Research Group 2022: Carl Johan Högberg

Alice Twemlow: How do you describe your practice?

Carl Johan Högberg: I’m a painter and a weaver. But a research-heavy painter and weaver, in that I spend a lot of time in archives and doing writing. I have this heap of stuff that I do and only a fraction of it comes out as a painting. One of my ongoing research interests is the 19th-century Swiss medium Hélène Smith, and I’ve been working for years on a speculative biography project about her.

In the sense that my practice and my research are combined, perhaps I’m an artistic researcher. But mostly this has all come together through being a member of the fantastic Deep Futures Research Group! I loved being part of the Research Group and knowing that I had this one day a week that I could reserve for my research. It was really helpful for the development of my own research and my own theory classes, but also for the curriculum development in BA Fine Arts. 

AT: What was the project you worked on in the Research Group?

CJH: It’s about pigments and tracking the various connections between material research and pigment and painting. How can we do that sustainably? The speculative element comes in because rather than wanting to make an actual library of pigments, I want to consider how we talk about them. How we weave stories around pigments. We all use pigments, whether as designers or artists or consumers. But, I feel there is this distance, at least my students seem distanced, from the materiality of their practice — about how pigments are produced and in what conditions.

The framework for my research is storytelling. Is it really about the pigments? I don’t know. I like to research and think about things from a slight angle. I like to take something that should be there, in academia or in art school, and see what I can do to rethink it.

AT: What are the urgencies around this project? Why should we be spending time thinking or speculating about pigments?

CJH: Pigments are often used unthinkingly, and they may have been made and distributed in very unsustainable, problematic ways. But I think my research interests have changed during my time in the Research Group. At first, as an artist and a tutor, I thought I could weave in my research into my classes. But then I became co-head, and I started thinking a bit more institutionally. Now I have more agency within this place, so how can I use that and the resources I have access to sort of reimagine things, to question things, and then try and inspire the students and tutors to do similarly?

AT: How does your research relate to the gardens being developed at the KABK?

CJH: I’m very grateful for all this gardening work going on at the KABK. The Green Office has started a pigment garden, together with the Textile Department. They’re so knowledgeable about extracting pigments for dyes. As a clear consequence of my participation in the Research Group, I aim to start a research collaboration with participants from the Green Office and the Textile Department on a series of classes for our third-year students at BA Fine Arts.

AT: Your research practice, your art practice, and your teaching practice seem very closely interwoven. How is research understood and taught in the BA Fine Arts department?

CJH: Until now research has been ill-defined. And in fact, most people had bad associations with it. There hasn’t been any focus on methodology. There was theory and I think people thought that meant research. There have been tutors who’ve really tried to change that, of course, but for the former head of this department, even though he saw that art was moving toward research, it was not a priority.

So, when we started as heads, one thing we immediately noticed was that research was separated from the rest of the teaching. It took place on a different day, and so I think the students never really saw a connection between what they did on that day and the rest of their classes and their practice. While we understand that there are specific research skills and methods that need to be taught, we want to embed them throughout the whole program. It’s the same with theory – we are taking steps towards how to mesh that a little bit better.

So, among the changes: How we are framing research as something connected to every aspect of practice. How we are talking about research methodologies right from the start of the program, integrating writing as much as possible, introducing blogging and documenting vocabularies already from year one. Then we will be able to have a better sense of a student’s learning curve over the four years and to have ways to log it. We’ve also introduced study groups. Until now, the only didactic tool was the tutorial, but now tutors are coming up with themes and focuses for these groups. Some of them are practical in nature, like doing a printmaking workshop, for example, whereas others are more theoretical, on postcolonial theory, for example. But some of them try to bridge practice and research, like Rachel Bacon’s group class on “Drawing as a Research Tool”.

It’s going to take a few years, but we want studio research to be better integrated with thesis research and to see that shift manifesting itself in the graduation show.

We are also trying our best not to be so isolated as a department – we started a relationship with MA Artistic Research, and we will be collaborating on a series of lectures for 2024. We have invited Jack Halberstam and Lisa Robertsson to give lectures and studio visits.

We will also introduce something we call the “Festival of Ideas” – a full week devoted to research and to the love of ideas. A celebration! Part of it will be on artistic research, with lectures, methodologies, processes, play, sharing and writing, among other things. Anke Haarmann, the ATP Lector, will also teach a class. And if I can convince you to come in too, that would be great!

AT: That’s a smart move, to ask me during an interview! I can’t refuse now, can I? What is your experience of the research culture at the KABK more generally and how could it be improved?

CJH: I feel the KABK research community, you know, it’s a little bit in the shadows. I really want to help to change that. I haven’t been here long enough to have a full answer on this, but I get the sense it’s underdeveloped. Researchers shouldn’t have to fight for space in the KABK or for financial support needed for the production and dissemination of research.

Maybe we need to group together more. Whether that would be assemblies or applications or like, a dream would be to create a space like a kind of Forensic Architecture group, the kind of thing that would put us on the map.

And it’s also why I’m interested in a PhD trajectory now, sort of seeded by our Research Group.

AT: Will it be in artistic research? 

CJH: Could go either way. It’s not material research, per se. It’s more keyword research, so it could be within a more traditional cultural studies or humanities PhD program.

AT: In the Theory Platform, you’re part of a working group looking at the thesis assessment criteria. Any progress to report there?

CJH: We’ve only met a few times, but we all feel it needs to be updated to reflect how research is done these days. And it could be made more exciting and creative as well. One change that has been made is that it is now called the “Graduation Research Paper”. It needs to be more connected to studio practice, though. What’s always bothered me with theses is that we spend all this time training students to be artists, celebrating creativity etc. and then when it comes to the thesis, they end up becoming like LARPing historians.

They’re not trained to do that; not trained to write these long dissertations. So I want to explore how we can make the link to the studio research clearer or introduce other formats such as position papers where they reflect on theory and social issues or whatever in relation to their role as an artist. And then for the final submission, it can be an artwork, or podcast, or anything in which they summarise and reflect on the progress of that positioning.

AT: I hope we can discuss this kind of thing going forward. I’d like to see more connections between a student’s graduating body of work, the documentation of their research and how both elements are presented together for public dissemination.