From: "David Goldenberg" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Post-Autonomy on-line
From David Goldenberg http://www.postautonomy.co.uk/blog
Please download, print and distribute
An invitation for you to participate in a project looking at the
relationship of an audience to the space of art, and the future of art
by answering some questions and/or taking part in a discussion.
Contents:
0. Introduction
1. Participating in the project
2. Introduction to the questions
3. Questions
4. Options for extending a debate
0. Introduction
Currently my project, “Move into the domain of Post-Autonomy” is being
exhibited in the group show “Jump into Cold Water”, curated by Sonke
Gau and Katharina Schlieben, at the Shedhalle, Zurich, Switzerland
until the 30th July 2006.
http://www.shedhalle.ch/dt/presse/index.shtml
“Move into the domain of Post-Autonomy” is an on-line project located
on the Post-Autonomy web site; comprising text, questions, a schedule
of daily on-line discussions, which will be updated and changed
throughout the exhibition.
http://www.postautonomy.co.uk/blog
I have proposed to the Shedhalle that the next phase of this project,
which is planned to take place during July, will take the form of a
collaborative debate. A debate that proposes to focus on issues that
start by examining what is commonly understood as an “Audience for
art”, the relationship between an audience and Art, extending an
Audience’s Autonomy in Art, leading onto a discussion looking at
developing an Art for the future. For this to take place I am asking a
selection of people for their views on these topics.
1. Participating in the project if you want to take part.
I have devised a series of questions and would very much appreciate
you taking the time to answer them. These questions and subsequent
answers will be made available to the public on the Post-Autonomy
website and will remain online for the duration of the “Jump into Cold
Water” exhibition. Below I have made a few suggestions of the form
your responses may take, but if you have any other ideas or
suggestions please feel free to use them.
Practicalities
a) If you agree to take part please make sure to include your
name so that you will be fully credited.
b) You can email your responses to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
c) Locate material on the PA website yourself.
d) Or you can book time to talk about your answers and any other
issues in the PA chat room.
To locate material on the website will only take a few minutes. To do
this you will need to go to the PA homepage,
http://www.postautonomy.co.uk/blog enter a user name and apply for a
password, which will be sent back to your email automatically. Once
you have this, enter both your user name and password and you will be
able to add your material to the site. A space for your content will
be clearly visible on the homepage.
If you want to discuss issues raised by this information sheet in more
depth or open up a discussion topic of your own, you can book a time
to talk about these in the PA website chat room with myself or anyone
else who enters the chat room. I can usually be found in the chat room
from Monday-Friday between 6-7 BST.
English language version
Post-Autonomy on-line
From David Goldenberg http://www.postautonomy.co.uk/blog
2) Introduction to Questions
Expanding the role of an audience in Art as a point of departure for
making changes in Art
Examining the role of an audience in Art is much more than a question
of how to reach new or untapped consumers, it is also much more than
the fashionable cynical use of an audience as free labour.
Nevertheless how is it possible to address and rethink the issue of an
Audience in Art in its complexity, in a manner that allows the
possibility to break through the current dead end, and that over comes
the suggestion that the problem of an audience for Art is already
solved? In the quest to develop ideas for making changes in Art it is,
I think, important to start by looking at ungluing and renegotiating
these existing positions in Art. By “positions” I understand this to
mean recognition of those persons who want to take part in Art, as
opposed to those persons who ought to take part, and who is and who is
not allowed entrance into Art to take part. This is what is
understood as the Politics of Art. And when I discuss ideas for change
I specifically refer to the possibility for making alterations or
improvements to a Euro-centric Art tradition, and when I refer to an
end of Art, or an end or development of aesthetic Autonomy, again it
is in specific reference to the construction of this Euro-centric Art
tradition. We can take that further by looking at breaking the link
between this model of Art and its symbolic role in promoting the
expansion of Western values.
Entry points into the questions
A point of departure for the project must start by looking at whether
there is a realistic possibility for freeing up and renegotiating the
space of what is recognised as the space of the Audience, in order for
the audience to acquire an extended role.
I therefore want to start with the following preliminary questions as
a guide for you to enter the project.
How should any audiences contribution to a project be acknowledged?
What is an audience in Art?
What constitutes an audience for Art?
Why should an audience engage with Art?
What is the role an audience plays in shaping an Art event?
How does an audience acquire information about Art?
Should an audience be interested in expanding their role? And if they
do in what way do you think this is possible and how do they do this
effectively?
What system requires to be put in place to assist an audience to be
able to do this?
(If you want to address any of these questions specifically please do)
These concerns, I think you will agree, are of interest to many of us.
For a non specialised audience to begin to engage with these issues
and go onto make an informed decision within the space of Art, a
system of acquiring a body of specialist knowledge and concepts, and
learning about art through a working channel for communicating is
obviously necessary, and this is what I want to look at putting into
practice during this project. But having said, please note, that I
have out of necessity tried to cut out as much specialist language as
I can, by falling back to familiar terms that a general audience
understands, but they are not necessarily the terms I would employ in
describing the field of Post Autonomy, which I hope doesn't lead to
further misunderstandings!
Changing a Euro-centric tradition of art
An audience’s Autonomy
What I would like to ask you next are a number of questions about what
you think about Art today; whether you think there is a realistic
possibility for its development or change, including the expansion of
the role of the audience and the space for an audience to make
decisions about the shape of any Art practice. This can be described
as an audience’s “Autonomy in Art”. Development of an audience’s
Autonomy in Art can also be understood as its “Post-Autonomy”, through
expanding beyond a standard or normalised idea of Autonomy.
English language version
Post-Autonomy on-line
From David Goldenberg http://www.postautonomy.co.uk/blog
Bureau for research into Post-Autonomy, Post-Autonomy on-line, and the
Post-Autonomy website, established 2006
What is Post-Autonomy?
The debate and understanding of Post-Autonomy, which is in its
infancy, is proposed as another way of thinking and staging
contemporary culture. A debate that taps into and builds on recent
research carried out by the theorists and philosophers Luhmann,
Lingner and Ranciere, into the history of the invention of
contemporary Art, or what is more correctly understood as a
Euro-centric art tradition. This research examines the physical make
up that embodies this tradition, in order to then go onto staging a
fundamental rethinking into how that tradition has been translated and
transmitted. All agree that our current understanding of this
tradition is seriously flawed and that a complete rethinking is
required. Key to this revision and rethinking revolves around the
notion of Aesthetic Autonomy, and here these authors can be seen to
belong to the tradition that opens up and expands any closed or
restricted reading of Aesthetic Autonomy, including how and where it
is applied. This process of how we rethink, reinvent, expand or go
beyond Autonomy is what we understand as Post-Autonomy; this reading
of Post-Autonomy feeds into Political Sciences concrete example and
understanding of Post-Autonomy as the completion or conclusion of a
Nation States Autonomy. Since this moment allows for the fundamental
revision of all aspects of how we rethink and stage a contemporary
cultural practice, it can also be seen as a moment that coincides with
developing a new model for the future of art, a new model, which we
have termed Post-Autonomy.
Recently 16 Beaver Group described Post Autonomy as follows:
“Post-Autonomous art describes a mode of making art at a time when the
artist’s presumed autonomy has become rather problematic. A
post-autonomous mode of production is no longer concerned with
creating singular works of art attributable to a particular artist or
author. Instead, a post-autonomous art practice employs a
collaborative or dialogical mode of production, for example, via
face-to face or on-line dialogues, conversations or events, wiki’s,
salons, bulletin boards, chat rooms, or collaborative visual editing
environments.
The aim of post-autonomous artistic production is not (or not
primarily) to create objects (electronic or physical) or to document
the traces of the productive process. Rather, it is to support and
embody a political transformation whereby the human participants
subscribes to an open ended mutual learning process and define and
activate a productive space outside capitalism and its competitive
mode of production.”
Ola Stahl of Ccred has written:
In relation to the post-autonomy project, the comment was made that
the project raises a significant question: What is a concept? How does
a concept operate? Referring specifically to the notion of
post-autonomy, for instance, is it meant to be an art historical
concept (used to group together and define a number of practices as
being post-autonomous), or is it an ‘inventive’ concept (i.e. is it
used to crack open habitual practices of thought (and practice in
itself) to open up to different parameters of cultural
production/practice)?
English language version
Post-Autonomy on-line
From David Goldenberg http://www.postautonomy.co.uk/blog
Questions
Introduction
An Audiences role in taking responsibility for shaping an Art of the
future by building a new model that we understand as Post Autonomy.
Your contribution to this project can be seen to extend and test out
how we understand Autonomy in Art, and in that respect develops a
debate into understanding a notion of “Post-Autonomy”. Through
expanding the Autonomy of your role relocates you into a central
position where you have the responsibility, if you wish to take up the
challenge, for discussing how you can contribute to making fundamental
changes to a normalised model of Art.
How do we understand this use of language in art?
I now want to make a number of tentative observations, concerning the
form this language and questioning has taken so far, and where I think
it is leading. And these have to be tentative since I want to see
whether it is at last feasible to begin to pin down the
characteristics of a recognisable language and inherent logic that
allow us to understand this new and unexplored terrain of
Post-Autonomy.
How can we characterise the logic of using language in art, the use of
this form of questioning, the process of rethinking through all
aspects of what we understand as a Euro-centric tradition of art, and
how do we go onto understand this or a similar methodology transferred
into the space of PA?
So far it is possible to make the following observations:
. Use of language and questioning as a continuation of PA projects
exploring the stripping down or away of formal and conceptual
trappings of a
Euro-centric tradition. (I do of course that this continues a
reductive rather than additive form of developing a practice and
system of building
thinking, with all of its inherent problems, art historical
ideologies and mythologies.)
. Working in a “gap” that bares no resemblance to any existing means
of presenting, staging and thinking within the tradition of a
Euro-centric
tradition, but nevertheless allows the possibility of moving
forward.
. Recognising the end, or suspension, of this Euro-centric tradition.
. Recognising a space where a language doesn’t have to rely on the
resources and logic of this Euro-centric tradition.
. Use of a type of language and questioning that allows for the
possibility for rebuilding and navigating around the space of Post
Autonomy. I
understand this use of language inside PA, dislocated from its
context and comprehension within a Euro centric tradition, to full
fill another role
and function inside the space of PA, where language can be seen as
more or less than language.
1) What is Autonomy?
In discussions looking into the future of art, in talks and texts into
“Post-Autonomy” on the Post-Autonomy website, we start by asking
ourselves what is Autonomy? In most people’s thinking the idea of
Autonomy is linked to Democracy, freedom and Art. But when we try to
put our thoughts into words it proves notoriously illusive and
difficult to pin down exactly what Autonomy is. However, given that
the issue of Autonomy is so significant, particularly it’s central
role in any understanding of Contemporary Art, I would like to ask
you:
1a) How, would you put into words and define your own idea of Autonomy?
1b) If you cannot do this maybe you can provide visual examples?
1c) But how useful is the continued application of the notion of
Autonomy to our daily lives? Is there an alternative notion we can
point too?
1d) Do you think an understanding of Autonomy in Art and Politics is
equivalent? If it is, I now want to ask the following. If the notion
of Autonomy is such a distant notion, and it is necessary to remember
or recall what Autonomy is in order to think about Autonomy; and, if a
recent reading of Autonomy can be linked to Western expansionism,
Neo-Liberalism, and Neo-Liberalism’s reading of freedom and Democracy,
how useful is it to continue to apply this template of Autonomy to a
changing, advanced understanding of contemporary culture?
English language version
Post-Autonomy on-line
From David Goldenberg http://www.postautonomy.co.uk/blog
2) Art and Computers
Recently the debate into issues of Autonomy, freedom, open society,
break down of positions and authorship etc has migrated to the web.
2a) Where do you think we can locate clear examples or evidence of
Aesthetic Autonomy today, is it in a normalised art practice or the
mythical open space of net art?
2b) Can you say something about how you think Autonomy works in net
art or the web, and if possible show examples.
3) Rethinking how we understand art, developing a new model of Art,
and an Art of the future.
By rethinking Autonomy and expanding the role of an audience’s
Autonomy in Art, we start to think about new possibilities for Art,
which is equivalent to thinking about an “Art of the future”. An “Art
of the Future” is another method we can use to disengage from existing
thinking and examples of normalised notion of Art by projecting
outside or beyond this existing framework.
3a) In your opinion is this method of breaking, disrupting and
forgetting how we think and stage Art now a useful way to start to
look at developing a new idea of Art? If not what other process would
you suggest?
3b) Again in your opinion is there a need, and is it realistic to
rethink our understanding of art and develop a new model within
today’s economic and cultural climate?
3c) If you have an opportunity of rethinking and reinventing Art what
would you want in Art in the future?
4) How do we position this thinking about an Art of the future?
4a) Through developing a new model of Art, which we call
“Post-Autonomy”, how do you think we can make sense of this thinking
and research?
4b) If the project looks at developing a new model of Art, or a model
of Art for the future, does it make sense to continue to recognise
this thinking in relationship to a tradition of Art that the thinking
is seeking to disengage from?
4c) Or, does it make sense to look at developing a different context
for this thinking, in relationship to different debates, for instance
debates into Globalisation, Post Colonial thinking, New Media and Net
art, or none of these?
5) A language for a future Art practice.
5a) If this thinking and practice can be seen to break with the
tradition of a Euro-centric practice en-route to establishing an Art
of the future, what language do you suggest we tap into to articulate
to make sense and open up this Art of the future?
6) The term Post-Autonomy
6a) How useful is the term or image of “Post-Autonomy” in signalling a
new model of Art?
6b) The use of the term "Post-Autonomy" often triggers debate into the
lack or loss of Autonomy in art (and peoples daily lives), so that the
use of Post-Autonomy can be seen to define the actual existing
conditions of un freedom in contemporary art . But the term can also
be seen to suggest a moment and opportunity for setting out a set of
ideas that could better embody the specificity of today's cultural
practice. In that respect the debate generated by PA can be seen as an
opportunity to replace a weak notion with a notion generated by
living, engaged practitioners that is specific to today's conditions.
In your view is this use of PA worth while, and if it is how do we go
onto construct a better set of ideas for a contemporary cultural
practice?
6c) Possibly Post Autonomy doesn't hint at a new model, but instead
could be seen to picture a new stage in the development of
Capitalism, of the nation State, and even the virtual space of the
web, new technologies, net art, which is sometimes recognised to
embody notions of Capitalist space. Due you think this a better
understanding of PA, and if it is can you place say why.
7) Please include here any other issues you think are useful to raise
or you would like to discuss on the PA website.
If you require any further information to do with this project, or
have constructive ideas on how to clarify any statements I have made,
please feel free to contact me.
English language version
Post-Autonomy on-line
From David Goldenberg http://www.postautonomy.co.uk/blog
4) Options for extending the debate
If you don’t want to respond to the questions or statements in the
form of a questionnaire then please feel free to use this space to
develop or sketch out an alternative idea
For example this could take the form of:
A programme of discussions on the PA chat room
Talks using skype
A web caste debate
Rewrite any part of the text in your own language and wording
Or any other form you think would be more appropriate
