Henk Borgdorff
Henk Borgdorff is an Amsterdam-based academic, specialised in music theory and artistic research. He is emeritus professor for research in the arts at Leiden University and at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, University of the Arts The Hague.
Education
Henk Borgdorff was born in The Hague. He studied music theory at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague and philosophy and sociology at Leiden University. He graduated in The Hague in 1983 with a thesis on the philosophy of music of Theodor W. Adorno and obtained his PhD at Leiden University in 2012.Academic career
From 1983 to 2002 he taught music theory and aesthetics in Hilversum, The Hague and Amsterdam, with a focus on Renaissance counterpoint and philosophy of music. Together with his wife, Barbara Bleij, he founded in 1996 the Dutch Journal of Music Theory, and acted as chair of the editorial board until 2008.In 2002 Borgdorff was appointed professor in Art Theory & Research at the Amsterdam University of the Arts where he led an interdisciplinary research group, ARTI. His own research started from there on to focus on the theoretical and political rationale of research in the arts Together with Jeroen Boomgaard he founded the Artistic Research master programme at the University of Amsterdam, and together with Peter Dejans and Frans de Ruiter he established the doctoral programme in music, docARTES.
In 2010 Borgdorff took a position as professor Research in the Arts at the University of the Arts The Hague and a position as visiting professor in Aesthetics at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. In 2016 he was appointed full professor in Theory of Research in the Arts at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, Leiden University, and acted as academic director of ACPA until his retirement in December 2020.
Borgdorff was involved in the establishment of the Journal for Artistic Research and the associated Society for Artistic Research. He served as editor of JAR from 2010 to 2015, co-founded the Research Catalogue in 2011, acted as president of SAR from 2015 to 2019.
Academic work
Borgdorff is best known for his contributions to the field of artistic research - a field also referred to as practice-based or practice-led research in the creative and performing arts, or research-creation/recherche-création. Some of Borgdorff’s work is collected in The Conflict of the Faculties. Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia.In his 2005 The Debate on Research in the Arts Borgdorff introduces four perspectives on the relationship between theory and practice in the arts: the interpretative, instrumental, performative and immanent perspective. These perspectives form the basis for a distinction between three forms of art research: research on the arts, research for the arts, and research in and through the arts, thereby deviating from an earlier distinction made by Christopher Frayling.
In ‘The Production of Knowledge in Artistic Research’ Borgdorff has worked out more in detail the specific epistemological and methodological features of artistic research, drawing on research on tacit knowledge and embodied knowledge. By comparing artistic research with research in the humanities, the social and natural sciences Borgdorff subsequently develops an understanding of artistic research as an advanced form of academic research in its own right, marked by non-conceptual forms of knowing and understanding, unconventional research methods and outcomes, and enhanced forms of documentation and publication.
The contribution of Borgdorff’s work to science policies is most manifest in his Artistic Research within the Fields of Science. Interpreting Gibbons’ Mode-2 knowledge production and Stokes’ Quadrant model of scientific research, he makes a case for including artistic research in the Frascati Manual's classifications of research, science and technology; an appeal later taken up by the publication of the Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research.
In his later work Borgdorff has focused on the criteria for assessment of artistic research, and on the relationship between artistic research and science and technology studies.