Adorno

Adorno - Llewellyn Millhouse 

My interest in the writing of Theodor Adorno stems from the critical analysis of contemporary cultural and economics that is central to my art practice. In his writings on sociology and popular culture, and its intersection with his theory of domination within human psychology, Adorno identifies culture and media in advanced industrialised capitalism as the chief force of pacification and manipulation of the individual. Adorno recognizes popular culture as a socially constructed entertainment industry, as formulaic, mechanical, alienating and dominating as its reflective industry of production. According to Adorno, the individual in an advanced capitalism of abundance is simultaneously dominated through both modern systems of production within the workplace, and consumption of culture, leisure and notions of wealth in the entertainment industry. As opposed to the economic determinism and romanticised ruminations and projections of revolution that define Orthodox Marxism, Adorno and the Frankfurt school of Marxism were principally concerned with consciousness, psychology and culture. Reflecting on the absorption of capitalist values within consciousness and their subsequent supremacy over human life, Adorno’s critical theory provides an approach to contemporary culture, philosophy, economics, and sociology that is not limited and deformed by political pragmatism and political systems. 

My art practice is primarily a response to the critical theory of Adorno, and his successor Guy Debord’s theories of culture and class struggle. Within my practice I attempt to illustrate the physical and metaphysical body that is denied within popular culture, creating images of the body and the human that discredit, attack or subvert the commoditised images of pseudo-culture generated by the entertainment industry. Through the channelling of labour towards the creation of media, integrating a primal liberty to interconnect manual and mental labour in a creative process, my painting practice endeavours to illustrate the physicality of alienation, commodification, and exchange value obsession through the embodiment of their effects by the tangible human body.