Guiding principles of allodoxic art
Allodoxic interventions build on the participatory elements of new genre public art, as theorised by Suzanne Lacy. Lacy states that the critical consideration of the effectiveness of this practice has remained relatively unexamined.[6] Allodoxic interventions extend new genre public art by aiming to embed sustained change; they are able to take up the challenge to provide this embedding as a criterion of judgement. This is done through examining the tangible systemic impact of the work, rather than simply the impact on the audience, and consideration of how the principles drawn from the application four principles that I have discussed in this essay.
The ideas on revolution devised by German political thinker Hannah Arendt serve as principles for allodoxic art by providing an analytical armature for judging the success of these tactics and extending these types of interventions. These principles have developed out of my twenty-five year socio-politically engaged practice and became articulated in a practice-led DAAD scholarship where I creatively interpreted the life and legacy of Hannah Arendt.
Firstly, by embodying freedom through innovation allodoxic interventions incorporate rupture, risk and disobedience to signify rebirth of action and the public realm to stay true to originating political spirit. Secondly, by designing for durability interventions make provision for institutions, the law or groups of people to embed rights and maintain or expand the commons in sustainable ways. Thirdly, by embedding rights as safeguards to our happiness these themes become rooted and internalised within communities so that they can become sustainable. Finally, as public participation in concert with others allodoxic interventions should owe their greatest relevance and general interest to political predicaments rather than to legal or moral ones, so they relate to what Arendt sees as collective responsibility.
Arendt and the socio-economic
The conceptual refitting of allodoxic principles to this historical case helps fill a box with subversive tools of tactical gameship for activism within a range of milieus.
Joseph Beuys finds his redemptive path channelling political thinker Hannah Arendt when crash landing his fighter plane onto Nazi sympathiser Martin Heidegger’s hut. The event can be understood as catalysing Beuys’ determination to set about on a lifelong journey to use the art field to reinvigorate a socialist trajectory, by challenging and ‘crashing down on’ what both he and Germany lost to Heideggerian informed Nazism.
Hamburg activist Annalena Kirchler performs as herself and Arendt, highlighting the importance of linking Arendt’s revolutionary horizon as part of action for the common good.
The work illustrates the way in which artistic efforts can support others leading initiatives against their specific local commons threats.
The argument throughout this thesis is that the exploration and advocacy of allodoxic practice has the potential to disrupt, reveal and intervene as socio-politically engaged practice, most specifically by means of a sustained praxeological commitment to the realisation of ‘the commons’: a shared, if contested and contestable, ground for social, cultural and therefore political action-based engagement that resists the cauterising logics of private versus public. In making this case, I use a range of art-derived practices to illustrate ways to realise this aspiration (whilst also recognising the impossibility of any absolute political effect): there is recognition of the inherent always-incompletedness of such work. The nature of allodoxic practice must be that it is a game that effectively never ends. As an Arendtian ‘tactic’, allodoxic art calls on a disenfranchised, indeed existentially threatened, ‘public’ to bear witness to innovative ruptures critically sustained as a perpetual displacement of, or interference with, a naturalised status quo. This happens by means of a reiterated insistence on the principle of active citizenship, and a claim to and assertion of (a lost) claim to the commons. Allodoxic art can be understood as a practice that seeks to elucidate how power and control operate in society, by exposing the ways in which power’s negative consequences impact on the common good in the daily lives of the general public. This practice would involve artists seeking solutions as part of their critique of the social world. They could, therefore, be open to suggestions that they might test their ideas through activity for the commons. An allodoxic intervention is a secondary aspect of any art practice because it incorporates action in the public realm to make provision for embedding rights in institutions, the law or groups of people, and for maintaining or expanding the commons in sustainable ways. The theoretical aspect of this thesis explores the institutional arrangements that reflect the range of needs of projects relating to the commons. In particular, it focusses on the legal frameworks relating to rights that support individuals and groups to shape their own lives and participate in commons activities that contribute to the ongoing expansion of the common good, which is the goal of democracy. This concern for legal matters aligns with the dominant aims of activity in today’s social movements. These differ slightly from those of earlier times, such as the nineteenth century when rights were sought in political solutions, or the twentieth century when the changes generally sought were more economically-based.