4. 'What is worth more: art or life?’
Just Stop Oil protesters
Anna Holland + Phoebe Plummer
is this a critique of the art institution?
what does it have to do with climate
change and art institutions? is the
London’s National Gallery’s use of oil
being critiqued?
5. “You can get another picture, but you cannot get a
life, as they are killing Mrs Pankhurst.”
These were the words of Mary Richardson who, on
10 March 1914, walked into London’s National
Gallery and slashed, with a meat chopper,
Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus (1647–51). Smashing
through the glass, she scarred several times
Velázquez’s idealised nude in protest of the re-
arrest of British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst.
Richardson was subsequently sentenced to six
months’ imprisonment.
She later admitted that it wasn't just the picture's
value - £45,000 in 1906 - that made it a target. It
was "the way men visitors gaped at it all day long".
7. INSTITUTIONS
• Institutions are humanly devised structures
of rules and norms that shape and
constrain individual behavior.
• Laws, policies, social norms
8. LAWS, RULES AND
NORMS ENACTED
BY:
Governments
Religious organizations
Schools/Universities
Banks
Marriage
Sports teams
Girl Scouts
Museums
Funding agencies
Unions
Etc.
9. “OF OTHER
SPACES:
UTOPIAS AND
HETEROTOPIAS
MICHEL
FOUCAULT”
• Heterotopias = “counter-sites”
• “Places outside of all places, even though it may be
possible to indicate their location in reality”
• utopia = a 'placeless place', an unreal virtual place
(aspire to)
• a heterotopia is a physical representation or
approximation of a utopia, or a parallel space that
contains undesirable bodies/actions outside of the
norm to make a real utopian space possible
• Heterotopias = worlds within worlds, mirroring and
yet upsetting/troubling what is outside.
• Some examples: cemeteries, brothels, fairs
• Often linked to rituals (coming of age) or
purification (sweat lodge)
• Can be places where we put individuals outside of
the norm (hospitals, asylums, prisons, rest homes,
daycare)
10. HETEROTOPIAS
LINKED TO TIME
Places “linked to the accumulation of time”
Enclose in one place objects from all times and
styles
“Museums and libraries have become
heterotopias in which time never stops
up and topping its own summit”
Notion persists that museums are sites set apart
from the world; they have a special status;
sacred spaces that hold priceless objects
13. WHAT IS
CRITIQUE?
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Critique is tied to institutions
Institutions govern our behaviors
Critique begins with questioning the demand for absolute obedience and
subjecting every governmental obligation imposed on subjects to a rational and
reflective evaluation.
Asking “how not to be governed?” (28)
For Foucault, the question itself inaugurates both a moral and political attitude,
“the art of not being governed or, better, the art of not being governed like that
and at that cost.”(29)
Critique is the art of not being governed quite so much. (p. 29)
This is the signature mark of what Foucault calls “the critical attitude”(28)
Critique for Foucault is a critical attitude that asks how can we modify our
relationship with an institution so that our behavior is less regulated
14. • What are the limits of the right to govern?”(31)
• “‘To not want to be governed’ is of course not accepting as true...what an authority
tells you is true, or at least not accepting it because an authority tells you that it is
true, but rather accepting it only if one considers valid the reasons for doing so.”
(31)
15. “I do not think that the will not to be governed at
all is something that one could consider an
originary aspiration. I think that, in fact, the will not
to be governed is always the will not to be
governed thusly, like that, by these people, at this
price” (72).
16. “If governmentalization is...this movement through which individuals are subjugated
in the reality of a social practice through mechanisms of power that adhere to a truth,
well, then! I will say that critique is the movement by which the subject gives himself
the right to question truth on its effects of power and question power on its
discourses of truth. (my emphasis, English text, 32; French text, 39)
“Critique would essentially insure the desubjugation of the subject in the context of
what we could call, in a word, the politics of truth.” (32, 39)
19. ANDREA FRASER
FROM THE CRITIQUE OF INSTITUTIONS TO
AN INSTITUTION OF CRITIQUE
• From 1969 on, a conception of the “institution of art” begins to emerge that includes
not just the museum, nor even only the sites of production, distribution, and reception
of art, but the entire field of art as a social universe
• In the works of artists associated with institutional critique, it came to encompass all
the sites in which art is shown—from museums and galleries to corporate offices and
collectors’ homes, and even public space when art is installed there.
• It also includes the sites of the production of art, studio as well as office, and the sites
of the production of art discourse: art magazines, catalogues, art columns in the
popular press, symposia, and lectures.
• And it also includes the sites of the production of the producers of art and art
discourse: studio-art, art-history and, now, curatorial-studies programs.
• And finally, as Rosler put it in the title of her seminal 1979 essay, it also includes all the
“lookers, buyers, dealers and makers” themselves.
21. “With each attempt to evade the limits of institutional determination, to
embrace an outside, to redefine art or reintegrate it into everyday life, to
reach “everyday” people and work in the “real” world, we expand our frame
and bring more of the world into it. But we never escape it.”
22. FRASER
NO INSIDE VS. OUTSIDE OF THE INSTITUTION
“There is, of course, an “outside” of the institution, but it has no fixed, substantive
characteristics. It is only what, at any given moment, does not exist as an object of
artistic discourses and practices. But just as art cannot exist outside the field of art,
we cannot exist outside the field of art, at least not as artists, critics, curators, etc. And
what we do outside the field, to the extent that it remains outside, can have no effect
within it. So if there is no outside for us, it is not because the institution is perfectly
closed, or exists as an apparatus in a “totally administered society,” or has grown all-
encompassing in size and scope. It is because the institution is inside of us, and we
can’t get outside ourselves.”
23. ARTIST RUN CENTERS
LATE 1960-1990S
• Oppositional art centers, alternative art
centers, artist-run art centers
• Hallwalls, Artist Space, White Columns,
Thread Waxing Space, Real Art Ways,
Randolph St Arts, DiverseWorks, Alternative
Museum, PS 1, Franklin Furnace, Highways,
LACE, New Langdon, Sushi, Atlanta
Contemporary Art Center, SPACES, Visual
Studies Workshop, Washington Project for
the Arts, Pyramid Atlantic, Pyramid
(Rochester)
25. ARTIST ARE THE
INSTITUTION/ARE
INSIDE
Institutional critique has always been
institutionalized.
“It is artists—as much as museums or the
market—who, in their very efforts to
escape the institution of art, have driven its
expansion.”
Like Foucault – question is how do we
want to be governed? Or how do we
govern?
27. INSTITUTIONAL
CRITIQUE
“…confronting the institution of art with the
claim that it was not sufficiently committed
to, let alone realizing or fulfilling, the pursuit
of publicness that had brought it into being
in the first place” (Alberro)
Inquiry into the systems of operation and
governance of institutions of art including
museums, galleries, archives, collections,
funders, publications, board of directors, and
more
28. INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE
• Emerges as a term applied to a group of artists working in the early 1970s
• Emerges out of 1960s art practices such as Minimalism, appropriation, Fluxus and
critical theory by Foucault, Roland Barthes and others who questioned authorship,
originality
• Emerges out of 1960s activism
31. Ad Reinhardt
Rough Sketch for a
Leaflet in the “Event” or
“Happening” of a Fine-
Artists Strike, 1961
32. Aldo Tambellini & Ben Morea
The Event of the Screw (1962)
“The Golden Screw Award”
was awarded to MoMA;
similar events took place at
the Whitney and
Guggenheim Museums.
33. “[The Screw] was created to raise the social consciousness of artists. I voiced my
objection to the manipulation I saw in the art establishment which used the artists as
a commodity and financial investments rather than cultural entities.”
Aldo Tambellini
35. protesting what they saw as , “the
imperialist influences of European high
culture” and calling for “the dismantling
and dispersion of any and all organized
cultural forms.”
38. The Black Emergency Cultural Coalition Inc. (BECC) was
organized in 1968 by a group of African-American
artists in response to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's
"HARLEM ON MY MIND" exhibit, which omitted the
contributions of African-American painters and
sculptors to the Harlem community.
Over 150 members by 1971
39. “CONTEMPORARY BLACK ARTISTS IN
AMERICA” PROTEST
• The Black Emergency Cultural Coalition initiated the show with the Whitney in 1969 “for
the support and encouragement of black artists throughout the United States”
• The Coalition charged that the Whitney reneged on “two fundamental points of
agreement” — that the exhibition would be selected with the assistance of black art
specialists, and that it would be presented “during the most prestigious period of the
1970–71 art season.”
• 15 African-American artists out of a scheduled 75 withdrew from the exhibition in
solidarity
40. Whitney Boycott
Called for a boycott an exhibit at the Whitney
Museum of American Art in 1971, after talks
between the BECC and the Whitney to curate an
African American art exhibit failed to achieve
greater participation and visibility for the
African-American artist
41. Benny Andrews Black Emergency Cultural
Coalition protest against the exhibition
Contemporary Black Artists in America, Whitney
Museum, January 31, 1971: “The Moon Walk
Won’t Be as BAD as Our Walk”
43. In 1969 an anonymous letter circulated in the
New York art world, declaring, “We must
support the Revolution by bringing down our
part of the system and clearing the way for
change. This action implies total dissociation of
art making from capitalism.”
It was signed, simply, “An art worker.”
44. AWC TIMELINE
• January 3, 1969: Takis removes kinetic sculpture from MoMA’s The Machine at the End of the Mechanical Age “as a
symbolic act to stimulate a more meaningful dialogue between museum directors, artists, and the public.”
The institution had not consulted him about including his 1960 sculpture Tele-Machine, which made use of
magnets and gadgetry that caused objects to move as if on their own
• January 28, 1969: 13 Demands submitted to Bates Lowry, MoMA Director
• Bates Lowry refuses public forum at MoMA
• Protests/demonstrations at MoMA
• April 10 1969: open hearing at the School of Visual Arts. The event was retitled "What Should Be the Program of
The Art Workers Regarding Museum Reform, and to Establish the Program of the Art Workers' Coalition.
• October 5, 1969, the AWC organized a successful "Moratorium of Art to End the War in Vietnam." The MoMA,
the Whitney Museum, the Jewish Museum and a large number of commercial art galleries closed for the day.
45.
46.
47.
48. AWC Achievements:
Free admission days to NYC Museums
Evening hours
Working with artists/estates to exhibit
work from permanent collection
Better installation methods
Met hires Lowery Stokes Sims in 1975
(first African American curator)
49. • Puerto Rican Art Worker's Collective, 1970
• Members active in establishing El Museo del
Barrio (1969)
• Equal representation
• Fought to establish institutions that reflected
the culture and needs of Latino artists in New
York City.
50. VIETNAM MORATORIUM
• Artists and critics also fought for museums to address broader political issues including the
Vietnam War
• On 15 October 1969, the AWC organized the "Moratorium of Art to End the War in Vietnam"
• The Metropolitan Museum and the Guggenheim Museum did not comply
• Artists who opposed the war, also received funding from MoMA to produce and circulate an
opposition poster
51. I.C. BECOMES A GENRE
Critiquing the system not always political
52. FIRST WAVE OF ARTISTS
LATE 1960S AND EARLY
1970S
“the critical method was an artistic practice, and the
institution in question was the art institution,
mainly the art museum, but also galleries and
collections. Institutional critique thus took on many
forms, such as artistic works and interventions,
critical writings or (art-)political activism.” Simon
Sheikh
53. INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE AS A GENRE
Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel
Buren, Hans Haacke, Michael
Asher, John Knight (artist),
Christopher D'Arcangelo,
Robert Smithson, Dan
Graham, Adrian Piper,
Martha Rosler, Louise Lawler
Looking at the structure and
operation of the museum,
its economics, the issues
artists face (payment,
ownership), intersections of
race and sexism, war, elitism
and the public
54. DANIEL BUREN’S “THE
FUNCTION OF THE MUSEUM”
(1970)
‘Privileged place with a triple role:
1. Aesthetic. The Museum is the frame and effective
support upon which the work is
inscribed/composed. It is at once the centre in
which the action _ takes place and the single
(topographical and cultural) viewpoint for the
work.
2. Economic. The Museum gives a sales value to what
it exhibits, has privileged/selected. By preserving
or extracting it from the commonplace, the
Museum promotes the work socially, thereby
assuring its exposure and consumption.
3. Mystical. The Museum/Gallery instantly promotes
to “Art” status what it exhibits with conviction, i.e.
habit, thus diverting in advance any attempt to
question the foundations of art without taking into
consideration the place from which the question is
put. The Museum (the Gallery) constitutes the
mystical body of Art.
It is clear that the above three points are only there
to give a general idea of the Museums role. It must
be understood that these roles differ in intensity
depending on the Museums (Galleries) considered,
for socio- political reasons (relating to art or more
generally to the system).’
https://eleco.unam.mx/en/3397
-2/
55. THE MOMA POLL OF 1970
HANS HAACKE • In 1970 Hans Haacke proposed a work for the
exhibition entitled Information to be held at the
Museum of Modern Art according to which the
visitors would be asked to vote on a current
socio-political issue.
• The proposal was accepted, and Haacke
prepared his installation, entitled MoMA Poll, but
did not hand in the specific question until right
before the opening of the show.
• His query asked, "Would the fact that Governor
Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon's
Indochina Policy be a reason for your not voting
for him in November?"
• Visitors were asked to deposit their answers in
the appropriate one of two transparent Plexiglas
ballot boxes.
• At the end of the exhibition, there were
approximately twice as many Yes ballots as No
ballots.
• Haacke's question commented directly on the
involvements of a major donor and board
member at MOMA, Nelson Rockefeller.
57. MICHAEL ASHER
A piece created for the Claire
Copley Gallery, Los Angeles, in
1974, involved the removal of a
partition wall shielding office from
exhibition area, redefining the
gallery as a site of administrative,
economic and bureaucratic
procedure rather than as a rarefied
location for the contemplation of
art (i.e., not a heterotopia).
58. BIRDCALLS (1972)
LOUISE L AWLER
“Louise Lawler sounded out the names of
various well-known male artists—
including Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, and
Donald Judd—in the style of birdcalls. The
humor and wit are balanced by the
knowledge that these white male artists
are continually recognized as being at the
forefront of art, its discourses, and its
histories, with no symmetrical attention
paid to the significant contributions of
women artists and artists of color in the
discussion of advanced aesthetics.”
https://hammer.ucla.edu/take-it-or-leave-
it/art/birdcalls
59. GARAGE SALE (1973)
MARTHA ROSLER
In 1973, Martha Rosler held her first Garage Sale at the Art
Gallery of the University of California, called the
Monumental Garage Sale. Clothing, books, toys, and
household items were sold alongside personal items such
as the artist’s private letters; her son’s baby shoes; and,
more unconventionally, used diaphragms.
Interrogating not only the economics of the garage sale but
also those of the art market, Rosler located these issues
within the gallery space, directing them toward questions of
value and ownership in relation to art production
61. SECOND WAVE
1980S
“However, in the so-called second wave, from the 1980s, the institutional
framework became somewhat expanded to include the artist’s role (the
subject performing the critique) as institutionalized, as well as an
investigation into other institutional spaces (and practices) besides the art
space”
Simon Sheikh
62. UNT I T LE D ( MLLE BOURGE OI SE NOI R E )
1 9 8 0 - 1 9 8 3
LO R R A I N E O ’ G R A D Y
• a tempestuous 1950s beauty queen named Mlle Bourgeoise
Noire, or Miss Black Middle-Class. was inspired by the Futurist
declaration that art has the power to change the world.
The persona was generated out of O’Grady’s anger at the racism
and sexism then prevalent in the art world, and her own, complex
relationship to race.
Through Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, she expressed the conflicts in her
own identity, while also, as she stated, “invading art openings to
give people a piece of her mind.”
First performed at Just Above Midtown (JAM), an art space in
Manhattan representing work by African American and other artists
of color.
63. Enough is Enough for Mlle Bourgeoise Noire
Among the poems that Mlle Bourgeoise Noire shouted at the Just Above
Midtown (JAM) gallery reception was:
THAT’S ENOUGH!
No more boot-licking…
No more ass-kissing…
No more buttering-up…
No more pos…turing
of super-ass..imilates…
BLACK ART MUST TAKE MORE RISKS!!!6
64. FRED WILSON
MINING THE MUSEUM
(1992-93)
His intervention exposed the
biases of museums to under-
represent the uncomfortable
historical narrative of slavery.
65. GUARDED VIEW (1991)
FRED WILSON
• Wilson’s experience working as a guard
at his college museum in the early
1990s inspired him to create “Guarded
View.”
• “Noting that besides myself and the
guards, and perhaps, the people in the
food service or the maintenance, you
know, we were the only African-
Americans or people of color in the
museum. And no one in the
professional staff, who decides what
gets put on display, how those things
get described and discussed, what’s
acquired by the museum—to me that
was also very much a part of why I did
this piece. “
66. UNTITLED (2003)
VIDEO
ANDREA FRASER
• 60 minutes in
duration, Fraser
recorded a hotel-room
sexual encounter at
the Royalton Hotel in
New York, with a
private collector, who
had paid close to
$20,000 to participate
67. MUSEUM
HIGHLIGHTS (1989)
ANDREA FRASER
• Fraser posing as a Museum tour
guide at the Philadelphia Museum of
Art in 1989 under the pseudonym of
Jane Castleton.[ During the
performance, Fraser led a tour
through the museum describing it in
verbose and overly dramatic terms to
her chagrined tour group.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=f26NY2xciKk
68. DISCUSSION
What does it mean
to critique the
institution from
inside of the
institution?
How does it fit with
Foucault’s notions
of critique?
70. OCCUPY MUSEUMS
Ritual Rebranding of the David H. Koch
Plaza on the Day of its Dedication (2014)
http://occupymuseums.org/ritual-rebranding-of-
the-david-h-koch-plaza-on-the-day-of-its-
dedication/
71. LIBERATE TATE
2010-2017
Crude, 2010
Liberate Tate was an art collective
exploring the role of creative intervention
in social change. The group aims to "free
art from oil" with a primary focus on the
art museum Tate ending its corporate
sponsorship with BP.
https://vimeo.com/45436934
73. SACKLER PROTESTS
• Nan Goldin led numerous protests
around the world of Sackler family
“artwashing” of opioid crisis.
• Protesters stage a "die-in" inside
Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Museum
to protest the Sackler family's ties to
Purdue Pharma and the opioid crisis.
Remember Fred Wilson’s work – Mining the Museum – read – this work has served as an important model to indigenous artist working with museum collections.
