My dissertation – The Application of the Trap as a Metacritical Model at the Intersections of Peasant Culture and Contemporary Art – examines the question of autonomy in contemporary art through the concept of the trap. It takes as its starting points the anthropological understanding of traps and the conditions of artistic practice within institutional frameworks.
Throughout my research, I observed that the production and interpretation of artistic projects often unfold within situations of entrapment that operate on five levels: ideological, sociopolitical (culture wars), institutional (museums and artistic research), affective (trauma-based art), and reflexive (paranoid reading). To identify and examine these dynamics, I developed a metacritical trap model based on five defining characteristics: concealment, mediation, transformation, constructedness, and hierarchy. The model serves as both a diagnostic tool and a framework for artistic practice.
The theoretical framework draws on ideology critique; theories of culture wars and hegemony; institutional critique and artistic research; trauma and affect theory; and theories of paranoid and reparative reading.
My central argument is that the trap model does not offer a means of eliminating the forces and conditions that shape artistic practice, but rather a way of negotiating them with greater awareness and competence. Autonomy, in this sense, is not a fixed state but an ongoing process of fine-tuning within artistic practice, in which somatic practice (Weil) and the artwork conceived as a “good trap” (Danto, Gell) can play a crucial role.
“And finally, I have left the Weilian interpretation of this entire process for the end, as it reveals that my pursuit of autonomy is not driven by the illusion of complete control. Rather, I try to free myself from certain constraints in order to become open to other forms of necessity – ones that are unpredictable, yet also emerge from the internal logic of the creative process.
According to Simone Weil, necessity – the order of things that exists independently of our will – can be experienced directly through the body. If intuitive painting is a somatic practice, meaning that it engages the body through a particular form of attention, then, in the Weilian sense, it is anything but individualistic. Although it is a solitary activity, its aim is not self-expression.
From this perspective, my shift from collaborative practices to solitary painting does not necessarily mean severing connections. Rather, it involves cultivating a form of attention that, as a sensory and ethical practice, seeks to make space for something that is not necessarily myself – but not necessarily others, either.”
