In the following text it will be attempted to (de) construct the weave of institutional critique through contemporary curatorial practise. It will be questioned in a Derridarian way, how Western society has constructed a semantic, practical, and an operative field around artistic practise and its main characters, based and filtered through a somehow limited language.
Referring to what a critical reading should produce, the Argelian-french philosopher Jaques Derrida, expresses in his texts “The Exorbitant: Question of Method” and “The Engraving and the Ambiguities of Formalism” from Of Grammatology, that “the writer writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely. He uses them only by letting himself, after a fashion and up to a point, be governed by the system. And the reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses.”[1]
Is this only applicable on critical reading? Haven’t other disciplines made language one of the most important elements to construct their own discourse?
Such as literature appears to be forever tied to language, there are other fields as art that have been “benefited” from it. Even though artistic practise aimed to create a “new way of expression” or “communication of ideas”, most of the time it ends tripping over linguistics. It seems that there is no “artistic communication” between the different characters appearing on the artistic scene, if there was, there would not be words in museums, no artistic reviews or critiques in journals, no catalogues, nor other kinds of tools used by artists, curators, critics, spectators, journalists, museographers, among loads of other characters involved. In fact, in other sense, we can turn back to Hegel and some of his followers (such as Arthur Danto), which “predicted” that art was going to turn into text or philosophy.
In spite of this, some might rightfully claim that art operates through a system of signs, which may constitute a language. In fact, Derrida himself suggested that “if art operates through the sign…it can only take place within the system of a culture… Aesthetics passes through a semiology and even through an ethnology. The effects of aesthetic signs are only determined within a cultural system.”[2]
Nevertheless, we should take into account that even those signs can be translated into a text filtered by language. Both image and word (letters), working as signs, refer to something in particular but they are thought, explained, expressed, shaped and even exist through the same language that, as Derrida suggests, operates into a cultural system.
If Clement Greenberg claimed in the past that three-dimensionality was a proper quality of sculpture and that painting should stop borrowing it, why does literature does not claim its own rights? It might be because language is not a proper quality of literature either; in fact the misconception appeared when Western societies thought that they constructed language: it was language which constructed them, their lives and all the social and cultural practises, their weltanschauung is completely filtered by it. As once Ludwing Wittgenstein expressed “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
Now that this has been said, the question is, how could the semantic field around artistic practise be used as critique? Is it possible to make institutional critique through curating? (Saying that most of the time the practise and the dictionary meanings of curating are associated to institutions).
This is not such a recent idea, as there are texts, reviews, symposiums, conferences, and even practical intents that talk about it. For example, “Issues of curating contemporary art and performance”, as its own intro suggests, this was a book which came out from a series of symposia hosted in 2004 and 2005 by the University College for the Creative Arts at Canterbury “on issues of curating as a form of critical intervention into ways of comprehending contemporary culture.”[3] The authors of the book explain how during the 1960s, curatorial criticism became latent as the space of exhibition turned to be a critical tool as important (or even more) as the art object. It is also pointed out that curatorial criticism was different from “that of traditional western art criticism (i.e. linked to modernity)” in the sense that they included the role which the curator played on exhibitions. It is said that in the 1990s, artists and curators were compromised with this “neo-criticality” and to show their engagement, they stretched the parameters of the exhibition to “incorporate more discursive, conversational, and geo-political discussion.”[4] Nevertheless, all this was done in order to establish curatorial practise as a space of critique, indeed, according to them, the curator took the place of the critic.
But, is that doing institutional critique through curating? Speaking about politics does not mean being critical. It seems that it was just a change of role, or better, the appearance of a new character, a new producer of cultural value, which by the way, needs to earn money for a living. This new character now has become an unarguable job vacancy on the artistic sector, mainly on institutions.
It is worth to bring up the point that this “new face” of curating which aimed to do institutional critique, did it sometimes through institutions in a Kantian way: apparently institutions tried to become self critical. That was such a moderate, pink-light way of doing it! Wasn’t it kind of hypocritical? A tricky attempt with a kantian-marxist mask to show the world that the art institution is not authoritarian nor it has an hegemonic structure.
This does not exactly mean that all the critical purposes through curating were hypocritical; in fact, there are plenty of great projects that do a truly sincere institutional critique. Nowadays the job of the curator appears to be much more flexible, what takes me to think that the concept is limited. If practically the concept is trying to expand, then why not doing a theoretical expansion as well?
Referring to this expansion of the concept of curating, Alex Farquharson in the article “I curate, you curate, we curate” says that “new words, after all, especially ones as grammatically bastardised as the verb “to curate” (worse still the adjective “curatorial”), emerge from a linguistic community’s persistent need to identify a point of discussion.”[5] This may be useful, but just to show how the expansion of meaning comes from a need of clarification, and not as a new way of taking the concept into practise.
To revert this, what this text proposes is to work through the meanings of the words that constitute the art weave. That is to say, a deconstruction or an expansion of the semantic field of the words, leaving behind the mental procedure of using words as defined on the dictionary. It will not be the dictionary which defines words, but how do they operate, or even better, how COULD they operate, this means to leave open the condition of possibility.
George Bataille defined the “formless” on his “Critical Dictionary” saying that “a dictionary should begin from the point when it is no longer concerned with the meaning but only with the use of words. Thus formless is not only an adjective with a certain meaning, but a term serving to deprecate, implying the general demand that everything should have a form. That which it designates has no rights to any sense, and is everywhere crushed under foot like a spider or a worm.”[6]
Therefore, the proposal is going to be the publication of a newspaper called “Formless Curation”, making obvious reference to the concepts reviewed before. It will be published every week.
This proposal emerged by going through the ideas of Fluxus and Situationism. It has theoretical elements of both movements, but also with some ambiguous aspects. It will not be engaged to any particular statement or idea and it will have the format of a real newspaper.
Its theoretical framework is based on this text and is also inspired by Wittgenstein’s Tractatus- logico philosopicus. If the questions are: what is a newspaper? What is a museum? What is an exhibition? What does “visiting” a museum or an exhibition mean? What is an artist? What is curating? Then the answers that the Tractatus would give are:
2.014
Objects contain the possibility of all situations.
3.02
A thought contains the possibility of the situation of which it is the thought. What is thinkable is also possible.
Therefore, if I think that a museum can be a newspaper and the curator can literally perform through it, then it is possible, and it is not anymore about the practise being in agreement with what the concept says, but it is about making a concept through the way it can operate. The thing is to feed this idea of a shift of episteme and of structure (in which art and art history have been engaged playing a fundamental role) within the flexibility not only of the semantic field, the discourse, or even the mere “artistic” practise, but with the whole “dispositif.”
Newspapers are a key issue on enhancing and maintaining “the exercise of power within the social body.”[7] They are well located as “truthful” pieces of paper and even if they pretend they are not, they appear to be always engaged to ideological “institutions.” Here, two concepts are going to be deconstructed: newspaper and institution; on one hand, why would a newspaper be exactly as we know it?
And on the other hand, institutions are not only buildings with doors, but ideological fields; then doing institutional critique is criticising ideology.
But the question is, what would happen if the meaning of this rooted words/things/concepts change or expand? It would be a slight micro-possibility (may be utopian, as it is stated that a proposal can be[8]) of breaking or penetrating on the hegemonic structure. This structure is of course sub-divided, and some of those divisions can be the museum as an institutional framework of art, the characters involved, such as the curator, and the tight structure of the media as a “truthful” device.
This newspaper will have the appearance of a normal newspaper, the price will be the same as the cheapest newspaper available, and it will be sold in the same places. It is going to assume itself as a museum and the names of the staff are going to have the same titles as the typical museum staff. i.e. there will be no editor, there will be curators, museographers, etc.
Such as the newspaper, it will have different sections but all of them related to artistic practises. For example, in the business/finance/economy section, the works published may be related to auctions, market, sales, etc. This may be contradictory, but the market is part of the art world and this newspaper is not pretending to hide anything. There will not be any intentional non dit.
Some of the pages will be dedicated to temporary exhibitions (the public will be able to send their works and proposals to the office and they will be analysed and chosen by a committee, then the curator will work with the artist or the artists). Articles, essays, manifestos, critiques, etc. could be published as well. It will be different from a journal because it will not be homogeneous in themes nor practises, but the difference with a traditional newspaper will be that it will not promote itself as a “truthful” space nor it will attempt to construct any particular discourse, the ideal will be to be seen as: an archive and as an artwork itself that can only be judged in a Kantian way.
In conclusion, it is left to be said that this may be one in a thousand proposals of doing institutional critique; in fact, there is nothing original about this one, but the main attempt is to collect several proposals with different ideologies, to deconstruct through several mediums the concept of art institutions, artistic practise, and its main characters in order to aspire to a change of episteme. In this case, the medium aims to be language and to think about it in terms of how the things that it represents COULD operate, and not to understand it as an absolute and breaking point category of practise.
Bibliography:
Bataille, Georges “Critical Dictionary”, in Art in Theory: 1900-2000…An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. By Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 482-484.
Derrida, Jacques, “The Exorbitant: Question of Method” and “The Engraving and the Ambiguities of Formalism, form Of Grammatology, in Art in Theory: 1900-2000…An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. By Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 944-949.
Farquharson, Alex. “I curate, you curate, we curate”, Art Monthly, Issue 269, September 2003: 7-10.
Lewis, Peter, “If X, then Y, A Pure Condition: Proposals and Rehearsals”, /Seconds http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/003/003/articles/01_plewis/index.php [accessed 5 March 2010]
Rugg, Judith and Michèle Sedgwick, Issues in curating contemporary art and performance, (Intellect Books: The University of Chicago Press, 2007).
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, (Oxford: Rhees, 1984).
[1] Jacques Derrida, “The Exorbitant: Question of Method” and “The Engraving and the Ambiguities of Formalism, form Of Grammatology, in Art in Theory: 1900-2000…An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. By Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 944-949, p. 944.
[2]Jacques Derrida, p. 946.
[3]Judith Rugg and Michèle Sedgwick, Issues in curating contemporary art and performance, (Intellect Books: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 7.
[4] [4]Judith Rugg and Michèle Sedgwick, p. 13.
[5] Alex Farquharson, “I curate you curate we curate.” Art Monthly. Issue 269, September 2003: 7-10.
[6] Georges Bataille, “Critical Dictionary”, in Art in Theory: 1900-2000…An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. By Charles Harrison and Paul Wood. (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 482-484, p. 483.
[7] Peter Lewis “If X, then Y, A Pure Condition: Proposals and Rehearsals”, /Seconds http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/003/003/articles/01_plewis/index.php [accessed 5 March 2010]
[8] Peter Lewis “If X, then Y, A Pure Condition: Proposals and Rehearsals.”
