The possibility for Autonomy?

E-flux journal 16 – may 2010 Diedrich Diederichsen Audio Poverty

In discussing a notion of utopia as embodied within a creative moment that is free from systems of exchange, Diedrich Diederichsen addresses an assumption about ‘nature’ that has been confused with a sense of autonomy. An instance that springs to mind is that of abstract expressionist painting. Despite expressing a scepticism that arises against practices that claim to operate within ‘original states’ (and without explicitly differentiating) Diederichsen none-the-less suggests that music might offer access to a state of utopian autonomy,

“such a utopia of music possesses a radicalism that the other ideal functions of the arts do not. While other arts formulate maximums or optimums, it is always in relation to emerging or established social rules, and not as the suspension of those rules – which would be genuinely utopian.”

Hal Foster’s 1983 essay ‘The Expressive Fallacy’ uses a structuralist framework to argue for the impossibility of generating form outside of inherited cultural codes. He identifies an established account of expressionist gesture “we commonly say that an expressionist like Kandinsky “broke through” representation, when in fact he replaced (or superimposed) one form with another.” (Foster, Hal “The Expressive Fallacy” Recodings. Bay Press: Washington. 1985 P60. –Essay first published in Art in America. January 1983)

And returns to an analysis of how the forms in the work signify their autonomy from conventional representational convention to point out the irony of its status as such “Both types of representation are codes: the classical painter suppresses nonnaturalistic marks and colors so as to simulate (a staged) reality; the expressionist “frees” such marks and colors of naturalism so as to simulate direct expression” (Ibid. P61).

In context, Foster’s essay, like Diederichsen’s was concerned with the commodification of form. There was an unprecedented boom in the art market, in which expressionist paintings drew obscene commercial returns. The scepticism of practice one might arrive at from the situation is a suspicion that the practice ceases to be authentic and generative if (in whatever it is exploring) if it is created as a reiteration of a predetermined meaning.

However, a view that focusses on historical canonisation (that relies on somewhat arbitrary or framework-specific establishments of meaning) of artistic gestures, could be seen as a stingy and obtuse way to dismiss the potential for nuances within gestural form to generate surprise and lucidity.