Erratum


 Compensation Portrait: The Rise and Fall of New Institutionalism. Perspectives on a Possible Future
Original Author: Nina Möntmann, 2007

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 Moravian Gallery in Brno

Authority: The Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic
Director: Mgr. Marek Pokorný

History:
The Moravian Gallery was created in 1961 with the merging of the Picture Gallery of the Moravian Museum with the Moravian Museum of Applied Arts. The first collections go back to the founding of the Franz (later Moravian) Museum in 1817 and to the founding of the Moravian Museum of Applied Arts in 1873; both institutions systematically built up their collections.

The Museum of Applied Arts was founded in order to help improve the quality of the spontaneously growing manufacturing industries through collecting examples of good craftsmanship.

Collection:
The original collection of the Picture Gallery of the Moravian Museum was donated by noble and patrician families and by the Church to the Franz Museum, as it was called at the time. In the 1920s and 1930s pictures from the Gomperz Municipal Gallery and from Arnold Skutecký’s private collection substantially expanded the Picture Gallery. Even more important were the acquisitions after 1961, the year of the founding of the Moravian Gallery. In its collections the Museum of Applied Arts focuses on historical arts and crafts and on contemporary industrial art.

Statement:

Only a few years ago, “new institutionalism” was recognized in a curatorial intention to create “an active space” that is “part community center, part laboratory and part academy”,  attributes I am quoting from the profile of the Rooseum in Malmö, which – under the directorship of Charles Esche and later Lene Crone Jensen – was one of the model institutions of this new experimental and multi-functional approach to curating. At the zenith of these activities and their discourse Jonas Ekeberg edited a publication with the title “New Institutionalism”, in which he defined this subject as an “attempt to redefine the contemporary art institution [...] ready to let go, not only of the limited discourse of the work of art as a mere object, but also of the whole institutional framework that went with it”, stating that it was “far from peripheral, but rather central, even crucial, to the contemporary art scene.”

What is not wanted, in short, is criticality. Criticality didn’t survive the “corporate turn” in the institutional landscape. This is not only due to the larger institutions that are run like a branded global company in an obvious way, like the Guggenheim, which provides the clearest example of how an institution is conceived and staged by politicians and sponsors. More and more this also applies to mid-sized and smaller institutions, such as the German Kunstvereine or art associations, which are supposed to be experimental, but find themselves increasingly forced into curating programs similar to an established Kunsthalle.

This situation raises some crucial questions: What is “new institutionalism” today? Is there still anything like an institution of critique, and what does it mean in the present context? Can the discussion of the conditions of production be carried out within the institutions themselves, and what are the consequences for their internal structures, functionality, programming and projections? Or, to quote Hito Steyerl: “is it not rather absurd to argue that something like an institution of critique exists, at a time when critical cultural institutions are clearly being dismantled, underfunded, and subjected to the demands of a neoliberal event economy?”

This current situation, which goes hand in hand with the dismantling of the welfare state, produces an urgent need for emancipatory forms of action in the institutionalized art field and hereby for new institutions. This brings us back, first of all, to a fundamental question: What do we actually expect from an art institution? What do we want an institution to stand for? What desires does an institution in the art field produce? In his essay for the publication “Art and its Institutions“, the Swedish philosopher Sven-Olov Wallenstein analyzed “institutional desires” that are connected with art institutions, and reveals a profound paradox by asking: “Why is there such a desire for institutions, and why does the very attempt to meet it only give rise to more dissatisfaction?” Referring to Guattari, he concludes that “the need for facilities is an illusion, or rather a retroactive rationalization.” Instead it is the very institution which – as he continues – “produces a certain structure of desire, it enables a certain space where signifiers and desires can circulate, and in this sense it is just as futile to dream of a fully de-institutionalized space as it is to dream of an institution that would work.” While you can’t beat this argument on the one hand, on the other the conclusion cannot be – as Wallenstein also says – to leave institutions completely aside in order to enter alternative spheres.

In the face of this dilemma, what is therefore required is the establishment of transgressive institutions that question and break with the current developments of privatization and simultaneously orient themselves towards other disciplines and areas besides the corporative business of globalized capitalism.

In search of participatory institution-forming activities, my attention has recently turned to the institutional situation in several regions in the southern hemisphere. There the few official contemporary art institutions mostly are inaccessible for young artists and dysfunctional as part of the public sphere, and artists and curators don’t have easy access to public or private funding. These kinds of local situations where there is a lack of access to institutional infrastructure often give rise to community projects, that are characterized by their institution-forming character, such as Sarai or Khoj in Delhi, PUKAR and crit in Mumbai, or ruangrupa in Jakarta. You often find collective and occasionally interdisciplinary activities by artists, sometimes together with curators, researchers, activists or new media workers. They start with a small space and very local programming, exhibiting their own work and that of artists they know, or using the space for other community activities such as discussions or parties. In the beginning there is thus a kind of community center or hang-out for friends from the art field. In the regions I am talking about these activities are assuming a quasi-institutional status that often goes hand in hand with an expansion of their activity. They then start to fundraise internationally, to set up residencies, offer research possibilities, invite foreign curators and artists, organize film programs, edit magazines and so on. This tendency we find of course in the Czech Republic as well.

In my opinion, what institutions in western countries need to do is precisely to reduce the number of structures and standards, and disengage spaces from too many codes and contexts. Here, where we have an institutionalized art field – and consequently the opportunities to participate in semi-public spaces, but also the difficulties caused by the control mechanisms of these spaces – the options are somewhat different. Here there are inherently many categories and conventions for all kinds of art spaces, and alternatives are always measured against the official system that already exists and is increasingly defined by the politics of city marketing and sponsorship. It may seem paradoxical, but from this perspective, in fact they have less scope there and more control. Therefore, a conceivable new institution of critique would be one that maintains and expands its participation in (semi-) public space, and at the same time creates free unbranded spaces and negates dependencies.

It could counter the corporate globalization that neo-capitalism created, instead enabling an active and immediate global exchange of diverse public groups and individual voices, and a critique of the nation-state. It would have to widen its scope, consider cross-genre collaborations with established as well as alternative organizations, and initiate multi-disciplinary activities. This conceivable critical institution could, for example, take on the form of an internationally operating “organized network”, which strengthens various smaller, independent institutions and activities – be they alternative, artist-run, or research-based – and could also set up temporary platforms within bigger institutions. Ned Rossiter describes the potential of “organized networks” for superseding modern institutions that are just “rebooted into the digital age” by “reconciling their hierarchical structures of organization with the flexible, partially decentralized and transnational flows of culture, finance and labor.” The advantage of “organized networks” instead is the way they function as “social-technical forms that co-emerge with the development of digital information and communication technologies.” In the art field this new institution of organized collaborations could serve then as an information pool, a hub for various transdisciplinary forms of collaboration, in legal matters as a union, and as an entry for audiences to participate locally and exchange internationally.

The transformative public potential of an institution so structured lies in creating “diasporic public spheres”, that are described by Arjun Appadurai – who like Ned Rossiter derives his transferable model from an analysis of the globalized use of electronic media – as “phenomena that confound theories that depend on the continued salience of the nation-state as the key arbiter of important social changes.” Precisely in this lies both an internationalization as well as a democratization of the art institution and its research facilities, which not only breaks down or questions certain dominant forms of institutional politics, but also opens up a “new role for the imagination in social life.” On the level of funding, ground-breaking new private as well as public foundations are required to create self-sustainable, independent and powerful alternatives – a “globalization from below”, if you will.