Review article
https://doi.org/10.31664/zu.2020.106.06
From the Institution of Art to the Apparatus of Art. Strategies of Institutional Critique
Maja Stanković
orcid.org/0000-0002-9480-6114
; Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade, Serbia
Abstract
Institutional critique is one of the key phenomena in the art of the second half of the 20thcentury. The starting point of research is Buchloh's thesis on the transition from industrial aesthetics, aesthetics of production and consumption to the aesthetics of administration: problematization of institutions as dominant reference points in the field of art. The main research question is: What is the significance of institutional critique if it is an institutionally accepted way of acting? Does institutional critique act in the service of institutions by giving them the legitimacy of “openness”, in the sense that the possibility of resistance exists, or is it an emancipatory practice? The thesis of the paper is that institutional critique has indicated the role of institutions related to artwork, which brought into question the issue of the neutrality of institutions as a dominant feature of the modernist paradigm of art. At the same time, it has played a key role in constituting a critical approach to art, formulating an attitude that calls into question the existing institutional matrices, and thus made visible, and at the same time subject to criticism, the actions of the institutions themselves. The common denominator of different artistic strategies related to institutional critique is the problematization of artistic institutions as points of different confrontations of interest—economic, political, financial—which called into question the idea of autonomy as an ideological cover for various non-artistic interests. At the same time, this has shown that art does not function in binary code—art vs. non-art, which was the dominant logic of the 20thcentury modernist discourse and pure categories—but as an apparatus (dispositif): a field in which relations, powers and connections with different walks of life, artistic and non-artistic, intersect. This has simultaneously made institutional critique an inseparable part of contemporary art.
Keywords
institutional critique; art institution; apparatus (dispositif); contemporary art; art autonomy; aesthetics of administration; museum; market; systems theory
Hrčak ID:
246890
URI
Publication date:
1.7.2020.
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