Artists Questioning the Museum
When we think of art, we generally think of museums. But not all artists have accepted this. Starting with Dada in the early twentieth century and rising again in the Protest era from the 1960s, many artists have questioned the museum as a subject of their work, seeing museums and galleries as an extension of the establishment. Can art ultimately escape the institution? The answer is mostly no. In other words, art can critique the institution, but the only problem is that art is itself an institution. Art can be self-critical, sure, but the only real escape is not to de art, which sounds a little self-defeating.
When Did it All Begin?
We can say that the questioning of the gallery and the museum came with questioning what could be art, which is with the Dadaist artists from around 1917 onward, many of whom also affiliated and associated with the Surrealists.
But the fully-fledged attack arrived with the Conceptualists, Installation, Performance and Land Artists in the 60s. And in fact, it is now common for experimental contemporary art to critique that institution.
Land Art
The Land Art phenomenon of the late 60s and 70s was an effort to join art back to the forces of nature and so-called real life and is therefore connected with the flower child, back-to-nature cults, and the hippie and yippie movements of the time.
Like other experiments from this era, Land Art didn’t necessarily make us re-enter into the bosom of mother earth, though it did loosen the boundaries between the inside and outside the gallery such that sculpture in the ‘expanded field’ (borrowed from the famous essay by Rosalind Krauss) or Kunst im öffenen Raum (art in open space) as the Germans call it, is an accepted mode of approach.
The Lightning Field. By Walter De Maria. 1977. © Estate of Walter De Maria. Via Wikiart
Pioneers in this field include Walter de Maria (b. 1935), Michael Heizer (b. 1944), Christo (b. 1935) and Jeanne-Claude (b. 1935), and Robert Smithson (1938-73). De Maria's Lightning Field (1977) in southwestern New Mexico uses a vast 400 steel poles grid to attract electrical activity from the sky. The shining poles are beautiful in themselves, but the work exists only at the behest of nature's random effects.
"Double Negative", land art created. By Michael Heizer. 1969. Photo by Chris Fullmer. Via Wikimedia Commons
Michael Heizer is best known for Double Negative (1969), a 1500' (c. 450m) trench carved into the side of the mesa in the Nevada desert. Most famous of all Earthworks is Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970), a vast outcrop of rock and earth spiralling from an embankment into the Great Salt Lake, Utah.
The Pont Neuf in Paris, wrapped. 1985. By Christo. Photograph: Eye Ubiquitous/Alamy
Christo, together with his collaborator and partner Jeanne-Claude, have made a career of wrapping things on a mammoth scale: a section of Sydney coastline (1969, calling for 9300 m2 of synthetic fabric and 56 km of rope, and 130 helpers), Pont Neuf in Paris (1984), The Berlin Reichstag (1995) and eleven islands off Miami (1983) have been the temporary hosts to their mammoth condom-conceits.
Smithson stated that he ‘would let the site determine what [he] would build’. How his idea came to him is laced with latter-day mysticism.
To Smithson ‘the site was a rotary that enclosed itself in an immense roundness. From the gyrating space emerged the possibility of the Spiral Jetty. […] It was as if the mainland oscillated with waves and pulsations, and the lake remained stock still’. The Spiral Jetty is in many ways held up as the quintessential example of Land Art.
Spiral Jetty from atop Rozel Point. By Robert Smithson. 1970. Photo by Soren.harward. Via Wikimedia Commons
Smithson's incantatory visions bring to mind another Land artist, Richard Long (b. 1945), who would make his walks the subject of his work, displayed as maps and stone sculptures within the gallery space. Not as uncompromising in his rejection of the gallery as Smithson and his peers, Long's works are known for their elegance and poetry. They have renewed relevance to the world environmental crisis.
Installation and Site-Specificity
Long's work is typical of such art and hard to classify, as it fits into both camps of Performance Art as Land Art. This problem of situating the work was common to the Minimalists, whose geometrically inscrutable works depended on its location for their meaning. Since the work was neutral, the site couldn't be.
View of Federal Plaza with “Tilted Arc” seen from the side. “Tilted Arc” by Richard Serra. 1981. Photograph by Susan Swider/Courtesy of Richard Serra.
Richard Serra (b. 1939), when faced in 1985 with relocating his Titlted Arc (1981), which had been commissioned for the plaza of the Javits Federal Building in Lower Manhattan, declared, 'To remove the work is to destroy the work' but to deaf corporate ears. Carl André (b. 1935) was a repeated advocate for the site-specificity of the work of sculpture. He saw the lines between inside and outside as dynamic and fluid.
Equivalent VIII by Carl Andre. 1966. © Carl Andre/VAGA, New York and DACS, London 2020
When the Tate bought his Equivalent VIII (1966), two layers of firebricks laid out as an oblong slab on the floor, in 1972, a royal ruckus ensued. According to André, the work was a metaphor for a shallow stream. Other works, such as his outdoor sculpture in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris, Roaring Forties (1988), attest to his ongoing project of creating a clinically still space amidst flux. His use of the grid, a format treasured by the Minimalism, for André creates a deliberate tension between containment (the closed block of the form) and endless serialization (the grid goes on and on).
André is notoriously non-committal about the role of site in his work. Notwithstanding this, the lasting effect of the great Minimalist works is a self-consciousness of where the work of art is placed. The implications are formal but also cultural.
As later generations of artists have explored installation, the meaning of the work of art changes according to where it is shown. Many artists base a career on adapting ideas to the places they travel. In this sense, the artist and curator are forever joined because each must be sensitive to the cultural bedrock that renders a work of art great or misunderstood.
Admittedly, this is a cultural relativity that can be taken too far, but especially where visiting and foreign artists are concerned; it urges the audience to be sensitive to the artist's cultural (or gender) trajectory, while the artist is expected to choose work to which his new audience might be receptive. Installation, the art of activating and responding to a specific space, is all part of this ethic.
Happenings and Performance
Among the most radical challenges to the museum are with Performance and Happenings. Alan Kaprow (1927-2006) was one the pioneers, combining the 60s love of protest and communal living with the vaudeville bluster of Dada and Surrealism.
Calling for the immediately present in art, Kaprow categorically declared that ‘the concept of the museum is completely irrelevant’, pursuing alternatives to the prized gallery object with a campaigner’s zeal. Art’s greatest strengths lay in experimentation and the moment of exchange between artist and viewer.
Allan Kaprow center with beard in YARD (1967) at the Pasadena Art Museum (julian-wasser/getty)
Kaprow not only called for a collapse of the gallery but a collapse of genres. He insisted that his happenings were simply 'doing life'. When simple acts ('telephoning a friend, squeezing oranges') are performed with (artistic) self-consciousness, they are made strange and cause us to learn about so much we take for granted.
Lurking in this argument, however, is an admission that art cannot be dispensed with because art is that quality which, if we allow it, makes us take a step sideways and see the word from a parallax angle.
The Art-Life activists did not unfasten art from its institutions any more than free-lovers of the 70s broke the strain of the Cold War or created paradise on earth. But brief escapes did succeed in exposing the permeability of institutions, and that the gallery is just an idea. The gallery idea is the boundary—a wall or a line, or as immaterial as a set of words or expectations—that exists around the work and distinguishes it from the items of nature, use, and workaday habit.
Conceptualism
Conceptualism puts the idea before the work. But this is not a case of the cart before the horse because the real value of Conceptualism, a positive arm of Duchamp's legacy, is to give priority to the ideas and motivations within the work of art to emphasize that the work we see is a remnant of the idea of an act or a trigger to the internal emotive-intellectual work within the viewer. I have covered already somewhat in chapter two, but it is still worth mentioning two major conceptual artists, Mary Kelly (b. 1941) and Hans Haacke (b. 1936).
Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973-9) archives the primary stages of her son's growth and intellectual development through six sub-series of works typically exhibited in an installation format.
Post-Partum Document. By Mary Kelly. Circa 1973-79. Perspex units, white card, sugar paper, crayon, 1 of the 13 units. Via Khan Academy
Each sequence makes the most of the slippage between the bodily and pre-linguistic on the one hand and the intellectualized and linguistic on the other; the formless and the formed. One sequence, Analyzed fecal stains and feeding charts, consists of diapers/nappies collected between when the boy was five and seven months.
Kelly dispassionately examined the number of solids her baby consumed, then correlated to what he excreted using a key of 1-5 where one stood for Constipated and 5 Diarrhoeal. In her notes to the work, she attempted to find the relationship between: '(1) the kind of food and the completeness of digestion; (2) the amount of putrefaction or fermentation; (3) the amount of bile secreted; (4) the amount of fat and water remaining unabsorbed.' The diapers/nappies are presented flat like abstract paintings with the relevant data printed on them; gestural painting meets the hospital.
When first exhibited, the adverse reactions to the work were caused by the way it ostensibly reduced motherhood's joys to a set of bloodlessly clinical criteria. But that was its point.
Just as performance art objectifies the body to reveal that very point at which the body can never be objectified, by reducing motherhood to a set of procedures, Kelly exposed all that could not be expressed or categorized. It is also one of the most compelling and ingenious feminist confrontations of ‘male’ order.
By subjecting an essentially female experience to an analysis foreign to that experience, Kelly exposes the weaknesses both in arbitrary subjectivism and scientific objectivity. The works are themselves unaesthetic, or not aesthetic in a typical sense, so in other words, its exhibition is always a surrogate. Like the best Conceptualist works, Kelly's work makes us powerfully aware of the limits of representation on certain forms of human experience.
Whereas Kelly takes on male systems of knowledge, Haacke attacks the higher echelons of the art establishment, and with unparalleled success. Haacke is a model for today’s politically engaged artists concerned with climate change and militarism.
Since the 70s, Haacke has produced elaborate multi-media installations decrying corporate art sponsors' self-interest or drawing attention to the bureaucratic trails and convenient oversights of major institutions if it means getting what they want. His exhibition 'The Renaissance Society' in 1979 consisted of altered advertisements for Mobil, Allied Chemical, and Tiffany & Co, perverting the messages into declarations of manipulative hypocrisy.
Installation View. One of the paintings during Haacke’s. 1979. Solo exhibition at Chicago's Renaissance Society 1979. By Hanas Haacke. Via Renaissancesociety.org
In 1990 Haacke produced Cowboy with Cigarette, a doctored version of Picasso’s Man with a Hat (1912-3) as a jibe against the cigarette magnate Philip Morris who sponsored a Cubist exhibition at MoMA in 1989-90. But Haacke’s masterpiece was his exhibit Germania in the German Pavillion of the Venice Biennale in 1993. He jackhammered the site, drawing attention to the Biennale's affiliation with Fascist Italy and the scars borne on the German soil. And as an expression of disgust at the commotion of the Biennale itself, it is unparalleled.
Germania, installation views at the German Pavilion, 45th Venice Biennale. By Hans Haacke. 1993. © Hans Haacke/VG Bild-Kunst; courtesy: the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; photograph: Roman Mensing. Via frieze.com
Contemporary efforts to address the corruption of the art market and corporate agendas usually start with the internet. In the mid-2000s, the consortium of artists, designers, theoreticians and scientists 'Platform' in the U.K. (www.platformlondon.org) led a campaign against the oil company BP, calling for people to boycott all oil-sponsored cultural events. This had been preceded by a decade-long multi-linked inquiry '90% Crude' into the 'impact of transnational corporations'. Platform organizes exhibitions, publications, seminars, and educational programs in addition to its everyday rallying.
