POST AUTONOMIA

The German Conceptual artist Michael Lingner proposed the notion of Post Autonomy in the 1990s. The aim of post-autonomous artistic production is not (or not primarily) to create objects (electronic or physical) or to document the traces of the productive process. Rather, it is to support and embody a political transformation whereby the human participants subscribe to an open ended mutual learning process and define and activate a productive space outside capitalism and its competitive mode of production.

• Conscious control of the artefact / outcome is relinquished or weakened. The surrealists experimented with the unconscious in automatic writing; a number of conceptual artists used random events as input to the productive process; dialogical encounters contributed to the work (see, for example, some works of Stanley Brouwn or Douglas Huebler); choices of performers and improvisation influence the result, for example, in a (musical) performance where the players can chose which module of music to play.
• The process of production itself is considered as constituting the art, not any resulting products or documents. This was very common in various conceptual art practices in the Sixties. The role of documentation and of documents (e.g. of performances) as quasi artefacts undermined this somewhat as conceptual artists needed objects for the gallery system. For some artists such as Allan Kaprow, a dissolution of the boundary separating life and art led to the idea of an invisible art practice.
• Practices are considered open-ended, i.e., no pre-conceived result is intended. Instead, the initial boundaries or rules of some process are defined and the actual development is left to the interaction of participants. Censorship issues can become important in this context.
• There is no narrow focus on the aesthetic experience as in most other art forms. Rather, post-autonomous art explicitly deals with social, political and economic issues as well a with the communication, media, race and gender issues discussed in cultural studies. This also links to the practice of the Situationists who intended to abolish the notion of art as a separate, specialized activity and aimed to transform it so it became part of the fabric of everyday life.

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