Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

The Production of Social Space as Artwork 249
9. Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art, 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of
Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” in October: The Second Decade, ed.
Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloh, and Silvia
Kowbolski (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 119.
10. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markham (New
York: Grove Press, 1967), 17.
11. One unfortunate example of the museological integration of institutional critique
as a museum object and paraphernalia is the 1999 exhibition “Museum as Muse:
Artists Decide” organized at the Museum of Modern Art by Kynaston McShine.
Nowhere was the idea of institutional critique more disarmed and artists more complicit
in the game than this exhibition. More disappointing in this case was Michael
Asher’s take in the exhibition on the deaccessioned artworks from the museum’s
collection.
12. Hal Foster is one of the few critics to have offered a most scathing reXection
of this critical turn in his magisterial text “The Artist as Ethnographer,” in Return
of the Real (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996), 171–203.
13. Ibid.
14. See Sydney KasWr, “African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow,”
in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, ed. Okwui
Enwezor and Olu Oguibe (London: INIVA [Institute for International Visual Arts];
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 88–113.
15. See, for example, Wole Soyinka’s critique of negritude in Myth, Literature,
and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
16. See Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses
(London: Routledge, 1993).
17. Yinka Shonibare and Chris OWli are but two of the most well-known African
artists who have made the critique of authenticity central to their work. In the case
of Shonibare, he has used the idea of excess as a strategy to undercut the power of
the authentic as a marker of cheapness and lack of sophistication.
18. See Achille Mbembe and Janet Roitman, “Figures of the Subject in Times of
Crisis,” Public Culture 7, no. 2 (1995): 323–52.
19. See Cornelia Klinger, “The Politics of the Subject—the Subject of Politics,”
in Democracy Unrealized, ed. Okwui Enwezor, Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer,
Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash, and Octavio Zaya (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz
Verlag, 2002), 285–301.
20. Achille Mbembe, On the PostColony (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 2001), 10.
21. Sydney KasWr has made the important observation that questions of authenticity
of African art were Wrst a value of connoisseurship of the Western collector
for whom the importance of authenticity depended on the establishment of what is
valued as real and what is not valued as a copy or a fake. Therefore, the science of
authentication is no more than a fantasy of projection through the construction of
“tribal style” whereby “authenticity as an ideology of collection and display creates
an aura of cultural truth around certain types of African art (mainly precolonial and
sculptural).” KasWr, “African Art and Authenticity.”
22. Mbembe, On the PostColony, 6; emphasis in original.
23. Throughout, I have pivoted my idea of crisis around Achille Mbembe and Janet
Roitman’s exceedingly important text “Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis.”
24. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at Collège de France,