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Dirty Work: Art Beyond Autonomy

Dirty work: art beyond ‘autonomy’

Mary Anne Francis

Abstract

Across Europe there are signs that art’s relationship to work is changing in a way that calls for new analytic categories. The era of art’s autonomy is on the wane as artists increasingly pursue practices involving work in the world, where not so long ago they favoured doing art’s own work.

This article establishes the grounds for those claims. First, it looks at art’s ‘autonomy’ (via recent theory from Jean-Marie Schaeffer and Michael Lingner) in order to assess the nature of the work done by much of twentieth century Western art. Then, taking the work of the Danish (art) collective, Superflex, as typical of these new practices, it analyses how autonomy is being rejected. Deciding that Michael Lingner’s concept of ‘post-autonomy’ is helpful in describing and thinking about such work, it concludes by referring uses of that term to the notion of ‘relative autonomy’.

1. The work of the question: ‘what work does the artwork do?’

In asking the question ‘what work does the artwork do?’ there are signs of an anxiety. Or at least, behind the expressed desire for an inventory of art’s productivity, there may be a repressed desire to be assured that art indeed does something – never mind quite what. This is all very Protestant, and it may be obsolescent. For of late, in the last decade or so, art has begun to change in terms of its relationship to work, in ways that may dispel the need for the question as a mode of concern. Where once, and until quite recently, art’s work was minimal (at least in range, and minimally ‘work’ in some opinions), it is now clearly doing more. Or such is the proposition of this article.

1.1. Preliminary procedures

In order to substantiate this claim, it is necessary first to review the role of art’s work in its recent history; in the era that provides the intellectual context for the ‘now’ – so in effect, the last hundred years or so. This provides the setting for a detailed assessment of the ‘newness’ of the art that prompted the basic proposition, with the assessment being referred to as an example of that art.

2. Art did not do much work? A history of (post)modernism: the analytic tools

One of the key concepts used to frame the art of the last century is ‘autonomy’. And this goes for both today’s art history of the twentieth century and the art history then. (Of course there was art outside this frame of autonomy, but this frame is regarded not for its inclusiveness but rather for its dominance.) Glossed, in the first place, via its etymology as ‘self-law’, autonomy may be taken more expansively to designate a thing’s legislation for and by itself. Becoming ‘autonomous’, art can therefore be described as ‘a progressive and purely interior historical development, and … a search for the essence of art as defining the ultimate goal of art itself’ (Schaeffer 1998: 40). And while ‘[m]ost historians agree that artistic modernism has been dominated by the idea of the autonomy of art and its implications’ (Schaeffer 1998: 40), the term is increasingly regarded as having an application to a larger period of art history. Indeed, having noted the agreed alliance of the terms as above, Jean-Marie Schaeffer goes on to use a detailed analysis of art’s autonomy to describe ‘contemporary art’ while recognizing that ‘[r]ecent developments in (European) art seem to move further and further away from any form of essentialism and autonomy’ (Schaeffer 1998: 39). In this way, as the German artist and art theorist Michael Lingner argues, autonomy may well be a concept that is still persistent in postmodernism. Certainly, for Lingner, autonomy has been identified with art ‘[e]ver since the French Revolution … wrested power from the nobility and the church …’ (Lingner 1993: 114). Extensive – or elastic – in its temporal scope, the concept of autonomy has not only acted as an analytic for periodizing art’s history, but also for regarding art’s many other aspects. Most obvious is the way in which the question of art’s being – its ‘ontology’ – was, with modernism in particular, addressed by that category. The ‘obviousness’ owes much to Clement Greenberg’s essentializing quest for the ‘pure’ or ‘fundamental’ character of visual art (Greenberg 1982: 6). However, autonomy facilitates a ‘teleology’ of art as well – the consideration of art’s purpose or its functionality.

To address the teleology of autonomous art is both to ask what purpose art’s autonomy fulfils and to ask what purpose art has when it is autonomous. The enquiries are similar but not the same; this discussion focuses upon the latter.

2.1. Whose autonomy?

Accounts of art’s autonomy are manifold, with most being produced in the last hundred years or so. Yet as Greenberg reminds us, ‘this self-critical tendency … began with the philosopher Kant’ – in the eighteenth century (Greenberg 1982: 5). And a notion of art as autonomous around the viewer’s judgement also began with Kant’s notion of the viewer as, ideally, without practical investment in the work of art; hence in Kant’s term ‘disinterested’. Thereafter, Kant’s autonomy has followers in figures such as Schiller. In the twentieth century, accounts of art’s autonomy multiplied the more so as they paid tribute to the coming-into-being of autonomy in art (witness Greenberg’s). Beyond him, the list of writers on autonomy in art includes Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and latterly, Peter Bürger, among the more notable.

However, the versions of autonomy used here to review the recent shifts in art are contemporary with these ‘recent developments’ more so than the better known accounts. They are, in the first place, and principally, Jean-Marie Schaeffer’s ‘Experiencing Artworks’ from Think Art; Theory and Practice in the Art of Today and Michael Lingner’s ‘Art as a System within Society’ from Public Places.

They are used not just for reasons of their recentness (the date of Schaeffer’s text is 1998; and Lingner’s was published in 1993) nor are they used only when because they are so recent, they relate discussions of autonomy to contemporary developments in the area. Neither are they used simply for the way in which they refer their theorizing to examples of art practice (as Lingner does). All this is helpful but not sufficient. Rather, the compelling aspects of the texts are that, in the case of Schaeffer’s, it adopts a broadly historical-materialist approach to (recent) autonomy which in addition, yields internal distinctions in the term, as coincidentally, does Lingner’s (while adopting a methodology that owes more to formalism). In the case of Lingner’s text, the key distinction is its coining of a term which may be applied to the phenomena this article reviews and regards as significant.

First, Schaeffer’s essay is reviewed for the way in which it frames autonomy – as that which in turn frames the new work in art – then Lingner’s. The two are then compared before their findings are referred onwards to assess the newness of that work.

2.2. Schaeffer and autonomy

Schaeffer, engaging different foci of historical-materialist analysis, regards autonomy through three frameworks. He starts by reviewing art’s relationship to other cultural forms, then looks at art’s relationship to common life and then considers art via the axis of relations between production and consumption. All these offer observations about the role of work in recent art.

2.2.1. ‘Art as a way of making’

Wanting to look at the historical conditions for the origin of art’s autonomy, Schaeffer argues first for a sub-division in the concept of autonomy. This directly relates to questions of art’s work. Contending somewhat disingenuously that ‘the expression “autonomy” is perhaps not the most convenient one for designating the dominating conception of art during modernism’ (Schaeffer 1998: 40), he proceeds to offer (instead) a distinction between ‘aesthetic’ and ‘artistic’ autonomy.

While arguing that the two need not denote successive stages in a history of art (they do not in every culture, so he notes), Schaeffer argues that they did, however, appear in that configuration in art since the Renaissance. When art is aesthetically autonomous – which Schaeffer says it was, by and large, after the Renaissance and before ‘modernism’ – ‘painting but also many genres of sculpture had a purely aesthetic function’ (Schaeffer 1998: 41). (Note that Schaeffer’s term, ‘aesthetic autonomy’, does not use the latter word to qualify the former – with autonomy being merely an aspect of the aesthetic – but rather the term works vice versa such that art’s aesthetic function militates against its otherwise intrinsic autonomy. In other words, save for its aesthetic aspect, art is ‘purely’ non-functional.)

And yet the notion of what aesthetic means for Schaeffer remains unclear. Later in the essay, he proposes that ‘aesthetic experience’ (the effect of an encounter with art’s aesthetic function?) is ‘a cognitive experience [‘perceptual, conceptual, or imaginative’] … regulated by the intrinsic degree of satisfaction or dissatisfaction it induces’ (Schaeffer 1998: 50). So extrapolating only a little, art which is aesthetically autonomous works to provide satisfaction via the viewer’s cognitive faculties.

Refraining from commenting on this as a satisfactory outcome of so much work (art’s and Schaeffer’s), it should be remembered that aesthetic autonomy is also defined against ‘artistic autonomy’. Central to the latter, Schaeffer says, is ‘the idea that art possesses a sort of ontologic insularity …’ (Schaeffer 1998: 41). Hence, he continues, ‘for many modern artists, aesthetic experience had to be cut off from artistic questions. Kosuth … was very explicit about this he insisted that it was important to remove aesthetic experience from the further development of art …’ (Schaeffer 1998: 41). This begs the question of what constitutes ‘artistic questions’. Schaeffer leaves this open; although having started his text with a reference to Arthur Danto, it might be surmised that these are the questions that art asks about itself and that, asked philosophically, result in the ‘end of art’ (History). Only thus would art sustain (the fiction of) its ‘ontological insularity’.

2.2.2. ‘Art and common life’

That art’s ontological insularity is, indeed, a fiction is proposed as Schaeffer makes the simple point that ‘[i]n anthropological terms, art is always part of social life, not something situated outside it’ (Schaeffer 1998: 45). When art is believed to be at work on the ‘purely interior’ project of its own refinement – its aesthetic cleansing – that belief is mis-informed. But as Schaeffer writes (in terms, if not explicit debt, that owe much to Richard Rorty), beliefs are ‘defined foremost by their operability and not by their truthfulness or falseness’ (Schaeffer 1998: 45). So falling for the ‘myth’ of art’s autonomy – the notion that it is separate from social life – fulfils a certain social function, and commits art to a second round of work besides its own: the work of sustaining the fiction or keeping up pretences. Schaeffer’s argument in this respect is very similar to Peter Bürger’s. Bürger has written:

… the autonomy of art is a category of bourgeois society. It permits the description of art’s detachment from the context of practical life as a historical development …. What this category cannot lay hold of is that this detachment of art from practical contexts is a historical process i.e., that it is socially conditioned. [Original emphases; (Bürger 1984: 46)]

And Bürger’s analysis suggests an understanding of how ‘non’ artwork might be glossed as practical activity. The test of this is then do artworks (not) enable mundane tasks?

2.2.3. ‘Experiencing art’

Returning to the self-understanding of (artistically) autonomous art, Schaeffer here considers how the work between the artist and their audience is seen. Referring to Kosuth again, he notes that art concerned only with artistic questions can be considered to remove ‘experience from the work of art’ as its aesthetic function disappears’ (Schaeffer 1998: 48). The ‘artworld’ thus created is ‘centred entirely around the artist and his relationship to art: the audience is concerned only as far as it is willing and able to adopt the artist’s stance’ [original emphasis; (Schaeffer 1998: 48)] – when presumably it does have ‘an experience’ of sorts. A charge of solipsism hovers as the work in this relationship is all one way; a far cry from Flint Schier’s understanding of the empathetic act that the artist would ideally undertake in ‘imagining’ the audience’s response (to their work) (Schier 1992).

2.3. Lingner and autonomy

While Lingner’s contribution to the field is most significant in terms of how he views the legacy of art’s autonomy, there are some useful observations that he makes regarding what precedes that: on autonomy itself.

First, potentially magnificent confusions of terminology have to be defused; all the more magnificent because, in order to describe autonomy, Lingner, perhaps not surprisingly, invokes the same vocabulary (artistic, aesthetic) as Schaeffer does, but in a very different way. He writes: ‘when I outline the historical development and speak of the autonomy of art … I mean artistic, aesthetic autonomy, something art must achieve on its own’ (Lingner 1993: 114). And his use of the terms thereafter suggests – as does this passage – that artistic and aesthetic are synonymous.

Then, the point can be made that Lingner draws attention to the work that art-as-autonomy does not do; such is the work that is not done – or only by default (by reading between the lines) – in Schaeffer’s text. Of aesthetic autonomy, Lingner writes (slightly tautologically) that this ‘consists in throwing off the injunctions, expectations and interests that society imposes on [art’s] aesthetic design’ (Lingner 1993: 114). Clearly, then, art in this way, does not do ‘social’ work (Schaeffer’s point about the sociality of such denials notwithstanding).

2.4. Schaeffer and Lingner: the findings

So there is agreement between the two writers that art-as-autonomous does very little (social) work. Rather, its work is largely, and increasingly, as modernism wears on, ‘autotelic’ – regulated by art, and for art.

And that, much of the art referred to as ‘postmodernist’ might also be encompassed in the scope of autonomy, is indicated by the number of examples conforming (at least to some) of autonomy’s distinctive features. Telling, for instance, is the way in which a large proportion of the art termed ‘postmodern’ (think of the Saatchi collection) is still ‘centred around the artist and his relationship to art’ with the audience still expected to ‘adopt the artist’s stance.’ Such is the less-than-social contract that the audience usually commits to on entering the contemporary gallery; the white cube even in its less-than-white inflections.

3. The new work

However prevalent the white cube is today as art’s repository, there are, as Schaeffer proposes, ‘recent developments in (European) art’ that suggest things may be changing. In looking at just one of these, the work of the Danish (art) collective Superflex, and even then, just one of Superflex’s projects, the issue of typicality arises. (Schaeffer avoids this problem by evading examples.) The issue of selection is fraught philosophically when any metaphysics of the general is refused, and it is fraught more so as these recent developments take place around and in cultural difference. This may be – paradoxically – a point of commonality.

These comments notwithstanding, a rudimentary list of practices related to Superflex includes the work of Park Fiction, Cantieri Isola, Clegg and Guttman’s ‘Open Air Library’ (which Lingner discusses in his article), Sarai Media Lab, Ala Plastica; many of these were featured (participated) in the Unlikely Encounters in Urban Space congress organized by Park Fiction in Hamburg, 2003. (See www.parkfiction.org) And that Park Fiction had a presence in Documenta 11 indicates the artworld recognition that these practices have already attained.

The project that is chosen to discuss art’s new (emphasis on) work is ‘Supergas’. The description of the work that follows is taken from the Superflex website.

3.1. Superflex and Supergas

Superflex has collaborated with Danish and African engineers to construct a simple, portable biogas unit that can provide sufficient gas for the cooking and lighting needs of an African family. The system has been adapted to meet the efficiency and style demands of a modern African consumer. It is intended to match the needs and economic resources that we believe exist in small-scale economies. The orange biogas plant produces biogas from organic materials, such as human and animal stools. For a modest sum, an African family will be able to buy such a biogas system and achieve self-sufficiency in energy. The plant produces approx. 4 cubic metres of gas per day from the dung from 2–3 cattle. This is enough for a family of 8–10 members for cooking purposes and to run one gas lamp in the evening. (www.superflex.dk)

When only the mention of the work’s – or works’ – colour (orange) suggests, however tenuously, that someone is, perhaps, thinking of this thing as art (though colour is a property of most things), then apparently the sole other pretext for its citation in this argument is the frame of that description: that it is the work of artists, Superflex. So acts of nomination and selection aside – anything, as Marcel Duchamp (on behalf of R. Mutt) proposes can be art if the artist ‘chose’ it (Duchamp 1992: 248) – the ‘frame’ here may be taken to suggest an intentionality for Supergas: as art, and on closer inspection this intentionality would seem to have appropriate effect.

3.2. Continental drift: thinking about the work of Supergas in Africa via European theory The issue of the ‘art’ of Supergas, as an aspect of its ontological condition is, with this shift in the discussion from European Denmark to Africa, properly referred to the issue of how the work is known; by what conceptual apparatus. That is to say, in seeking to understand that work, this article adopts conceptual tools identified with the artists’ (and this writer’s) culture-of-origin. In so doing, it does not assume its reading of the work accounts for how the work is read on site, by its users in Tanzania. Nor does it assume that it does not. (And nor, by the way, does it assume that ‘European theory’ is legible throughout Europe and speaks of the meaning of the work for all Europeans.) Rather, the representation of Supergas (also known as ‘the Biogas project’) that follows must be seen as the product of a certain culture, and as such circumscribed.

3.3. Supergas and social work

If the ‘artness’ of Supergas is, at first sight minimal – certainly according to mainstream European (art) theory – then the work that it does in other areas is less so. Its engagement with at least three disciplines is clear (if the work that it does in each sometimes overlaps). In the first place, it is civil engineering as the piece entails identifying and then processing a source of energy. Then, it is aid work or humanitarian activity as Supergas involves replacing an unsustainable and unsafe form of energy with a more reliable and safer one. As Dan Cameron writes, in ‘rural Africa’,

[m]ost residents use firewood for cooking, but such methods are not sustainable due to the ecological damage caused by burning fossil fuels, the heavy burden placed on those individuals (mostly women) who gather the wood and the health hazard represented by smoke inhalation. (Cameron 1998)

There is also green politics. Over and above the previous remarks, Åsa Nacking notes how ‘Superflex teamed up with a Tanzanian organizaton, Surude (Foundation for Sustainable Rural Development), which had expressed an interest in alternative energy sources’ (Nacking 1998: 376).

Given so much obvious work, it is hardly surprising that Superflex refer to all their projects – of which Supergas is representative – as ‘Tools’ (www.superflex.dk). And if Supergas facilitates the types of work above (and also reifies that work in actually being civil engineering, in as much as doing it, thereby turning work as a verb into a noun), it is also, and most clearly, a tool for other work, as gas enables cooking among other things.

3.4. Supersocial work: Supergas and art’s autonomy

While cooking has occasionally been seen as art (with the Futurists’ activities providing the worst example in culinary terms) seldom has its associated disciplines been seen as art, as they are here. And in working in these ways, and seen through Schaeffer’s version of autonomy, the Biogas project is neither aesthetically autonomous nor artistically autonomous. It neither works to provide a satisfying experience alone nor does it (simply) work to address artistic questions. Moreover, it evades the criteria for autonomy as Schaeffer sees them, in the way that it configures the relationship between the ‘artist(s)’ and their ‘audience’. (That the terms are a little strained predicts this evasion.) Reversing the mode of artistic autonomy, the artworld that Supergas constructs – the social encounters it facilitates in Schaeffer’s understanding of an artworld – are ‘centred’ on the users rather than the artist. The audience is activated; the needs of Tanzanian villagers provide a rationale for making the gas boiler. (And in its constitution of the work, this ‘rationale’ exceeds the terms of aesthetic autonomy, too, which, in only consulting the audience’s need for ‘pleasure’, still admits the artist’s agenda.)

In all this, there is a crucial change in art production. And yet, with regard to the second point – the ‘origin’ of Supergas in its users’ needs – there are as, Superflex themselves note, qualifications. ‘Aid’ work may well do the empathetic work that Flint Schier recommends the artist does in thinking of the audience, but as theories of ‘the gift’ and more appropriately, postcolonial critiques, suggest it is often disingenuous to imagine that altruism is the only rationale in such activity. Supergas originates with Superflex, if also elsewhere. As Nacking notes and generously interprets:

Mindful of history and the white man’s imperial campaigns, the artists dress in neo-colonial safari uniforms, humorously confirming the old stereotype. They are determined to reflect upon the full implications of their own actions in an utterly foreign – and extremely loaded – cultural context. (Nacking 1998: 376)

One such ‘implication’ might be the way in which two forms of ‘development’ – art’s and that of ‘Third World’ countries – are related by this work, perhaps uneasily.

Spectacularly exceeding the terms of art’s autonomy, the Biogas project exceeds Schaeffer’s understanding of ‘recent developments’ in European art, as well – as it emerges at the end of his essay. For him, art may indeed be moving ‘further and further away from any form of essentialism or autonomy’ but, in 1998, it had not got as far as Superflex. Except that it had on the ground if not in (Schaeffer’s) theory; in 1997, Supergas was up and running.

So Schaeffer enables us to see ‘what’ is happening with this work, as referred to his analysis, Supergas is ‘not’ autonomous art in both aesthetic and artistic terms. But he does not facilitate an understanding of what this refusal amounts to historically. To claim that Supergas is typical of other phenomena is to suggest that something is afoot. It is to claim that Supergas has some significance beyond itself. The question is: In constituting a refusal of autonomous art on both its fronts, can Supergas be understood as art in its next phase?

Lingner is more helpful here. Predictably, his comments on autonomy result, like Schaeffer’s, in a reading of the Biogas work as not autonomous. If art that is autonomous ‘throws off’ ‘the injunctions, expectations and interests that society imposes on [art’s] aesthetic design’, Supergas embraces them. Indeed, Lingner actually foresees this via his wider historical predictions. In 1992, he writes (a little clumsily): ‘I think of further art development not in terms of postmodern but post-autonomous for, which art need only give up that moment of autonomy that allows it no final purpose’ (Lingner 1993: 116). And his rationale for this is species survival. (Schaeffer described art’s early modernist upheavals likewise.) And Lingner’s terms and tones oscillate between the prescriptive and predictive: ‘[b]ecause – if art has come to the end of the road of aesthetic autonomy, it seems to me unavoidable that it will look to extra-aesthetic goals and functions in order to survive and evolve’ (Lingner 1993: 116). Thus, Supergas is named and understood as ‘post-autonomous’ art. And in so being, it is placed at the beginning of that new era in a new art history.

3.5. Post-autonomous…‘art’?

In all of this, the artness of Supergas has rather disappeared. To refer this to the work’s conspicuous orangeness seems facile, even when related to the fact of its shape: a squat-lozenge; the union of the two producing a quasi-minimalist object. That the work includes an aspect of ‘asethetically’/‘artistically’? autonomous art is doubtless a strategic atavism with which to divert artworld personnel. And on this note, it is telling that sketches for the piece involved the ‘abstract image of an African landscape filled with orange balloons – a new form of Land art?’ before Superflex progressed to ‘a realistic art project that successfully assumes social responsibility’ (Nacking 1998: 376). Then again, to find the art work with the exhibition of the ‘plant’ in art museums (as evidenced in Cream, for instance) is to miss the point.

There is doubtless a great deal of intellectual work to be done on Superflex’s work as it is encountered in the gallery (not the least because it frequently appears in just such venues). However, in the case of Supergas (if less so, with Superflex’s other projects), the work that appears is not strictly speaking the work of the project’s title. Rather, it is on the one hand, the work in documentary form (video and photographs display the plant in action), and on the other hand, the work as a ‘readymade’, as the plant appears, but severed from its functional context. This is not Supergas, but only a superannuated piece of plumbing. The parts in part are only, if necessarily, a fetish of the art elsewhere. Tempting though it is to follow various prompts here (for instance, the readymade as post-autonomous art in its repressed, modernist condition), the work of establishing the art work of Supergas has not been done yet.

4. The real work of Supergas (and post-autonomous practice): a disciplinary analysis

Assistance is provided by Dan Cameron, who having commented that ‘the idea behind the Biogas project is disarmingly simple’, observes further that

[t]he mostly foreign scientists, economists and health professionals who have been carrying out research and programmes to fight poverty in these regions had considered enlisting biological waste and solar heat as weapons in their campaign – but the idea has never been seriously implemented. (Cameron 1998)

This supports the anecdotal claim that Superflex contend that Supergas was work that no one else would do, and in that way, was art. (The argument is strong whoever authored it.) Importantly, it sites Supergas as art – and hence the latter as a discipline – in an ‘essential difference’. (Word play, if nothing else permits the oxymoron.) This seems to be appropriate. For efforts to distinguish the distinctiveness of Supergas as a phenomenon (aside from its affiliation to non-art disciplines) are difficult. And certainly, a positive identity has not readily emerged from this discussion. Superflex’s definition seems to get around this, avoiding art’s (premature) demise: were Supergas actually to be civil engineering etc. in the disciplines’ own understanding of themselves, it would be nothing else.

This ‘negative identity’ of art in being the work that other disciplines would not do has to be distinguished from its forebears. Because, on first sight, it seems similar to art as defined by certain modernist procedures of differentiation. There, art was very clearly seen as not-the-work of other disciplines. In Greenberg’s canonical inscription of modernism: [w]hat had to be exhibited and made explicit was that which was unique and irreducible not only in art in general, but also in each particular art. Each art had to determine, through the operations peculiar to itself, the effects peculiar and exclusive to itself. (Greenberg 1982: 5)

The difference between these identities through difference can be put somewhat algebraically; whereas Greenberg’s modernism finds art via the rejection of other disciplines’ endeavour, ‘post-autonomy’ finds art in the work that other disciplines reject. Everything lies in the order of the words. Or expressed more graphically, post-autonomous art resides in residues, in disciplinary refuse.

That one medium of Supergas is shit – ‘pure waste’, aside from its uses as manure, and now, as fuel – makes Supergas an instance of post-autonomous art ‘par excellance’. The medium is an emblem of the work’s disciplinary identity. However, in transforming shit’s symbolism as an abject form, by putting it to work as fuel, Supergas additionally, perhaps, transforms various disciplines’ refused work into something equally valuable; ‘fuel’ for social transformation. Much could be made of this economy of shit – or the origins of post-autonomous art in such; there is not the least, a frisson in the fact that ‘culture’ and ‘dirt’ are colliding in this way, after so many years of hygienic segregation, however putative. ‘Putative’, because, as Dominique Laporte elaborates in his History of shit (the title typographically expelling its last word), culture has been long haunted by shit’s ‘lingering stink’ (Laporte 2002: 10). And this could be read as the olfactory version of Walter Benjamin’s famous remark that ‘[t]here is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’ (Benjamin 1999: 248). But scatology diverts from autonomy.

On closer inspection, it may be insufficient to define Supergas as art on the basis of the work that it does being other disciplines’ leftovers. And that is not just because the field of post-autonomous art would be unmanageably wide and weird. Clues as to why such a definition could be deficient are provided by Lingner.

Prescribing or predicting the succession of postmodern by post-autonomous, he writes: ‘[i]n order not to lose its autonomy, however, art must set its own extra-artistic or heteronomous [‘legislated externally’] social ends in strict self-determination, that is autonomously’ (Lingner 1993: 117). Here, the implication is that art (i.e. artists’ reified agency) has to actively determine or choose its ‘social ends’ for only in so doing are those ‘ends’ art. Social work becomes art only when it also fulfils art’s distinct agenda. The many questions, as to what this is, are not addressed by Lingner and nor in the documentary literature on Supergas. Thus, the question to put to Superflex would be: Why the Biogas endeavour, rather than the many other worthy things that they could have also done? The comments Lingner makes above continue in a way that underline this last aspect of the term post-autonomy. Anticipating Schaeffer’s point that art is ‘always part of social life’, even when autonomous, Lingner follows his remarks regarding art’s autonomy with the observation that: ‘[b]y setting up extra-artistic, that is, heteronomous, functions for itself, that is autonomously[,] art becomes a part of the he-autonomous structure’ (Lingner 1993: 117). To which he adds: ‘[t]his is a rediscovery of a mental image of FRIEDRICH SCHILLER, one that he called “he-autonomy” …. It is a type of autonomy and can only be carried out in society, not used as an instrument against society’ (Lingner 1993: 117). (Capitalization and italics belong to source material.) Lingner’s rather convoluted writing prompts a paraphrase (incorporating his remarks above): art itself decides the terms of its engagement with social projects. In this is its autonomy and hence an artness. However, that autonomy is socially provided for and permitted by society.

4.1. Post-autonomy and ‘relative autonomy’

Regarded in this way, the kind of autonomy that is a necessary feature of post-autonomous art if art is not to disappear (the rather awkward ‘he-autonomy’) is not so far from relative autonomy – a phrase that more readily returns this discussion to its more Marxist terms. Such is the label used by certain Marxist theorists to describe the fact that ‘all’ cultural forms are separate in ‘varying degrees’ but never absolutely from social practices. The variation is specific to the type of cultural form and changes historically, as Raymond Williams notes (Williams 1981: 218–22).

If in the term post-autonomy, the prefix ‘post’ implies – however over-zealously – a transcendence to the point of absence of the noun that follows it, the notion of a relative autonomy supplies a useful corrective. For, if a thing is ‘relatively autonomous’ then by the same token it is also relatively post-autonomous. That relative autonomy does not have the same apocalyptic tones as post-autonomy will doubtless prevent it from supplanting the latter in critical vocabulary. But if the latter is allowed to admit the sense of the former, then that should not be a problem. Post-autonomy does very useful work – both in name and, crucially for this article’s address to the question of what work art may do indeed.

References

Benjamin, W. (1999), ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, London: Pimlico.

Bürger, P. (1984), Theory of the Avant-Garde, Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.

Cameron, D. (1998), ‘Into Africa’, www.superflex.dk. Accessed 5 January 2007.

Danto, A. (1992), Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective, New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux.

Duchamp, M. (1992), ‘The Richard Mutt Case’, in C. Harrison and P. Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1990–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford: Blackwell.

Greenberg, C. (1982), ‘Modernist Painting’, in F. Frascina and C. Harrison (eds), Modern Art and Modernism: an Anthology of Critical Writings, London: Paul Chapman.

Laporte, D. (2002), History of Shit, MA and London: MIT Press.

Lingner, M. (1993), ‘Art as a System within Society’, in Ine Geevers (ed.), Place-Position-Public, Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Akademie.

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First published as: Francis. M.A. (2007), ‘Dirty work: art beyond “autonomy”’, Journal of Visual Art Practice 6: 1, pp. xx–xx, doi: 10.1386/jvap.6.1.xx/x Intellect www.intellectbooks.co.uk

Author details Mary Anne Francis is senior lecturer on the Critical Fine Art Practice degree at the University of Brighton, and research fellow in Critical Practice at Chelsea College of Art and Design. She is an artist and writer. Across these practices, she has been concerned with the reciprocal conditions of the social-in-the-artist (and in particular, the notion of the artist as a multifarious agent) and the artist-in-the-social, as identified with recent participatory, collaborative and ‘post-autonomous’ activities. For further details of her practice and research see www.brighton.ac.uk/arts/research/ and http://www.chelsea.arts.ac.uk/17224.htm. Contact: University of Brighton, School of Arts and Communication BN2 OJY, UK; Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London SW1P 4RJ, UK. E-mail: maryannefrancis@hotmail.com

Last modified: 24.10.07 by MaryAnne