners, such as Tinder. For the arts, this implies that artists should view themselves as brands that need to be built and maintained through their artistic practice. This is reflected in the practice and existence of education in the arts: in the dilemma of whether a school should be a production house for the manufacture of art or simply a school. From an educational point of view, this also creates friction between, on the one hand, developing the talent of students and, on the other, the student’s own need to develop their brand. The world beyond the school gates is called the industry and the industry often becomes some kind of third person, always hovering as a phantom presence. I sometimes wonder if this talk of the industry is simply a useful yardstick, like the average viewer used by a television company as some kind of metric for the norm. Will the average viewer understand this? What about the average viewer! The average viewer needs to be able to keep up! A more diverse society and globalised media has rendered the average viewer redundant but his spirit lingers on.

This chaffing between brand-building and freely experimental art also applies to artistic

practice. I have participated in two collective artistic research projects: Performing the

Common (2012) and Work-a-work (2017–2019). Both projects applied the feminist research

methodology memory work. Briefly, the method involves groups of people exploring their

individual memories in writing to achieve an analysis. Participants are encouraged to write

down their experiences in the third person. The aim is to build up a joint analysis, or map of

values and preconceptions about the world, which in turn can be used as the basis for a societal

analysis and awareness of their own situation. This research method is not far removed from

Pablo Freire’s liberating pedagogy. It has become apparent that, in a group of artists, all of

whom are anxious to safeguard their own brand, memory work has a more catalytic effect,

acting as a starting motor for an artistic process but then coming to a screeching halt as another

mechanism kicks in: the artists shut down the discussion and begin working on their own

projects. They do their own thing.

19

THE FREEDOM AND BOUNDLESSNESS THAT ART PROVOKES

Art, or the arts, stand for a strong, cherished, revolutionary and critical counterforce in society.

In the notion of art and its self-efficacy, there is a sense of something that cannot be limited by digital forms, markets, brand building, or like buttons. That art is not a dietary supplement produced to improve people’s sense of well-being but rather an alarm clock, a canary in the mine. It is a metric for the health of society as a whole. Art stands for something exalted, timeless and without borders, a dimension of society that is both spiritual and corporeal. Art has an inexplicable energy. Naturally, this is a source of some annoyance to many people and creates uncertainty, even among those who work with administrative tasks at a university of the arts but who have experience from other higher education institutions. The formal, by-the- books, neurotic administrative attitude can easily gain the upper hand at a university of the arts.

Even schools with sound finances lack the kind of robust premises needed for experiments and exhibitions. It seems that the white office cube with a computer and a desk is the ideal. The bright open-plan office landscape or fixed workstations in which all of the people are replaceable are the furnishing norm today in many companies and schools.

The ambivalence in art’s mission to create means that, when it comes to writing and thinking, higher education institutions for the arts sometimes get it wrong in their view of how writing should be valued, encouraged, and given space in lessons. This includes their view of the writing artist and the results of writing and of what is commonly referred to as theory, and even in their view of artistic research. At times, it might be formulated in the words: Why can’t we talk about research instead? Why must we bring art into it? Sometimes, art phobics conceal their fear behind technology. Behind inventing new machines or equipment. When did machines become neutral?

The most obvious example of art being confronted by rigid academic thinking has been in

the examination of Master’s students. As a rule, Master’s students present an artistic work

accompanied by a thesis in Swedish or English. They also have the opportunity to submit their

thesis in one of Sweden’s minority languages, although this is very rare indeed.

20 From The Disasters of War/Los Desastres de la Guerra. With his

innovative way of creating tension between text and image, not unlike

a composer’s use of counterpoint, Francisco Goya is considered to be

one of the first modern artists.

21

THE ACADEMIC DUNCE CAP

It is not unknown for external experts to examine work based entirely on the quality and scope of the thesis, ignoring the artwork completely. This is generally because the academic external expert feels uncertain when confronted with the artwork but feels confident in their command of the written words as a form of expression and thus secure in their role as a critical reader of the thesis. Such encounters between academics and artistic master’s students can sometimes be extremely unfortunate in as much as the poor student feels that their art has been completely overlooked while an academic dunce’s cap has been placed upon their head.

But shouldn’t students undertaking an artistic master’s degree be able to take criticism? Are they so fragile? Why should art students be handled with kid gloves?

The thing is, no school wants unhappy, disappointed and demoralised students. The demands on an art student are different from those on, for example, a would-be engineer or a trainee teacher. Students at a university of the arts are expected to share their personal histories, to challenge themselves, their families, and friends in various complex artistic processes and expand their boundaries time and time again. Generally, this means many hours of teaching and supervision, as well as dialogue and criticism of their own practice. Young people who are taught to courageously give their all in artistic processes may also become oversensitive to criticism, which can be construed as an attack on their identity and person. There is a need to develop additional methods for taking and giving criticism in second and third-cycle programmes. There is an opportunity to develop a functioning culture of criticism on artistic higher education programmes.

How criticism is received and given is dependent on the local environment in which it is offered. Karin Hansson, who has experience of research in a number of fields including human- computer interaction, sociology of art, art history, and artistic research, is currently working on several interdisciplinary projects. Karin believes that it is important to understand that different research disciplines have different ways of giving and receiving criticism. In research fields in which methods and empirical study are clearly separated from the researcher and the research is more of a collective process, there are well-developed and often highly detailed procedures for criticism. Within research in the humanities and the arts, it is more difficult to separate the method and empirical study from the researcher as they are sometimes the same thing, making it difficult to criticise the research without criticising the researcher. These differences are often expressed in cultural practices that are expressed in aesthetic genres. It may be a matter of something as banal as whether to use a table in a text or to structure it according to a certain model. A mistake will be dismissed rather than taken seriously. According to Karin, these practices are also an expression of the researcher/artist’s identity, which is why, paradoxically, writing can create major barriers to communication for artists, who are also expected to shape the written word into an entirely new and distinct piece of art. A more transparent, scientific way of writing based on simplification and clarification threatens the very identity of the artist ⁴ .

4

Cf. a more developed discussion of this in Hansson, Karin. (2013). Art as Participatory Methodology in

Tidskrift För Genusvetenskap [Journal for Gender Studies], no. 1).

22 Honoré Daumier had an eye for what happens when the people of Paris

are consumed by passion for the great ideal. This drawing shows a

literary discussion.

23 Le Déjeuner en fourrure [Lunch in fur] 1936, Meret Oppenheim.

© Meret Oppenheim / Bildupphovsrätt 2020

24

PUBLICATION FORMS AT STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS:

EXPOSITION

Words are a blunt instrument when it comes to describing and presenting a complex reality, an artistic experience, or represented insight that works at all levels and with all senses, both from the artist’s perspective and the receiver’s. Insight often exists in the gaps between words, pictures, movement, action, body and space. Sometimes one quickly forgets only to later recall in a photographic flash followed by a cold shower, or washed down by memories and fried on a griddle of anxiety. How can we describe it in words? Can it be done? It is possible to come close? That is why philosophy is interested in art. The Ancient Greek concept of catharsis, meaning purification or cleansing, is used by Aristotle in his Poetics to describe what happens in the mind of an audience member experiencing a Greek tragedy. The question he was actually trying to answer was why we enjoy experiencing the dramatization of dreadful events.

Immanuel Kant uses the sublime, in the sense of boundlessness and disruptive, and compares the experience of art to natural phenomena such as storms at sea or earthquakes. These are concepts born of language’s awkwardness in capturing a powerful experience.

At Stockholm University of the Arts, there is a practice with a multilayered exposure area of text, images, sounds and references. This presentation is called exposition. In English, exposition means both a major art exhibition and a detailed explanation or account of a phenomenon, its history, and situation. At Stockholm University of the Arts, exposition is a concept that can be linked to artistic research and is also how master’s students show their work in preparation for future research. The exposition form is applied in both two-year master’s programmes and by doctoral candidates. The exposition should not be regarded as a finished work of art, but as a representation richer than simply words and pictures and yet still something that can be exhibited audio-visually on a screen with all of the limitations of a data tin can.

Today, doctoral candidates at Stockholm University of the Arts are recommended to curate expositions to document their artistic research projects. The publication platform for an exposition is the online portal Research Catalogue.

For those familiar with the 1990s art movement known as new media art, the format will be reminiscent of that period’s online art and interfaces.

The concept is associated with the Society for Artistic Research (SAR), which is behind both the Research Catalogue publication system and the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR).

The publication platform for degree projects at first, second and third cycle at Stockholm University of the Arts is DiVA. The DiVA portal is a common search service for research publications and student theses written at 49 higher education institutions and research institutes. It is administered by Uppsala University Library.

Artists sometimes also publish their master’s thesis or exposition as a book. Mia Engberg is a documentary filmmaker, researcher, and doctoral student at Stockholm University of the Arts.

Mia has recently published the book Den visuella tystnaden – en essä om film [The Visual

Silence: An Essay on Film]. The book is based on the anti-film research project The Visual

Silence, which was financed through the Swedish Research Council’s Artistic Research

Committee. Mia Engberg reported her research in the form of an exposition in the Research

Catalogue but was not satisfied to rely on this outlet alone: “This is to do with my previous

book, Belleville Baby. One day I was walking past the library and saw a young woman with a

nose ring sitting engrossed in my book. As not many people have the patience to visit the

Research Catalogue to find research results, I wanted to publish a book to start a discourse with

25 a broader and preferably younger readership of cineastes. That’s why I published the book,”

explains Mia.

Mia Engberg writes about her own films and research into visual silence, but also about her two cinematic lodestars, Marguerite Duras and Derek Jarman. Photo: Sara Mac Key

The book is well-written with lovely references to Mia Engberg’s artistic colleagues in the

realm of cinema, Marguerite Duras and Derek Jarman, while at the same time it bears witness

to an illness that struck Engberg during her work on the project. Mia adopts a refreshing tone

and I can only sympathise with her goal of communicating with a wider public, which is of

course especially important given that she is a practicing artist on the state payroll. Artistic

third-cycle study programmes are crucial to the production of all kinds of art in Sweden. Many

artists do their most significant work as students thanks to the resources, time, peace and quiet,

and stability afforded them to complete their projects within the framework provided by well-

resourced art schools. An extensive list could be compiled of artistic careers jumpstarted by

such programmes. Sweden may well have the most generous and technically advanced artistic

higher education in the world.

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THE ROYAL INSTITUTE OF ART: WRITING AS ART’S POSITIVE DENTIST’S APPOINTMENT

The Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm invests in fostering the joy of writing and integrating writing into artistic practice, so that it does not become an alien practice.

Perhaps we could describe it as art’s dentist’s appointment, designed to provide the artist with strong, gleaming teeth that they can sink into their work. The Royal Institute of Art constructs a writing triangle between the supervisor, librarian, and fine art student. All writing teaching is based on individual supervision. There are no general writing courses. Students have one year to write their text, which must be between 12 and 15 pages long. The supervisor maintains an active dialogue with the student about reading and literature. Together with the librarian, suitable books are identified and ordered for the student to read. The supervisor attempts to challenge the student’s choice of literature and reading by suggesting texts and books. Once the writing is underway, the supervisor takes on the role of editor – and often proofreader. The supervisor may cycle to the student’s home to collect their texts. Various forms of writing, ideally experimental and poetic, are encouraged. Students are challenged to both write within an essayistic tradition and to break down the boundaries of the essay form.

Here, a minor digression may be in order: a text published in a book or magazine is almost never the product of a single person’s efforts. A text is commissioned. It is edited and revised.

It is proofread several times. It is abridged. Headings are added. It is given graphic form. Not even a classic novel has a fixed form. It is published in various editions and updated much like a film may appear in the cinema or art gallery in different versions or be remade as a television series. Texts and books are dough to be constantly kneaded and baked.

The key to writing at the Royal Institute of Art is personal writing and supervision. Once a text is completed, it will be read by a professor who will offer yet another layer of criticism.

Once all of these criticisms have been addressed, the librarian will publish the essay on DiVA.

The lesson the Royal Institute of Art provides is that the desire to write is central and that this must be accompanied by flexible, diligent supervision. Students are challenged to write freely but to be consistent in their use of notes and references. The resulting texts are very different:

from the highly practical to poetic excursions, from political manifestos to handmade books that are artworks in themselves.

Research issues are not at the heart but rather earnestness and playfulness.

It is within this triangle of library, editorship and desire that writing thrives. It is not unknown for students to struggle with writing, in which case the supervisor will suggest alternative solutions for working with texts. In one such case, a collaboration arose in which an art historian interviewed the student and then wrote about the student’s work and issues.

Writing in artistic study programmes demands many such solutions to avoid becoming a production house for theoretical karaoke and empty text calories. My source of information regarding the Royal Institute of Art’s approach to writing for fine art students is Emma Kihl.

Emma herself trained in fine art at the Royal Institute of Art and has also conducted the research project A Study of the A4 Sheet, which was funded by the Swedish Research Council.

In addition to her position as adjunct lecturer in fine art at the Royal Institute of Art, Emma is currently a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at Södertörn University.

“There is also a need for many more role models for writing and thinking artists. The missing element at the Royal Institute of Art is reading and perhaps some form of ceremony when the text is completed,” says Emma.

The Royal Institute of Art also offers a freestanding second-cycle course in Artist Books,

with an approach to writing and books that has proved successful in inspiring students: lovingly

handcrafted books made by the artists themselves.

27 The Royal Institute of Art offers a five-year programme in Fine Arts. At one time, the school applied a process of elimination for students after the completion of the bachelor’s programme but this created too much uncertainty, discontent, and a generally difficult situation for students, teachers, and professors alike. Today, the school has returned to a five-year programme. The Royal Institute of Art’s organisation is still characterised by a tradition dating from the era of Johan Tobias Sergel, full of unwritten rules that, while not always easy to understand, seem to work. It exists in a kind of imaginary world founded on an alternative conception of time that intuitively takes account of the long arc of learning and creativity that art necessarily entails. A process of oil, clay, body, metal and text, it is a slow process but unique.

Whenever I describe the Royal Institute of Art’s writing and supervision process to students in fine art it is apparent how affronted they are by the practice. The method applied at the Royal Institute of Art is redolent of the work of an editor at an art or culture journal to which people submit pictures, photographs, etc. that they want published. Here, the editor’s task is to extract text from people who are not as a rule used to expressing themselves in writing. This demands great sensitivity on the part of the editor/supervisor that should not be confused with cossetting but is more a matter of respect for a nascent artistic practice. Perhaps there is a need for a training course for supervisors/editors working with all forms of art and text.

“Then you can do things that you didn’t think you were capable of.”

Text from Lars Norén’s play War became an artwork on traffic signs by art duo FA+, Ingrid Falk and Gustavo Aguerre, 2004.

Photo: Nils Claesson

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“It is worthwhile underlining that the essayistic form is viable and accepted in the academic world, or at least parts of it, and indeed in the large and multilayered US educational system,”

observes Professor Kristina Hagström-Ståhl of the Academy of Music and Drama and the PARSE platform for artistic research at the University of Gothenburg. Kristina is currently leading a writing course for doctoral students at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts’ graduate school in Gothenburg. The course is given in English and Swedish and the course’s literature seminar primarily deals with texts from the Anglo-Saxon world.

There is an invisible wall running between Stockholm and Gothenburg when it comes to the role of text in art education, in those elements of master’s programmes preparing students for third-cycle studies, and in how theses should be written. Under previous head of department Mick Wilson, the University of Gothenburg’s HDK-Valand – Academy of Art and Design introduced the requirement for all doctoral dissertations in artistic disciplines to include a minimum of 130 printed pages of text. Funds were also allocated for book production.

Gothenburg also has similar rules regarding text, scope, and written academic work at first and second cycle. Essay writing plays an important role at the Photography Department at HDK- Valand. Niclas Östlind is a senior lecturer with responsibility for writing and thinking. He summarises the position of photography as entirely dependent on the practical application of theory. As modern photography defined itself in the 1980s and 90s, it went through a process of theoretical writing and image-making hand in hand. Although this process began in the United States, it was reflected in Sweden a decade later. For photography, it was a matter of coming to terms with documentary photography’s romantic ideal of authenticity.

This debate was won by postmodernists, who proved that images are constructions, that it is possible to artificially create and reinforce those elements associated with authenticity and documentary photography. Examples from photographic images include the strong influence of the postmodern discourse on architecture: in the affirmation of the mixture of styles, decorative and narrative elements in buildings not only serve as an accommodation with modernism’s aesthetic cult of colour and form, but also a critique of modernism’s totalitarian tendencies.

It was through a critical discussion and writing about photographic images that postmodernism and critical theory gained the upper hand in contemporary art. In Sweden, this began with the exhibition Implosion curated by Lars Nittve at Moderna Museet (Nittve went on to become director of the museum). This was followed by other exhibitions, including Lika med [Equals] (1991) curated by Iréne Berggren, which Niclas Östlind describes as “a welcome acknowledgement of photography as art” ⁵ in his survey of the breakthrough of Swedish fine- art photography as part of his doctoral dissertation. This included a reconstruction of the exhibition together with Iréne Berggren.

The discourse on photography and authenticity as a construction led to the hegemony of Konstfack’s Department of Photography and Index in Stockholm in the art world during the 1990s. It was then that the art world experienced its great theoretical wave, with Continental philosophers beginning to dominate the public discourse, especially regarding fine art, in texts published in the magazines Kris, Material and Index.

This was followed up by leading postmodern theorists with roots in photography, including Tuija Lindström and Hans Hedberg, who developed photography study programmes in Gothenburg.

The postmodern ideas’ tradition and its strength in photography means that writing remains important to photographers at Valand, as a matter of being able to write about their own and other photographers’ work. It is apparent that Niclas Östlind has a background as a curator, exhibitor, and publicist. The Photography Department at Valand works actively to ensure that

5

https://gupea.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/28442

29 its students’ writing is read. Students must complete their essays in December of their second year, giving them one semester to cut their texts by half to 25-30 A4 pages and have them printed. The Photography Department has also created its own webzine ⁶ in which to publish the texts. There is a vision of having the students read, and that their writing has meaning above and beyond simply completing the course syllabus.

ANYTHING GOES IN STOCKHOLM

At both Stockholm University of the Arts and the Royal Institute of Art, the regulations are less stringent and more open to interpretation. There is constant experimentation with publication platforms, intermediate seminars for artistic doctoral candidates, and even titles and words. This is sometimes detrimental for students.

Konstfack, on the other hand, is in the process of redesigning its research and second and third-cycle programmes with a view to being granted the right to examine doctors in its own right.

Konstfack’s head of research, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Magnus Bärtås, is leading the work of transforming thinking, writing and artistic research.

Magnus played a pivotal role in the emerging field of artistic research in Sweden, primarily by coining the term verkberättelse [work stories] to describe a written or oral narrative about the forming of an artwork.

An artistic doctoral candidate’s training at Konstfack is intended to be applicable in practice, they are free to write in Swedish, and intensive efforts are underway to prepare course syllabuses, as well as to identify good examples of artists who write about their own artistic practice. Magnus describes how critical theory triumphed in the artistic life of the 1990s, a period during which a view was cultivated of artists as so wild and unruly that they needed the help of philosophy to organise and structure their ideas. As this view gained the upper hand over artists, an implicit understanding was reached that one’s practice should be described in the language of critical theory. In Konstfack’s planned new third-cycle programmes, writing will be on the artist’s terms and based on their own experiences of artistic creation. How this will actually look in practice, and which route the texts may go, is impossible to answer today.

Magnus Bärtås is also one of the editors of the knowingly named VIS – Nordic Journal for Artistic Research. We will shortly come to the matter of why art publications such as VIS and JAR do not pay researchers when they publish extensive combinations of their words and texts.

Magnus contends that being published in these journals offers the benefit of thorough peer review.

Meanwhile, this makes publication in JAR or VIS almost exclusively reserved for artists who are either employed and have research as part of their job description, working on externally funded projects, or financially independent. Freelance artists with a doctoral education quite simply cannot afford this luxury. In many ways, this transforms artistic research and these publications to a sport with few practitioners and a small coterie of spectators, equivalent to the collectors of expensive wines or stamps.

*

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https://ugotphotography.se

30 As an example of the artist who writes: why not Elis Eriksson? The artist, who lived to be almost 100 years old, was a dyslexic author and an innovator in the Swedish language, a political and poetic artist who followed his own path.

Elis Eriksson, from a T-shirt published by Ronnells Antikvariat.

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TEXTS THAT NOBODY READS

Books That Nobody Reads was the title of an evening arranged by Mårten Medbo, Ingela Josefson and me at Ronnells Antikvariat in 2018. The event took the form of a discussion of artistic research and writing based on our theses and Ingela Josefson’s practical experience of teaching and lecturing on practical traditions of knowledge. Our intention was to highlight the lack of interest in, and publicity for, artistic research and writing. The same applies to the research weeks at Stockholm’s artistic higher education institutions, which take place at the end of January and beginning of February each year. It is then that the Royal Institute of Art, Konstfack, Stockholm University of the Arts and the Royal College of Music exhibit the results of their research practices.

This year, between them these events did not yield a single article in the culture pages of the daily press or report on television or radio. The combined artistic research output of all of Stockholm’s artistic higher education institutions was met with a deafening silence.

This lack of publicity for artistic research and writing practices makes for a vulnerable environment. Niclas Östlind was one of the arrangers of the Swedish Research Council symposium Artistic Research with Impact, which was held at Konstfack on 20 November 2019.

“Despite invitations being sent to representatives of Sweden’s museums and all of the major newspapers, no one attended. Not a single one,” says Niclas Östlind.

It is possible that the silence surrounding artistic and much other research can be partly explained by the fact that the academic system in its entirety is a kind of planned economy with a points system as its currency. There are algorithms and tools to evaluate texts and their influence – this is called bibliometrics – but mechanisms that reward public discourse and criticism appear to be lacking. This is something that Magnus Linton examines in his book Text

& Stil: om konsten att berätta med vetenskap [Text & Style: About the art of using science to tell stories], which is aimed at experienced writers of academic texts and has the mission statement of getting academics to write in plain, comprehensible Swedish. Magnus Linton is currently employed half-time at the Institute for Futures Studies and spends the rest of his time visiting higher education institutions to give free courses on text and style to academics. This is financed by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, an independent foundation with the goal of promoting and supporting research in the humanities and social sciences. Magnus Linton is a journalist by trade and his book is packed with practical advice and alert observations. “When you read some researchers on social media and then the same person’s latest academic article, it sometimes leaves the impression that a quick-witted, entertaining mind has somehow been transformed into a blockhead. This is often because the latter text has been drained of all of the vital elements of colloquial language.” (Text & Style, p. 58)

Linton describes the pitfalls of academic writing with acuity. The book is educational and

each chapter contains recipes for style. What the book actually reveals is the complete

indifference to any public discourse within the sphere of scientific writing, that many

researchers and academics spend a great deal of time writing grant applications, and that what

really matters in academia is publication in scientific journals rather than engaging with the

public. That silence reigns around research is of little consequence given that the spotlight of

publicity is a matter of no concern to the internal academic scoring system.

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THE INSTITUTE FOR FUTURE STUDIES INVESTS IN DISSEMINATING ITS RESEARCH RESULTS

That it is possible to create public interest in research and its results is exemplified by the Institute for Future Studies. The institute’s head of communications is researcher and documentary filmmaker Staffan Julén. Staffan describes how research results become news and debate articles in newspapers, podcasts and other media outlets. The Institute for Future Studies is an independent research institute that attracts researchers from all over the world.

Today, there is an ongoing dialogue between researchers and communicators at the institute and newsletters are written containing pure research results, something that Staffan Julén sees an increased appetite for from the press and media in the COVID-19 era.

Writing and language expert Magnus Linton also provides help and guidance to researchers on how they can write better texts. Once again, it appears that practical editorial knowledge and craftsmanship can enliven a lacklustre text and transform it into a press release or article that people will want to read.

Artistic research is afflicted with not being seen or read. This is a sorry state of affairs given that art is founded on a dialogue with the present and the eternal. All art presupposes a recipient, in other words an audience. For universities of the arts, the possibility remains to deliberately create a dialogue with a public and to attempt to renew writing and thinking by communicating the results of artistic research.

“There is nothing so disagreeable as to be hanged in silence,” as Voltaire once wrote, a sentiment quoted by Strindberg on the introduction page of his debut novel, The Red Room.

There is a desire in all writing to communicate and discuss. Even poetry is a dialogue with another person. It is difficult to write a text without imagining a reader. The inherent risk at a higher education institution is that, when the student writes and the teacher grades, it is no more than a process on the education production line.

There is another explanatory model for the silence surrounding artistic research that may serve better than the academic world’s general reluctance to communicate. It is that artistic research is a relatively new field and that its vision is in itself radical, given that it fundamentally renegotiates the traditional relationship between the creator of the artistic work and those whose task is to explain and write about art in general.

In many ways, the prevailing role of the artist in the twenty-first century remains passive.

An artist must be patient, they must wait to be called upon, raised up and explained by the curator, the critic, the patron, the film scholar, the art historian, the musicologist or the philosopher – while at the same time they are expected to be a capable entrepreneur. Artistic research consolidates an artistic role that renegotiates preconceptions about how an artist should work with their own art and writing. It is no wonder then that it elicits concern on the part of a corps of critics, academics, and producers of text who themselves often live in straitened circumstances. This may be one explanation.

Adelsö, 5 October 2020

Nils Claesson

33 Eadweard Muybridge’s late-nineteenth-century studies are still used

by animators to understand how to represent the body in motion. The

story in the film contains an interplay between technical experiment

and artistic achievement.

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THIS REPORT IS BASED ON CONVERSATIONS WITH:

Karin Hansson, PhD, reader, artist and research fellow; Dmitri Plax, playwright, poet and producer at Radioteatern; Bogdan Szyber, artist and doctoral candidate; Carina Reich, artist and doctoral candidate; Emma Kihl, artist, adjunct lecturer, doctoral candidate in comparative literature and responsible for essay writing at the Royal Institute of Art; Olof Halldin, head librarian, and Lena Nettelbladt, librarian, at Stockholm University of the Arts; Alejandro Bonnet, assistant lecturer in mime acting at Stockholm University of the Arts; Åsa Andersson, PhD, research administrator at the Royal Institute of Art; Niclas Östlind, PhD, senior lecturer at HDK-Valand’s Photography Department, and senior lecturer Pelle Kronestedt; Magnus Bärtås, PhD, deputy vice-chancellor at Konstfack; Mårten Medbo, PhD, senior lecturer in ceramics and glass at Konstfack; Maria Ben Saad, senior lecturer in fashion studies and director of Artistic and Contextual Studies at Beckmans College of Design;

Professor Kristina Hagström-Ståhl, PhD, course coordinator for a third-cycle writing course

at HDK-Valand; Tinna Joné, coordinator of the master’s programme at the Department of

Film and Media at Stockholm University of the Arts; Katarina Eismann, artist and supervisor

for the master’s programme The Art of Impact; Love Ekenberg, PhD, Professor of Computer

and Systems Sciences at Stockholm University; Staffan Julén, documentary filmmaker, head

of communications and responsible for art research at the Institute for Future Studies; and

Professor Ingela Josefson, PhD, who has written her own addendum to this report. The author

also exchanged correspondence with critic, poet, and translator John Swedenmark.

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PROPOSALS FOR VARIOUS METHODS AND MEASURES THAT CAN CONTRIBUTE TO CREATING A THINKING AND WRITING RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT

National level

I believe that we should introduce the Norwegian word formidling into artistic research.

In Norwegian, this means to take responsibility for demonstrating, explaining and clarifying. It is a word with deeper meaning than the Swedish förmedling or the English mediation. It arises from ideas about life-long education and may be one way to thoughtfully and actionably remove artistic research from its isolation.

Organise discussion regarding The Silence surrounding artistic research. This could be achieved through collaboration with the Swedish Research Council’s Artistic Research Committee and the Institute for Future Studies, a research institute with a global network.

Although many researchers from other disciplines are interested in artistic research, they have limited knowledge of the field.

Create a national resource platform for artistic research. We need an easy-to-read,

pedagogical overview of the field. Publish a book and a website with a comprehensive review of all dissertations and themes. The purpose is to provide the tools for anyone in need of orientation in the field, who may themselves be interested in conducting research. Avoid officialese. Start from the needs of artists and researchers.

Introduce a system of scholarships to strengthen research projects. Administration should be swift and unbureaucratic and dealt with by practitioners.

Fees for publishing texts and expositions in Research Catalogue, JAR and VIS. May be paid in the form of scholarships in the range SEK 35,000-50,000.

Institute a scholarship for master’s dissertations from all Swedish artistic higher education institutions. The prize is publication in book form.

Stockholm level

Convene one or more seminars on writing and thinking at artistic higher education institutions.

Arrange several research seminars on different aspects of artistic research in collaboration

with other artistic higher education institutions. Combine with new forms of publication. One

good example is the Öresund Collegium for Artistic Research at Malmö Theatre Academy, a

forum for artistic research involving artistic higher education institutions in both Denmark

and Sweden.

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Stockholm University of the Arts

Open an exhibition space in which students’ and doctoral candidates’ work can be shown.

Ideally, this should be adjacent to a laboratory and the library.

Institute a room in the library called the Writing Cabin, where students can get hands-on help to write and polish texts. On example of a similar resource is Malmö University’s Writing Centre.

Regularly invite authors and social commentators to present their books in the library. Pay Swedish Writers’ Union rates. Students, teachers and alumni who write should be encouraged to give readings of their work. Examples of students who are also authors include poet Arazo Arif, a graduate of the Master’s Programme in Literary Composition, Poetry and Prose at HDK-Valand, author Sara Villius and poet and artist Clara Diesen.

PROPOSAL FOR LONG AND SHORT COURSES FOR MEDIA AND FILM

Another proposal is a short course in calligraphy aimed at teaching functioning handwriting.

The course also includes components on drawing narratives, for example, film storyboards.

Find connections between characters and images but also to concrete poetry and sound art.

Letter course. Experimentation with letters and text in media from film to potato prints and tattoo sketches. Stop motion animation of letters would be great, as well as creating an alphabet and taking an in-depth look at how letters and text have been used historically in art and film.

Gestures and texts. How does a mime look at text? Lecture on movement by Alejandro Bonnet to visualise the conflict between text and image traditions.

A short course on gibberish – made-up language often used in animation.

Walking and talking – the peripatetic school. Practical exercises in walking and talking without notebook and pen. Learning to consider things large and small, both with one another and with strangers. NB: with telephones switched off.

Knowledge organisation. A workshop and a cultural-historical journey about why a library is organised in a certain way. A one-day course rather than an information meeting.

Sweden has the world’s oldest Freedom of the Press Act. A workshop aimed at explaining and understanding press freedom, freedom of speech and academic freedom and their history.

There is an exciting historical background to explore that deals with conflicts in eighteenth- century Sweden.

Secret symbols and encrypted messages. A journey among spies and those who code and

decode. One day dedicated to Alan Turing, one of the creators of the digital world.