Opinion

Helena Lugo

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01.05.2022

Imagination belong to us

Historian and curator Helena Lugo questions the institutional critique and the discourses proposed by the official art system.

From the 1960s to the late 1990s, a series of works were produced, especially in the United States, under the label of institutional critique against the discourses set forth by the official art system. It was an artistic strategy exercised by artists and directed against institutions [1] to point out the ways in which museums construct the canon of art history under hegemonic and patriarchal discourses of power. Developed by artists such as Hans Haacke, Douglas Crimp, Louise Lawler, Andrea Fraser, Daniel Buren, Michael Asher or the Art Workers’ Coalition, the so-called institutional critique addressed issues such as the exclusion of minorities, discourses and narratives, as well as the conceptual limits of curatorial programs and their connection to political power.

This practice expanded internationally and led to a deep understanding of cultural venues while at the same time stressing their modes of production, distribution, exhibition and historicization. Thanks to the discomfort it caused, it led cultural agents to consider the inclusion of other themes, incorporate other audiences and, in general terms, taught us to distrust the narratives presented by the hegemonic spaces of culture. It also promoted democratic and horizontal practices that even suggested that it could be a utopian space operating within the machinery: the critical capacity of the art works not only filled them with political force but also established a space of possibility that, by addressing the concerns and discomforts of society, gave way to imagining what could be.

To be suspicious in this era of institutional critique is the norm. Andrea Fraser, one of the leading exponents of the practice, declared almost two decades ago that: “institutional critique is dead, a victim of its success or failure, it was swallowed up by the institution it denounced”.[2] While fifty years ago it provided a space to disrupt and discomfort the institutions and thus question their social, ideological and political function, today, it seems to have displaced its provocative character to become an anachronistic practice with little credibility co-opted for the benefit of the institution itself. Artistic strategies ended up internalizing the institution and in turn the institution chose to devour the practices that were questioning its status quo.[3] Today, institutional critique is no longer characterized as a transformative power or a space for reflection.

Beyond its historical relevance or its contemporary irrelevance, it is worth asking ourselves how institutional critique operates in this place (Mexico) and at this time. Museums seem to be increasingly exhausted. The notion of the museum as a refuge for thought, as a space with the capacity to transform narratives or question hegemonic discourses has been forgotten. The public institutions that were created as meeting places where society dialogues and projects its past, present and future are increasingly distant from their communities. Culture has never been a fundamental axis of the State; for decades it has been defined by annual, systematic and arbitrary budget cuts where some institutions and projects have many resources, while others are precarious. Symbolic payments flood cultural policies; artists and managers have “the opportunity” to show their work under the promise of “visibility and prestige”. Some museums are even becoming political spoils. Far from reality and immersed in their bureaucracy, they reproduce a false discourse of well-being by building a façade that displays an apparent prosperity, but which is actually cracking. Why continue building museums?

Against this backdrop, a thorough review of cultural policies, of the role of the cultural institution in contemporary society and of the needs of the cultural community is urgently needed. Is there an inability of the museum and its cultural workers to be critical of themselves? It seems that the institutions are not reflecting on their exhaustion and the illusory image they project. I would love to read curatorial texts that talk about their lack of budget, their selection methods to decide who occupies these spaces, or to see exhibitions that confront the crisis of the institution itself as well as the conditions of precariousness to which they subject artists and workers. How to bite the hand that feeds you? How to insert critical works within a machinery that is governed by cultural policies coated with contradictions? Faced with the incapacity to ask these questions, how can we dialogue these issues and give a voice to the artistic practices interested in them? Are they only possible from the outside?

Leaving aside the outdatedness of the term, we are still navigating today without being able to address and shape the limitations and contradictions that operate within cultural institutions or the way in which there can be an effective critique that operates from within. What became of institutional critique? Where can we examine the relationships that are generated between the social imagination and the institutional imagination? How is power negotiated within cultural venues and the public sphere? Are dissidents really supported or listened to by institutions, and if so, what role do they play in their regard?

Currently, when a work that criticizes the institution is presented in the field of art, it risks at least two things. The first is that both the work and its author could be censored. This represents the triumph of the work in question and simultaneously its defeat. Defeat implies living with the consequences of the disapproval of those who legitimize artists and their practices; however, the triumph is enormous. If the work manages to generate an affect/effect, cause controversy or has the capacity to touch the heartstrings to the point of making the institution exasperated, indignant or moved, it not only implies that it is necessary and urgent, but also that it restores to institutional criticism its political, combative and defiant power. Is it true that institutional criticism is dead?

The second risk is that the work of art may be used to reproduce established institutional discourses, and that is where its paradox has always been. It runs the risk of becoming a spectacle, of being co-opted by the art market, of clinging to the limits of the institution itself and thus reproducing the very practices it criticizes -in other words, of replicating the history that led to the loss of relevance and credibility of institutional criticism at the beginning of the new millennium. Its co-optation implies that the work reveals its contradictions: scandal becomes complicity, thus finding a new discourse of legitimacy. If criticism shared ideals that brought it closer to the real world–placing itself in social, political, ideological struggles–, confining it to the institution unanchors it from reality. Criticism is deactivated, as if protest or resistance had settled comfortably in the white cubes.

There is perhaps a third option closer to the abyss: that the State is not aware of institutional criticism, that the machinery does not allow the critical questions that are asked to really permeate the essence of the museum or institutional practices. However, behind censorship, appropriation or oblivion, we must remember that the institution does not have the capacity to take away our critical potential. Accepting the conditions it offers for the realization of some work should not extirpate our power of discernment. The tremendously limited field that artists, agents and cultural workers have to permeate the essence of the museum should not be a reason to stop pointing it out. Criticism will always be a strange and provocative entity in the face of the conservatism and stagnation of institutions. Despite the fact that institutional criticism runs up against a wall every time it encounters the limits of the institution itself, we must not lose our ability to think and question under the lens of fiction, speculative creation or the poetic terrain. Let’s remember that it is also in the hands of individuals, artists and managers to rethink models or relationships between the State, the public, citizens and artistic practices. This is where the imagination and the exploration of terrains forbidden by the institution lie.[4]

Is it relevant to think about whether institutional criticism is alive, dead or in the wake of its twenty-fifth resurrection? Yes, and perhaps it is worth thinking of it as not only alive but extremely powerful. As suggested by curator and theorist Simon Sheikh, institutional criticism should not be thought of as a wave, a movement or a historical period but as a tool, a strategy, a constant and permanent method of approaching the world.[5] A sort of compass that shows us where to go in order to advance towards the ideals that gave way in the first place to build, inhabit and preserve cultural enclosures. It is essential that museums ask themselves if there is openness to criticism from where they hold their power. That they question their capacity for self-criticism and dialogue with the artistic manifestations that challenge them, that they open spaces for underlying micro-narratives within the official narratives. It is even more elementary that criticism be exercised from within, otherwise, where else? Perhaps institutions should turn to meta-reflection, and from there, begin to project their fantasies or possibilities hand in hand with artistic practices. It is not a matter of recovering the social importance of the institutions, but of understanding their potential, and with this, constructing a kind of critical discourse on what they can add to the expansion of cultural models and policies.

Beyond thinking of the white cube as a safeguard of memory, it should be a space where the relationships generated between social imagination and institutional imagination are analyzed. The museum is no longer here to remind us of who we were, but to propose a space where we can project what we want to be; it is no longer here to look at the past, but to question it with other paradigms and its relationship with the world it inhabits. More than collections and artistic objects, the museum should amaze us, yes, but for the possibility of imagining other presents; of finding shared images where something common can be glimpsed. Criticism is not meant to stay in classrooms, in magazine articles, nor in books. What happens when the debate on cultural policies leaves the private sphere and floods the public sphere?

“We are the institution,” returning once again to Fraser. And although the author refers to the fact that art institutions “should not be contemplated as an autonomous field, separate from the rest of the world, in the same way that the “we” is not separate from the institution”[6] we can also think of it in another way. We are the institution. Art belongs to us. Imagination belongs to us. There is always a chance to seep into the cracks of something that is cracking. Camouflaged behind their immovable and weakened structures, perhaps there remains in museums a state of magic and marvelous, challenging and provocative discovery.

 

Notes

  1. Simon Sheikh, Notas sobre la crítica institucional, Translation by Marcelo Expósito, 2006 in www.transversal.at/transversal/0106/sheikh/es.

  2. Andrea Fraser, From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique, ARTFORUM, SEPTEMBER 2005, VOL. 44, NO. 1 in www.artforum.com/print/200507/from-the-critique-of-institutions-to-an-institution-of-critique.

  3. Maite Aldaz, ¿Qué fue la crítica institucional?, Fuera de marco, 31 de marzo 2018 en http://fuerademarco.xyz/archivos/538.

  4. Maite Aldaz, ¿Qué fue la crítica institucional?, Fuera de marco, 31 de marzo 2018 en http://fuerademarco.xyz/archivos/538.

  5. Simon Sheikh, Notas sobre la crítica institucional, Translation by Marcelo Expósito, 2006 in www.transversal.at/transversal/0106/sheikh/es.

  6. Simon Sheikh, Notas sobre la crítica institucional, Translation by Marcelo Expósito, 2006 in www.transversal.at/transversal/0106/sheikh/es.

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