From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique - Andrea Fraser

Notes

"Condensation Cube, 1963-65, and his MOMA-Poll, 1970, the gallery and museum figure less as objects of critique themselves than as containers in which the largely abstract and invisible forces and relations that traverse particular social spaces can be made visible. Moving from a substantive understanding of "the institution" as specific places, organizations, and individuals to a conception of it as a social field, the question of what is inside and what is outside becomes much more complex." p.279

"However, it was Asher who may have realized with the greatest precision Buren's early understand- ing that even a concept, as soon as it "is announced, and especially when it is 'exhilbited as art'... becomes an ideal-object, which brings us once again to art." With his Installation Münster (Caravan), Asher demon- strated that the institutionalization of art as art depend: not on its location in the physical frame of an institu- tion, but in conceptual or perceptual frames." p.279

"Asher took Duchamp one step further. Art is not art because it is signed by an artist or shown in a museum or any other "institutional" site. Art is art when it exists for discourses and practices that recog nize it as art, value and evaluate it as art, and consum it as art, whether as object, gesture, representation, or only idca. The institution of art is not something external to any work of art but the irreducible con- dition of its existence as art. No matter how public in placement, immaterial, transitory, relational, everyday, or even invisible, what is announced and perceived as art is always already institutionalized, simply because it exists within the perception of participants in the field of art as art, a perception not necessarily aesthetic but fundamentally social in its determination. What Asher thus demonstrated is that the institu- tion of art is not only "institutionalized" in organiza- tions like museums and objectified in art objects. It is also internalized and embodied in people. It is inter- nalized in the competencies, conceptual models, and modes of perception that allow us to produce, write about, and understand art, or simply to recognize art as art, whether as artists, critics, curators, art historians, dealers, collectors, or museum visitors. And above all, it exists in the interests, aspirations, and criteria of value that orient our actions and define our sense of worth. These competencies and dispositions determine our own institutionalization as mermbers of the field of art. They make up what Pierre Bourdieu called habitus: the "social made body," the institution made mind." p.279

"While Asher and Buren examined an object or sign is transformed as it traverses physical and concep- tual boundaries, Haacke engaged the "institution" as a network of social and economic relationships, making visible the complicities among the apparently opposed spheres of art, the state, and corporations." p.281

"Every time we speak of the "institution" as other than "us," we disavow our role in the creation and per- petuation of its conditions. We avoid responsibility for, or action against, the everyday complicities, com- promises, and censorship-above all, self-censorship- which and the benefits we derive from it. It's not a question of inside or outside, or the number and scale of vari- ous organized sites for the production, presentation, and distribution of art. It's not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution. It's a question of what kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalize, what forms of practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to. Because the institution of art is internalized, embod- ied, and performed by individuals, these are the ques- tions that institutional critique demands we ask, above all, of ourselves." p.281