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Sophie Barr K0934283 Museums, Critique, Aesthetics – June 2010 Museums, Critique, Aesthetics Entrance Is the term ‘institutional critique’ consigned to art history or is it still a relevant contemporary practice? Current literature suggests that a new phase of institutional critique has emerged which goes beyond the earlier phases of the 1970s and the 1990s. 1 But can institutional critique exist when it has been entirely co-opted by the new self-critical, reflexive museum, making it irrelevant for artists today? Could the return to a DIY, junk aesthetic, as exemplified by the exhibition Unmonumental in New York in 2007, be read as a critique of the corporatized, globalized institution? Or perhaps the work of contemporary artists such as Rachel Harrison and Urs Fischer who re-cycle, imitate and violate the architecture of the gallery space, could be seen as new practices of institutional critique ‘sampling’ the likes of Michael Asher. Maybe we have entered a phase where artists and audiences alike have tired of ‘critical art’ 1 See for example G. Raunig, & G. Ray, (eds), Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique, Mayfly, London. 2009 and J.C.Welchman (ed), Institutional Critique and After: Volume 2 of the SoCCAS symposia, JRP/Ringier, Zurich, 2006 and N. Möntman, (ed) Art and its Institutions: Current Conflicts, Critique and Collaborations, Black Dog Publishing Ltd. London, 2006. 1

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An essay exploring institutional critique in the 21st century submitted as part of my Master's in Fine Art with Learning and Teaching in HE at Kingston University 20110.

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Page 1: Museums, Critique, Aesthetics

Sophie Barr K0934283Museums, Critique, Aesthetics – June 2010

Museums, Critique, Aesthetics

Entrance

Is the term ‘institutional critique’ consigned to art history or

is it still a relevant contemporary practice? Current literature

suggests that a new phase of institutional critique has emerged

which goes beyond the earlier phases of the 1970s and the 1990s.1

But can institutional critique exist when it has been entirely co-

opted by the new self-critical, reflexive museum, making it

irrelevant for artists today?

Could the return to a DIY, junk aesthetic, as exemplified by

the exhibition Unmonumental in New York in 2007, be read as a

critique of the corporatized, globalized institution? Or perhaps the

work of contemporary artists such as Rachel Harrison and Urs

Fischer who re-cycle, imitate and violate the architecture of the

gallery space, could be seen as new practices of institutional

critique ‘sampling’ the likes of Michael Asher. Maybe we have

entered a phase where artists and audiences alike have tired of

‘critical art’ and ‘art as idea’ and have embraced a new realm of

the aesthetic. On the other hand, perhaps our audience and

education-fixated institutions and museums, those of the

‘blockbuster show’, are ripe for a renewed critique? Can the

aesthetic provide a new politics in art?

Foyer

1 See for example G. Raunig, & G. Ray, (eds), Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique, Mayfly, London. 2009 and J.C.Welchman (ed), Institutional Critique and After: Volume 2 of the SoCCAS symposia, JRP/Ringier, Zurich, 2006 and N. Möntman, (ed) Art and its Institutions: Current Conflicts, Critique and Collaborations, Black Dog Publishing Ltd. London, 2006.

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The late 1960s saw political upheaval and the radicalization

of a generation dissatisfied with the bourgeois status quo. This

radicalism was not isolated to politics. During this period we see a

diversification of art practices, from performance and happenings

to conceptual and land art. These practices mark a move away

from the tradition of the studio and gallery, a new relationship

with audience and a radical questioning of the art object. In their

1968 essay on the dematerialization of art Lippard and Chandler

state that the current “ultra-conceptual art that emphasizes the

thinking process almost exclusively” may result in the “object’s

becoming wholly obsolete.” 2 This would enable art to stand

outside commodity culture and be valued in its own terms. “When

works of art, like words, are signs that convey ideas, they are not

things in themselves but symbols or representatives of things.

Such a work is a medium rather than an end in itself.”3 Alberro

summarises conceptual art thus:

The conceptual in art means an expanded critique of the

cohesiveness and materiality of the art object, a growing

wariness toward definitions of artistic practices as purely

visual, a fusion of the work with site and context of display,

and an increased emphasis on the possibilities of publicness

and distribution.4

It is at this politically radical, anti-aesthetic juncture that

institutional critique emerged. Buchloh argues that this

decimation of “the last remnants of traditional aesthetic

2 L.Lippard & J. Chandler, ‘The Dematerialization of Art’ in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, A. Alberro & B. Stimson, (eds), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, London, England, 1999, p. 46.3 ibid., p. 49.4 A. Alberro, ‘Reconsidering Conceptual Art, 1966-1977’ in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology A. Alberro and B. Stimson, (eds) MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, London, England. 1999, p. xvii.

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experience” was the moment that artists such as Daniel Buren and

Marcel Broodthaers turned their attentions to the ideological

apparatus of the institution.5 Broodthaers, suggested “that the

contextual definition and syntagmatic construction of the work of

art had obviously been initiated by Duchamp’s readymade model

first of all.”6

Daniel Buren, Marcel Broodthaers, Michael Asher and Hans

Haacke are often cited as the first proponents of institutional

critique. Through their work they exposed the structural and

ideological mechanisms of the gallery and the museum. Their aim

was to “oppose, subvert or break out of rigid institutional

frameworks.”7

Gallery

In his mid-seventies collection of essays Inside the White

Cube, Brian O’Doherty unpicks the history of modern art in

relation to its institutions, with the ‘white cube’ positioned as its

aesthetic and ideological zenith. For O’Doherty the gallery is a

highly controlled, sealed space, “unshadowed, white, clean,

artificial.” The ungrubby surfaces are continuous, never breached

by windows – there must be no outside world - much like the

institutional architectures of the church, courtroom or laboratory.8

5 B.H.D. Buchloh, ‘Conceptual Art 1962-1969’ in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, A. Alberro and B. Stimson, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, London, England, 1999, pp. 532-533.6 ibid., p. 529.7 G. Raunig, and G. Ray, (eds), Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique, Mayfly, London, 2009, p. xv8 B. O’Doherty, Inside The White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (expanded edition), University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1976 & 1986, p. 14.

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O’Doherty recognises that the gallery wall is a “far-from-neutral

zone” that it participates in the art rather than acts as a passive

support. For O’Doherty, the story of modernism has resulted in the

context of art, i.e. the gallery, becoming more important than the

art itself.

In his 1972 essay Cultural Confinement, Robert Smithson

likens the museum to an asylum or jail; both institutions with

“wards and cells – in other words neutral rooms called

‘galleries.’”9 The function of the warden-curator is to “separate art

from the rest of society.” The art object then, becomes entirely

“neutralized, ineffective, abstracted, safe, and politically

lobotomized as it is ready to be consumed by society.”10 Smithson’s

comparison of the museum to a graveyard echoes Adorno’s

suggestion that “museum and mausoleum are connected by more

than phonetic association.”11 O’Doherty suggests that time stands

still in this most static and separate of spaces, “this eternity gives

the gallery a limbolike status; one has to have died already to be

there.”12 For Smithson, this hegemonic, symbolic, white cube

served to obfuscate the relationship of objects to time and to

audience.

It is in this climate that Michael Asher “opened up the entire

existing exhibition space as an area for consideration.”13 For his

exhibition at the Toselli Gallery in Milan in 1973, the walls and

9 R. Smithson, ‘Cultural Confinement’ in Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. C. Harrison and P. Wood (eds), Blacklwell, Oxford UK, Cambridge, USA, 1992, p. 947.10 ibid., p. 947.11 T. Adorno, ‘Valéry Proust Museum’, in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber, Neville Spearman, London, 1967, p. 175.12 O’Doherty, op. cit., p. 15.13 A. Rorimer, ‘Michael Asher: Context as Content’ in InterReview, <www.interreview.org/03/rorimer.html> [accessed 24/06/2010]

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ceiling were sandblasted, revealing the raw building materials

underneath numerous layers of white paint. For his exhibition in

the Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles in 1974 he removed the

white partition wall that separated the viewing space from the

office space, simultaneously breaching the white cube and

exposing the commercial foundations of the gallery. Daniel Buren’s

site-specific, systematized striped paintings echoed the

architecture of the gallery “in order to examine and expose the

work of art’s affiliation with its external surroundings.”14 Hans

Haacke incorporated, “the commodity structure [of the museum]

directly into the conception of the work and into the elements of

its presentation.”15 In his 1974 work for PROJEKT ’74 Haacke

proposed to re-present Manet’s painting Bunch of Asparagus along

with a record of its lineage, linking it to a Nazi donor. Haacke’s

work, censored by the Wallraf-Richartz–Museum in Cologne,

reflected on the “museum’s collecting practices by raising

questions about exactly how the objects in the museum get

there.”16 Broodthaers’ conceptual Museum of Modern Art, The

Department of Eagles displayed in the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in

1972 “consisted of vitrines containing diverse representations of

eagles, produced in art, craft, or commercial contexts.”17 These

various symbols of “imperial might” that, according to a series of

signs were not works of art, “implied that museums obscure the

14 A. Rorimer, ‘Questioning the Structure: The Museum Context as Content’ in Art apart: Art Institutions and Ideology across England and North America, Marcia Pointon (ed), Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1994, p. 254.15 B.H.D. Buchloh, ‘Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art’ in Art After Conceptual Art, A. Aberro and S. Buchman (eds), MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 2006, p. 35.16 M. Buskirk, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, London, England, p. 169.17 D. Hopkins, After Modern Art 1945-2000, Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, New York, USA, 2000, p. 165.

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ideological functioning of images via the imposition of spurious

value judgments or taxonomies.”18

Subsequent incarnations of institutional critique that

emerged in the late 1980s and 90s often investigated the

formation of identity by the museum and unpicked institutions’

inherent value systems. Fred Wilson’s 1992 artwork, Mining the

Museum, rearranged existing exhibits at the Maryland Historical

Society in Baltimore. “He both followed and subverted museum

categorization” to reveal institutionalized racism.19 Andrea

Fraser’s lecture/tour Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk was

performed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1989. The tour

served to “highlight gender and class relations inherent in the

structures and histories of art organizations.”20 Similarly, Mark

Dion’s work is critical of the official voice of the museum. In his

1999 work Tate Thames Dig, Dion collected flotsam from the

banks of the Thames, classified it and displayed it unlabeled in a,

‘cabinet of curiosities’ in the Tate. This work questioned the value

attached to what are essentially discarded objects in museums, as

well as empowered the visitor to write their own history of the

object.

Gallery - New Extension

In recent decades, perhaps as a result of these critical art

practices, museums and art institutions have evolved. In 2003,

Judith Stein writes of the changes made to the Maryland Historical

Society apropos of Wilson’s Mining the Museum:

18 Ibid., p.165.19 Buskirk, op. cit., p. 163. 20 Philadelphia Museum of Art, <www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/2006/257.html> [accessed 25/06/2010],

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The MacArthur Foundation named Fred Wilson a Fellow in

1999. The 160 year old Maryland Historical Society is today

poised to re-open its greatly expanded and renovated

facilities. Director Dennis Fiori looks back with pride at the

broad legacy of Wilson’s exhibition, which prodded his

museum to become a more open and broad-based institution.

Their current show, What’s it to You?: Black History is

American History, grew directly from their experience of

working with Wilson. Today the Society has five minorities

and 10 women on their board, a significantly higher

proportion than a decade ago. 21

As we see above, the re-interpretation of collections to

reflect gender and post-colonial discourses has become common-

place. Curators are aware that there is always a subtext involved

in the placement of (specific, historic) objects in (specific, historic)

spaces. Simon Sheikh suggests (after Buchloh and Fraser) that

“the practice of institutional critique and analysis has shifted from

artists to curators and critics”22. He writes:

“[…] current institutional-critical discussions seem

predominantly propagated by curators and directors of the

very same institutions, and they are usually opting for rather

than against them. That is, they are not an effort to oppose or

even destroy the institution, but rather to modify and solidify

it. The institution is not only a problem, but also a solution!23

21 Stein, Judith, Sins of Omission: Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum. Slought, <http://Slought.org> [accessed 25/06/2010]22 S. Sheikh, ‘Notes on Institutional Critique’ in Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique, G. Raunig and G. Ray (eds), Mayfly, London, 2006, p. 31.23 ibid., p. 30.

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Not only have museums and art institutions become critical

and reflective in terms of their collection and purpose but recent

decades have also seen a paradigm change in the architecture of

the museum. Spaces sought by artists as ‘alternative’ to the white

cube and the institution have been adopted by organisations such

as the Tate. All but gone is the sealed, ‘neutral’ white space of the

twentieth century and in are the warehouse and post-industrial

monoliths such as Tate Modern, not to mention sought after new

architectural commissions. In these new ‘destination’ spaces

windows to the outside world are commonplace, visitors are

encouraged to browse the bookshop and eat in the café. This

mausoleum if not gone, is certainly eroded.

Iwona Blazwick, Director of the Whitechapel Gallery writes,

“the twenty-first century art institution is drawing on the legacy of

artists and alternative spaces to metamorphose from dead

repository to vital cultural resource.”24 She goes on to cite

O’Doherty who examines how artists in the late sixties and

seventies, suspicious of the ideology of the institution made site-

specific, temporary, non-purchasable work that could not be co-

opted by the institution. These practices “have not proved

impervious to the gallery’s assimilative appetite.”25 The institution

has found ways in which to display the undisplayable as well as

find markets for it. Despite this apparent paradox Blazwick sees

artists’ critical practices as an advantage to the museum:

Through objects, environments and actions, artists have

proposed a historical and political understanding of the

aesthetics of space and situation… This intellectual energy

24 I. Blazwick, ‘Introduction’ in A Manual For the 21st Century Art Institution, Koenig Books, London, 2009, p. 1425 B. O’Doherty, cited by Blazwick, op.cit., p. 14

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has percolated through western institutions to effect a radical

transformation.26

Sheikh suggests that institutional critique has been totally

co-opted by institutions and has made “institutional critique as a

critical method completely obsolete.”27 Welchman asks, “could it

be that there is something delusional in practices that are so

attached to deconstructing the apparatuses of the museum –

mostly from within the institution – yet still believe themselves to

be “critical” according to some measure or judgment from the

outside?” 28 Can institutional critique really be successful if it must

use the very framework it is trying to critique? Does that not

simply render the critique meaningless? Fraser agrees that in the

current climate artists can no longer take up a critical position

from without or within the institution. There is no longer an

outside.29

Office

In 1973 Lippard finds numerous problems with advanced

(conceptual) art out of which institutional critique materialized:

firstly that it will never reach ‘the masses,’ secondly, the world in

which it circulates relies on the unpalatable, incestuous ghetto of

“dealers, critics, editors, and collectors” who are bound to the

“real world’s power structure.” Finally she writes, “Art that begins

26 Blazwick, op. cit., p. 1527 Sheikh, S. op. cit., p. 31.28 J.C. Welchman, ‘Introduction’ in (2006) Institutional Critique and After: Volume 2 of the SoCCAS Symposia, J.C. Welchman (ed), Zurich, JRP/Ringier. 2006, pp. 13-14.29 A. Fraser, ‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,’ in Institutional Critique and After Volume 2 of the SoCCAS Symposia, J. C. Welchman (ed), JRP/Ringier, Zurich, 2006, p. 124.

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with other than an internal, aesthetic goal rarely produces

anything more than illustration or polemic.”30

Perhaps a further problem with this form of critical art is

that is that it becomes too ‘readable.’ In Simon O’Sullivan’s article

The Aesthetics of Affect, he opens with a question, “How could it

happen that in thinking about art, in reading the art object, we

missed what art does best? In fact we missed that which defines

art: the aesthetic.” He continues, “art is not an object of

knowledge (or not only an object of knowledge). Rather, art does

something else. Indeed art is precisely antithetical to

knowledge.”31 As we have seen in Lippard and Chandler,

conceptual art transformed the object into a vessel for meaning

outside itself. The art object existed in service to an idea and the

aesthetic was seen to be complicit with the dominant political

status quo. This movement from object to context was at once a

de-aestheticization as well as a dematerialization of art.

Take for example Haacke’s Bunch of Asparagus project

described above; here the viewer is not invited to experience the

Manet painting as an object in itself, or indeed experience the

affects of the installation of the painting and the documentation of

its heritage. The work stands outside the objects and the space.

The work is the critique of the heritage of the painting, given

meaning through the context of the building in which they are

displayed. The art exists in a third space, the mind of the viewer

and the intention of the artist – it is a meta-art. This artwork exists

to be ‘read’ by the viewer as opposed to ‘experienced’. Similarly,

Wilson and Dion re-contextualize objects within the museum.

30 Lippard, op. cit., p. 295.31 Sullivan, op. cit, p. 125.

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Again the reading, the art, is not in the objects but in the context

of the objects – they are signs that convey ideas rather than

objects in their own right.

Conceptual art’s emphasis on idea over object diminished

art’s affectivity; what Sullivan argues is art’s reality.32 He blames

both Marxism and deconstruction for the loss of the aesthetic as a

category in art. Marxist theory denotes the aesthetic as ideological

and transcendent, and deconstruction - whilst for Sullivan can be

useful – is ineffective because it “closes down the possibility of the

event that is art. …[It] is always already positioned and

predetermined by the discourse that surrounds it.”33 “After the

deconstructive reading, the art object remains. Life goes on. Art,

whether we will it or not, continues producing affects.”34

It could be argued that the critical art practices I have

discussed above fall into both these camps. Haacke for example,

not only introduces a Marxist critique of the ideology of the

museum and exposes the commodification of the art object, but

art, the materiality of the art is dominated if not subsumed by its

discourse. Sullivan invokes Deleuze and Guattari, he explains that

art is “a bundle of affects” or “a bloc of sensations, waiting to be

reactivated by a spectator or participant. Indeed you cannot read

affects, you can only experience them.” 35 For Sullivan then, art

that exists to be read, art that only exists in a ‘reading’ misses the

point, it misses what art does best.

32 ibid., p. 125.33 ibid., p. 127.34 ibid., p. 126.35 ibid., p. 126.

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Lippard suspects that it is “unlikely that conceptual art will

be any better equipped to affect the world any differently than, or

even as much as, its less ephemeral counterparts.”36 Similarly in

2000, Jacques Rancière maintains “it is up to the various forms of

politics to appropriate, for their own proper use, the modes of

presentation or the means of establishing explanatory sequences

produced by artistic practices rather than the other way around.”37

Art therefore, cannot transform the world by intersecting in

politics. However, art and artists can intersect in the world of

aesthetics to create forms that interrupt or re-order the

distribution of the sensible, that which can be perceived “based on

the set horizons and modalities of what is visible and audible as

well as what can be said, thought, made, or done.”38

Sullivan describes art as a “switch of register” as a sort of

side-stepping of ourselves. “This is art’s function: to switch our

intensive register, to reconnect us with the world. Art opens us up

to the non-human universe that we are part of.”39 It is an act of

“making the invisible visible, making the imperceptible

perceptible… art is a deterritorialisation, a creative

deterritorialisation into the realm of affects.”40

Café

Despite the transformation of the museum, and the apparent

exhaustion of the anti-aesthetic, many of the artists mentioned

36 Lippard, op. cit., p. 295.37 J. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, G. Rockhill (trans), Continuum, London, New York, 2004, 2006, p. 65. 38 ibid., p. 85.39 Sullivan, op. cit., p. 128.40 Sullivan, op. cit., p. 130.

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above are still making, showing, writing about and exhibiting art.

What is their legacy for artists now?

Contemporary artists continue to recall some of the earlier

practices of institutional critique. Take for example Urs Fischer

whose piece You was shown at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New

York in 2007. Fischer excavated the entire floor of the main gallery

leaving a giant, rough, eight-foot deep crater. Despite criticism

(You is simply a re-working of Chris Burden’s 1986 work, Exposing

the Foundation of the Museum) the piece has been described as a

powerful aesthetic experience and has been aligned with moniker

institutional critique:

To enter this rocky terrain was to feel the precariousness of

aesthetic experience and institutional critique – here

dangerously internalized, whether one was stumbling down

into the crater or teetering on the slim ledge that circled

it…You reminded us how staid, how uniform, our

contemporary methods of exhibition remain…But most

surprising of all was that we could feel something like

collective shock. For all our knowing critical distance and

heterotopic, virtualized bodies – precisely amid this

prosthetic dislocation – Fischer figures out how to violently

re-embody us.41

Through this simple yet extreme transformation, Fischer totally

deterritorializes the gallery space enabling this sense of ‘side-

stepping.’ In his piece Noisette from 2009, Fischer disturbs the

gallery space again, but rather than using shock, he uses humour:

41 M. Kuo, ‘Taste Tests,’ ArtForum, November, 2009, <www.artforum.com/inprint/id=24005&pagenum=2> [accessed 08/06/2010]

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Underscoring the architectural divider as a permeable

membrane or cavity, Noisette…actually sticks its tongue out

at you, startling passers by with a lifelike muscle that,

triggered by a motion sensor, abruptly bursts through a

crude hole in the wall. 42

Fischer’s sculptures upset the dry, analytical, albeit necessary

discourse, of the critique of the white cube and early institutional

critique.

Rachel Harrison’s recent exhibition at The Whitechapel

Gallery, Conquest of the Useless, incorporated “pedestals

borrowed from London’s museums clustered into a landscape of

towers and plateaus on which objects are arranged in idiosyncratic

scenarios.”43 According to Cherry Smyth, “Harrison employs the

plinth to defuse the hierarchies of worth and spectacle encoded in

systems of display.”44

Harrison’s work was also included in the 2007

Unmonumental an exhibition at the New Museum, New York. The

catalogue describes the work thus:

The scale of many of the sculptures collected here suggests

a more intimate relationship with the art object. It is a

profoundly modest, radically anti-heroic art…many artists

dethrone any sense of authority, literally defacing the

42 ibid. 43 Whitechapel Gallery <www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/rachel-harrison-conquest-of-the-useless> [accessed 29/06/2010]44 C. Smyth, ‘Rachel Harrison Review’ in Art Monthly, Issue 337, June, 2010, p. 26.

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formulas of traditional sculpture, such as the pedestal, the

bust or the standing figure.45

At the annual conference of the Association of Art Historians

in Glasgow this year, Lane Relyea described this junk art as “…a

counter trend, a backlash against more ephemeral, conceptual or

post-studio forms of art, or temporary and site-specific projects

commissioned by and realized within institutions.” 46 Although he

finds this work “experimental, fun loving…without the melancholy

and disempowerment that so characterized postmodernism,” 47 he

also problematizes this interest in junk and debris. He says that

“ruins tend to accumulate in art” at the moment of political,

cultural and institutional decay but “collapse is only one side of a

simultaneously integrative process… One person’s – or business’s

or culture’s or community’s – debilitating catastrophe will

represent another’s unique opportunity.”48 He argues that the art

world, like major business sectors, has undergone globalization,

de-centering and dispersal as well as achieving “greater

organization and professional coherence.”49 The artistic canon is

all but ruined and a database model of search and retrieve,

something to pick through and select, has replaced it. “Databases

supersede canons because they are more radically open ended,

they don’t tell stories, don’t have a beginning or an end.”50

45 M. Gioni, ‘Ask the Dust’ in Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, Phaidon Press Limited, London, New York, 2007, p. 68. 46 L. Relyea, On the Changed Status of Debris in Contemporary Art, Proceedings of the AAH Annual Conference 2010, 15th – 17th April, University of Glasgow, Panel: Materiality and Waste: Poetics of the Concrete in Modern Life.47 ibid.48 ibid.49 ibid. 50 ibid.

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For Relyea, the sculptures in Unmonmental embody a kind of

networked making, the individual artist as the operator in a

horizontally structured social or business model in which “private

consumption appears active, touted as a form of production in its

own right.” He asks has this paradigm created the “itinerant artist

as service- provider?” Does all this flexible, automomous,

improvisational, DIY in fact reflect the nature of the internet start-

up, art as business? Perhaps this cannot then be designated a

‘critical’ practice. What appears to be rhizomatic, non-heirarchical,

different and new is in fact simply another practice coerced by

‘bad capitalism’.

The New Museum has not escaped criticism itself. In the

catalogue to the Unmonumental exhibition the museum director

positions it as “not too proper, polite or institutional” and sited in

“a run-down strip.”51 The Frieze reviewer for Unmonumental

however found, “There is a sense that the New Museum is

adopting a… winking, referential, faux denial: the message ‘This is

not a museum’ seems to hover behind their recent moves.

Whatever else ‘Unmonumental’ was, it was a canny exercise in

marketing, an advertisement for the spirit of the organization.

However much one wants to believe in that spirit, it is slightly

alarming how slickly they are promoting their unslickness.”52

Restaurant

51 L. Phillips, Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, Phaidon Press Limited, London, New York, 2007, p. 7

52 S. Stern, ‘Review of Unmonumental at the New Museum, New York’ in Frieze, issue 114, April, 2008, <www.frieze.com/issue/review/unmonumental> [accessed 9/06/2010]

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Fraser laments, “Now, when we need it most, Institutional

Critique is dead, a victim of its success or failure, swallowed up by

the institutions it stood against.”53 For all the progressive

transformation of the museum it is still in crisis. Relyea and

Stern’s arguments about the simultaneous corporatization and

self-criticality of the institutions of art are a common theme in the

recent literature around institutional critique. Raunig and Ray

suggest that museums are under increasing pressure from

“authoritarian repressive cultural policies, partly from neo-liberal

populist cultural policies.”54 Möntman criticises “corporatist

institutional logic, flexible working conditions, event-style

programmes and a populist concept of the public sphere.” She

finds that all too often governments and sponsors measure success

by visitor numbers rather than “in the form of multiple, hybrid

publics and the inclusion of groups that do not conform with

bourgeois ideas of prestige.55 Regarding the 2004 expansion of

MoMA NYC she writes:

The additional space created in the new building, opened in

November 2004, was largely assigned to the merchandising

areas on every floor, the restaurants, cafes and imposing

lobbies, tailored for fund-raising events. MoMAs institutional

logic thus coherently internalised the illusory idea of a populist

public sphere concept and consumerist subject production.56

53 A. Fraser, ‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,’ p. 124.54 G. Raunig, ‘Instituent Practices: Fleeing, Instituting, Transforming’ in Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique, Mayfly, London, 2009, p. xiii55 N. Möntman, ‘Art and its Institutions’ in Art and its Institutions: Current Conflicts, Critique and Collaborations, Black Dog Publishing, London, 2006, pp. 9-11.56 ibid., p. 10

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The museum has seen a change from enlightenment

bourgeois model to managerial consumer model. The museum no

longer serves to educate and instruct the audience – its subjects

are now positioned as consumers.57

Last year’s Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Royal Academy in

London may at first glance have chimed with some of the concerns

of institutional critique. In his piece entitled Shooting into the

Corner Kapoor used a pneumatic compressor to fling “big

cylindrical bullets of dark crimson gunk right across a gallery

where they explode like a body in a bad Hollywood movie: a mass

of waxy giblets splattered apart on white walls.” Viewers queued

up to get into the gallery, safely waiting behind rope, for the canon

to fire once an hour. For me the experience was akin to the

changing of the guards or other mega-tourist attraction. The ‘one

and a half hour’ blockbuster show has become simply another form

of consumer entertainment, albeit one with superior cultural

cachet. Smithson’s critique of the gallery as one of cultural

confinement surely rings true here. The blockbuster show presents

us with a politically lobotomized art ready to be consumed by

society. This is perhaps where one must be wary of the aesthetic

as consumer spectacle.

Not only must we endure such exhibitions in our main public

spaces but we are subject to a funding stranglehold by

corporations and the government. Currently the UK’s main

contemporary art institution, Tate, is financially supported by

(amongst others) the disgraced oil company BP. Corporate

sponsorship, the managerialization of the institution and the

57 S. Sheikh, The Trouble with Institutions, or Art and Its Publics’ in Art and its Institutions: Current Conflicts, Critique and Collaborations, Black Dog Publishing, London, 2006, p. 143.

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incessant expansion of the commercial spaces of the museum are

current issues that cannot be ignored. Funding issues will deepen

and complicate as public institutions in the UK feel the effects of

recession and a conservative government.

Gift Shop

So what of institutional critique now? It no longer exists in

the previous century’s forms. It can’t, the landscape has changed

too much, but its legacy has infiltrated art making as well as the

art institution itself. Perhaps the term has become outmoded or

inaccurate and no longer resonates with current practices. To

attempt to encapsulate divergent practices within the confines of

this term is no doubt an impossible and futile task. We would be

better off thinking of institutional critique as a term to describe a

set of fluid, ongoing practices that intersect with one another in

their awareness of critical art history and responsivity to the

ideological conditions of the institution. Sheikh does not see

institutional critique as an ‘institution’, or a historical period but

rather “as an analytical tool, a method of spatial and political

criticism and articulation that can be applied not only to the art

world, but to disciplinary spaces and institutions in general.” 58

Raunig explains, “if institutional critique is not to be fixed and

paralyzed as something established in the field of art and

remaining constrained by its rules, then it must continue to change

and develop in a changing society.”59

This loosening of the term suggests an expansion of the

realm of institutional critique. Perhaps there has been a significant

absorption of institutional critique into contemporary practices

58 Sheikh, ‘Notes on Institutional Critique’ p. 32. 59 Raunig, ‘Instituent Practices: Fleeing, Instituting, Transforming’ p. 6.

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over the past two decades. Few serious artists have no concern for

site and place. Welchman suggests that institutional critique has

become so thoroughly digested that “the predicates of place have

now become the first condition of the artwork.” 60

One way of looking at institutional critique is to recognise

that rather than simply opposing the structures of the museum

artists have been attempting to both save the revivify the space.

Fraser writes, “Anyone familiar with [Haacke’s] work should

recognize that, far from trying to tear down the museum, Haacke’s

project has been an attempt to defend the institution of art from

instrumentalization by political and economic interests.”61 As we

have seen there is no longer an inside/outside binary. The

metaphorical walls (the collection, art history, audience) of the

museum are in flux, as are artists’ relations to it. But the museum

is still a contested site. Rather than kicking against the museum as

paternalistic, ideological enemy artists must now attempt to

continually sidestep themselves – to deterritorialize the museum

from within. As Rancière says:

Artistic practices are ‘ways of doing and making’ that

intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and

making as well as in the relationships they maintain to

modes of being and forms of visibility.62

This is not a call for an artistic activism:

60 Welchman, op. cit., p. 14.61 Fraser, ‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique’ p. 132.62 Rancière, op. cit., p. 13.

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An artist can be committed, but what does it mean to say

that his art is committed? Commitment is not a category of

art. This does not mean that art is apolitical. It means that

aesthetics has its own politics, or its own meta-politics.63

For Rancière a political art is an interruption into “what is

seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to

see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and

the possibilities of time.”

Current debates around the failure of critical art, the

resurgence of the aesthetic and the critical possibilities of the

aesthetic provide us with a new discourse for the institutions of

art. The museum is still a contested site that can be kept alive

through deterritorializing practices and discourses. The museum

can and should be a space that enables a living, evolving dialogue

or even ‘multilogue’ between the event that is art, the aesthetic,

the critique and site.

63 ibid., p. 60.

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