On Institutionalisation

Rebel without recourse

Peter Suchin responds to Dave Beech's feature

Writing in the publication Chelsea Arts UK, published in 2005 to coincide with Chelsea School of Art and Design's relocation to London's Millbank, the college head, Roger Wilson, observes that it is 'a curious thing' to be organising the many complexities of this difficult move while having 'simultaneously to plan for subversion and creative transgression, as essential to the fabric of the college as the roof over our heads'. It is indeed curious that Wilson can so easily align the history and continuation of one of London's most renowned art schools with transgression and dissent. Wouldn't one expect someone in Wilson's position to be advocating not the disruption of accumulated values but rather the continuation over time of those things - those traditions - that have made the institution that is Chelsea worthy of appreciation and respect? 'There is', notes Edward Shils, 'an inherently normative element in any tradition of belief which is represented for acceptance; it is presented with the intention of producing affirmation and acceptance' (Tradition, 1981). Wilson's ramming together of continuity and subversion goes against the grain of plausibility: either the art school holds to a select body of values and strives to transmit these to its students or it is perversely keen to ratify the refusal of such norms as are asserted within its walls. Operating in such a manner would be an act of disaffirmation, a pulling to pieces of its own ethical and institutional conceits.

Yet Wilson is not alone in trotting out such contradictions. They also operate within Dave Beech's 'Institutionalisation for All' (AM294), in which Beech proposes that 'Institutionalisation occurs when the social system gets a grip on art, threatening art's autonomy, independence and dissent'. 'We do not need to avoid institutionalisation', he concludes; 'we need fuller, wider, and more diverse forms of institutionalisation.'

Though Beech advocates challenging institutions such as museums and art schools from within as well as inventing new, genuinely alternative structures, the most difficult question is something upon which he does not touch: how can one institutionalise something that is by its very nature against institutions, practices, for example, which consciously and unreservedly challenge established - and establishment - positions and beliefs? Institutions are, practically by definition, exclusive and excluding, not open to invasion by what are deemed to be inappropriate or unruly entities or ideas.

'The first condition of art's independence is', Beech remarks, '... its contestation of the cultural field, either by setting up alternative spaces or by occupying existing spaces differently.' Yet in the current, increasingly corporate climate the prospects for setting up genuinely alternative operations are pretty small. The limited existence of those 'alternatives' for which Beech claims institutional status hardly suggest that a radical attack upon Capitalism is in full swing: the Info Centre, Variant magazine, Bank space and Art & Language may all have held (or still hold) potentially radical intentions but to compare them with full-blown institutional structures such as museums and universities is as laughable as it is misleading. Variant is run by, at the latest count, only three people (but with, it is true, excellent intentions); Info Centre and Bank space no longer exist, and A&L, though certainly now firmly established, is not a club one might join. It is more a historicised artistic intervention than an ongoing prospect for social transformation, closer to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood than the Paris Commune or whatever exactly it is that Beech would like it to be.

Beech repeatedly employs the term 'Avant Garde', an expression he never defines. Since the phrase has such a convoluted history it is difficult to see what he specifically means by these words. In Theory of the Avant Garde, 1984, Peter Bürger outlines several kinds of practice for which this nomenclature has been deployed, the most radical of which were Dada and Surrealism, both intent on destroying art itself rather than merely extending its domain. Beech argues that the radical potential of objects such as Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, 1917, is only maintained through a persistent ideological operation, but this is only partly true. Its very acceptance within the walls of that murderous institution the museum are what has rendered its radical force null and void. As Roland Barthes noted in The Pleasure of the Text, 1976, 'the avant-garde is that restive language which is going to be recuperated'. That which operates under the sign of the Avant Garde is always already poised on the brink of an irretrievable demise. Duchamp, in any case, merely radicalised art and its conventions, not the forms and mores of everyday life.

Wilson and others similarly placed can rattle on about facilitating radical art because recuperation today is already in play long before the would-be art student has organised his or her student loan. Chelsea Arts UK could not be glossier if it had been dipped in a bucket of shiny emulsion. It reeks of celebrity and implied economic success, of getting on and 'making it' and being cool. Art's erstwhile marginality, its refusal to kowtow to the senseless sensibilities of business and the entertainment industry are, apparently, no longer viable options for the aspiring artist. Rebellion at the present time is packaged, trapped, strapped down and hung out to dry.

In his contribution to Philosophy in France Today (edited by Alan Montefiore, 1983) Jacques Derrida convincingly defines the contemporary disposition of the university, and possibly the museum too. 'The reproductive force of authority can get along more comfortably with declarations ... whose content presents itself as revolutionary', he writes, 'provided that they respect the rites of legitimation, the rhetoric and the institutional symbolism which defuses and neutralizes whatever comes from outside the system. What is unacceptable is what ... upsets the deeply entrenched contract, the order of these norms, and which does so in the very form of works, of teaching or of writing.' If Derrida is correct, Beech's suggestion that artists enter institutions in order to fill them with a politically progressive content fails to recognise that it is only when institutional forms are critically contravened that any effective transformation can occur.

This feature was originally published in April 2006 / No 295, p38.

Peter Suchin is an artist and a critic.