{"id":38847,"date":"2024-06-03T08:50:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-03T06:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quadriennalediroma.org\/?p=38847"},"modified":"2024-05-24T10:06:20","modified_gmt":"2024-05-24T08:06:20","slug":"institutions-and-critical-practice-an-organic-horizon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quadriennalediroma.org\/en\/institutions-and-critical-practice-an-organic-horizon\/","title":{"rendered":"Institutions and Critical Practice. An Organic Horizon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Over the last few decades, a number of economic, social and cultural phenomena have challenged the power of criticism, from both the \u2018inside\u2019 and the \u2018outside\u2019. These involve the rise of the postmodernist vulgate, on the one hand,and poststructuralist thinking, on the other; the spread, since the 1990s, of the anthropological paradigm, the turn introduced by the transversality of visual culture studies, the revival of feminist orientations and debates on gender issues, such as the issue of deculturalisation. Every opinion must be preceded by a questioning of the systemic prejudices that determine it. Otherwise, any critical judgement risks appearing to be an act of domination and blind power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the other hand, globalised neoliberalism, which in the knowledge economy (from the university to private companies) has achieved the tertiarisation of work and precarity, has generated a hyper-production of cultural opportunities aimed at a progressively larger audience of consumers and tourists. This, in turn, objectively makes free, autonomous, independent \u2014 and thus, uncompromised \u2014 criticism increasingly difficult. In addition to this, the \u2018software society\u2019 of digital applications has started to give shape to alternative worlds. This means that each individual can immediately find comfortable answers to their own cultural interests, conforming to their own identities, and so they can avoid having to engage with different and alternative dimensions. These are widespread views \u2014 but let\u2019s try to get down to the practicalities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We know that the enjoyment of a work of art (and purchase is a special form of enjoyment) involves engagement with a \u2018frame\u2019, as Judith Butler states in one short but intense intervention: \u2018The frame is a physical object, sometimes more conspicuous, sometimes more elusive\u2019, Butler writes. \u2018But \u2014 at least in museums \u2014 the artwork is framed not only by the solid material that delimits the image, but also by the room, the wall, the light, the hooks on which it hangs \u2026 Curators well know that the painting, the sculpture, the drawing is framed not only by the objects and people that surround it, but also by the captions that \u2018contextualise\u2019 and \u2018interpret\u2019 it for the viewer. Not to mention the processes of artistic acquisition, the economic and logistical aspects underlying the transfer of the work \u2026 So, one enters the museum with the expectation of a pure experience, which, as I said, is based on specific mechanisms of repression\u2019.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Avoiding this action of \u2018repression\u2019 and translating things, we would hope that the critical act (text, gesture, voice…) does not have a frame \u2014 yet it does possess one, and seems to be articulated in a complex but concrete way in the body of both public and private institutions. The question then arises as to how critical space finds shelter within the institution, and how criticism as a form of power (in the Gramscian sense of hegemony) can assert itself therein, according to types of practices apparently destined to meagre visibility and which may be perceived as \u2018secondary\u2019 but which are in fact effective, taken as a whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the pervasive spread of exhibitions understood as a cognitive appointment \u2014 one in which new paradigms can be enunciated and the languages of the contemporary and its protagonists can be publicly expressed through the involvement of historical venues, museal and even \u2018non-art\u2019 spaces \u2014 the curator\u2019s increasingly visible role appears to have changed. From being an independent figure, a \u2018fellow traveller\u2019 of artists,[2]<\/a> the curator has become the focus of a training framework, produced through the first courses in the 1990s, leading to her subsequent contractualisation within institutions. The range of her tasks expands according to the dimensions and the characteristics of these same institutions: she is no longer, therefore, a mere exhibition maker, <\/em>but a person in charge of the educational programme, of cultural activities in the virtual and digital dimension, of in-depth talks, an art director, trainer, lecturer, activator of material in the archives and so on. The increasingly professionalised curator, therefore, specialises by implementing a complex system of necessary \u2018mediations\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Nathalie Heinich suggests: \u2018To borrow two of Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts, the importance of mediations grows in direct proportion to the degree of specialisation and creative innovation or \u201cautonomisation\u201d of the \u201cartistic field\u201d. These may be verbal or written mediations (reviews, articles, books, theses, contracts, etc.), but also iconic mediations (reproductions), professional mediations (critics, conservators, gallery owners or producers of works), institutional mediations (galleries, museums, public or private art centres, etc.) or material ones (museum and gallery walls, posters, pedestals, frames, catalogues, archives, etc.)”[3]<\/a> .<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These mediations, now identified from a sociological point of view, can become \u2018microforms\u2019 of critical space within institutions. We need only imagine activities such as: free discussion with an artist, collaborations for seeking funds, engagement during studio visits, the organisation of official exhibitions, alternating with more experimental ones; or moreover, writing texts with differentiated spaces and autonomies, the planning of popularisation, reading and offering books to the public, and dialogue in dialectical engagement with administrative hierarchies and political structures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Interpreting some of these practices more radically, along the lines of James Scott’s writings, we may infer that they construct a secret, hidden discourse, alternative to public and official discourse, indeed potential actions of resistance within micro-spaces of autonomy.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Micro-criticism, from within, can produce unexpected connections and outcrops. As they take concrete form, encounters, choices, bodies in relation, actions, dialogues, and passions will shake up prejudice, short-sighted decision-making, propagandistic blindness, a \u2014 sometimes soporific \u2014 bureaucratic automatism, the system built on connections and lobbying, as well as the disinterest and delegation that removes responsibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari argue in Kafka. Toward a Minor Literature<\/em>,[5]<\/a>  perhaps there is a \u2018minor criticism\u2019 that acts in these forms, creating unpredictable concatenations that, by deconstructing the official organisation of things, render it porous and more open to this criticism\u2019s influence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This articulation of practices, which can still be defined as curatorial and close to contemporary art knowledge but which are certainly more constructive, experiential, and relational, can be experienced in many places: In listening to the guided tour of Peng Zuqiang\u2019s work at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, or in the set-up of an exhibition at the GAM in Turin, in the cultural mediator of the Biennale or in the passion of the Musei Civici conservator who defends their authoritativeness in an information sheet. In the article written by a curator at the Mart or in the research of a PhD student working on a woman critic who has remained virtually overlooked. Or indeed, in the lecture to visiting students, in the outstretched hand to help the artist experimenting with her passions, in the partnership responding to a ministerial call for contributions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Micro-criticism accepts that it is not authoritarian, dominant, discriminating. But it acts, frayed, within the meshes of a complex, political, economic, hierarchical and administrative system. Of course, micro-criticism acts effectively if the subject within the institution manages to carve out a personal space \u2014 even outside the multiple possible roles \u2014 for the free exercise and growth, training and updating of skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the privacy of our interests, we read about the \u2018metamorphic\u2019 in Emanuele Coccia, the concept of debt and consumption in David Graeber, dysphoria mundi <\/em>in Paul B. Preciado (read it!), Donna Haraway’s Chthulucene<\/em>, aspects of critical formation in bell hooks, David Toop\u2019s ocean of sound, <\/em>and so on. We address everything we consider an update on contemporary thought. But such knowledge will articulate itself, virally take hold in the subjectivities that somatise, move, shift, act, choose, respond, in the secondary rivulets of the activities of the work and the post to which we are called.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the hands of this curatorial attitude, the official space of the institution is critically stimulated to enter the fray, to make itself available for practices that reach from the organisation to the relational, to the dimension \u2018in common\u2019 and that, therefore, are not limited to descend from a curator understood as a deus ex machina<\/em>: an \u2018Uber Curator (German word), who has the total control over exhibitions, product of system of power, fame, and cartels; the curatorial operation inevitably goes through a complex process of negotiation between different creative practices, institutions, stakeholders. This process opens up different possibilities for a new mode of knowledge production and dissemination \u2026 This process cannot be claimed by a single author \u2026 If the ownership shifts to the visitors, the Uber Curator becomes vulnerable. In this sense, curatorial research can only be completed by visitors’ practice of commoning the curatorial operation\u2019.[6]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n

[1]<\/a> J. Butler, Perdita e rigenerazione. Ambiente, arte, politica<\/em>, Venezia, Marsilio, 2023, pp 25-27.
[2]<\/a> \u2018In the 60s the curators were just friends of the artists, companions on the road, they accompanied the artists along the way, part of the making of art (very different was, for example, the figure of Clement Greember\u2019: C. Christov-Bakargiev in (multiple authors), Reclaiming Artistic Research<\/em>, edited by Lucy Cotter, Berlin, Hatje Cantz, 2019.
[3]<\/a> N. Heinich, Le paradigme de l\u2019art contemporain<\/em>, Paris, Gallimard, 2014.
[4]<\/a> J.C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts<\/em>, New Haven (CT), Yale University Press, 1999.
[5]<\/a> G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature<\/em>, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
[6]<\/a> Je Yun Moon, \u2018Curatorial Research as the Practice of Commoning\u2019, in (multiple authors) Institution as Praxis<\/em>, edited by B. Balaskas. and C. Lito, London, Sternberg Press, 2020.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the last few decades, a number of economic, social and cultural phenomena have challenged the power of criticism, from both the \u2018inside\u2019 and the \u2018outside\u2019. These involve the rise of the postmodernist vulgate, on the one hand,and poststructuralist thinking, on the other; the spread, since the 1990s, of the anthropological paradigm, the turn introduced […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":38845,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[309],"tags":[387,342],"class_list":["post-38847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-quaderni_arte_italiana-en","tag-qai9-en","tag-quaderni-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quadriennalediroma.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quadriennalediroma.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quadriennalediroma.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quadriennalediroma.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quadriennalediroma.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quadriennalediroma.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38847\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quadriennalediroma.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quadriennalediroma.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quadriennalediroma.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quadriennalediroma.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}