Research as Art

About

Artists have long investigated the world before picturing it. Leonardo da Vinci filled notebooks with dissections and studies of water, and Maria Sibylla Merian sailed to Suriname in 1699 to observe insects through their life cycles, publishing Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium in 1705. George Stubbs spent months dissecting horses for The Anatomy of the Horse (1766).

Since the late 20th century research has often become the form of the work itself. Hans Haacke traced New York landlords in Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971). Mark Dion stages archaeological digs and cabinets of curiosities, and Forensic Architecture, founded in 2010, reconstructs human-rights violations through spatial and digital analysis and exhibits its findings. Ursula Biemann's video essays follow migration and resource routes. Such work borrows the look of documents, maps, vitrines and timelines while connecting things in ways scholarship would not.