Erratum

Compensation Portrait: Art Without Administration: Radical Art and Critique after the Neo-Avant-Garde
Original Author: Jonathan Vickery, 2002
Notable Changes: In the article, the London based artists group BANK is replaced by the Prague based artists group GUMA GUAR. BANK was active in London during the 1990s. The location in the text is thus shifted from London in the 1990s to present day Prague.

Introduction

The Representing the Nation publication was prepared in relation to our participation in the International Triennial of Contemporary Art (ITCA) organized by Tomáš Vlček and Milan Knížák at the National Gallery (NG) in Prague in 2008. We were invited to create a new work.

We wanted to characterize the NG in Prague as an institution. In 2008 the NG was a member of the Association of Czech Galleries. We decided to visit all of its member institutions across the country during a six month period. This gave us an overview of topics, complications, facilities, and staff issues, including an understanding of the challenges the respective institutions face, in respect to the regional, economical, and historical collections of art for which they are responsible. How do they think about and reflect on their own practice? What kind of functions, positions, roles, or ambitions do they articulate?

Despite being dissatisfied with the research material, we made a decision to maintain the project’s original framework. We had anticipated more substantial visions or statements, so we applied an improvised strategy of so-called Compensation Portraits, inspired by a concept from the exhibition catalog First Papers of Surrealism held in New York in 1942. In this case, the surrealist painters were asked to bring photographs of people other than themselves to represent them in the publication. In this spirit, we selected theoretical texts on institutional critique from a range of international writers, translated these texts into Czech and presented them as texts from Czech institutions and their representatives.

The project as a whole was self-financed. The sponsors or partners whose logos are printed on page 59 at the end of the publication are all imaginary sponsors, themselves unaware of any seeming participation. Thus, the publication falsely takes on the form of a serious international cooperation between the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Practices (eipcp.net), the EU Education and Culture D6 Framework Program, the Association of Czech Galleries, the National Gallery Prague, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Prague, the Office for Contemporary Art Norway, and funded by the Austrian Raiffeisen Bank. This parody reflects the trend of corporate sponsorship supporting critical, progressive, intellectual, and autonomous initiatives within locations of their respective markets.

The Representing the Nation publication was immediately distributed to all of the represented institutions. The project was not appreciated by the organizers of the ITCA / NG, generally disappointed in not understanding the basic conceptual framework. They refused to cover production costs or to further communicate concerning the project. In addition, part of the publications went missing from the NG depository. Few institutions encouraged further dialogue, and there was limited interest by other representatives and researchers from various institutions in Prague.

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The City Gallery of Prague

Authority: City of Prague
Director: Petra Hoftichová

History:
The Prague City Gallery (GHMP) was established in 1963 with a duty to collect art, be responsible for maintenance and preservation of Czech art of 19th and 20th century. The gallery responsibilities was extended to built cultural heritage like public monuments and historical buildings. However, the background of the City Gallery collection dates back almost 100 years, before it was officially established, with the Artists Association related to the painter Josef Manes.

Collection:
More than 13 948 items are in the collection. In addition, the gallery takes care of 420 public sculptures. In the second half of the 80s’ the gallery became involved in a new approach of collecting and working as an institution. Priority was given to contemporary art and in 1997 a new part of the collection was designated to photography.

Statement:

The sociological reality of institutionalisation was arguably, since the mid-nineteen-century in France, the condition out of which the modernist avant-garde emerged in the first place. For example, in Tomas Crow’s essay, ‘Modernism and Mass Culture’ from 1983, the newly emergent consumer culture in Paris provided the unregulated social space necessary for resistant impulses and creativity unavailable within an art world governed by the norms of the Academy.

However, the most influential model of institutialisation to date-outlined by Adorno’s post-Weberian ‘totally administered society’ and the Culture Industry thesis (i.e. the complete economic instrumentalisation of creative spontaneity) – argues that late capitalist society has no unregulated spaces; the anarchic and expressive potential of early forms of consumerism has become entirely regulated. the Culture Industry thesis is surely still convincing, but I would say only on the level of macroeconomics. Again, in the absence of an empirically grounded critical sociology of the art world- revealing the way of the reflexive capacities of specific practices have been dissolved or radically reduced – institutionalisation thesis themselves have become little more than the art world’s own bad conscience.

As anarchic as GUMA GUAR’s art seems, it revolves around a series of basic hermeneutical manouveres, using non art-world spaces to bring together the visual and auditory ambience of anti-commercial pop subcultures (like the rave and the dance culture of the 1980′s, themselves emerging from resistance to mainstream mass-consumerised pop), reigning art world ‘theory’, procedural and regulative norms from the art world’s administrative mechanisms of display and dissemination, and avant-garde visual strategies like Audio-VJ, photomontage, readymades, assemblage, installations and so on. John Roberts and Dave Beech have recently theorized GUMA GUAR’s aesthetic as a form of philistinsim, or radical scepticism of all extant forms of institutionally endorsed aesthetic value. The figure of the philistine (which it seems becomes our subject-position as spectator/participator) is the ‘spectre of the aesthetic’, which, it seems, is an embodied return of art’s repressed aesthetic content – the true somatic basis of aesthetic experience – hitherto preserved in anti-pop cultures. The philistine articulates what we might call ‘the institutional abject’: what any given time is expelled in order to constitute the institutional (even if unconscious) conditions of any given instance of production, display, reception or dissemination of art. Here again Tomas Crow comes to mind: moderism circa 1850 became the other of the Academy by internalizing the aesthetics of mass culture. More important perhaps is GUMA GUAR’s indication that avant-garde and kitsch, critique and ideology, the radicals and the establishment, are now inseparable, and thus what is needed is an art practice capable of articulating the excluded other of this postmodern collusion.

In relocating the site of art’s annunciation – exhibiting site-specific work in non-artworld spaces – GUMA GUAR is right to see that the problem of institutionalisation is as much one of physical location and a symbolic engagement with the material conditions of production as one of the Sign or representation – that ‘discourse’, however multivalent and characterized by the principle of iterability, is nevertheless articulated within specific social regimes. GUMA GUAR’s attempt to embody the institutional abject – a kind of immanent critique of the postmodernist art world – has a compelling dimension but at times comes perilously close to a parody of some of the worst aspect of the art world. There is a sense in which GUMA GUAR overstates the art world’s legitimizing power in regulating aesthetic practice; the way the art world is portrayed – as exclusive constitutive conditions of aesthetic production – panders to its aggrandized self image and the ideological identity between the potentially expansive social field of art practice and the art world’s institutional administration; it was through this identity that the art world has claimed exclusivity and significance as site of political contestation and has equated itself with ‘culture’ per se, and thus privileged adjudicators of value. In pursuing the institutionalisation theory – seeing how far the logic of Capital has penetrated culture and how far culture has itself become Capital (how our very powers of sense perception are conditioned by the commodity form) – art’s orbit of meaning is socially more expansive than any one dominant configuration of administrative power.

The scarcity of politically motivated art after the neo-avant-garde is of course, in part, engendered by real concrete problems which come with being outside the systems of institutional patronage, but also engendered by and over-concern with the art world and a lack of attention to art’s capacity for intervention in other regions of social life. What I find more promising was the (admittedly more fashionable) move in the 1990 to locate spaces for event-oriented art experience outside art-world institutions – the gutted social spaces vacated by outmoded forms of commodity production – and where the nature of visual practice follows from that.

To give an example from abroad, Rachel Whiteread’s House from 1993 was most certainly an example of the art world’s capacity for institutional expansion. Yet it did suggest another model of radical praxis. So evidently not merely another variant of public sculpture, it was soon perceived as such. When threatened with demolition, House became saturated with the rhetoric of moral superiority and bankrupt values concerning ‘great’ art and artistic heritage. House could have been more visibly an embodied ‘moment’ of an economic process – a momentary (if only symbolic) halt to the local urban so-called ‘regeneration’ – the social pretext for feeding the politically induced house-price inflation in London at the time, and its ensuing ‘class-cleansing’ of the next generation of East Enders out of the East to make way for the City’s next young army of white-collar proletariat. There were few symbolic sites in the early 1990s so socio-economically encoded as domestic property. House reasserted the social content of aesthetic form by interlocking the politics of private and public space on the shifting territories of economic class while still thematising the historical sculptural models of spatial experience and architectural aesthetics of urbanism. In short, House could have articulated the social realities of the divisions that facilitated the institutionalised separation of creativity and ‘the everyday’ by becoming the site of social economy – where culture, values, law and Capital merge in ways that really matter.