Wolfgang Ullrich: “Art after the end of its autonomy” – culture

A bold thesis, a provocative assertion, a not entirely implausible observation of a trend that promptly becomes a new age – one must be happy when someone claims a full turn of the century, just because art history and art science are often so incredibly cautious, entrenched behind descriptions and general mindfulness? In any case, it is easier to be happy if a diagnosis of the present in Germany does not turn out to be culturally pessimistic. And if you can’t accuse Wolfgang Ullrich of anything, it’s that his findings about “Art after the end of its autonomy” have become culturally pessimistic. This end of autonomy is so bright that you have to put on dark sunglasses and the publisher for the blurb has let the neologism “culturally optimistic” jump.

In any case, the good news is, to put it bluntly, that after the bourgeois-elitist terror of autonomous art, activism and gift shops have now joined forces to finally reconcile far-reaching inclusion and consumption of art with tangible utility events, from the cuteness of an art toy to the restitution of stolen art To bring colonial art to the original cultures.

Virgil Abloh is celebrated for an imaginative activism that unashamedly embraces the commodity form

Key witnesses from Virgil Abloh to Hans Sedlmayr march to round off the front. The clerical-conservative Sedlmayr gets a re-sacralized art, even if it’s not a real church, but a consumer cult; Abloh is honored for an imaginative activism that did not use the commodity form modestly and mendaciously, like modern art, but openly. Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s visit to the Louvre, toys by KAWS, empowerment by Kerry James Marshall and detective work by Forensic Architecture complete the panorama of the deserved end to the autonomy era through social media infantilism on the one hand and serious political art on the other . Earlier concepts of art from the European Middle Ages, indigenous cultures and of course Instagram are also rushing in to end the reign of terror of Adorno and Duchamp.

Regardless of how this development is evaluated, the fact that gift shop culture and activism are not opposites, but sometimes pull in the same direction, cannot be entirely dismissed at first glance. What they both have in common is a certain and not always unproductive impatience with the auratic objects. They should finally save the world, include the excluded and let them take them home to cuddle.

The point of the book, however, lies precisely in the evaluation: relatively manageable, not to say banal, reception events are consistently preferred to dense, exciting, poignant ones. The only original thing is the coalition designed here, which has something traffic light-like: left-wing activists and right-wing market fans don’t come together in the real art world, nobody who supports the goals of activism can support those of commercialization and vice versa – Ullrich’s point: he finds both excellent and believes that others agree with him

Well, the examples are all real, it’s debatable how much change they signal when 99 percent of art institutions are still functioning exactly as they did since the great booms of the noughties. If you look at neighboring worlds like that of pop music, which Ullrich also looks at, nobody would belittle their politicized-activist part and nobody the culture-industrial part. Nevertheless, Kendrick Lamar’s rap masterpiece “To Pimp A Butterfly” is an autonomous work of art: Autonomous does not mean unaffected by the world and money, but to be received according to one’s own rules.

You could buy Duchamp’s “Big Glass” as a shower curtain as early as the 1980s

In addition, since time immemorial, inclusion and participation have been the core business of the reform movements in autonomy art (Dada, Fluxus, relational aesthetics and so on) and Duchamp’s “Big Glass” – Ullrich’s example of a particularly crazy, senseless case of autonomy – you could already do bought as a shower curtain in the eighties. What is actually new are new forms, new objects, new themes of activism – but they too are largely dealt with in relation to and in the forums built around the art that Ullrich, in his very broad interpretation of the concept of autonomy, counts as obsolete art.

Open detailed view

Two steps then go quite wrong: on the one hand, the cardboard comrade “Autonomie”, drawn with unnecessarily rough lines, on the other hand, the misjudgment of the historical connection between the current strength of activism and gift shop culture and precisely the logic of a modern and post-modern art, in the course of which the concept of autonomy has played and still plays a role.

First, Ullrich’s autonomy is associated with thought-out art-religious intricacies, in reality long undetectable bourgeois diligence and nasty purity obsessions, not at least as often with good jokes and necessarily complex ideas. Like so many populists, Ullrich adheres to the misunderstanding that what is intellectually challenging is pious and conservative, when in fact it forms the basic idea of ​​what is entertaining. On the one hand he is disgusted by genius artists, on the other hand Kafka and Duchamp, the greatest opponents of genius, embodiments of obsolete puzzle art are spoilsports for him. Overall differences, such as between Adorno and Heidegger, pale before the great common guilt of autonomy.

The fact that not everyone can afford good wines speaks against capitalism, not against good wine

Ullrich’s language sounds calm, he overstretches and demonizes with a friendly, post-heroic expression. However, his rather associative and crudely determined counterpart of the Art-Toy-Activism-Liberation has nothing in common with the relatively unspectacular fact that autonomy initially means nothing else than that visual art draws a certain amount of attention, lifted out of everyday life, to an immediately common object would not dedicate, claimed.

And this attention, which Kant calls “disinterested pleasure,” has nothing to do with emotional coldness and disinterest, as Ullrich believes. It’s because you don’t have an existential interest in the reality of the object, i.e. you look at a Dutch food still life because you’re hungry or it makes you hungry. This attention is based on privilege, for which this construction has long and rightly been thrown into critical hell, but it goes against privilege; not what makes this possible. The fact that not everyone can afford good wines speaks against capitalism, not against good wine.

Secondly, for about 100 plus/minus 50 years now, autonomy has been exactly the place at the center of which Ullrich discovered the independence of trade and activism, not from outside – namely as a consequence of their dialectics of action and reflection, effect and procrastination, aesthetic urgency and suspended temporality. The fact that art is autonomous, i.e. that it gives itself laws, means that these are transgressed and disputed and, for as long as they have existed, have been questioned and reformed. Historically, this circumstance not only made the value of self-reflexivity and the questioning of the institutional foundations of art (including the material conditions of autonomy) rise to their central value, but also that directly because of these findings, activist art emerged as a result of a self-governing attitude that takes itself seriously – admittedly only against the heteronomy of market and state and often again successfully co-opted by them.

The Picabias, the Koons and Hirsts of this world have also always and regularly positioned the total affirmation of the market as an autonomous measure with the claim of subversion against elitist or overly academic art. Right from the beginning of every art autonomy, the market was the counter-principle to the church and court commission. To say that this has reached a new level is not very plausible; the global new collectors much invoked here also mainly buy white cube goods. Only the anti- and decolonial content is really new and relevant today – Ullrich ultimately associates it with another, rather questionable undertaking.

It is hardly possible that he could easily find satisfactory allies for his counter-autonomous project of an art that wants to find a cure for elitism through a widespread possession of art goods that is no longer limited to minorities. He tries to do this by forging an alliance between an animism of the object, attributed to restitution and anti-colonial activists, and what used to be called commodity fetishism: a new “thingness”.

A painting by Chéri Samba, in which the African artist mourns the cult objects stolen by colonialism and gathers them in front of him with a melancholy expression, parallels Ullrich with a photo that shows a proud art toy collector with his figurines. Ullrich’s language is cautious, but it boils down to comparing non-European art to toys. It doesn’t help that Ullrich finds these toys much better than the old European art of genius that is said to be or was in charge outside of the playground.