« Institutional critique and after explores the history and contemporary reassessment of the Institutional Critique movement lauched in the late 1960s, redeveloped in the 1980s, and vigorously reoriented in recent years to address issues such as globalization. In this publication, the histories, theories, diverse locations, and different kinds of institutional alternative space are investigated, looking at traditional forms of art but also at installation, performance, new media practices, and cultural activism. Its central questions turn on the critical potential of art (and institutions) and whether–and if so how–they can stimulate social or political change. »--
An anthology of writings and projects by artists from across Europe and throughout the Americas who developed and extended the genre of institutional critique.
'Institutional critique' is best known through the critical practice that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by artists who presented radical challenges to the museum and gallery system. Since then it has been pushed in new directions by new generations of artists registering and responding to the global transformations of contemporary life. The essays collected in this volume explore this legacy and develop the models of institutional critique in ways that go well beyond the field of art. Interrogating the shifting relations between 'institutions' and 'critique', the contributors to this volume analyze the past and present of institutional critique and propose lines of future development. Engaging with the work of philosophers and political theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno and others, these essays reflect on the mutual enrichments between critical art practices and social movements and elaborate the conditions for politicized critical practice in the twenty-first century.
A critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s. Site-specific art emerged in the late 1960s in reaction to the growing commodification of art and the prevailing ideals of art's autonomy and universality. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as site-specific art intersected with land art, process art, performance art, conceptual art, installation art, institutional critique, community-based art, and public art, its creators insisted on the inseparability of the work and its context. In recent years, however, the presumption of unrepeatability and immobility encapsulated in Richard Serra's famous dictum "to remove the work is to destroy the work" is being challenged by new models of site specificity and changes in institutional and market forces. One Place after Another offers a critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s and a theoretical framework for examining the rhetoric of aesthetic vanguardism and political progressivism associated with its many permutations. Informed by urban theory, postmodernist criticism in art and architecture, and debates concerning identity politics and the public sphere, the book addresses the siting of art as more than an artistic problem. It examines site specificity as a complex cipher of the unstable relationship between location and identity in the era of late capitalism. The book addresses the work of, among others, John Ahearn, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Donald Judd, Renee Green, Suzanne Lacy, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Richard Serra, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Fred Wilson.
A monograph surveying the storied career of German artist Hans Haacke, on the occasion of a major retrospective exhibition Born in Germany in 1936, Hans Haacke is known for his intellectual and politically engaged art that has long shed light on systems of power. A pioneer of institutional critique, conceptual art, and environmental art, Haacke creates incisive, often site-specific works that call upon the viewer to engage or participate and thereby question invisible structural dynamics at play in society. This book offers an opportunity to revisit the artist's thought-provoking career in light of contemporary culture.
This book examines how ordinary users review cultural products online, ranging from books to films and other art objects to consumer products. The book maps different communities—in institutional and non-institutional settings—which intersect with the genre of review, especially in the social web where reviewing is conducted on platforms such as Instagram, YouTube and Vimeo. The book, drawing on the key concepts of cultural intermediation, platformized cultural production and post-professionalism, looks at user-generated content in lifestyle communities beyond the binary of professional and amateur production.
Essays, criticism, and performance scripts written between 1985 and 2003 by an artist whose artistic practice investigates and reveals the social structures of art and its institutions. Andrea Fraser's work, writes Pierre Bourdieu in his foreword to Museum Highlights, is able to "trigger a social mechanism, a sort of machine infernale whose operation causes the hidden truth of social reality to reveal itself." It often does this by incorporating and inhabiting the social role it sets out to critique—as in a performance piece in which she leads a tour as a museum docent and describes the men's room in the same elevated language that she uses to describe seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. Influenced by the interdisciplinarity of postmodernism, Fraser's interventionist art draws on four primary artistic and intellectual frameworks—institutional critique, with its site-specific examination of cultural context; performance; feminism, with its investigation of identity formation; and Bourdieu's reflexive sociology. Fraser's writings form an integral part of her artistic practice, and this collection of texts written between 1985 and 2003—including the performance script for the docent's tour that gives the book its title—both documents and represents her work. The writings in Museum Highlights are arranged to reflect different aspects of Fraser's artistic practice. They include essays that trace the development of critical "artistic practice" as cultural resistance; performance scripts that explore art institutions and the public sphere; and texts that explore the ambivalent relationship of art to the economic and political interests of its time. The final piece, "Isn't This a Wonderful Place? (A Tour of a Tour of the Guggenheim Bilbao)," reflects on the role of museums in an era of globalization. Among the book's 30 illustrations are stills from performance pieces, some never before published.
An insightful philosophical essay on the work of minimalist sculptor Carl Andre by Brooklyn-based poet and critic Jeremy Sigler (b.1968). While researching and editing the catalog for Andres recent retrospective at Dia Art Foundation, Sigler gleaned surprising new readings from a series of lost negatives that resurfaced at Dia. Shot by Andres close friend and collaborator Hollis Frampton in the 1960s, the photos depict small, carved wooden artworksmany lost or destroyed shortly after being photographed. Sigler draws connections between these early inchoate artworks and Andres later scatters, spills and floor pieces, all of which are analyzed through a compellingly personal lens. Writing on Andres poetry and his confounding book-length masterpiece, Stillanovel, Sigler further proposes that Andres greatest contribution may be to literature. Is it possible that one of the modern eras greatest experimental love poets is hiding in plain sight, disguised as a unionized blue-chip art worker? Sigler taught at Yale University School of Arts, edited the Swiss art journal Parkett, and has published numerous books of poetry.
In the decades following World War II, France experienced both a period of affluence and a wave of political, artistic, and philosophical discontent that culminated in the countrywide protests of 1968. In Disordering the Establishment Lily Woodruff examines the development of artistic strategies of political resistance in France in this era. Drawing on interviews with artists, curators, and cultural figures of the time, Woodruff analyzes the formal and rhetorical methods that artists used to counter establishment ideology, appeal to direct political engagement, and grapple with French intellectuals' modeling of society. Artists and collectives such as Daniel Buren, André Cadere, the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel, and the Collectif d'Art Sociologique shared an opposition to institutional hegemony by adapting their works to unconventional spaces and audiences, asserting artistic autonomy from art institutions, and embracing interdisciplinarity. In showing how these artists used art to question what art should be and where it should be seen, Woodruff demonstrates how artists challenged and redefined the art establishment and their historical moment.
A survey of art's complex and troubled relationship with institutions, this is a useful introduction to those involved with art appreciation, collecting, curation, the art market, art practice, as well as students and practitioners of art history, theory and politics.
