Art is Ubiquitous at Universities

ELIA President Andrea B. Braidt spoke on a panel last month at the European University Association EUA 2021 Annual Conference. The session entitled: Universities as places of culture: Luxury or necessity?, addressed the fundamental value art can bring to an institution and to society in general. We are delighted to share Andrea’s presentation which stirred such a vibrant and engaging debate.

Art is Ubiquitous at Universities

Artistic interventions keep us safe and sound

As president of the European League of Institutes of the Arts, ELIA, my thesis statement will not surprise you: art is ubiquitous at all Universities, it is always and everywhere present. Let me use the next 5 minutes to explain in three points why:

Firstly, in approximately 800 art universities across Europe, all teaching, all research, all learning is dedicated to the production of art. At the moment, there are about 800,000 students in Europe studying art at these universities, and for them, as for their professors and all staff, art is neither a luxury or a necessity, it is their daily bread, it is what they do. The impact of this work is considerable: whenever you look at a contemporary art work in an exhibition, listen to music during a concert, watch a play at a theatre, or admire a sculpture in public space, the chances are about 95% that what you are perceiving is the work of an alumnus or alumna of an art university. And the next time you watch the famous New Years’ Concerts by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, be aware that you are watching 120 university professors perform: most of this orchestra’s musicians teach at the Vienna university for music and performing arts, the only Austrian university occupying the first place in university rankings, such as the QS World University Ranking.

Secondly, science and research of all disciplines and at all universities happens while engulfed by art. As scholars we inhabit built spaces, our university buildings that have been conceived, often many years ago, but sometimes also out of a very contemporary moment by architects, designers, painters, decorators, in short, by artists. University life in all its entirety takes place in these buildings and built environments, and thus it shapes all dimensions of our being, as inhabitants of scholarly work, of thought, of teaching and learning. The way we walk through university buildings, lecture halls, labs, studios, festive halls is a determining factor in the way hierarchies in university life and scholarly thought are built. The built environment is responsible for access and exclusion in a physical way, but also in a symbolic, representative way.

Buildings are often given the names of founders, sponsors, icons, and thus represent certain traditions. Too often we are so used to these built environments, that we do not make ourselves aware of them. We forget that the functionality of these environments has also an aesthetic dimension. Ever since the Bauhaus movement we know that form and function are intrinsically linked. So, the next time you go to your university office, please look at all hallways, doors, walls, colours, furniture and so on, from an aesthetic perspective. Look at how the aesthetic of the things makes a difference.

Thirdly, the dimension of the ubiquity of art in universities. Art, especially fine art, has the brilliant capacity to make us understand complex connections within one glimpse. One image can change the way we look at things, one intervention can make us realise what is what. In this way, art keeps us safe and sound. It enables an immediate reaction which may start a process of reflection as opposed to scholarly work, which makes us understand and reflect through different, argumentative and discursive ways. Let me present one example of the potential of artistic intervention.

For decades, the arcade hall of the University of Vienna has been criticised for its representation of 161 male scholars in the form of busts on sockets. In between all these men busts only one woman is honored, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, on a plaque on the wall. The second female presence in this architectural ensemble is taken up in the shape of a muse decorating a fountain in the centre of the courtyard. So when in 2009, in preparation of the 650th founding anniversary of the University of Vienna, artists were invited to conceive of an artistic intervention, Austrian fine artist Iris Andraschek won the competition with her project: “The Muse has had it! Der Muse reichts.”

Andraschek built an enormous shadow out of granite in anthracite colour (“nero assoluto”) of a woman in fighting position, fist raised, and had it laid into the stone floor of the courtyard. The shape was cut out of the stone floor and the shadow was laid into drainage concrete. Andraschek built the 28meter long shadow inspired by a picture series she took of women scholars of the University of Vienna posing on a socket in the courtyard. In addition to the shadow of the muse the artist built two sockets, one bearing a concept sentence for the project, and the other resulting from a call for proposals circulated among students and scholars of the university of Vienna, saying “those without names step out of the shadow”. The sockets can now be used for performative interventions, or to take a rest on, in the shadow of the muse.

The art work is important, and gives testimony to a critique of the lacking representation of female scientists and scholars in the hall of fame of the University of Vienna. But even more important were the discussions that preceded and followed the project, enabling the University members to raise consciousness about the built environment they live and work in. Art and culture in this particular case was no luxury to the University of Vienna. The artistic intervention was desperately needed as part of a discourse of historical memory and contemporary thought, of not only theoretically and historically reflecting and criticising the symbolic policy of the representative space but also to change it.

The ubiquity of art at universities needs to be reflected in all the frameworks for universities: the funding programmes, the national budgets, the legislative frameworks. Artistic research, for example, needs to become part of the Frascati Manual’s list of disciplines, so that the science statistics can account for the now 30-year-long tradition of research with artistic means, a demand that has been raised in the Vienna Declaration of 2020, published by all stakeholder networks of the Higher Arts Education Sector. And then we can realise that art in the tertiary education sector, is neither a necessity nor a luxury, but a given.

Presented by Andrea B. Braidt on 23rd April at the European University Association Conference 2021 online.