04 2004 Fidelity, Betrayal, Autonomy: In and Beyond the Post Cold-War Art MuseumCertainty, fidelity Cut the power and storm the museum. Barricade its entrance with Richard Serra's sculpture. Cover its windows with Gerhard Richter paintings. Transform the sculpture garden into an organic produce cooperative; refurbish the boardroom to serve as a day care facility; place the cafeteria under the supervision of homeless people. Yet, in spite of this hypothetical uprising it is apparent that institutional power persists. Like gravity issuing from a collapsed star it draws us into the very orbit of what we once sought to escape because despite our protestations we continue to love it - or at least the unselfish image it projects--more than it could ever love itself. For no matter how imperfectly actually existing museums fulfill their social obligations, the symbolic position of the museum remains inseparable from notions of public space, democratic culture, and citizenship itself. That is the scandal my essay seeks to comprehend. Nevertheless, exploring what a liberated, post-revolutionary museum might look like, how it would function, and what its revitalized role within the local community might actually be is an approach often taken up today by younger, socially committed artists who have grown apprehensive of the virtually conventional form of institutional critique. This is encouraging. Yet when coupled with an absolute rejection of institutional power it can devolve into a fantasy in which a simple us versus them mentality replaces the critical opportunities opened by the allure of the other. Today, the socially committed artist, writer, curator, or administrator must face one very unpalatable fact - how and why large, basically conservative institutions, including museums and universities, eventually charm even their most defiant critics and radical apostates. If the end of the Cold War (and of modernism) has brought a new level of cultural inclusiveness to these cultural institutions, what can we say has become of the once defiant notion of a counterculture? Perhaps it is heretical to propose this, yet if we agree that institutional power is no phantom let me suggest that by equal measure the institutional function --to rework a term borrowed from Foucault is seldom precisely directed nor primarily even repressive towards its other. In this sense are not museums, universities, corporations, and perhaps even the armed forces not rife with administrative malfunctions, redundancies, and even occasionally destabilizing internal conflicts? And is not their intermittent effectiveness in the field of battle, either cultural or military, often more the result of a magnitude of scale than of organizational efficiency? Naturally, when faced with conflict, administrators, managers and curators will, in the last instance, always side with the institutional function. But at any point prior to that critical juncture, there arise intrigues, affairs, and infidelities of great potential to political activists, interventionists and cultural radicals. Today, even the most formal art claims social relevancy. It has become almost de rigueur to make explicit reference to issues of politics, cultural diversity, gender, and sexual identity (although, I must add, seldom to class or economic inequality). Indeed, such routines can be lamentable for political as well as artistic reasons. Yet, from the perspective of a politically engaged activist artist or organizer this kind of intra-institutional, liberal ambition can indeed be useful, if frustrating. Useful, because a certain amount of actual political work can be "leveraged" through it and frustrating because curators, artists, museum administrators, and academics carelessly confuse the kind of symbolic transgression that takes place inside the museum with a direct, political activism that occurs at the judicial, penal, even global levels of society. The reflex to make art socially relevant appears to have accelerated following the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Perhaps this is because in the US at least, artists no longer needed to display to the world an uncompromising fidelity to individuality such as that exemplified by abstract expressionism in the 1950s. At the same time, however, new grounds for justifying culture were needed after the "fall of the wall." One mode that fit the bill turned out to be community-based art practices. Thus, in the past fifteen years or so, we find the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) increasingly supporting art as an educational and even therapeutic profession. By contrast, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, art involved directly in concrete, social issues was dismissed as utilitarian and not sufficiently abstract to be taken seriously. As difficult as it is to imagine today, in 1975 resistance to any sullying of high cultural standards through politics actually toppled the short-lived editorial team of John Coplans and Max Kozloff at Artforum. Coplans and Kozloff brought to the influential trade magazine a raft of radical art historians and essayists, including Carol Duncan, Allen Sekula, Lawrence Alloway, Alan Wallach, Eva Cockcroft, and Patricia Hills. These writers dared to suggest that art was not an autonomous expression of transcendental truth, but an integral part of the social world. Hilton Kramer, then the principal art critic for the New York Times as well as an ardent cold warrior, openly called for art dealers to boycott the magazine. In what might be considered a virtual coup d' état, both Coplans and Kozloff were soon dislodged from their positions.[1] By the late 1970s,
politically engaged artists were becoming increasingly
sophisticated in mixing the symbolic realm of art making
with the practical needs of political activism. Unlike
an earlier generation, exemplified by Donald Judd or
Carl Andre, who both strongly opposed the Vietnam War
and supported the Civil Rights Movement and yet remained
devout minimalists, many post-formalist artists collaborated
with one another as well as with environmentalists,
anti-nuclear and housing activists, and community workers,
producing a heterogeneous range of artistic forms and
styles that directly addressed social causes. An incomplete
list of organizations that operated in the New York
area between 1979 and 1982 include PAD/D or Political
Art Documentation and Distribution and Group Material;
anti-nuclear organizations such as Artists for Survival
and Artists for Nuclear Disarmament; the community-based
Asian American group Basement Workshop; media activists
including Deep Dish and Paper Tiger Television; and
the feminist art collectives No More Nice Girls, Heresies,
and Carnival Knowledge. And this list could be re-sorted
by highlighting specific projects including The
Women's Pentagon Action and The
Anti-WW III Show; The Real Estate Show, an anti-gentrification
exhibition, organized by a splinter group from Colab,
that was staged in a squat space on the Lower East Side;
Bazaar Conceptions, a pro-choice "street fair" organized
by Carnival Knowledge; and an art auction to help fund
a women's centre in Zimbabwe organized by the ultra-left
Madame Binh Graphics Collective, some of whose members
later served time at Rikers Island in connection with
the infamous Brinks robbery in upstate New York.[2] Speaking from my
own experience, those artists working out of abandoned
warehouses and in basement workshops, cooperative centres,
and urban squats believe that large institutional structures
operate with a militarylike precision to strategically
defuse grassroots and resistant practices. In response,
any viable counter-practice is compelled to constantly
re-establish itself at an ever-greater perimeter from
the institution's expanding hegemonic zone. Yet even
within this outermost post, at a safe distance from
the discourse and economy of the museum, there is a
form of unspoken fidelity to the museum's institutional
marrow. There is a vague recognition as well that the
passion that drives and sustains opposition is motivated
just as much by an affinity for the failed ideals of
such institutions as by any overt hostility to institutional
power. For even the most fleeting and decentralized
collective, art group, or political collaboration requires
some form of operating structure, some kind of institutional
arrangement, and an organizational mission regardless
if it is stated or is ad hoc and informal. To think
otherwise is to naturalize and mystify what is a specific
type of contractual relationship among individuals with
common concerns (among them is often the actual or perceived
threat of being crushed by institutional hegemony)!
And certainly, at some level, both the museum and its
other - those
resistant, residual, and informal cultural organizations
recognize that the centralized institution proper
does not exist. Instead, it is constructed within a
field of ideas as well as economic variables that are
jointly, if unequally, shared by the centre and the
margins. This means that activists must develop the
cunning to see the museum, as well as the university
or corporation, as virtually predicated upon the collective
productivity of those whom it regulates. In the case
of the museum, this naturally includes artists, but
also the museum staff and the public that patronizes
it. To paraphrase the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the
institution is an apparatus of capture. But what does
it seize? The answer is the enthusiasm of artists that,
at least for a brief moment, it manages to entrap. (Yet,
one must also ask, what dangerous, even treasonous ideas
now spread within the institution as a result of this
abduction that is also an infection?) … around it move radically autonomous processes of self-valorization that not only constitute an alternative basis of potential development but also actually represent a new constituent foundation.[4] Naturally, such critical
autonomy could not exist in close proximity to voracious
institutions like art museums, kunsthalles,
or international biennials for very long. That lesson
was learned from the 1980s all too well, when a select
group of artists were chosen to represent "political
art" within the mainstream culture industry.[5]
No, what is required is a program of theft and long-term
sedition aimed at rupturing and re-appropriating institutional
power for specifically political purposes. Once more,
the work of autonomous collaborations, including PAD/D,
as well groups such as REPOhistory, RTMark, Sans Papiers,
Temporary Services, UltraRed, or Ne Pas Plier, Colectivo
Cambalache to mention a few now active in the United
States and Europe, can serve as provisional models. Corporeal collective
presence: [1] A decade later, Lucy R. Lippard was herself ousted from her post at the Village Voice, ostensibly because her political enthusiasm prevented her from writing "objective" art criticism. [2] My list is compiled from the first and second issues of 1st Issue, the newsletter of Political Art Documentation and Distribution, both 1981. [3] An example of leveraging is the series of exhibitions entitled Mumia 911 that took place across the United States in the Fall of 1999 not only called attention to, but provided material support for confronting police brutality and institutionalised racism. Mumia 911 was made up of dozens of exhibitions, installations, and concerts and help garner signatures and public support for an impartial retrial of the outspoken African-American activist Mumia Abu Jamal who has been on Pennsylvania’s death row the last 17 years accused of murdering a Philadelphia police officer. International human rights groups have condemned his conviction as legally flawed even politically motivated by a vindictive police department known for its widespread racism and corruption. Along with building support for a new trial the coalition focused public attention on the disproportionate number of non-white people incarcerated and on death row across the United States. [4] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of State Form (University of Minneapolis Press: 1994), 281. [5]
for more on this history see my essay: "News
from Nowhere: Activist Art & After: Report from
New York" , Third Text, (Winter #45, 1998-99.)
P 45-62. and at: http://slash.interactivist.net/analysis/03/04/01/1532234.shtml [6] "The Ashes of Gramsci," in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Poems, trans. Norman MacAfee with Luciano Martinengo (New York: Noonday Press, 1982). 19. |
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