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.

Andrew Moore. First Light, Cherry County, Nebraska, 2013. Courtesy of Andrew Moore & Yancey Richardson.

The 100th meridian west is a longitudinal line that snakes through North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma, and forms the eastern border of the Texas panhandle. Historically, it divides the weathered, parched land in the western Great Plains from its lush eastern neighbor. Through digital aerial photographs and large-format negatives taken on land, artist Andrew Moore captures this sparsely populated area, not scarred with train tracks and city clusters, but empty and yawning. His collection of photographs, Dirt Meridian, is currently on view at Yancey Richardson Gallery.

Many of them were taken from above, in an airplane with a camera placed on the strut. The results are sweeping views of windswept houses, splintered earth, and prairie grass growing like a horse’s hide. The symmetrical composition of these photographs belies their flux. Moore explains that the area “teeters between being lost in time, so to speak, yet at the same moment itʼs highly affected by large-scale global forces, such as climate change, energy exploration, resource management, and food production.”

This dichotomy infects each scene. Their visual balance exudes a sense of stillness that fractures when nature enters. In one, we see an old wooden house. Its roof buckles from the strain of age, and lifeless black windows gape open. But this decaying vestige of human habitation is literally overshadowed by natural weather cycles. An inky black cloud hangs overhead, while sunlight dips through, promising both light and darkness. By capturing this liminal space, Moore demonstrates the oscillating spirit of the area.

Andrew Moore. Cash Meier Barn, Shadbolt Ranch, Cherry County, Nebraska, 2012. Courtesy of Andrew Moore & Yancey Richardson.

Like the land, many photographs are absent of humans. On occasion, they reappear, shoving through the viewer’s sense of solitude. Take the photograph Uncle Teed. Death pervades, through the liver spots that litter his forehead and the wizened fingers that crumple at his knees. The 100th meridian has carved valleys into his forehead. Even ostensible signs of fertility reek of lifelessness. A fake wreath of leaves hangs above his head, and artificial orchids stand tall behind him. This image acts in conversation with the others.  Even in life, natural cycles win.

Andrew Moore. Uncle Teed, Sioux County, Nebraska, 2013; archival pigment print; 46.5 x 32.5 in. Courtesy of Andrew Moore & Yancey Richardson.

Many families in the area can trace their line back to original settlers, encapsulating a sense of continuity that permeates this place. Visually, temporal boundaries cease to exist; structures could date back to the Homestead Act. One piece shows a bent and broken fence dividing the image in two. For what, though? Each side shows the same mix of melting snow and brown grass, reminding us that some lines mean nothing. Justly, in most of these images, death mingles with life. One image shows paint peeling off of the walls of a windowless barn. A cow skeleton curls into clods of dirt and trash, slightly off-center in the foreground. But a ray of light still pokes its way through the barn’s roof, almost invisible.

Andrew Moore. The Ferrell Place, Sioux County, Nebraska, 2013. Courtesy of Andrew Moore & Yancey Richardson.

Moore’s photography presents places of rupture. In one series, titled Detroit Disassembled, he shows us the dilapidation of the scraped-out boomtown. Buildings are at once resplendent architectural affirmations and symbols of festering decay. As in Dirt Meridian, Moore shows us these symbols of hardship and success while reminding us that both are fleeting. Superiority is wasteful.

Darren Jones. Deeper Understanding, 2008; broken computer, additional and rearranged keyboard keys; 11 x 17 x 11 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Darren Jones works across a wide range of forms and subjects, often displaying an adroit sense of humor in his installations, sculptures, digital images, and text-based artworks. However, Jones’ work is not only a series of well-pitched interventions and rearrangements; there is a poetic and delicate seriousness that complicates much of what he makes.

Deeper Understanding (2008) turns his old broken laptop, stuck in the process of starting up, into a readymade sculpture. The keyboard of the haggard PC computer has been altered to read, “I know that you are feeling tired,” as though Jones is trying to communicate his appreciation for the now-broken computer’s lost memory and functionality. This ode to a personal computer, lost and gone, gives levity to an experience that can be quite trying and that many people have gone through at least once.

Darren Jones. Anagrams, 2013; ink on paper; 11 x 8.5 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

On the other end of the spectrum is his text-based ink-on-paper work, Anagrams (2013), which, as the title suggests, is a series of anagrams. The phrases are from Fire Island Pines, a notorious mecca for wealthy gay men, a subject that Jones frequently addresses in his work. For example, in the first of six lines, he has rearranged the initial word “paradise” into “aids rape,” a jarring alternative. Although this work is almost devastatingly direct, there is still a subtle degree of playfulness in the way the artist alters the forms of these words and phrases.

Darren Jones. Flotsam and Jetsam, 2013; Found Objects; variable dimensions. Courtesy the artist.

Two other works that deal directly with the myths and culture surrounding Fire Island Pines are Flotsam and Jetsam (2013), the refuse from a weekend spent on the island; and Rainbeau (2013), an image of the torso of a gay man, typical of the style for dating sites, but softened by unnaturally bright superimposed lighting—glowing lens flares—to make the image appear at odds with the hyper-masculine and sexualized portrayal of the subject.

Darren Jones. Rainbeau, 2013; digital image; 2.5 x 3.5 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Another work that is both critical and strikingly humorous, perhaps in a sardonic way, is Binary System (2013), a digital print that depicts a Bally’s Total Fitness sign and an Outback Steakhouse sign competing for attention, with counterintuitive yet perfectly synchronous messages.

Darren Jones. Binary System, 2013; digital print on magic canvas; 36 x 24 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

When asked about the image, Jones noted, “Yes it does seem a manufactured composite. But in fact the signs exist like that in reality. I saw them in a parking lot in Orlando. I couldn’t believe it when I read them, as it was a true readymade. I was struck by the conflicting lifestyles they were advertising, both vying for attention; this was a snapshot of differing aspects of American life. I’m really drawn to subtle, wistful, social or cultural commentary.” Jones has captured something quintessential to the 20th-century American experience—the constant barrage of advertisements with competing yet intertwined lifestyle messages—and, with the light touch of a cultural anthropologist, he catalogs, observes, and offers a look at the present moment in all its complexity.

Darren Jones. The Silent Language of Grief (After Voltaire), 2012; frame, paper, water, prolactin, adrenocorticotropic hormone, leucine encephalin, mucin, lipids, lysozyme, lactoferrin, lipocalin, lacritin, immunoglobulins, glucose, urea, sodium, potassium (tears); 5.5 x 3.5 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

In the last few years, Jones’ work has taken an experimental but not unexpected turn. Some of his works seem to be purposefully dependent upon the web platform—the artist’s website—they are displayed through. Jones’ sculpture The Silent Language of Grief (After Voltaire) (2012) is emblematic of this internet-based shift. The work is a small sculpture comprising an ornate gold frame fitted with paper that has been stained with the chemical composition for tears. The piece is a poignant object on its own, but becomes fully realized, contextually, when the artist writes out the chemical composition for tears in the materials list. When asked about the integration of web-based platforms with his artwork, Jones said: “Some years ago my work became more conceptual, and materially less cumbersome and less rooted in traditional modes of making. The visual transaction between the artist and viewer was more electronic than bodily. As the work became more ephemeral and less fixed, so too did the ways it could be seen. More art is viewed online than it is in person and I like that fluidity. I think much of my work and my sensibility can be understood whether in the gallery or on the screen.” This shift is hard to describe fully, as it is still underway, but Jones is navigating an important area for any artist working now.

Darren Jones is a Scottish-born visual artist and writer currently living and working in New York City. He has fine-arts degrees from Central Saint Martins College of Art, London, and Hunter College, New York. His work has been shown at museums and galleries in group and solo exhibitions in New York, New Haven, Edinburgh, London, Hamburg, Zurich, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.