Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

230 Okwui Enwezor
radicalization of the concept of art. Of course, there were radical exceptions
to this orthodoxy such as the Situationist International, South American
conceptualists such as Hélio Oiticica, Cildo Meireles (Brazil), Tucuman Arde
collective (Argentina), Laboratoire AGIT Art (Dakar), and, in the United
States, Hans Haacke, Martha Rosler, Adrian Piper, and feminist-derived
interventions. It is through them that the nature of critique (e.g., commodity,
race, gender, power, the public sphere, art object, spectator) extended
beyond the framework of art institutions. The South American artists actually
raised very important questions concerning the entire relationship of art
to the public sphere and shifted the emphasis from dematerialization to the
production of social space. This came about as a consequence of the artists’
awareness of the dictatorial power wielded by forces of the neoconservative
military apparatus that ruled much of Latin America from the 1960s to the
1980s. In Senegal, Laboratoire AGIT Art moved beyond the philosophizing
of art or the debate about the status of the art object by making the critique
of the postcolonial state and the social context of their activities the
object/subject of their critical inquiry. Guy Debord’s critique of spectacle
remains today more far-reaching than the formal gestures and instrumentalization
of criticality of so-called institutional critique. Similarly Adrian
Piper, Judy Chicago, Mierle Lederman Ukeles, and others brought into the
frame of American conceptual art that most unspeakable of all hegemonic
practices: race, identity, and gender.
One could say that the idea of institutional critique produces a
certain form of tautology in the stylistic conventions it has adopted vis-àvis
the institution as such, all the more so because it has remained parasitic
to the institution rather than predatory. 11 Consequently, it is easy to understand
why museums not only have been able to vitiate the forms of institutional
critique but have successfully absorbed them into the museum’s legacy
of bourgeois ideas of art through its collection. In a remarkable way then,
institutional critique today comes off as an antique object of a utopian rebellion,
reduced to nothing more than radical chic. Its reliance on the discursive
opacity of the institution that not only sanctioned the efWcacy of its
procedures but also certiWes the institution as the very medium of such procedures
is a disturbing effect of its bizarre critical currency, which hitherto
is yet to be fully explored. 12
If the dialectic between modernist and contemporary art has been caught in
attempts at elucidating, within each Weld, what the authenticity of the work
of art and artist (author) is, the unexplored political consequences of this
question take us now to the important question of identity formation, the