Abstract
Carl Andre’s opposition between an activating art and a pacifying culture becomes the impetus for wider reflections on artistic autonomy and agency with special reference to how fine art is taught at college. I propose that artistic agency might better be accounted for and enacted by conceiving of it not as something set against or at a distance from culture in general, but ‘as’ culture. Through an overview of various institutional and discursive accounts of artistic production which describe the ways in which art is itself influenced and determined by external factors, and an extended analysis of Raymond Williams theory of culture as ‘collective advance’, I propose that fine art education needs to confront the question of contemporary art’s wider cultural embeddedness, and the political culture of art itself—a politics based in the nature of the social relationships art practice engenders.
Highlights
The study of fine art has long been viewed in terms of a commitment to a practice not governed, in essence, by external requirements—commercial, traditional, governmental, or anything else.Art, it is said, must be ‘free’, autonomous, determined only by its own laws, ‘laws’ which might best be understood as diffuse and shifting logics which appear through the struggle of practice, continuously reset as a result of ongoing advances made by the community of artists themselves, alongside the critical and institutional discourses that reveal and produce art works as meaningful and valuable
Bohemian ideals of creative autonomy, coalesce with the sorts of individualist modes of self-realization that define the competitive culture of neoliberalism, where every act and decision can be conceived in terms of advantageous investment in one’s ‘human capital’
It is to ideas of ‘culture’ that I turn in order to address these wider concerns: art as part of culture and cultural development in general, and how the specific culture of art effects such development. From this perspective artistic autonomy and agency are precisely questions of cultural production and struggle, not goals which demand separation from ‘culture’. My interlocutors in this somewhat speculative endeavor are the Minimalist artist Carl Andre and the cultural theorist Raymond Williams, two names that are not often seen together but which might well collide in an art school context— today’s students are much more likely to be introduced to the sculptor than to the cultural theorist, an omission which, I would say, is to the detriment of art and artists
Summary
The study of fine art has long been viewed in terms of a commitment to a practice not governed, in essence, by external requirements—commercial, traditional, governmental, or anything else. Bohemian ideals of creative autonomy, coalesce with the sorts of individualist modes of self-realization that define the competitive culture of neoliberalism, where every act and decision can be conceived in terms of advantageous investment in one’s ‘human capital’ These days, fine art education no longer propounds but challenges a crude Romantic view of autonomy as an escape towards unencumbered self-determination. It is the question of artistic autonomy as social separation, and its institutional reproduction through systems of exclusion that I wish to focus on in this essay by reflecting on how these relate to wider issues of agency and control It is to ideas of ‘culture’ that I turn in order to address these wider concerns: art as part of culture and cultural development in general, and how the specific culture of art effects such development. My interlocutors in this somewhat speculative endeavor are the Minimalist artist Carl Andre and the cultural theorist Raymond Williams, two names that are not often seen together but which might well collide in an art school context— today’s students are much more likely to be introduced to the sculptor than to the cultural theorist, an omission which, I would say, is to the detriment of art and artists
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