Research Methodology

Given that the theoretical sample (Ragin) of art biennials will be small, the research methodology appropriate for this research proposal is that of qualitative reconstruction of the working assumptions behind the approaches that multiple actors that bring art biennials into being put into operation. The interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary setup of this research makes strong theoretical assumptions less amenable to its objectives since theoretical translations from one discipline into another of later developments in any of them more often than not involve methodological contraditions. The latter are less of a concern when classical sociological texts are being taken as a point of departure for this research project that sees its ambit lie in the emerging field of sociology of space. In this case, methodology is inseparable from the theoretical lines of inquiry. A promising direction of methodological development for this research is a stretegy of methodological realism that seeks to theoretically recontruct the causal environments in which art biennials occur. A return to a founding figure of sociological discourse, such as Max Weber, is not excluded in so far as his dictum of understanding-oriented sociology is read in a broadly interdisciplinalry manner.

While sociological methodologies that are qualitatively sensitive to cases of historical comparison between situations with high degree of documentary densitiy and causal complexity, such as Ragin's, the challenge that the methodological approach needs to address is an establishment of an insightful communication among representatives of as different disciplines as comparative sociology, theatre studies, and contemporary philosophy. In different ways, all these disciplines, as well as their representatives in the future research team, deal with contemporary art, urban space, and global culture. However, building methodological commonalities across these fields can only advance in so far as theoretical commonalities obtain as well. In the case of growing art market, expanding art museums, and flourishing art biennials, a broadly comparative approach can be a prudent counterpart to analytical realism that theoretically defines the dimensions of reality that are of relevance to a scholar's needs. For this research, its methodological aim lies in sharpening the analytical distinctions between different art biennials, the theoretical concepts with interdisciplinary applications, and the epistemological advantages of academic fields that are drawn on.

The risks that inhere in this reliance on emergent interdiscplinary methodology of comparative anlysis promise to be compensated with higher than average probability of insights that a more stringent methodological models will make impossible to discover to the extent that the latter rely on relatively closed and consistent theories. This research intends to be of relevance to figures that are active in the fields of ciltural, urban and policy studies. The state of the art that these fields taks as the point of departure for their activity is both a challange and an opportunity for interdiscplinary research teams, such as the one around this research hopes to be, that need to operate with theoretical and methodological tools that allow for transfer across and unitilization in contexts that differ markedly from one another. Thickly documented descriptions need to be complemented with theoretically grounded generalizations for a mutually enriching dialoge across disciplines to start. The guding assumption of this research project is that art biennials responde to an urgent demand of many cities to reinvent themselves as cities-of-culture. This goes beyond the capitals of culture program of the European Union towards the alternative forms of urban development that gain increasing salience as the models of industrialization, modernization, and urbanization that have been prevalent during the historical development of modern capitalism reach their ecological, theoretical and social limits.

Under these circumstances the role of the urban, cultural, and policy studies representatives may also be changing from that of directing a linear change to that of exploring unexpected possibilities. A literary turn in social sciences may have to find its counterpart in research methodologies that lend themselves to adoption by artists, curators and academics that address urban, cultural and social issues from a creative, curatorial and critical point of view. Similar to institutional ethnography (Smith 2005), a methodology of comparative research can take recourse to an inductive approach to the field of research that in the case of contemporary art oftentimes represents results of various artistic, curatorial and scholarly appropriations of theories, methods and disciplines according to the requirements of the moment. This orientation to the present moment that finds its philosophical counterparts in the works of Perniola on art (2004a), modernity (1994), and sensibility (2004b) has parallels and applications in contemporary art as multiple art biennials pose philosophical questions as their overarching themes. How these ideas of post-Enlightenment aesthetics, post-modern art, and object-oriented experience operate in the expanded institutional field of art biennials can lead to drawing lessons on how urban spaces of global culture contribute to the reimagination of cities as sites of sustainability, preservation and uniqueness or fail to do so.

Sociological reflection on what does historicization of modern condition mean (Schulze 2003) opens the perspective of an imperseptible challenge of the radical possibility at a stage where the fulfillment of the project of modernity arrives at its end. There are important aguments that maintain that the project of modernity is far from reaching its proclaimed objectives (Habermas). If only the duality of tradition and modernity is considered, a post-modern transition may either refer to a return to a tradition or a different modern configuration (Munch 1984, 1986). However, these contraditions become accessible to methodological probing when urban spaces are concerned since the scale of the relations that they let themselves be embedded into can stretch from local to global, from traditional to modern, and from identity to difference. The contemporary contradicitons of cities make them, on one hand, seek their urban identity, and, on the other hand, highlight their global difference. For the cities of modern capitalism of yesterday the limitations of its existing model translate into de-industrialization, negative migration, and social problems. Not by coincidence, the cities that have succeeded at re-inventing themselves as urban centers attractive to creative classes, investment flows, and trend-setting media, such as New York or Berlin, put into practice the strategies of cities of culture.

Given the continuing popularity of building flag-ship museums as a means to revitalize cities, one might surmise an aesthetic turn in cultural, urban and policy studies as they are practices. The controversies that every large museum project causes to flare up, the trenchant critique of the effects on local artistic communities that brand-name museums have, and the social conflicts that large scale transformations of urban space trigger have little in common with the effect that art biennials have in these regards. Connecting money and abstraction in unexpected configurations of art works that they exhibit, art biennials are laboratories of urban, cultural and social future that produce repeated samples of the state-of-the-art of contemporary culture both locally and globally. A research inquiry into the success of their precarious existence demands interdisciplinary and multidsiciplinary bodies of knowledge come into productive contact as modes of inductive theorization of the relations that connect urban spaces and global culture into series of art biennials that at each their instance negotiate the relations between identity and difference. In this effort of philosophy, sociology, and history to be relevant to the global moment of changing modernity, a methodology that allows for exploration, discovery and reflection is in order.