Some of you might have asked themselves: Why a lecture on “autonomy” - especially when I’m not a fine art but a design student? This brings us to our first problem: In no other countries in the world except the Netherlands and Flanders, fine art is called “autonoom”. And in the way I just phrased this sentence, I created a second problem: Flanders is actually not a country, but a part of Belgium. Yet, as we know, a considerable of its population actually does consider Flanders a country and thus wants autonomy.
We are confronted with issues of autonomy in the media every day: The Brexit is a plea for the UK’s autonomy from the EU, in a country - by the way - that historically hardly any experience of giving up parts of sovereignty for a larger political entity while this is a normal experience for continental Europe. If the Brexit should happen, there is a chance that Scotland would strive for national independence, which would be: political autonomy. We have a war over autonomy in the Ukraine; which includes a partial question of whether the Eastern part of the country should be conversely autonomous from the Ukraine as a whole. ISIS is a campaign for autonomy, of an Islamist califate. In the USA, Donald Trump campaigns for “America first”, demanding among others to end existing international free trade agreements. At the same time, as a conservative, he campaigns against liberal abortion rights - which have been a central issue of autonomy for feminism, concerning the autonomy of women to decide about their own bodies. [Barbara Kruger, Your Body is a Battleground]
In America, Google and Tesla conduct the first field tests for automatically driving cars - since they do not require human drivers, at least ideally, they are called “autonomous cars”.
These examples show that autonomy is not only a thing of the past, but also very much of the present. They also show that autonomy is an issue at stake, a question rather than an answer. It is in a process of redefinition and reinvention in the 21st century. In my lecture, I will try to cover as many aspects and issues of autonomy as possible, but not in order to give you definite answers, but in order to lay out the questions that concern autonomy today.
Our preliminary conclusion thus could be: there are several concepts of autonomy in various fields. Art is only one of them. But since the invention of the concept, the autonomy of art might never have been as contested as today. To talk more specifically about the Netherlands: the autonomy of art has been exposed as fragile, and been contested as such, since 2011 when Dutch governmental cultural politics changed and shook the fundaments of the Dutch contemporary art system.
In the same year, there was a large-scale demonstration in the Netherlands, the “March of Civilization” (“mars der beschaving”). Through this showdown between the VVD party and the protesters, the issue of art and its autonomy was narrowed down to one between the political right and political left, and one between business logic and humanism. It seems as if in the Netherlands, we are still stuck with this dualism - in this lecture, I will attempt to cut through this and broaden our perspective on autonomy.
The severe budget cuts of the first Rutte cabinet exposed two things:
Art was economically not autonomous, but dependent on public funding. By the way, this did not only apply to contemporary visual art (“autonoom beeldende kunst”), but to large parts of Dutch design which was indirectly dependent on cultural funding - for example, all experimental graphic and media designers whose clients were, and are, mostly art institutes. And to architects and designers who could realize their most daring and adventurous projects for clients from the cultural sector. Nevertheless, this brings us to the question how something could be called autonomous that is economically not self-sufficient.
In that sense, you could argue that Rutte and Zijlstra were just good liberal politicians who brought back the Dutch concept of art’s autonomy to its Dutch liberal origins - about which I will talk in a couple of minutes. Instead, however, the Rutte cabinet created a new complex and expensive institutional bureaucracy and funding system for the creative industries, which seems outright absurd: If creative industries are really an industry, then they are commercial and need neither public support, nor public planning. As a result, in 2016, we ended up with two parallel cultural systems: art and creative industries, both of them now having a distinct Dutch flavor, even to the extent where one could argue that “Creative Industries” in Netherlands now means something rather different from the rest of the world.
In that sense, we have neither real “autonomy” nor real “industries”. This begs a more fundamental, even philosophical question: Is there such a thing as autonomy at all? Considering that all beings and all things in the world exist in vital interdependence, as part of connected systems, isn’t “autonomy” a romantic illusion?
If go back to the root of the word, then “autonomy” first of all relates to politics: The Greek work “nomos” means “law” or “norm”, “auto” means “self”. Therefore, “auto-nomos” refers to something that gives itself its own law, or that follows its own law.
We mostly know the law as something that isn’t individual, but written by the state: In that sense, radical claims for autonomy will always clash with the legal authority of the state in power. However, autonomy may not be absolute, but relative: In that sense, we have relative autonomy wherever state law leaves areas undefined, or just defines a framework. A good example are house rules, whether at a bar, club, shop, your own home or a school like this one: Within the parameters of state law, we have the right to create our own rules for a particular space, for example that visitors of a restaurant may not bring their own food and drinks, that visitors of your home have to take their shoes off, that visitors of a church have to be silent, or that visitors of a squatted house may not utter sexist or racist statements even if they fall under the freedom of speech of state law.
In all of these examples, we can recall numerous historical conflicts between individuals or communities on the one side and state authority on the other: the fight between catholic church and secular powers, popes and kings over power in the Middle Ages - a fight that still continues between fundamentalist homeschooling Christians and state authorities today. The fight between radical Islam and secular authority over law and political rule, the law of the Sharia versus secular law. Or, in the Netherlands as well, churches providing shelter to asylum seekers whom the state wants to detain. Or the fights of squatters against the police, which are fights for the degrees of relative autonomy.
The definition of a totalitarian political system is that leaves absolutely no room for autonomy, not even miniscule amounts of relative autonomy. George Orwell’s 1984, with the “telescreen” as its all-pervasive medium of propaganda and surveillance, remains the most precise scenario of such totalitarianism, no matter what its ideological (or religious) facade.
Therefore, the issue of “autonomy” is intrinsically linked to that of free will. Or, to be more, precise: to the question of how free will can translate into law, or at least into rules and policies that are commonly accepted within a larger rule of law. - I.e.: we create house rules for this school, they allow the school to kick out people if necessary, and these rules are formulated in a legally waterproof way - so that the person who got kicked out cannot go to the police and to a court and sue him- or herself back into this building, if necessary, by police force (i.e. police agents escorting him into the school). If you think that this is an unrealistic scenario, just think of the American civil rights movement in the 1960s where black people sued themselves into schools, and needed to be escorted by the police, based on the general rule of law that rendered certain house rules illegal; think of civil rights activist Rosa Parks who did not accept the house rules of a public transport company that assigned different seats to black and white people.
[Rosa Parks]
In other words, the conflict between Rosa Parks and the bus company can be read as a conflict over multiple instances of autonomy: Rosa Parks’ autonomy to choose whatever seat she wants and not be discriminated because of the color of her skin; the bus company’s autonomy to create its own house rules (which could also be the assignment of 1st and 2nd class seats like in trains); and, in conflict with these two claims for autonomy, the sovereignty of the state that has to enforce its law. In the case of the United States, the situation was even more complicated through the collision of state law and federal law. The Southern States in the 1960s had the Jim Crow laws that commanded racial segregation and discrimination whereas Federal law was based on the assumption of equal rights for all Americans. The civil rights movement made this conflict visible by drawing it from a legal conflict between state and federal governance to a personal conflict between the autonomy of a person versus the autonomy of a bus company: In that sense, this could be read as an activist piece of performance art, or a performative media intervention, on this legal and political issue. - Another reading of this intervention is that it took a political issue from abstract laws and policies to visual culture, creating an iconic image for the issue at stake. It is thus also a textbook example for the political power of image-making.
[patientenrechtendossier]
An example for autonomy as part of our daily lives are patient rights, which are particularly highly developed here in this country. The right to determine whether, for example, be taken off life support if you are terminally ill, is a right that concerns your autonomy. Other countries, Germany for example, do not grant their citizens this right and autonomy. And a complex question concerns the degree of autonomy you still have if your physical and mental health has degraded.
“Autonomy” is, to repeat it, thus individual free will expressed as a law or rule for an action.
A very recent philosophical question is to whom we grant this autonomy: to all humans (egalitarian), but to which degree to children, to elderly, to mentally and physically ill people? To the citizens of a state or also to tourists,
visitors or new immigrants? Consider the autonomy of drugging yourself and whether or not you need a “wietpas” for that: Here, we are already talking about different interpretations of autonomy between Brabant and the Randstad.
[Mirandola] [Castoriadis]
But what about animals, or - to take very recent philosophical discussions - even plants or inanimate objects? Let’s park this question for a while and let’s just refer to classical humanist definitions of autonomy: For the Italian Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, “autonomy” marks the very difference between people and animals: for him, humans have autonomy, animals don’t. (It should be noted that in the 20th century, system theorists described the unpredictability of the way in which a dog would run as an example of the animal’s partial self-organization or autonomy.) For the French post-war social philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, an anti-Soviet Marxist, autonomy was a crucial part of a democratic society, marking the difference between self-rule (the literal translation of autonomy) and foreign-rule (heteronymy) through a dictatorship.
So far, we have discussed autonomy as individual sovereignty, linked to the concept of individual rights and freedom against the higher authority of the state. But today’s political concept also recognize collective autonomy: namely what is defined in the United Nations charta as the right of national self-determination. This brings us back to our initial examples: Ukraine, Scotland, Flanders. The problem here is: Who defines a nation? Isn’t the nation itself a problematic concept in a globalized and networked world? (Those of you who are foreign students probably are intimately familiar with this issue, given the complexities of moving from one country to the other, getting insurance, rental contracts etc., even within the EU.) The history of the Netherlands shows how fragile the concept of national autonomy can be, especially if you are a small country.
What has this to do with the arts? Quite a lot: Many of today’s nations in Europe were constructions of the 19th century. Much of their national folklore was invented by poets, painters and composers (like the Brothers Grimm and Wagner in Germany) in the period of romanticism. [Grimm]
In the last few decades, we have seen a reversal of this logic where artists no longer cater to the creation of a nation state they are part of, but instead create micro nations of their own:
[AVL-Ville]
Declaration of a free state in AVL’s studio building complex in the harbor area of Rotterdam, “a utopian village, where people could live and work in an ecological, autarkic way”. Autonomy taken literally: from fine art to a self-sustaining, self-ruling state. “This large-scale project forms a high point in the work of AVL; it was a culmination of all the works produced by AVL up to that time. This project provided a form of art not just to look at, but to be lived in and with”.
Previous example: Otto Muehl commune - grew out of Vienna actionism in the early 1970s, established as a utopian living and sex commune, grew in the 1970s and 1980s internationally, accumulated financial power, ended up as a quasi-fascist dystopia, dissolved by the police because of sexual abuse of children growing up in the commune, Muehl jailed for seven years.
In both cases: combination of artistic autonomy and political autonomy - if you are truly self-governed in your art, then the ultimate consequence is to found your own state. In the case of Muehl, carried out to the last consequence, as a total and totalitarian artwork; in the case of Atelier van Lieshout, as a symbolic and semi-ironical experiment.
NSK state: created by the Slovenian artist collective Irwin/Neue Slovenische Kunst and the band Laibach. Issues passports since the early 1990s. Anyone can become a member of the NSK state and order a passport. Can be read as a reaction to the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Some have used the passport for travel. Massively ordered by people in African countries by people who hoped it would work as a passport to immigrate into Europe. NSK state thus became a mythology: When members of Irwin traveled to Nigeria to explain that this was an art project, people insisted that the NSK State was a really existing European country.
These are examples of claiming full autonomy for communities, no matter whether these are artists’ communes or geographic regions. We are also familiar with partial autonomy, for example for ethnic minorities or semi-autonomous regions (native Americans in the U.S., Friesland in the Netherlands, Scotland and Wales in the UK, Catalonia in Spain).
I leave aside the complex relation between autonomy, sovereignty and hegemony - which a political philosopher could better explain than me. (Gramsci, Schmitt, Mouffe) Just briefly: A popular concept of both the radical left and the radical left of the late 20th century has been that of hegemony, founded by the Italian communist party leader Antonio Gramsci - which is not about gaining autonomy or sovereignty for a particular population, but about gaining cultural influence and intellectual leadership in a community: For example, it could be argued that right-wing populism since Pim Fortuyn, Geert Wilders but also thanks to media like GeenStijl has gained intellectual hegemony in the Netherlands for more than a decade, even if this doesn’t express itself in majority votes.
[Geert Wilders, Fitna - example of politician using art as a hegemonic device.]
Italian communism and socialism was an intellectual think tank for new political ideas of the late 20th century because it broke with Leninism, Stalinism and many traditional socialist dogmas. Perhaps most importantly, with the dogma of trade unionism; that unionized workers organized in councils should form the root of society and the political system. (“Soviet” is the Russian word for “worker council”.) In the 1970s, a part of the radical Italian left organized itself decentrally under the name “Autonomia Operaia” (“workers’ autonomy”). The connecting idea was that there should be no top-down organization, no central committees, and indeed a focus on the independence/autonomy of the working class rather than their central collective organization. ntonio Negri, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi. Next to “autonomy”, a central concept for this movement was “autogestione”, bottom-up self-organization.
This movement is known as the autonomist movement, and manifested itself in experimental pirate radio stations (Radio Alice) and squatted “social center” (“centri sociali”) that became the role model for squatter culture in Northern Europe including the Netherlands. Several prominent cultural theoreticians were involved or had close ties, next to Negri and Berardi, Michel Foucault and Félix Guattari. This movement was called “autonomist” and spilled over in the late 1970s to Germany and the Netherlands, where it is still known as “Autonomen”, and operates at the fringes of the radical communist and radical anarchist left.
In the early 1990s, their concepts were extended by the American countercultural theorist Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson) who had closely studied the Italian left and its theory. In 1992, he proposed a concept of “Temporary Autonomous Zones” which, as the name says, no longer makes a comprehensive territorial claim, but calls upon for the creation of spaces - TAZ is
“like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen before the State can crush it”.
Influential on 1990s rave culture, and beginnings of Internet art and Internet activism.
To cut the discussion very short: This politics is by far not monopolized by the left. Militias in the U.S. employ the same concepts and tactics of autonomy, Neonazis in Eastern Germany run “nationally liberated zones” that perfectly fit the theoretical framework of Hakim Bey and the Italian autonomists. There are even neofascist squats in Italy, such as the “Centro sociale Ezra Pound”, and a Neonazi movement of “Autonome Nationalisten” both in Germany and in the Netherlands which copy the tactics and the visual culture of the left-wing Autonomen squatter movement.
So if political “autonomy” doesn’t say anything about the politics performed in its name, is there any intrinsic political value to autonomy? Contemporary examples: Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, both under state prosecution, both are free only because they used certain loopholes of political autonomy: the autonomy of the Venezuelan embassy in London, the autonomy of Russia as a political territory.
Example: [Trevor Paglen, Autonomy cube] - this work was developed with a close collaborator of Julian Assange, hacker activist Jacob Applebaum, co-developer of the TOR network for anonymous browsing - that Snowden currently uses for his communication. At the same time, using the visual language of contemporary art and the autonomy granted by the art museum. So again, the tactical use of art’s relative autonomy for gaining political autonomy.
I mentioned the Dutch art funding cuts in 2011 as a rupture for the understanding of art’s autonomy in this country. In the same year, artists, critics and curators in collaboration with Dutch art spaces began an “autonomy project” to critically examine the status of autonomy in relation to art today. I greatly recommend its project website as a resource for in-depth reading on the subject:
http://theautonomyproject.org/about
In 2012, Jonas Staal addressed autonomy in relation to the new cultural politics in a manifesto “Art in Defense of Democracy” which he published in NRC Handelsblad. The first two sentences are a precise definition of what is commonly understood as the autonomy of art since the enlightenment period:
“The struggle of art in the twentieth century is characterized by an aspiration for freedom. Art has battled the church, the state, and the wealthy bourgeoisie in order no longer to serve a religious, political, or economic agenda.”
In his manifesto, he sums up the Dutch take on art’s autonomy in relation to politics as follows:
“The politics of Post-WWII parliamentary democracies - such as in the Netherlands - has taken this struggle seriously. In our post-war era, politics has financed art’s duty to be free. Any direct ideological commitment has become suspect, as a result of the role played by art in the Nazi and Stalinist systems. […]”
From a critical point of view, politics financing art to be free is a contradiction in itself. Which way you turn it, state-financed art is ultimately state art. Staal acknowledges this in his manifesto, too:
A generic politics - a politics replacing ideology with management - has sponsored an equally generic art.
His alternative vision is the following:
“[W]e need a proactive politics and a proactive art which dare to serve a truly ideological project. […] From the Spanish Indignados protests to the worldwide Occupy Movement, from the old Green to the new Pirate Parties, from Wikileaks to Anonymous and the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), we see the outlines of an international democratization movement appear.”
“I believe art may become of social significance again if it dares to make the ‘freedom’ it has gained in the 20th century serve an ideological project, rather than to brand this freedom once more in the hysteric speculative economics of the market of art consumption”. “We do not want to create art within a so-called democracy; we want to shape democracy ourselves”.
Staal creates a strong link between aesthetic autonomy and political autonomy.
In the same year, Jonas Staal began his project New World Summit, a non-profit organization that creates parliaments for people who have been put outside political representation. These included Philippine, Kurdish and Basque independence fighter organizations - later summits organized by Staal brought in more representatives of “stateless states”. Since these events always gathered in art institutions, they could be seen as autonomy of art to provide a space for political autonomy claims.
But where does the concept of the autonomy of art come from? It is relatively recent, and relatively specific: As Staal explained in the statement quoted earlier, art historically depended on patronage and therefore was not independent - patronage also dictated the subjects and styles of art: In the European middle ages, the Catholic church was almost the only patron of art, hence was all art depiction of biblical motives according theological rules. In the modern age, patronage became secular, and kings or rich families like the Medici - in the Dutch golden age, the well-to-do bourgeoisie - dictated taste, style and content of art. But has this really really change if patronage now has shifted to public art institutions and rich private collectors?
The concept of the autonomy of art was invented in the European enlightenment period, more specifically in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. To cut this as short as possible: Kant’s moral philosophy fundamentally dealt with the autonomy of the human subject, since he tried to formulate a secular moral law, i.e. an ethics that is no longer founded on external laws like the biblical ten commandments. This resulted in the categorical imperative, which says: “always act according to the rule that the rule of your action should become general law”. To simplify the statement: “always act like you think everyone should act”. While this sounds frightening, it radically shifts the principle of morality from top-down (god) to bottom-up (human individual), and assigns the individual human autonomy - in general rule - that is cleverly put in relation to general law: the human subject is autonomous, but puts itself under law.
The autonomy of art is closely related to this figure of thought: In enlightenment, romanticist and modernist aesthetic philosophy, it essentially means that art gives itself its own rules. Kant defines this as the “disinterested pleasure” of art: There is no external interest (like that of the church or the aristocracy) commanding art, but also the perception of art is not guided by particular political, religious, or even moral and social interests. In romanticism, this view was radicalized to the idea of “l’art pour l’art”, art for art’s sake: Art should not only be independent from external factors, but also free itself from the classical rules of depiction and representation.
[William Turner, shipwreck] - no longer allegorical depiction, beginning of abstraction [Caspar David Friedrich]
In abstract art, this aesthetic found its almost logical conclusion. The most influential critic of modernist art in the 20th century, Clement Greenberg, wrote in the early 1960s in his essay Modernist Painting:
“I identify Modernism with the intensification, almost the exacerbation, of this self-critical tendency that began with the philosopher Kant. Because he was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism, I conceive of Kant as, the first real Modernist.”
Greenberg applies Kant’s project of self-critique to art, using it to determine the essence of the arts in the modern age:
What had to be exhibited was not only that which was unique and irreducible in art in general, but also that which was unique and irreducible in each particular art. Each art had to determine, through its own operations and works, the effects exclusive to itself.
So, to paraphrase, when art is no longer determined by external factors but autonomous, it has to find and focus on its core essence. This essence is, for Greenberg, the “medium” of art:
It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the specific effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thus would each art be rendered “pure,” and in its “purity” find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence. “Purity” meant self-definition, and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance.
The purity thus is l’art-pour-l’art, where painting is about the medium of painting and nothing else. Greenberg was the major advocate of abstract expressionism, so his concept of medium-specificity of modernist art related to work like this:
[Pollock], [Rothko]
In the Netherlands, we mostly understand “autonomous art” as the opposite of applied art, design. However, this is actually not the understanding of autonomy in art theory and aesthetic philosophy: In the latter, “autonomy of art” relates to art not being instrumentalized for religious or political purposes. This means, in an understanding informed by aesthetic theory, Jonas Staal’s New World Summit is not autonomous at all, because it brings political purposes into art. It is neither “pure” in Greenberg’s sense, nor “disinterested pleasure” in Kant’s sense.
The most debates about aesthetic autonomy happened in 20th century left-wing art: Most of the artistic left was strictly opposed to it, because it wanted art to serve an educational, enlightening or even propagandistic purpose. This was true for the theater of Brecht (which drew on Friedrich Schiller’s earlier educational aesthetics and critique of autonomy), the Situationists, or contemporary political activist artists. Most Marxists reject the concept of autonomous art as bourgeois aestheticism.
One of the main defenders of art’s autonomy as a political value was Theodor Adorno [Adorno]. He positions the supposedly bourgeois autonomy and l’art-pour-l’art as “social antithesis to society”: For Adorno, the art work is both “fait social”, a social fact and a commodity, and autonomous, and thereby transcends it value as a commercial commodity. For him, autonomy of art means resistance to commercialism and commodification, and in that sense, the most extreme l’art-pour-l’art works are political: For example, to quote his own favorites, Arnold Schönberg’s atonal music and Mallarmé’s symbolist poetry - examples of extremely difficult, extremely complex, extremely non-popular, sometimes even hermetic art. For Adorno and his followers, this avant-garde character was a manifestation of political resistance. He would therefore completely have rejected Jonas Staal’s New World Summit, whereas Marxists and radical left-wingers who were against autonomy aesthetics would have applauded his work.
I think the reason for this is a particularly Dutch understanding of “autonomous art” that partly differs from how the concept is understood in the rest of the world. To remember the quote:
“I believe art may become of social significance again if it dares to make the ‘freedom’ it has gained in the 20th century serve an ideological project,
There is a paradox of “freedom” and “serve” - a philosopher would argue that there is no more real freedom or autonomy in art if it serves and project or purpose. -
In the Netherlands, the understanding of autonomous art historically goes back to the 19th century liberal politician and co-founder of the Dutch democractic system, Johan Rudolph Thorbecke, who had a doctorate in literary studies and taught at the German university of Gießen where he got influenced by 18th and 19th century German philosophy, including its aesthetic theory. In 1848, he said in a parliamentary debate:
“De Kunst is geen regeringszaak, in zooverre de Regering geen oordeel, noch eenig gezag heeft op het gebied der kunst.”
(“Art is not the government’s business to the extent that the government has neither any judgment, nor any saying in the area of art”.) This clearly describes a liberal democratic policy of granting art freedom. What Thorbecke thus granted is the freedom of art, or “vrijheid van de kunst”, and being closely related to the constitutional “freedom of speech”; this issue has subsequently got mixed up with “autonomie van de kunst”. On top of that, the common understanding of “autonome kunst” in the Netherlands is now that of “fine art” versus “applied art” which other languages describe with the attribute “free” versus “applied art”: “arts libres” versus “arts décoratifs” in French, “freie Kunst” versus “angewandte Kunst” in German.
This division is specific to Western culture and is unknown in Asia and Africa except as an import of the Western model. It is also a division that has been fundamentally questioned since the Art and Crafts movements in the 19th century and the Russian avant-garde of the early 20th century: the work of artists like Rodchenko and El Lissitzky cannot really be divided into “fine art” or “design”, and as revolutionary communist art, it was decidedly against any bourgeois-liberal concepts of l’art-pour-l’art and autonomy aesthetics. The Netherlands, where all contemporary art schools come out of the Arts and Crafts tradition and use the Bauhaus curriculum, has an even longer respective tradition: De Stijl couldn’t be easily divided into fine art and design either, and many contemporary Dutch artists like Joep van Lieshout and Jeanne van Heeswijk - and Jonas Staal in some of his works - operate in an area between fine art and design.
Conversely, much if not most of what is now famous as Dutch Design has a fine art or “autonomous” quality to it because it is not simply industrial design or utilitarian. The history of speculative and artistic design starts with Russian futurism [Lissitzky, Lenin monument; Tatlin, Letatlin, Varvara Stepanova, sports suit], continues in the 1960s with Buckminster Fuller [dome] and today is exemplified by Dutch designers like Moniker [Moniker], Metahaven [Metahaven] and Jurgen Bey [Bey] and Studio Superuse [Superuse].
This begs the question: Is the concept of “autonomous art” still sustainable? Isn’t it a left-over of 19th century idealist aesthetics? And hasn’t it always been a pipe dream rather than a reality since, the one way of the other, artists and languages of art have never been fully self-governed, but always subject to various social and material forces?
There has been an interesting update to the definition of art’s “autonomy” by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in the 1980s. He radically cuts through the classical notions of autonomous art by proposing the following new, sober definition:
“autonomous” refers to any artwork that has not been commissioned by an external party, but looks for its own market.
“heteronomous” refers to any artwork that involves a commissioning party.
For design, this definition of course doesn’t mean a big change: Design projects are almost always work for a client, so they are heteronomous according to Bourdieu. But if your design studio would create a demo or a moonshot project to show its work to the outside world, without a commissioning party, this would be autonomous, even if it were commercial. For example, if you are a game designer and develop a game without an external sponsor or client according to your own ideas and put it on the market as a commercial product, then your work is “autonomous”. The same is true for all Hollywood films produced by the major studios: They are the studios’ own products, seek their own market, and hence are autonomous.
Conversely, all fine art subsidized by the Mondriaan Fonds - and all design projects subsidized by the Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie - would not be autonomous, but heteronomous according to Bourdieu. Art in the public space wouldn’t be autonomous either because it has been commissioned by municipalities. The commercial art gallery market, however, would be autonomous since it consists of uncommissioned works looking for buyers just like a Hollywood movie is looking for buyers of movie theater tickets or DVDs.
If we accept Bourdieu’s definition, then the margin for autonomous art production becomes very slim: Even for a Hollywood film, only the film producer really counts as an autonomous artist while everyone is working as a commissioned party. And if one considers the rights of fine artists in gallery trade, one might wonder whether it’s really the artist or rather the gallerist, collector or curator who assumes the autonomous position. (This has become more clearly visible in the last two decades when star curators became more famous than contemporary artists - [Obrist].)
The struggle for autonomy is thus an economic and political rather than an aesthetic struggle, but nevertheless has been the subject of a whole subgenre of conceptualist art called institutional critique - I will gloss over this quickly:
Seth Siegelaub, The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer And Sale Agreement, 1971 http://www.primaryinformation.org/product/siegelaub-the-artists-reserved-rights-transfer-and-sale-agreement/
Art Workers Coalition, Gorilla Girls
Andrea Fraser
“Autonomy” then means something else: worker’s rights within an existing economic system. This brings us back to the political movements we discussed in the very beginning of this lecture: namely trade unionism and its alternative, autonomism. The activism and interventions of Siegellaub, the Art Workers Coalition, Gorilla Girls and Andrea Fraser could be called trade-unionist because they intervene into the art market and the museum as the factories of contemporary art, trying to change the system from within.
The equivalent of autonomism is to establish artist-run spaces, quite comparable to the centri sociali and squats of the radical left and right.
Generally, we could sum this up as a tendency of bottom-up instead of top-down organization.
There are equivalents for this outside political activism and art design, namely in hacker culture:
All these could be described as “autonomist” tendencies. But perhaps the hacker tendencies are even more interesting as objects of study than artist and political activism: These interventions do not remain symbolical or experimental, but sometimes have worldwide impact. For example, when Bitcoin is seriously discussed as an alternative to the existing currency system, and has serious social and economic impact.
At the same time, the oscillation between political left and right becomes even more obvious and problematic: Bitcoin as a project that is based on hardcore neoliberal concepts of economy and finance, and has led to a situation where a few earlier adopters, miners and speculators - and elite oligarchy - got rich from the system.
Autonomy as a privilege of the few, of an techno-entrepreneurial elite, is a common idea today, for example in Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and early investor and board member of Facebook, is the most prominent spokesman of this ideology. He pays $100,000 to people who drop out of their college or university education to found companies, wrote a book in which he defends monopolies, and has just become economic advisor of Donald Trump. The founder of this right-wing libertarian “autonomism”, so-to-speak, was the popular Russian-American writer Ayn Rand whose novels glorify independent entrepreneurs that revolt against mediocrity and, most of all, against the state and any form of social security and welfare systems.
It may help if we look at scientific and philosophic theories of autonomy and self-organization.
General Systems Theory came up in the post-World War II period and was strongly linked cybernetics, the theory of control and feedback systems (that is at the origins of modern computing, telecommunication network engineering and interactive systems). I will try to make this as brief as possible: Through the new computer and communication technologies, and through the new theories of 20th century sciences - physics, biology -, many scientists saw the necessity of describing their individual specialist domains in a more comprehensive way that would allow to connect their disciplines. “System” simply means an organized structure, systems theory would be about how these structures are organized and regulating themselves. The notion of system could be applied to a computer system, weapon systems like missile defense, but also to organisms (the body as a system), psychology (the mind as a system), sociology (society and organizations like this school as a system), politics (the theory of political systems) etc.etc. Prominent system theoreticians include the Austrian-American biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, founder of the general systems theory, the educational psychologist Jean Piaget, the Nobel prize-winning Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine (whose wife and co-author Isabelle Stengers now is one of the most important theoreticians in the interdisciplinary field science, culture, politics and society), and later the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann.
General Systems Theory began as a theory of open versus closed systems. It had both a scientific and a political component, because it implied that closed systems cannot survive because they lack a metabolism/exchange with an environment. This was a clear statement against Soviet communism in the cold war (and one that proved to be true). The whole notion of “the environment” and ecology was invented by systems theory in those years, too. Environmentalism is a result of this theory and thinking.
An artist who applied General Systems Theory early in his work was the German-American conceptual artist Hans Haacke:
Artwork interacts with its environment; as soon as many visitors will be in the museum, the glass walls of the cube will be covered with condensed water, as soon as the visitors go, the cube will return to its original state. So the artwork has a metabolism, it interacts with the environment, it is partially an open, partially a closed system. [From here on, generative art, computer-generative music and bio art continue this aesthetic.]
This leads us to later stage of General Systems Theory in the 1970s, prominently embodied by the Chilean biologists and philosophers Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. They broke with the strict dualism of open versus closed systems, arguing that life is about self-organization: cell division of an embryo, for example, genetic evolution or free will and unpredictable behavior in living beings (even if this free will is not absolute). In other words, they reflected on the issue of autonomy in systems. Their explanation for self-organization (or “autopoiesis”) was: in real life, systems can be both open and have partial, or operational closure. For example, when we conform to group behavior by all sitting through this lecture in this auditorium, we are acting according to our environment and thus in an open system where we exchange information with others. If some of you decides to leave the lecture now, then you shut out this environment and act in operational closure of your own ideas - the Dutch language has the word “eigenzinnig” for this behavior, which literally corresponds to autopoiesis or systemic self-organization. The child psychologist Jean Piaget to systemic self-organization as the model for education, where an educator accepts the child’s self-made world (which could be a fairy tale world in which the child sees itself as a princess or prince) and does not try to superimpose his or her world as the norm. The sociologist Niklas Luhmann applied self-organization to social organizations: In his view, the function of a school like this one, for example, is not to educate student, but to maintain itself as a system; likewise, the function of art is to maintain the art system, not to provide something for audiences or society. (That wouldn’t be negative though because society itself is only there to maintain itself, serving no other purpose.)
If we keep in mind these keywords - open and closed systems, self-organization based on operational closure within an open system - then we can critically re-examine all the examples that we studied before:
NSK State as operational closure to maintain itself as the NSK state; same is true for the Atelier van Lieshout free state.
Bitcoin as a system with operational closure but some open interfaces to other systems (convertibility into other currencies such as Euro and Dollar) in order to have a self-organized financial system;
“Autonoom design” as design with some operational closure from commercial commissioning parties in order to give room for experimentation;
Maybe, I am not sure, autonomous art as something that is indeed not 100% autonomous, but has multiple social, economic, aesthetic dependencies, and therefore operates as an open system interacting with other open systems, but also has a relatively high degree of operational closure: for commercial reasons, as stylistic signature and branding, but also for other reasons in order to experiment with non-established aesthetics and non-conventionalized forms of communication and organization.
From a systems theoretical point of view, autonomy equals self-organization in systems. This applies to artificial intelligence, for example for the statistical algorithms (called “neural networks”) which companies like Google employ to improve face recognition, machine translation or playing Chess and Go. These algorithms all work with a combination of openness and closure: Openness, by reading in all Go games ever played and deducting behavioral patterns from them, closure, by applying these patterns in endless games of the computer program against itself to optimize those patterns.
But autonomy as self-organization also applies to art, and to businesses: Are you, as a designer, building a self-sustaining business, or is your plan to work for or be bought up by a larger company? As a fine artist, do you wait for galleries and museums to show your work, or do you create your own art space, which might not even be an exhibition space but, for example, a restaurant like Gordon Matta Clark’s FOOD?
There are even more radical examples - artistic self-organization as self-organization of a community’s entire life. Next to medieval monasteries, which sought to be economically self-sustainable, modern artists’ communes are prime examples of this approach.
In the 19th century, the British Art and Crafts movement tried to organize resistance against the industrial revolution be reviving traditional crafts, creating villages that should economically sustain themselves by designing and manufacturing furniture, textiles, books, houses and therefore live in an autonomous realm outside industrial society. (Today’s organic farms and food coops follow exactly the same model.) Art and Crafts also became the immediate predecessor of 20th and 21st century design culture in the Netherlands, only that modernist design ultimately embraced industrial production.
The Otto Muehl commune of the 1970s and 1980s was founded on the same idea of reaching self-sustainable production, but failed just like the Art and Crafts movement.
Since the 1990s, the Slovenian artist Marco Peljhan developed Makro Lab, an artist-run media lab that should be ecologically self-sustaining.
In the beginning, we discussed that autonomy does not only concern self-organization, but also self-determination, for example in questions of medical treatment, and political independence. This subject matter has been addressed in contemporary artists projects as well: The Autonomy Cube by Paglen and Appelbaum addresses individual self-determination in the right that our communication is not read and used by third parties, and it addresses political independence because the TOR network withdraws from state and corporate control, but also uses the exhibition space, with its granted freedom or autonomy of art, as an experimental safe harbor.
A related, very contemporary work is the Random Darknet Shopper by !Mediengruppe Bitnik, a Swiss artist duo. It consists of a computer program that goes onto anonymous, often illegal marketplaces in the TOR network and randomly buys one article per day. The article is then delivered to the museum where the work is currently been show, and put into the exhibition - without anyone knowing what has been ordered and delivered. (It could be drugs, weapons, or completely harmless things.) Here, the work plays with the legal limits of the autonomy of the art space, with the operational closure of the random shopping algorithm versus the openness of the Darknet marketplace, and the openness of the situation that will be created when the ordered item is being put into the exhibition space. But it also provokes the question of what would happen if this institutional protection didn’t exist: if the goods were delivered to a self-organized artist-run space - including a restaurant like FOOD.
So if there is a conclusion to this lecture, then it is questions: Is art really necessary for claiming autonomous (or partially autonomous spaces)? Does autonomy exist at all except as a provocation and experiment? If autonomy can only exist as relative autonomy (operational closure within a larger open system), can it then still be meaningfully called autonomy? Is autonomy thus speculative rather than related to practice?
Does human autonomy end where technological systems become autonomous? Isn’t “autonomy” an outdated concept of a human-centered philosophy, isn’t it obsolete if we have to think instead of systemic ecologies of humans, animals, things? If we recognize our dependence on the environment in a century of political, economic and ecological crisis, isn’t “autonomy” in the way of acknowledging this dependence? [For example, my autonomy to drive my own car…] Isn’t autonomy a macho privilege that historically has been granted only to white men, and was used for the stamping women, and non-white people, second-class humans or even not human beings at all?
Or aren’t we dodging the question of artistic autonomy when we’re rebranding fine art as “artistic research” and design as “creative industries”?
(Heidegger, letter on humanism; Foucault)