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SoSe 23: Autonomy and Art: A Reading Seminar

Eric de Bruyn

Comments

One of the main ideas underlying modern aesthetics is that of autonomy, which derives from the Greek words autos (self) and nomos (law). Since the 19th century, it has become customary to speak of an “autonomous” work of art as well as the “autonomy” of the artist or an artistic institution and even the “autonomy” of the critic of art. But if this notion was crucial to many formalist critics of modernism, it was simultaneously subjected to vehement critique by members of the historical avant-garde. As a result, since the 1960s at the very latest the term has become highly suspect. Nevertheless, the concept of autonomy which was provided its first rigorous definition in the aesthetics of Immanuel Kant, is crucial to the methodological development of our discipline. This seminar will, therefore, consider classical and contemporary theorists and artists, such as, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Karl Marx, André Breton, Alice Creischer, Fredric Jameson, Donna Haraway, David Graeber, Peter Osborne, and Elizabeth Povinelli, who approach this term from various critical angles. The seminar is intended to provide art history students with a thorough grounding in art theory by focusing on the discursive fortunes of this term. We will discover, for instance, that autonomy has multiple, sometimes contradictory uses in aesthetics, art criticism, political theory, and sociology and is not only current in art history but also in the history of social movements. Autonomy, therefore, cannot be reduced to a retrograde notion of “medium essentialism” and has acquired a renewed vitality in contemporary debates on art and the social. We will use Art and Autonomy: A Critical Reader, edited by Sven Lütticken, as our course book and conduct close readings of the texts assembled in this anthology. The course will be conducted in English, but all assignments can be written in German or English. close