We use cookies on this website, you can read about them here. To use the website as intended please... ACCEPT COOKIES
UAL Research Online

Dirty work: art beyond 'autonomy'

Francis, Mary Anne (2007) Dirty work: art beyond 'autonomy'. Journal of Visual Art Practice, 6 (1). pp. 33-44. ISSN 1470-2029

Type of Research: Article
Creators: Francis, Mary Anne
Description:

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'.

Official Website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jvap.6.1.3/2
Keywords/subjects not otherwise listed: post-autonomy, contemporary art, Michael Lingner, Superflex, relative autonomy, modernist autonomy
Publisher/Broadcaster/Company: Intellect Publishing
Your affiliations with UAL: Other Affiliations > RAE 2008
Colleges > Chelsea College of Arts
Date: 1 July 2007
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1386/jvap.6.1.3/2
Date Deposited: 07 Dec 2009 13:41
Last Modified: 08 Oct 2015 05:47
Item ID: 775
URI: https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/775

Repository Staff Only: item control page | University Staff: Request a correction