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Paper short abstract

As contemporary artists have unmoored themselves from producing objects and embraced art as process, the question of what kind of knowledge art produces has again emerged as a concern. This talk explores the epistemic politics of contemporary artistic practice in which process is a central modality.

Paper long abstract

As contemporary artists have continued to unmoor themselves from producing objects and have instead embraced art as a process, the kind of knowledge artists produce has again emerged as a central question. If objects of art were once sites of knowledge, the turn to art as process, which emphasises experimentation, has undermined these epistemic claims. Indeed, in diverging from academic/scientific propositional knowledge, its status remains, at best, ambivalent. This presentation explores the epistemic politics of contemporary artistic practice in which process is an experimental mode. Through a series of conversations with contemporary artists in Yogyakarta, we explore this process as a form of experimentation in which an unfinished quasi-object is presented as an open-ended site for non-knowledge making. It is not that works of art are not able to create knowledge, but rather the knowledge they produce is not the same kind of knowledge as that of the sciences. It is a site, we propose, where we do not know what we do not know, and thus a contestation of knowledge itself. The aim is to interfere with the process of knowledge production itself, and, in turn, create a site for a different kind of knowledge that can co-exist without competing against the academic model of knowledge production (commodified, hierarchical, normalised). What artists put forward is not knowledge in a propositional form, but processes of experimentation that are unfinished and incomplete, and that expose open-ended questions: What is this? What does it want? What do we not know?