an individual dialogue
→ in the context of artistic strategies, what is self empowerment?
self-empowerment, to me, means a complete and unfiltered expression of oneself through art. this implies that it is the empowerment of the artist ‘self’ and not the observer ‘self’. i exclude the observer from my understanding because ‘the observer’ refers to a group of people, though it is composed of individual selves. Charles Esche states “self-empowerment might superficially suggest an individualistic approach to art, a one person liberation movement that ignores collective needs”, which aligns well with my understanding of the term.
→ if my understanding is superficial, what am i missing?
Charles Esche disagrees with the typical notion that art should be taught as a mode of self-expression, “an artistic work can only be transformative to the extent that the society allows it to be”. he goes on to explain that self-empowerment is “only meaningful in as much as it creates the conditions where others are also given agency to do things they otherwise could not”, including that observer ‘self’ within this framework of self-empowerment.
this idea abstracts the ‘self’ away from individuality and towards a sense of “being part of something bigger than a discrete human body”. so your sense of ‘self’ is defined by your participation is “something bigger” which also implies that self-empowerment is thus the foregrounding of an individual's participation in this collective.
→ how is this related to the autonomy of art?
it was Esche's belief that autonomy in art “seems to diminish the potentiality of art to be shared”, that the “play between the market’s attempt to reign in the work of art and the work’s attempt to escape is something that has been lost in recent years” and he finds that “grim indeed”. art, in his eyes, must dance around its own commodification - i agree. to own a piece of art, is to own its self-empowering quality. for an individual to own something self-empowering that subsumes individuality is non-sensical and so for an artwork to be truly self-empowering, in Esche's definition, it must resist this commodification (and thus fall into individuality). but, this relationship between commodification and individuality stems from capitalism and so our perception of self-empowerment exists within the narrow framework of neoliberal political frameworks. i would be interested to learn what other frameworks and definitions exist.
adrian robinson
last updated: december 2025