The ‘Distance’ Stance. The Apparatus of Knowledge Production in Early Russian Artistic Research

The article examines the specifics of Russian artistic research. First, with the help of historical analysis of the phenomenon in the international context, the essential characteristics of artistic research are deduced. They consist in the intertwining of ontology, epistemology and methodology of a work or a process, which is enacted through a problem beyond the issues of art. Art in this situation acts as an “epistemic thing” (Henk Borgdorff), a “theoretical object” (Hubert Damisch), or an enactive environment. This boundary, or the interdependent intertwining of the subject, method, and purpose of the work, manifests itself in different ways in the various apparatuses of knowledge production in art, varying from context to context, despite the globalization of the art scene of the twenty-first century. The Russian art of the late noughties and early tens was just approaching the use of the research paradigm. Its application is conditioned by a range of reasons, including the need to construct a work of art as a complex reflection on a socially acute topic, such as issues of national identity and historical amnesia. The art segment under consideration tried to avoid merging with the common media imagery, moving away from both the dominant rhetoric and its ironic interpretations by artist predecessors and fellow contemporaries, while bypassing straightforward activist strategies. The kind of knowledge such art dealt with was often non-knowledge, the ungraspable, the erased, and the camouflaged. This knowledge found its elusive manifestation in traces of absence, scattered authorship, failures, and other forms of distancing, yet sometimes revealing through such embodiments its own communicative limitations.