The Arts in Society Conference, Budapest, June 2013
(Presentation using visual material)
Dr. Alec Shepley and Professor Steve Dutton
Lincoln School of Art and Design
The University of Lincoln, UK
Contact: ashepley@lincoln.ac.uk
_______________________________________________
The Artists’ Institute and the Institute of Art
Alec
Introduction
“Under the intensity of creative experimentation (the situation and challenge of
artists’ practice) each work asks itself (and therefore us, too) whether there might be
a ‘place’ where culture has not yet reached; it hopes to be that ‘place’ – an elsewhere
that is not yet a ‘place’ on culture’s terms”1
If Institutional interests operate such an enclosing grip on the representation of
cultural production is the prospect of a ‘place for art’ simply a utopian pipe dream?
Drawing on our own practices as artists and academics where we attempt to both
subvert and use the rhetoric and structure of institutional knowledge production,
either by creating mock Institutes and Departments or working with processes of
ruination and institutional collapse, we will discuss a recent rise in the number of
artists and artists' projects which are occupying Institutional structures in order to
‘place’ ambiguous, complex, conceptual and/or contradictory forms of practice, in
particular we will look at such projects as The Institute of Beasts, Entropic Union, The
Department of Wrong Answers and the Faculty of Invisibility.
Our own respective practices demonstrate a knowing relationship to the
impossibility of housing what Jon Thompson has described as the “mysterious
ontological terrain within which all art must find itself”2
But if this terrain were a place, what would it look like and how do our current
institutions access it without closing it down. How do we, as both artists and
academics place and house complexity? Could the institute itself, as a place of
articulation, examination, deconstruction and interrogation, be 'in ruins'?
1 Phillipson, M. 1995 ‘Managing ‘Tradition’. The Plight of Aesthetic Practices and their Analysis in a Technoscientific Culture’ in
Jencks, C. (Ed) 1995 ‘Visual Culture’ Routledge, London and New York.
2 The Collected Writings of Jon Thompson. Ed. Akerman and Daly. Ridinghouse. P.407
1
These questions become more ever more critical if we are to create new sites and
places for art and education, and new institutions for new forms of practice and
relationships between art and society.
We are speculating on the ‘possibility of place’ re-imagining itself and what a new
form of institution might look or even ‘feel’ like. We are discussing the potential of
‘place’ which is dedicated to the housing of its own impossibility and cite examples
of recent practices and projects related to the concept of The Institute of Ruin is an
idea in the making, the suggestion of a place which is not yet a 'place', a place which
is always destroying and re-imagining itself anew.
Steve
Taking what could be described as a very short sabbatical out of my University role
at that time, I undertook an Arts Council England funded residency, as part of my
collaboration Dutton and Swindells, at Ssamzie Contemporary Art Space in Seoul,
South Korea through January to April 2008. During the course of this residency our
collaborative practice, which already prioritised nebulous and ambiguous processes
of production was thrown into even ever more chaotic territory by finding ourselves
in this entirely new environment.
Nevertheless, in time, not only did we soon feel we had little to lose, we also
recognised that we had little to hand and that our only resources were our ourselves.
In the midst of this precarious situation the ‘studio’ became a site for the production
of an output/body of what seemed like a series of random manifestations and
eruptions, the driving force of which, looking back, was probably no more or less
than the lack of centre and the subsequent proliferation of ‘selves’ we were
experiencing at the time.
Our entire project then became the production of a form of self–curation, a project
possibly more akin to an on-going performance than a workshop or production line
of artefacts. In other words, our work, which was already a rather obtuse and
ambiguous form of practice (geared towards problematizing itself and its reception
rather than formal resolution, pointed towards the presence of contradictions, of
potency and impotency for example, and towards the manifestation of
‘incomprehension’) was veering ever further into what for us was an unknown,
leaping from one form, strategy, trope, material, idea or method to another in an
unruly gathering of multiple appearances and disappearances.
Rather than try to rein that in, our choice was to give that unpredictable process
some room to flourish and grow. In short we wanted to allow the unpredictable, the
chaotic and the contrary back into the work in the spirit of negating our own recent
institutionalising experience within our respective ‘day jobs’ and the puncturing of
the symbolic power those ‘day jobs’ held over us, our practices and indeed our ‘lives’.
2
It would seem, however, that you could take the artist out of the institution but not
the institution out the artist, as within a month of our residency we had given our
project the working title of, ‘The Institute of Beasts’
The naming of work in progress can be intended initially as no more than this means
of identification, a pet-name, as any intuitive title may be, but it soon became clear,
that even if it was not exactly pre-planned, it was also no accident that this ‘name’
contained a contradictory rhetorical conflation of the ‘ruly’ in the form of the
Institute and the ‘unruly’ in the form of the Beasts and their unpredictability.
Like this beast. Having fallen asleep...
Here was an ‘Institutional’ model as a structural mechanism trying to accommodate
what we considered to be increasingly errant and divergent processes which were
developed both prior to and during the residency period which were, frankly,
proving impossible to house.
Later, I would go on to suggest that we were attempting a deliberate failure, perhaps
willing our own internal institutionalisation to collapse which is the point where Alec
and I picked up the conversation. We were as Emma Cocker has pointed out ‘tilting
at windmills’, attempting and knowingly failing to establish an impossible taxonomy
of unruly ideas and forms which could (not) be housed, or at the very least, managed,
under the auspices of said faux Institute as we considered these thoughts and
actions, rightly or wrongly, to be ‘animal’, in the simple sense that what we were
trying to work with was an encounter with a ‘subject’ which was unpredictable and
to a large extent, ‘unknowable’.
Lets not forget that we were ‘academics’, but were ‘academically’ trying to work
outside of the academy.
The whole project then could be described, possibly somewhat depressingly, as a
critical exercise in Institutional futility, which of course doesn’t preclude succeeding
as something else, indeed possibly quiet the opposite.
To put it bluntly, ‘The Institute of Beasts’ came about from sitting at a table, in a
space, in a city, wondering what the hell we were going to do with ourselves and
with our time, in much the same way as many studio based ‘scenarios’ might appear
in art schools across the world at that point of entering what Jon Thompson
describes as “ the mysterious ontological terrain within which all art must find
itself”3, which I’m sure resonates with colleagues in the room.
Of course, institutions are by their nature habitual and habit forming. It should have
come as no surprise to us that we were feeling our way around and attempting to
3 Akerman and Daly (Eds), ‘The Collected Writings of Jon Thomson’ Ridinghouse.
p.407
3
subvert or at least divert some of the institutional rhetoric and structures we had
come to inhabit and be inhabited by and which we were subsequently ‘aping’.
Perhaps it was inevitable that we would start to play with, or upset, or breathe life
into, the very forms and structures from which we had felt we had temporarily been
liberated, namely the educational institution, in what could probably be rightfully
thought of as a semi-cathartic process.
Over to Alec
In much the same way I have for many years now been dealing with not dissimilar
concerns in my work but here centred around notions of the ruin as an ideal place,
the nomadic studio and the ‘incomplete project’ exploring whether ‘the work’ itself
or project is in a state of ruin.
Playing with abortive ideas, projects that often fail to remain intact, running contrary
to institutional imperatives and opening up the nascent space or what Derrida
referred to as the fragile construct that is the frame or ‘parergon’4.
Referencing often broken and damaged structures associated with the studio and
classical painting, my work explores how the artwork/viewer/location relationship
can be disrupted through provisionalised engagements. Spatial ‘disturbances’ are
created in institutionalised meaning and function5.
The artwork experienced the ‘incomplete project’ or as ruin is one by-product of this
process.
Briefly one example of this was recent project entitled [sic].
[Sic] indicates that quoted words have been transcribed exactly as spelled or
presented in the original source, complete with any erroneous spelling or other
presentation. In this project I took my studio as my ‘text’ and installed it as a
transcription of my studio in the gallery throughout October 2012.
The transcribed studio occupied most of the gallery space and comprised various
assemblages and constructions, neon lights and studio devices, purposefully
informing anyone in the space that any mistakes or apparent errors in the
transcribed material did not arise from transcription faults but had been repeated
intentionally.
The piece was reproduced exactly as I had set it down with the main intention being
to indicate a new beginning: to what Joseph Beuys referred to as revolutionary act6
4 Jacques Derrida 1987 ‘The Truth in Painting’ The University of Chicago Press.
5 Joseph Kosuth 1977 – see discussion of the first (physical/material) frame and the second (institutional/conceptual) frame in
‘Comments on the First and Second Frame’ in Guercio, G. 1991 ‘Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966 – 90’ pp.
169 - 173, Cambridge Mass. MIT Press.
6 Joseph Beuys (original source as yet unknown) “Let’s talk of a system that transforms all the social organisms into a work of art, in
which the entire process of work is included… something in which the principle of production and consumption takes on a form of
quality. It’s a Gigantic project.”
4
“a system that transforms all the social organisms into a work of art, in which the
entire process of work is included… something in which the principle of production
and consumption takes on a form of quality”
The ‘work’ signaled itself as a ‘place in progress’ – as Ronald J Onorato referred to as
‘blurring the boundaries’ between the gallery space and the artwork7. This had the
effect of foregrounding a system of performed art practice that transformed all the
social interactions in the space into the work of art, in which the entire process was
included within the work.
It was a place but also a moment (albeit brief) where image became object or
substance again – and the image again - everything was where it shouldn’t have
been on the gallery’s terms. Where figure, ground, substrate, support, architecture
unfolded/peeled away from one another and became undone, revealing void - space
before it has disappeared8 - fresco in reverse if you will. Fluctuating.
Daniel Buren once said that it is in the studio that the artwork is closest to its own
reality – beyond this place it is prone to endless manipulations, interpretations and
vested interests9.
Whenever I read this quote I’m reminded of ‘Las Meninas’ by Diego Velasquez and
Foucault’s discussion about the way Velasquez he played with subject/object
suggesting an act of ‘unplaceability’ and the notion of time or moment with place.10
In this spirit [Sic] playfully questioned and made humorous comment on the
boundaries around ‘art’ and any institutional frameworks at large, and drew
attention to mistakes, running repairs, wonky constructions and calamitous
assemblages, emphasizing erroneous logic and resisted the commodification of art.
It was a place where what Miwon Kwon11 referred to as our fictional selves could be
in the space of unmaking, where culture has not yet reached.
Another example is Distance2 from 2011 in Sofia, where fragments from the studio
were strewn across the gallery intermingled with items selected from the museum
store to create an ‘artwork as campsite’ and attempting to place the artwork [as
decoys] at quite some distance from anything that could be termed ‘art’.
As Henri Lefebre wrote:
7 Onorato, R. J. 1997 ‘Blurring the Boundaries: Installation Art 1969-1996’ in Farrell, A. (Ed.) 1997 Museum of Contemporary Art San
Diego/Distributed Art Publishers
8 Jean Baudrillard, J. 2009 ‘Why hasn’t everything already disappeared?’ Seagull
9 Daniel Buren, D. 1987 ‘The Function of the Studio’ in Krauss, R. 1987 (pp. 200 – 207)
10 For a discussion of this painting see Michael Foucault, 1989 ‘The Order of Things’ Routledge pp.3-19
11 Miwon Kwon, M. 2000 ‘One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity’ in ‘Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art’
(ed. Erika Suderberg) University of Minnesota Press, pp38-63.
5
“Inasmuch as abstract space [of modernism and capital] tends towards homogeneity,
towards the elimination of existing differences or peculiarities, a new space cannot
be born (produced) unless it accentuates differences.”12
In her essay ‘One Place After Another’, Miwon Kwon13 investigates theoretical and
conceptual issues surrounding definitions of art practices associated with site or
place and what is at stake in ‘radical positionality’, itinerant artistic practices and
resisting the commodification of art - what Erika Suderberg in her introductory essay
refers to as a “bending of the structures of exhibition and reception.” 14
Paradoxically (and as perhaps a …cautionary? note) in resisting or circumventing the
problem of the art object’s commodification Kwon argues that it is now the
performative aspect of the artist’s mode of operation that is circulated as an art
commodity – artists have adopted managerial functions of art institutions15 in an
“aesthetics of administration.”16
Nevertheless, she argues, despite a proliferation of ‘artist/nomad/aesthetic
administrator’ and the loosening of relations around exhibition and reception the
phantom of a site as an actual place remains – perhaps as a “compensatory fantasy
in response to the intensification and alienation wrought by a mobilized market
economy (following the dictates of capital).”17
Artist/itinerant, provisionality, theatre, camp site, performance space, aesthetic
distance and control, hauntings, discursive sites and fictional selves are all
behaviours which are concerned with performing the unnamed place or what
Marina Abramovic once referred to as places of power18 - the place where culture
has not yet reached.
It’s the space as yet unnamed before it has disappeared into culture.19 Is it too much
to ask here that the art education institution can ‘hover’ between these states?
Through the course of our projects various notions have developed such as my
ruinous projects and provisionalised spaces and Steve’s sub-departments of folk art,
celestial mechanics, love birds and music, where birds, chickens, hamsters and dogs
were enlisted as faculty members, all continue attempt to create a place,
conceptually, aesthetically and physically which was productive towards creating the
conditions within which some thing take place.
12 Henri Lefebre, 1991 ‘The Production of Space’, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell) p52.
13 Kwon Ibid
14 Ibid, p14.
15 Ibid, p53.
16 Benjamin HD Buchloh, 1991 ‘Conceptual Art, 1962-1969: From Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions” October
(winter 1991): 105-43.
17 Miwon Kwon, ibid p57.
18 http://www.pbs.org/art21/season-6-features/viewer-qa-responses-from-catherine-opie-el-anatsui-and-marina-abramovic
19 Jean Baudrillard ibid 2007
6
Thus it is hopefully in the spirit of this conference to ask ‘how does the institute
perform this taking place which are surely the conditions for and the conditions of an
art practice?’
As I said just now it is not our intention here to dig into that body of work, things
have to move on anyway, but it may be useful as a way of thinking again about the
institutions we currently inhabit.
Michael Phillipson wrote:
“Under the intensity of creative experimentation (the situation and challenge of
artists’ practice) each work asks itself (and therefore us, too) whether there might be
a ‘place’ where culture has not yet reached; it hopes to be that ‘place’ – an elsewhere
that is not yet a ‘place’ on culture’s terms”20
Can we then explore whether there might a ‘place’ where culture has not yet
reached, whether art can be that place – an elsewhere that is not yet a place on
culture’s terms21 and whether the institution can be a place which is ‘not yet a
place’.
On returning to the UK following such productive times and to quickly once again
becoming a part of the academic framework, enmeshed in the bureaucracy and
often [seemingly] chaotic institutional imperatives it didn’t go unnoticed to us that
there were a number of other artists’ projects around which were also employing
the nomenclature of the educational Institution appearing variously an Institutes,
Faculties, Departments or even a University and there was the inevitable question of
what might this proliferation of artists’ ‘institutes’ and ‘departments’ mean for those
of us who teach and work in the more conventional ones?
Steve
Thinking specifically of such projects as our own but also for example Inga Zingbrich’s
Faculty of Invisibility for example, or Wysing Art Centre’s The Department of Wrong
Answers, or The University of Incidental knowledge.
It seems doubtful that artists who are wishing for some sense of institutionalisation
create these projects.
More likely we would suggest an act of appropriation of the institution by these
artists, a form of insinuation into institutional language and rhetoric of these
institutions, in an attempt to get back some form of ownership and control. A form
20 Michael Phillipson 1995 ‘Managing ‘Tradition’. The Plight of Aesthetic Practices and their Analysis in a Technoscientific Culture’ in
Jenks, C. (Ed.) 1995 ‘Visual Culture’ Routledge London and New York. pp.202-203
21 Ibid
7
of rhetorical occupation22 - a way of ‘de-institutionalising the institute as a
performative process.
We are all familiar with working ‘outside’ the institution but the reality of working
this way could appear to be the ‘compensatory fantasy’ referred to earlier or to put
it bluntly - a cop out!23 According to Professor Mike Neary ‘place’ is key in any
attempt to create radical new forms from out of the ruins but we must be guard
against mere fetishisation of the institution and its apparatus.24
For example, founded in 2006 Inga Zingbrich’s Faculty of Invisibility describes itself as
follows,
‘The Faculty of Invisibility composes itself of a group of artists, practitioners,
designers, theorists and teachers who mutually carry out an emerging institute.
…..The Faculty does not stage events and does not take public appearances, besides
issuing its communications. As such the Faculty of Invisibility appears to be in
disengagement, a context in withdrawal.” (my italics )
And
“The Faculty invites practices which ……reside in the shade of the visual arts, explore
the virtual, explore the invisible, address the border between vision and imagination,
explore the usage of language both as a tool of poetry and as tool of definition,
dealing with psychic phenomena, address other invisible dynamics and phenomena.”
Originally the Faculty of Invisibility housed departments, such as the Department of
Uncertainty, the Department of Haunting and the Department of Doubt.
Later in 2008 The Faculty of Invisibility described itself for their project ‘Dark Light”
at Transmission Gallery in Glasgow in 2008 as
“engaging itself with the processes of institutionalisation. Exposing the mechanisms
of these processes by means of quotation, the Faculty of Invisibility tries to put them
at play” and “suggested a place situated in the realm of memory rather than offering
an attendable exhibition”.
Since 2008 then, “the Faculty of Invisibility has been less an institution that
establishes itself in terms of chronology, continuity and a definite place or position
22 Educational projects which are seeking to democratise knowledge production are nothing new and I would also make a distinction
here between such projects as ‘The University of Strategic Optimism’ coming out of Goldsmiths, ‘the Free University of Liverpool’,
‘The Social Science Centre in Lincoln’ or The Alternative Art College network, all of which could be said to be attempting to provide
real alternatives in Higher Education and are actively developing a practice of cooperative spaces and practices with a priority of a
foregrounding of non-credentialised experience of knowledge. The question here is to think in terms of how the artist/student/teacher
‘produces’ the institution within which they are themselves being ‘produced’
23 see discussion in Miwon Kwon, ibid
24 Neary, M. 2012 ‘Student as producer: an institution of the common? [or how to recover communist/revolutionary science]’
http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/subjects/csap/eliss/ELISS_vol4_issue3_guestpaper
8
of speech, than a gesture of constituting and withdrawing itself at once”
And finally
“the Faculty of Invisibility has dedicated its work to a practice of instituting that
attempts to assemble, quote and execute moments of institutionalisation without
giving in to them.”
Likewise, in its own descriptions of ‘The Department of Wrong Answers’, an
exhibition as sub Dept of a broader series of exhibitions under the collective title
of the “Institute of Beyond” at Wysing Art Centre in spring 2012 reveled in the
paradoxical rhetoric and etiquette of the educational institute;
THE INSTITUTE OF BEYOND is a series of twelve artists’ residencies based within 3
research departments …..The institute is an informal educational model,
experimenting with methods of artistic research and production. Three
departments have been created within the institute focusing on wrong answers,
psychedelic studies and overlooked histories.
Some descriptions of the work are
“Laure Prouvost & Francesco Pedraglio work humorously depicts a fictitious
department’s desperate work environment; an obscure camp dedicated to search for
unrecognizable objects and dig abstract ideas from muddy meadows.
Rob Filby borrowed the mood board's impropriety as the artwork to example the
laughable aspect of invention and the desolation of ideas against their regular
application in creative industry and the pretence of communication and evocation.
Cally Spooner writes in dialogue to perform absurd collisions of arguing characters,
looping narratives, miscommunications, mis-readings and interruptions.”
Another UK based project, The University of Incidental Knowledge describe itself as
‘a collaboration based on a higher education model, incorporating self-directed and
peer-to-peer learning.
Incidental Knowledge is acquired by chance; through the process of doing something
else such as a journey, a day job, a holiday, watching a film or overhearing a
conversation. It is unexpected, unintentional, extraneous, random, accidental or
found, discovered in connection with or resulting from a primary activity”
and runs programmes such as:
BA (Hons) Avant Garde
BA (Hons) Comedy
BA (Hons) Cut ‘n’ Paste
Diploma in Artwank
MPhil Mistakes
NVG Pedantics
9
Even these projects differ from each other enormously in terms of scale, humour,
poetics, seriousness and wit they share a common sense of disruption in their use of
antithetical terms of the Institute
All of them could be said to be deliberately attempting to play with the
impossibility of the housing their subjects. The impossibility of placing them.
Despite the rigidity of the Faculty, Institute, and Department, they are all in fact
aligned to the opposite. It this process of managing and ‘executing’ moments of
institutionalization without giving in to them that is key. Time and again we are
reminded that the faculty is ‘emerging’ yet ‘in withdrawal’. Faculties are working
with the invisible, the animal the incidental, with haunting, uncertainty, doubt and
psychedelia, in which various practices are described as ‘humorous’, ‘abstract’,
‘muddy’, ‘obscure’, ‘improper’, ‘laughable’, ‘desolate’, ‘absurd’, ‘mis-readable’, and
‘mis- interpretable’.
The art-educational institutional structure here is consistently represented as a site
of impossibility, a site in conflict with itself. Despite an aim to organize and measure,
its production is one of the invisible, the immeasurable, and the improper. These
‘artists institutes’ embody a state of play which may echo what Chantal Mouffe
describes as an ‘agonistic struggle’, where ‘hegemonic structures are contested in
conceptual and physical spaces within which they can never be fully resolved’.25
All of us who are familiar with working within the our Institutes will know that there
are systems within them which are entirely dedicated to re-inscribing their own
internal and external realities and appearances. For a Faculty of Invisibility to exist
however, the Institution which houses it must also begin to partly disappear, a place
in the making of its own disappearance.
Alec
In other words the institute is in the making and unmaking – e.g. in ruin (after all a
ruin is always in a nascent state – otherwise it is preserved and cannot be ‘in ruin’).
These Artists Institutes produce that which cannot be seen and measured, yet they
still produce. By prioritising the production of the invisible, or the stupid, the
laughable or the feral, they subvert the ‘real-world’ language of the institutions
proper. The ‘Real’ (or I guess what we talking about here is actually the institution
itself) is inhabited by the immeasurable and as a consequence begins to dissolve into
its inversion.
We will end it there but let’s just remind ourselves of the question posed earlier
about whether the institute can perform this taking place? Especially given the
25 Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces, Chantal Mouffe, Art&Research
A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, Volume 1. No.
2. Summer 2007 ISSN 1752-6388
10
fundamentally opposing aims of the ‘progressive model’ and the ‘non-progressive’ or
transgressive model found in most art schools? and…
how does the art school exist in this mysterious ontological terrain referred earlier?
how can the art school’s becoming be a work?
*
The disruptive play of the naming of contradictory and conflicting forces in the
Artists Institute are significant but what then of ‘us’, the artist/academics ?
(Repeated again below – we need to edit this)
For Charles Esche, “the art academy is a paradox that can be reconciled only if we
keep contrary objective and ideals in sight”26
Those of us who are artists and teachers of art, are also students of art. We open
ourselves into the ‘mysterious ontological territory’27 of art on a regular basis and we
learn from it, and we often learn that all that is to be learnt cannot be ‘taught’ and
this is the contradictory and paradoxical lesson that art teaches us and cannot teach
us. It is not a simple binary opposition in or outside the institution, good or bad, but
it is always fascinating to see that all the good stuff happens off the radar so to speak
– in spite of the institution or against it.
Slide 14
The Artists Institute is a site of movement as withdrawal, fragmentation and
disruption but above all it is a site of expansion, existing to prevent foreclosure. It
must therefore understand and work with contradiction.
If the Artists Institute can accommodate its own appropriation of the educational
model by means of the ironic use of its own organizing rhetoric, and by insinuating
its contradictions into the certainties of ‘knowledge’ and ‘credit’, then so too may
the educational model appropriate the artists institute.
The Artists Institute inhabits the place we are interested in and what they the RAQS
Media Collective term ‘a double life’ in which, contradictory tendencies are laid bare
for all too see and manage.
Slide 15
Sara Ahmed, writing around Affect theory suggests that
26 C. Esche. Include me out. P101-112, Art School (Propositions for the 21st century)
27 Akerman and Daly ibid p.407
11
‘Affect is what sticks’, that affect is sticky, it is what ‘sustains or preserves the
connection between ideas, values, and objects’28.
Here is an articulation of affect as being something which ‘touches’ something else.
How we are touched by what we are near? And how is what we are near touched by
us?
It may be only a slight exaggeration to suggest that many of our Institutions are now
so far removed from a conception of non-instrumental practices that they are not
‘touched’ by the practices they house and attempt to produce. Indeed many
institutions may positively recoil in abject disgust at the unpredictability and
immeasurability of some aspects of art practice ( by which I mean, physical,
temporal and the conceptually unpredictable ).
It could also be suggested that the Institute distances itself from its contents by
housing them. Housing may not always bring things closer, but merely frame them
temporarily, sometimes in concealment, in what Sara Ahmed describes as
‘awayness’, not really a place at all.
What the artist/teacher/student may need to develop is the recognition that they
are not being housed by the institute. Instead they are occupying it, they are living
within it, appropriating the idea(l) of it through the very words they use and the
practices they perform.
To paraphrase Randolph Bourne’s statement that
“if you want to change minds you must first change the words that people use” it
could be said that one way the artist can affect the institute is to ‘occupy it’ , by
changing its words in order to change its mind.29
The Artists Institute can tell us that for an institute of art education to flourish it
must be able, like its participants to inhabit a form of schizophrenia, to inhabit this
dual life rather than be controlled by it, or attempting to control it. In short, an
institution must negotiate the conflict between foreclosure and unpredictability.
It is here that the conventional places of art can learn from the ironized practices of
artists. To paraphrase the RAQs media collective once again, if the ‘work of art is
never done’, then neither is the work of the institute. If the institute can itself
manifest some of the behaviours of its participants in its organization and terms of
reference it may begin to become a project and a place, rather than housing simply
attempting to house them. If it allows itself to get near to its “sticky” subjects, as
opposed to away from them, then what it houses will be able to affect what it
becomes, always a place in-the-making.
28 Sara Ahmed in ‘Happy Objects The Affect Theory Reader’ (Eds M.Gregg and G.J Seigworth) p29 Duke University Press
29 Randolph Bourne from Jon Thompson p 479
12
Slide 19
Back to Alec
Slide (o)
Of course there is a way – the place of the art school – to protect/resist/reinvent
from the inside / radical alterity (Baudrillard)
TANC
Theory
Art
Nonsense
Craft
ATIAINA
All
That
Is
Art
Is
Not
Art
Professors of the Impossible
………and all the other ones Steve has cited.
Back to Steve!
In effect, in the past where artist-teachers may have rubbed up against the
institution from within and encouraged students to do the same, in the age of
extreme institutionalization and hyper-instrumentalisation this approach, this stance
of being both within yet against, may no longer be possible. Instead the artiststudent- teachers are taking the ‘mantle’ of the institution and occupying its
linguistic and rhetorical frameworks instead of its architecture, and by doing so, are
attempting to unravel and explore what might be meant by an institution in the first
place.
This may have profound possibilities within the ‘walls’ and traditions of the art
school where, the power of the institution becomes not only something ‘lessened’
but also something existing ‘in quotes’, thus empowering both staff and students to
occupy and produce the ‘institution’ on their own terms. By creating and inhabiting
these equivalents, in effect by inhabiting institutional terminology, change may take
13
place from within. Students and staff no longer attend the institution, but attend to
it by inhabiting it and creating it, and re-creating it in a constant process of
expansion.
(This last bit needs a little work/thinking through)
…..actually that’s not a bad ending is it!!??
With Slide (a) how to work better - backwards (Fischli and Weiss) ?
END
Appendix
Perhaps the relationship of the art to the art institution is like the relationship of
speech to text as described by Jon Thompson on his essay on Richard Deacon
“ texts are self evidently additive, unitised assemblages of a linear kind, subject to
the syntactical closure which meaningful sentences demand, and with a locus in the
abstract space of the printed or written page.
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Speech, by contrast, is more in the order of the ‘incarnation’ expanding and moving
within the social space. Certainly it is not ‘manufactured……speaking tends to reveal
what writing purposefully seeks to hide: the complex and genuinely mysterious
ontological terrain out of which all meaning emerges- the place of language itself” 30
*
As an attempt to try to bring my thinking back down to earth I want to draw
attention to a series if exchanges within the pages of Art Monthly involving Peter
Suchin, Elizabeth Wright and J.J. Charlesworth.
In his article “Rebel without a Course” 31 Peter Suchin expressed considerable doubt
about the validity of practice based PhD in Art and was taken to task in series of
exchanges by Elizabeth Wright. After around three months of back and forward
argument it appeared to have come to and end. However, JJ Charlesworth’s
contribution in AM 353 expanded the field further in his conclusion that the
challenge lay in “reclaiming the academic context in order to remake it”.
For me this crystallised the situation and this concerns all of us who teach or manage
within the ‘academic context’.
What these split between the artist-critic and artist-academic suggested was that
while it might be generally acknowledged that some of the divisions between what
would traditionally be understood as an art practice on the one hand and
research/knowledge on the other may have become more permeable in the last
decade or so, what is frequently revealed in this more open environment is the lack
of academic and institutional capability to respond effectively to these new
complexities, dynamics and paradoxes which are ushered in as consequence.
The co-existent, yet distinctly uncomfortable relationship, between the ‘cultures’ of
research-as-knowledge, art in education and art-as-practice still often provokes
debate, sometimes in the pages of the art press, often in the seminar room and in
the studio but, I suspect, perhaps not often enough within the higher echelons of the
Higher Education sector. It is this lack of impact of the complexity and fluidity of
some cultural practices at policy and management level which leaves art, education,
knowledge and research the poorer.
Despite these difficulties however I’m not convinced that our students are as fixated
on institutional validation as Suchin suggests. My bet is they still want to be artists.
When Suchin illustrates his position by citing Patricia Bickers’ comment, “I am not
opposed to a PhD in Fine Art per se”, but that “in order to fulfil the criteria for a
30 p.184 Jon Thompson collected writings.
31 Rebel without a course. Peter Suchin AM 345
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research-degree in any meaningful way, the fine art researcher will almost inevitably
be drawn away from meaningful practice,” there is a suggestion of a lack of a
nuanced understanding of what is really going on within practice-based PhDs in
many art schools in the UK.
Many students/artists/teachers work in or across areas which may be unhelpfully
termed as art, art research, criticism, teaching, creative practice, writing and/or
curation in some way or another.
This is surely a fertile environment; to imply that artists occupying multiple roles and
positions automatically risks a dilution of meaningful practice is plainly odd. These
interstitial operations and blurrings of positions may have come to the fore precisely
because they provide a more complex and rich ground from which to work in
whatever form or method that is, in the context of a response to increasingly limiting
and reductive instrumentalisation; a response which occupies a place or places
where such work becomes a field of operations, critical positions, strategies and
subjectivities which prove harder to gather, or master, than any one method,
position or discipline.
While Suchin rightly points out that there is a “danger of submitting one’s practice to
the bureaucratic and critical scrutiny of an academic institution” which may “distort
or radically re-inscribe the candidate’s practice” he perhaps misses the crucial point
that the institutions may also have to accept the ‘danger’ of submitting their
bureaucracies and formulaic methodologies to the candidate’s practice.
In other words, perhaps in an engaged art school it would be a two-way street. To
some extent what might be at stake, for example, in a PhD via art practice could be
seen more as a collaborative and continual re-thinking, through practice, of what
might constitute knowledge and artistic research in the first place, rather than a
weak (or optimistic) desire on the part of the candidate for institutional validation.
What seems to be missing from much of the discussion around art/PhD/research
anxieties is the question of the capability of the institutions to work with art’s work,
in which it might be possible to tangle with the question of how an art practice can
affect a relationship to knowledge as well as the other way round.
Realistically speaking, I suspect many artists who also work within art schools may
not consider the PhD as the most appropriate vehicle for the purpose of a highly
advanced art practice. However, as it stands, if artists inhabit the PhD and in much
the same way as artists are inhabiting the institutions, if they get inside language so
to speak, rather than submit to its institutional force, then perhaps something will
emerge which can accommodate and do justice to the multifarious and interconnected forms of practice and knowledge production which surround us.
The implications of positively encouraging or even insisting on active institutional
engagement with art practice as an on-going, yet productive, series of predicaments
rather than as a progressive drive towards knowledge, might result in a re-thinking
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of what artists and art educators mean by the conceptual and practical frameworks
of art practice, research and knowledge in the first place.
Seen in this light, perhaps an artist’s intention when approaching a PhD is often less
a means of achieving some form of academic validation, as Peter Suchin suggested,
than of contributing to the increasingly amorphous, awkward and fluid practices
which might constitute an art-practice in the first place. One might even go as far as
to suggest that such a contribution has significant implications for how we
understand and work with, in, without, and/or against the institutions and cultures
which produce us and are produced by us.
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