Christophe Meierhans
Building Temples
Artistic autonomy in the confessional
Published in Rekto:Verso magazine, December 2014
Questions
Artists should be able to freely express anything they feel like expressing, without having to bother about any undesirable interference. No question.
Art is a place where anything can be expressed freely, without having to bother about any undesirable interference. No questions ?
How then exactly does one get to this autonomous territories, in which thoughts are said to be so free? Has anybody been there? There are enough of us who seem ready to watch their borders, but what exactly is the territory of the arts being defended from? Autonomy from what? What does it still mean today? Could autonomy be just a myth? And why do the guards look back so annoyed when you ask?
Acknowledgements
As a genuine – Google-dependant – child of our times, the first thing I did when beginning to work on this text was running a search on the most revered engine of the world-wide web.
With words such as “autonomy” and “temple” in the query, the semi-automatic gesture of a google-search reveals itself as a ritual act of devotion. I type my wordly offerings in to the Oracle and hope in exchange to be granted guidance by Her.
But gods have never really cared much about us, mortals. They always had their own agenda, their own lusts and their own little petty fights. I am well aware of all that, but nevertheless, I surrender. Google is the index of my world, the superior authority which settles all that exists and all that doesn’t. For, wouldn’t it be in Google that i believe I would have to believe in something else. Freedom is a complex asset.
On my screen, the Oracle’s answer is simple. It is already all there, right in front of me. All that needs to be done is to compile, to interpret the message, to look in the direction all the Google-hits are pointing at: we all remain believers, whether we like it or not, and the temples we adore are those we’ve built for ourselves.
References
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/autonomy-moral/
For Kant, the self-imposition of universal moral law is the ground of both moral obligation generally and the respect others owe to us (and we owe ourselves). In short, practical reason — our ability to use reasons to choose our own actions — presupposes that we understand ourselves as free. Freedom means lacking barriers to our action that are in any way external to our will, though it also requires that we utilize a law to guide our decisions, a law that can come to us only by an act of our own will (…). This self-imposition of the moral law is autonomy.
http://www.manifestoclub.com/hubs/artistic-autonomy
We are a network of artists, arts administrators, researchers and students who want to defend artistic autonomy in all its forms. A vibrant artistic culture is founded upon artistic freedom. The only limits for artists should be the limits of the discipline and limits that they choose for themselves.
http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/the-importance-of-being-autonomous
In Literature and Revolution Trotsky points out, “The form of art is to a certain and very large degree independent, but the artist who creates this form, and the spectator who is enjoying it, are not empty machines, one for creating form and the other for appreciating it.” What Trotsky helps to illustrate is that art’s autonomy is interdependent with social relations and conditions; for art to have its autonomy, its independence, it must be dependent upon subjects of society who both create and participate with its form.
https://libcom.org/library/socanlifean3
If individual ‘autonomy’ overrides any commitment to a ‘collectivity,’ there is no basis whatever for social institutionalization, decision-making, or even administrative coordination. Each individual, self-contained in his or her ‘autonomy,’ is free to do whatever he or she wants — presumably, following the old liberal formula, if it does not impede the ‘autonomy’ of others. Even democratic decision-making is jettisoned as authoritarian.
http://www.andyhamilton.org.uk/andy_pdfs/Adorno_and_the_autonomy_of_art.pdf
It is precisely through their refusal of social function that, according to Adorno, autonomous music and art acquire a critical function. By standing apart from society, autonomous art becomes more genuinely critical than political art. It is a model of emancipation, of life lived under non-oppressive conditions; (…) Whether an art form is capable of autonomy cannot be entirely predicted; but humans would have somehow to lose the need for furniture, before items of furniture could become autonomous art. Even when exhibited in a museum, furnitureʼs functional origins are inescapable.
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/art-as-occupation-claims-for-an-autonomy-of-life-12/
Nowadays, the invasion of life by art is not the exception, but the rule. Artistic autonomy was meant to separate art from the zone of daily routine—from mundane life, intentionality, utility, production, and instrumental reason—in order to distance it from rules of efficiency and social coercion. But this incompletely segregated area then incorporated all that it broke from in the first place, recasting the old order within its own aesthetic paradigms. The incorporation of art within life was once a political project (both for the left and right), but the incorporation of life within art is now an aesthetic project, and it coincides with an overall aestheticization of politics.
Autonomy then, as a theory can be seen to embody the practice of new non-hierarchical, non-exploitative social relations in which human beings’ capacity for freedom and cooperation is recognised and encouraged, instead of frustrated and blocked by other more powerful interests in an unending competition for material, and indeed psychological and emotional survival (…). As such, autonomous action seeks to challenge and subvert existing oppressive social relations of exploitation and hierarchy whilst setting itself the task of not reproducing these same social relations
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jamie-heckert-nurturing-autonomy
People sometimes say autonomy can’t work, that it goes against human nature. I wonder, how do we know what we are capable of? How can we know when we confuse our potential, our possibilities with the stories we tell ourselves, with the images of ourselves in our minds? Practice. Autonomy is not something that is achieved, it’s not simply replacing one system with another. It is a process of growing, of changing, of empowerment. It is how we realise that we are not who we think we are. It is how we come to imagine our own lives.
Dialogue
— Man, they are really up to killing it all. Have you seen how much they are cutting in the cultural budgets ?
— Yeah, I am for sure not happy with that either. But let’s face it: do you really believe that people are in such a bad need for art and artists at the moment ?
— Yes.
—But concretely, in a situation like now, with the economic crisis and the budget shortages, why exactly should the state continue spending public money on the production of art works ?
— I believe we should dedicate more means to artistic activity, exactly because of the fact that we are in a situation of crisis.
— I understood this was your position, but why ?
— Well, the real question is actually that of why we are in a situation of crisis in the first place: because we have come short of solutions. Because we are no longer capable, as a society, to come up with good ideas. Anything we do seems to make things get even worse. The ideas which circulate in our world are like the inhabitants of an isolated village high up in the Alps who have married among each other a bit too many times. Our view on the world is impoverished and we are not even capable of noticing it.
— You’re such a pessimist. And besides: don’t you think you are simplifying things a bit too much? And what about fundamental research, things like the CERN for instance ? They are literally busy with redefining the way we see and understand things…
— Sure, we are refining our views, continuously, and to rather extreme levels of complexity, but at the same time we are focussing more and more on the same perspective. Politics is the most obvious example of that. Just compare the programs of the different parties, there was a much bigger diversity of ideas and perspectives only 30 years ago!
— And what about internet ? I mean, there is much to say about globalization, but you can’t deny that we’ve gained access to a lot more diversity in terms of information and influences!
— Agreed, but diversity is not treated any differently on the internet, there’s a super strong mainstream also there. So if you are not yourself actively looking for the different stuff, you will hardly be confronted with any such thing. What our society is in bitter need for at the moment is to practice its imagination. We are so filled with redundant images, messages and tastes entering through all possible body openings that it is difficult to even dream that anything else is imaginable outside of that.
— And you think that it is art that can achieve that …
— If not art, then what else will ? Art is not the solution of course. The solutions will always remain political, economic, social, spiritual, and scientific — or at least for as long as we think in these categories, which is most certainly also part of the problem — but we also need to be able to think these different solutions, understand them, believe in them, implement them, which as a society we are totally incapable of because we only give credit to that which we already are certain of and we distrust anything that sounds strange.
— Wow, I didn’t know you were such an idealist. Art will save the world!
— Sure, but only if it is good art.
— Aha, and who decides about that then?
— Nobody needs to. Good art is just art that fulfills its function. Taste and personal preference have nothing to do with that. They are just some of the parameters art operates with.
— So, if I get you right, art is a kind of mind training program that should help people to be more open to new things, and the state should provide for this training, as a kind of measure for public hygiene?!
— Yes, exactly, art is a kind of brain yoga. Our imagination has grown stiff, it needs stretching, badly.
— Sorry, but that’s way too restrictive for me, I mean, to assign such a definite function to the arts.
— Maybe. But I don’t care. All I know is that in the present situation, we need tons of good art works and we need tons of people experiencing them. Call it state gymnastics if you wish, I have no problem with that.
— But how can you preserve any kind of autonomy for the arts under these conditions?
— Very simple: you don’t.
Pamphlet
An autonomy of art from the social, the political, the economic, the spiritual and the scientific realms can only exist if the practice of art effectively proposes alternatives to the established order from which it claims to be autonomous and if this practice is able to make those alternatives experienceable. If we content ourselves with merely claiming autonomy for the arts, we loose the possibility of touching at what we actually aim to reveal, namely, actual relationships of dependence.
Autonomy is not a condition for the existence of art, it is its objective. Art’s autonomy cannot be preserved nor defended, it can only be generated. There is no such thing as a safe haven for the arts from which to imagine the world differently. Autonomy as a state of things is a delusion. Art consists of an infinite number of effective dependencies, just as any other human activity does.
The prevalent social, political economic, spiritual, scientific assumptions which define our world are the many temples that we visit daily for worship. These temples stand strong on their foundations only for as long as there are people who believe in them. And since it is our reality itself which rests on these foundations we obviously do not want them to break apart. Yet, the passage of time and the intensive usage we make of our temples inexorably erode them. They crumble away bit by bit. Our faith in private property, in clean energy or in democracy, to name just a few, have long become shaky.
Art is about imagining the existence of other such temples, before the foundations of the existing ones are totally hollowed out. Art itself is a temple, dedicated to heretic practices, consecrating extra-marital beliefs. It is therefore not well regarded by the tenants of the other temples – and quite understandably so. But taking on that controversial role is what generates art’s autonomy in the first place.
A temple erected in the name of artistic autonomy can only be a mausoleum. The only way for autonomy to exist is through acting towards the renewal of the old temples which are falling apart, and towards the establishment of new ones. Worshipping autonomy stands in the way of its practice.
Autonomy should have no temple. Let’s not believe in autonomy. Dependencies are a fact, let’s rather acknowledge them and try to look at them, not as dead weights, but as points of support. Let’s not depend on things by default, but affirm our dependences in order to reveal their fragility, undo those which have become obsolete and cultivate those which appear to be standing more firmly. Perhaps autonomy is nothing else than a state of radical dependence that enables one to decide what to depend on and commit to it to the fullest. For if we can’t believe in our temples strongly enough, they will begin to fall apart and chances are then that their heavy bricks will fall onto our heads if it is still inside of them that we are seeking for shelter.