Series of Reconciliation; The Realm of the Unreconciled (2013), GCGCA(i)

The Realm of the Unreconciled

The Second Difficulty in Writing the Truth

Brecht-Weigel Museum, Berlin

20 Mar - 20 Jun 2013

The appearance of self-legislating form positions the work of art critically in relation to society because it functions as critique of social functionality (including its own functionality, in the commodified status of the artwork itself), which it has to internally resist or counter in some way in order to maintain its critical autonomy - which is an illusion of autonomy.

It is the fact that it is an illusion of autonomy that allows it to figure freedom. Art is political because it figures freedom through its immanently illusory structure. This is the truth of art. The figuring of freedom, or art's figuring of a free practise means that autonomous art is not part of an 'aesthetic regime of art'.

Autonomous art is part of a supra-aesthetic artistic regime of truth. It is not part of an aesthetic regime. Aesthetic art is one philosophically self-consciously confused strand of a supra-aesthetic, artistic regime of truth.

Series of Reconciliation; The Realm of the Unreconciled (2013), GCGCA(i)

The historical development of modern art is a development in the social forms and dynamics of the dialectics of autonomy and dependence that constitute this supra-aesthetic artistic regime of truth. Politics is inscribed into this concept of autonomous art in three ways that follow from the fact that it is constituted by the transposition of practise into the appearance of autonomy:

1. Autonomous [art] has a political meaning insofar as it is an image of freedom - it prefigures a free practise. As such it is supposed to criticise the existing state of affairs.

Series of Reconciliation; The Realm of the Unreconciled (2013), GCGCA(i)

2. The political meaning of the dialectic of autonomy and dependence is in the model of reconciliation which is carried by this dialectical unity, which functions in the traditional way as a 'promise of happiness' (a phrase of Stendhal's), by offering a model of reconciliation (not a reconciliation, but a model of reconciliation).

Series of Reconciliation; The Realm of the Unreconciled (2013), GCGCA(i)

In both these cases of politics immanent to autonomous art, it is because of these imagings of freedom and happiness that autonomous art becomes affirmative in the bad Marcusian sense of affirmative, and is viewed as such from the 1920s onwards. It is because autonomous art became affirmative of existing society at the same time as criticising it, because it was figuring the possibility of freedom and happiness in an unfree, unhappy society.

This complicated the critical criterion for the achievement of autonomy, adding an additional critical requirement for it, to counteract this affirmative function of autonomy; the requirement of an element of anti-art - an element of non-autonomous anti-art - within autonomous work, in order to render the autonomous work autonomous from its own affirmative autonomy.

It is only the anti-art element in twentieth-century art that marks the illusory character of the autonomy of the work. Since the artwork is autonomous by virtue of generating the illusion of autonomy, the problem is that people take the illusion of autonomy seriously. But it is not meant to be 'genuinely’ illusory, but self-consciously illusory.

What is important is that the artwork isn't 'actually' ontologically autonomous in some full sense, but rather 'appears' to be autonomous. The autonomous artwork is autonomous to the extent to which it can generate out of itself the appearance the illusion of its own autonomy.

Series of Reconciliation; The Realm of the Unreconciled (2013), GCGCA(i)

 Autonomy is operating at two different levels;

- As a set of institutional conditions: it requires the social determination of a space free from social determinations of meaning based on non-artistic functions; that is the social concept of autonomy; artistic autonomy is a social form. An institutional form. Arts taking up of its social conditions into itself, as part of its constitution of autonomy is a large part of the autonomizing 'act' of the artwork itself.

- As the achievement of each individual work: from the standpoint of criticism, the critical question is: 'Does this individual work achieve autonomy?' 'Can I find a critically significant self-legislating law of form in my reconstruction of the internal structure of this work?’

Series of Reconciliation; The Realm of the Unreconciled (2013), GCGCA(i)

3. The third way that politics appears (within the dialectic of autonomy and heteronomy within any work) is as a mode of heteronomy (as external determination, necessity or constraint). Politics is one of the main forms of dependence within autonomous art, by which autonomous art protects itself from its own affirmative illusory autonomy. Autonomous art has functionalized politics and anti-art into its own autonomous dynamic. It’s one of the things that happens to twentieth-century art.

A wholly politically dependent art (art which isn't autonomous: ’political art' in the strong sense) loses its practical context (which happens quickly to all art, since the practical context of an act cannot be sustained), and is going to then be reproduced by an institution. Then dependent art becomes autonomous art in the institutional sense. It survives as autonomous art, in the institutional sense, to the extent to which its originally strongly anti-art element is sufficiently residual to make it autonomous. It’s a very contradictory process.

As a paradigm of dependent art, politics is a paradigmatic way of rendering art critically autonomous. However this critical function only operates as long as the ant-art element in question resists incorporation into the art institution. The art institution's ability to appropriate anti-art, and political art in particular, gets stronger. So the institution's recognition of the anti-art element as an element of art begins to negate the autonomizing effect of politics within art (the familiar logic of what happened to ‘institutional critique’).