Is there now a possibility to understand or even to influence change? Or do artists in this process position themselves merely as vehicles of a pre-established cultural paradigm?

I part from the notion of the global social transition, in which we find ourselves today. Sociologist Andreas Reckwitz*, for instance, describes this transition as a transformation from a normalised to a disrupted society. According to Rechwitz, social transformation in context of a neoliberal dissolution of boundaries and dynamised change can no longer be categorised in terms of right/left scenarios, because this dichotomy has already been corrupted; art and culture have played an important role in this disruption. At the beginning, I spoke with Cornelia Koppetsch about the entanglement of, among other things, leftist lifestyles with the transnational economy. The point of departure in the research project Autonomie + Funktionalisierung was the functional shift of art in the course of an ongoing urban and political restructuring of the city of Berlin during the nineties. A characteristic of this particular functional shift in art is the phenomenon that art and also artists are no longer to be regarded merely in terms of the internal paradigms or development of the art world, but that the role that an artistic praxis and its products play in the realms of agency and epistemology has become raison d’être of art itself to an ever increasing degree.

A common feature of both processes of change is that artists become agents within a change as a result of specific imprints, patterns of socialisation and prejudices. For instance, one of the points of discussion in the research project was that artists of East Berlin, who brought their preconceptions of artistic and cultural work into the functional shift of art during the reunification of Germany are not properly credited or taken into account in the historiography of that transitional shift today. Functional art played an important role in the institutional as well as in the resistance/critical discourse on art in the German Democratic Republic; it is also the grounding concept of Socialist Realism, among other things. Since the nineties, functional art has been undergoing modifications and has evolved, but in turn, it has also brought about important contributions to the shift in the praxis and the discourse of autonomic art.

To sum up: Only as a result of the amalgamation of contrasted approaches to art and their methodologies has this evident functional shift being taking place in Berlin since the nineties. In my opinion, the role that this new functional understanding of art, but also the impressions of creativity and freedom that have been theoretically associated with them, play in today's shift cannot be summarised in such a way that what was assumed in art and in artistic action has been transferred onto a one-to-one basis to the economically globally based lifestyle of the mobile middle class. Nevertheless, it remains a persistent question (which I cannot answer here) which links can be precisely built to connect these two phenomena of change.

However, I think that the issue of artistic agency cannot be answered in terms of freedom and self-expression, for these narratives have become — if one can trust sociologists — the motto of the self-proclaimed "winners of globalisation" (or it has always been, but rather unnoticed). The general approach of many institutions and agents outside art, which today measures art by means of its impact in the media, should not be answered with a mere insistence on the individual subject's artistic freedom as an end in itself, for this idea has turned long ago in the dangerous cliché of the American art-market.

On the other hand, I have tried to emphasise that it makes a difference whether the results, institutions and effects of artistic practices are bound to capitalist dynamics or whether artists make an effort to understand the meaning and significance of their intention as part of their work in the sense of the effects of their actions. In my understanding and estimation, many artists already do this. For the definition of artistic action understood in this way, it is important to me that the empowerment of the artist in relation to the baseline condition of basic inaccessibility consists in finding an extent, a scale, so to speak. I understand this scale as both, a form of autonomy and a form of renunciation of autonomy. Empowerment manifests in asserting the correct measure, or one perceived as such, or even one that is conceivable at all in the context of a dynamic society. It is a counter-paradigm to that of a neoliberal dissolution of boundaries that; on the one side, cannot be concieved in its full dimension through subjects of poststructuralist deconstruction. On the other side, does not refer to the idea, deconstructed by poststructuralism, of a subject transparent to itself, that calculates the means to achieve its chosen ends.

Rather, the precarity of the subject ought to be the standard for the determination, a precarity that does not diminish or cancel itself out in dynamics of competition and performative singularisation, but one which also enables itself, within the scope of the acknowledgement of a dysfunction, to include the agency of the artist in the praxis. Globalisation and digitalisation, whose impact concerns us all nowadays, should be regarded as a challenge, which can only be offset through artistic action throughout the wide range of approaches and methodologies available today, i.e. with a standard or scale of one's own. Neither the concept of a complete failure nor that of an external, ever-judging critic eye can grasp the horizon of possibilities for artistic action that opens up in context of a ongoing social transformation.

Artistic Action & the Functional Change of Art
Prof. Dr. Judith Siegmund

4 — Being (or having been) part of change

* In Reckwitz (2019), "Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten: Zum Strukturwandel der Moderne." (Zeit, 14.11)