Autonomy, Activism & Art Direction.

From an intersectional perspective (Crenshaw).

“Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety” – James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (1992)

Autonomy:

How to resist the “seedy demon born when the ignorant tastes of the people mate with the fiscal lust of the capitalist”?

Autonomy serves as a normative foundational principle for the creation of cultural products. Autonomy allows for activism, which in turn serves as a radical catalyst for growth and greater representation. As Banks (2010) points out “the belief that cultural and artistic labour can serve to effect radical social transformation remains vital and enduring” – it is this belief that has underwritten some of the more significant social shifts and reveals the source of power in modern societies. As Adorno (1991) implied, are we now producing cultural goods ‘more or less according to plan’?  Is the autonomy of works produced in addition to the freedom of producers and consumers, being ‘tendentially eliminated by the culture industry’?

Within this, they thread the charged metaphysical space between ‘art’ and ‘consumerism’ as they strive to create bodies of work that are once authentic and also capable of garnering economic and cultural acclaim. This dialect reflects what Banks (2010) terms as the ongoing “struggles” for coherence”  cultural workers face in striving for authentic ownership over their creative work within the confines and ‘cultural’ demands of the capitalist marketplace. On some level, art direction seems intrinsically linked with capitalism and consumerism – a capitalist zeitgeist (i.e., appeal to the tastes of the time that are somewhat profitable). This TOR explores the way cultural workers of color attempt to develop a more autonomous and authentic relation to their work. It asks questions around how they are creating/finding a space for artistic freedom in cultural work? If this is a realistic desire? and what this looks like in practice?

A diversity report by Arts Council England (ACE) shows that 17% of the workforce in England’s 663 national portfolio organisations is BME a rise in figures from last year of 13.9% (Brown, 2018). This lack of representation can lead to an undeveloped world of opportunities from a wide, diverse range of creatives. Art directors play a multi-faceted role in the production of cultural goods. Throughout the creative industries – advertising, publications, film, music – they are charged with bringing together the nuances of an artistic vision in a way that creates cultural meaning for the consumer.

Slater and Tonkins (2001) describe the autonomy of culture as meaning at least two things: In the first instance, “autonomy from economic values, the creation of art in relation to its own inner gods rather than the marketplace” – and secondly: “autonomy from the false and inauthentic ‘culture’ that arises in and through the marketplace, the seedy demon born when the ignorant tastes of the people mate with the fiscal list of the capitalist”, essentially when human nature gets in bed with Mr. Money. In practice however, the boundaries are in a constant state of flux. Oakley (forthcoming) identifies the struggle for artistic autonomy as both an ethical and a social practice, ‘the importance of being an artist lies not in its anti-commercialism, but in an assertion of meaning beyond the commercial’.

Through looking at several high-profile advertising campaigns, films, television series, and other pop-culture references that support the marginalised voice, such as sports campaigns from Nike and Adidas Campaigns for Nigeria National Teams, and influences of representation music films like Sampha Process and Beyoncé’s Lemonade directed by Kahlil Joseph and influences from Virgil Abloh, and Edward Enninful, Ibrahim Kamara, and Jenn Nkiru, this TOR will consider this ‘assertion of meaning’ and explore the “struggles for coherence” of the art directors championing the narratives of the other.

This ToR will focus particularly on Art directors of colour who are capturing the nuances of authentic lived experiences by pushing boundaries of visual representation into the mainstream. In achieving this goal we hope to put the notions of creative autonomy and activism at centre stage.

Topics for this ToR include, but are not limited to:

• Cultural capital of visual storytelling
• Plagiarism in the Western world: little fish/big fish
• Decoding the Diaspora: “The New Africa on screen”
• Art Direction through diversity
• Identity and culture in Art as a visual narrative
• Consumerism and Capitalism within Art Direction
• Lack of, and the importance of marginalised visibility in visual media