museums, critique, aesthetics
Post on 24-Mar-2015
176 Views
Preview:
DESCRIPTION
TRANSCRIPT
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.
1
Sophie Barr K0934283Museums, Critique, Aesthetics – June 2010
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.
2
Sophie Barr K0934283Museums, Critique, Aesthetics – June 2010
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.
3
Sophie Barr K0934283Museums, Critique, Aesthetics – June 2010
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]
4
Sophie Barr K0934283Museums, Critique, Aesthetics – June 2010
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.
5
Sophie Barr K0934283Museums, Critique, Aesthetics – June 2010
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],
6
Sophie Barr K0934283Museums, Critique, Aesthetics – June 2010
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.
7
Sophie Barr K0934283Museums, Critique, Aesthetics – June 2010
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
8
Sophie Barr K0934283Museums, Critique, Aesthetics – June 2010
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.
9
Sophie Barr K0934283Museums, Critique, Aesthetics – June 2010
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.
10
Sophie Barr K0934283Museums, Critique, Aesthetics – June 2010
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.
11
Sophie Barr K0934283Museums, Critique, Aesthetics – June 2010
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.
12
Sophie Barr K0934283Museums, Critique, Aesthetics – June 2010
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]
13
Sophie Barr K0934283Museums, Critique, Aesthetics – June 2010
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.
14
Sophie Barr K0934283Museums, Critique, Aesthetics – June 2010
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.
15
Sophie Barr K0934283Museums, Critique, Aesthetics – June 2010
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]
16
Sophie Barr K0934283Museums, Critique, Aesthetics – June 2010
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
17
Sophie Barr K0934283Museums, Critique, Aesthetics – June 2010
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.
18
Sophie Barr K0934283Museums, Critique, Aesthetics – June 2010
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.
19
Sophie Barr K0934283Museums, Critique, Aesthetics – June 2010
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.
20
Sophie Barr K0934283Museums, Critique, Aesthetics – June 2010
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.
21
Sophie Barr K0934283Museums, Critique, Aesthetics – June 2010
Bibliography
Adorno, T. ‘Valéry Proust Museum.’ Prisms, trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber, Neville Spearman, London, 1967.
Alberro, A. ‘Reconsidering Conceptual Art, 1966-1977.’ Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology A. Alberro and B. Stimson, (eds) MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, London, England, 1999.
Blazwick, I. ‘Introduction.’ A Manual For the 21st Century Art Institution, Koenig Books, London, 2009, pp. 14 – 23.
Buchloh, B.H.D. ‘Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art.’ Art After Conceptual Art, A. Aberro and S. Buchman (eds), MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 2006, pp. 27 – 52.
Buchloh, B.H.D. ‘Conceptual Art 1962-1969’ Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. A. Alberro and B. Stimson (eds), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, London, England, 1999, pp. 514 – 537.
Buskirk, M. The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, London, England, 2003.
Fraser, A. ‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique.’ Institutional Critique and After Volume 2 of the SoCCAS Symposia. J. C. Welchman (ed). JRP/Ringier, Zurich, 2006, pp 123 – 136.
Hopkins, D. After Modern Art 1945-2000. Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, New York, USA, 2000.
Kuo, M. ‘Taste Tests,’ ArtForum, November, 2009, <www.artforum.com/inprint/id=24005&pagenum=2> [accessed 08/06/2010].
Lippard, L. ‘Postface, in six years: the dematerialization of the art object.’ Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, A. Alberro and B. Stimson (eds), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999, pp. 294 – 295.
Lippard, L. & Chandler, J. ‘The Dematerialization of Art.’ Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, A. Alberro & B. Stimson, (eds), MIT Press, Cambridge MA, London, England, 1999, pp. 46 – 50.
22
Sophie Barr K0934283Museums, Critique, Aesthetics – June 2010
Möntman, N. (ed) Art and its Institutions: Current Conflicts, Critique and Collaborations. Black Dog Publishing Ltd. London, 2006.
O’Doherty, B. Inside The White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (expanded edition). University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1976 & 1986.Philadelphia Museum of Art, <www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/2006/257.html> [accessed 25/06/2010].
Phillips, L, Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century. Phaidon Press Limited, London, New York, 2007.
Rancière, J. The Politics of Aesthetics. G. Rockhill (trans), Continuum, London, New York, 2004, 2006.
Raunig, G. ‘Instituent Practices: Fleeing, Instituting, Transforming’ in Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique, Mayfly, London, 2009.
Raunig, G. & Ray, G. (eds), Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique, Mayfly, London. 2009.
Relyea, L. 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.
Rorimer, A. ‘Michael Asher: Context as Content.’ InterReview <www.interreview.org/03/rorimer.html> [accessed 24/06/2010].
Rorimer, A. ‘Questioning the Structure: The Museum Context as Content.’ Art apart: Art Institutions and Ideology across England and North America. Marcia Pointon (ed).
Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1994, pp. 253 – 280.Sheikh, S. ‘Notes on Institutional Critique.’ Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique, G. Raunig and G. Ray (eds), Mayfly, London, 2006, pp. 29 - 32.
Sheikh, S. ‘The Trouble with Institutions, or Art and Its Publics.’ Art and its Institutions: Current Conflicts, Critique and Collaborations, Black Dog Publishing, London, 2006, pp. 142 - 149.
23
Sophie Barr K0934283Museums, Critique, Aesthetics – June 2010
Smithson, R. ‘Cultural Confinement.’ Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. C. Harrison and P. Wood (eds), Blackwell, Oxford UK, Cambridge, USA, 1992, pp. 946 - 948.
Smyth, C. ‘Rachel Harrison Review.’ Art Monthly, Issue 337, June, 2010, pp. 26 – 27.Stein, J. Sins of Omission: Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum. Slought, <http://Slought.org> [accessed 25/06/2010].
Stern, S. ‘Review of Unmonumental at the New Museum, New York.’ Frieze, issue 114, April, 2008, <www.frieze.com/issue/review/unmonumental> [accessed 9/06/2010].
Sullivan, S. ‘The Aesthetics of Affect: thinking art beyond representation.’ Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanitites, Vol 6, December 2001, pp. 125 – 135.
Welchman, J.C. ‘Introduction.’ Institutional Critique and After: Volume 2 of the SoCCAS Symposia, J.C. Welchman (ed), Zurich, JRP/Ringier. 2006, pp. 11-20.
Welchman, J.C. (ed), Institutional Critique and After: Volume 2 of the SoCCAS symposia, JRP/Ringier, Zurich, 2006.
Whitechapel Gallery <www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/rachel-harrison-conquest-of-the-useless> [accessed 29/06/2010].
24
top related