Some Alternatives to Institutional Critique
Carey Young, "Speech Acts," 2009. Installation view at Contemporary Art Museum St Louis. Photo: David Ulmer.
In 1974, Hans Haacke mounted an index of the museum’s corporate sponsors and board of trustees along the Guggenheim’s walls. The work, simply titled, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees, bared the political and economic affiliations behind the exhibition’s proverbial curtain. For Haacke, the work’s site (the museum) became the “institutional membrane” linking artistic avant-garde practice to global corporate and political networks — as it was for many of his earlier air flows and condensation cubes — by way of the cultural negotiations between exhibition sponsorship and museum board membership. And, as Benjamin Buchloh of October wrote, such work “turned [the self-reflexivity of conceptual practice] back onto the ideological apparatus itself, using it to analyze and expose social institutions from which the laws of positivist instrumentality and the logic of administration emanate in the first place.” For Haacke, as for other conceptual practitioners such as Marcel Broodthaers, the late sixties and seventies were a critical period for revealing the entangled relationships between cultural production and the corporate institution — be it the Guggenheim Museum or Philip Morris, official sponsor of the seminal 1969 exhibition, When Attitudes Become Form. Yet, as much of this work was situated within the museum itself, these radical conceptual strategies were quickly subsumed under their own “institutionalization.” Today, this kind of Marxist materialist analysis that compelled Haacke to disturb the commodity system of art production seems to have been extinguished.
There was a moment when institutional critique held some currency as a proposition for (and often against) the ethical standards of arts institutions. But is this brand of critique a viable, or even a compelling, possibility for art practice today? It’s nothing new to say this genre of conceptual art—in its dematerialized, utopian resistance to market forces and the corporate institution—had long ago foreclosed on its own radical potential. As Ian Burn, for one, recalled in hindsight, “Such intellectual Luddism was unashamedly idealistic… perhaps the most significant thing that can be said to the credit of conceptual art is that it failed.” Despite intention for revolution, as Burn suggests, the contentious history of institutional critique was troubled early on by the avant garde’s inevitable, and ineluctable, affiliation with economy. Its pursuit of criticality, in other words, was largely quashed by its failure to produce more than merely revelatory gestures.
And, until recently, largely neglected in scholarship was the fact that conceptual art was marketed as commodity from the moment of inception. In 1967, Seth Siegelaub—an art dealer famous for branding and first promoting the neo-avant garde in New York—drafted a brochure to prospective corporate collectors. In it, he advertised the “marketability”—the use-value—of the corporate world’s partnership with culture. Siegelaub’s advertising prospectus would hardly be shocking today. Indeed, corporate sponsorship has become de rigueur in the new millennium, and increasingly, images of radicality and revolution—now often perceived as impotent gestures—are marshaled by global brands and marketed back to us as exchangeable commodities. All told, the great weakness of institutional critique (as shaped by Haacke, Fraser, Wilson, Asher, and others) as an alternative model for production was its failure to move beyond the exposure of unethical (or questionable) institutional practices in favor of effecting real change. Artist-activists certainly took up this mantle a decade later, as did a generation of artists who began to move beyond the museum frame to explore other sites of information.
