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]1Juliane Rebentisch, Aesthetics of Installation Art (2003), trans. Daniel Hendrickson with Gerrit Jackson (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 266-267.

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]2Peter 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.

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]3Sven Lütticken, Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy (Berlin: Sternberg, 2017), 14.

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]4As 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.