Institutional Critique and After

Institutional Critique and After explores the history and contemporary reassessment of the Institutional Critique movement launched (but not yet so-named) in the late 1960s by artists including Marcel Broodthaers and Daniel Buren in Europe and Michael Asher and Hans Haacke in the US. Through its quite different early manifestations, Institutional Critique took on the critical analysis or ironization of the structures and logic of museums and art galleries. Redeveloped, reassessed and first designated in the 1980s by artists including Andrea Fraser, Renée Green, Fred Wilson and others, who engaged in more interactive and performative interventions, and by critics, including Benjamin Buchloh, who offered some of the first sustained critical histories of the movement’s pioneers, Institutional Critique has been vigorously reoriented in recent years to address issues such as site-specificity, globalization, and the relation of visual culture to urban and metropolitan environments.
            The core of this book emerges from the symposium of the same title held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in May 2006. Three panels comprised of noted artists, scholars, and museum professionals debated the histories, theories, diverse locations and different kinds of institutional and alternative space associated with the movement. They discussed traditional forms of art, but also installations, performance, new media practices, and cultural activism. Some of the most pressing issues they raised turned on the critical potential of art (and institutions), and whether—and if so, how—they can stimulate social or political change.
            In the first panel Alexander Alberro, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Florida, and Isabelle Graw, editor of the journal Texte Zur Kunst and professor of art theory at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, discussed the geographies and wider cultural implications of Institutional Critique. Taking his point of departure from one of the more provocative artworks featured at Documenta11 (2002), Cildo Meireles’ Disappearing Element/Disappeared Element, Alberro outlined his work-in-progress for a book on the role of Latin American and East European art in the development of work from the late 1960s and 1970s in North America and Western Europe that was later referred to as Institutional Critique.
            The second panel took on the role of curators and exhibition practices, both within "institutions" as well as “independent” of them, or in so-called “alternative” spaces, with presentations by Christiane Paul, adjunct curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Jens Hoffmann, director of exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London; and Lauri Firstenberg, then assistant director and curator of the MAK Center, Los Angeles, now director of LAXART. The panel was moderated by Lynn Zelevansky, curator and department head of Contemporary Art at LACMA. For the third panel Renée Green, then professor in the Art department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, now dean of graduate studies of the San Francisco Art Institute; Ricardo Dominguez, co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) and professor in the Visual Arts department at UC San Diego; and New York-based artist Andrea Fraser, examined some of the larger social and political questions raised by the movement and its aftermath, including its relations to performance and net activism.
            The panels aired several important questions, many of them taken up and developed in the essays and projects that follow. In the aftermath of a movement that commenced nearly four decades ago, how have its leading concepts, assumptions, and tactics developed, especially as many of them can no longer be considered as radical or adversarial as they might have been in the late 1960s? Have the demographics and cultural politics of the museum and gallery sectors also shifted in the last few decades, in response—or otherwise—to Institutional Critique itself? Have the locations (pre-eminently museums and exhibition spaces) that were the objects of critique emerged in more recent generations as objects of desire, or even fetishism? Much of the effort of Institutional Critique was directed toward forcing museums to declare their own structures, constitutions and assumptions (or covertly precipitating them), a project that may be said, almost perversely, to resemble as much as to contest formalist protocols for making art that does something similar to the structures and conditions of “art.” Could it be that both tendencies, normally held quite separate and usually deemed antithetical, actually share certain presuppositions at the level of "self-reference"?
            Might it be possible even to include Institutional Critique in the genealogy that commences with flatness and the associated litany of purportedly intrinsic qualities set out in the criticism of Clement Greenberg and his followers? With Frank Stella, for example, self-referentiality migrates to the frame and the subtending shape of the work; with the Minimalists to the perceptual envelope of an object in a specific location; and with Conceptual art, especially in its first phase, most clear in Joseph Kosuth's notion of "Art as Idea as Idea" (with its insistence on tautology), to the domain of “meta-reference.” Does Institutional Critique continue and complicate this referential migration, extending it to the parameters of the institution, which must also be "declared," made visible, have its "properties" laid bare and be compositionally reassembled? And if these continuities are, in fact, visible in the move from the 1960s through the 1970s, do they still endure? Or, have they been reformulated once again in more recent work, which develops its relations to the connectivity of art and social extension somewhat more obliquely, with a new round of obsessions that are less historically weighted? How, finally, have the premises of “relational aesthetics” taken on or incorporated the suppositions of Institutional Critique?
            From these reflections other questions opened up. What role did documentary or “factographic” research and presentation play in the initial phases of Institutional Critique; and do these methodologies and modes of visibility in fact define the movement, so that when (and if) they are absent it effectively ceases to exist? How were the nature and experiences of “audience” assumed, conceived or abstracted in first and second generation work? 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? Has critique been evaporated into absorption; and the era of installation and site-specificity ushered in during the 1990s digested the assumptions of Institutional Critique so thoroughly that the predicates of place have now become the first conditions of the artwork? 
            It certainly seems to be the case that many contemporary artists have a lightly diffident but strangely enmeshed relation to art institutions, which, in turn, grant them almost unlimited permission for their ambivalence. Many artists are interested in transmitting the power of "art" into local landscapes and reinfusing the resulting synthesis back into gallery space in the form of art-dusted everyday routines (cooking, down-time, DJing, objects split between common use and aesthetic dysfunction, etc.). While the black-box media caverns now ever-present in international theme and groups shows, and one of the dominant idioms on the biennial circuits, offer a kind of parodic reversal of the self-declaratory white cube, creating sub-museological zones of documentary transport or fictive projection that are effectively subtracted from the institutions that nevertheless put a general roof over their false ceilings. During the last decade of biennial mania and super-commuting curators who package and reassemble a core of international artists in concert with a homegrown quotient at a myriad roving locations (Istanbul, Yokohama, Cairo … ), the contemporary aspect of the "museum" has been effectively re-calibrated as a global delivery system.
            Mindful of these issues and problems and of current conditions in art, we commissioned a number of new critical essays and artist’s projects to help give a sense of the diversity and particularity of interventions around the issues of Institutional Critique, especially in recent years. While important questions were posed to both the terms that come together under Institutional Critique—by Graw, Green, and others—one absence from the live event was a discussion of the concept and social implications of the term “institution” from a point of view not confined to, or originating in, the art world. In his essay “What is an Institution?” the philosopher John Searle addresses the definitional question he poses with the contention that the defining horizon of institutionality—whether in the domain of economics, which provided the occasion for his text, or any other discursive formation, including “art”—is language itself. Most theories of institutions, and much philosophy until the 20th century—have, he suggests, taken language for granted, so that “of course, if you presuppose language, you have already presupposed institutions.” Searle proposes, therefore, to reverse the terms of these general assumptions, arguing that “instead of presupposing language and analyzing institutions, we have to analyze the role of language in the constitution of institutions.”
            As noted above, the focus of both event and publication is not on the work of the so-called pioneers of Institutional Critique (Broodthaers, Haacke, Buren, Asher, John Knight, and others), whose work has been addressed in a signal series of essays and exhibitions catalogues over the last 30 some years. Yet as it became clear that their projects, example, and names were cited time and again by contributing artists and critics from subsequent generations, we felt it was important to offer some sense, at least—even if by no means inclusive or comprehensive—of the issues they addressed and the terms they employed.
            Hans Haacke’s short piece “All the Art That’s Fit to Show” was first published as a catalogue statement (originally untitled), for the exhibition Art into Society – Society into Art, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, in 1974. One of Haacke’s most forthright assertions of the nexus of social, political, cultural, and economic interests embedded in the art institution through its board, trustees, membership, fund-raising operations, and so on, the text offers a clear summary of some of the central assumptions of Institutional Critique: that all artists and all art institutions are inexorably implicated in what Haacke calls the “socio-political value-system”; and that there is a moral obligation to make these implications clear, and where necessary, to work against them. “Artists as much as their supporters and their enemies, no matter of what ideological coloration,” he concludes, “are unwitting partners in the art syndrome and relate to each other dialectically. They participate jointly in the maintenance and/or development of the ideological make-up of their society. They work within that frame, set the frame, and are being framed.”
            One of many changes that ensued in the art world with the politicization of some artists and some of their contexts in the later 1960s, was a rethinking of the whole enterprise of the exchange, sale, and ownership of art works, especially in relation to auction and the secondary market; and of the wider nature and function of the artists’ relations to commercial, private, and public gallery systems. In an extended interview with Berlin-based artist, Maria Eichhorn, Daniel Buren offers a detailed discussion of the Avertissement (or Agreement) he generated with a lawyer in the late 1960s. Eichhorn’s discussion arises from a wider project which had as its subject “The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement” formulated by Bob Projansky and Seth Siegelaub in 1971, which included interviews with Siegelaub, Haacke (who has worked with the contract since 1972), and Lawrence Weiner, as well as Buren. A final engagement with the artists involved in the earlier stages of Institutional Critique comes in the form of Alberro’s essay “Meaning at the Margins: The Semiological Inversions of John Knight,” which offers a detailed critical examination of a range of Knight’s projects carried out through the 1990s.
            Graw’s essay is one of several in the volume that set out critically to re-examine the assumptions and contexts of Institutional Critique. Graw begins by addressing the implications of an axiom at the heart of the movement—that art can effect change through a critical address to socio-cultural issues. Under such terms and conditions, “art,” she contends, “is overtaxed and in some measure closed down.” By wrestling with the legacy and currency of Institutional Critique, Graw admits its strategic importance in certain art world situations and in the service of the lowest common denominators of the system of production, exchange, and visibility that defines the art system: “that value is not intrinsic to an artwork, but assigned to it through financial transactions; that the productive and other contexts of an artwork are necessarily carried into and delivered through it as part of its signification; or, more simply, that it does make a difference when public museums are run by trustees.” 
            At the same time, she attacks the “neutralization” of these precepts as institutionally critical strategies have become repetitively bound up with the whole circuit of contemporary exhibitions and thematic group shows—often as the governing predicate of any commission—which has tended to hollow-out the fundamental precepts of Institutional Critique, transforming it into a mantra of recuperated—and thus false—criticality. By examining some of the signifying shifts associated with the two terms in question here—institution and critique—Graw asserts the necessity of working with the shades of meaning they subtend, but also the need resist some of the lessons of Institutional Critique. She argues for the pursuit of means to oppose the inevitability of the capitalist system, even while being inscribed within it, and, finally, for ways of using the tools and terms of Institutional Critique to move beyond it.
            Another stand of discussion centers on the re-orientation of curatorial practice and exhibition strategies in the aftermath of Institutional Critique. Paul offered an overview of the cluster of relations that have linked—and separated—the practices of Institutional Critique over the last 15 years or so of the development of new media and associated art activities. For Paul, the “inherently collaborative, participatory, networked and variable” nature of new media “tends to challenge the structures and logic of museums and art galleries and reorients the concept and arena of the exhibition.” New media art, she continues, “seems to call for a ‘ubiquitous museum’ or ‘museum without walls,’ a parallel, distributed, living information space open to artistic interference—a space for exchange, collaborative creation, and presentation that is transparent and flexible.” To the proposition that the intrinsic qualities of new media already threaten the traditional fixtures of the museum or art institution and its normative missions of collecting, exhibition, and display, Paul adds an important rider, suggesting that the ideas and logic of Institutional Critique have only rarely been addressed, in any direct form of commentary or dissent, by new media activities, and then only by the specialized subset of “Internet Art.”
            Hoffmann sketches a manifesto for the de-differentiation of the artist and curator, arguing that one of the most salient turns in the art world in recent years has been the rise of a new horizon of curatorial practice. The previous curatorial regime, book-ended, he argues by Harold Szeemann (1933–2005) and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and identified with the creation of thematized exhibitions, has been replaced, starting in the late 1990s, by a new era predicated on the notion of curatorial “authorship”—so that curators become makers in a sense shared with the auteurs of cinematic practice. Hoffmann argues that this move can be associated with the rise of the artist-curated exhibition, which he traces back to Barbara Kruger’s pioneering Pictures and Promises: A Display of Advertising, Slogans, and Interventions (1981), Group Material’s intervention Americana in the Whitney Biennial of 1985, Joseph Kosuth’s The Play of the Unmentionable, at the Brooklyn Museum (1990), and Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore (1992). Hoffmann also discusses the work of three innovative European curators, Sabine Breitwieser, Maria Lind, and Ute Meter Bauer. He concludes by considering several projects in which he was involved, including The 6th Caribbean Biennial, which he co-curated with Maurizio Cattelan in 1999 in order to “disorganize most of the common parameters of an exhibition”; The Next Documenta Should be Curated by an Artist (which originated in a conversation with the artist Carsten Hollers in 2003) for which 30 artists were asked the question “What would you do if you were asked to curate the next Documenta?”; and the two parts of Artists’ Favorites (ICA, 2004).
            Zelevansky offers a view onto the debates around Institutional Critique from the informed and pragmatic point of view of a curator from a major institution. She examines some of the implications of the new art forms that emerged from the late 1960s on from the side of the museum, noting for example, how the development of new materials, scales, and locations for art necessitated a profound shift in the artist-curator relationship, which still endures.
            Both Fraser and Dominguez examine the stakes and possibilities of performative interventions within and around the institution, though they locate their work in different critical and activist contexts. Fraser contributes two texts, one developed from her talk at the LA County Museum, the other published in Artforum in summer 2005 a few weeks later. The Artforum essay looks at Institutional Critique from a more historical and critical perspective; while the second piece is more personal and experimental, using Fraser’s signature humor and irony to debunk not just institutional etiquettes of education, display, and outreach, but also some of the pretensions of Institutional Critique itself. Domiguez contributes another experimental piece in the form of a multi-layered diatribe against digital correctness and techno-formalism in which is folded an apologia for disturbing the digital boundaries of the institution. The text comprises a series of digressions on the work of the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT)—in Swarm actions against the Minutemen on the US/Mexican border, for example—on Dominguez’s involvement with Zapatismo and on the incendiary archaic futurism of Mayan Technologies.
            Green contributes a discussion of the elisions and omissions in much work associated with Institutional Critique, drawing attention—like Graw—to the limitations of the movement’s notion of “institution” and its relative neglect of questions of race and class. She argues that inquiries into the structural coefficients of institutions need to be accompanied by insight into their make-up at the level of human relations.
            We also commissioned a series of projects by artists who have worked both to extend and critically to disrupt the legacies of Institutional Critique or who have been associated with some of its commitments or languages. Berlin-based Monica Bonvicini shares two drawings and two installation shots from I Believe in the Skin of Things as in that of Women, 1999, a project that attends to a certain moment of what she calls “kick-in-the-balls” feminism in Europe in the later 1990s, as well as to her own sense of frustration as an artist associated with site and institutionally-specific work who is struggling against her cooptation by the commission structures of the institutions and biennials in which she has been invited to participate.     
            In Be A Latin American Artist and its accompanying text, “I’ll Be Back, and I’ll Be Germans,” Martin Sastre confronts the panoply of economic, cultural and geographic differences—both lived and assumed—between European and Latin American artists. Taking a sometimes humorous, but unironically literalist, approach to these continental divides, the Martin Sastre Foundation for the Super Poor Arts sponsors periods of residence in Sastre’s native Uruguay during which European visitors are confronted by the same practical circumstances as those experienced by local artists, including subsistence on 100 euros (around $120) a month. One result of Sastre’s efforts here is the attempt, as he puts it, to “change reality with no metaphors.” Javier Tellez’s suite of film-stills and texts relates to a collaboration with patients at the Rozelle Hospital in Sydney, Australia, which gave rise to his installation with DVD projection, La Passion de Jeanne D'Arc (Rozelle Hospital), 2004. Using Dryer’s film as an intertext to reconsider the face as a site for the subjective and social signification of “excess”—passion, terror, constraint, derangement—Tellez probes the limit-terms of institutional discourse produced at boundaries between confinement, expression, and definitions of mental “health.” A fourth project, the Guerilla Girls’ Art Museum Activities, proposes a witty, yet scathing, exposé of the persistence of gender inequalities and naked commercialism in most aspects of the institutionalized art world in the form of ironically benign pages from a children’s activity book.
         Juli Carson offers a close reading of the institutional psycho-dynamics of the Robert Mapplethorpe controversy set in motion by the Jesse Helms Amendment in 1989, reading this in relation to the issues raised in Fraser’s contribution to the exhibition Notes on the Margin: A Framework in Focus put on at Gracie Mansion Gallery in New York City in February 1990, while she (Carson) was director. The essay offers a detailed examination of the referential complexities of this moment in the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s, in which censorship routines, homophobic and related pathologies, the me-generation art world boom, and reinflections of Institutional Critique were layered together in a complex weave of overlaps and contestations. .
         In “Walls fall Down” Berlin-based critic and curator Astrid Mania outlines some of the institutional parameters of the burgeoning Berlin art scene, looking in particular at the emergence of collectives such as UNWETTER, artist-run spaces, and innovative forms of publication (including the Neue Review); and placing these in the context of a defining set of relations with underground practices in East Berlin and East Germany before the reunification, as well as wider issues in German cultural federalism. One of her interests focuses on how, in these new modalities, “the roles of artist and curator, producer and presenter frequently overlap, put[ing] … pressure on traditional professional and institutional boundaries.”
         Recent UCLA graduate Amy Pederson contributes a piece which uses the site-specific projects of a recent work by the group Temporary Services, entitled Construction Site, to think through the matrix of differences and overlaps between Relational Aesthetics and Institutional Critique. In “Nabbed by the Web Police” the infitrationist pranksters known as The Yes Men offer a self-deprecating yet provocative meditation on the relative failure of one of their recent projects; and on the implications for art and its politics of what might be at stake when a targeted action goes wrong—when critique doesn’t quite take, or institutions out their infiltrators.
            To give a sense of the some of the strategies taken on by artists who, while addressing formations of institutionality, including the museum, have chosen not to work in any self-conscious relation to Institutional Critique and are in many respects opposed to its implicit moralisms and negative critique, I conducted an interview with the Los Angeles based artist Mike Kelley. This discussion turns on Kelley’s career-long interest in the relations, repressions, and determinations of wider institutional structures such as the family, criminality, and religion.