This course, given at Konstfack University College for Arts, Crafts and Design during spring 2012, has been nothing less than a gently evolving artistic coming-out – for me, and for a number of my fellow participants as well. Course seminars fused clear-eyed analysis with integrative dialogue; a mental space where, recurrently, deep artistic and intellectual challenges were perceived – much thanks to the encouraging emotional safeness. A valid theoretical and practical context elaborated underway, by means of individual art-making interleaved with lectures, talks and workshops. All thanks to professors Emma Göransson and Roland Ljungberg, who settled the premises – a work of Quality, if any. And, in the next step, also thanks to the extraordinary group of participants, each one responding with full professional experience along with empathical and analytical skills: Agnieszka Knap, Arne Widman, Ana Maria Almada, Angelica Harms, Anna Odlinge, Antonie Frank, Auli Laitinen, Gert Germeraad, Ivar Sviestins, Lena Oja, Madeleine Aleman and Sophia Rilby.
From the studio – preparing for examination.
My own contribution is, mainly, a series of meditations; re-experiencing the artistic process as such and trying to capture verbally the situations where artistic choices are perceived – mapping the grounds for decisions made. Here I’m deeply indebted to Robert Pirsig’s discussion on Quality (in his novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), and I further attempt to establish a discursive bridge between art as action and method and the cultivation of introspective analysis in contemporary science. The text is written in Swedish, and will be available in Swedish DIVA database within short – as will the texts from the rest of the group.
Here are two links to a scientific forum for research on related topics: