Report on the 17 October, 2015 session ~ "Interdisciplinarity in Art Research" ~ a meeting between visiting scholar Vivian Ziherl and the APRC.

For the first part of this session we welcomed 3 new members to the APRC; Lauren Alexander, Padraig Robinson (and Rosie Heinrich in absence), in addition to associate PHD-researchers Florian Göttke and David Maroto, founders, together with Gabriëlle Schleijpen (in absence)of the collective. With a series of presentations we got updated about the status of each other’s research projects, and we agreed on the contents and structure of the subsequent sessions for the rest of the academic year in DAI.

For the second part of the sesion we were joined by Vivian Zihler (Associate Curator at If I Can’t Dance I Don't Want to Be Part of Your Revolution, Amsterdam, and Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane), who conducted a reading group session focused on the question of interdisciplinarity in art research. In her own words:

'It is difficult to offer disciplinary classification to the field of ‘artistic research’ other than in its permissiveness. Approached to suggest a reading for the DAI’s doctoral platform I was informed that participants draw from many fields including literature, anthropology, visual arts and media studies. In what form does this a-disciplinary approach nonetheless confront and negotiate epistemological questions of ‘proper knowledge’, and how can this be understood in practice?

The session departed from a short text by anthropologist and sociologist Ghassan Hage that proposes Critical Anthropology as a State of First Contact. From this point the session conducted an exercise of reading the ‘frontier’ across texts derived from political-economic theory, history and literature. The group discussed the ideas of ‘contact’ as a knowledge methodology, as well as the formation of the ‘frontier’, considering this with regard to the research projects that are being undertaken among the participants.'

Bibliography:

- Ghassan Hage, Critical Anthropology as a State of First Contact (2013). Paper presented at the AAA roundtable: The Ontological Turn and Its Politics – Chicago.

- David Harvey, The Spatial Fix: Hegel, Von Thunen and Marx (1982). Article for the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 5.

- Isabel Connors, Warrior (2015), pp. 118–131.

- Donald Barthelme, The Indian Uprising (1965). Link: Chris Adrian reads Donald Barthelme's The Indian Uprising.