Arts in Society

Europe, Latin America and Africa, the connections of the Arts and Society Artistic expression has long been a means to express ideas and opinions about wider society, whether it be through text, images, architecture, or a wide range of other means. Researchers at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society are exploring the interaction between the arts and society, getting to the roots of cultural production, as Professor Anthonya Visser explains.

The arts have long had a major influence on public debate across different societal domains, providing a means of expression that has helped to shape people’s views on wider society. Based at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS), Professor Anthonya Visser is the coordinator of the Arts in Society project, a graduate programme encouraging students to look more deeply into the relationship between the arts and society. “We applied for grants for four fullyfunded PhD students, each with their own research project within the Arts in Society programme,” she outlines. This work centers on exploring the interaction between the arts and society in four main domains; science and technology, law and justice, politics, and religion. “Religion as a societal domain is very relevant for art, where art is expressed in a societally relevant form. That has been the case for centuries,” explains Professor Visser. “We’re also looking at science and technology, which is a relatively new domain, where art holds relevance in a societal sense.

Law and justice is another important domain,

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while we’re also researching the ways in which art becomes relevant in politics.”

This research spans a wide time-period, from classical antiquity right through to the present day, although the forms of artistic expression in use have of course changed

have antiquity, then we have medieval and early modern, and then we have modern and contemporary,” says Professor Visser.

One project in the programme is focused on medieval religious culture, with researchers examining both texts and images to build a

We do not, in the first place, make a moral or political judgment, but rather analyse how crossings of borders between domains are shaped and what is being done as a social practice, as an artistic practice. So we look at modes of artistic invention and innovation. significantly over time, as new methods have been developed and social attitudes have shifted. The scope of the research is correspondingly broad, with four separate PhD projects within the programme looking at the relationship between the arts and society with respect to each of the four specific societal domains, research which is organised into three time clusters. “We

deeper picture of the interaction between arts and society at the time. “We are looking at documents, texts from the medieval period, along with visual elements,” continues Professor Visser. “This is art in which the religious domain is used as a means of expression, to come to an expression or social practice that holds broader relevance in wider society.”

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Science and technology Research into the science and technology domain is centered more on the modern age, with one project in this area looking at bioart, a form of artistic practice in which living materials are used to produce artistic works.

Researchers are investigating how public debate helps to shape this art. “One of our colleagues at LUCAS does experiments on the intersection between biology, biological experiments, and art. This kind of art can affect public opinion on major issues, for example debates around bio-ethics,” says Professor Visser. Research in the law and justice domain meanwhile is more language-based, with researchers analysing key texts to explore the relationship between arts and society.

The courtroom has often been compared to a theatre by legal scholars, an idea which is being explored further within the Arts in Society programme, alongside probing more deeply into the concepts of law and justice.

“This group is looking at the literature and analysing specific literary texts,” continues Professor Visser. “It is possible to look at

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literary texts and to see how discussions on law and justice are sometimes intermingled, and sometimes influence each other.”

This research can reveal deeper insights into the general perception of precisely what these two concepts mean. While the concepts of law and justice are closely related, they do not mean the same thing, now researchers in the project aim to delve deeper in this area and shed new light. “We have a group of people working here together to critique literary texts, including people from the legal and juridicial faculties. They are working together to analyse such texts,” says Professor Visser. The fourth societal domain being addressed in the project is politics; Professor Visser describes this as being perhaps the most traditional domain, with researchers looking at politics in quite a broad sense, as a collective process of decisionmaking. “All art forms in the public domain, so not only visual art forms or architecture for example, but also literature, have a political dimension. So everything that is art in the public domain can be looked upon from a

political perspective,” she says. “When you have art as a social practice, it almost always also becomes a political practice.”

There are also cases where art productions cross the borders between these individual domains, as in the case of the Russian feminist punk rock group Pussy Riot, who have staged unauthorised performances in a number of public locations since they were formed in 2011. In particular, the group gained a lot of attention in the West when they angered the Russian religious and political authorities by posting a video of a performance inside a Moscow church in 2012, for which several members were later jailed. “Pussy Riot made use of religious forms to express themselves politically,” says Professor Visser. The aim in this area of research is not to make a judgment on the rights or wrongs of the Pussy Riot case, but rather to look more deeply into the mode and method of artistic expression.

“We do not, in the first place, make a moral or political judgment, but rather analyse how those crossings of borders between domains are shaped and what is being done as a social

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Arts in Society Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) Project Objectives

The LUCAS Arts in Society program hosts four PhD projects exploring key questions in fields of intense interaction between cultural production and social practice: (1) religion, (2) science & technology, (3) law & justice and (4) politics. The aim of the programme is to articulate the research profile of LUCAS in terms of the societal relevance of the Arts.

Project Funding

The project is funded by NWO (The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) with Euro 800.00.

Institutional Partners

• Rijksmuseum Amsterdam • Museum Beelden aan Zee Den Haag • Dr. P.A. Tiele-Stichting Den Haag • Scaliger Institute Leiden University

Contact Details

Project Coordinator, Professor Anthonya Visser Leiden University PO Box 9500 2300 RA Leiden T: +31 (0)71 527 2071 E: a.visser@hum.leidenuniv.nl W: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/ humanities/centre-for-the-arts-in-society Blog: http://www.leidenartsinsocietyblog.nl

Professor Anthonya Visser

Anthonya Visser is Professor of European Modern European, in particular German, Literature and Culture at the University of Leiden and Academic Director of the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). Author of Körper und Intertextualität. Strategien des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Böhlau 2012) and of many articles and papers on recent German literature, and issues of cultural identity after the ‘Wende’.

practice, as an artistic practice,” continues Professor Visser. “So we look at modes of artistic invention and innovation.”

Inter-disciplinary research This research is very much inter-disciplinary in nature, bringing together specialists in different fields, including literary history and theory, art history and film and media studies.

These broad foundations give researchers at LUCAS a firmer basis to investigate the relationship between arts and society, and contribute to the literature and wider debate.

“The Arts in Society graduate programme will deliver four dissertations in the short-

term, and an educational programme for PhD candidates,” says Professor Visser. Beyond the programme’s initial funding term, Professor Visser hopes to continue her research in this area, laying strong foundations for continued investigation at LUCAS. “We are currently around two-thirds of the way through the project. We will evaluate it over the next year or so, then we will see how we will proceed,” she continues. “The idea of art in society will remain central to the research agenda at LUCAS. The precise plans for the future will depend to a large degree on the outcome of the evaluation that we will carry out next year.”

This research is very much inter-disciplinary in nature, bringing together specialists in different fields, including literary history and theory, art history and

film and media studies.

Woman praying to Christ in the Van Hooff prayer book, University Library Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, XV.05502, f. 133v, Flanders, ca. 1520.

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