Cultural Interference

Radical change is a matter of altering the entire culture's view of reality.
—Gregg Bordowitz^#

For quite some time, it seems, artistic dialogues regarding criticality—by now a go-to, if also often doubted, rhetorical marker for unflinching engagements with and examinations of culture—have revolved largely around its precariousness or, more aptly, its likely demise. Indeed, two of the most prominent strains of critical practice in postwar art, appropriation and institutional critique, are by many accounts exhausted today. The former is typically posited as an operation, a kind of technique for displacement, first understood to radically lift the veil of images and idioms—extracting sign from syntax to dispel cultural myths—and allow viewers to recognize their own place in a constructed representational field. Yet with this operation considered today most often in a formal vein, images so "liberated" from their original settings are commonly regarded as utilized in the service of cultural amnesia, in the name of the perpetually circulating sign. As for institutional critique, which is by contrast largely considered a kind of articulation—an instance in which site and work meet, with the latter making evident the ideologies and infrastructures of the former—even its protago­nists and champions have lately posited the genre as a thing of the past. To cite just two prominent examples, the artist Andrea Fraser would in a 2005 essay underline the degree to which institutional critique and its techniques necessarily had to be understood as "institutionalized" themselves—belonging to a celebrated passage in art history regarded by many as bolstering figures of authority more than dismantling or problematizing them in any substantive way.^# And before the decade was out, in 2009, one of the editors of an anthology of writings on institutional critique explicitly deemed his subject a historical one, titling his introductory essay "What Was Institutional Critique?"^#

Regarding such assessments, however, it is useful to consider how criticality is in fact consistently under duress. The term is a moving target, historically attended by questions regarding what it is, whether it can be sustained, and, moreover, whether it inadvertently fuels the very entities it aims to combat. Even a cursory survey of discussions regarding institutional critique, for example, reveals anxieties around the artistic model from its beginnings. No less a figure than the artist Hans Haacke—whose long-standing commit­ment to rendering transparent economic, social, and aesthetic struc­tures throughout culture has led him to be immanently associated with the paradigm—used the phrase "consciousness industry" as early as the mid-1980s to describe the sophisticated networks of institutional support necessary to make visible ostensibly adversarial avant-garde artistic gestures.^# Works seeking to emphasize the moral, political, and intellectual forces that determine and enforce culture, he observed, were nevertheless dependent on a museum or gallery platform designed to privilege aesthetic experience. Such an observation was elaborated on nearly ten years later by the art historian James Meyer in his nuanced 1993 exhibition What Hap­pened to the Institutional Critique?. Presented at American Fine Arts in New York, Meyer's effort was intended specifically as a reply to that year's Whitney Biennial, which had, he argued, effec­tively thematized politics and subsequently rendered critical artwork the stuff of style, preparing it for ready consumption by the public.^# Notably, the Berlin-based critic Isabelle Graw would roughly con­temporaneously take note of museums' increasing desire to invite artists to deconstruct institutional infrastructures and ideologies in their projects, dubbing the growing trend "subversion for hire."^#

This seeming paradox regarding modes of criticality, far from illustrating the details of distant history, is incredibly resonant with, if not just prescient of, circumstances in art today. If Haacke decades ago was suggesting that museums were increasingly corporatized entities—at the same time that they were, ironically, pressed to narrate their distinctiveness from the rest of culture in order to maintain relevance—so today these institutions have to vie for attention with an exponentially larger entertainment industry while still needing to demarcate the function of "art" as separate from other modes of production, distribution, and consumption.^# And what arises in turn is a double-bind scenario taking the one described by Meyer to a new level: museums are compelled to highlight extreme measures by artists in order to compete with the intensity of popular culture, and yet, bracketed safely as "art," these gestures are easily digested and dismissed by the very public they set out to titillate. Again, the notion of critically engaging one's audience in art and its museum or gallery setting seems fragile at best.