A Situated Terminology
Terms:
Unlearning
Prompt: "visualize unlearning", made with Ideogram, January 2025
Maj Ørskov: "Since, in the context of the artistic practices that interest me, the practice of unlearning relates directly to the production, circulation and instrumentalization of knowledge, I also find the concept of unlearning to be a key methodological stance to think, write and practice through when interacting analytically with these works." Continue reading
Thinking, writing, practicing in circles
All the steps towards an image generated with Stable Diffusion XL and the prompt "Thinking, writing, practicing in circles", January 2025.
Maj Ørskov: "we, researchers of contemporary art, are forced not just to work progressively in line with the history of art, when composing a problem or object of analysis, but to work in circles across the analytic material that we find of relevance." Continue reading
Reflexive transformation
An image generated with the prompt "The aesthetic is political". The red dots show the zones of the image activated by the word "political" in the prompt. The visualization is created using DAAM, March 2025.
Jacob Lund: "The aesthetic is political precisely because of its ability to differentiate itself from the normally inconspicuous organization of our everyday lifeworld, and, through such differentiation, provoke critical reflection on this organization — which is what makes a certain degree of exhibition of decisive importance.[2]" Continue reading
Maj Ørskov: "I want to ask what consequences this implied precedence of reflexivity over more bodily circumstances has for the analytic potential of the term. In Rebentisch’s and Lund’s writing on the phenomenon, I find a lack of reflections regarding the more “practical” or "material" (in lack of better words) dimensions of reflexive transformation. Under which spatial-temporal conditions can an intense exchange between an interpreting subject and a sensemaking object come to qualify as reflexive transformation?" Continue reading
Reality/virkelighed
Prompt: visualize reality, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Jacob Lund: "Reality is constituted by what is at work, virker, in the world; by what is in operation, what operates; and by what has effects and informs our perception and understanding of the world. The artistic practices in question here operate in and on reality and demonstrate that the reality of the world, virkeligheden, is negotiable and can be made to work, virke, otherwise." Continue reading
Planetarity
Prompt: visualize planetary entanglement, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Jacob Lund: "Entering the anthropocene epoch influences our very perception of time. Hence, we are not only dealing with a new epoch replacing an old one, the Holocene, in a process of linear progressive development – which in the case of the Earth spans more than 4,5 billion years, a time scale that is highly abstract to our human perception. The new epoch is also accompanied by an increasing need for us to relate to a planetary scale, according to which we, as inhabitants of the same Earth, globally and across our cultural differences and national histories, share the same historical now, the same present." Continue reading
Ordinary research
A composite of four images generated with the prompt "to understand the different processes and gestures which together constitute ordinary analysis within art research today" by Stable Diffusion. On the left top, the red and yellow zones represent the parts of the image most affected by the term "art". On the top right, the zones affected by the term "and". On the bottom row, the red and yellow zones represent the parts affected by the terms "ordinary" and "research" respectively. March 2025.
Maj Ørskov: "Consequently, I would say that the core practice of humanistic research in general, and particularly the core practice of art research, is analysis. However, I find that we have a relatively poor language to understand the different processes and gestures which together constitute ordinary analysis within art research today." Continue reading
Institutions/ dependencies/ entanglement
Prompt: visualize institutions/ dependencies/ entanglement, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Nicolas Malevé: "Art is not only art and its methods proliferate outside of its traditional remits under the constraint of an external factor. The art school inundates the art world and a majority of trained artists are excluded from the art market (or who refuse to join it or abide by its rules, a combination of all that). This population is not just an army of reserve for the art world or art education. They learn other professions, they are “reconverted”. Continue reading
Historicity
A composite of two images generated with the prompt "a global interconnection of different presents" by Stable Diffusion. On the left, the red zones represent the parts of the image most affected by the term "interconnection". On the right, the zones affected by the term "present". March 2025.
Jacob Lund: "What I find crucial about our present, the present present, is that it is conditioned by con-temporaneity, understood as a global interconnection of differentpresents, with different pre-histories, and of different time-experiences. It is an idea of contemporaneity as a, at least in principle, shared present across divisive cultural and historical differences; of a temporary unity of the present across the planet." Continue reading
Flammability
Prompt: Amateurish photo of the new york modern museum of art in flames contrast between the white building and the flames at night with a crowd of disguised artists demonstrating, generated with Flux Schnell, March 2025.
Nicolas Malevé: "Indeed the consequences of the perilous exercise of pleasing collectors and donors whilst decolonizing the collection offers the perfect fetish to the alt right that never tires to denounce the hypocrisy of the left and their secret alliance to the elite. Whilst museums are in a perfect trap, the institutions that sought to give structural room of manoeuvre to progressive projects, such as the recent documenta, are not in a better place." Continue reading
Exhibition
Image: On the left, an image generated with Stable Diffusion 1.4 and the prompt "a certain openness in regard to sense". On the right, a visualization of the parts of the image (in yellow and red pixels) which correspond to the zones activated by the word "regard" in the prompt. March 2025.
Jacob Lund: "The act of showing, displaying, exhibiting and demonstrating something, is an indispensable part of the manifestation of any work of art – contemporary as well as modern – and hence a condition for its being perceived and experienced. This is not yet, however, what makes the thing being shown art or an aesthetic object, be it physical or not. What makes it artistic, or at least aesthetic, is a certain openness with regard to the sense or signification of the thing that appears, which ignites a process of reflexivity that, ultimately, is a negotiation of the world and how we live in it." Continue reading
Diagramming
Prompt: visualize diagramming, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Nicolas Malevé: "The practice of diagramming requires the unlearning of expected positions, working against my initial assumptions. To undo a certain image of the controversy that I have in mind when I encounter a situation." Continue reading
Critical assemblage
Prompt: visualize critical assemblage, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Nicolas Malevé: "Critical assemblage presumes that to critique is not simply to formulate an argument against something or someone. It is to assemble the conditions for a critique to be formulated and be listened to as much as to formulate an argument. These conditions are not determined by the subject who formulates the critique alone. This means that the locus of the critique is distributed." Continue reading
Contemporary conditions
All the steps towards an image generated with Stable Diffusion XL and the prompt "an aesthetics that includes more-than-human agents", March 2025.
Jacob Lund: "We are in need of developing an aesthetics that includes more-than-human agents and recognises that we are bound to Earth and inescapably entangled in its dynamic being, but without letting go of human responsibility and political agency." Continue reading
Composition
Prompt: visualize composition, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Maj Ørskov: "I am aware that the practice of composition as laid out here contributes to further expose the fundamental fragility and unprovability of our knowledge production systems, but I say: wonderful!" Continue reading
Nicolas Malevé: "To compose an object then requires to move across all the layers of this problem. To strategically contribute to the general economy of attention, to work on the conditions of discernibility. And be reflexive about the implications of making visible and discernible." Continue reading
Autonomy
Prompt: visualize artistic autonomy, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Jacob Lund: "My assumption is that we, if we are to talk about artistic autonomy today, should talk about the autonomy of a particular form of practice and the experiential process that is related to this practice, rather than the autonomy of a given object-based work or the subject position of the artist as autonomous." Continue reading
Aesthetic/Artistic practice
Prompt: visualize what aesthetic practice is, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Jacob Lund: "Thus, artistic aesthetic practice is not only a particular way of engaging with the sensuous world, but also involves the production of aesthetic reflective perception. In artistic practice the production of aesthetic perception is addressed to a public. In this sense, an artistic aesthetic practice proper involves the invitation of an audience, a public, to take part in the process of sensing and sense-making." Continue reading
Unlearning
Prompt: "visualize unlearning", made with Ideogram, January 2025
Maj Ørskov: "Since, in the context of the artistic practices that interest me, the practice of unlearning relates directly to the production, circulation and instrumentalization of knowledge, I also find the concept of unlearning to be a key methodological stance to think, write and practice through when interacting analytically with these works." Continue reading
Thinking, writing, practicing in circles
All the steps towards an image generated with Stable Diffusion XL and the prompt "Thinking, writing, practicing in circles", January 2025.
Maj Ørskov: "we, researchers of contemporary art, are forced not just to work progressively in line with the history of art, when composing a problem or object of analysis, but to work in circles across the analytic material that we find of relevance." Continue reading
Reflexive transformation
An image generated with the prompt "The aesthetic is political". The red dots show the zones of the image activated by the word "political" in the prompt. The visualization is created using DAAM, March 2025.
Jacob Lund: "The aesthetic is political precisely because of its ability to differentiate itself from the normally inconspicuous organization of our everyday lifeworld, and, through such differentiation, provoke critical reflection on this organization — which is what makes a certain degree of exhibition of decisive importance.[2]" Continue reading
Maj Ørskov: "I want to ask what consequences this implied precedence of reflexivity over more bodily circumstances has for the analytic potential of the term. In Rebentisch’s and Lund’s writing on the phenomenon, I find a lack of reflections regarding the more “practical” or "material" (in lack of better words) dimensions of reflexive transformation. Under which spatial-temporal conditions can an intense exchange between an interpreting subject and a sensemaking object come to qualify as reflexive transformation?" Continue reading
Reality/virkelighed
Prompt: visualize reality, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Jacob Lund: "Reality is constituted by what is at work, virker, in the world; by what is in operation, what operates; and by what has effects and informs our perception and understanding of the world. The artistic practices in question here operate in and on reality and demonstrate that the reality of the world, virkeligheden, is negotiable and can be made to work, virke, otherwise." Continue reading
Planetarity
Prompt: visualize planetary entanglement, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Jacob Lund: "Entering the anthropocene epoch influences our very perception of time. Hence, we are not only dealing with a new epoch replacing an old one, the Holocene, in a process of linear progressive development – which in the case of the Earth spans more than 4,5 billion years, a time scale that is highly abstract to our human perception. The new epoch is also accompanied by an increasing need for us to relate to a planetary scale, according to which we, as inhabitants of the same Earth, globally and across our cultural differences and national histories, share the same historical now, the same present." Continue reading
Ordinary research
A composite of four images generated with the prompt "to understand the different processes and gestures which together constitute ordinary analysis within art research today" by Stable Diffusion. On the left top, the red and yellow zones represent the parts of the image most affected by the term "art". On the top right, the zones affected by the term "and". On the bottom row, the red and yellow zones represent the parts affected by the terms "ordinary" and "research" respectively. March 2025.
Maj Ørskov: "Consequently, I would say that the core practice of humanistic research in general, and particularly the core practice of art research, is analysis. However, I find that we have a relatively poor language to understand the different processes and gestures which together constitute ordinary analysis within art research today." Continue reading
Institutions/ dependencies/ entanglement
Prompt: visualize institutions/ dependencies/ entanglement, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Nicolas Malevé: "Art is not only art and its methods proliferate outside of its traditional remits under the constraint of an external factor. The art school inundates the art world and a majority of trained artists are excluded from the art market (or who refuse to join it or abide by its rules, a combination of all that). This population is not just an army of reserve for the art world or art education. They learn other professions, they are “reconverted”. Continue reading
Historicity
A composite of two images generated with the prompt "a global interconnection of different presents" by Stable Diffusion. On the left, the red zones represent the parts of the image most affected by the term "interconnection". On the right, the zones affected by the term "present". March 2025.
Jacob Lund: "What I find crucial about our present, the present present, is that it is conditioned by con-temporaneity, understood as a global interconnection of differentpresents, with different pre-histories, and of different time-experiences. It is an idea of contemporaneity as a, at least in principle, shared present across divisive cultural and historical differences; of a temporary unity of the present across the planet." Continue reading
Flammability
Prompt: Amateurish photo of the new york modern museum of art in flames contrast between the white building and the flames at night with a crowd of disguised artists demonstrating, generated with Flux Schnell, March 2025.
Nicolas Malevé: "Indeed the consequences of the perilous exercise of pleasing collectors and donors whilst decolonizing the collection offers the perfect fetish to the alt right that never tires to denounce the hypocrisy of the left and their secret alliance to the elite. Whilst museums are in a perfect trap, the institutions that sought to give structural room of manoeuvre to progressive projects, such as the recent documenta, are not in a better place." Continue reading
Exhibition
Image: On the left, an image generated with Stable Diffusion 1.4 and the prompt "a certain openness in regard to sense". On the right, a visualization of the parts of the image (in yellow and red pixels) which correspond to the zones activated by the word "regard" in the prompt. March 2025.
Jacob Lund: "The act of showing, displaying, exhibiting and demonstrating something, is an indispensable part of the manifestation of any work of art – contemporary as well as modern – and hence a condition for its being perceived and experienced. This is not yet, however, what makes the thing being shown art or an aesthetic object, be it physical or not. What makes it artistic, or at least aesthetic, is a certain openness with regard to the sense or signification of the thing that appears, which ignites a process of reflexivity that, ultimately, is a negotiation of the world and how we live in it." Continue reading
Diagramming
Prompt: visualize diagramming, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Nicolas Malevé: "The practice of diagramming requires the unlearning of expected positions, working against my initial assumptions. To undo a certain image of the controversy that I have in mind when I encounter a situation." Continue reading
Critical assemblage
Prompt: visualize critical assemblage, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Nicolas Malevé: "Critical assemblage presumes that to critique is not simply to formulate an argument against something or someone. It is to assemble the conditions for a critique to be formulated and be listened to as much as to formulate an argument. These conditions are not determined by the subject who formulates the critique alone. This means that the locus of the critique is distributed." Continue reading
Contemporary conditions
All the steps towards an image generated with Stable Diffusion XL and the prompt "an aesthetics that includes more-than-human agents", March 2025.
Jacob Lund: "We are in need of developing an aesthetics that includes more-than-human agents and recognises that we are bound to Earth and inescapably entangled in its dynamic being, but without letting go of human responsibility and political agency." Continue reading
Composition
Prompt: visualize composition, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Maj Ørskov: "I am aware that the practice of composition as laid out here contributes to further expose the fundamental fragility and unprovability of our knowledge production systems, but I say: wonderful!" Continue reading
Nicolas Malevé: "To compose an object then requires to move across all the layers of this problem. To strategically contribute to the general economy of attention, to work on the conditions of discernibility. And be reflexive about the implications of making visible and discernible." Continue reading
Autonomy
Prompt: visualize artistic autonomy, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Jacob Lund: "My assumption is that we, if we are to talk about artistic autonomy today, should talk about the autonomy of a particular form of practice and the experiential process that is related to this practice, rather than the autonomy of a given object-based work or the subject position of the artist as autonomous." Continue reading
Aesthetic/Artistic practice
Prompt: visualize what aesthetic practice is, made with Ideogram, January 2025
Jacob Lund: "Thus, artistic aesthetic practice is not only a particular way of engaging with the sensuous world, but also involves the production of aesthetic reflective perception. In artistic practice the production of aesthetic perception is addressed to a public. In this sense, an artistic aesthetic practice proper involves the invitation of an audience, a public, to take part in the process of sensing and sense-making." Continue reading
Aesthetic/artistic practice
Autonomy
Composition
Composition
Contemporary conditions
Critical assemblage
Diagramming
Exhibition
Flammability
Historicity
Institutions/ dependencies/ entanglement
Ordinary research
Planetarity
Reality/ virkelighed
Reflexive transformation
Reflexive transformation/ destabilization
Thinking, writing, practicing in circles
Unlearning
Autonomy
The question of autonomy is provoked by a perceived change in the relationship between artistic practice, sense-making, and the sociopolitical and eco-systemic reality in which art takes place and by which it is nourished. In recent years a significant body of artistic practice has focused on critical social questions relating to some of the consequences of modernity, including climate change, migration, human rights, decolonisation, racism, and sexism. This makes it seem more inclusive, activist and politically committed than previous artistic practices. But what is it that enables us to regard it as art? What is it that still makes it artistic, and allow it to retain its (relative) autonomy? And how does this affect their political relevance?
The question of the autonomy of art is raised as a problem within a number of contemporary artistic practices. This means that the question of autonomy is being raised through the artistic practice itself and not only as an externally posed question. At same time, several contemporary practices are moving across artistic and non-artistic activities, and the practitioners do not necessarily identify themselves as artists or participants in the field of art. Furthermore, artists – not least the historical avant garde movements – have challenged the institutions that since the mid-18th century have helped warrant the autonomy of their practice: art academies, conventional artistic media, traditional art forms, etc. Finally, it could be claimed that the history of art no longer functions as guarantor for the autonomy of artistic practice since this practice in many cases no longer regards itself as a participant in the unfolding of the (mainly Western) art historical narrative, and as something this narrative and its concepts and terminology is capable of grasping.
My assumption is that we, if we are to talk about artistic autonomy today, should talk about the autonomy of a particular form of practice and the experiential process that is related to this practice, rather than the autonomy of a given object-based work or the subject position of the artist as autonomous.
In this regard, I subscribe to Juliane Rebentisch's claim, following Adorno, “that commitment in art ought not to strive to escape the autonomous logic of the aesthetic”. Art, according to Rebentisch, is “constitutively tied to a praxis that cannot be translated directly into action or immediately into cognition”. It is, however, “by no means irrelevant which content enters the denormalizing and defamiliarizing movement of the processes of aesthetic understanding in a given work. Even more: aesthetic experience seems to be able to gain a certain intensity and, hence, quality only when the content that is brought into aesthetic play matters to the subject of experience”.[1]
The autonomy of art and artistic practice is connected to a certain experiential structure and open-ended processes of sense-making. The work of art constitutes a dynamic process in which the aesthetic is no longer separated from the non-aesthetic as something objectifiably different, but where the aesthetic consists in a reflexive transformation of (what is/was regarded as) the non-aesthetic. The work of art consists not only of its physical presence, but also of its senses and the values in which it is inscribed, and which are inscribed in it. In addition to this, Peter Osborne argues for a notion of a socially determined autonomy which is “immanently construed, as art's taking up of its social conditions into itself, as part of its constitution as art”.[2]
The structural autonomy of art is not simply a given and is not an assumption we can simply set once and for all without questioning it, and in that sense the aesthetic is precisely that which continues to question and challenge limited understandings of autonomous art. As Sven Lütticken writes: “If the aesthetic problematizes the relationship of autonomy and heteronomy, then this means that an act or, beyond that, a praxis can be termed aesthetic insofar as it lets autonomy appear sensibly as a problem in a world where subjectivities and objectifications are profoundly entangled, where different agencies coexist and collide.”[3]
The contemporary artistic practices in question here generate a special experience that relates reflexively to the experiences and perceptions that are linked to the different areas of the life world – the sociopolitical and ecosystemic reality – that the contemporary artistic practices intervene in or relate to. Thus, the autonomous life of art rather consists in a dynamic that makes a one-sided formalistic or exclusively content-oriented approach impossible, and in which the viewer is inevitably involved. The form of the contemporary work of art relates not only to the object that is presented to an experiencing and perceiving subject but to the constellation itself or the exchange between objects and subjects as well as the constant transition between form and content. It is this dynamic form and open sense-making – a sense-making that also questions both the viewer's own and social interpretation schemes and concepts of the world – which works (relatively) autonomously; which has a “freedom in appearance” (cf. Schiller's notion of Freiheit in der Erscheinung). This is a freedom that does not consist in the absence of law, but in autonomy, in a self-imposition of law or a self-chosen acceptance of law, of dependencies and heteronomies, and which takes up its socio-political conditions into itself as part of its own constitution as art. Contemporary artistic practices can therefore be seen as constant processes of autonomization in attempts to create reflexive transformations of the sociopolitical reality they take part in and are partly conditioned by.[4]
________
1
Juliane Rebentisch, Aesthetics of Installation Art (2003), trans. Daniel Hendrickson with Gerrit Jackson (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 266-267.
2
Peter Osborne, “Theorem 4. Autonomy: Can It Be True of Art and Politics at the Same Time?,” in The Postconceptual Condition: Critical Essays (London: Verso, 2018), 61-72: 70.
3
Sven Lütticken, Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy (Berlin: Sternberg, 2017), 14.
4
As Kerstin Stakemeier claims, such strategies of autonomisation within art are only important when they actively work against nostalgic modern notions of artistic autonomy. Cf. Kerstin Stakemeier, “(Not) More Autonomy,” in Kerstin Stakemeier og Marina Vishmidt, Reproducing Autonomy: Work, Money, Crisis and Contemporary Art (London: Mute Publishing, 2016), 7-32: 13.