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Begin forwarded message: > From: "Art&Education" <[email protected]> > Date: October 13, 2012 6:00:12 AM EDT > To: [email protected] > Subject: Papers: "Aesthetic Autonomy Reconsidered" by Bret Schneider > Reply-To: [email protected] > > October 13, 2012 > > Performance view from Hanging Times Athens, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff. 2012 courtesy the artists and T293. > Art&Education Papers > Aesthetic Autonomy Reconsidered > > Bret Schneider > Share this: Facebook | Twitter > 'Autonomy' has crept into the lexicon of contemporary art. As contemporary art is a field vaguely founded upon the theoretical rejection of aesthetic autonomy, its recent theorization is fraught with particular manifestations of abuse. On one hand, autonomy has become a dirty insult, used pejoratively. On the other, it is construed as the restoration of art in an era of its impossibility. In the former scenario, art-activists and political artists, ideological critics, and philosophers see the 'pure form', which is now conflated with autonomy as extraneous and perhaps even decadent when understood in a social context of profound social injustice. It is 'merely' aesthetic. In the latter, art is expressly valued for its myopic focus on 'aesthetics' alone, which in turn is valued for its projected apolitical nature, as something that does not take part in the torpor of contemporary politics. In other words, left politics is considered so miserable today that it drives otherwise political thinkers into depoliticized art. Neither of these sentiments are explicit, however. The 'pure art' vs. 'political art' debate is itself antiquatedbit was understood as passC) even a century agoband today it does not debate autonomy, but the terms of debate indicate something else entirely: aesthetic autonomy's absence as a meaningful category. It indicates not a discussion of aesthetic autonomy, or even politics, but rather the reconstitution, in a curiously distorted form, of a classical debate from the nineteenth century that by the early 1920s was mooted by advanced social conditions. This critical framework of necessary misinterpretation is one of the defining categorical features of contemporary art. Before our time, we sense, there were notions of the autonomy of art in modernity that dabbled in no such simple bifurcation of 'political or apolitical', which are antidotes to conservative times, imparted by conservative times. The very separation of 'political' or 'apolitical' into 'formal' and 'informal' indicates regressionbor at least a mild transfiguration without consciousness of that transfigurationbin terms of how we now determine the social situation of art, which isn't to say the quality of the art itself. I.e. the meaning of how and why it is misunderstood today demands newfound clarity as a possibly critical misinterpretation. The mode of the era is misinterpretation. Autonomy is necessarily misunderstood, but it may ultimately be for the sake of clarifying what autonomous art was trying to convey, but could not in its own moment. > > *** > > Autonomy and Society > The construction of 'autonomy' has origins in philosophical and social conditions extrinsic to art, but that art was theorized as critical for developing. 'Philosophical' and 'social' conditions were not initially perceived as separate, though they were not understood as unified either, not in the sense we'd understandbtheir separation is posthumous in a way that misunderstands autonomy, and in particular ways does so. These extrinsic, or heterogeneous conditions, beginning with the French Revolution and German philosophy, have been theorized retrospectively by a number of art historians, philosophers, and political thinkers who perceive the situation of autonomy as 'dead', perhaps in the sense that it can be seen clearly anew. Our distant vantage point is an otherness to the moment of autonomy, but not the otherness that autonomous artworks proposed. Seeing this historical development requires a certain imagination. For instance, T.J. Clark imagines Jacques Louis David's Death of Marat (1793) becoming unhinged from the walls of patronage and joining the newly articulate masses in the streets of the French Revolution. Imagery becomes synthetic, open to interpretation, and abstract when representing new conditions of social possibility. Idealism and Romanticism were direct reactions to the failure of the French Revolution to sufficiently 'achieve' liberty; aesthetics emerges because art becomes a mirror not of concrete reality, but of reality in the image it wants to be, of what is embryonic within it. Art in modernity is the representation of efflorescence. This project of the hypothetical, so to speak, led German Romantics to develop an individuation that is in tension with universals that are no longer given; a universal which is critically incomplete, and which has necessary manifestations in different particulars that cannot add up to a singular whole, but is a totality nonetheless. Marx articulated this developmental process when he said that with modernity, "all that is solid melts into air", which may sound today like an indictment of modernity as being chaotic, meaningless, or even nihilistic, but what was originally meant was that this dynamism registers the mutability and transformability of social conditions. > > This new social world co-developed, and was refined by a philosophy of autonomy: the development of a philosophical program of "self-determination". Autonomy to its foundational theorist, Kant, is summed up in his paper, Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment? His well-known answer is that it is "man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity". It is "emergent" because humanity for the first time becomes free to think without affirming predetermined values and predetermined institutions. That is, free to think critically, to think through the limits of reflection, and to develop this autonomy historically and within a new concept of the public. Marx's For A Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing further developed the necessity of this projectba thesis on how critique can productively bring about dynamic change by understanding that everything, which exists is incompletely free. In the context of a free but undetermined public, art becomes about its own self-determining reconstitution, free from having to reinforce the social mores or religious values to which it was once lawfully bound. For example, in the nineteenth century, Baudelaire criticized the regressive tendencies of artists who were still cloaking themselves in the past, urging them to paint modern life in all its contradictions. Art's inveterate self-criticism and adaptability to problematic contradictions is the reason it survives. In a sense, artworks continue because they critically recognize their possible death, imitating death, so to speak, and thereby living. Art's newfound problematic characterbits critical limitationsbis its origin. > > Read the full article on Art&Education.b(> b(> > > > Ongoing Call for Papers > A free contributor-driven platform, Art&Education Papers seeks to expand publication opportunities for art historians, theorists, curators, and artists, and to make papers more easily available to the public. As AE Papers continues to grow, we are reiterating our call for new and existing scholarly articles from around the world.b(> Texts should be research-based articles pertaining to art history or contemporary art, and can be culled from conference papers, seminar papers, dissertation chapters, etc. We ask that you submit pieces anywhere from 2,000 to approximately 7,500 words and include a 100-word abstract and full contact information (or publication information for previously published texts). All submissions are welcome and will be reviewed and considered for publication on the website. Please submit articles by email to [email protected]. > > News Announcements Papers About Subscribe Contact RSS > Unsubscribe
