Aim
- Examine the historical development of practices of institutional critique in relation to the corresponding development of the modern art gallery
- Looking a series of practices - institutional critique
- Focusing on a particular influential artist Michael Asher, looking at avant grade practice
- Importance of art museum - argue that the development of the art museum played a role in the development on a sense of public awareness, individuals belonging to a social body
- Looking at Burger's theorisation of art practice
- Go on to post war period, critique of White Cube, format of modern art gallery
Notes
- The social function of the gallery can be rooted in 19th century public exhibition spaces
- Created a sense of belonging, mystified the role of the individual in society
- Ideological function within wider society
- Marx's ideas of the individual persons place in society
- Integration between individuals - visible public presence in art galleries
- Under capitalism the workers labour becomes a commodity that he or she must sell to live, makes them alien to their labour, no longer feel connected to the products of our work
- Marx notes the workers work becomes an object and exists outside of him, sense of distance from your work
- This economic process (capitalism) developed a class division between the bourgeoisie and proletariat who were forced to sell their labour. A core factor is ideology, a form of social mystification. False consciousness. Man's failure to comprehend his own alienation. Different class interests who have their own take on our place within society.
- TJ Clarke identifies ideologies as systems of values by which particular social classes in conflict with one another attempt to naturalise their own special place in history - the idea that our circumstances are rooted in our material situation, socially constructed understanding in relation to lots of voices
- Day to day have to deal and acknowledge other perspectives - multiple individual audiences that are all contributing
- Social institutions such as churches, schools and the press play an important role in supporting ideologies
- Modernist art museum
Louvre
- An example is post revolutionary France, where the over throw of the Feudal social structure developed new social institutions
- With the rise of the bourgeoisie came the rise of the new public art museum, spaces devoted to the celebration of mans greatest feat
- French revolution core values: liberty, quality, and fraternity
- In pursuit of universal values
- Rationalise shift in society, development of Louvre core component of this
- Festival in Paris joining individuals in society as one, making them aware of their belonging within the public
- Free and equal access to treasures confiscated from the nation from the crown
- Valuable artefacts that were held back from the French peasantry were thrown open to them in this public space
- Displays of acknowledged masterpieces
- Specific political function, promoting the values of the new regime and demoting the previous one
Liberty leading the people
- Quiet political storms, prove to enemies and friends that the liberty we seek is founded in a belief in progress and philosophical symbols
- Condensed French cultural life in to a space
- Cultural development and sophistication of French people, shared cultural life of their state
- Joined them with other citizens as part of a museum audience
- New social structure of french republic - freedom
- It depended on the unequal distribution of means by the French people
- The french peasantry suffered under monarchically rule, poverty of wage labour
- Ideological structure in relation to word myth
- Everyday cultural production appropriate to role of Louvre
- His motivation a feeling of being impatient, resented seeing nature and history confused, ideological abuse
- Certain attitudes are so natural that they are unquestionable
- One of the core procedures of a critique is to emphasise how motions of naturalness have been constructed
- Culturally specific ideological assumptions - e.g. woman are caring men are strong developed by historical development of society, falsely obvious, potentially reduced in prejudice
- Ideologically grounded in relations of production
- Collective consciousness related to the way society produces itself physically and materially
- Material circumstances are generating ideological constructs
- It is mens social existence that determines their consciousness
- Our place in the world generates our believes
- Root of Marx's materialism
- Throughout the 19th century these public spaces developed - exhibitory complex
The Great Exhibition
- Different countries were displayed their ingenuity
- The development of public museums generated spaces for the production of public audiences and the representation of cultural life
- Transfer of bodies from private domains to more public arenas, formed vehicles for broadcasting the messages of power throughout society
- Exhibition all about the power and prowess of different nations
- Countries belonging in a space aware of their cultural achievements in image
- Pivotal role in the generation of public belonging
- Relations between the public and the exhibits, see and be seen, spectacle and survey lance [Foucalut - panopticism - behave and beware of your behaviour]
- Witnesses inclusion within a larger social body, aware of rights and responsibilities
- Pivotal role for each visitor
- Theorisation of art practice, progressive closure of art between museum spaces, modern art came to direct an address to the audiences aesthetic sensibility
- Exhibits addressed the individual, made them aware of their own individuality
Matisse The Snail
- The status of art at this stage is being contested, trying to be held apart form society so it can be free from representing society
- It can be orientated around individual viewing pleasurable
- Avante garde tendance to re-intergrate art with life
- Interaction between art and other practices such as graphic design with the idea of social change and social usefulness, sometimes seen as propaganda
Grafton Galleries
- Colour / shape / formal characteristics started to be understood as emotively expressive, could stand as equivalent to the artists own feelings, generated in relation to abstract components
- Harmonious interactions
- Values developed at the turn of the century in relation to post impressionist art
Gauguin
- Colour is able to retain what is universal but what is inside
- Capture the feelings of the artists encounter with nature
- Harmonious expressive potential
Blaue Reiter
- Later manifest ions art became decreasingly divorced from representation of nature and became abstract
- The freedom that Gaugin claimed for artists to depart from the limitations of reality was celebrated
- Idea of significant form, what is important is formalisation of work to get a response
- Independence of modern art from the natural world
- One can feel their own individuality - focus on own emotions
- Separate these arts from other form of human activity - art no longer has responsibility to represent social reality, now about social pleasure.
- Art now rendered as an autonomous representation
- Focus the production and reception towards disinterested tastefulness, against need and desire
- Convey a type of contemplation
- Opportunity to experience your own intellectual capacities at play
- Autonomy of art is a category of bourgeois society, arts detachment from practical life
- Life's made up of getting things done, for some the development of the modern art gallery became a space apart from the wider pleasures of life
- The institutionalisation of a particular set of values/practices in which the individual might discover aesthetic emotions
- Ideology about the independence of art from the wider spheres of social life
- The citizen in everyday life has been reduced to a partial function, but he can be discovered in art as a human being
- Art gallery, one can experience own aesthetic emotions before an artwork
- Sense of freedom restricted to that space, then cast back in to the world of getting things done
- Post WWI, - Dada movement of negation, negative, seeked to reject cultural values
- Development of autonomous art
- Dada - anti-art, rejection of values of tastefulness, fed directly in to a cult of individualism
- Dadaists attacked things that lead to- control, manipulation and domination
- Question the idea of putting together any kind of rational argument or positive statement, this practice formed along rejection
- Marcel Duchamp - attack on autonomous art - urinal in public exhibition
- Art works aren't independent entities, nothing natural, the way in which it is socially conveyed
- Urinal refused entry to the competition so got friend to photograph it and put image in journal
- The submission caused an interjection - merely a function non-art object, the rejection retrospectively provided the object with art status
- Even though it gets rejected, a debate grows up around it
- Separation between art and life
Duchamp bottle rack that he presented at an art gallery again in different categories
- Art is a beautiful object that should draw an aesthetic response from the audience
- Reduces art to a game but in a sense it is
- Duchamp's gesture shows there is no inherent property that differentiates works of arts from other objects in the world, what makes the different is what we do or say about them
- Criticise art as an institution and its development with a bourgeois society
- Art has become separate from social life, become powerless to transform the wider sphere of practical life
- People come to galleries and engage in work in a particular way
- Create this boundary around it from the wider sphere of social life
- Examine physical structure and social functions of art galleries
- White cube example
- Beautiful, clean environment, only bare essentials, simple chair structure
- Highly finished, clean, polished floor
- White walls, rectangular structure, spotlight lighting system
- Works on display have space to be enjoyed - no interruptions from other works
- Conditions of presentation that remove reference to a particular context
- White cube format became default mode of gallery design
- Coloured pieces stand out against a white background
- Made for the institutional format for the presentation of abstract art
- Structure guides the behaviour of the people in them
Micheal Asher
History of the gallery:
- Prior to Asher's intervention the gallery was separated into an area designated for exhibitions, and an office and storage space at the back of the gallery. These were split by a wall, adjacent to which was a doorway that connected the two spaces. Creating the installation involved removing this wall and refinishing the areas where it had connected with the side walls, ceiling and floor, in order to create a single, seamless, white room
- This wall segregated the office and exhibition space, so Asher turned the gallery in to a white cube environment
- The white cube environment seems like anything that is placed in it is supposed to be art
- But where is the art?
- What do you engage with? Is it the office space at the back?
- Supposed to engage with the room and the people as art
- Asher brought critical attention to how convention sites of artistic display were constructed
- The installation demonstrates how people respond to different kinds of architectural structure in ways that are appropriate to the space, and this is due to the pre-determined social construction of that space
- It had the function of renewing the social order
- By viewing it you are involved with the cultural coding
Old art gallery compared to modern one:
- Thus following Althusser's analysis it is the way that we interpret particular spaces that determines how we interact with them, as they make us aware of the expectations of other people within that space regarding our own behaviour. Here we approach a definition of institutionality, which Althusser broadly groups under the banner of ideological state apparatuses. Thus the modern art gallery joins the list of institutions that through their functioning serve to integrate individuals into a wider social corpus.
Conclusion (from lecture notes)
- Initially the status of the artwork in the new century came under attack from negative avant-garde practitioners such as Marcel Duchamp. Then later in response to the dominance of abstract art in post war America, artists such as Michael Asher began to intervene in the architectural structures of the white cube spaces that had developed to facilitate the presentation of such artworks, bringing emphasis to their ideological function.
- Such practices came to be defined as institutional critique; because of they questioned how these spaces integrated individual gallery visitors within a wider public art audience, and drew them into an interaction with displays that were socially understood to serve as a form of individual self-identification.
- Thus a sense of social belonging, and individualism was perpetuated through the social interaction of individuals with these spaces.
