Anniversaries, especially those of institutions, often become
opportunities for taking stock. This is true of the ICA in its 60th
anniversary year, and the programming of Nought to Sixty
has sought to implicate itself in the dynamic of critical reflection and
self-questioning which the arrival of the ICA's seventh decade has
prompted. That process of critical reflection has been both explicit and
implicit; explicit in the various events of dialogue and discussion
that have been a key part of Nought to Sixty's programme;
explicit in the texts, like this one, published every month. And that
process of critical reflection is implicit in the form of the programme
itself – "60 projects, 6 months" – which, quite apart from being a good
catchphrase, prompts a variety of questions: Why 60 projects? Why
'emerging artists'? Why shows that last a week? Why openings on a Monday
night? In short, why present a programme of art like this, and not any
other way? And by extension, Nought to Sixty asks a bigger question. Why an institution of contemporary art(s) like this, and not any other?
How
to be an art institution today seems beset by a huge range of
uncertainties and conflicting demands. Sixty years ago, there was not
one institution in London that explicitly championed contemporary' art.
Today, it is the great galleries of old art that seem out of place and
anachronous, and everywhere is a space for contemporary art. So the
project that was the ICA – for an institution explicitly committed to
artistic culture that was speculative, independent and current, rather
than hidebound by tradition and dominated by the sanction of the academy
– is one which now seems to have been realised, and the ICA has become a
victim of its own success. Instead of being driven by the need to
represent forms of cultural practice ignored and unrepresented by the
institutions that represented art, the ICA now finds itself to be just
another 'venue' for that thing which it set out to make visible in the
first place.
So, how to be not just another venue. If Nought to Sixty
presents 60 projects in six months, this points to an ongoing critical
dilemma about the function that institutions of contemporary art now
perform. What does it mean to represent already current artistic
practice today? This is no easy job, when much of the most
self-consciously critical art of the last decades has called into
question the relationship – between art and its public – that is
produced and perpetuated by this thing called the art institution. In
her essay for Nought to Sixty, curator Emily Pethick
describes her approach to her job as curator of Casco in Utrecht, the
defining feature of which "is that it is not conceived of as a gallery
but as an open space, where many different kinds of activities and forms
of work can happen."[1]
Her discussion of the projects she developed there shows how far one
can go from the standard idea of a 'gallery', where particular objects
and works produced elsewhere are brought for presentation to a public.
Nevertheless,
the presentation of works produced elsewhere is still, by and large,
what goes on in these spaces we once used to simply call art galleries.
Yet one paradoxical aspect of the debate over alternative definitions of
what can go on in an art gallery, or 'art space', is that such
alternatives inevitably return to being 'presentations', however much
they attempt to redefine the relation between work and public away
from presentation and spectatorship. 'Presentation', it could be
argued, isn't a relationship produced between people and certain types
of artwork, but is rather a type of relationship between people and an institution, produced, in largest part, by the institution itself. That's why the ability to present is itself a form of power.
That
power, however, is rarely alluded to explicitly. To a cynical observer
of the art world, it can appear as if all institutions that 'present'
are involved in a similar business of inclusion and exclusion. While the
power of that business is an unspoken given; institutions appear merely
as passive presenters of what is 'best' or 'most innovative' in
artistic practice, while obscuring or hiding the fact that institutions
make choices about what not to present, exerting power over how artistic
practices are made visible.
This 'behind the scenes' character
of presentation is the actual relation of power that exists between
artist, institution and public. It's this form of relationship that
leads institutions to various habits of deferral of responsibility in
the way they explain the choices they make. Often this responsibility is
passed to some other institution – artist X has had previous shows in
one or other major exhibition / biennial / museum, which becomes
justification for another show elsewhere. This form of serialised
artistic career, where an artist can move from one institutional
presentation to another, highlights how homogenised the culture of
presentation of contemporary art has become, in the sense that many
institutions replicate the same attention to certain artists once their
significance has become unquestionable. (In this regard, the reputation
economy of much of the art world uncannily mirrors that of the art
market, where artworks are seen as investments whose value should only
go up, not down.)
The active aspect of institutional choice
becomes more visibly unstable, however, when it addresses that thing
called the 'emerging artist'. What is an 'emerging artist'? Where do
they emerge from and what do they emerge into? This is an obvious
preoccupation for a programme such as Nought to Sixty,
which offers itself as a mediator of a thriving scene of artists in the
UK and Ireland who have not had "significant commercial exposure". Nought to Sixty
draws instead "on a network of artist-run initiatives". Again, the
legitimacy of such a programme is based on the sanction of a
constituency elsewhere – the network of artist-run initiatives – and the
process of presentation becomes a job of facilitating the communication
of this pre-existing constituency to another one; that of the ICA's
public. There is of course a lot of truth in this, even though what
remains unspoken are the many exclusions and omissions that are always
part of such programming. But the paradoxical aspect of such
formulations of art as 'emerging' is that responsibility for art
emerging is assigned to itself, or to any other agency other than the
institution which in fact enables its emergence. We could argue that
nowadays the institutions of presentation of contemporary art are
strangely uncomfortable with openly declaring the power that they do in
fact wield. I may be wrong, but the Independent Group, so central to the
establishment of the early ICA, did not claim for itself the
description of 'emerging art'. What it did claim was the legitimacy that
came from championing an art that related to contemporary experience,
rather than the institutionalised conventions of a culture rooted in the
past.
Emerging art only emerges if powerful institutions allow
it to. It is obvious, for instance, that art that cannot be sold will
not emerge out of the 'institution' of the commercial art market. Public
institutions have the option to either merely reflect the conditions of
presentation of the commercial art system, or instead to sponsor and
support different forms of artistic practice and presentation. Since the
late 60s, ambitious art has massively extended the definition of what
can be presented within the institutional sphere of art; that expansion
of artistic possibilities was assisted by – is in fact synonymous with –
the progressive expansion of semiautonomous public venues for new
artistic production such as the ICA. The acknowledgement of the role of
the contemporary art institution in producing an art scene,
and not merely representing an already existing one, lies behind many
recent discussions regarding curatorial practice and the role of the
curator, especially the role of the curator-as-author.
But
curiously, what is largely absent from those discussions is an
acknowledgement of the curator as someone who wields power and makes
substantial decisions of inclusion and exclusion.
Curator-as-facilitator, curator-as-DJ, curator-as-artist – what these
well-worn tropes have in common is the persistent disavowal of the
purely institutional character of the curator's power. It
may be that an artist can curate and that a curator can make art, but –
until all artists are in charge of their own personal art space – the
categorical distinction between artist and curator remains an
institutional one, governed by an inequality of access to resources.
This is the real power of the already-existing institutions of
contemporary art. It was the concentration of power in the hands of
certain institutions that provoked the formation of the ICA (and
subsequently the Independent Group). A couple of generations later, it
was a similar concentration of power that drove the explosion of
artist-run initiatives that characterised the London art world of the
1990s. With the rising cost of property in the last decade, that dynamic
has largely disappeared from the London art scene, shifting from
non-commercial spaces to commercial spaces, and from the artist-run
space to the artist-run event – including the performance evening or
screening programme. It is not coincidental that the period of decline
of the artist-run space is also the period in which the role of the
curator has expanded. But it also the period in which institutions of
art presentation have become increasingly homogenous and
interchangeable, directed to an increasingly mainstream public, while
the process of decision-making becomes increasingly
professionalised
and opaque. This is no coincidence either. What distinguishes the art
institution today is its relative distance from the community of
practising artists (or rather, the separation of the latter
from those institutions that directly represent them). In contrast to
earlier institutional formations such as the original ICA, the usual
contemporary art institution's programme is no longer governed by a
close association with a group of artists or mutually interested
practitioners.
As the ICA goes through a period of self-scrutiny
and revision, how might it rethink itself, in a crowded market of
identikit public spaces for contemporary art that its own long history
has helped to shape? Staying close to young artists, being implicated in
their 'emergence', and acting as a first port of call for ambitious new
art is a good place to start. But if that process is to distinguish
itself from the 'scene' of other similar institutions – each with their
programmes of presentation that appear ready-made, and yet all strangely
similar – it needs to go further. Rather than merely present the
emergent as if the institution has no hand in the matter, the case
should be made for an institution which is argumentative, that openly
discusses the choices it makes and the art it chooses to represent.
Rather
than a taste-maker institution that serves up its own version of the
'contemporary' to an otherwise casual public, this imagined institution
would not only present, but re-present: shaping the attention of
practitioners and non-practitioners alike through discussion of the
questions that drive the shifting tendencies of the art scene; and
harbouring what it disagrees with, as much as what it agrees with. Such
strategies would openly reveal the power and partisanship that all
institutions wield, rather than hiding them behind a false and
inscrutable neutrality. In these ways the institution would avoid
becoming 'institutionalised'. Recomposed of active, conflicting publics
of practitioners and non-practitioners, a forum for opinion and
opinion-former, it might solve the apparent contradiction of being an
institute for the contemporary.
JJ Charlesworth is a writer, teacher and Reviews Editor of Art Review.
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