Dirty work: art beyond 'autonomy'

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'.