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CHAPTER 1
Fidelity, Betrayal, Autonomy: Within and Beyond the Post-Cold War Art Museum
Certainty, fidelity On the stroke of midnight pass Like vibrations of a bell
W.H. Auden (Lullaby, 1937)
Today, the socially committed artist, writer, curator or administrator must face one very unpalatable fact — large, basically conservative institutions, including museums and universities, eventually charm even their most defiant critics and radical apostates. If the end of the Cold War (and of Modernism) has brought a new level of inclusiveness to these cultural institutions, what has become of the once defiant notion of a counterculture? Writing as a heretic, I believe that while institutional power is certainly no phantom, the "institutional function" (to rework a term borrowed from Michel Foucault's essay "What Is an Author?") is seldom precisely directed. Rather, museums, universities, even corporations are rife with redundancy and internal conflict. Their greatest effectiveness is often more the result of a magnitude of scale than organizational efficiency. Naturally, administrators and curators will, in the last instance, always side with the institutional function, but at any point prior to that critical juncture, there arise intrigues, affairs and infidelities of great potential to political activists. And if institutional power persists in attracting even its opponents, perhaps it is because we love it, or at least the unselfish image it projects, more than it could ever love itself. That is the scandal this chapter seeks to comprehend.
I want to begin by describing my own troubled history. I have worked inside art institutions as well as outside and against them. I want to address this space of ambivalence, but I also want to confess a still deeper, long-standing disloyalty — toward the practice known as contemporary art, and toward the increasingly global market that supports it. As a practicing artist and curator who teaches in an arts administration program, this confession is nearly seditious. Yet, like all complex relationships, it also betrays my co-dependency on institutional authority as a means of achieving what are in effect contrary, democratic goals.
I can trace my declining faith in the institutions of art back to 1979, the year I graduated from The Cooper Union School of Art. No longer a student, I began to attend meetings where other artists spoke not about their art but about their opposition to racism and apartheid, sexism and militarism. Rather than visiting studios or planning exhibitions, we focused on supporting Third World liberation movements, labor unions, the ecology movement and public housing. Art was at best a vehicle for accomplishing these ends. Besides, there was serious work to be done that had nothing to do with career building. Among those active at these gatherings was the critic Lucy R. Lippard, the writers Clive Philpot, Irving Wexler and Barbara Moor, and the artists Ed Eisenberg, Tim Rollins, Jerry Kearns, Richard Myer, Julie Ault, Janet Koenig, Doug Ashford, Mike Glier, Mimi Smith, Herb Perr and Rudolph Baranik. Many were veterans of other organizations, including Artists Meeting for Cultural Change (AMCC) and the feminist group Heresies. Before long, an organizational mission was being formulated that would transform these informal meetings held in Lower Manhattan into a coherent association with its own offices and bank account. In principle, the new group was to focus its activities on archiving and circulating the many boxes of materials about political and activist art that Lippard had been collecting for several years. At the moment of institutionalization, Philpot, then the director of the MoMA library, proposed the appellation Political Art Documentation, or PAD. When several members raised concerns about the service-oriented connotation of this name, it was modified to become Political Art Documentation and Distribution, or PAD/D.
The PAD/D archive was intended to be an instrument for expanding left-wing activism among artists. By accumulating and distributing models for politically engaged practices, the archive would serve as a sort of tactical toolbox. The greater expectation was that this informal network would grow into an entirely autonomous system for distributing and exhibiting activist culture. This countercircuit would be woven out of a combination of new and existing sites not strongly tied to the dominant art world. It would include university art galleries, community centers, labor union halls and various public venues. Work would also be made for demonstrations and picket lines. Note, however, that most alternative art spaces were not part of this network because these artist-run institutions were perceived as outposts and stepping stones for the very cultural hegemony that PAD/D opposed. To underscore this desire for critical autonomy, consider the group's mission statement from 1981, in which PAD/D proclaimed that it "cannot serve as a means of advancement within the art world structure of museums and galleries. Rather, we have to develop new forms of distribution economy as well as art."
Today, even the most formal art claims social relevancy. As Bruce Ferguson noted in his opening address for the 2000 Banff Curatorial Summit, it has become almost de rigueur to make explicit reference to issues of politics, cultural diversity, gender, and sexual identity (although, I must add, seldom to class or economic inequality). Indeed, such routines can be lamentable for political as well as artistic reasons. Yet, from the perspective of a politically engaged activist artist or organizer this kind of intra-institutional, liberal ambition can indeed be useful, if frustrating. Useful, because a certain amount of actual political work can be "leveraged" through it. At the same time, this tendency to display one's politics on one's sleeve (or via an interpretive wall text) is frustrating because curators, artists, museum administrators and academics easily confuse the kind of symbolic transgression that takes place inside the museum with the political activism that occurs at the judicial, penal, even global levels of society.
The reflex to make art socially relevant is itself a recent phenomenon (as well as a return to a much older one). It appears to have accelerated following the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Perhaps this is because US artists no longer needed to display to the world an uncompromising individuality exemplified by abstract expressionism. At the same time, however, new grounds for justifying culture were needed. Social purposefulness and community-based art fit that need. By contrast, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, art with overt social subject matter was dismissed as utilitarian or as protest art. As difficult as it is to imagine today, in 1975 resistance to any sullying of high culture with politics actually helped topple the short-lived editorial team of John Coplans and Max Kozloff at Artforum. Coplans and Kozloff brought to the influential trade magazine a raft of radical art historians, artists and essayists, including Carol Duncan, Allan Sekula, Lawrence Alloway, Alan Wallach, Eva Cockcroft, Ian Burn and Patricia Hills. These writers dared to suggest that art was not an autonomous expression of transcendental truth, but an integral part of the social world. Hilton Kramer, then the principal art critic for the New York Times, as well as an ardent cold warrior, openly called for art dealers to boycott the magazine. In what might be considered a virtual coup d'état, both Coplans and Kozloff were soon dislodged from their positions.
Meanwhile, by the late 1970s, politically engaged artists were becoming increasingly sophisticated in their mixing of the symbolic realm of art with the practical needs of political activism. Unlike an earlier generation, exemplified by Donald Judd or Carl Andre, who both strongly opposed the Vietnam War yet remained devout minimalists, many post-formalist artists collaborated with one another as well as with environmentalists, anti-nuclear and housing activists, and community workers, producing a heterogeneous range of artistic forms and styles that directly addressed social causes. Even PAD/D soon veered away from its stated archival and networking mission to make performances and agit-art for public rallies and demonstrations, including the 1981 action in Lower Manhattan titled No More Witch Hunts. The Reagan administration had recently passed anti-terrorist laws giving the government expanded powers of surveillance over US citizens. Many understood these so-called anti-terrorist laws as a thinly disguised legal justification for spying on domestic supporters of the FMLN (the Farabundo Marti National Liberation), a Salvadorian-based insurrectionary organization opposed to the US-backed regime of José Napoleón Duarte. No More Witch Hunts brought together religious activists, a local progressive union, legal activists and artists. Meanwhile, Group Material, another New York City-based artists' collective founded about the same time as PAD/D, performed a mocking, military-influenced disco dance outfitted in hybrid "uniforms" that grafted together standard GI camouflage with the bright red colors of the FMLN. Such reflexive and playful use of visual signifiers marked the increasing experimentation and confidence of a new "political art" that was consciously distancing itself from the banners and murals of the past.
Along with PAD/D and Group Material, a partial list of organizations that operated in the New York area between 1979 and 1982 included the anti-nuclear organizations Artists for Survival and Artists for Nuclear Disarmament; the community-based Asian American group Basement Workshop; media activists including Deep Dish and Paper Tiger Television; and the feminist art collectives No More Nice Girls, Heresies, and Carnival Knowledge. And this list could be sorted differently by highlighting specific projects, including The Women's Pentagon Action and The Anti-WW III Show; The Real Estate Show, an anti-gentrification exhibition, organized by a splinter group from COLAB (Collaborative Projects), that was staged in a squat space on the Lower East Side; Bazaar Conceptions, a pro-choice "street fair" organized by Carnival Knowledge; and an art auction to help fund a women's center in Zimbabwe organized by the ultra-left Madame Binh Graphics Collective, some of whose members later served time at Rikers Island in connection with the infamous Brinks robbery in upstate New York.
Therefore, when one speaks about political activism taking place inside the museum, as a prominent Chicago curator of contemporary art Mary Jane Jacobs once asserted, it is important to contrast the sort of critical and material engagement I've described above with attempts to "subvert the institutional frame" or to "transgress" conventions of representation or modes of display. Needless to say, and for reasons too detailed to go into here, by the later part of the 1980s, the category "political art" had become widely accepted, even as PAD/D dissolved. Meanwhile, the PAD/D archive is now housed in the mother of all establishment art institutions, MoMA in New York City. And while activist cultural work continued to evolve within organizations such as ACT UP, Gran Fury and the Guerrilla Girls, by the time MoMA organized its 1988 "political art" survey, Committed to Print, the very possibility of an alternative or counter-network of affiliated activist artists and autonomous exhibition spaces such as PAD/D proposed could no longer be sustained, either in practice or in theory. Perhaps even more disconcerting is that today, some 20 years later, much of the art documented in the PAD/D archives remains invisible, in spite of the apparently required observance of political correctness within the contemporary art world.
The degree to which collectives such as PAD/D or Group Material or the Woman's Building on the West Coast participated in this normalization of politically and socially engaged art has yet to be studied. Nevertheless, when the terms "political art" or "multiculturalism" or, more notably, "activist art" are invoked today, they raise for me specific historical as well as theoretical questions regarding definitions and context. They also remind me that history is premised on such lost opportunities, just as activism is a process of recovering what the past has betrayed.
To briefly summarize then, from the perspective of a politically engaged art practice, whatever the motive is for the post-Cold War art world's alliance with social content, it must be read as a potential site for rendezvous. To think otherwise, to remain opposed to all institutional intercourse, is to assume the most ideologically accommodating position possible. It leaves the institution in the hands of those administrators and intellectuals who dismiss the impulse for economic and political justice as impractical, turning instead to a melancholy exploration of personal meaning or an unreflective indulgence in popular culture. Therefore the current fashion for political correctness (to use a term I despise but one that makes perfect sense in this context) is useful if for no other reason than that it provides leverage for a certain measure of engaged, political work.
Perhaps the clearest way to frame this dilemma then is in the form of a question. How can artists learn to siphon off a portion of institutional power while maintaining a safe distance and margin of autonomy from the institution? At the same time, we need to ask what ethical questions this raises — not only for artists but also for sympathetic curators and arts administrators working on the "inside." In other words, what is the nature of the contradiction such potentially dangerous liaisons can produce? One answer can be found in the work of several contemporary artists, including Dan Peterman, his associates on the South Side of Chicago, and the collective REPOhistory.
Peterman's project, Excerpts from the Universal Lab: Plan B, was on display in the summer of 2000 at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago's urban campus. The Smart Museum is located not far from Peterman's multipurpose studio that, prior to a suspicious fire in 2001, included a neighborhood organic garden and housed a bicycle recycling and woodworking business as well as the offices of The Baffler, an iconoclastic left-wing journal featuring articles about global media culture and the so-called "new economy." On one level, the artist's project for the Smart Museum resembles an unassuming display of outdated scientific equipment painstakingly arranged on a cylindrical platform or dais. The initial effect is of a display meant for a science fair that was mistakenly delivered to the wrong institution. But the "excerpts" that Peterman has used in the installation were in fact drawn from the collection of a former University of Chicago research associate named John Erwood (the man's actual name, but Peterman chose not to identify him in his project). By using the history of this collection, the artist is able to launch his subtle process of leveraging institutional power.
For several decades, Erwood had been diverting scientific materials from the university into a warehouse north of the campus. Initially, Erwood's accumulations formed the basis of an unregulated science laboratory under the utopian-sounding name Universal Lab or UL. This "laboratory" was intended to be a free space in which science projects that were not sanctioned by the university could be explored by almost anyone wearing a lab coat. (At least one viable scientific project involving solar-voltaic technology did result from the work done at UL.)
The Universal Lab was therefore something of an institutional parasite. It recycled outmoded equipment and materials while remaining invisible to any oversight by its host, the university. However, Erwood's free space eventually became so choked with discarded apparatus and hazardous chemicals that it was no longer anything but a storage depot. By 1999, the Universal Lab devolved into piles of Geiger counters, autoclaves, lab ovens, oscillators, computers, radio equipment, plastic buckets of mercury, and hundreds of chemicals in brown glass bottles, all of which were stacked from floor to ceiling inside a cavernous former factory on Chicago's South Side. If the University of Chicago was not concerned with this pilfering, it may have been because Erwood was "disappearing" obsolete, even dangerous holdings that would have been expensive to dispose of in the proper manner.
UL might have remained invisible indefinitely if the building's ownership had not changed hands around 2000. In the meantime, Erwood had become destitute. With nowhere to turn, and no cost-effective way to dispose of the mountains of archaic technology, the new owner called on the assistance of the Resource Center, a Chicago-based non-profit recycling organization. Closely associated with Peterman's own recycling projects, the Resource Center allowed the artist to selectively catalogue some of the anonymous equipment and display it at the Smart Museum as part of an exhibition titled Ecologies: Mark Dion, Peter Fend, Dan Peterman, which was organized by curator Stephanie Smith. By physically relocating some of the University of Chicago's lost "assets" back to its campus, Peterman was able to provoke a series of political and aesthetic challenges that extend beyond the immediate art context. As Smith notes, through this collaborative project, these objects, many of which were scavenged from the university's loading docks and trash bins, spiraled back in a new context. They did not complete a circle/cycle but instead accrued new layers of use, value and meaning as they were temporarily incorporated into the systems and physical spaces of the University of Chicago's art museum.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Delirium and Resistance"
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Copyright © 2017 Gregory Sholette.
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