The Autonomy of Art is Ordinary

Historians tell us that art was first associated with autonomy when the bourgeoisie came to political ascendency after the French Revolution. Over the preceding century, art had developed into a distinct institution with its own markets, academies and criticism. By the end of the eighteenth century, it could be regarded as an end in itself, independent of the social functions it had previously served. The first theorist to apply the concept of autonomy to art was Friedrich Schiller, whose ideas – formulated over two hundred years ago – have been repeatedly revised or challenged. Yet they remain relevant points of reference in contemporary debates, including those explored in the book under review, Kim West’s The Autonomy of Art is Ordinary: Notes in Defense of an Idea of Emancipation FIG.1.

In the early part of the twentieth century modernists such as Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) and Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) sought to secure aesthetic autonomy whereas others, including the Dadaists, set out to transcend it. A similar dichotomy was evident in the post-war period. By the beginning of the 1960s, when Clement Greenberg’s valorisation of autonomy in the self-referential logic of modernist painting had become institutionalised in America, Guy Debord, the de facto leader of the Situationist International in Europe, purged the movement of its artists. Art’s apparent autonomy only served, in Debord’s view, to compensate for an absence of autonomy in society generally, which would not be realised until art ceased to exist as a separate institution. Towards the end of the twentieth century, however, this debate largely faded from view. On the one hand, Postmodernism’s reaction against Greenbergian orthodoxy meant that attempts to reclaim and redefine autonomy were sidelined. On the other, there was little faith that there might be a viable route for art beyond capitalism. The best that could be hoped for was for art to ironically embrace the simulacral world that capital had produced.

Over the past two decades, by contrast, autonomy has returned to the agenda. For example, Sven Lütticken, whose book Art and Autonomy (2022) anthologises key historical and contemporary texts, has also charted movements focused on political autonomy that have picked up Situationism’s torch, and Nicholas Brown’s Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism (2019) is a substantial defence of autonomous art.¹ West’s contribution to this growing field is a compact tract that systematically parses recent objections to aesthetic autonomy, uncovers their assumptions and dismantles them. In place of the straw man arguments that its detractors take aim at, West’s concise book offers a cogent and compelling case for the continuing importance of art’s assertion of autonomy. A nuanced and carefully argued theoretical manifesto, it presents its thesis in the form of three propositions, each corresponding to one of the three misrepresentations it debunks.

West’s starting point is clear. As art of any type remains externally determined by social, economic and political forces, the question to be addressed is in what sense it may nonetheless assert autonomy. Given the political commitments invoked in the book’s subtitle, it may come as a surprise that West’s response boils down to what at first glance seems to be a relatively traditional answer: a work of art asserts its autonomy not through its message or any manner of direct action in the world, but through its form. It is here, with his first proposition, that West parts ways with the likes of Lütticken: he is clearly aligned with a position that privileges aesthetic meaning over direct political action. Those who identify art with the latter are likely to find the author’s equation of artistic autonomy with emancipation controversial; his stance may appear too close to the acquiescent politics allegedly implicit in Theodor Adorno’s aesthetics. Indeed, West closely echoes his Frankfurt School predecessor when he argues that a work of art asserts its autonomy where it ‘take[s] up into itself its social conditions and render[s] them as figure’ (p.20). West is more explicit, however, in his contention that autonomous form – beyond serving as a negative image of current social conditions – reveals the very position from which critique of those conditions is possible. If art becomes subordinate to external political agendas it jeopardises this potential. Moreover, this danger is precisely the reason why a political defence of art’s autonomy is necessary today, not least in the charged climate of Trump’s America.

Form may seem an unlikely vehicle for securing autonomy, given what West tasks it with counterbalancing – namely the effects of the commodity form and market ideology or, in short, capitalism. West does not claim, however, that art should, or is able to, counteract capitalism in the wider world in any objective sense. Rather, he argues that art can momentarily suspend its logic. According to West’s account, it does so in two steps: it acknowledges the heteronomous logic of the social world implicit in the materials from which it is constructed; then, it mediates those materials and their implications through its own form.  

Although West’s book focuses on bringing conceptual clarity to the debate – a job it does admirably well – it forgoes analysis of specific examples, which would illustrate this process. Reading through it, the work of Anne Imhof (b.1978) came to this reviewer’s mind: her slick spray-painted panels etched with scratches FIG.2, reminiscent of a keyed luxury car; the gratuitous corridors, platforms and gantries that evoke corporate or municipal architecture, which have served as the arenas for her impressive large-scale performance pieces; and the lugubrious, vaping youths that stalk these installations, resembling, with their expressionless stares, Balenciaga models in a Piranesian prison-cum-fashion show FIG.3. These are the apotheosis of our own impotence in the face of the prevailing socio-economic system libidinised and sold back to us as ersatz rebellion. If it managed to assert autonomy in the face of this material, Imhof’s work would, by West’s account, do so by dominating it with its own immanent form. This might mean, for example, extending the imagery it borrows beyond its function in marketing or by physically including the audience, manipulating their movement and frustrating their access to the spectacle presented. Whether Imhof succeeds in this second step is not the issue at hand; what matters is that these are the terms that West’s book provides for framing the question in the first place.

West’s remaining two propositions are that the autonomy of art is, firstly, ordinary and, secondly, a social relation. The former is persuasive, not least because ordinary culture is where capitalism’s determination of our lives – as wage labourers, social-media users and algorithmically targeted consumers – is most acutely felt. It also implicitly absorbs Debord’s critique by relocating the potential of autonomy from the rarefied sphere of high art to any cultural form within broader society. In a similar vein, West’s description of art’s autonomy as a social relation echoes Debord’s identification of the capitalist spectacle under the same concept. The implication of the coincidence is that here the work of art does not merely withdraw from capitalism’s condition but confronts it.

This requires explanation, because, as West points out, capitalism and the work of art ­– one an abstract system and the other a concrete artefact– are not comparable phenomena. He resolves this tension by contrasting the form of subjectivity determined within the socio-economic order with that invoked by the autonomous work of art. We are, he writes, addressed by the work as ‘the subject of a groundless critical act’ (p.43). That is to say, because the work demands to be understood in terms of its own immanent logic, it asks to be engaged with and its significance determined without reliance on any external criteria. Insofar as we rise to this call, we constitute the work as autonomous. In this reciprocal relation, the prevailing socio-economic logic plays no part, and the admittedly precarious moment of autonomy thus realised acts as a tinderbox for critical thought. Here, West’s account may be at its most speculative and theoretically dense, but it is also where it indicates precisely both the limits to what he believes autonomous art can achieve as well as the indispensable role that it nonetheless plays – or could do.