The Artistic Act

The beginning of a quest – shaping LABO’s perspective on artistic research

Titles, dear reader, are the sirens of the written word. They beckon, they tease, and, if we’re being honest, they sometimes promise more than the article can deliver. One might be tempted to hide behind a glossy image, to gild the lily, but I shall resist that temptation out of sheer respect for intellectual integrity. Instead, let me lay my cards on the table, modestly declaring that this piece does not aspire to settle, once and for all, the ever‑elusive definition of an ‘artistic act’. Rather, it is a humble starting point on a longer pilgrimage undertaken by the LABO XIX&XX research group, a first, necessary step to map the terrain that lies ahead.

“A necessary first step?” you may inquire, eyebrows raised in skeptical curiosity. “Why, indeed, is it necessary?” The answer lies, perhaps unsurprisingly, within the very walls of the Royal Antwerp Conservatoire, where our troupe makes its home. The conservatoire – in the Belgian context, at least; more broadly, the art faculty – serves as the natural cradle for artistic research: research that places artistry not merely beside its object of study, but at the very heart of the inquiry itself.

Over recent years, the appetite for research at art faculties has swelled consistently, necessitating a clearer outline of what research at the art school is, and what it is not. Up until recently, many a project was still lodged within art schools under the banner of ‘research about the arts’, tethered to disciplines such as musicology, theatre studies, psychology, or sociology. Their outcomes often culminated in a tangible artistic product, yet that product could frequently be dismissed as nothing more than an illustration of the scholarly findings. Even though this statement is somewhat too rash, and I am definitely cutting a few corners here for the sake of stirring up discussions, it would be hard to counterargument that such a research project, while perhaps less dazzling if the artwork were to be removed, would still retain its conclusions and validation.

True artistic research, however, demands something more intimate: an artistic expertise that does not reside in distant university departments but thrives within the studios, rehearsal rooms, creative workshops and experimental setups of art schools and faculties themselves. It is this expertise that breathes life into the research, turning it into Artistic Research, as a path that is distinct from other scientific trajectories.

If Artistic Research is its own rhizome of methodological possibilities, it diverges sharply from research about the arts because its core is defined by the artistic act. At LABO we have tentatively described this act as follows:

‘The artistic act is defined as the performative and creative actions through which new knowledge is revealed. This can take the form of performance, creation, interpretation, reconstruction, or experimentation, all of which transcend mere illustration. While historical, musicological, dramaturgical or sociological contexts remain relevant, they serve primarily as reflective resonances that deepen the core artistic process.’

Even though the definition itself appears self-evident, we ought to pause and examine the words performative and creative more closely. They sit at the very heart of what we instinctively associate with art. Perhaps because these notions have become almost fossilised in our scholarly vocabulary – and because they are invoked with such habitual regularity – they almost beg us to sweep them aside as if they were merely ornamental flourishes. This habit feeds the familiar critique of academic prose, where lofty adjectives can be draped across sentences to render them deliberately opaque – an elegant, if indulgent, way of cloaking simplicity in verbosity. Consequently, the first waypoint on our expedition compels us to plunge beneath the surface and, with a modest dose of scholarly curiosity, interrogate precisely how we conceive of performance and creation.

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I have, over the past year or so, found myself in a succession of lively conversations about creativity with a handful of scholars I am lucky enough to call friends. Some of them – still steadfast, I suspect – cling to the maxim that a creative idea or artefact must be both novel and valuable. This formulation, as most of us know, is most often associated with the eminent Margaret A. Boden, who famously described creativity as the capacity to produce “new, surprising and valuable” works.

An ardent, yet polite protest rises in my chest against this equation. Writing this article, then, offers a perfectly respectable excuse to articulate a counter‑argument.

To begin, let us consider novelty. It is a term that loves to masquerade as an objective fact, yet it is forever shackled to history. An invention can only be declared ‘new’ after the dust of time has settled enough for us to see where it sits in the grand tapestry of human endeavour. Boden herself draws a helpful distinction between psychological creativity (something new to the individual mind) and historical creativity, which is new to the whole of humanity. By introducing this bifurcation, one could say that she tacitly admits that absolute novelty, nowadays, is elusive, impossible to be sure about.

Equally slippery is value. What one culture hails as a masterpiece, another may dismiss as frivolous noise. Value is never a property of the artefact alone; it is a reflection cast by the evaluative frameworks of particular communities, disciplines, and epochs. Thus, when we bind creativity to ‘value’, we risk reducing the creative act to a verdict handed down by a committee of judges, rather than recognising it as an intrinsic transformation of the maker’s epistemic horizon.

For artistic research, these twin problems are not merely academic curiosities; they strike at the very heart of what we intend to study. If we insist that creativity is defined principally by novelty and value, the artistic act is forced into the glare of external appraisal, and its internal, epistemic alchemy is left in the shadows.

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Our preoccupation with originality can be traced back to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790). Kant portrayed artistic genius as the faculty that introduces new rules for art, not merely as a virtuoso of technique but as a rule‑breaker who expands the very grammar of aesthetic experience. This Kantian seed sprouted into the Romantic myth of the solitary, divinely‑inspired creator and, over the centuries, blossomed into the contemporary fetish for ‘originality’.

Margaret Boden’s later cognitive taxonomy – combinational, exploratory, and transformational creativity – can be read as a sophisticated attempt to capture this inherited Western narrative within a systematic framework. While her three‑fold model is undeniably insightful, it remains anchored to the assumption that creativity is essentially about novel configurations inside conceptual systems. This seems to me a premise that may be more a product of Western ontology than a universal truth.

Allow me, then, to escort you beyond the familiar towers of Kant and Boden, into a chorus of alternative philosophies that treat creativity not as a race for the newest trophy, but as a process of emergence, attunement, and relational participation.

Now, I may be an ardent defender of looking further than the horizon, but I am in no sense an expert in the following traditions. However, if we have but a brief look into the valleys of Daoism, figures such as Laozi and Zhuangzi champion zìrán (自然, “natural spontaneity”) and wú wéi (無爲, “non‑forcing action”). Here, creativity is the effortless alignment with the generative currents of the Dao, a kind of responsive openness that permits forms to arise without coercion. Zen masters, too, echo this sentiment. The worth of the act lies not in breaking new ground but in embodying a moment of fully realised presence. The artwork becomes a mirror of the practitioner’s mind, already complete, rather than a novel artifact.

Moving into the sands of the Arab world, the mystic Ibn Arabi speaks of tajallī: the continual self‑manifestation of the Divine. Human creativity, in this view, is a participatory echo of an ongoing cosmic act of creation; novelty is secondary to the degree of unveiling that the act facilitates. And in the vibrant communal rhythms of Africa, philosophers such as John Mbiti foreground ubuntu: ‘I am because we are’. Artistic practices emerge from collective ritual, thriving on relational exchange rather than solitary invention.

Again, each of these merit a more thorough exploration than what I have superficially touched upon, but for the sake of our quest, it is important to note that all these strands converge on a portrait of creativity as manifestation, emergence, or relational participation. It seems, that the notion of creativity opens up to a plethora of meanings, of which the relentless pursuit of novelty is only one, and value is present in each and every one of these meanings.

From the perspective of artistic research, and our trajectory towards a better understanding of the artistic act at its core, the process-oriented ideas of creativity of non-Western traditions seem to lead to richer terrain to explore. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I – I took the one less travelled by; the one that seemed to wander slightly away from the well-trodden highway of novelty.

At this point, I must confess that I intentionally steered away from other strong presences in today’s discussions of AR, for example the work of Karen Barad: food for another article.

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If creativity is not primarily the triumphant unveiling of something never before seen, but rather a process of emergence or participation, then the other question inevitably presents itself: where does this emergence take place? Through what medium does it become perceptible? The answer, I would suggest, lies in the performative nature of the artistic act itself.

Performativity is a word that, much like creativity, has suffered from overuse in contemporary discourse. It is invoked in philosophy, linguistics, theatre studies, and increasingly in discussions of artistic research, sometimes with such elasticity that it threatens to lose its contours altogether. Yet if we momentarily strip the term of its academic patina, a rather simple idea emerges. A performative act is one that does not merely describe or represent something but brings something into being through action. It unfolds in time; it requires presence; and it leaves traces in the material world.

In the context of artistic research, this performativity is not an abstract metaphor. It is anchored in the most tangible of realities: the human body engaging with matter.

When a violinist draws a bow across a string, when a dancer transfers weight from one foot to another, when a painter presses pigment into canvas or a composer reshapes sonic textures through gesture and breath, something more occurs than the execution of a pre-conceived plan. The body encounters resistance, friction, inertia. Materials respond in ways that are never entirely predictable. It is precisely within this subtle negotiation between intention and material response that artistic knowledge begins to surface.

One might therefore propose that the artistic act cannot exist in the absence of such embodied engagement. The body is not merely the executor of artistic ideas; it is the very instrument through which artistic understanding takes form. Craftsmanship, in this sense, is not the humble servant of creativity but its indispensable partner. Without the disciplined capacity to manipulate matter – be it wood, metal, pigment, sound waves, or digital signals – the creative impulse would remain suspended in the realm of speculation.

This observation may appear deceptively obvious, yet it carries significant implications for how we conceive of artistry in the present moment. In recent decades, certain strands of artistic discourse have increasingly emphasised forms of authorship that operate at a distance from material production: curatorial practices in which the artwork is assembled from the contributions of others; algorithmic processes in which generative systems produce visual or sonic configurations; conceptual frameworks where the idea itself is presented as the work.

Such practices undoubtedly possess their own intellectual and aesthetic legitimacy. Yet such acts operate primarily in the realm of artistic thought rather than artistic act: the imagination directs, the intellect chooses, but the body does not engage materially with the matter in question. Artistic thought may inspire, shape, and structure the performative acts that follow, but it cannot substitute for them.

If the decisive moment of transformation occurs entirely within a computational system or through the labour of others, the artist’s role risks shifting from performative engagement to strategic orchestration. The body withdraws from the field of action, and with it disappears the immediate encounter between intention, gesture, and material resistance. At least in LABO’s perspective, in our engagement with archives, our connection with history, it would be precisely in embodied processes that knowledge can emerge which as yet has not been unearthed through theoretical means. It stands then, that performativity characterises the artistic act as we have begun to describe it.

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This is not to suggest that digital technologies or collaborative processes are incompatible with artistic research. On the contrary, they can expand the field of experimentation in fascinating ways. The crucial point, however, is that somewhere within the process there must remain a locus where the artist’s embodied interaction with material conditions becomes decisive. Without such a moment, the process may still produce artefacts of aesthetic interest, but it becomes harder to speak of an artistic act in the strict sense of the term.

Seen from this perspective, the performative dimension of artistry reveals itself as more than a technical requirement. It is the epistemic engine of artistic research.

For it is precisely in the encounter between body and matter that something unexpected may arise. A slight change of pressure alters a tone; an unforeseen resonance suggests a new musical direction; the resistance of a material provokes an adjustment of gesture that leads to a previously unimagined form. These moments cannot be fully planned, nor can they be entirely attributed to the autonomous will of the artist. They emerge within the dynamic interplay between intention, skill, and the responsive world of materials.

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Here we arrive at the final notion that quietly underlies the definition proposed earlier: the idea of revelation.

At first glance, the term may appear somewhat archaic, perhaps even suspiciously metaphysical. Yet it captures a nuance that neither ‘production’ nor ‘invention’ adequately conveys. To reveal something is not simply to fabricate it ex nihilo, nor merely to discover something that existed independently in a fully formed state. Revelation occupies a subtle middle ground. It describes the moment when something that was previously latent becomes perceptible through a specific act.

The artistic act, in this sense, resembles the lifting of a veil.

The knowledge that emerges through artistic practice is certainly shaped by the artist’s imagination, discipline, and sensibility. It is undeniably creative. And yet, from the inside of the process, it often feels less like the arbitrary construction of novelty than like the gradual disclosure of possibilities that were already somehow present within the materials, the gestures, and the situation itself.

The sculptor senses a form within the stone; the musician discovers a musical trajectory hidden within a sequence of sounds; the performer recognises expressive potentials that reveal themselves only through repeated engagement with a score or a movement. In each case, the artistic act becomes the site where these latent configurations step into the light of experience.

To speak of revelation, then, is not to mystify artistic practice, but rather to acknowledge its peculiar epistemology. The artist does not simply impose meaning upon the world, nor passively receive it. Instead, through performative engagement with matter, the artist participates in a process through which new knowledge gradually discloses itself.

If this hunch proves right, then the artistic act is not merely a footnote in the grand tome of research but its very nucleus, the singular, gloriously messy moment where creation, performance and understanding collide in a spectacularly embodied fireworks display.

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Having wandered through Kant’s lofty rule‑breakers, Boden’s tidy taxonomies, the spontaneity of Daoist zìrán, the reverence of Zen brushwork, the cosmic unveiling of Ibn Arabi’s tajallī, and the communal pulse of Ubuntu, we are now in a position to ask the inevitable question: does our initial, gut‑felt proclamation about the artistic act survive this little odyssey of ideas?

In short, yes – but with a modest amendment, perhaps.

‘The artistic act is the embodied, performative, creative gesture through which latent possibilities are revealed as new knowledge, whether that revelation takes the form of performance, creation, interpretation, reconstruction, experimentation or any other mode that transcends mere illustration.”

In other words, the act is still the crucible where creation, performance and understanding fuse, but we now foreground its embodied epistemic engine and acknowledge that the new knowledge it uncovers may emerge through a plethora of modalities.

It is precisely this glorious conflagration of ideas, gestures and serendipitous mishaps that the intrepid members of LABO XIX&XX intend to poke, prod and, if necessary, gently coax apart in the series of investigations that lie just around the corner.