THE BIRTH OF CRITICISM FROM THE SPIRIT OF ART: KARIN HANSSEN’S ALLEGORIES OF SATIN Kurt Vanhoutte
Logic of invention The Borrowed Gaze/Variations GTB was realized between June 2010 and September 2011 as a preliminary investigation in the doctoral project Karin Hanssen is working on at the moment within the framework of a collaboration of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Antwerp. When Hanssen suggested me to help think about the doctorate the debate on research in the arts was in full swing. The consensus prescribed innovative artistic work linked to a thorough reflection on that work and its cultural conditions. It was, however, less clear where that critical reflection would be situated and how it had to externalize itself. Can an artist be expected to write up her experiences as theoretical considerations? Should the visual artist willy-nilly master academic skills? Or, conversely, is the sovereignty of the work of art to be respected, because it is eminently capable to speak for itself? This choice then in turn would raise the question what makes a doctorate in the arts distinctive against the background of a century in which art is, almost of its own accord, meta-art, because the avant-garde discounts the statute of art in our society as a problem in the work of art. The image as such versus reflection by text – there still seems to be no answer. I cannot escape the impression that the discussion regarding the doctorate is stuck between both positions today. This way it seems doomed to reproduce the truism that research in the arts precisely wanted to undermine: the incommensurability of word and image, the fundamental inability to convert both into one another. To the extent that this is particularly the case in the institutional discourse this can lead to the logic of conformism. The artist is then confronted with continually changing criteria and is expected to conform
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