Institutional critique is defined

And all of this presents a very different relationship to wealth and economics than it does for artists working in the States. And when Canadian artists I know move to the States and change their bio line to “based in Brooklyn,” it seems like a shift starts to happen around how they’re positioned in relation to the market, or how they understand their art practice and the ways in which they sustain their practice in relation to money. AF: Yes, it’s very different. Outside of the United States, I’ve spent the most time working in Germany, where there is a great diversity of institutions: public institutions, membership organizations like Kunstvereins, private museums, artist-run organizations, as well as an art market. To me, that seems to be the best scenario.

We have a long history of artist-run centres, for example, where practicing artists are supposed to make up the majority of folks serving on the board.

housework is not work

Marxist feminists in the 1970s articulated a prominent critique of domestic labour by revealing how its social and economic devaluation derived from the essentialising link to the female character or physique. The transformation of domestic work into an internal need, aspiration, and an attribute of the female personality – its essentialisation or naturalisation – made unpaid housework invisible as a form of labour and its economic as well as cultural devaluation socially acceptable. Because housework was viewed as a woman’s natural calling – it was ‘transformed into a natural attribute of female physique and personality’ and thereby altered into non-work, invisible work (Federici 1975, 2).

demand wages for art work.

“a” archive

Winsom

True and Functional

Shwetal Patel in discussion with Shaheen Merali

sorry contemporary

We have to continue to operate as artists, curators and archivists—as people who are willing to be collecting rather than remaining within the narratives, which are applied to us, but to create the counternarratives that challenge us.

Black Atlantic

Rastafarianism and the Punk movement were expressions of historical pain and radicality that involved black history, populist political expression and encountering ‘colonial’ traits. Panchayat as a collection was influenced by the fragmentary presence of information accompanying these trials and experiments with the formations of collective notions of Black power in midst of mainstream power structures. The collection provided for and enabled many artists from diverse backgrounds and concerns to communicate the historic changes in the local and international environment under the edifice of Black Art or issue-based arts or even New Internationalism.

Panchayat primarily remained a way of further examining issues and a depository of information from contested arenas, one which is often a subject deemed as either specialist or neglected or relegated, due to its origins in a specific agenda. As the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson,stated, ‘We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately’. In a mediated manner, Panchayat’s activities can be seen as interventionary, or coming from an intermediary agent or means, by indirect mediation, indirectly.

Kobena Mercer’s concept of vernacular realism, as the constant reference of artists to their realities, is easily observable in the photographic work of Samena Rana, whose physical disability impeded the process of ‘taking photographs’, whilst her aesthetic decisions influenced her work and perspective. Due to her (dis)ability, she held her camera in a certain way and shot images from the position of her wheelchair. She often shot images of objects she found beautiful from above and in this way a vernacularism developed through the manner in which people looked at their specific conditions.

The collection was characteristic of its time, representing contemporary artists who produced issue-based work, with a particular focus on cultural identity. As with all archives, the collection is fragmentary and reflective of the conditions of self-funded collecting. The collection addressed the interdependent relationships of cultural conditions, predominantly in the so-called critical decade of the 1980s, which witnessed artists embracing the new technologies. Video art, copy art and digital media were being used to explore, through a range of aesthetic devices, the political and social formations of identities, imagination and artistic production and the policing of sexuality, the emerging migration and refugee crisis of the early 1990s.

community galleries

I graduated with a degree in Fine Art (Sculpture) from the University of Wales, Newport and returned to London where I quickly realised that one had to be involved in some sort of relationship with education. However, at that time, education somehow felt limiting, and many of us sensed the importance of working within community education. In many ways, this was very stimulating, as we came into contact with other people who had similar ideas about working with communities and who were mainly operating through workshops in community settings. Many artists were involved in working in these settings in the outlying boroughs of London but also in more centrally located places including Paddington, Westminster, Brixton and Lambeth. We managed to reconfigure ourselves as artists in settings that were mainly meant for youth culture, in terms of youth centres, for instance, or sometimes in centres for young offenders, interfacing with youth workers, as well as with other artists, alongside actors, dancers, writers and poets. In hindsight, one realises it was a really important way of responding to how we understood ourselves as artists and writers in relation to ‘the community’. It came out of a necessity to allow forms of expression for artists and groups in creative ways other than hanging out in the street. We were functioning in a space that was ‘off street’ at a time of a high volume of stop and search activities by the police. It is hard to imagine that certain citizens could not always use the streets in those days, but had to find other places in which to congregate. Thus, one found oneself working within youth and community centres.

Not surprisingly, this goal of unanimity has also led to the establishment of what is considered a more democratic composition of public-art selection committees. There has been a generous and well-intentioned effort to include on these committees not only panelists with backgrounds in the arts, but also representatives from the local community in which the public installation will be situated. Yet if followed to its logical conclusion, the concept of “public” that this phenomenon implies reveals itself to be quite ludicrous. For public space is either communal—a part of the collective citizenry—or it is not. Somewhere along the line, our democratic process has presumed that the sentiments of one particular community, simply because of its members’ propinquity to the prospective installation, should be granted greater significance. What this suggests is that we have arrived at some reliable formula for articulating the precise radius that distinguishes that community’s interests from the larger field of public life. Thus the ideas of the local community and of the general public are put into an adversarial relationship, implying a fundamental conflict between those inside a particular neighborhood, area, city, etc., and those outside.

the temporary is important because it represents a provocative opportunity to be maverick, or to be focused, or to be urgent about immediate issues in ways that can endure and resonate.

Space, it has been suggested, not the artwork, is the material of curators, and their instrument the exhibition.35 When space is the street, the artwork becomes roadwork, the exhibition a procession, a parade, a march.

Santiago Sierra

It’s worth looking closely at Lind’s criteria here. Her assessment is based on an ethics of authorial renunciation: The work of Oda Projesi is better than that of Hirschhorn because it exemplifies a superior model of collaborative practice. The conceptual density and artistic significance of the respective projects are sidelined in favor of an appraisal of the artists’ relationship with their collaborators. Hirschhorn’s (purportedly) exploitative relationship is compared negatively to Oda Projesi’s inclusive generosity. In other words, Lind downplays what might be interesting in Oda Projesi’s work as art—the possible achievement of making dialogue a medium or the significance of dematerializing a project into social process. Instead, her criticism is dominated by ethical judgments on working procedure and intentionality.

It is more than a union of artist-run centres, it has a connective tissue. It is in motion.

Canada Council instituted the travel grant

Image Bank

Vincent Trasov

Michael Morris

Ingrid Baxter

Iain Baxter

Global South

What are the implications of this for contemporary curators and museums that are responsible for interpreting contested histories and whose prime matter is knowledge? How are curators and art institutions positioned within the colonial matrix, and is it possible for them to restructure knowledge and power – to return agency to those who have lost it?

Coloniality is ever-present. Even decades after the period of formal colonisation has ended, it has persisted through structural forms of privilege and bias. Beyond their more obvious economic and social manifestations (such as the racial stratification of labour and the proliferation of inequality and racism), these oppressive hierarchies also pervade the realm of culture; but so much of the modern world we know and experience has been constructed out of Western imperial categories that the coloniality of knowledge is perhaps harder to discern and much more insidious to overcome.

Tony Albert’

Brook Andrew

Black Mirror

In the end, instead of denying statistics, or ignoring the subject of gender, race and sexuality altogether, we all need to stop making excuses and to face these issues head-on in order to come up with solutions, possibilities, and strategies for addressing these inequities. Mainstream curators need to join the ranks of curatorial activists working worldwide to institute change, and to collectively work towards transforming what is, in the end, an abhorrent situation for Other artists in the art world. Now is the moment for curators to work together to acknowledge the problem, to come to a resolution, so that all peoples and their creative outputs have the opportunity for equal exposure.

The thesis of my forthcoming book, Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating, takes as its operative assumption that the art system—its history, institutions, market, press, and so forth—is an hegemony that privileges white male creativity to the exclusion of all Other artists.

These curators—and others like them interested in art world injustices—have curated everything from biennales and retrospectives to large-scale thematic exhibitions, focusing on both historical and contemporary material.

Telling History: An Archive and Three Case Studies

We visit museums far less often than we visit their websites and follow their activities across the internet.

Traditionally, the main occupation of art was to resist the flow of time. Public art museums and big private art collections were created to select certain objects—the artworks—take them out of private and public use, and therefore immunize them against the destructive force of time. Thus, our art museums became huge garbage cans of history in which things were kept and exhibited that had no use anymore in real life: sacral images of past religions or status objects of past lifestyles. During a long period of art history, artists also participated in this struggle against the destructive force of time. They wanted to create artworks that would be able to transcend time by embodying eternal ideals of beauty or, at least, by becoming the medium of historical memory, by acting as witnesses to events, tragedies, hopes, and projects that otherwise would have been forgotten. In this sense, artists and art institutions shared a fundamental project to resist material destruction and historical oblivion.

In a world in which the goal of stopping the flow of time is taken over by the internet, the function of the museum becomes one of staging the flow—staging events that are synchronized with the lifetimes of the spectators. This changes the topology of our relationship to art. The traditional hermeneutical position towards art required the gaze of the external spectator to penetrate the artwork, to discover artistic intentions, or social forces, or vital energies that gave the artwork its form—from the outside of the artwork toward its inside. However, the gaze of the contemporary museum visitor is, by contrast, directed from the inside of the art event towards its outside: toward the possible external surveillance of this event and its documentation process, toward the eventual positioning of this documentation in the media space and in cultural archives—in other words, toward the spatial boundaries of this event. And also towards the temporal boundaries of this event—because when we are placed inside an event, we cannot know when this event began and when it will end. The art system is generally characterized by the asymmetrical relationship between the gaze of the art producer and the gaze of the art spectator. These two gazes almost never meet. In the past, after artists put their artworks on display, they lost control over the gaze of the spectator: regardless of what some art theoreticians say, the artwork is a mere thing and cannot meet the spectator’s gaze. So under the conditions of the traditional museum, the spectator’s gaze was in a position of sovereign control—although this sovereignty could be indirectly manipulated by the museum’s curators through certain strategies of pre-selection, placement, juxtaposition, lighting, and so forth. However, when the museum begins to function as a chain of events, the configuration of gazes changes. The visitor loses his or her sovereignty in a very obvious way. The visitor is placed inside an event and cannot meet the gaze of a camera that documents this event—nor the secondary gaze of the editor that does the postproduction work on this document, nor the gaze of a later spectator of this document. Ai Wei Wei tweeted this image of himself in bed after suffering a hemorrhage caused by police aggression. Ai Wei Wei is the second most followed artist on Twitter, despite Twitter being illegal in China. That is why, by visiting contemporary museum exhibitions, we are confronted with the irreversibility of time—we know that these exhibitions are merely temporary. If we visit the same museum after a certain amount of time, the only things that will remain will be documents: a catalogue, or a film, or a website. But what these things offer us is necessarily incommensurable with our own experience because our perspective, our gaze is asymmetrical with the gaze of a camera—and these gazes cannot coincide, as they could in the case of documenting an opera or a ballet. This is the reason for a certain kind of nostalgia that we necessarily feel when we are confronted with documents of past artistic events, whether exhibitions or performances. This nostalgia provokes the desire to reenact the event “as it truly was.” Recently in Venice, the exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form” was reenacted at the Fondazione Prada. It was a very professional reenactment—and so it provoked a new and even stronger wave of nostalgia. Some people thought how great it would be to go back to the 1960s and breathe the wonderful atmosphere of that time. And they also thought how awful everything is at the Biennale itself, with all its fuss, compared to the sublime askesis of “When Attitudes Become Form.” At the same time, visitors from a younger generation found the exhibition unimpressive, and liked only the beautiful guides in their Prada clothes. The nostalgic mood that is inevitably provoked by art documentation reminds me of the early Romantic nostalgia towards nature. Art was seen then as the documentation of the beautiful or sublime aesthetic experiences that were offered by nature. The documentation of these experiences by means of painting seemed more disappointing than authentic. In other words, if the irreversibility of time and the feeling of being inside rather than outside an event were once the privileged experiences of nature, they now became the privileged experiences of contemporary art. And that means precisely that contemporary art has become the medium for investigating the eventfulness of events: the different modes of the immediate experience of events, their relationship to documentation and archiving, the intellectual and emotional modes of our relationship to documentation, and so forth. Now, if the thematization of the eventfulness of the event has become, indeed, the main preoccupation of contemporary art in general and the museum of contemporary art in particular, it makes no sense to condemn the museum for staging art events. On the contrary, today the museum has become the main analytical tool for staging and analyzing the event as radically contingent and irreversible—amidst our digitally controlled civilization that is based on tracking back and securing the traces of our individual existence in the hope of making everything controllable and reversible. The museum is a place where the asymmetrical war between the ordinary human gaze and the technologically armed gaze not only takes place, but also becomes revealed—so that it can be thematized and critically theorized.

If the public follows my activity all the time, then I do not need to present it with any product. The process is already the product.

In the theater, spectators remain in an outside position vis-à-vis the stage, but in the museum they enter the stage, and find themselves inside the spectacle.

However, the relationship between internet and museum radically changes if we begin to understand the museum not as a storage place for artworks, but rather as a stage for the flow of art events.

Malevich offers a good example of this in his short but important text “On the Museum,” from 1919. At that time, the new Soviet government feared that the old Russian museums and art collections would be destroyed by civil war and the general collapse of state institutions and the economy. The Communist Party responded by trying to secure and save these collections. In his text, Malevich protested against this pro-museum policy by calling on the Soviet state to not intervene on behalf of the old art collections, because, he said, their destruction could open the path to true, living art. In particular, he wrote: Life knows what it is doing, and if it is striving to destroy, one must not interfere, since by hindering we are blocking the path to a new conception of life that is born within us. In burning a corpse we obtain one gram of powder: accordingly thousands of graveyards could be accommodated on a single chemist’s shelf. We can make a concession to conservatives by offering that they burn all past epochs, since they are dead, and set up one pharmacy. Later, Malevich gives a concrete example of what he means: The aim [of this pharmacy] will be the same, even if people will examine the powder from Rubens and all his art—a mass of ideas will arise in people, and will be often more alive than actual representation (and take up less room).4 It is obvious that what Malevich proposes here is not merely the destruction of museums but a radical curatorial project—to exhibit the ashes of artworks instead of their corpses. And in a truly Wagnerian manner, Malevich further says that everything that “we” (meaning he and his artistic contemporaries) do is also destined for the crematorium. Of course, contemporary curators do not reduce museum collections to ashes, as Malevich suggested. But there is a good reason for that. Since Malevich’s time, mankind has invented a way to place all artworks from the past on one chemist’s shelf without destroying them. And this shelf is called the internet.

Indeed, every curatorial project necessarily aims to contradict the normative, traditional art-historical narrative embodied by the museum’s permanent collection. If such a contradiction does not take place, the curatorial project loses its legitimation.

Wagner introduced the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk in his programmatic treatise “The Art-Work of the Future” (1849–1850). Wagner wrote this text in exile, in Zurich, after the end of the revolutionary uprisings in Germany in 1848. In this text he develops a project for an artwork (of the future) that is heavily influenced by the materialist philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. At the beginning of his treatise, Wagner states that the typical artist of his time is an egoist who, in complete isolation from the life of the people, practices his art exclusively for the enjoyment of the rich; in so doing he follows the dictates of fashion. The artist of the future, says Wagner, must become radically different: “He now can only will the universal, true, and unconditional; he yields himself not to a love for this or that particular object, but to wide Love itself. Thus does the egoist become a communist.”1 Becoming communist, then, is possible only through self-renunciation—self-dissolution in the collective. Wagner defines his supposed hero as such: “The last, most complete renunciation [Entäusserung] of his personal egoism, the demonstration of his full ascent into universalism, a man can only show us by his Death; and that not by his accidental, but by his necessary death, the logical sequel to his actions, the last fulfillment of his being. The celebration of such a death is the noblest thing that men can enter on.”2 Admittedly, there remains a difference between the hero who sacrifices himself and the performer who makes this sacrifice onstage (the Gesamtkunstwerk being understood by Wagner as a musical drama). Nonetheless, Wagner insists that this difference is suspended by the Gesamtkunstwerk, for the performer “does not merely represent in the art-work the action of the fêted hero, but repeats its moral lesson; insomuch as he proves by this surrender of his personality that he also, in his artistic action, is obeying a dictate of necessity which consumes the whole individuality of his being.”3 In other words, Wagner understands the Gesamtkunstwerk precisely as a way of resynchronizing the finiteness of human existence with its cultural representation—which, in turn, also becomes finite. Poster for the exhibition Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk: Europäische Utopien seit 1800 (Tendency toward the Gesamtkunstwerk: European Utopias since 1800), Zurich, Markus Raetz and Albin Uldry, designers, 1983. The Getty Research Institute, 2011.M.30. Copyright: 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ProLitteris, Zurich. All the other performers achieve their own artistic significance solely through participating in the hero’s ritual of self-sacrifice. Accordingly, Wagner speaks of the hero performer as a dictator who mobilizes the collective of collaborators, with the exclusive goal of staging his own sacrifice in the name of this collective. In the sacrificial scene, the Gesamtkunstwerk finds its end—there is no continuation, no memory. In other words, there is no further role for the dictator-performer. The artistic collective dissolves, and the next Gesamtkunstwerk is created by another artistic collective, with a different dictator-performer in the main role. Here the precariousness of an individual human existence and the fluidity of working collectives are artistically embraced, and even radicalized. Historically, we know that many artistic collectives followed this model: from Hugo Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire to Andy Warhol’s Factory and Guy Debord’s Situationist International. But the contemporary name for this temporary and suicidal dictatorship is different: the “curatorial project.” Harald Szeemann, who initiated the curatorial turn in contemporary art, was so fascinated by the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk that he organized an exhibition called “The Tendency to Gesamtkunstwerk” [“Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk”] (1984). Considering this historical show based on the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, it becomes necessary to ask: What is the main difference between a traditional exhibition and a modern curatorial project? The traditional exhibition treats its space as anonymous and neutral. Only the exhibited artworks are important—but not the space in which they are exhibited. Thus, artworks are perceived and treated as potentially eternal—and the space of the exhibition as a contingent, accidental station where the immortal artworks take a temporary rest from their wanderings through the material world. In contrast, the installation—be it artistic or curatorial—inscribes the exhibited artworks in this contingent material space. (Here one can see an analogy between this shift and the shift from theater actor or cinema actor to the director of theater and cinema.) The curatorial project, rather than the exhibition, is then the Gesamtkunstwerk because it instrumentalizes all the exhibited artworks and makes them serve a common purpose that is formulated by the curator. At the same time, a curatorial or artistic installation is able to include all kinds of objects: time-based artworks or processes, everyday objects, documents, texts, and so forth. All these elements, as well as the architecture of the space, sound, or light, lose their respective autonomy and begin to serve the creation of a whole in which visitors and spectators are also included. Thus, stationary artworks of the traditional sort become temporalized, subjected to a certain scenario that changes the way they are perceived during the time of the installation because this perception is dependent on the context of their presentation—and this context begins to flow. Thus, ultimately, every curatorial project demonstrates its accidental, contingent, eventful, finite character—in other words, it enacts its own precariousness.