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Website: http://www.dutchartinstitute.nl
Location: Enschede, Netherlands
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Latest Activity: Nov 9, 2011

TRACES OF AUTONOMY - THE ECONOMY OF SPEECH AND VOICE IN GLOBAL ART PROJECT CURATED BY VAN ABBEMUSEUM.

Considering the new program 2010/2011:

An artwork today is no longer just an object in its independance, but exists out of a complex network - a discrete economy - of statements and events. This now obvious truth has a profound inpact on all those actors that work to produce and mediate art. The name given to this development is the 'decline' or even the 'death' of art's autonomy. How irreversible this presumed decline of art's autonomy may seem, this does by no mean indicate that it is clear how we should produce and receive art today. Many institutions and professions have been carefully constructed around this almost sacred autonomy, including the profession of the artist. In this project a group of maximum 10 students will conduct an investigation mapping out the consequences of this development, identifying problems that should be addressed and thinking out a way how to address them in a symposium in early June in the Van Abbemuseum.

The starting point for the project will be the work of two French philosophers Bruno Latour and Jaques Rancière. Both philosophers have opened a door that leads beyond the type of critical analysis that dominated the thinking of the preceding generation. From Rancière comes the insight that art's autonomy should not be understood just as it's independance or as a right to be esoteric, but that it plays a particular role in modern democratic societies, marking the point where someones private 'voice' - unrecognized by the majority - enters the public stage and becomes 'speech'. Within todays globalized world this transformation from voice to speech takes on new forms and asks a new awareness from artist and related professionals. It is Latour who has developed a method on how to arrive at such awareness, based on tracing connections. In the project we will explore the value of Rancière's insight and Latour's method for artistic practice, offering Ma-students not so much a platform to produce new works, but more a deeper understanding on how to mediate their own work in the future. Although there is a good chance that this work will also be affected by this project.

The project will be supervised by staff members of the Van Abbemuseum and different guest teachers and coordinated by Steven ten Thije. Students who want to participate are not required to have specific knowledge, but should be willing study texts and participate in discussions.

Discussion Forum

Autonomy as beginning – some thoughts on contemporary global art 4 Replies

Last Sunday DAI-students met with Galit Eilat to discuss the exhibition ‘The Politics of Collecting, the Collecting of Politics’, which she curated for the third chapter of the four chapter program…Continue

Tags: Akram Zaatari, Zofia Kulik, Lia Perjovschi, Michal Heimann, Galit Eilat

Started by Steven ten Thije. Last reply by Daniel Miller Jan 12, 2011.

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Comment by Steven ten Thije on January 8, 2011 at 19:48: screenshot Arthur Zmijewski's Them 2007

After two sessions, one with Clare Butcher and Annie Fletcher, a second hosted by Clare Butcher and myself, the third chapter of ‘Traces of Autonomy’ is comprised out of a discussion with curator Galit Eilat in the Van Abbemuseum and a seminar dedicated to reading Rancière’s ‘Aesthetics as Politics’. With this we turn from the relativist, critique of autonomy from Latour to one of autonomy’s last defenders Jacques Rancière. Where Latour consider ‘autonomy’ a typical modernist purist delusion, Rancière reposition autonomy as a structural node in modern political practice. In the session we will have to further diversify and specify our understanding of the term autonomy. On the one hand we are costumed to understand autonomy as a quality of artobject (Latour’s critique of the term), but Rancière suggests that we might also see autonomy as quality of a type of encounter between people which can be facilitated by art. This complex theoretical conundrum will be put to the test by Galit Eilat, who as curator working in often in the Middle-East, has intimate experience of the ‘aesthetics of politics’ and art’s practical possibilities to influence real politics. In dialogue with her, discussing among other things her current exhibition in the Van Abbemuseum ‘The Politics of Collecting, the Collecting of Politics’ and the work of Polish artist Arthur Zmijewski, we hope to put meat on the philosophical bones of Rancière’s suggestion.

Comment by Eva on June 24, 2010 at 8:51: Started google with the word 'AUTONOMY', the first definition that stayed with me: entry 10 of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, article titled 'Feminist Perspectives on the Self'.

(...)The topic of the self has long been salient in feminist philosophy, for it is pivotal to questions about personhood, identity, the body, and agency that feminism must address. In some respects, Simone de Beauvoir's trenchant observation, “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other,” sums up why the self is such an important issue for feminism. To be the Other is to be the non-subject, the non-person, the non-agent—in short, the mere body.(…)