Autonomy, Collaboration, Place and Craft - Charles Esche Talk

Hello all,

Welcome to our new critical blog – Autonomy, Collaboration, Place and Craft – which will run parallel to the lecture programme we have devised for this semesters Masters in Fine Art course at Liverpool School of Art and Design.

This blog is in direct response to requests from a range of post and undergraduate students who attended the Charles Esche seminar on Thursday 12 Feb 09.

Just to remind you all, we agreed to a rather altruistic blog, one in which we’ll all be able to post and edit – as well as respond. The hope was for people to start communicating their ideas and experiences about the themes and issues raised in the talks and how they relate to/impact on our own working practices and relationships to shows and exhibitions we see, articles we read etc.

Ok, to get the ball rolling I’ll recap briefly on Charles’ talk last night.

Initially, Esche outlined a history of galleries and museums in relation to our contemporary perceptions of art. We were usefully reminded that Art, as we know it in the West, is a bourgeois construct that developed hand in hand with the growth of the very class with which it is most usually associated. From the Louvre onwards, Esche argued that galleries and museums functioned as much as a space for the bourgeois to gather and reaffirm their own class identity and status as they were spaces to appreciate artworks that satisfied the bourgeois’ own ideological world view. This was an important point, as it immediately reminded us of the active role played by art and culture in the inscription and construction of world views – thus guaranteeing a kind of agency for art practice as opposed to a conception of art as a purely passive reflection of a dominant ideological viewpoint (as it became in more crude Marxist analysis of culture).

This instrumentialising role of art re-emerged – all be it in a more aggressive and didactic manner – in the cultural policies of Soviet Russia, Fascist Germany and Communist China. In the Cold War period which followed the Second World War, a Western bourgeois notion of art became enshrined in the white walled gallery spaces of New York’s Museum of Modern Art as the only viable cultural alternative to the intsturmentalising propaganda of Eastern Block Socialist Realism. This was evidenced by the CIAs involvement in promoting the new post WWII culture of Abstract Expressionism. It was at this point – during a period in which arts self-referential guarantee of ‘purity’ was, in fact, the equally instrumentalised rationale for its identification as ideological credibility (in the West at least) – that Adorno began to make claims for the Autonomy of Art. Adorno, however, was acutely aware of the political and bureaucratised role that art, galleries, museums and culture could play in a new consumer driven society. Adorno’s point was to rescue a kind of space for Art which would both guarantee it an autonomous space beyond the insturmentalisation of capitalist culture whilst, at the same time, allowing it to be inherently critical of that culture – even if that critical opposition was simply based on offering a glimpse beyond the kind of society which was rapidly developing in the West at the time. In this case, abstract or non-referential artworks could be seen to ‘negate’ the ‘affirmative’ culture of capital – pointing, in some ways, to the possibility of ‘imagining the world otherwise than it is today’ (to use one of Esche’s phrases). The redemptive faith that Adorno put in Art – its capability, as he saw it, to offer us glimpses of ways to change the world – was to become one of Arts burdens in a postmodern and post-autonomous world. After the collapse of the former Soviet Union, Art lost its place as an ideological guarantee of freedom against the more obviously coercive social policies developed in the Eastern Block. Instead, art began to take on a new and equally insturmentalised role as a social glue in a new globalised neo – liberal and post-capitalist society. Governments, especially Blair’s in the UK, began to expect art to act as a focal point for social change in an increasingly fractious and under resourced ‘community’. As such, relational, dialogic, socially engaged practices (which had developed on a principal of moving away from the now rigorously corporatized ‘autonomous’ art object) became increasingly embroiled in a Beinnial led world of spectacle and show. Museums and Galleries, for their part, began to be regulated by the demand for audience figures and the high turnover of ‘annual reports’. Artists, art organisations and community groups began to be curated by proxy as the applications they had to make and the funding they received was closely regulated and dependant on particular types of ‘outcomes’.
In this post-autonomous art world, the landscape began to look increasingly bleak.

However, within the last couple of years, the problem with autonomy has re-surfaced (as Esche pointed out, post-autonomy has an indelible relationship to the very term it once wished to exceed). How do artists produce work which isn’t immediately instrumentalised within a globalised culture of specatacle and display? How does art become critical of neo-liberal centralised politics without falling into the trap of seeing itself as somehow separate from (and therefore able to externally critique) this culture? How do we enable artists, both practically and conceptually, to exceed their insturmentalised confines without re-rehearsing the clichés of the artist as shaman – of special individual who is capable of simply seeing the world in a different way? Is it possible to make works which decentre the authorial processes of the individual which, nevertheless, engage full bloodedly with the particulars and generalities of social, political and economic circumstances? Is it possible to revivify Kant’s notion of the Aesthetic (as a kind of experience – not just offered by art) which enabled us to imagine a world different from what it might be today) without merely allowing artists to produce dissociated and dislocated proposals for utopian impossibility? To this end Esche suggested the term ‘negotiated autonomy’ (signifying a concern with both the internal structures of art and a critical relationship to the political realities of its production) as an alternative to the more binary and limiting post-autonomy. This seems an interesting point to start. Is it possible to comprehend (or imagine) kinds of art practice which are capable, sophisticated and dialectical enough to conceive autonomy and engagement as interaction? As necessary conditions of an extended practice?