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Despite references to knowledge production intensifying in art discourse over the past decade or so, its meaning and value has remained unclear, and hence it occasionally rings as little more than an intriguing buzzword. Yet the thought that art may produce knowledge is compelling and captures something both characteristic of and vital in contemporary practices. This condition of being trapped amid blurry extremes is analysed in Tom Holerts new book, Knowledge Beside Itself.
The social determinants undergirding the epistemologisation of art have been much scrutinised, and Holert delineates various standpoints taken by artists and theorists as well as weighing their limitations and potentialities. Post-Fordism, with its commodification of knowledge, its construction of templates for measurability and verification, and its colonisation of subjectivity, is the cornerstone of this development. Contemporary art, from the biennale to the university, has evinced tendencies aligned with post-Fordism, with knowledge production among the most visible. Under post-Fordism, art has increasingly found the university in the expanded field as its hub for production and consumption rather than the traditional passage from studio to gallery. Thus, institutional critique and kontext kunst since the 1990s has correspondingly shifted towards education spaces where knowledge is taught and challenged. Debates around artistic research within the university have been at the...