Institutional Critique
In
Institutional critique takes the form of temporary or nontransferable approaches to painting and sculpture, architectural alterations and interventions, and performative gestures and language intended to disrupt the otherwise transparent operations of galleries and museums and the professionals who administer them. Examples would be Niele Toroni making imprints of a No. 50 brush at 30 cm intervals directly onto gallery walls as opposed to applying the same mark to paper or canvas;[3] Chris Burden's Exposing the Foundation of the Museum (1986), in which he made an excavation in a gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, to expose the literal concrete foundation of the building;,[4] Andrea Fraser inhabiting the persona of an archetypical museum docent in the form of a live performance or video document,[5] or art group monochrom who sent the fictitious artist Georg Paul Thomann to the São Paulo Art Biennial. Assumptions about the aesthetic autonomy of painting and sculpture, the neutral context of the white cube gallery, and the objective delivery of information are explored as subjects of art, mapped out as discursive formations, and (re)framed within the context of the museum itself. As such, institutional critique seeks to make visible the social, political, economic, and historical underpinnings of art. Institutional critique questions the false distinction between taste and disinterested aesthetic judgement, revealing that taste is an institutionally cultivated sensibility that differs depending on the intersection of any one person's class, ethnic, sexual, or gender subject positions.[6]
Origin
Institutional critique is a practice that emerged from the developments of
Artists
Artists associated with institutional critique since the 1960s include Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, Michael Asher, John Knight (artist), Christopher D'Arcangelo, Robert Smithson, Dan Graham, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Adrian Piper, and Martha Rosler. Artists active since the 1980s include Louise Lawler, Antoni Muntadas, Fred Wilson, Santiago Sierra, Martha Fleming and Lyne Lapointe, Renée Green, Group Material, Andrea Fraser, Renzo Martens, Fred Forest, Christian Philipp Müller, and Mark Dion.
In the early 1990s, influenced in large part by Daniel Buren,
In recent years, Maurizio Cattelan, Ellen Harvey, Matthieu Laurette, monochrom, Tameka Norris, Tino Sehgal, Carey Young, and others have taken a critical eye to the art museum and its role as a public and private institution.[10][11]
Criticisms
One of the criticisms of institutional critique is that it requires from its audience a familiarity with its esoteric concerns. As with much contemporary music and dance,
Another criticism of the concept is that it can be a misnomer. Artist Andrea Fraser (in Artforum) and critic Michael Kimmelman (in The New York Times) have argued, for example, that institutional critique artists work within—and benefit from—the very same institutions they ostensibly critique.[14][15]
In his 2015 book "Der wunde Punkt", curator and art critic Thomas Edlinger addresses some of the inherent problems of institutional critique. He specifically refers to monochrom's Taiwan intervention as an excellent example of new and needed forms of intervention: "[It] shows an area of conflict between inclusion and exclusion, and one has to recognize that institutional critique is constantly changing and cannot know any fixed rules. Contextualization and site specificity have become key terms. Depending on the situation, it proceeds very differently and also wants very different things. Moreover, the change from criticism to affirmation is always possible and hardly predictable."[16]
References
- ISBN 9780262013161.
- ^ "1965-1975: Reconsidering the Object of Art".
- ^ "Niele Toroni | Exhibitions | the Renaissance Society".
- ^ "Exposing the Foundation of the Museum".
- ^ "Three Histories: The Wadsworth According to MATRIX 114".
- ^ "Publishing House - Contemporary Artists".
- ^ "MAY, Quarterly Journal » Traffic: Space-times of the Exchange".
- ^ http://www.marginalutility.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Claire-Bishop_Antagonism-and-Relational-Aesthetics.pdf [bare URL PDF]
- ^ "Traffic Control: Joe Scanlan on Social Space and Relational Aesthetics". 11 February 2004.
- ^ "Fair Use - Joe Scanlan - Things That Fall". Archived from the original on 2017-12-12. Retrieved 2017-12-10.
- ^ "Maurizio Cattelan: "America"".
- TheGuardian.com. 28 November 2010.
- ^ https://www.um.es/vmca/proceedings/docs/35.Inma-Alvarez.pdf [bare URL PDF]
- ^ http://www.marginalutility.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Andrea-Fraser_From-the-Critique-of-Institutions-to-an-Institution-of-Critique.pdf [bare URL PDF]
- ^ Kimmelman, Michael (25 March 2005). "Tall French Visitor Takes up Residence in the Guggenheim". The New York Times.
- ISBN 9783518742068. Retrieved 2021-12-22.
Further reading
- Meyer, James (1993), What Happened to the Institutional Critique? New York: American Fine Arts, Co. and Paula Cooper Gallery. Reprinted in Peter Weibel, ed., Kontext Kunst (Cologne: Dumont, 1993), 239-256.
- Buchloh, Benjamin (1999), Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions," October 55: 105–143.
- Bryan-Wilson, Julia (2003), A Curriculum of Institutional Critique, in: Jonas Ekeberg, ed., New Institutionalism (Oslo: OCA/verksted), 89–109.
- Edlinger, Thomas (2015), Der wunde Punkt. Vom Unbehagen an der Kritik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2015).