A study in four sessions that offers a parallax perspective on Jaleh Mansoor’s Spring 2017 course syllabus, “The New Romantics: Aesthetic Autonomy in the Age of the Wage.”
February 8, February 22, March 8, March 22
221 East Georgia Street
6:30 – 8:30pm
Autonomy / Wage: The terms comprising the title of this course form an internally fraught paradigm. The category of “autonomy” could be defined as the absence of work; so what is an artwork in the age of the wage, which is to say in the era of proletarianization, industrialization, and capital, 1844 – now?
The history of the Canadian artist-run centre has unfolded in the past half-century as a negotiation of and over autonomy. The naïve title “artist-run” itself invites interrogation; national cultural policy has overdetermined the relationship between artists, private and ‘public’ institutions, and state bureaucracies as a kind of ambivalent romance, stumbling between dysfunctional triangulation and an impossible synthesis, as in AA Bronson’s chimerical artist-bureaucrat. It is against this backdrop that 221A opens an embedded space to study the entangled histories of aesthetic and political autonomy mapped in Jaleh Mansoor’s syllabus.