Arsène Caens develops, since 2008, in Paris, a practice of research-creation involving a continuous investigative work on the forms of activity and aesthetic existence. Trained in traditional art history at the school of the Louvre, it marks his interest in art without author forms, multiple and reproducible of Western modernity by specializing in the arts of the printed image (print). Anxious to develop work spaces structured around new forms of objects, knowledge and practices in arts, he became a founding member of Cadrans.org, site of contemporary creation, then invited Member of the collective of arts and sciences Oscar Roméo. In this perspective, he also regularly works in relationship with China, as well with contemporary or traditional artists of the world of business in the cultural sector.
Currently and since 2016, Arsène Caens performs a thesis work at the school of advanced studies in Social Sciences (Ehess, Paris). The investigation he leads is a comparative ethnography of various qualified practices as artistic or para-artistiques, and is an analysis of the streamlining procedures as of certain types of artifacts, activities and situations. Very different between them, situations he approaches – including contemporary music, literary arts out of the book, the design of art exhibition in extra-occidental context and post-conceptuelles artistic practices – have in common to make the artistic problem situations under the institutional periphery of the worlds of art.
At the Enda Arsène Caens enrolled in a double search. (1) as a researcher, he gives vent to his work as an ethnographer, documenting, to bring them to the attention of an audience of social scientist, sessions of work of one of the very few schools implementing a complete reformulation of creative art practices. (2) as a practitioner, it applies to situation elements of this research, while updating reflectively the condition of developing inquiry status defined as fundamental artistic practice. Building on the tools of art (theoretical and practical), philosophy and the social sciences, it is then set as art a certain project of knowledge, and experimentally stake project of a collective practice of elucidation of the social experience.