STAGING KNOWLEDGE – Mise-en-scène of knowledge spaces and performative culture mediation

PhD course for the acquisition of competence in conceiving and realizing exhibitions as performative culture mediation and transdisciplinary research practice for the humanities, with special consideration of the topic “History of Collecting”

PhD/doctorate course at the University of Arts Linz in cooperation with the University of Applied Art Vienna, the ZKM Karlsruhe, the Architectural Association London, King’s College, London, and Stanford University CA.

Idea, concept, realization: Herbert Lachmayer and colleagues
Initial event: “Welt im Kopf” as an experimentation lab for “Staging Knowledge”
Start: Winter term 2009/10

Collaborators: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Comparative Literature, Stanford University), Klaus Heinrich (Comparative religion, Berlin), Ernst Strouhal (University of Applied Arts, Vienna), Helmut Lethen (IFK Wien), Bice Curiger (Kunsthaus Zürich), Cliff Eisen (King’s College London), Patrik Schumacher / Brett Steel (Architectural Association AA London), Naomi Segal (University of London), Richard Heinrich (University of Vienna), Gerhard Müller (University of Jena), Wolfgang Ullrich (Cultural studies, Karlsruhe), Jacqueline Burckhardt (art historian, Zürich), Hans Belting (art historian, Karlsruhe), Giaco Schiesser (Zürcher Hochschule der Künste), Beate Söntgen (University of Bochum), Christoph Schmälzle (Klassikstiftung Weimar) and others

Science, education and culture mediation are increasingly more in demand as human resources. The contents of the social and cultural sciences and of the humanities and the experiential potential of the arts and of aesthetic cultural practice are indisputably as relevant to our understanding as is “scientific” knowledge. Reducing these contents to mere “cultural content” that we simply absorb or “download” won’t do – culture is always a detour that is worth the pains, even for excessively rigorous rationalists.
In the process of redefining the relationship between art and science an exclusive key role will be played by the universities of arts: It is precisely in the places that foster the development of artistic creativity that the humanities and the social and cultural sciences have to live up to their claim to be “mediators of contextualization”. The idea that the rationalist methods used by the sciences per se guarantee results that are more objective than the products of the intuitive imagination that is characteristic of art, which, being subjective by its own admission, can mount no comparable claim for itself, amounts to nothing less than a prejudice directed against art and culture, which must be put aside – despite its entrenchment in terms of the history of mentality.
However: “How much discussion – and what kind of discussion – can an aesthetic feeling bear?” In our lives the conscious/unconscious aesthetic intelligence displayed by judgments in aestheticis plays a role that can be as objectively assessed in everyday cultural terms as the canon of rules of logic.
Austrian legislation categorically demands that the country’s art universities foster the development of “artistic-scientific competences”. The question is however what is actually meant by this. In the PhD/doctorate course “Staging Knowledge” that is now in the planning stage an attempt is to be made to arrive at an answer to that question aimed at a real solution – based on a model for the development of that “experimental conceptual competence” and that “imaginative rhetoric” that are needed to conceive and realize exhibitions. It has to be borne in mind in this context that any mediation strategy has to be just as valid as a research strategy and vice versa.
The professionalisation of the subjectivity of aesthetic judgement is as indispensable in this context as the objectifiable and quantifiable knowledge generated by science. The reason why knowledge is to be staged in the framework of an exhibition is this: There is objective proof that production processes in the humanities and the social and cultural sciences entail a broadening of the horizon for the formulation of hypotheses.
For the planning stage and the development of the international PhD/doctorate course “Staging Knowledge” the exhibition “Welt im Kopf – Die neue Lust am Speculieren” is an essential precondition and serves as an experimental laboratory during the first term of the academic year 2009/10. “Welt im Kopf” is a project of Linz 2009 European Capital of Culture and will be shown from 11 September until 13 December 2009 in Linz.