European Doctoral Seminar > Organising institutions > Interart FU Berlin
Conception of the International Research Training Group
“Interart Studies”, Freie Universität Berlin
Subject, Tasks and Targets
Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and beginning on October 1, 2006, the International Research Training Group aims to develop a newly emerging field of research – interart studies. During the last decades, in the art scene, two tendencies are to be observed: on the one hand a still growing tendency towards an annulment, a dissolution of the boundaries between different art forms, as brought about by performativity, hybridization, multimedia; on the other hand, we have observed an aesthetization and theatricalization of other cultural fields, including politics, economy, the media, sports, everyday life, that tends to abolish the boundary between art and non-art. Both tendencies are a challenge to the arts disciplines. For those have preferred a kind of monadic existence for a long time. Art history, theatre studies, musicology, film studies, comparative literature or national literature studies, each arts discipline has understood itself as defined and clearly delimited from the others by its very specific objects, as well as by a methodology and theoretical approaches that referred expressly to them alone. The new situation that has emerged over approximately the last fifty years, radically questions this self-understanding. It disorientates the arts disciplines in terms of their special objects, i.e. in terms of just that momentum that seemed to guarantee the self-definition and delineation of the other arts disciplines in each case and, as a result, in terms of their methodologies and theoretical approaches.
Research Programme
This situation provides the point of departure for the IRTG. It aims at restructuring the arts disciplines in such a way that they will be able to do justice to what is going on in the different arts disciplines as well as to the aesthetization of culture in general. We argue that it makes more sense to proceed from the idea of a dynamic field of art – quite naturally embedded in and entangled with other dynamic cultural fields – where various processes of differentiation exist. Such differentiations allow the structures, segments, or elements constituting the field to be open to a permanent re-grouping resulting in ever-new and ever-changing constellations which, after a while, even a longue durée, may stabilize. Thus, such processes may result in what is traditionally regarded as a particular art form – for instance, painting – or as a special combination of two or more arts – as, for example, songs, emblems, illustrated novels or theatre and opera performances, festivals, and various kinds of installation.
The aim of the IRTG is to engage with art works and art events from a wide range of epochs in order to devise new methodical approaches to these varying Interart phenomena. At the same time, it serves the creation of new aesthetic categories, which might adequately describe the tendency towards multi-medialization, hybridity, performativization. The long-term goal is the creation of a new theory, which refers to different types of Interart phenomena and which cannot be grasped by a single discipline within art studies alone.
From this approach it follows that what we need today are new theories and methodologies that are not restricted to one particular art form. Since we do not believe in either a unified theory or a unified method, the risk otherwise entailed in such a novel approach is minimized. This holds true in particular because of the stimulating environment in which the IRTG will be embedded. It will consist not only of the DFG Collaborative Research Centre 626 "Aesthetic Experience", in which the applicants participate but also some working groups of the DFG Collaborative Research Centre 447 "Performing Culture" that are devoted to problems of different arts, led by colleagues who will be members of the IRTG and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Art Studies and Aesthetics. With its numerous arts institutions and related activities, Berlin offers the doctoral candidates of the IRTG diverse possibilities for cooperation and networking, which would enhance their scientific work and create useful opportunities especially for young scholars with regard to their career planning.
Perspectives
It is presumed that the collaboration in the IRTG will inspire new approaches towards a re-structuring of the participating art studies disciplines. The aim, however, is not to blend them together under a general visual studies or even media studies category. Instead, this re-structuring of art studies should, on the one hand, do justice to the shifting cultural conditions of today’s situation in the arts, which cannot be achieved by a single discipline alone but only through such a concept as Interart Studies, which includes all art studies. On the other hand, we are convinced that Interart Studies would also open new possibilities for a re-interpretation of art works from the past.
The interdisciplinary approach of the IRTG thus takes the current changes in cultural and arts studies into account and is investigating new ways of researching in the participating fields. In this respect, it is particularly relevant to the young generation of scholars. At the same time, multi-disciplinary qualifications are transmitted through team work, communication with scholars of other disciplines and the oral as well as written presentation of the research results. Moreover, the engagement with InterArt phenomena opens new perspectives towards numerous day-to-day cultural and political developments. These insights apply not only to a professional career in academia but also in the field of cultural practice.