- Sadakichi Hartmann, ‘The Esthetic Significance of the Motion Picture’, Camera Work, no. 38, April 1912: 19–21.
- One example of this is the Autonomy Project, an initiative of the Van Abbemuseum and a number of art schools and art-history departments. Although an initiative by academics and curators, the Autonomy Project also involves a number of artists whose practices re-problematise the notion of autonomy, such as Paul Chan, Andrea Fraser, and Hito Steyerl. This text is informed in many ways by discussions (with John Byrne, Charles Esche, Steven ten Thije, and others) in the context of the Autonomy Project.
- The first US and UK editions appeared under Eisler's name alone, possibly because the composer was already being investigated by the Un-American Activities Committee, and Adorno thought it advisable to withdraw his name.
- Hanns Eisler [and Theodor Adorno], Composing for the Films (London: Dobson, 1951; first US edition 1947), 74. Citations are from the 1951 version.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 49.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 81.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Allan Kaprow, ‘The Education of the Un-Artist, Part 1’, in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1993), 104.
- Ibid.
- Nikolaï Taraboukine, Le Dernier Tableau (1923), trans. Michel Pétris and Andrei B. Nakov (Paris: Champ Libre, 1972), 56.
- In 1983, Kaprow discussed one curious case of an artist apparently changing jobs, becoming mayor of a small town for a short period. See ‘The Real Experiment’, in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, 209–12.
- Kaprow does not mention Rosenberg by name in ‘The Legacy of Jackson Pollock’ (1958), but the influence is unmistakable. Rosenberg is referenced in later essays, for instance, ‘The Artist as a Man of the World’ (1964), in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, 47, 50.
- Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’ (1952), in The Tradition of the New (London: Paladin, 1970; first edition 1959), 36.
- Harold Rosenberg, ‘Criticism-Action’ (1956), in Act and the Actor: Making the Self (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 140.
- If the proletarian mass subject that Bolshevik ‘professional revolutionaries’ had sought to forge did not materialise in the US, art offered a haven for acts with uncertain addressees and destinies. His writings are thus characterised by a constant slippage that Rosenberg himself detects in the work of André Malraux: ‘In Malraux's thinking, action constantly blends into acting: with historical script in hand, the only problem is which part to play and how to play it.’ Rosenberg, ‘Actor in History’, Act and the Actor, 165.
- Rosenberg tantalisingly states that those artists whose work completely matches a theory are usually not the ‘deepest’ (‘The American Action Painters’, 35). While most people thought that the essay was mostly based on Pollock, this remark suggests that de Kooning, whom Rosenberg admired, was in fact a greater painter for being less of an action painter. One may say that Rosenberg's writings constitute a missed encounter with works by both de Kooning or Pollock as sensuous fact; yet these works, in their factuality, are also a missed encounter with Rosenberg's writings.
- The developments of the late 1950s and 1960 forced Rosenberg to argue that, after all, it was crucial that the act did result in material traces. ‘In emphasizing the creative act rather than the object created, Action painting, or—by the testimony of Allan Kaprow—the idea of Action painting, led logically to the Happening. Action painting is ambiguous; it asserts the primacy of the creative act, but it looks to the object, the painting, for a confirmation of the worth of that act… Action painting is subjective, yet it is bound to a thing, even though a thing in process.’ Harold Rosenberg, ‘The Concept of Action in Painting’, Artworks and Packages (New York: Dell, 1969), 224. Against happening and Fluxus artists, Rosenberg stated that ‘To dissolve “the barriers that separate art from life” is an impossible ideal—the dream of a world in which all actions are intended to be forgotten at their moment of fulfillment’. ‘The Museum of the New’, Artworks and Packages, 156. While Kaprow had drawn logical conclusions from the notion of action painting, Rosenberg argued that ‘in art it is always a mistake to push a concept to its logical conclusion.’ ‘The Concept of Action in Painting’, 226.
- Harold Rosenberg, ‘The Concept of Action in Painting’, 226.
- Ibid.
- Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’ (1960), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 85.
- See Iain Macdonald, ‘Cold, Cold, Warm: Autonomy, Intimacy and Maturity in Adorno’, in Philosophy and Social Criticism, 26 April 2011, http://psc.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/04/12/0191453711402940.full.pdf.
- Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’, 42.
- Brian Holmes, ‘Artistic Autonomy and the Communication Society’ (2003), www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0310/msg00192.html.
- In the 1950s, there was, of course, no shortage of ‘action thinkers’, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Hannah Arendt. In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt opposes action to labour and work; a similar depoliticisation is seen in Rosenberg's aesthetic act. While Arendt's concept of action is seemingly more political, her account of the way in which action transcends (rather than transforms) the sphere of work shows an idealist bias.
- Harold Rosenberg, ‘Critic within the Act’, in Art News 59, no. 6, October 1960: 26–8. This article was republished without illustrations in Encounter, no. 93, June 1961: 58–9.
- Harold Rosenberg, ‘Surrealism in the Streets’, in The De-definition of Art (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 51.
- On this point see Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 71–2.
- Brian Holmes, ‘Artistic Autonomy and the Communication Society’.
- This point is made in several contributions in the September 2011 ‘emergency issue’ of the Dutch journal Open, whose existence is uncertain as a result of funding cuts.
- It should be noted that Rosenberg would later, on occasion, oppose the act and the event, complaining that acts increasingly meld into events. The event here stands for a quasi-natural occurrence, for planned quasi-happenings imposed on the subjects. Rosenberg, ‘The Diminished Act’, in Act and Actor, 4–5.
- Fraser first used the term ‘institutional critique’ in her 1985 essay on Louise Lawler, ‘In and Out of Place’. See Andrea Fraser, ‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique’, Artforum 44, no. 1, September 2005: 278–83.
- Hence Edu-factory Collective's call for new forms of ‘autonomist’ organising within the corporate university. See Edu-factory Collective, Towards a Global Autonomous University (New York: Autonomedia, 2009).
- Nikos Papastergiadis interprets my remark (from my book Idols of the Market) to mean just that. See his ‘Aesthetics and Politics in the Age of Ambient Spectacles’, Broadsheet 39, no. 1, 2010: 34.
- See http://carrotworkers.wordpress.com and http://precariousworkersbrigade.tumblr.com/.
- For instance, artist Matthijs de Bruijne is collaborating with cleaners and domestic workers organised in the union FNV Bondgenoten.
- There were four performances in two locations: the middle of an intersection in the Lower Ninth Ward and the front yard of an abandoned house in Gentilly.
- Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 477.
- Harold Rosenberg, ‘The Diminished Act’, in Act and the Actor, 8.
- Ibid. As action slows down to a crawl and the event is forever around the corner, history seems to develop autonomously, beyond human intervention. For Adorno, the ‘il faut continuer’ at the end of L'Innommable stands precisely for the need to continue the modernist endgame, with language grinding almost but not quite to a halt. Theodor Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 474.
- Paul Chan, Ed., Waiting for Godot in New Orleans: A Field Guide (New York: Creative Time, 2010).
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art
Volume 11, 2011 - Issue 1: Art and Entertainment