PRESS RELEASE
THE ORGANISATION OF DIRT
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY
UNDER THE AEGIS OF INDEPENDENT CURATING, STUDENTS FROM LEEDS UNIVERSITY HAVE INITIATED A PROJECT WHICH WILL INVITE GUESTS AND THEIR PARTICIPATION TO BE HELD AT THE MEMBER"S BAR, TEMPLE WORKS, LEEDS, ON WEDNESDAY MAY 19TH COMMENCING AT 6.00PM. ORGANISED WITH THE CURATOR MICHEALE SPESSA AND DESIGNER ALEX KEATING, "THE BIRTHDAY PARTY" WILL HOST PERFORMANCES AND SCREENINGS BY STUDENTS FROM THE COURSE INCLUDING THE LAUNCH OF A WEBSITE, "THE ORGANISATION OF DIRT" THAT CATALOGUES AND DISPLAYS TEXT AND IMAGE RELATED TO A CRITIQUE OF THE MUSEUM. HOW DISPLAY CAN BE RETHOUGHT IN ACTIONS. FOR TEMPLE WORKS GUEST ARTIST MAKIKO NAGAYA WILL PRESENT AN EDIBLE WHITE CUBE IN THE CONTEXT OF HAROLD PINTER'S SCREENPLAY FOR "THE BIRTHDAY PARTY".
THE PROJECT REPRESENTS THE RESEARCH UNDERTAKEN IN WORKSHOPS WITH PETER LEWIS AT LEEDS UNIVERSITY, FINE ART, ART HISTORY AND CULTURAL STUDIES DEPARTMENT, ENTITLED "CONTEXT RESPONSIVE CURATING". A COURSE ORIGINALLY DEVISED BY PROFESSOR VANALYNE GREEN AND THE LEEDS BASED SITUATIONIST GROUP, BLACK DOGS. "THE ORGANISATION OF DIRT" INTERROGATES THE POTENTIAL OF ACTION THROUGH ALTERNATIVE MODES OF ADDRESS THAT RESIST THE 'INSTITUTIONALISATION' OF DIRTY SPACE, AND INHERITS ART'S ACTIVIST AND RADICAL PROGRAMMES FROM THE VARIOUS HISTORICAL AVANT GARDES SITUATING PERILOUS ACTS, THAT OFFEND, RECONCILE, ATTRACT, REPEL, BREAK, DISSOCIATE, UNITE, AND RE-UNITE, TO LIBERATE THOUGHT.
YOU CAN'T TAKE THE MUSEUM OUT OF ART, CAN YOU TAKE THE ART OUT OF THE MUSEUM? IS THERE STILL AN OUTSIDE OUT THERE? IS THERE STILL ANY ALTERNATIVE?
THE EVENT WILL PRESENT LIVE WORKS BY PARTICIPANTS FROM THE CONTEXT RESPONSIVE CURATING MODULE, LED BY PETER LEWIS AT LEEDS UNIVERSITY, FINE ART, HISTORY OF ART AND CULTURAL STUDIES DEPARTMENT, WITH GUEST ARTIST MAKIKO NAGAYA
EVENT DATE WEDNESDAY 19th MAY
TIMES 6.00PM - 11.00PM
ADDRESS TEMPLE WORKS, LEODIS COURT, LEEDS, WEST YORKSHIRE, LS11 5JJ, UK
SPONSORS LEEDS UNIVERSITY, LEEDS METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY, TEMPLE WORKS, LEEDS, REDUX PROJECTS, LONDONSPECIAL THANKS TO MICHEALE SPESSA, SUSAN WILLIAMSON, ALEX KEATING, CHRIS TOSIC, SIMON LEWANDOWSKI
CONTACT
Peter Lewis plewis@inbox.com
07986084697
Tuesday, 27 April 2010
PRESS RELEASE
Monday, 26 April 2010
SESSION: 27th April
We will be discussing all the practical detail and writing a press release. Essays are to be sent by email to plewis@inbox.com asap. Michelle Spessa will be attending to work out everything needed for event. Dates 18 - 20 May. Most suitable is the 19th May. This was the only time when we could schedule.
WEBSITE UNDER CONSTRUCTION - URGENT! TEXTS TO BE SENT WITH BLOG ADDRESS
http://www.sereneinnovation.co.uk/TheOrganisationofDirt.html
cut and paste the link above
Formatted so far: Katherine Alderson's text. You can use the zoom/in
out tools at the bottom and print any page. You can also see it
full-size.
Friday, 23 April 2010
Thursday, 22 April 2010
WHITE CUBE CAKE
I propose a white cube cake made of 343 smaller white cubes, made of chocolate [ white] with a filling to be determined, to be eaten [ gorged upon] during the event. My partner and collaborator, Makiko Nagaya has volunteered to make the cake which would be delivered from London for the night. Other proposals can also be presented for the night from each of you.
Monday, 19 April 2010
NOTES FOR INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE HANDOUT
IS THERE STILL SOMETHING TO CLAIM ON THE "OUTSIDE"?
WHAT OUTSIDE?
WE WILL CONSIDER SPACES 'OUTSIDE' AND 'INSIDE' THE INSTITUTION. CAN YOU GET THE ART OUT OF THE MUSEUM OR THE MUSEUM OUT OF ART?
OPTIONS:
WORKING WITH CURATOR MICHELLE SPESSA AND DESIGNER ALEX KEATING TO HOLD AN EVENT AT TEMPLE WORKS AT A CERTAIN DATE TO BE DECIDED. DISCUSSION WITH GROUP AND VISIT TO TEMPLE WORKS.
PRINTING IMAGES AND TEXTS TO MAKE POSTERS FROM BLOGS - TO ASSEMBLE A HISTORICAL FIELD OF REFERENCES; TO SET THE 'STAGE' FOR AN INVITED PERFORMANCE. DISCUSSION WITH GROUP
WRITING PRESS RELEASE THAT PRESENTS A CRITICAL VIEW OF THE EVENT.
DEEP RIVER ARTISTS PROJECT SPACE, Los Angeles
FURTHER READING:
INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE AND AFTER, edited by John Welchman (jrp/ringer)
The danger to critical thinking is in assuming its ‘canon’ – especially so in the work of Institutional Critique. The critical itself must accommodate criticism. The canon does not resist its own commodification by the culture industry which utilises it. It is also better positioned to understand the industrial ‘real’ of the work of art and artists.
The key text will be Andrea Fraser’s “ From the Critique of Institutions to the Institution of Critique”, in which she writes of the necessary failure of an enterprise that purports to stand outside, when language itself is imbricated as layered, forming, and formed by, the institution. She is compelled to articulate the paradoxical nature of a construction as it suggests a critique of an institution that is itself one, of a ‘given’, institutional ‘nature’ - of the individual in neo-liberal society. Isabelle Graw also identifies a paradox in “Beyond Institutional Critique”. Contrary to expectation of disallowing ‘criticism’, institutions that would encourage works which conform to their new model of liberal flat hierarchy institutions, and could be easily accepted experiments with them are, like capital itself, absorbing antagonism to grow stronger. By opting for such contestation as research, teamwork, documentation, and their ‘transparency’, human ‘communication’ is turned to commodity, the whole endeavour to resist tuned to the advantage of the culture industry. Some do remain, however, outside such absorption, Fraser and Graw write of insisting on the critique of institutions while working on new more adequate redefinitions of the redundancy of its terms, reminding that co-optation has always been a fiction of standing on the outside.
It is believed that the critique of DeepRiver as an institution instigated the destruction and de-installation of the work, and that the "rising frustration" was largely due to the critique being made evident in written format via a handout.
AN EXAMPLE OF INSTITUTIONALLY CRITICAL ART AS PRESS RELEASE
Marcel Broodthears
Press Release
"I, too, wondered whether I could not sell something and succeed in life. For some time I had been no good at anything. I am forty years old... Finally the idea of inventing something insincere finally crossed my mind and I set to work straightaway. At the end of three months I showed what I had produced to Philippe Edouard Toussaint, the owner of the Galerie St Laurent. 'But it is art' he said 'and I will willingly exhibit all of it.' 'Agreed' I replied. If I sell something, he takes 30%. It seems these are the usual conditions, some galleries take 75%. What is it? In fact it is objects." Broodthaers, 1964
Institutional Critique
Institutional Critique is an art term that describes the systematic inquiry into the workings of art institutions, for instance galleries and museums, and is most associated with the work of artists such as Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Andrea Fraser, Fred Wilson and Hans Haacke.
In more technical terms, Institutional Critique is an artistic term meant as a commentary of the various institutions and assumed normalities of art and/or a radical disarticulation of the institution of art (radical is linguistically understood in its relation to radix which means to get to the root of something). For instance, assumptions about the supposed aesthetic autonomy or neutrality of painting and sculpture are often explored as a subject in the field of art, and are then historically and socially mapped out (i.e., ethnographically and or archaeologically) as discursive formations, then (re)framed within the context of the museum itself. As such, it seeks to make visible the historically and socially constructed boundaries between inside and outside, public and private. Institutional critique is often critical of how of the distinctions of taste are not separate from aesthetic judgement, and that taste is an institutionally cultivated sensibility.
Origin
Institutional critique is a practice that emerged out of the developments of Minimalism and its concerns with the phenomenology of the viewer, as well as formalist art criticism and art history (i.e., Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried), conceptual art and its concerns with language, processes, and administrative society, and appropriation art and its concerns with consumption and identity. Institutional critique is often site-specific, and perhaps could be linked to the advent of the "earthwork" by minimalist artists such as Robert Smithson and Walter De Maria. Institutional critique is also often associated with the developments of structuralist and post-structuralist philosophy, critical theory and literary theory.
HANS HAACKE
Since his poignant installation at the 1993 Venice Biennale, in which he smashed up the marble floor of the German pavilion as an aggressively fractured monument to his homeland, Hans Haacke has become a bankable designer of public memorials. Berlin is home to two of the artist’s larger and more recent such projects – Denkzeichen Rosa Luxemburg (Memorial Rosa Luxemburg, 2006) in the Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and Der Bevölkerung (For the People, 2000) at the Reichstag – so it seems appropriate that the city was recently co-host, with Hamburg, to the biggest exhibition of Haacke’s work to date. Though not officially a retrospective, the show, entitled ‘wirklich’ (real) – Works 1959–2006’, encompasses the full range of the artist’s oeuvre, from his photographs of the late 1950s, through his minimalist works of the 1960s developed after his early affiliation with the German artist group ZERO, to the politicized installations of the 1970s.
Haacke’s interest in closed physical systems, biological growth and random movements manifested itself in works such as Condensation Cube (1963–5), a moisture-filled Plexiglas con-tainer whose appearance altered constantly in relation to its environment. By the end of the 1960s, however, Haacke had shifted his focus to another type of autopoietic system, analysing it in political and sociological terms: the art world. In Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile (1969–70), for instance, Haacke inverted the mores of exhibitive logic and made the visitors to his shows the subject of his work, by quizzing them about aspects of their personal lives and then displaying the results. Shapolsky et al… (1971) took this approach further and presented the findings of Haacke’s research into the underhand business dealings of a New York real-estate company with strong ties to several art institutions, in a work that conflated stripped-down pictorial serialism in the style of Ed Ruscha with an acute awareness of economic underpinnings.
Famously, Haacke’s refusal to withdraw the piece from his solo show at the Guggenheim Museum in 1971, led to the exhibition being cancelled. Haacke’s career has, of course, been undergirded by a heroic narrative of institutional neglect and censorship that con-tinues to nourish his credibility as a political artist: on another occasion, his Manet-PROJEKT ’74, which detailed the provenance of Manet’s Bunch of Asparagus (1880), was rejected by the Museum Ludwig in Cologne since it revealed the Nazi-era career of patron and Deutsche Bank chairman Hermann Josef Abs, who had given the painting
to the museum as a permanent loan.
By the end of the 1970s, Haacke’s work had become more aggressively political – albeit in a more allegorical way – and throughout the 1980s the artist required ever-larger spaces to acommodate his ‘factographic’ installations. In A Breed Apart (1978), Haacke reworked an advert for Jaguar cars by British Leyland to accuse the company of supporting South Africa’s apartheid regime by selling it police and military vehicles. In Ölgemälde, Hommage a Marcel Broodthaers (Painting in Oil, Homage to Marcel Broodthaers, 1982), shown at Documenta 7, Haacke hung a portrait painting of Ronald Reagan (executed by the artist), with its intended implications of stately respectability, opposite a large-scale image of a crowd protesting in Bonn against Regan’s lobbying for the deployment of American missiles in Germany.
To this day, Haacke has continued to scrutinize contemporary political issues – attacking com-panies like Philip Morris, Mobil Oil, Mercedes-Benz and Deutsche Bank among others – and thus the art world’s Achilles’ heel: its complete dependency on big money. As Benjamin Buchloh argues in the show’s catalogue, Haacke was never so naive as to expect change to be triggered by his practices, but simply kept asking the right questions in the right place and at the right time. Yet his taut moralism has increasingly tended to overstatement and there is unquestionably a paternalist impulse in the way Haacke often asks the questions and devises the answers in one go, rejecting the option of being more ambivalent, even unsure, about issues.
While ‘wirklich’ constituted a comprehensive archive of Haacke’s many projects, and confirmed his work’s central concerns with processes, site-specific interventions and the delegitimization of idealistic claims for art, the artist’s life-long rejection of the notions of ‘style’ and ‘personal expression’ was somewhat undermined by the very conditions of presentation. A lot of his ‘formalist’ works of the 1960s, for example, showed surprising stylistic consistencies to his better-known and seemingly more topical pieces from the following decades. The Perspex boxes of the 1960s resonate in his later picture boxes, the early kinetic works in recent proposals for monuments. Wide White Flow (1967), a machine piece in which a huge veil-like fabric gently flutters over constant streams of air, even managed to enliven the clunky solidity of newer works.
One of Haacke’s most intriguing pieces remains Seurat’s ‘Les Poseuses’ (small version) 1888-1975 (1975), in which he outlines the work’s changes in ownership along with some biographical data. Using only a few sheets of printed paper and some frames, the piece delivers a perfectly encapsulated history of art distribution and economic change from the late 19th until the late 20th century. The violence of an epoch is present between the lines, and for once it is really left to the viewer to fill in the gaps.
Manfred Hermes
Artists associated with institutional critique include Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, Mark Lombardi, Michael Asher, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, since the 60's, Antonio Muntadas, Fred Wilson, Renée Green, Andrea Fraser among others since the late 80's or more recently Matthieu Laurette, Graham Harwood, Carey Young, all of whom have typically taken a critical eye to the modern art museum and its role as a public and private institution. The Artout project, started in 2006 by Anton Koslov Mayr, critically investigates the relationship between artists and collectors.
ANARCHI-TECTURE
By the 1970s that state of mind had been tried, tested and expressively rejected by the inhabitants of the vandalised modernist housing projects Matta Clark captured in the photo-piece Window Blow-out (fig.16). Matta-Clark himself was more interested, as he put it in his notebooks, in converting a building into a state of mind. This involved liberating structures from the straightjacket of their maker’s intentions and recycling them as consciousness-altering artworks – ‘making sculpture’, as he wrote in a letter to the New York Department of Real Estate, ‘using the by-products of the land and the people’.
Haake's exhibition at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne was cancelled due to the inclusion by Haacke of the work "Manet '74" that connected the funding of the museum to the cultural politics of the Cold War. In 1993 Haacke shared, with Nam June Paik, the Golden Lion for the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Haacke's installation "Germania" made explicit reference to the Biennale's roots in the politics of fascist Italy.
Or more crudely Kendell Geers’ performance of throwing a brick through a Johannesburg gallery window, as a response to the systemic institutional violence of apartheid.
Marcel Broodthears ‘Pense bete’
Eduard Manet – Olympia
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Tn6PheSubWcC&pg=PA138&lpg=PA138&dq=manet+74,+Haacke&source=bl&ots=ytYELmnoj4&sig=j1NjAR2p9ZcELbzjW7jc0-NHcRs&hl=en&ei=l0vKS6HUFpf00gTGv4C_BA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CA0Q6AEwAjgK#v=onepage&q=manet%2074%2C%20Haacke&f=false
Daniel Buren
Hans Haacke
One of the criticisms of institutional critique is its complexity. As many have noted, it is a practice that often only advanced artists, theorists, historians, and critics can participate in. Due to its highly sophisticated understanding of modern art and society, as part of a privileged discourse like that of any other specialized form of knowledge, it can often leave layman viewers alienated and/or marginalized.
Another criticism is that it can be a misnomer, since it could be argued that institutional critique artists often work within the context of the very same institutions. Most institutional critique art, for instance, is displayed in museums and galleries, despite its critical stance towards them.
Institutional Critique and the internet
Net.art has been a heavy contributor to institutional critique. net.art interventions tackled the praxis of art business and digital culture institutions, from the perspective of curation. net.artists have actively participated in the debate over the definition of net.art within the context of the art market. net.art promoted the modernist idea of the work of art as a process, as opposed to a conception of art as object making. But the question of how this process should be presented and accessible within the art world, either sold in the art market, or shown in the institutional art environment, is problematic for digital works made for the web. The web, as marketable as it is, cannot be restricted to the ideological dimensions of the legitimate field of art, the institution of legitimation for art value, that is both ideological and economical. All for Sale by Aliona is an early net.art experiment whereby she claimed that because of the crashed art market and the end of social patronage, rather than work the traditional low-paid jobs out of work artists usually seek, she would sell her body in an artistic act of prostitution.
FRED WILSON
Wilson's unique artist approach is to examine, question, and deconstruct the traditional display of art and artefacts in museums. With the use of new wall labels, sounds, lighting, and non-traditional pairings of objects, he leads viewers to recognize that changes in context create changes in meaning. Wilson's juxtaposition of evocative objects forces the viewer to question the biases and limitations of cultural institutions and how they have shaped the interpretation of historical truth, artistic value, and the language of display.
For example, for his installation at the 2003 Venice Biennale he employed a tourist to pretend to be an African street vendor selling fake designer bags - in fact his own designs. He also incorporated "blackamoors", sculptures of black people in the role of servants, into the show. Such figures were often used as stands for lights. Wilson placed his wooden blackamoors carrying acetylene torches and fire extinguishers. He noted that such figures are so common in Venice that few people notice them, stating, "they are in hotels everywhere in Venice...which is great, because all of a sudden you see them everywhere. I wanted it to be visible, this whole world which sort of just blew up for me."
Wilson recontextualizes, deconstructs and re-presents the way in which historical institutions or art institutions present historical objects, in particular those of Non-Western origin or indigenous origins. Wilson works with collections that already exist within museums- African Art, Native American Art, Post-Modern Art, etc, etc. He describes the way in which he gains access to a museum (historical or art based) and has the ability to redisplay the cultural objects available to him. Obviously, museums know exactly what they are getting themselves into when they ask Fred Wilson to create an installation using their objects. However, Wilson states that it is not about disrespecting the institution, it is about looking and critically thinking about the meaning and representation of these objects that are interpreted by the museum to the public. This is problematic to how co-optation operates.
It is then not just about having the viewer reconsider notions of representation, race and colonialism. Fred Wilson works within the museum system and ‘becomes’ sublimated. He looks through the basements of museums, storage spaces, has conversations with the security guards, docents, curators and visitors and gains inspiration from it all to create his installations. His interest in existing museum collections is in its fascination with ‘black’ or otherness as some kind of ownership of identity. He challenges the viewer, invokes conversation and questions museumification by creating new connections between objects, and between selected objects and their locations. He described the way museums include all African objects in one plexi-glass vitrine. He asked the audience if the same would be done with say, Modernist Painting. Would they be exhibited on top of one another? Wilson then showed us an image of an installation of a collection he recontextualized using Westernized Paintings and Sculptures. A Giacommeti right next to a Picasso in front of a DeKooning and all on one platform, to exhibit them the same way African objects have been traditionally “showcased”. Through his practice, he has been able to challenge museums to critically think about the way they present the world to others and to become more creative about the way they do this. Wilson redefines notions of culture and power in ways that we need to reconsider, throws it back as the viewers in the ‘wrong place’ [ a difficult one of identifying with repressive norms, the cultural producers, the museums and the co-opted artists. He promises nothing, but challenges everything, including his own identity as a ‘western’ or American artists [representing USA]...
Hans Haacke
A presentation on some examples of the now historical concept of institutional critique, and inheritances.
How does an artist now work in the saturated field of art as it has come to accommodate everything, and vice versa? How does the 'everything' respond, if not 'critically'? Alex Keating will also be present to discuss the website. We will also be asking for the essays to be uploaded. A discussion will also begin about press releases, and their function in view of a critical or uncritical form of writing. Is the press release an obsoleted style of broadsheet or manifesto? Examples will be considered in view of writing a release for the launch of the website and a 'show' that will accompany it as an event. Ideas can be exchanged.
PROFILE: GUSTAVO ARTIGAS
Sally O’Reilly on conflict, spectacle and disaster
In Homo Ludens (1938) the psychologist Johan Huizinge proposed that games are not distinct from work, that they percolate through daily life. This, then, places us all in a great big arena in which a multitude of games are being played out, overlapping and interfering. In fact, politics, economies and cultures could be described as the outcome of negotiations between different rules of conduct, which is why they are contingent and never wholly satisfactory.
This might be one analogy drawn from Gustavo Artigas’s The Rules of the Game II (2000–1), an event which took place in the Tijuana neighbourhood of La Libertad, a crossing point for many illegal immigrants entering the United States, as part of ‘InSite 2000’. Two football teams and two basketball teams from local US and Mexican high schools were invited to play simultaneously on the same court, so not only did each team encounter the usual adversary, but each game was pitched against the other, vying for space. Previously, in The Rules of the Game I (2000–1), Artigas built a handball court with the wall on which the ball is bounced placed right on the Tijuana/San Diego border, creating a particularly tense ‘can we have our ball back please’ situation. Although these represented antagonistic conditions that could be analogous to many situations, this vicinity of a political and geographic boundary steep the piece in immigration issues – essentially the accommodation of the other.
This, however, would be a one-dimensional reading of Artigas’s concerns. In 2001 he was invited to take part in ‘The End of the Eclipse’, a show of Latin-American artists curated by Spanish philosopher José Jiminez at the Fundación Telefonica in Madrid. Artigas’s proposal was a conference at the opening on the subject of artistic identity evaluated from the viewpoint of national identity. Someone who looked and dressed like Artigas took the stand and began speaking on the subject of identity and multiple personality disorder. They then stood down and the speech was continued by another Artigas look-alike – there were five incarnations in all. Artigas talks about the event, DUPLEX, not in the socio-political terms that such a conference would normally dictate, but as an autonomous artwork:
‘The readings made from the work will be discussions on its elements, but my basic problem as an artist, above all else, is to make art...The commentary on the piece was, to say the least, ironic as to this type of classification concept, without ceasing to be a piece. It is curious to think of it as a series of portraits or as a possible multiple portrait.’
So instead of considering conflict as a subject matter, Artigas uses it as a medium in and of itself. He often creates a contestant out of an observer, confounds an expectation or sets up a perverse situation that seems almost heinous. In September he is staging the event Opening in Galeria O, Mexico City, where two gallery spaces are divided by a long wall. Ten American football players will be divided into two teams, one each side of the wall, and, egged on by cheerleaders, they will throw themselves at the wall until it is destroyed. This has obvious connotations of market competition, categorical separation, the desperation of the struggling artist and so on, but the dynamics of the players themselves will also have their own athletic aesthetics, and a savagery which will be beyond the artist’s control.
It seems important that Artigas works with the lexicon of leisure, often construed as a yardstick of wealth or class. There is a tradition of Mexican artists working in this way – Gabriel Orozco’s ping-pong table and Damián Ortega’s house constructed from tortillas, for instance. Yet what seems different here is Artigas’s reliance on participation in a real, contingent way, which is then translated into a mediated gallery presentation – action and evidence are never confused, but held separately as if two very distinct parts of a project.
In Geeta vs. Sage (2001) two female striptease artists were pitched against one another in a mud-wrestling match at the Roxy Rhythm Bar in Melville, Johannesburg. The final gallery presentation comprised a ceramic piece – made by firing the muddy fall-out of the wrestling – and the women’s embroidered robes, as well as photographs and video of the wrestling match. Again, the live context might provide a socio-political situation within which the piece ‘comments’, but there is an undoubtedly internal, formal logic too. Artigas considers the documentation as ‘a kind of second life of the idea’.
GUSTAVO ARTIGAS – rules of the game
NET-CRITICAL Incomplete Installation by Critical Art Ensemble in The Interventionists exhibition at MASS M oCA, June 2004: note that most of the work was already in the custody of the FBI. Incomplete Installation by Critical Art Ensemble in The Interventionists exhibition at MASS MoCA, June 2004: note that most of the work was already in the custody of the FBI.
Critical Art Ensemble were pioneers in using the infrastructures of the techno-social space and to use it in a critical capacity to draw attention to the suture of political power, corporate power and art industry and marketability. Writing can be freely pirated from their website http://www.critical-art.net/books/mp/
State intervention into the production and distribution of culture is as enduring as the history of nations is long. Think of Plato’s injunction against poets and painters in his ideal Republic or Stalin’s decree enforcing Socialist Realism in mid-1930s, as well as, of course, the House Un-American Activities Committee’s witch-hunting of Hollywood radicals in the 1950s. Modern bourgeois societies have evolved two seemingly contradictory modes of state control. One of these is the isolation and overt suppression of select individuals, groups or ideological positions allegedly carried out in defense of the freedom or morality of an alleged majority interest. This type of explicit control reappears cyclically in the United States, especially whenever government or big business is threatened by collective dissent emerging ‘from below’. Its most recent full-scale manifestation took place immediately after World War II when militant labour unions, communists, and other Left radicals, grown strong during the anti-fascist Popular Front years, were systematically eradicated through a combination of legal and extra- constitutional measures. Before it was over, thousands of men and women were investigated, lost their jobs and / or were blacklisted in the name of freedom and democracy. Many of these people worked in the culture industries and academia. While such overt repression is extremely effective in the short-run, the same establishment that unleashed it will eventually denounce tyranny as antithetical to the free society it claims to protect. So even as the hammer of law enforcement was descending on individual radicals and nonconformists, a subtler means for managing dissent was coming to fruition.
ARREST ? TERROR CHARGES
On the morning of 21 May, 2004, Steven Kurtz awoke to find his wife Hope lying unresponsive beside him. Kurtz immediately called paramedics. On arrival, the medical response team took notice of assorted laboratory equipment in the home, including Petri dishes, microscopes and test tubes. Nervously, local police alerted the FBI. The Joint Terrorism Task Force soon descended on the Kurtz home and in a scene reminiscent of the 1971 techno-thriller The Andromeda Strain agents wearing white Haz-Mat (Hazardous Materials) suits cordoned off the house, confiscated the body of Kurtz’s wife, and gathered a variety of materials for scientific analysis. They also impounded the artist’s passport, lesson plans, books, automobile, computers, and his cat.
By the next day the New York’s Commissioner of Public Health officially reported that nothing hazardous was discovered in the home and no danger to the public existed. Hope had died of a heart attack. Nonetheless, the house was under quarantine for six days during which time Kurtz was placed under surveillance for twentytwo hours. FBI agents did not arrest him, but put him up in a hotel, together with collaborator and family friend Claire Pentecost, who recently arrived from Chicago. The agency even purchased Kurtz dinner with the hopes of uncovering more information. At one point Pentecost was taken aside and asked if Kurtz had ever advocated the overthrow of the United States government.
Steve Kurtz
On the Mythology of Terrorism on the Net – some excerpts published on the Net
Herein lies a substantial clue as to why some people fear the disruption of cyberspace. While the organic body may not be in danger, the electronic body could be threatened. Should the electronic body be disrupted, immobilized, or (heaven forbid) deleted, one’s existence in the realm of the social could be drastically effected. One could become a social ghost, so to speak - seen and heard, but not recognized. The validation of one’s existence could disappear in the flick of a keystroke. Once a population has accepted the notion that representation justifies one’s being in the world, then simulacra begins to have direct material effects on the motivations and perceptions of people, allowing the security state and other keepers of information to exert maximum control over the general population. No doubt the erasure of social existence is a threat that strikes terror into people’s hearts. This is, in part, why I believe it has been so easy to deploy the sign of terrorism on the net. This is also why I believe I was accused of terrorism when I suggested using tactics of civil disobedience on the net. Once I moved CD out of the realm of the physical, where disruption is localized and avoidable, for those who accept their data body as their superior, I was suggesting their erasure as a consequence of political objection. What is frightening to me about this scenario is that electronic erasure is perceived as an equivalent to being killed in a bomb explosion. Now the perception exists that the absence of electronic recognition equals death.
With such considerations in mind, those who plan to continue the fight against authoritarianism, and in support of maximum individual autonomy, have two important projects to complete. First, organic being in the world must be re-established as the locus of reality, placing back the virtual in its proper place as simulacra. Only in such a situation can virtual environments serve a utopian function. If the virtual functions and is perceived as a superior form of being, it becomes a monstrous mechanism of control for the class that regulates access to it and mobility within it. The new calls for consolidation and fencing of the Internet are indicators that we are behind in this battle. Second, steps must be taken to separate political action in cyberspace from the signs of criminality and terrorism. The current state strategy seems to be to label anything as criminal that does not optimize the spread of pancapitalism and the enrichment of the elite. If we lose the right to protest in cyberspace in the age of information capital, we have lost the greater part of our individual sovereignty. We must demand more than the right to speak; we must demand the right to act in the ‘wired world’ on behalf of our own consciences and out of goodwill for all.
WHAT OUTSIDE?
WE WILL CONSIDER SPACES 'OUTSIDE' AND 'INSIDE' THE INSTITUTION. CAN YOU GET THE ART OUT OF THE MUSEUM OR THE MUSEUM OUT OF ART?
OPTIONS:
WORKING WITH CURATOR MICHELLE SPESSA AND DESIGNER ALEX KEATING TO HOLD AN EVENT AT TEMPLE WORKS AT A CERTAIN DATE TO BE DECIDED. DISCUSSION WITH GROUP AND VISIT TO TEMPLE WORKS.
PRINTING IMAGES AND TEXTS TO MAKE POSTERS FROM BLOGS - TO ASSEMBLE A HISTORICAL FIELD OF REFERENCES; TO SET THE 'STAGE' FOR AN INVITED PERFORMANCE. DISCUSSION WITH GROUP
WRITING PRESS RELEASE THAT PRESENTS A CRITICAL VIEW OF THE EVENT.
DEEP RIVER ARTISTS PROJECT SPACE, Los Angeles
FURTHER READING:
INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE AND AFTER, edited by John Welchman (jrp/ringer)
The danger to critical thinking is in assuming its ‘canon’ – especially so in the work of Institutional Critique. The critical itself must accommodate criticism. The canon does not resist its own commodification by the culture industry which utilises it. It is also better positioned to understand the industrial ‘real’ of the work of art and artists.
The key text will be Andrea Fraser’s “ From the Critique of Institutions to the Institution of Critique”, in which she writes of the necessary failure of an enterprise that purports to stand outside, when language itself is imbricated as layered, forming, and formed by, the institution. She is compelled to articulate the paradoxical nature of a construction as it suggests a critique of an institution that is itself one, of a ‘given’, institutional ‘nature’ - of the individual in neo-liberal society. Isabelle Graw also identifies a paradox in “Beyond Institutional Critique”. Contrary to expectation of disallowing ‘criticism’, institutions that would encourage works which conform to their new model of liberal flat hierarchy institutions, and could be easily accepted experiments with them are, like capital itself, absorbing antagonism to grow stronger. By opting for such contestation as research, teamwork, documentation, and their ‘transparency’, human ‘communication’ is turned to commodity, the whole endeavour to resist tuned to the advantage of the culture industry. Some do remain, however, outside such absorption, Fraser and Graw write of insisting on the critique of institutions while working on new more adequate redefinitions of the redundancy of its terms, reminding that co-optation has always been a fiction of standing on the outside.
It is believed that the critique of DeepRiver as an institution instigated the destruction and de-installation of the work, and that the "rising frustration" was largely due to the critique being made evident in written format via a handout.
AN EXAMPLE OF INSTITUTIONALLY CRITICAL ART AS PRESS RELEASE
Marcel Broodthears
Press Release
"I, too, wondered whether I could not sell something and succeed in life. For some time I had been no good at anything. I am forty years old... Finally the idea of inventing something insincere finally crossed my mind and I set to work straightaway. At the end of three months I showed what I had produced to Philippe Edouard Toussaint, the owner of the Galerie St Laurent. 'But it is art' he said 'and I will willingly exhibit all of it.' 'Agreed' I replied. If I sell something, he takes 30%. It seems these are the usual conditions, some galleries take 75%. What is it? In fact it is objects." Broodthaers, 1964
Institutional Critique
Institutional Critique is an art term that describes the systematic inquiry into the workings of art institutions, for instance galleries and museums, and is most associated with the work of artists such as Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Andrea Fraser, Fred Wilson and Hans Haacke.
In more technical terms, Institutional Critique is an artistic term meant as a commentary of the various institutions and assumed normalities of art and/or a radical disarticulation of the institution of art (radical is linguistically understood in its relation to radix which means to get to the root of something). For instance, assumptions about the supposed aesthetic autonomy or neutrality of painting and sculpture are often explored as a subject in the field of art, and are then historically and socially mapped out (i.e., ethnographically and or archaeologically) as discursive formations, then (re)framed within the context of the museum itself. As such, it seeks to make visible the historically and socially constructed boundaries between inside and outside, public and private. Institutional critique is often critical of how of the distinctions of taste are not separate from aesthetic judgement, and that taste is an institutionally cultivated sensibility.
Origin
Institutional critique is a practice that emerged out of the developments of Minimalism and its concerns with the phenomenology of the viewer, as well as formalist art criticism and art history (i.e., Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried), conceptual art and its concerns with language, processes, and administrative society, and appropriation art and its concerns with consumption and identity. Institutional critique is often site-specific, and perhaps could be linked to the advent of the "earthwork" by minimalist artists such as Robert Smithson and Walter De Maria. Institutional critique is also often associated with the developments of structuralist and post-structuralist philosophy, critical theory and literary theory.
HANS HAACKE
Since his poignant installation at the 1993 Venice Biennale, in which he smashed up the marble floor of the German pavilion as an aggressively fractured monument to his homeland, Hans Haacke has become a bankable designer of public memorials. Berlin is home to two of the artist’s larger and more recent such projects – Denkzeichen Rosa Luxemburg (Memorial Rosa Luxemburg, 2006) in the Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and Der Bevölkerung (For the People, 2000) at the Reichstag – so it seems appropriate that the city was recently co-host, with Hamburg, to the biggest exhibition of Haacke’s work to date. Though not officially a retrospective, the show, entitled ‘wirklich’ (real) – Works 1959–2006’, encompasses the full range of the artist’s oeuvre, from his photographs of the late 1950s, through his minimalist works of the 1960s developed after his early affiliation with the German artist group ZERO, to the politicized installations of the 1970s.
Haacke’s interest in closed physical systems, biological growth and random movements manifested itself in works such as Condensation Cube (1963–5), a moisture-filled Plexiglas con-tainer whose appearance altered constantly in relation to its environment. By the end of the 1960s, however, Haacke had shifted his focus to another type of autopoietic system, analysing it in political and sociological terms: the art world. In Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile (1969–70), for instance, Haacke inverted the mores of exhibitive logic and made the visitors to his shows the subject of his work, by quizzing them about aspects of their personal lives and then displaying the results. Shapolsky et al… (1971) took this approach further and presented the findings of Haacke’s research into the underhand business dealings of a New York real-estate company with strong ties to several art institutions, in a work that conflated stripped-down pictorial serialism in the style of Ed Ruscha with an acute awareness of economic underpinnings.
Famously, Haacke’s refusal to withdraw the piece from his solo show at the Guggenheim Museum in 1971, led to the exhibition being cancelled. Haacke’s career has, of course, been undergirded by a heroic narrative of institutional neglect and censorship that con-tinues to nourish his credibility as a political artist: on another occasion, his Manet-PROJEKT ’74, which detailed the provenance of Manet’s Bunch of Asparagus (1880), was rejected by the Museum Ludwig in Cologne since it revealed the Nazi-era career of patron and Deutsche Bank chairman Hermann Josef Abs, who had given the painting
to the museum as a permanent loan.
By the end of the 1970s, Haacke’s work had become more aggressively political – albeit in a more allegorical way – and throughout the 1980s the artist required ever-larger spaces to acommodate his ‘factographic’ installations. In A Breed Apart (1978), Haacke reworked an advert for Jaguar cars by British Leyland to accuse the company of supporting South Africa’s apartheid regime by selling it police and military vehicles. In Ölgemälde, Hommage a Marcel Broodthaers (Painting in Oil, Homage to Marcel Broodthaers, 1982), shown at Documenta 7, Haacke hung a portrait painting of Ronald Reagan (executed by the artist), with its intended implications of stately respectability, opposite a large-scale image of a crowd protesting in Bonn against Regan’s lobbying for the deployment of American missiles in Germany.
To this day, Haacke has continued to scrutinize contemporary political issues – attacking com-panies like Philip Morris, Mobil Oil, Mercedes-Benz and Deutsche Bank among others – and thus the art world’s Achilles’ heel: its complete dependency on big money. As Benjamin Buchloh argues in the show’s catalogue, Haacke was never so naive as to expect change to be triggered by his practices, but simply kept asking the right questions in the right place and at the right time. Yet his taut moralism has increasingly tended to overstatement and there is unquestionably a paternalist impulse in the way Haacke often asks the questions and devises the answers in one go, rejecting the option of being more ambivalent, even unsure, about issues.
While ‘wirklich’ constituted a comprehensive archive of Haacke’s many projects, and confirmed his work’s central concerns with processes, site-specific interventions and the delegitimization of idealistic claims for art, the artist’s life-long rejection of the notions of ‘style’ and ‘personal expression’ was somewhat undermined by the very conditions of presentation. A lot of his ‘formalist’ works of the 1960s, for example, showed surprising stylistic consistencies to his better-known and seemingly more topical pieces from the following decades. The Perspex boxes of the 1960s resonate in his later picture boxes, the early kinetic works in recent proposals for monuments. Wide White Flow (1967), a machine piece in which a huge veil-like fabric gently flutters over constant streams of air, even managed to enliven the clunky solidity of newer works.
One of Haacke’s most intriguing pieces remains Seurat’s ‘Les Poseuses’ (small version) 1888-1975 (1975), in which he outlines the work’s changes in ownership along with some biographical data. Using only a few sheets of printed paper and some frames, the piece delivers a perfectly encapsulated history of art distribution and economic change from the late 19th until the late 20th century. The violence of an epoch is present between the lines, and for once it is really left to the viewer to fill in the gaps.
Manfred Hermes
Artists associated with institutional critique include Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, Mark Lombardi, Michael Asher, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, since the 60's, Antonio Muntadas, Fred Wilson, Renée Green, Andrea Fraser among others since the late 80's or more recently Matthieu Laurette, Graham Harwood, Carey Young, all of whom have typically taken a critical eye to the modern art museum and its role as a public and private institution. The Artout project, started in 2006 by Anton Koslov Mayr, critically investigates the relationship between artists and collectors.
ANARCHI-TECTURE
By the 1970s that state of mind had been tried, tested and expressively rejected by the inhabitants of the vandalised modernist housing projects Matta Clark captured in the photo-piece Window Blow-out (fig.16). Matta-Clark himself was more interested, as he put it in his notebooks, in converting a building into a state of mind. This involved liberating structures from the straightjacket of their maker’s intentions and recycling them as consciousness-altering artworks – ‘making sculpture’, as he wrote in a letter to the New York Department of Real Estate, ‘using the by-products of the land and the people’.
Haake's exhibition at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne was cancelled due to the inclusion by Haacke of the work "Manet '74" that connected the funding of the museum to the cultural politics of the Cold War. In 1993 Haacke shared, with Nam June Paik, the Golden Lion for the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Haacke's installation "Germania" made explicit reference to the Biennale's roots in the politics of fascist Italy.
Or more crudely Kendell Geers’ performance of throwing a brick through a Johannesburg gallery window, as a response to the systemic institutional violence of apartheid.
Marcel Broodthears ‘Pense bete’
Eduard Manet – Olympia
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Tn6PheSubWcC&pg=PA138&lpg=PA138&dq=manet+74,+Haacke&source=bl&ots=ytYELmnoj4&sig=j1NjAR2p9ZcELbzjW7jc0-NHcRs&hl=en&ei=l0vKS6HUFpf00gTGv4C_BA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CA0Q6AEwAjgK#v=onepage&q=manet%2074%2C%20Haacke&f=false
Daniel Buren
Hans Haacke
One of the criticisms of institutional critique is its complexity. As many have noted, it is a practice that often only advanced artists, theorists, historians, and critics can participate in. Due to its highly sophisticated understanding of modern art and society, as part of a privileged discourse like that of any other specialized form of knowledge, it can often leave layman viewers alienated and/or marginalized.
Another criticism is that it can be a misnomer, since it could be argued that institutional critique artists often work within the context of the very same institutions. Most institutional critique art, for instance, is displayed in museums and galleries, despite its critical stance towards them.
Institutional Critique and the internet
Net.art has been a heavy contributor to institutional critique. net.art interventions tackled the praxis of art business and digital culture institutions, from the perspective of curation. net.artists have actively participated in the debate over the definition of net.art within the context of the art market. net.art promoted the modernist idea of the work of art as a process, as opposed to a conception of art as object making. But the question of how this process should be presented and accessible within the art world, either sold in the art market, or shown in the institutional art environment, is problematic for digital works made for the web. The web, as marketable as it is, cannot be restricted to the ideological dimensions of the legitimate field of art, the institution of legitimation for art value, that is both ideological and economical. All for Sale by Aliona is an early net.art experiment whereby she claimed that because of the crashed art market and the end of social patronage, rather than work the traditional low-paid jobs out of work artists usually seek, she would sell her body in an artistic act of prostitution.
FRED WILSON
Wilson's unique artist approach is to examine, question, and deconstruct the traditional display of art and artefacts in museums. With the use of new wall labels, sounds, lighting, and non-traditional pairings of objects, he leads viewers to recognize that changes in context create changes in meaning. Wilson's juxtaposition of evocative objects forces the viewer to question the biases and limitations of cultural institutions and how they have shaped the interpretation of historical truth, artistic value, and the language of display.
For example, for his installation at the 2003 Venice Biennale he employed a tourist to pretend to be an African street vendor selling fake designer bags - in fact his own designs. He also incorporated "blackamoors", sculptures of black people in the role of servants, into the show. Such figures were often used as stands for lights. Wilson placed his wooden blackamoors carrying acetylene torches and fire extinguishers. He noted that such figures are so common in Venice that few people notice them, stating, "they are in hotels everywhere in Venice...which is great, because all of a sudden you see them everywhere. I wanted it to be visible, this whole world which sort of just blew up for me."
Wilson recontextualizes, deconstructs and re-presents the way in which historical institutions or art institutions present historical objects, in particular those of Non-Western origin or indigenous origins. Wilson works with collections that already exist within museums- African Art, Native American Art, Post-Modern Art, etc, etc. He describes the way in which he gains access to a museum (historical or art based) and has the ability to redisplay the cultural objects available to him. Obviously, museums know exactly what they are getting themselves into when they ask Fred Wilson to create an installation using their objects. However, Wilson states that it is not about disrespecting the institution, it is about looking and critically thinking about the meaning and representation of these objects that are interpreted by the museum to the public. This is problematic to how co-optation operates.
It is then not just about having the viewer reconsider notions of representation, race and colonialism. Fred Wilson works within the museum system and ‘becomes’ sublimated. He looks through the basements of museums, storage spaces, has conversations with the security guards, docents, curators and visitors and gains inspiration from it all to create his installations. His interest in existing museum collections is in its fascination with ‘black’ or otherness as some kind of ownership of identity. He challenges the viewer, invokes conversation and questions museumification by creating new connections between objects, and between selected objects and their locations. He described the way museums include all African objects in one plexi-glass vitrine. He asked the audience if the same would be done with say, Modernist Painting. Would they be exhibited on top of one another? Wilson then showed us an image of an installation of a collection he recontextualized using Westernized Paintings and Sculptures. A Giacommeti right next to a Picasso in front of a DeKooning and all on one platform, to exhibit them the same way African objects have been traditionally “showcased”. Through his practice, he has been able to challenge museums to critically think about the way they present the world to others and to become more creative about the way they do this. Wilson redefines notions of culture and power in ways that we need to reconsider, throws it back as the viewers in the ‘wrong place’ [ a difficult one of identifying with repressive norms, the cultural producers, the museums and the co-opted artists. He promises nothing, but challenges everything, including his own identity as a ‘western’ or American artists [representing USA]...
Hans Haacke
A presentation on some examples of the now historical concept of institutional critique, and inheritances.
How does an artist now work in the saturated field of art as it has come to accommodate everything, and vice versa? How does the 'everything' respond, if not 'critically'? Alex Keating will also be present to discuss the website. We will also be asking for the essays to be uploaded. A discussion will also begin about press releases, and their function in view of a critical or uncritical form of writing. Is the press release an obsoleted style of broadsheet or manifesto? Examples will be considered in view of writing a release for the launch of the website and a 'show' that will accompany it as an event. Ideas can be exchanged.
PROFILE: GUSTAVO ARTIGAS
Sally O’Reilly on conflict, spectacle and disaster
In Homo Ludens (1938) the psychologist Johan Huizinge proposed that games are not distinct from work, that they percolate through daily life. This, then, places us all in a great big arena in which a multitude of games are being played out, overlapping and interfering. In fact, politics, economies and cultures could be described as the outcome of negotiations between different rules of conduct, which is why they are contingent and never wholly satisfactory.
This might be one analogy drawn from Gustavo Artigas’s The Rules of the Game II (2000–1), an event which took place in the Tijuana neighbourhood of La Libertad, a crossing point for many illegal immigrants entering the United States, as part of ‘InSite 2000’. Two football teams and two basketball teams from local US and Mexican high schools were invited to play simultaneously on the same court, so not only did each team encounter the usual adversary, but each game was pitched against the other, vying for space. Previously, in The Rules of the Game I (2000–1), Artigas built a handball court with the wall on which the ball is bounced placed right on the Tijuana/San Diego border, creating a particularly tense ‘can we have our ball back please’ situation. Although these represented antagonistic conditions that could be analogous to many situations, this vicinity of a political and geographic boundary steep the piece in immigration issues – essentially the accommodation of the other.
This, however, would be a one-dimensional reading of Artigas’s concerns. In 2001 he was invited to take part in ‘The End of the Eclipse’, a show of Latin-American artists curated by Spanish philosopher José Jiminez at the Fundación Telefonica in Madrid. Artigas’s proposal was a conference at the opening on the subject of artistic identity evaluated from the viewpoint of national identity. Someone who looked and dressed like Artigas took the stand and began speaking on the subject of identity and multiple personality disorder. They then stood down and the speech was continued by another Artigas look-alike – there were five incarnations in all. Artigas talks about the event, DUPLEX, not in the socio-political terms that such a conference would normally dictate, but as an autonomous artwork:
‘The readings made from the work will be discussions on its elements, but my basic problem as an artist, above all else, is to make art...The commentary on the piece was, to say the least, ironic as to this type of classification concept, without ceasing to be a piece. It is curious to think of it as a series of portraits or as a possible multiple portrait.’
So instead of considering conflict as a subject matter, Artigas uses it as a medium in and of itself. He often creates a contestant out of an observer, confounds an expectation or sets up a perverse situation that seems almost heinous. In September he is staging the event Opening in Galeria O, Mexico City, where two gallery spaces are divided by a long wall. Ten American football players will be divided into two teams, one each side of the wall, and, egged on by cheerleaders, they will throw themselves at the wall until it is destroyed. This has obvious connotations of market competition, categorical separation, the desperation of the struggling artist and so on, but the dynamics of the players themselves will also have their own athletic aesthetics, and a savagery which will be beyond the artist’s control.
It seems important that Artigas works with the lexicon of leisure, often construed as a yardstick of wealth or class. There is a tradition of Mexican artists working in this way – Gabriel Orozco’s ping-pong table and Damián Ortega’s house constructed from tortillas, for instance. Yet what seems different here is Artigas’s reliance on participation in a real, contingent way, which is then translated into a mediated gallery presentation – action and evidence are never confused, but held separately as if two very distinct parts of a project.
In Geeta vs. Sage (2001) two female striptease artists were pitched against one another in a mud-wrestling match at the Roxy Rhythm Bar in Melville, Johannesburg. The final gallery presentation comprised a ceramic piece – made by firing the muddy fall-out of the wrestling – and the women’s embroidered robes, as well as photographs and video of the wrestling match. Again, the live context might provide a socio-political situation within which the piece ‘comments’, but there is an undoubtedly internal, formal logic too. Artigas considers the documentation as ‘a kind of second life of the idea’.
GUSTAVO ARTIGAS – rules of the game
NET-CRITICAL Incomplete Installation by Critical Art Ensemble in The Interventionists exhibition at MASS M oCA, June 2004: note that most of the work was already in the custody of the FBI. Incomplete Installation by Critical Art Ensemble in The Interventionists exhibition at MASS MoCA, June 2004: note that most of the work was already in the custody of the FBI.
Critical Art Ensemble were pioneers in using the infrastructures of the techno-social space and to use it in a critical capacity to draw attention to the suture of political power, corporate power and art industry and marketability. Writing can be freely pirated from their website http://www.critical-art.net/books/mp/
State intervention into the production and distribution of culture is as enduring as the history of nations is long. Think of Plato’s injunction against poets and painters in his ideal Republic or Stalin’s decree enforcing Socialist Realism in mid-1930s, as well as, of course, the House Un-American Activities Committee’s witch-hunting of Hollywood radicals in the 1950s. Modern bourgeois societies have evolved two seemingly contradictory modes of state control. One of these is the isolation and overt suppression of select individuals, groups or ideological positions allegedly carried out in defense of the freedom or morality of an alleged majority interest. This type of explicit control reappears cyclically in the United States, especially whenever government or big business is threatened by collective dissent emerging ‘from below’. Its most recent full-scale manifestation took place immediately after World War II when militant labour unions, communists, and other Left radicals, grown strong during the anti-fascist Popular Front years, were systematically eradicated through a combination of legal and extra- constitutional measures. Before it was over, thousands of men and women were investigated, lost their jobs and / or were blacklisted in the name of freedom and democracy. Many of these people worked in the culture industries and academia. While such overt repression is extremely effective in the short-run, the same establishment that unleashed it will eventually denounce tyranny as antithetical to the free society it claims to protect. So even as the hammer of law enforcement was descending on individual radicals and nonconformists, a subtler means for managing dissent was coming to fruition.
ARREST ? TERROR CHARGES
On the morning of 21 May, 2004, Steven Kurtz awoke to find his wife Hope lying unresponsive beside him. Kurtz immediately called paramedics. On arrival, the medical response team took notice of assorted laboratory equipment in the home, including Petri dishes, microscopes and test tubes. Nervously, local police alerted the FBI. The Joint Terrorism Task Force soon descended on the Kurtz home and in a scene reminiscent of the 1971 techno-thriller The Andromeda Strain agents wearing white Haz-Mat (Hazardous Materials) suits cordoned off the house, confiscated the body of Kurtz’s wife, and gathered a variety of materials for scientific analysis. They also impounded the artist’s passport, lesson plans, books, automobile, computers, and his cat.
By the next day the New York’s Commissioner of Public Health officially reported that nothing hazardous was discovered in the home and no danger to the public existed. Hope had died of a heart attack. Nonetheless, the house was under quarantine for six days during which time Kurtz was placed under surveillance for twentytwo hours. FBI agents did not arrest him, but put him up in a hotel, together with collaborator and family friend Claire Pentecost, who recently arrived from Chicago. The agency even purchased Kurtz dinner with the hopes of uncovering more information. At one point Pentecost was taken aside and asked if Kurtz had ever advocated the overthrow of the United States government.
Steve Kurtz
On the Mythology of Terrorism on the Net – some excerpts published on the Net
Herein lies a substantial clue as to why some people fear the disruption of cyberspace. While the organic body may not be in danger, the electronic body could be threatened. Should the electronic body be disrupted, immobilized, or (heaven forbid) deleted, one’s existence in the realm of the social could be drastically effected. One could become a social ghost, so to speak - seen and heard, but not recognized. The validation of one’s existence could disappear in the flick of a keystroke. Once a population has accepted the notion that representation justifies one’s being in the world, then simulacra begins to have direct material effects on the motivations and perceptions of people, allowing the security state and other keepers of information to exert maximum control over the general population. No doubt the erasure of social existence is a threat that strikes terror into people’s hearts. This is, in part, why I believe it has been so easy to deploy the sign of terrorism on the net. This is also why I believe I was accused of terrorism when I suggested using tactics of civil disobedience on the net. Once I moved CD out of the realm of the physical, where disruption is localized and avoidable, for those who accept their data body as their superior, I was suggesting their erasure as a consequence of political objection. What is frightening to me about this scenario is that electronic erasure is perceived as an equivalent to being killed in a bomb explosion. Now the perception exists that the absence of electronic recognition equals death.
With such considerations in mind, those who plan to continue the fight against authoritarianism, and in support of maximum individual autonomy, have two important projects to complete. First, organic being in the world must be re-established as the locus of reality, placing back the virtual in its proper place as simulacra. Only in such a situation can virtual environments serve a utopian function. If the virtual functions and is perceived as a superior form of being, it becomes a monstrous mechanism of control for the class that regulates access to it and mobility within it. The new calls for consolidation and fencing of the Internet are indicators that we are behind in this battle. Second, steps must be taken to separate political action in cyberspace from the signs of criminality and terrorism. The current state strategy seems to be to label anything as criminal that does not optimize the spread of pancapitalism and the enrichment of the elite. If we lose the right to protest in cyberspace in the age of information capital, we have lost the greater part of our individual sovereignty. We must demand more than the right to speak; we must demand the right to act in the ‘wired world’ on behalf of our own consciences and out of goodwill for all.
Sunday, 18 April 2010
Saturday, 17 April 2010
IS THERE THE "OUTSIDE" ?
WE WILL CONSIDER SPACES 'OUTSIDE' AND 'INSIDE' THE INSTITUTION. CAN YOU GET THE ART OUT OF THE MUSEUM OR THE MUSEUM OUT OF ART?
OPTIONS:
WORKING WITH CURATOR MICHELLE SPESSA AND DESIGNER ALEX KEATING TO HOLD AN EVENT AT TEMPLE WORKS AT A CERTAIN DATE TO BE DECIDED. DISCUSSIONS WITH GROUP AND VISIT TO TEMPLE WORKS.
PRINTING IMAGES AND TEXTS TO MAKE POSTERS FROM BLOGS - TO ASSEMBLE A HISTORICAL FIELD OF REFERENCES; TO SET THE 'STAGE' FOR AN INVITED PERFORMANCE. DISCUSSION WITH GROUP
WRITING PRESS RELEASE THAT PRESENTS A CRITICAL VIEW OF THE EVENT.
OPTIONS:
WORKING WITH CURATOR MICHELLE SPESSA AND DESIGNER ALEX KEATING TO HOLD AN EVENT AT TEMPLE WORKS AT A CERTAIN DATE TO BE DECIDED. DISCUSSIONS WITH GROUP AND VISIT TO TEMPLE WORKS.
PRINTING IMAGES AND TEXTS TO MAKE POSTERS FROM BLOGS - TO ASSEMBLE A HISTORICAL FIELD OF REFERENCES; TO SET THE 'STAGE' FOR AN INVITED PERFORMANCE. DISCUSSION WITH GROUP
WRITING PRESS RELEASE THAT PRESENTS A CRITICAL VIEW OF THE EVENT.
Friday, 16 April 2010
Broodthears press release
"I, too, wondered whether I could not sell something and succeed in life. For some time I had been no good at anything. I am forty years old... Finally the idea of inventing something insincere finally crossed my mind and I set to work straightaway. At the end of three months I showed what I had produced to Philippe Edouard Toussaint, the owner of the Galerie St Laurent. 'But it is art' he said 'and I will willingly exhibit all of it.' 'Agreed' I replied. If I sell something, he takes 30%. It seems these are the usual conditions, some galleries take 75%. What is it? In fact it is objects." Broodthaers, 1964
INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE
Institutional Critique
Institutional Critique is an art term that describes the systematic inquiry into the workings of art institutions, for instance galleries and museums, and is most associated with the work of artists such as Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Andrea Fraser, Fred Wilson and Hans Haacke.
In more technical terms, Institutional Critique is an artistic term meant as a commentary of the various institutions and assumed normalities of art and/or a radical disarticulation of the institution of art (radical is linguistically understood in its relation to radix which means to get to the root of something). For instance, assumptions about the supposed aesthetic autonomy or neutrality of painting and sculpture are often explored as a subject in the field of art, and are then historically and socially mapped out (i.e., ethnographically and or archaeologically) as discursive formations, then (re)framed within the context of the museum itself. As such, it seeks to make visible the historically and socially constructed boundaries between inside and outside, public and private. Institutional critique is often critical of how of the distinctions of taste are not separate from aesthetic judgement, and that taste is an institutionally cultivated sensibility.
Origin
Institutional critique is a practice that emerged out of the developments of Minimalism and its concerns with the phenomenology of the viewer, as well as formalist art criticism and art history (i.e., Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried), conceptual art and its concerns with language, processes, and administrative society, and appropriation art and its concerns with consumption and identity. Institutional critique is often site-specific, and perhaps could be linked to the advent of the "earthwork" by minimalist artists such as Robert Smithson and Walter De Maria. Institutional critique is also often associated with the developments of structuralist and post-structuralist philosophy, critical theory and literary theory.
Artists
Artists associated with institutional critique include Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, Mark Lombardi, Michael Asher, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, since the 60's, Antonio Muntadas, Fred Wilson, Renée Green, Andrea Fraser among others since the late 80's or more recently Matthieu Laurette, Graham Harwood, Carey Young, all of whom have typically taken a critical eye to the modern art museum and its role as a public and private institution. The Artout project, started in 2006 by Anton Koslov Mayr, critically investigates the relationship between artists and collectors.
Haake's exhibition at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne was cancelled due to the inclusion by Haacke of the work "Manet '74" that connected the funding of the museum to the cultural politics of the Cold War. In 1993 Haacke shared, with Nam June Paik, the Golden Lion for the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Haacke's installation "Germania" made explicit reference to the Biennale's roots in the politics of fascist Italy.
Criticisms
One of the criticisms of institutional critique is its complexity. As many have noted, it is a practice that often only advanced artists, theorists, historians, and critics can participate in. Due to its highly sophisticated understanding of modern art and society, as part of a privileged discourse like that of any other specialized form of knowledge, it can often leave layman viewers alienated and/or marginalized.
Another criticism is that it can be a misnomer, since it could be argued that institutional critique artists often work within the context of the very same institutions. Most institutional critique art, for instance, is displayed in museums and galleries, despite its critical stance towards them.
Institutional Critique and the internet
Net.art has been a heavy contributor to institutional critique. net.art interventions tackled the praxis of art business and digital culture institutions, from the perspective of curation. net.artists have actively participated in the debate over the definition of net.art within the context of the art market. net.art promoted the modernist idea of the work of art as a process, as opposed to a conception of art as object making. But the question of how this process should be presented and accessible within the art world, either sold in the art market, or shown in the institutional art environment, is problematic for digital works made for the web. The web, as marketable as it is, cannot be restricted to the ideological dimensions of the legitimate field of art, the institution of legitimation for art value, that is both ideological and economical. All for Sale by Aliona is an early net.art experiment whereby she claimed that because of the crashed art market and the end of social patronage, rather than work the traditional low-paid jobs out of work artists usually seek, she would sell her body in an artistic act of prostitution.
Thursday, 15 April 2010
NEXT SESSION: INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE AND ITS NET DISCONTENTS
Tuesday - A presentation on some examples of institutional critique, and inheritances. How does an artist now work in the saturated field of art as it has come to accommodate everything, and vice versa? How does the 'everything' respond, if not 'critically'? Alex Keating will also be present to discuss the website. We will also be asking for the essays to be uploaded. A discussion will also begin about press releases, and their function in view of a critical or uncritical form of writing. Is the press release an obsoleted style of broadsheet or manifesto? Examples will be considered in view of writing a release for the launch of the website and a 'show' that will accompany it as an event. Ideas can be exchanged.
Tuesday, 6 April 2010
BLOGS
I have responded to each blog with a comment - you may have to look in the archive of your posts
Friday, 2 April 2010
CURATING DEBATE: THE DIRTY COLLECTIVE / PETER LEWIS
This was held on axis web with students from this curating module
Welcome to this, our first live debate in the Dialogue Journal debating chambers. Taking the format of the collegiate debating competition, the discussion will unfold from a set house motion, with arguments 'for' and 'against'.
Our guest in-house debating team for 'The Curating Issue' are The Dirty Collective. Having written the house motion, they've now had to split themselves into opposing teams to make their supporting and opposing arguments. Along with guest contributor Peter Lewis they will initiate and maintain the discussion.
We invite you to join us in the debate; whether you are 'for' or 'against', we want to hear what you have to say - but keep it clean!
The debate is open from 23rd June to 7th July.
Our guest in-house debating team for 'The Curating Issue' are The Dirty Collective. Having written the house motion, they've now had to split themselves into opposing teams to make their supporting and opposing arguments. Along with guest contributor Peter Lewis they will initiate and maintain the discussion.
We invite you to join us in the debate; whether you are 'for' or 'against', we want to hear what you have to say - but keep it clean!
The debate is open from 23rd June to 7th July.
'Exhibitions in Alternative-Non-White-Non-Gallery spaces negatively affect interpretations a spectator is encouraged to think about, since they often speak for and over individual works'
Have your say below...
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| FOR In distinction to non-white spaces, the White Cube is not a literal translation for a white-painted space, but that associated with the institution, the prestigious contemporary art venue, or the National Gallery, which, though the walls are in fact crimson red, is of the same character. Abbreviating the term to 'WC', White-Cube then designates the 'water-closet', or toilet, a place to dump waste, but the things which occupy them are anything but below the waist/waste. The clean, pure lines and aerial lighting of the gallery place great emphasis on each individual works' aesthetic values and draw comparative analysis within a language which is not necessarily elitist, but prioritises formalist interpretations without consideration of its social, historical and cultural context. As works of incredible bourgeois and economic value are displayed, beyond the average salary of the general population, any possible interpretation might similarly be felt to be inadequate, thereby jeopardising the viewer's confidence in engaging the work. People do not conceive of 'spaces'. Spaces are characterised by a specific sociality; you arrive at 'home', 'work', or 'the park'. When exhibiting in an alternative space, such as a radical social centre, a different set of interpretations can be arrived at. This also brings to light particular elements of the work that might be obscured by traditional notions of aesthetic value, neutrality and purity and further articulate a rich, white-male, Western history of art. Curators are responsible for making history as much as an artist, and in using a lived territory puts to work the idea that we are all equally capable of inventing our own translations. These new forms might serve to transform the people using them, in turn placing value on process and symbolic analysis in art production, and bring to attention the extent to which curatorial practice is a methodology of control and propaganda. | | AGAINST Exhibitions outside of the White Cube preserve traditional ideological tendencies and rarely truly liberate the spectator, in the end, coercively manipulating him/her with a façade of being for 'real' people. A judgement on aesthetic value can not occur in alternative venues. In a messy, dirty or perhaps any alternative venue, the division between the artist's work and the socio-political context effectively becomes muddled and obscured; this affects perception of its formal characteristics, but also can be an excuse for bad art. Since the artist's work is subservient to the demands of this mediator figure, a nice market niche has been carved out for the superstar curator. This could herald a time when the artist is employed as a service provider, for educational institution, gallery, local council, or corporation to serve their political needs and motivations. Certainly in Britain, public art, like the Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, are, perhaps unknowingly, used as a quick and easy remedy to cancerous and malignant social problems. The institution as a White Cube serves as a centralised location, an institution forming local identity in which one can celebrate many different types of community. It is exactly this space because it is a holy ground; it serves a ritualistic function, as a safe haven and communal gathering space. Such spaces may host inspirational works of the highest international quality; there is a market demand for art of this kind. Naturally tourism increases and serves to line the pockets of local people too. This is a global market, and unless it is played in this way the city falls off the map, so does civic pride and self-esteem. Finally, White Cubes naturally change as culture is willing to accept it, often in open debate and discussion amongst experts and pillars of local community, rather than through coercive force. |
Have your say below...
This forum is now archived
The White Cube carries the same depressingly familiar aura, of an unassailable or transcendental authority, and derives from earlier aristocratic regimes of taste and aesthetics, or we might say, that presents itself as ‘democratic’, as postmodern fragment, or as a-historical model forcing through an ‘absolute value’. This reduces art’s necessary plurality guaranteed by the gallery system’s claim of neutrality, isolating any ‘infection’ of the real. This is a disaster by any definition, since it mediates the production of artistic gestures into a single ingenious system of ‘ethical’ values, fragmented onto egoistic or ethnic particularities, as a vague infinite of personal freedoms, whilst quietly endorsing the aestheticisation of the political. We are therefore obliged to seek a space of suspension from these motives, in the artistic gestures of refusal.
(continued) Yet alternative attempts as gestures are not able to act as witness, nor can be accessible within a system that seeks to restore security by vetting works. The other, unredeemed, unknown, unacceptable, resides beyond the destructive logic of ressentiment. Does the White Cube not in fact make attempts to reassert its autonomy with allegiance to the practice of ‘ the specific and contingent’ (Gillick) as the facilitation of art’s true activity carried beyond its traditional autonomy? For example by promoting individuals who might be seen to challenge, yet in fact perpetuate obsolete forms (retrospective progressivism) branded historically, as 'conceptual art', (Ryan Gander, Frieze, cover) or 'institutional critique', (Simon Martin, Tate Britain, Lightbox) or 'identity politics', (Steve McQueen, Queen and Country, Barbican) or 'social practice' (Liam Gillick, Venice Biennale).
Posted by
Mark Whiteman
Mark Whiteman
The 'retrospective progressivism' Peter speaks of is particularly insightful, reframing a historical context for Liam Gillick's work, for example, that perhaps younger artists are ignorant of. Work such as Liam Gillick's Utopia Station, and what is characterised as a positive move to generating models of sociality rather than a banal critique of capitalism, receives the sanction of the White Cube, which believes it to be a reassertion of its autonomy and neutrality in being 'contingent and specific'. Perhaps someone could suggest artists or curators that buck this trend?
In fact I was criticising Liam Gillick and the others - well indirectly - as 'rhetorical' artists, who cleverly manipulate other's production into their own social positioning - something Michel Serres notes in 'Parasite' that the producer always loses, and the parasite always wins - since the postmodern surfing of signs of meaning reduces all to a playable relativism. I think that I agree with Alain Badiou when he writes of the witness to a 'second restoration' a period that has lost the passion for the real, and that covers politics with 'ethics' or post-politics, allowing a host of crimes the 'whitewash'...I am trying to say that the white cube has incorporated its antagonisms within a seamless movement so that all criticism is hollow, as if obsolete. This may be the situation but it leaves a bitter taste. If artists must now work within the market so completely, there is cause to find a way of refusing or subverting, disordering these internal mechanisms.
There is no lack of galleries, ironically, in fact it seems a problem really is of excess. [ e.g. Berlin is over-saturated with both 'artists' and 'galleries'. Too many egoistic dealers, managers, curators and too few artists who are producing anything other than recycled 'aesthetic' obolescence. I think that it's again a question of 'ressentiment' if one is blaming the 'white cube' as if one can't run a gallery or curate shows oneself - as so many independent artists' groups have throughout history, [ e.g. Dan Graham, Don Judd] or found ways of presenting work with or without funds. Scratch video, transgressive cinema and interventions in the street and internet swarming add to the availability of resources of ideas and platforms that adjust the 'unfairness'. Risk needed, or changing an attitude to singularity.
Posted by
ael
ael
Posted by
Mark Whiteman
Mark Whiteman
Exhibit Exhibit Exhibit! As a student of Fine Art, there is continuous pressure to be exhibiting, to the point where it becomes intrinsic to the course, and often devoid of critical application. Anybody can put a show on; its not difficult to negotiate the use of a bedroom, abandoned church, or the local dilapidated museum, and effective networking can secure white gallery space. Critical application to how these places are used is an imperative, as it can be boring to see one after the other. And yes, is it easier to measure production, aesthetic, values of one art work against another in a white cube space? Or a failure of the institution to encourage real debate, to question the ethical grounds on which it stands....
Posted by
Mark Whiteman
Mark Whiteman
...[continued] But where does risk begin? We are reminded this is the age of 'post-production'; cultural forms are regurgitated, reproduced, reframed, and rehacked. There is no such thing as originality, or, as recent exhibitions and writings indicate, and having abandoned any hope of change, are we seeing the author return? So how can you create a space in which to react against something that is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent? Or maybe that's not the question to be asking.
The artwork is a question for sure of its status as an object and of the subject, a 'commodity' of a special kind, the Self. To quote Isabelle Graw in Artforum, April issue on markets. It is considered unique, and is 'split between its assumed symbolic value and its market value'. This is here a kind of a self-evident observation, not entirely transparent, as Graw herself is a mover in-between. What has a price is paradoxically priceless [ this is the role of the gallery and museum/crtical journal afterall] - art is Art with a capital A- philosophy sutures onto sociality to produce desire from ideals fabricated in centuries past. Is there more meaning then than a handbag by Louis Vuitton? not everybody is an artist, the 'multitude' thinking of Negri and Virno is the mask of the ideal of a 'general intelligence' that doen't really exist- that the claim that 'everybody is an artist' belongs to the era of idealisms, the 60s.
Posted by
andy nizinskyj
andy nizinskyj
Whilst the forum appears to be focused upon the debate regarding preferences towards or against a whitecube setting, at this present moment it is not something that concerns me (I will be discussing this Saturday-Monday during my moderation of the forum), but I would like to introduce an alternative view of the space. Duncan and Wallach’s whitecube critique of the MOMA NY as a ritualistic labyrinth, sporting the architectural embodiments of corporate capitalism creating blank and impersonal experiences, and acting as a tool to implement the ideologies of the middle class white male. In regards to this why not consider the whitecube as a signifying mirror of post modernity?
Posted by
andy nizinskyj
andy nizinskyj
(Continued) If art production is becoming dependent on the market the whitecube appears to be an ideal arena to depict this business based demand for art, after all we live in a Capitalist world based upon economy and gross profits. In this case does to whitecube not act as a social commentary on how mankind is currently running the planet?
Posted by
andy nizinskyj
andy nizinskyj
I liked your analysis that "The classic gallery space almost acts as a signifier of established art, although certainly within the institution", this is great because as I said in my last post it reflects on one hand ONLY the art appreciated by a small minority, but on the other hand the social commentary on the infrastructures within our world which allow this. I also enjoy your concern that a site specific or specifically chosen area may cause the work to rely to heavily upon it; in my opinion an art work should be strong enough to "hold its own" so to speak, to be able to function within such a mundane space and outgrow the commercial and social status' you talked about whilst at the same time allowing investors and businessmen to turn a good profit.
Posted by
andy nizinskyj
andy nizinskyj
(Continued) But again that leads to the idea of art being created specifically to be compatible with the white space, to be overt and patron orientated as we saw in the days of the YBAs. I could relate this to Mark's analysis of the white space reflecting the institutions failure to encourage real debate and question its ethical grounds, but ideally it may not have to; the whitecube (like the majority of paradigmatic written art history) glorifies the individual and thus the space's representation of individuals and their opinions within a neutral space, opposed to the encouragement of separate debate, and inadvertently creates discussion by offering an analysis of itself and the practices of art history to fuel debates such as this very forum.
Posted by
Mette Woller
Mette Woller
To discuss something as established as the art institution without alternative models, is seemingly creating an endless game of tail chasing. However, there is no need to emphasise the importance of the interesting debate. When the street artist, Zevs, in February 2008, exhibited a Louis Vuitton bag behind glass at Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Denmark, did he not only stress the inescapable “social” inheritance from art's capitalistic father, but created simultaneously a boomerang effect, pointing directly back at himself: how and why have street artists become part of the institution? Is the whole foundation of street art not found in a critical position concerning public and “democratic” spaces and especially the institution of art? (a debate in itself) However, what I am trying to stress, is how it made me consider the importance of being heard, of getting “the message” out, which in some cases have created an almost paradoxical practise.
Posted by
Mette Woller
Mette Woller
(Continued) Since art (artists) has no interest in a neutral position, it will always seek the best speaking tube. In its complexity this can be generated as a seemingly neutral position, but there is no doubt that art always has something to say. Then, if the best speaking tube seems to be the institution, whether or not it is done as a criticism from within, or being part of, I found it hard to be critical about it. However, since the speaking tube is never clean but filled with fictive neutrality, the message will always be blurred, in other words, the art will always be affected by its frame in many ways.
Posted by
Mette Woller
Mette Woller
When Zevs exhibit in an art institution, he ends in the same crisis at the former appropriation art did: is he actually capable of criticising, or does he only replicate the same features, he is trying to criticise? Projects made by the Danish group Superflex are interesting critical approaches to the art institution, however, if one's practise is founded in painting and sculpture, what opportunities are then left? Exhibiting outside The White Cube? If the debate concerns neutrality, are alternative non-white spaces then more neutral? www.superflex.dk
I think the debates on neutrality are now fully absorbed. Critique is accommodated. The white cube is always accommodating its opposite. [ Aquirre] Zevs, with whom I have worked on a number of occasions, is closer to the novelty of fashion and quasi-realism of 'the street' as style [ life style] than art. The argument that is proposed in the new Artforum editorial is that novelty is at an impasse, at least in the platonic sense of a thorough programming. A parallel argument is proposed according to Paul O'Neill, curatorial discourse has acted 'as an engine of emergence for a set of contemporary practices, ones that do not simply rehearse the marketing of inconsequential novelty.' [ Nought to Sixty, ICA publication] - both write [ Tim Griffin in 'A New Novel' and Paul O'Neill in 'Emergence' ] of overriding the 'flawed creator-genius' heroism of the obselete avant garde and isms at a level of agency in works that constitute both a plurality and an embodiment
in the lull of any commentary [ is the server down, is there a technical fault?]- some more mystery - its always the mystique of the dealer's knowledge that allures and creates the economic value yet where does this knowledge / etiquette acquired? How does knowledge circulate and get filtered, so that the 'quality' is recognised, maintains its relation to the discourse of the market, is legitimated and yet others 'fall by the wayside' of the vanity website? And what of product? The economic model in place for a hundred years in Europe and America was 'product', ' filtered through galleries, offered to collectors and public institutions, written about in magazines, partially supported by teh galleries and drifting towards the academic apparatus that stabilses 'history' - certifying, much as banks do, the holding of its major repository, the museum.' [Afterword, Inside the White Cube, The ideology of the Gallery Space, Brian O'Doherty].
Posted by
ael
ael
I aimed to make a neutral comment. However, I do not believe a pro of the white cube gallery is that it offers commercial gain. This does not seem to be implied in my original post.
I would agree with Peter Lewis that the White Cube is always accommodating its opposite. This can be seen in the way that many galleries have off-site projects, or include site-specific work within their programming. The motion and opening presentations of this debate set up a dichotomy: 'alternative non-white non-gallery spaces’ vs ‘the White Cube.’ I think that 'alternative non-white non-gallery spaces’ are very rare. Alternative exhibition spaces frequently a connection with a gallery of some sort. If artists want to create opportunities for showing work in an interesting way they will often set up a gallery to support that. What I mean is: how alternative is alternative? Is a white cube that is programmed and maintained on a voluntary basis different from a White Cube? Part of my interest is that I am on the committee of OUTPOST, an artist-run voluntary-run gallery in Norwich.
I might draw your attention to some projects that conceive of practice and discourse as integrated and operate without the obligatory and futile 'chasing the hare' art's commodification, as Mark Harris had written about the outmoded, ineffectual post situationist, anarchist tactics against the state, [ that he criticised me for in fact ] or those more stylish ventures that embrace the system's 'system' like China Art Objects, in Los Angeles, eg as ironic strategy, simulated capitalists, going on to win 'best booth' at Basel Art Fair. Mark did choose to work on a number of projects with me where collaboration was a key factor, with an indifference to 'success or failure' [ at Host, Glasgow, a kind of phenomenal 'peer to peer' group work continually being added and subtracted to/from. Projects like Bert Thies' Isola Art Center in Milan, or Platoniq, in Barcelona [web-based] RT Mark, e:vent network in London with Colm Lally,
[continued] [...] or the veteran, internet artist Wolfgang Staehle, [who caught 9/11 on a webcam], or the Multitude projects set up in Mexico City [ see issue 6 /seconds on Multitude], there are many of course that present a difficulty for orthodoxy and legibility. I think the right wing Rand research group worried about some of these hyper-anarchic network operations but concluded that they were at least matched by traditional subversive network methods [ including social /public space interventions]. Then is the internet now a dead zone? Is this platform for debate merely a panacea? Outpost echoes some of the ideas we were playing with at Redux in London, working without state funding, using the domestic space as also social/showing space, and not differentiating between certain acceptable and unacceptable ethical positions.
continued [...]this is also not to 'push the envelope' or salute western liberal democracy's injunctions to the rights of artistic expression against any kind of censorship. Working internationally [ the Middle East for example] one comes up against a wall, if carrying that western, 'freedom' delusion, which is merely a superiority complex or something about 'other' cultures' need for western democracy, and a new form of missionary zeal in disguise.
Posted by
Leah Mai
Leah Mai
Townley and Bradby, you point out 'how alternative is alternative?', and I'd like to pick up on that. I find the issue of 'alternative', especially in art, a tricky business. Surely the aim in art is always the alternative, the challenging, the subversive. If white cube galleries are accommodating the opposite- for example site specific spaces, then what is the alternative? Where do things move on from here? Another issue that must be brought to the surface is funding. Its increasingly difficult to gain arts council funding. From experience, it seems its a constant battle to tick boxes and make sacrifices in order to gain funding or support, especially if your not an established organization. Going back to what Andy Nizinskyi points out, the business based demand for art, i have found in several of the white cubes i have visited recently, for example the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, seem to definitely blur the boundaries between business and art.
Posted by
ael
ael
I wanted an opportunity to write about an exhibition I saw in that very gallery. What a link. Earlier this year the Deutsche Guggenheim hosted an exhibition titled ‘True North’. The works were selected due to the attention paid in each to the romanticism of Northern Landscape painting. However, the medium of the projects were either video or photography, which contributed to the underlying theme of human and modern taint on a magnitude that is constituted due to it barrenness, un-touched and unyielding character. All the pieces indicate a human presence and a subsequent ‘loss of purity’ (True North press release), that unite in a melancholic tone. In the first room, I was under the impression that it was a solo show, however the small info panels next to the five photographs indicated otherwise- these were not as apparent in the gallery as I find them to be in Tate museums, for example, and as such I found the curatorial strategy to be more visible...
Posted by
ael
ael
This is not to say that this was a curators show, the work was very much at the forefront of ‘True North’s program. I must say that it was here that something clicked for me with regards to visual display. The work was placed in a way that the images (still or moving) were in conversation with one another- each piece introduced and complimented their acquaintance. However, I understand Leah Mai’s concern of the corporate presence in the gallery. Their commercial sponsor is very noticeable in every way the exhibition greets the visitor- in the catalogue, on the title wall and so on. Furthermore, in a side room where Orit Raff’s video piece, ‘Palindrome’ (2001) was considerably overshadowed by the gift shop, which seemingly guided your path through, and past the artwork- I’m certain Raff saw nothing in common with postcards and Guggenheim pencils...
Posted by
ael
ael
I’ve also learned that much of the works shown were collated from New York’s permanent collection, which makes me wonder if the Berlin museum was created more as a showroom for their bigger brother. However, I did consider the glacial theme of the show might have had something to do with the seeming harsh, clinical and arguably impenetrable sphere of the white cube, a comment on its faceless and powerful, business-related alter ego.
I would also like to experiment here with an example of younger curatorial tactics vis a vis older conventional forms and their displays. My colleagues Brody and Paetau run the operation 'e art-now' which mimics its commercial operation / mailing list 'e-flux', with an emphasis on eastern european initiatives..and its not a parody, it performs as an advertising device. Here is one I received tonight on my email. "The idea of 're-present' the famous Swiss art fair, Art Basel, emerged in 2005 with the happening Art Basel Geneva. The international art scene motivated the artists to create the happening as a reaction towards the commercialisation of art fairs and their continuous worldwide expansion. The actual context of economical expansion of emerging countries makes the question even more immediate. The subversive position of Art Basel Geneva about the art business is a 'product' of its own milieu. The happening tries to question the limit of the system as well as its purpose
[...] Art Basel Geneva converts a business event into a 'pop' spectacle, where the glamorous atmosphere, dilemmas and paradoxes of a cloudy art world are faced by a single message on the wall, a comment and modest inversion of meaning. Using the official Art Basel corporate identity, the artists will produce a wall painting of the Art Basel Geneva São Paulo logotype and turn the exhibition hall into a foggy environment full of artificial smoke. Hostess will inform the intentions of Art Basel Geneva São Paulo and an invitation will be submitted to all the Art Basel gallery members, invited to attend the opening. Art Basel Geneva São Paulo is an event hold by the artists Lukas Mettler & Cris Faria.
Despite the bad english here and there I think the sentiment is right, that adjusts perception to the seriousness of these satellite white cube events. There are many projects advertised on e art-now that are micro-political instances of this kind of attitude that though adding unnecessarily to the market, subtract something necessarily from it. Failure itself is productive as it accumulates more like-minded acts, indifferent to exclusion.
Posted by
ael
ael
‘If you’re not making ten mistakes a day you’re not trying hard enough.’ (Joel Fisher The Success of Failure). I like the idea of embracing failure- incorporating a form of playfulness in the ethos of an exhibition/collective/artwork is a quality that deserves to be privileged from time to time. This is not to the extent of flippancy or mocking, which could be perceived if such an attitude were to be placed in the white cube.
Posted by
Mark Whiteman
Mark Whiteman
(Wunderkammer, Uni of Leeds Degree Show 08) On entering this basement, curiosities arranged in a white space but what is this here: a screen, an amplification of a voice, a young artist - Taneesha - so she calls herself, and she's talking to me, and the group of people once there, and to the display, talking art, speaking art for them and me, caught amongst people bustling, sipping, standing in herds around hanging objets d'art, which are are there and they [italics] are not. That's in the past now. Its empty now, but full, I walk around, and climb stairs, jump on a couch, read a book, chat, talk to people, I'm bored, I'm comfortably immersed. I still hear the babble of the opening night crowd. And serious. There's some here. I wonder, in a tone frighteningly close to Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City, if the seriousness with which Art is treated is toxic to its causes.
Posted by
Mark Whiteman
Mark Whiteman
I was wondering what people thought of younger curators such as Curatorial Industries' and their project Self Storage, www.curatorialindustries.org/ ?
Posted by
ael
ael
Interesting website, I enjoy how annoying it is. It seems that this forum is making it more and more clear that the white cube is neither right or wrong but what is important, highlighted by and with thanks to all the generous offerings of new and exciting projects, is to be consciouses of where and why one chosen to create an exhibition. However, this may mean that the white cube, for all its intents and purposes is ultimately a site specific format.
yes, checked it out - very impressive as ever from west coast post conceptual art taught from the horses mouth. The archive has indeed come into its own, as it were, not just as an integer of curating. [see /seconds 8, on open archives]. Its practice since has struggled to resist the obligatory compromises, to attain an indifference to data, to the tasks insinuated in those nebulous territories and exchanges that devolve from the mixing of the terms, curating / archiving / collecting / data, which most often casts the curator either as an anonymous go-between or colonizer of artists true intentions.
We are presented with a taxonomy of artworks that comprise their series without making any such claims, by the affirmation of hermetic. These accumulations of works are situated in a paradoxical relation and extends new meaning to the threatened closure of roles, both artist and curator, in the death-throes of the author, now safely archived. The show is an archive, the archive, a show. This is a delicate balance indeed, precarious since it is at once art, and at once, curating. “What is it? In fact it is ‘objects’”. [Marcel Broodthears 1963 statement from his first one person, 'commercial' show] We hear so often and laboriously of the institution of the museum, and of the worker, yet not of the poetry of work, as a craft that turns obstacle into momentum, a movement to and from- from the work to museum, and reverse, from the museum to work.
Posted by
Emily Phelps
Emily Phelps
I'm particularly interested in this notion of the curator-artist. I wonder where or how one might distinguish between artist and curator? It would seem it is not only the alternative gallery space that might speak over and above the individual artwork, but the message of the curator themselves... in this, does the curator not become an artist, a kind of master puppeteer laying out a very particular scene in mind? If the connotations of the white cube are inescapable then surely it is impossible to forget the socio-political context of an artwork... I would be intrigued to hear anyone's thoughts on the distinguishing features that might separate an artist and curator.
Posted by
andy nizinskyj
andy nizinskyj
i like this idea too alice, i long for art that suggests the maker does not take themselves seriously, yet places utmost importance in their work. the shoddy, home-made and typically 90's work made by the mtv generation during the yba years was certainly refreshing and one could certainly plant the notion of embracing the 'failure' of creating the works of the high brow onto artists such as emin, lucas or hume; but this was the revelation of the period, a group of working class and lower middle class twenty-something's making millions on being slobbish, hedonistic yet ultimately determined. I do not think that the white cube would mock playful failure after displays such as these and i believe it is an institution that praises it indefinitely, ideally the whitecube exists to praise the final stages of perfection and with it the disappointments that preceded, a marker to improvement and success - afterall is success not born in the fires of many more failures?
I agree with Leah that in contemporary art we set great store on originality; we see art as exciting when it provides alternatives to the preceding tradition. However, I think that this forum is using ‘alternative’ in two different ways. The motion and the opening arguments were using ‘alternative’ to mean ‘non-gallery space.’ The ‘For’ argument suggested that when we see artwork in a ‘lived territory’ it allows us greater freedom to interpret the work and make it meaningful. The ‘Against’ argument suggested that the conflicting uses and symbolic languages of a non-gallery space can create a sort of noise which ‘muddles or obscures’ the artwork. (At least, that’s how I understood the arguments). I was using ‘alternative’ in the sense used by the motion, to mean a non-gallery space. (continued in next post).
On second thoughts, please disregard the last sentence of my last post. When I wrote, in post # 21, ‘how alternative is alternative?’ I was mixing up two meanings of the word. I was wondering whether an alternative way of running a white cube space equated in some way to an alternative (i.e. non-gallery) location for showing art. I was also wondering to what extent the organisational structure of a white cube space affects the experience of viewing art there. I mentioned OUTPOST gallery (www.norwichoutpost.org) because the exhibition space is a single room, painted white, with almost featureless walls; a classic white cube in fact. (continued in next post).
OUTPOST gallery is artist-run, using a model partly derived from Transmission gallery in Glasgow. The usual gallery tasks – programming, installing, writing press releases – are carried out, but without anyone receiving a wage for it. Since the work must fit around people’s day jobs, families and art practices, there is a fluidity to the way that tasks are initiated, discussed, passed on. Does any of this make the white cube space less ‘elitist’ or more of a ‘safe haven’ (to refer back to the opening arguments)? Does the collaborative commitment of the steering committee, and the inevitable importance of social networks to a low-budget organisation (loans of equipment for shows, programming discussions that take place outside of the formal meetings, etc) invisibly alter the ambience of our white cube?
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Sometimes I still return to the place where some part of this dialogue started, which is to say Block (a journal in visual culture). There was a particular article that Lucy Lippard mentioned, in which art is referred to as a form of social energy. In that sense, I think that where art exists (or what form of organisation thread in and out of it) might, at this stage, be less important than asking what it accomplishes and for whom. To the extent that the process of coming into being, such as nonhierarchical forms of decision making, enter into the equation, fine. Yes. But then what? And then we get into the question, not of the White Cube as such, but of the support structure for legitimating meaning. Here the market seems to trump, does it not (witness the influence of collectors on the curatorial staff of major museums)? But I don't wish to sound so pessimistic. I'm not: You know, "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will."
Peter Lewis says that OUTPOST, like Redux, is ‘working without state funding, using the domestic space as also social/showing space’. This is incorrect. In fact, OUTPOST is heavily reliant on an Arts Council grant. Although no one at the gallery receives a wage, the grant is essential for the other running costs of the gallery. Neither does OUTPOST make use of ‘domestic space as … showing space.’ As I wrote in my reply to Leah Mai’s post, the exhibition space is a conventional white cube. In post 31, Peter Lewis writes about micro-political acts that are ‘indifferent to exclusion.’ I’m interested in the way that exhibitions in ‘alternative non-white non-gallery spaces’ are usually indifferent to to some aspects of exclusion, but working hard to be included in the art world in other ways. (continued in next post).
(continued from post 44) The necessities of local cultural politics mean that most non-gallery exhibitions have to make use of some existing network (be it a gallery off-site programme, an artists’ studio complex, a city arts festival) to support the work or to access an audience. The interesting part is where the exhibition organisers choose to resist the conventions, the ground on which they choose to fight. The group of artists who set up OUTPOST in 2003 were resisting the pull to London, and creating a way for themselves to stay in Norwich, whilst still being able to engage with exciting contemporary art. This probably explains some of the mixture of radical and conventional approaches adopted by the gallery.
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