Wilhelm Wagenfeld Table Lamp 1924, Poul Henningsen Table Lamp 1928.
The Institution Within
It is impossible to exist outside the institution of art argues Lisa Le Feuvre.
This spring London saw two solo exhibitions of Martin Kippenberger's work - one at Tate Modern and the other at MOT. Each presented a different approach to exhibiting the practice of an artist whose work operates as a set of attitudes rather than objects. Tate Modern showed the work in a loosely chronological fashion, clustering paintings, sculptures and printed matter largely by medium, with a selection of posters hung in the circulation area outside the exhibition. Central to the display was The Happy Ending of Franz Kafka's 'Amerika', 1994. This was the one room of eight galleries that avoided reducing Kippenberger's practice to a set of discrete artworks. The installation consists of a playing field of tables and chairs that Kippenberger collected and gathered from flea markets, rubbish piles on the street, remnants from his own exhibitions, from other artists and from designers that include Arne Jacobsen and Charles & Ray Eames. Around 40 tables, each with a pair of chairs, are set out on an Astroturf pitch peppered with umpire seats. Stadium bleachers on each side of the gallery invite exhibition visitors to sit and watch the game-in-waiting. This potential sporting amusement gives a strong nod to the systems and endless negotiations that pervade all aspects of society - art included.
MOT's exhibition, titled 'Not Quite Ten Years Without Martin Kippenberger', featured a set of posters by and for Kippenberger. The artist regarded associated exhibition print material as being as important as the defined works themselves, sometimes wholly constructing an exhibition around a title. This interest was foregrounded here in the exhibition publicity that boldly used a quote by Kippenberger stating: 'The exhibition as such is a running gag for the artist. No more.' Including posters by Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons, Lawrence Weiner and Christopher Wool, the small space of MOT became for one month a private club that anyone could join - again drawing on Kippenberger's own interests, this time in the fictional club the Lord Jim Loge. On joining one was presented with a poster designed for the exhibition by Louise Lawler and invited to sit at 'Bar MOT For Kippenberger' to drink and listen to Kippenberger's music, whilst a drum kit sat in waiting amid the posters. A selection of furniture chosensimply for its look, as with The Happy Ending of Franz Kafka's 'Amerika', provided plinths for the audience where one could engage in conversation and ideas.
Although not the symbolic museum venue of Tate Modern, MOT's exhibition captured a sense of Kippenberger's practice far more effectively. It is important to note that this was not by dint of MOT's status as an 'alternative' space, rather the success lay in the attention to the artist's practice. Kippenberger's work operates within the field of art where the exhibition exists as artwork, meaning that a concentration on objects somehow misses the point. Considering this wider realm is the concern of artists engaged with the critique of institutions - and of course 'institutional critique' is a phrase well established within art parlance and history.
Certain artists have become somewhat reductively defined as doing this work - in particular Andrea Fraser, Hans Haacke, Marcel Broodthaers, Michael Asher and Daniel Buren who are regularly cited in the same breath as what has become the genre of 'institutional critique'. There are, though, many methods that artists have used to address the structures of art - from Kippenberger's use of appropriation and self-publicity to Allan Sekula's interrogation of capital, Felix Gonzales-Torres' candy ingestions, Tino Sehgal's onslaught of the audience and Joanne Tatham & Tom O'Sullivan's 'dumb' sculptures. The list can continue much further. These critiques lie in artistic practices that actively engage with the conditions of art-making, rather than seeking a naïve, romanticised position outside of the institution.
Andrea Fraser's parallel artistic and writing practices interrogate these structures of art using a self-reflexive methodology. Writing in Artforum in September 2005, she describes how the myth that 'any radical artistic practices can or ever did exist outside of the institution of art before being "institutionalized" by museums is contradicted at every turn' by the writings of many artists now saddled with the institutional critique rubric. In this text she considers the 'institutionalisation of institutional critique', urging a questioning of what this now familiar phrase actually means and represents. Dave Beech also addressed the ubiquity of notions of institutionalisation in an Art Monthly article earlier this year, opening with the statement 'institutionalisation in art is taboo' (AM294). He identifies the responsiveness of symbolic institutions and artists' investigations into the structures of art as creating a situation where avoidance of the 'institution' is near impossible, noting how the industry of art is more than capable of recuperating radical and conservative artists alike. For him, 'institutionalisation occurs when a social system gets a grip on art, threatening art's autonomy, independence and dissent.' Unlike Fraser, Beech states that previously 'institutionalisation lurked ominously in the distance for the avant-garde radical' suggesting that there was once a time when art could be autonomous from the institution. Was this ever really the case, though? Surely at the moment of conscious visibility or recognition any artistic production will become a part of the institution of art.
Responding to Beech, Peter Suchin discusses - with some scepticism - the tautological desire for organisations to 'plan for subversion and creative transgression' - defining the institution as an entity that, by definition, is 'exclusive and excluding' (AM295). Beech's observations on 'institutionalisation for all' reveal that the very notion of working outside of the constraints of the institution has become a misnomer. A clear example of this is the relatively recent trend of siting 'project spaces' within established organisations both in museums and commercial galleries. Both the project space and the museum or gallery are institutions. It is difficult to understand the purpose of the 'project space' in this context. Is it intended as a trying-out-space to see if an artist can 'upgrade'? Is it a claim on the counter-institution of the 'artist-run space' in an attempt to regain youthfulness? Or, even, is it a space where the dissenting voice is given a 'safe space', enabling a degree of control over any discussions questioning the museum or gallery. On the other hand, the so-called 'independent' project space often adopts the grammatical structures of the museum. This makes sense as these are assumed forms of good practice, but often it results in bureaucratic curatorial and programming strategies that are unnecessary and reminiscent of the future that Kippenberger evokes in The Happy Ending of Franz Kafka's 'Amerika'. To pit 'establishment' and 'alternative' against one another, though, is a task that will fail before it begins. Things are just not so clear-cut. A project space can be seen to be as 'establishment' as a museum, indeed the very term 'project space' trips off the tongue a little too easily now for it to be seen as anything other than standard practice.
Taking Suchin's definition of the institution as 'exclusive and excluding' points to the importance of some kind of dissenting counter-institution to gauge the difference. In this situation rather than disrupt the establishment, the dissenting voice reinforces establishment power; effectively becoming a part of it. Beech defines institutionalisation as an established, recognisable object that is constructed of systems capable of limited critical agency. Against this established organisational ideology the artist-as-free-agent is presented as the adoption of a rather heroic stance. In 2001, Fraser's performance Art Must Hang made direct reference to this oppositional myth. She re-presented a drunken opening speech Kippenberger made at Club an der Grenze with herself in the starring role, having memorised the talk phonetically from a recording. In creating this reconstruction Fraser questions the assumptions of the construction of the artist. Kippenberger is often regarded as having worked outside of the institution, but his work fully functions within its structures. The duality is false, predicated on a modernist stereotype of the artist. Of course the artist is a part of the institution, as he or she exists as an identifiable agent within what is recognised as the realm of art, beginning with the art school as a training ground for would-be artists.
In 1973 Dennis Oppenheim made a work titled Recall addressing the art school experience, and it still holds a resonance some three decades later. A video, tightly focused on Oppenheim's lips, shows the artist talking about his art school years. His narrative shifts in and out of focus - slurring as the artist inhales turpentine in an attempt to evoke the past. He describes his art school years in a rambling stream-of-consciousness monologue, using the 'paint medium to draw me into the past ... as a sensory catalyst ... activating my reflections as a painter ... an art student ... during the 50s'. He talks about the difficulties of getting a painting right, of overbearing art teachers, of smoking on fire escapes, of John McCracken's ability to 'make things' and of the impossibility of art-making itself. Veering between humour and melancholy, these stories are not dissimilar from the ones all ex-art students have recalled at some point - tales of being misunderstood, misdirected and then, ultimately, of refuting the entire art school system in some way. This work offers a questioning of an assumed facet of art-making practice within the conditions of art-making itself: complaining about art school is not radical - it is the standard. The institution of art is not simply in the apparatus of reception and distribution; it is also in the production and surrounding discourses.
As the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu points out, the realm of art is a field of operations that, like any other, acts on and is acted upon by other fields, such as power, politics and economics. Bourdieu identifies the social and historical structures within which choices and cultural products are made. Through habit and repetition certain beliefs become assumptions and perceived fact, creating what Bourdieu terms as the 'habitus' - a socialised subjectivity whereby the institution operates as a set of attitudes. Modes of behaviour, or dispositions, are passed on through generations and socially reinforced through education and culture. The habitus, like any attitude, is flexible over time as moods shift, yet it exists as a constructed set of widely held beliefs that are often left unchallenged. If the field of art is a set of attitudes then it is impossible to exist outside the institution of art. Fraser describes how 'the institution is inside of us', whereby the 'us' will always include the individual perceiving or producing the work of art, no matter what their set of knowledge is or who they are. So by definition, the critique of the institution has always been institutionalised. The museum and gallery become visible symbols for this institution, and as such become a shorthand for institutionalisation. The assumption that the art institution is taboo cannot be a tenable position as the institution does not exist simply in the symbolic presentation of art to audiences in museums and galleries. Rather than challenge the establishment, knee-jerk alternative positions can serve merely to reinforce its authority status. In a wider context one can argue, as Michel Foucault has done in his studies on governmentality, that visible counter-arguments are essential to the success of the state. A counter position underlines the power and success of the state by providing a harmless outlet for radical ideas.
The shift from an abstract notion of institutionalisation to a more specific idea of the terms under which a reduction of critical content takes place enables discussions to be charged with more engagement. The institution is secondary to artistic practice itself, and within this unavoidable structure artists are constantly moving beyond assumptions that seem natural, or simply the-way-things-are - and this included working with the taboo of the institution. If the institution is considered an attitude, or set of attitudes, then it demands that ideas are constantly challenged. Criticality can take unexpected forms - indeed it must do to ensure a shift away from existing assumptions.
Lisa Le Feuvre teaches at Goldsmiths College, is curator of contemporary art at the National Maritime Museum, London, and curated 'Dennis Oppenheim: Recall' at MOT, London February 18 to March 25 2006.
Illustrations:
1. Andrea Fraser, Art Must Hang, 2001.
2. Dennis Oppenheim, Recall, 1973
3. Joanne Tatham & Tom O'Sullivan, Think Thingamajig and Other Things, 2003
