Manifesto

A Manifesto of Post Autonomy

Selected by Maja Ciric from recent texts by David Goldenberg

Post Autonomy Today .Tomorrow

Why? Because of the “internal collapse of the system of art”, given that arts existence through a strategy to unhook itself from existing powers and belief systems has failed. This conclusion signals the culmination of a Euro centric traditions development, and, entrance into another intellectual and cultural space, a new space which requires inhabiting and mapping..

This end and new beginning is equivalent to a 2nd history of contemporary art.

Post Autonomy suggests a new discourse with a linguistic shift in the understanding and self-description of art

All narratives that have developed contemporary art in terms of Modernism have failed to address the negative aspects of Modernism, namely its role in colonising others/cultures while consolidating the Nation State. And since they are unable to resolve its inherent problems, there is therefore a necessity for a fundamentally different strategy and description. One can go so far to say that it is impossible to use the existing descriptions and models to resolve existing problems, of addressing political and social problems in society, for the very reason that the existing models are not only developed from within the Euro centric tradition, they also set out to maintain the existing World Order and centres of cultural power and wars. Furthermore, the shift to the scheme of PA allows for the possibility of moving away from the burden of concerns that exists within the current descriptions of art, and to locate other concerns and issues, or to be more precise, which amounts to the same thing, the existing concerns are determined within the existing Euro-centric traditions framework, so there is no other choice but to locate another framework.

 

A long term project examining the mental image of Post Autonomy through various formats:

 

Language and debate constitutes the core material for inhabiting and opening up a zone outside the Euro-centric tradition of art, Globalization, Colonisation and Biennials. A scheme for developing a different model through realizing the full potentiality triggered by the mental image of Post Autonomy, along with the materialization of Post Autonomy today within the existing Euro-centric tradition. To revisit the concept of Autonomy in order to understand the attributes and condition of contemporary art itself? On the way to posing the question “What concept and notion comes after Autonomy?”

Post Autonomy as a route/a critique out Post Modernism, Neo Liberalism, and revision of Globalisation and Colonisation and the role art plays in it

To understand what is meant by Post Autonomy today and how this idea can provoke new relations and situations in a global trans-national society,initiating a micro-political situation, and setting off an open ended process which looks at “gathering together a material form when there isn’t a clear material form at the outset!”

Therefore developing thinking into Post Autonomy offers the possibility to:

Resolve problems in the system that the system is unwilling to address

A route out of a tradition of art in the service of the Nation State and Colonization

We can understand Post Autonomy as term or a label or a new category or a fiction in the form of an art project

 

A new body of thinking and practices distinguished from our current understanding of art

That offers a broader range of scenarios to read contemporary art

A new term, territory, condition, language, terms and taxonomies which requires to be charted

 

Participatory practices is key to PA, in so far that participatory practices breaks with the autonomy of the artist, art work and audience shaped within a Euro centric tradition, the only methodology that starts with the break down of hierarchies and re negotiation of Contemporary culture. Through participation there is an encouragement for different cultures to meet and renegotiate another space to share & take up further developments.