Alistair Macaulay

This chapter takes improvisation as a model for artistic agency in general. An improvisor works and breaks through the constitutive habits and patterns that constrain their behaviour. An improvisor becomes free as they uncover novel opportunities, engendered through their engagement with idiomatic and wider musical structures. In this way, improvisation is the mechanism by which an individual relates and differentiates themselves from a collective understanding of music—a shared expressive medium of sedimented historical usages. Making a connection between its novelty and expressive freedom, I contend that improvisation presents an intersection between Derrida’s conception of language and Deleuze’s notion of style. An improvisor is immersed within this expressive medium, but divests themselves of the stratified and social habits that constrain what can or should be performed. This eschewal of habit enacts a mutual transformation by which the improvisor expresses themselves, coming to achieve agency as they develop their own style.

The question of agency is immediately both practical and political, given that it is ultimately a question of responsibility, and the exigence of establishing just who or what might be held accountable for a particular process or event. As such, far from an obscure problem of metaphysics, the question of agency is thus encountered quite directly in law, ethics and psychology, where it becomes synonymous with the need to distinguish voluntary action from all the other kinds of events. Given the combination of rational intentionality with a productive openness to the unpredictability of particular situations and materials, artistic and creative practices that strive to bring about the new resist explanation by standard accounts of action and agency. Drawing on contemporary French philosophy, this collection finds that the ethical and political significance of artistic agency lies in this combination of purposive behaviour and its openness to the unforeseen.

This volume seeks to explain the notion of control artists possess, and given they are changed by the action, the sense in which they can claim an artwork as theirs. Standard explanations of action and agency struggle to explain various artistic practices. Requiring recourse to a prior intention, these accounts are challenged by the spontaneity of dance and musical improvisation, a painter’s realization of an artwork, and how writers manifest meaning in a piece of writing. Furthermore, in such artistic practices, the artist is changed by the demands of the action. This interdisciplinary volume combines thirteen contributions from various artistic practices, in photography, music, dance and painting, with philosophical perspectives from post-war France to consider the changing role of the artist. This identifies what it is about an artistic practice that is creative, and how everyday occurrences can become artistic, describing the ethical and political implications of various artistic practices.

In October 2022 Just Stop Oil activists Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland threw soup at Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888) at the National Gallery in London. As they glued themselves to the wall, they asked spectators, ‘What is worth more, art or life? … Are you concerned about the protection of a painting or the protection of our planet and people?’ The National Gallery quickly confirmed that the painting was unharmed. Nevertheless, many were dismayed by this apparently iconoclastic protest. Protests of this kind have coincided with increased policing of non-violent civil disobedience. In conjunction with impending climate catastrophe that demands increasingly radical attention and change, one might be reminded of Deleuze and Guattari’s proclamation that ‘we lack resistance to the present’ (1994: 108). However, the pessimism associated with this claim is at odds with Deleuze’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s affirmative ethics of becoming. As such, this article argues that underpinning Deleuze and Guattari’s usage of the term ‘resistance’ is a notion of health as an aptitude to simultaneously prepare for and to enact change. Drawing on Deleuze’s notion of symptomology, this article proposes that activism is in some sense artistic – a means of creative resistance. The soup-throwers diagnose the State’s refusal to undertake the drastic change necessary to stave off the irreversible harms of climate change as a symptom of social illness and, in so doing, create a new space that opens a potential multiplicity of possible futures.