Arts & International Affairs Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2020 | Page 27

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
osition is, I argue, problematic, since artistic activity, produced under the impulse of
what I call artistic freedom, is always directly linked to the unpredictable investigations
of the artist. These investigations (produced outside theoretical discourse about art) do
not move forward or backward and most importantly, do not move as the funder would
wish to: the investigative journeys simply exist, describing trajectories steeped in freedom.
As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari note, artistic creation points to “the constitution
of an earth and a people that are lacking” (Deleuze et al. 1994:108). Art occupies
itself with creating “a possibility of life” (Deleuze 1997:4) and should not therefore be
primarily concerned with its civic, social, or political role. In other words, artistic acts
contain possibilities of life, which go beyond the socioeconomic and political arrangements
of the day. Perhaps that is why many totalitarian regimes (and other types) fear
the arts and artists, as they are able to propose new possibilities of life, outside, different
from, and better than the status quo. The secret ingredient to provoking such new possibilities
is artistic freedom.
At this point, it is useful to further explicate the way I envisage artistic freedom. Artistic
freedom is the sole generator of value of creation, which, as we have seen, stands outside
the register of exchange values coordinated by the state (through ACE). In other words,
artistic freedom is unrecognisable in the funder’s (or the state’s) utilitarian register of
expectations (the expectation that theatre should be like a town square, for example).
Artistic freedom can be explained like such: I make theatre because I want to, not because
I am on a mission to save my neighbour or because I want to improve the social
conditions around me. I sing because I sing. Art represents a qualitative jump outside
life as we know it. It is a branching out into an alternative equation of existence, adding
elements (types of people or kinds of life) that are currently lacking. It is precisely artistic
freedom that the state and its funding intermediaries want to capture and use for their
register of exchange values, putting it to work for their various agendas.
Bearing that in mind, how can ACE talk about art as moving forward? Has art ever remained
behind the times? How can that be conceivable if, as seen, art deals only with
possibilities of life? Has art ever gone backwards, when we know for sure that even in
the darkest times, artists have pointed towards previously unhoped for, undreamed of
worlds and types of people that are lacking? Art, therefore, cannot be seen as moving
forward or backwards on a horizontal axis. Instead, it engenders new axes, puncturing
the stratosphere of life as we know it, creating openings into worlds that until then had
been lacking. These leaps into unexpected referential systems that offer new colour to
our existence cannot be contained in a geometry of horizontal lines in which we measure
either progress or regress (proportionally to how “civic” an artistic act is). Artistic
freedom involves a lightning bolt, high-voltage electricity that punctures through the circumstances
of the present. That leads us back to the question of art’s so-called “authentic
dialogue with contemporary society.” Talking about art in these terms is completely erroneous�there
can be no measure of authenticity fixed in art’s dialogue with the wider
society. If one day a theatre-maker or actor decides to walk the streets of Bristol reciting
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