Museums, Critique, Aesthetics

Sophie Barr K0934283 Museums, Critique, Aesthetics June 2010
Museums, Critique, Aesthetics

Entrance Is the term institutional critique consigned to art history or is it still a relevant contemporary practice? Current literature suggests that a new phase of institutional critique has emerged which goes beyond the earlier phases of the 1970s and the 1990s.1 But can institutional critique exist when it has been entirely co-opted by the new self-critical, reflexive museum, making it irrelevant for artists today? Could the return to a DIY, junk aesthetic, as exemplified by the exhibition Unmonumental in New York in 2007, be read as a critique of the corporatized, globalized institution? Or perhaps the work of contemporary artists such as Rachel Harrison and Urs Fischer who recycle, 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 The late 1960s saw political upheaval and the radicalization of
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. Mntman, (ed) Art and its Institutions: Current Conflicts, Critique and Collaborations, Black Dog Publishing Ltd. London, 2006.
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 objects 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 experience was the moment that artists such as Daniel Buren and Marcel Broodthaers
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.
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 Duchamps 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 ODoherty unpicks the history of modern art in relation to its institutions, with the white cube positioned as its aesthetic and ideological zenith. For ODoherty 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 ODoherty 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 ODoherty, the story of
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. xv 8 B. ODoherty, Inside The White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (expanded edition), University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1976 & 1986, p. 14.
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 Smithsons comparison of the museum to a graveyard echoes Adornos suggestion that museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association.11 ODoherty 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 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,
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, Valry Proust Museum, in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber, Neville Spearman, London, 1967, p. 175. 12 ODoherty, op. cit., p. 15. 13 A. Rorimer, Michael Asher: Context as Content in InterReview, <www.interreview.org/03/rorimer.html> [accessed 24/06/2010]
simultaneously
breaching
the
white
cube
and
exposing
the
commercial foundations of the gallery. Daniel Burens site-specific, systematized striped paintings echoed the architecture of the gallery in order to examine and expose the work of arts 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 Manets painting Bunch of Asparagus along with a record of its lineage, linking it to a Nazi donor. Haackes work, censored by the Wallraf-RichartzMuseum in Cologne, reflected on the museums 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 Dsseldorf 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 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.
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. 18 Ibid., p.165.
Fred Wilsons 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 Frasers 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 Dions 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 Wilsons Mining the Museum:
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 Wilsons exhibition, which prodded his museum to become a more open and broad-based institution. Their current show, Whats it to You?: Black History is American History, grew directly from their experience of working with Wilson. Today
19 20
Buskirk, op. cit., p. 163. Philadelphia Museum of Art, <www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/2006/257.html> [accessed 25/06/2010],
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 critics22. 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
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
21
commissions.
In
these
new
destination
spaces
Stein, Judith, Sins of Omission: Fred Wilsons 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.
windows to the outside world are commonplace, visitors are encouraged to browse the bookshop and eat in the caf. 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 ODoherty 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 gallerys 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 has percolated through western institutions to effect a radical transformation.26
Sheikh suggests that institutional critique has been totally coopted 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
24
I. Blazwick, Introduction in A Manual For the 21st Century Art Institution, Koenig Books, London, 2009, p. 14 25 B. ODoherty, cited by Blazwick, op.cit., p. 14 26 Blazwick, op. cit., p. 15 27 Sheikh, S. op. cit., p. 31.
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 worlds power structure. Finally she writes, Art that begins 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 OSullivans 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
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. 30 Lippard, op. cit., p. 295. 31 Sullivan, op. cit, p. 125.
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 Haackes 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 recontextualize objects within the museum. 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 arts emphasis on idea over object diminished arts affectivity; what Sullivan argues is arts 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
32 33
ibid., p. 125. ibid., p. 127.
10
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. 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 Rancire 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
34 35
ibid., p. 126. ibid., p. 126. 36 Lippard, op. cit., p. 295. 37 J. Rancire, The Politics of Aesthetics, G. Rockhill (trans), Continuum, London, New York, 2004, 2006, p. 65.
11
done.38 Sullivan describes art as a switch of register as a sort of sidestepping of ourselves. This is arts function: to switch our intensive register, to reconnect us with the world. Art opens us up to the nonhuman 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
Caf Despite the transformation of the museum, and the apparent exhaustion of the anti-aesthetic, many of the artists mentioned 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 Browns 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 Burdens 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
38 39 40
experience
and
institutional
critique
here
ibid., p. 85. Sullivan, op. cit., p. 128. Sullivan, op. cit., p. 130.
12
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 remainBut 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 sidestepping. In his piece Noisette from 2009, Fischer disturbs the gallery space again, but rather than using shock, he uses humour:
Underscoring the architectural divider as a permeable
membrane or cavity, Noisetteactually 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
Fischers sculptures upset the dry, analytical, albeit necessary discourse, of the critique of the white cube and early institutional critique. Rachel Harrisons recent exhibition at The Whitechapel Gallery, Conquest of the Useless, incorporated pedestals borrowed from Londons museums clustered into a landscape of towers and plateaus on which objects are arranged in idiosyncratic scenarios.43
41
M. Kuo, Taste Tests, ArtForum, November, 2009, <www.artforum.com/inprint/id=24005&pagenum=2> [accessed 08/06/2010] 42 ibid. 43 Whitechapel Gallery <www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/rachelharrison-conquest-of-the-useless> [accessed 29/06/2010]
13
According to Cherry Smyth, Harrison employs the plinth to defuse the hierarchies of worth and spectacle encoded in systems of display.44 Harrisons 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 artmany artists dethrone any sense of authority, literally defacing the 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
47
finds this work experimental, fun lovingwithout the melancholy and disempowerment that so characterized postmodernism, 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
44
C. Smyth, Rachel Harrison Review in Art Monthly, Issue 337, June, 2010, p. 26. 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.
14
simultaneously integrative process One persons or businesss or cultures or communitys debilitating catastrophe will represent anothers 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 dont tell stories, dont have a beginning or an end.50 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 serviceprovider? 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
48 49
ibid. ibid. 50 ibid. 51 L. Phillips, Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century, Phaidon Press Limited, London, New York, 2007, p. 7
15
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 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 Sterns 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 Mntman 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
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] 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. xiii 55 N. Mntman, Art and its Institutions in Art and its Institutions: Current
16
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
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 years 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. Smithsons critique of the gallery as one of cultural confinement surely rings true here. The
Conflicts, Critique and Collaborations, Black Dog Publishing, London, 2006, pp. 9-11. 56 ibid., p. 10 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.
17
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 UKs 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 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 centurys forms. It cant, 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
18
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 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 [Haackes] work should recognize that, far from trying to tear down the museum, Haackes 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 Rancire says:
Artistic practices are ways of doing and making that
58 59
Sheikh, Notes on Institutional Critique p. 32. Raunig, Instituent Practices: Fleeing, Instituting, Transforming p. 6. 60 Welchman, op. cit., p. 14. 61 Fraser, From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique p. 132.
19
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:

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 Rancire 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.
62 63
Rancire, op. cit., p. 13. ibid., p. 60.
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