Adrian Piper. The Probable Trust Registry: The Rules of the Game #1–3, 2013–17 (exhibition view); installation and performance (3 gray walls reaching from floor to the ceiling, 3 golden circular desks, golden embossed letters, 3 standing desks, 3 lean stools, computer system, 3 receptionists); dimensions variable. Courtesy of Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie. Photo: David von Becker.

From a distance, visitors can see that the installation consists of three circular, golden reception desks in front of three ceiling-high gray-colored walls staggered along the hall. Behind each desk is an attendant dressed head to toe in black. Upon each desk rests a computer monitor that faces the visitor. After one approaches the desks, it becomes apparent that the walls are adorned with golden, uppercase embossed letters that form declarative statements, the eponymous Rules of the Game:

• I will always be too expensive to buy.
• I will always mean what I say.
• I will always do what I say I am going to do.

Adrian Piper. The Probable Trust Registry: The Rules of the Game #1–3, 2013–17 (exhibition view); installation and performance (3 gray walls reaching from floor to the ceiling, 3 golden circular desks, golden embossed letters, 3 standing desks, 3 lean stools, computer system, 3 receptionists); dimensions variable. Courtesy of Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie. Photo: Thomas Bruns.

A music stand to the side of each desk holds a sheet of “Performance Instructions” that purports to offer more information. Written in a dry, official tone, the list of eleven instructions begins: “1. Each Signatory signs and dates the digital Personal Declaration on the Receptionist’s desk screen.” After the viewer signs the digital contract, acknowledging her lifelong commitment to the declaration on the wall, the “Receptionist prints out for the Signatory a hard copy of the signed Personal Declaration plus the Performance Instructions of the Rules of the Game respectively.” These Personal Declarations are written in the style of binding legal contracts. For example, the Personal Declaration in The Rules of the Game #3 reads: “I, the undersigned, hereby certify that I will always (absent uncontrollable Acts of God) do what I say I am going to do.”

The Performance Instructions go on to explain that the signatory inputs his or her name and email address in the computer on the receptionist’s desk and that this information will be kept in a confidential registry held by the Berlin State Museums and sealed from the public for 100 years. After the exhibition, each signatory will receive a full list of the names, but not email addresses, of the other signatories. Should one signatory wish to contact another, she would request the contact information from the Berlin State Museums, which would only supply the information after receiving explicit written permission by the proposed respondent.

Adrian Piper. The Probable Trust Registry: The Rules of the Game #1–3, 2013–17 (exhibition view); installation and performance (3 gray walls reaching from floor to the ceiling, 3 golden circular desks, golden embossed letters, 3 standing desks, 3 lean stools, computer system, 3 receptionists); dimensions variable. Courtesy of Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie. Photo: Shahrzade Ehya.

On a recent Saturday at the museum, I watched some people walk up to the screens, swiftly sign the digital contract, receive their printed copy, and leave. A few visitors appeared totally confused throughout their time in the exhibit. Others lingered to speak with the receptionists, discussing further details before deciding whether to sign the Personal Declaration.

Although people can choose to sign one, two, three, or none of the contracts, one receptionist I spoke with said a number of visitors had been infuriated by the show, feeling coerced into signing the documents. Some parents have dragged unwilling children to sign the declaration, committing signatories to “…always do what I say I am going to do.” At the other end of the spectrum of responses to the work, many visitors expressed feelings of self-empowerment upon signing and seemed eager to embody their ethical vows. At least one person wept as she signed, explaining that she was so moved by her commitment. Clearly, the exhibition’s attendees demonstrated a broad range of motives as well as understanding and intention.

Adrian Piper. The Probable Trust Registry: The Rules of the Game #1–3, 2013–17 (exhibition view); installation and performance (3 grey walls reaching from floor to the ceiling, 3 golden circular desks, golden embossed letters, 3 standing desks, 3 lean stools, computer system, 3 receptionists); dimensions variable. Courtesy of Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie. Photo: Shahrzade Ehya.

In a recent interview, Piper described The Probable Trust Registry as offering a solution to the problem of individual self-interest by giving “everyone the opportunity to develop trust in themselves and at the same time show themselves to be trustworthy in a community of other trustworthy people. The process begins with the individual, spreads among other individuals who build a society, and even further among other societies that together form an international association.”[1] In this view, The Probable Trust Registry represents a utopian gesture that works toward the cultivation of a society built on relations of mutual trust. As such, Piper explains the title as a repository of names of individuals who are likely to be trustworthy: a community of ethical people on whom one can probably rely.[2] Yet this view seems insufficient, neglecting too many of the show’s physical aspects, including the legalese of the Performance Instructions and contracts, and the mystifying corporate presentation of the installation, set within a vast space that dwarfs the viewer.

One might argue that the show’s title could equally be interpreted to refer to a database of private information that will likely, but not necessarily, be kept safe. In this view, The Probable Trust Registry reflects on the role of institutions in people’s lives, drawing attention to all of the institutions—social, corporate, political—that demand our participation and to which we willingly or unthinkingly submit. The title of Jean Renoir’s 1939 film, The Rules of the Game, refers to the inescapable codes of conduct to which the characters must adhere in order to participate in the social sphere. Similarly, in a 2016 “Interim Report” on The Probable Trust Registry, Piper asserts that the work consumes anyone who encounters it, “forc[ing]” all viewers into a relation with it, no matter whether they choose to participate or not.[3] The choice of whether or not to sign The Probable Trust Registry is a pretense; we all internalize its terms and thereby participate in the rules of Piper’s game.

The Probable Trust Registry: The Rules of the Game #1–3 will be on view through September 3, 2017.

[1] Agata Waleczek, “Interview with Adrian Piper,” (author’s translation from the German), http://www.adrianpiperinberlin.de/index.php?id=2586&L=0.

[2] Adrian Piper, The Probable Trust Registry: The Rules of the Game #1–3 (Berlin: Hamburger Bahnhof—Museum für Gegenwart, 2017), exhibition brochure.

[3] “The Probable Trust Registry: The Rules of the Game #1–3. The Destiny and Interpretations of the Work are Part of the Work. Interim Report of 31 May 2016,” http://adrianpiper.com/art/docs/Piper2016TPTR_InterimReport-1.pdf.

Andrea Fraser. Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989; single-channel video (Betacam SP NTSC), color, sound; 30:00. Courtesy of the Artist.

#museums #historicity #institutional critique #detournement #appropriation

The exhibition Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology at UCLA’s Hammer Museum is an effort to comprehensively document the artistic modes of appropriation and institutional critique that emerged in American contemporary art of the 1970s–1990s. While related, these are two distinct forms—appropriation being the art of repurposing images and forms from an established, original context to a new, transformative one, while institutional critique is generally defined by installation-based art practices that appropriate and détourne forms and images from within institutional contexts such as museums and academia. Artists associated with institutional critique include Andrea Fraser, Fred Wilson, Renée Green, Martha Rosler, and Adrian Piper, all of whose work is included at the Hammer. Within the period of the exhibition’s scope, these artists had practices that were boundary-pushing and provocative. Nonetheless, that era is more than twenty years in the past, and the edginess and discomfort associated with these artists has largely given way to sanctification. As the critique generation enters the canon, it’s appropriate to ask whether the form of institutional critique can evolve to remain relevant and keep pressure on institutions that remain problematic and change-averse.

The first work I saw at the Hammer was Andrea Fraser’s Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (1989), a performative lecture and collection tour at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It’s a fitting introduction to the exhibition’s larger issues. In this work, Fraser, in the guise of a docent, articulates the unspoken class privilege that underpins American art museums that are invested in a Neo-Classical ideology imported from Europe. Fraser’s casual noblesse oblige is jarring, her distinction between the haves and have-nots blunt, but her tone differs dramatically from that of today’s tycoons who tend to favor more inclusive and populist rhetoric while disinvesting in culture as a public benefit. By comparison, one might even feel a kind of nostalgia for the targets of Fraser’s critique. Fraser’s own ascent to the highest levels of the art world has paralleled that of institutional critique as a discipline. As her profile has risen, the forms of her critique have shifted, from models rooted in her body and in specific sites to works that engage the global networks of back-room deals and questionable funding sources that underpin contemporary art markets worldwide. Like the medium of institutional critique itself, Fraser is embedded in and supported by the very institutions she critiques. As such, her often stark analyses are themselves circumscribed by the targets of her criticism, softening her impact. This is a challenging condition shared by many of the artists in the Hammer show because they must be inside the institutions in order to critique them from within, but their criticisms are also instrumentalized and dampened by the institutional context.

Mary Kelly. Post-Partum Document: Introduction, 1973; Perspex units, white card, wool vests, pencil, ink;
15 units: 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm) each. Collection of Eileen Harris Norton. Image courtesy of the Artist and Postmasters Gallery, New York.

A panel discussion, “The Future of Institutional Critique,” brought several artists together with the exhibition curators Anne Ellegood and Johanna Burton to discuss these very issues. Fraser joined Mary Kelly, Dara Birnbaum, and Judith Barry in a discussion of the philosophical and psychoanalytic doctrines that gave rise to the conceptual methodology of institutional critique that they each employ. As a form, institutional critique exists somewhere between installation art and curatorial practice. Its basis in Marxist philosophy and psychoanalytic theory manifests through emphasis of material as historical trace, audience as subject and object, and labor as performance. For example, Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–1977), an excerpt of which is on view at the Hammer, is a material archive of objects associated with the artist’s young son. When Kelly marks her child’s onesies with intersubjectivity axis diagrams derived from Lacanian psychoanalysis, framing them as art objects, she makes transparent her own deeply personal need to nurture her son’s developing sense of self and her struggle to balance that with the cool, critical distance of the conceptual artist. It is the artist’s vulnerability as much as her intellect that causes the work to remain vital and powerful. Conversely, time has softened the critical position of Dara Birnbaum’s PM Magazine (1982), a remixing of early 1980s television from a feminist perspective, that today appears charmingly nostalgic. Birnbaum’s more recent work Arabesque (2011) abandons such anachronistic technology to apply a feminist critique to the history of classical music, invoking the story of Robert Schumann and his wife Clara, a 19th-century composer couple whose artistic talents were more equally matched than their relative levels of renown would suggest. These works are historicized through their presentation at the Hammer as elsewhere, but the pressures of parenthood (including scarce time and insufficient support structures) that Mary Kelly documents, and the unequal treatment of men and women in creative professions that Dara Birnbaum confronts, remain very present concerns for a majority of viewers.These realities were articulated at the panel discussion yet go unremarked within the exhibition itself.

Dara Birnbaum. PM Magazine, 1982; single-channel video, color, stereo sound; bromide enlargement with speed-rail suspension system, painted wall; 71 x 95 x 20 1/8 in. (180.3 x 241.3 x 51.1 cm). Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, restricted gift of Joseph and Jory Shapiro, Mr. and Mrs. E. A. Bergman, and Mrs. Robert B. Mayer (1984.7). Photo by Nathan Keay, © Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Because the Hammer exhibition is framed as a historical survey, it does not represent institutional critique as a living discipline but rather as a contained movement. The downside of this approach is that it can perpetuate the impression that institutional critique is either no longer achievable or no longer necessary. On the contrary, the form is being revived by a younger generation that includes Occupy Museums and GULF (Gulf Ultra Luxury Faction). Like the Art Workers’ Coalition—a movement that profoundly influenced the generation of artists represented at the Hammer—these contemporary collectives are concerned with fair labor practices at art museums that increasingly operate like multinational corporations. These groups, rooted in a political theater of the streets, are staging interventions in museums to protest precarious employment at home and exploitative conditions abroad. On March 29, GULF staged an intervention at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in protest of the conditions of extreme indenture faced by thousands of mostly Bangladeshi temporary workers being imported into Abu Dhabi to build the Guggenheim and Louvre complexes on Saadiyat Island. On a crowded Saturday evening, the group dropped onto patrons thousands of printed “dollar bills” bearing slogans criticizing the museum’s complicity with abusive labor practices. As museums become more invested in global branding and more embedded in global markets, the future of institutional critique must include a push for greater transparency and attention to the money trail that drives the human impact of the global business of art.

Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology is on view at the UCLA Hammer Museum through May 18, 2014.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

The exhibition Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology at UCLA’s Hammer Museum is an effort to comprehensively document the artistic modes of appropriation and institutional critique that emerged in American contemporary art of the 1970s–1990s. While related, these are two distinct forms—appropriation being the art of repurposing images and forms from an established, original context to a new, transformative one, while institutional critique is generally defined by installation-based art practices that appropriate and détourne forms and images from within institutional contexts such as museums and academia. Artists associated with institutional critique include Andrea Fraser, Fred Wilson, Renée Green, Martha Rosler, and Adrian Piper, all of whose work is included at the Hammer. Within the period of the exhibition’s scope, these artists had practices that were boundary-pushing and provocative. Nonetheless, that era is more than twenty years in the past, and the edginess and discomfort associated with these artists has largely given way to sanctification. As the critique generation enters the canon, it’s appropriate to ask whether the form of institutional critique can evolve to remain relevant and keep pressure on institutions that remain problematic and change-averse.

Andrea Fraser. Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989; single-channel video (Betacam SP NTSC), color, sound; 30:00. Courtesy of the Artist.

The first work I saw at the Hammer was Andrea Fraser’s Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (1989), a performative lecture and collection tour at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It’s a fitting introduction to the exhibition’s larger issues. In this work, Fraser, in the guise of a docent, articulates the unspoken class privilege that underpins American art museums that are invested in a Neo-Classical ideology imported from Europe. Fraser’s casual noblesse oblige is jarring, her distinction between the haves and have-nots blunt, but her tone differs dramatically from that of today’s tycoons who tend to favor more inclusive and populist rhetoric while disinvesting in culture as a public benefit. By comparison, one might even feel a kind of nostalgia for the targets of Fraser’s critique. Fraser’s own ascent to the highest levels of the art world has paralleled that of institutional critique as a discipline. As her profile has risen, the forms of her critique have shifted, from models rooted in her body and in specific sites to works that engage the global networks of back-room deals and questionable funding sources that underpin contemporary art markets worldwide. Like the medium of institutional critique itself, Fraser is embedded in and supported by the very institutions she critiques. As such, her often stark analyses are themselves circumscribed by the targets of her criticism, softening her impact. This is a challenging condition shared by many of the artists in the Hammer show because they must be inside the institutions in order to critique them from within, but their criticisms are also instrumentalized and dampened by the institutional context.

Mary Kelly. Post-Partum Document: Introduction, 1973; Perspex units, white card, wool vests, pencil, ink;
15 units: 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm) each. Collection of Eileen Harris Norton. Image courtesy of the Artist and Postmasters Gallery, New York.

A panel discussion, “The Future of Institutional Critique,” brought several artists together with the exhibition curators Anne Ellegood and Johanna Burton to discuss these very issues. Fraser joined Mary Kelly, Dara Birnbaum, and Judith Barry in a discussion of the philosophical and psychoanalytic doctrines that gave rise to the conceptual methodology of institutional critique that they each employ. As a form, institutional critique exists somewhere between installation art and curatorial practice. Its basis in Marxist philosophy and psychoanalytic theory manifests through emphasis of material as historical trace, audience as subject and object, and labor as performance. For example, Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–1977), an excerpt of which is on view at the Hammer, is a material archive of objects associated with the artist’s young son. When Kelly marks her child’s onesies with intersubjectivity axis diagrams derived from Lacanian psychoanalysis, framing them as art objects, she makes transparent her own deeply personal need to nurture her son’s developing sense of self and her struggle to balance that with the cool, critical distance of the conceptual artist. It is the artist’s vulnerability as much as her intellect that causes the work to remain vital and powerful. Conversely, time has softened the critical position of Dara Birnbaum’s PM Magazine (1982), a remixing of early 1980s television from a feminist perspective, that today appears charmingly nostalgic. Birnbaum’s more recent work Arabesque (2011) abandons such anachronistic technology to apply a feminist critique to the history of classical music, invoking the story of Robert Schumann and his wife Clara, a 19th-century composer couple whose artistic talents were more equally matched than their relative levels of renown would suggest. These works are historicized through their presentation at the Hammer as elsewhere, but the pressures of parenthood (including scarce time and insufficient support structures) that Mary Kelly documents, and the unequal treatment of men and women in creative professions that Dara Birnbaum confronts, remain very present concerns for a majority of viewers.These realities were articulated at the panel discussion yet go unremarked within the exhibition itself.

Dara Birnbaum. PM Magazine, 1982; single-channel video, color, stereo sound; bromide enlargement with speed-rail suspension system, painted wall; 71 x 95 x 20 1/8 in. (180.3 x 241.3 x 51.1 cm). Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, restricted gift of Joseph and Jory Shapiro, Mr. and Mrs. E. A. Bergman, and Mrs. Robert B. Mayer (1984.7). Photo by Nathan Keay, © Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Because the Hammer exhibition is framed as a historical survey, it does not represent institutional critique as a living discipline but rather as a contained movement. The downside of this approach is that it can perpetuate the impression that institutional critique is either no longer achievable or no longer necessary. On the contrary, the form is being revived by a younger generation that includes Occupy Museums and GULF (Gulf Ultra Luxury Faction). Like the Art Workers’ Coalition—a movement that profoundly influenced the generation of artists represented at the Hammer—these contemporary collectives are concerned with fair labor practices at art museums that increasingly operate like multinational corporations. These groups, rooted in a political theater of the streets, are staging interventions in museums to protest precarious employment at home and exploitative conditions abroad. On March 29, GULF staged an intervention at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in protest of the conditions of extreme indenture faced by thousands of mostly Bangladeshi temporary workers being imported into Abu Dhabi to build the Guggenheim and Louvre complexes on Saadiyat Island. On a crowded Saturday evening, the group dropped onto patrons thousands of printed “dollar bills” bearing slogans criticizing the museum’s complicity with abusive labor practices. As museums become more invested in global branding and more embedded in global markets, the future of institutional critique must include a push for greater transparency and attention to the money trail that drives the human impact of the global business of art.

Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology is on view at the UCLA Hammer Museum through May 18, 2014.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.