Critical Practice Artists, Museums, Ethics 2016033832, 9780415658546, 9780415658560, 9781315272016

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CRITICAL PRACTICE

Critical Practice is an ambitious work that blurs the boundaries between art history, museum studies, political science and applied ethics. Marstine demonstrates how convergences between institutional critique and socially engaged practice, as represented by the term ‘critical practice’, can create conditions for organisational change, particularly facilitating increased public agency and shared authority. The book analyses a range of museum interventions exploring such subjects as the ethical stewardship of collections, hybridity as a methodological approach to social justice and alternative forms of democracy. Discussing critical practice within the framework of peace and reconciliation studies, Marstine shows how artists’ interventions can redress exclusions, inequalities and relational frictions between museums and their publics. Elucidating the museological and ethical implications of institutional critique and socially engaged practice, Marstine has provided a timely and thoughtful resource for museum studies scholars, artists, museum professionals, art historians and graduate students worldwide who are interested in mapping and unpacking the intricate relationships among artists, museums and communities. Janet Marstine is Academic Director of the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester. She is the co-editor of New Directions in Museum Ethics (2012) and editor of The Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics (2011) and New Museum Theory and Practice: An Introduction (2005).

MUSEUM MEANINGS Series Editors: Richard Sandell and Christina Kreps

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

Museums have undergone enormous changes in recent decades; an ongoing process of renewal and transformation bringing with it changes in priority, practice and role as well as new expectations, philosophies, imperatives and tensions that continue to attract attention from those working in, and drawing upon, wide-ranging disciplines. Museum Meanings presents new research that explores diverse aspects of the shifting social, cultural and political significance of museums and their agency beyond, as well as within, the cultural sphere. Interdisciplinary, cross-cultural and international perspectives and empirical investigation are brought to bear on the exploration of museums’ relationships with their various publics (and analysis of the ways in which museums shape – and are shaped by – such interactions). Theoretical perspectives might be drawn from anthropology, cultural studies, art and art history, learning and communication, media studies, architecture and design and material culture studies amongst others. Museums are understood very broadly – to include art galleries, historic sites and other cultural heritage institutions – as are their relationships with diverse constituencies. The focus on the relationship of the museum to its publics shifts the emphasis from objects and collections and the study of museums as text to studies grounded in the analysis of bodies and sites; identities and communities; ethics, moralities and politics. Also in the series: Museums, Society, Inequality Edited by Richard Sandell Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture Eilean Hooper-Greenhill Museum, Media, Message Edited by Eilean Hooper-Greenhill Learning in the Museum George Hein Colonialism and the Object Empire, Material Culture and the Museum Edited by Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn

CRITICAL PRACTICE Artists, Museums, Ethics

Janet Marstine

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 J. Marstine The right of Janet Marstine to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Marstine, Janet, author. Title: Critical practice : artists, museums, ethics / Janet Marstine. Description: New York : Routledge, 2017. | Series: Museum meanings | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016033832 | ISBN 9780415658546 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780415658560 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Artists and museums. | Art and social action. | Art museums and community. Classification: LCC N72.A76 M29 2017 | DDC 708—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016033832 ISBN: 978-0-415-65854-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-65856-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-27201-6 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Clay

‘Janet Marstine’s timely new book traces the evolution of Institutional Critique and the emergence of socially engaged artists practices, examining how they interact with the imperatives of public galleries and museums. Refreshingly, Marstine does not dodge the thorny ethical questions that inevitably arise when artists work and play with others. Critical Practice boldly engages with issues of care, authorship, conflict and reconciliation in the context of sometimes painful and often significant changes in habits, practices and policy that artworks produce.’ Neil Cummings, Chelsea College of Arts London, UK

CONTENTS

List of figuresviii List of platesxii Acknowledgementsxiii 1 Critical practice as reconciliation

1

2 Changing hands: ethical stewardship of collections

40

3 ‘Temple swapping’: hybridity and social justice

83

4 Platforms: negotiating and renegotiating the terms of democracy

119

5 Reconciliation and the discursive museum

157

Bibliography186 Index205

FIGURES

1.1

1.2

1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.10 1.11 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7

Maider López, Polder Cup (detail), 2010, Between You and I – Intervention 3: Morality Exhibition series, Witte de With (Center for Contemporary Art) Maider López, Polder Cup (detail), 2010, Between You and I – Intervention 3: Morality Exhibition series, Witte de With (Center for Contemporary Art) The Vacuum Cleaner, Able, Glasgow, 2007 Installation view: theanyspacewhatever, 2009, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Installation view: Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim, 2010, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Simon Rodia, Watts Towers, Los Angeles, 1921–1954 Ed Ruscha, The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1965–1968 Annette Krauss, Hidden Curriculum, 2012 Fred Wilson, Life’s Link (detail), 2012, Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art Behind the scenes during a webcast of tenantspin, Liverpool, 2002 Liam Gillick, The Moral Maze, 1995, installation at Consortium, Dijon Michael Rakowitz (left) and Kevin Lasko at restaurant Park Avenue, 2011 Michael Rakowitz, Spoils (detail), 2011 Michael Rakowitz, Spoils, as packed for repatriation to Iraq, 2011 Michael Rakowitz entering Iraqi Mission to the United Nations, New York, 2011 Installation view of Raid the Icebox with Andy Warhol, 1970, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design Robert Fontenot, ‘Teddy Bears’, from Recycle LACMA, 2009–2010 Robert Fontenot, Recycle LACMA blog, featuring John Galanos coat and a car seat cover Fontenot crafted from it

2

3 10 16 23 25 26 30 32 34 37 41 42 43 44 49 52 55

Figures  ix

Robert Fontenot, ‘BBQ Aprons’, from Recycle LACMA, 2009–2010 Robert Fontenot, ‘Bandoleer’, from Recycle LACMA, 2009–2010 Robert Fontenot, ‘Torch’, from Recycle LACMA, 2009–2010 Robert Fontenot, ‘Witch Hat’, from Recycle LACMA, 2009–2010 Alfred Waterhouse, Manchester Museum (tower at top centre), University of Manchester, 1890 2.13 Manchester Hermit weblog with post by Ansuman Biswas, Manchester Museum, University of Manchester, 2009 2.14 Malus niedzwetzkyana (apple blossoms), Kyrgyzstan, Manchester Museum, as photographed for Ansuman Biswas’s Manchester Hermit, 2009 2.15 St. Helena Giant Earwig (species last seen alive 1967), Manchester Museum, as photographed for Ansuman Biswas’s Manchester Hermit, 2009 2.16 Anopheles mosquito, Manchester Museum, as photographed for Ansuman Biswas’s Manchester Hermit, 2009 2.17 Human skull, date unknown, Manchester Museum, as photographed for Ansuman Biswas’s Manchester Hermit, 2009 2.18 Coin, British West Africa, 1915, Manchester Museum, as photographed for Ansuman Biswas’s Manchester Hermit, 2009 2.19 Bioblitz event undertaken with the Manchester Museum Youth Board, as part of the museum’s relational collecting initiative ‘Trees’, 2013 2.20–2.22 Ai Weiwei, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995 3.1 Documentation of A.A. Bronson’s Blessing for Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 2012 3.2 Bharti Parmar, Priest With Hair Loose, 2003 3.3 Fred Wilson, An Invisible Life: A View into the World of a 120-Year-Old Man (detail), 1993, Capp Street Project, San Francisco 3.4 Fred Wilson, An Invisible Life: A View into the World of a 120-Year-Old Man (detail), 1993, Capp Street Project, San Francisco 3.5 Matt Smith, Other Stories: Queering the University Art Collection (detail), Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds, 2012 3.6 Matt Smith, Other Stories: Queering the University Art Collection (detail), Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds, 2012 3.7 Matt Smith, Other Stories: Queering the University Art Collection (detail), Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds, 2012 3.8 Theaster Gates in front of Dorchester Projects, Chicago, 2012 3.9 Theaster Gates, The Art of Soul dinner, Dorchester Projects, Chicago, 2012 3.10 Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2002 3.11 Dave Drake, Storage Jar, Lewis Miles Pottery, 1858 3.12 Dave Drake, Storage Jar (detail), Lewis Miles Pottery, 1858 3.13 Theaster Gates working in the Kohler Pottery during his Kohler Arts/ Industry residency, 2010 3.14 Installation view of the exhibition To Speculate Darkly:Theaster Gates and Dave the Potter, Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, 2010 2.8 2.9 2.10 2.11 2.12

57 58 59 61 64 68

73

74 75 76 79 80 82 84 86 90 91 99 100 101 104 105 107 108 109 110 112

x Figures

3.15 3.16 3.17 3.18

4.1

4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6

4.7

4.8

4.9 4.10 4.11

4.12

4.13

4.14 4.15 4.16

Theaster Gates, Untitled (Bitch, I Made this Pot), 2010 113 Theaster Gates, Whyte Painting (NGGRWR0003), 2010 114 Work produced as part of Theaster Gates Jr.’s Kohler Arts/Industry residency, 2010 115 Installation view from The Dave Project, organised by the Chipstone Foundation in collaboration with the Milwaukee Art Museum, August 2010–ongoing 116 Henry Bond and Liam Gillick, 22 April 1991, 14:00, Royal Albert Hall, London England: Institute of Directors Annual Convention; speakers include Norman Lamont, F. W. De Klerk. From the series Documents, 123 1990 onwards Goshka Macuga, The Nature of the Beast, 2009, installation view, 128 Whitechapel Gallery, London Goshka Macuga, The Nature of the Beast, 2009, installation view with 129 Colin Powell, 2009, modelled by Aleix Barbat and Hero Johnson Goshka Macuga, The Nature of the Beast, 2009, installation view with 130 Sir! No Sir! 2005, written and directed by David Zeiger Goshka Macuga, The Nature of the Beast, 2009, installation view, 135 Whitechapel Gallery, London Goshka Macuga, The Nature of the Beast, 2009, installation view with meeting of Minority Rights Group International, 27 May 2009, Whitechapel Gallery, London 140 Goshka Macuga, The Nature of the Beast, 2009, installation view with meeting of The International Congress, 14 March 2010, Whitechapel 142 Gallery, London Goshka Macuga, The Nature of the Beast, 2009, installation view with meeting of The People Speak, 27 August 2009, Whitechapel 143 Gallery, London HRH Prince William delivering a speech at the reopening of 145 Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2009 HRH Prince William with Iwona Blazwick, Whitechapel Gallery 146 Director, at the reopening of Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2009 Goshka Macuga, On the Nature of the Beast (detail), 2009, Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT, on loan to Castello di 146 Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino Goshka Macuga, On the Nature of the Beast, 2009, Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT, on loan to Castello di Rivoli 148 Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino Goshka Macuga, On the Nature of the Beast, 2009, Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT, on loan to Castello di Rivoli 149 Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino Jonas Staal, Memorial, The Geert Wilders Works, 2005 152 Jonas Staal, Court drawing, The Geert Wilders Works: A Trial I–II, 2007–2008153 Jonas Staal, New World Summit – Berlin, Sophiensaele, Berlin Biennale, 2012 154

Figures  xi

4.17 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9

Jonas Staal, New World Summit – Berlin, 2012 (study), drawing in collaboration with architect Paul Kuipers 155 Carey Young, Conflict Management, 2003, as staged in Budapest 161 Hammer Museum Artist Council and Museum Staff, UCLA, 2014 170 Khaled Hourani, Picasso in Palestine, 2011, Art Academy of Palestine, Ramallah175 Khaled Hourani, Picasso in Palestine, 2011, Art Academy of Palestine, Ramallah176 Plug in to Play, Plug in #38, 2008, installation view,Van Abbemuseum 179 The Living Archive: The Street: A Form of Living Together, 2005, 180 installation view,Van Abbemuseum Play Van Abbe: Part 2: Time Machines – Andrzej Wróblewski, To the 181 Margins and Back, 2010, installation view,Van Abbemuseum Play Van Abbe: Part 2: Time Machines – Andrzej Wróblewski, To the 182 Margins and Back, 2010, installation view,Van Abbemuseum Play Van Abbe: Part 4: The Pilgrim, the Tourist, the Flâneur (and the 183 Worker), 2011, installation view,Van Abbemuseum

PLATES

1 Maider López, Polder Cup, 2010, Between You and I – Intervention 3: Morality Exhibition series, Witte de With (Center for Contemporary Art) 2 Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989, videotaped re-enactment of a live performance at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Spies in the House of Art: Photography, Film, and Video’, 2012 3 Neil Cummings, Self Portrait: Arnolfini (detail), 2011, Arnolfini Gallery 4 Michael Rakowitz, Spoils, 2011 5 Two pairs of Guatemalan trousers, hand-woven cotton with hand embroidery, date unknown; deaccessioned 2009 from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art 6 Robert Fontenot, ‘Wastepaper Basket’, from Recycle LACMA, 2009–2010 7 Ansuman Biswas exploring the Manchester Museum collection stores, 2009 8 Ana Prvacki performing Greeting Committee at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, for the opening of Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art, 2012 9 Installation view of the exhibition To Speculate Darkly:Theaster Gates and Dave the Potter, Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, 2010 10 Opening event for the exhibition To Speculate Darkly:Theaster Gates and Dave the Potter, Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, 2010 11 Liam Gillick, Twinned Renegotiation Platforms, 1998 12 Goshka Macuga, The Nature of the Beast, 2009, Installation view, Whitechapel Gallery, London 13 Jonas Staal, New World Summit – Berlin, overview, Sophiensaele, Berlin Biennale, 2012 14 Khaled Hourani, Picasso in Palestine, 2011, installation view, Art Academy of Palestine, Ramallah 15 Play Van Abbe: Part 2: Time Machines – Andrzej Wróblewski, To the Margins and Back, 2010, installation view,Van Abbemuseum

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Generous support from the College of Arts, Humanities and Law and the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester has enabled me to carry out this project. I am also grateful for the help of colleagues in the School of Museum Studies, particularly Suzanne MacLeod, Simon Knell and Sandra Dudley, and current and former PhD students Laura Diaz Ramos, Catharina Hendrick, Alex Woodall, Amy Hetherington and Sipei Lu. I thank Matthew Gibbons, Amy Davis-Pointer and Lola Harre at Routledge for their guidance and Bruce Altshuler and Chris Whitehead for their thoughtful reviews of the book proposal. Series editors Richard Sandell and Christina Kreps played key roles in the development of the project and were inspirational mentors throughout. My sincere appreciation goes to the many artists, curators, museum directors, educators, archivists and collectors who generously allowed me to interview them for my research. These include Allison Agsten, Mark Allen, Michael Asher, Lisa Ann Auerbach, Defne Ayas, Christiane Berndes, Jose Blondet, Layla Bloom, Sabine Breitwieser, Isolde Brielmaier, Gary CarrionMurayari, Boo Chapple, Elizabeth Cline, Matt Coolidge, Neil Cummings, Kat Dempsey, Douglas Eklund, David Eng, Charles Esche,Walter Evans, Alex Farquharson, Robert Fontenot, Diana Franssen, Andrea Fraser, Amira Gad, Theaster Gates, Liam Gillick, Jessica Gogan, Rita Gonzales, Pablo Helguera, Amber Hickey, Maria Hlavajova, Anke Hoffman, Pete James, Omar Kholeif, Ethan Lasser, Goshka Macuga, Michaela Melian, Nick Merriman,Vlad Morariu, Marguerite Nugent, Bharti Parmar, Christiane Paul, Emily Pethick, Jonathan Prown, Dorothee Richter, Dieter Roelstraete, Jay Sanders, Abby Sheehan, Eric Shiner, Nancy Spector, John Smith, Matt Smith, Stephanie Smith, Anthony Spira, Jonas Staal, Joanna Szupinska, Simon Taylor, Steven ten Thije, Nato Thompson, Tom Trevor, David van der Leer, The Vacuum Cleaner, Tresa Varner, Matias Viegener, Jonathan Watkins, David Wilson, Fred Wilson, Bedwyr Williams, Matt Wrbican, Sue Yank, Carey Young and Lynn Zelevansky. Special thanks also to the Manchester Museum and to Ansuman Biswas and Robert Fontenot for permissions to publish extensive passages from the Manchester Hermit blog and Recycle LACMA blog. All passages from the Manchester Hermit blog are © Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester .

xiv Acknowledgements

I relish the companionship of Mary Chris Semrow, Barbara Pickett and Janet Strahosky who kept me in good cheer during my research travels in the US and of Kathy Mansell and the Rawsons who make me feel at home here in the UK. The love of my family, Sheldon, Mark, Jean and Jake, informs the core of this project and I am indebted to them for their generosity, humour and belief in me. An earlier version of a section of Chapter Four of this volume was originally published as Janet Marstine (2013) ‘Cultural collisions in socially engaged artistic practice: “temple swapping” and hybridity in the work of Theaster Gates’, Museum Worlds: Advances in Practice 1: 153–178.

1 CRITICAL PRACTICE AS RECONCILIATION

The Polder Cup and the Morality project On 4 September 2010, on a stretch of low-lying land intersected by dykes in Ottoland, South Holland, an unusual series of football games took place. In this landscape, known in the Netherlands as a polder, four football pitches of different sizes were marked out in white (Plate 1). As in a conventional game, flags and goalposts further articulated the boundaries of the fields. Referees stood over the pitches to facilitate fair play. A master of ceremonies read out the schedule of quarter-finals, semi-finals and finals and announced the scores. Each team settled on their own name and shirt design. Fans cheered on the athletes (van Rijn 2011: 16, 18). As soon as the games commenced, however, it became clear that the dykes criss-crossing the fields made it impossible to follow accepted international football rules; because players were not allowed to jump across the water channels, defenders were unable to reach the opposite side of the pitch (Figure 1.1). This situation challenged teams to generate new strategies of play. And because the pitches were each unique in size and in relation to the dykes, every time a team switched fields, they had to renegotiate these strategies. Over the course of the day, the players devised innovative systems of kayaks, oars and nets to retrieve balls from the water (Figure 1.2). They also recalibrated their steps as they found that the tall grass and muddy ground of the polder prevented quick and graceful movements. The landscape disrupted the game, whilst the game itself disrupted a landscape commonly described as quintessentially Dutch (van Rijn 2011: 16, 18, 20). This day of football games and its supporting structures is a socially engaged artwork entitled Polder Cup, envisioned by Spanish artist Maider López and commissioned by the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam in conjunction with SKOR (Foundation for Art and Public Space). Polder Cup is one of four projects, together called ‘Between You and I’, commissioned by the two organisations to ‘reimagine and renegotiate the limits of public engagement with the institution’ (Gad et al. 2014) through interventions in the façade of the Witte de With. In the case of Polder Cup, López designed a monumental banner that enveloped the façade with a colour photograph of the marked-out pitches, along with text offering details of the project and how to get involved. Like an advertising billboard, the banner recruited the

2  Critical practice as reconciliation

Between You and I – Intervention 3: Morality Exhibition series, Witte de With (Center for Contemporary Art) Polder Cup by Maider López June – September 2010 Courtesy of the artist, SKOR (Stichting Kunst en Openbare Ruimte) and Witte de With (Center for Contemporary Art), image copyright: Bob Goedewaagen

FIGURE 1.1 

participation of both players and spectators. Interested parties could sign up in the gallery or online. López aimed to draw from both the arts and sports communities. How did Polder Cup reimagine and renegotiate the limits of public engagement with the art gallery? By uniting people who might not ordinarily interact with one another – gallery-goers and football enthusiasts – through group problem solving as play, López demonstrates the potential of artistic practice to strengthen the social agency of museums.Whilst on the surface the teams may only have been collaborating towards a trivial goal – winning a game – the symbolic value of their synergy, as harnessed by the Witte de With, underscores the capacity of art to recognise and advance the penchant of museums for addressing social problems. And by taking the project outside the gallery walls and into the larger public sphere, López creates the conditions for a critique of institutional bureaucracy as rote adherence to rules, not just in the domain of football but also in the world of museums and galleries and in the wider domain of political entanglements. With its site-specific spatial identity and demands for continual renegotiation among teammates, Polder Cup evokes the convergence between the long Dutch histories of fighting against water and of making decisions through consensus (Gad et al. 2014). The sodden terrain of the polder serves to personify the state; in fact, the bureaucratic insistence on consensus to the point of stagnation in the Netherlands is frequently referred to as the ‘polder model’ (van Rijn 2011: 20). By making it impossible for the footballers to play by accepted rules, López’s project expresses the need for creative, transgressive thinking through dissensus; only through nonconformist resistance to the rules can Polder Cup participants meet success. López planned the tournament to occur at the same time as the 2010 World Cup and to contrast the official game of football with its spectacle of consumption and international rivalries (van Rijn 2011: 18). Polder Cup asks: can resistance against consensus politics open up new solutions to diplomatic stalemates and create opportunities for reconciliation?

Between You and I – Intervention 3: Morality Exhibition series, Witte de With (Center for Contemporary Art) Polder Cup by Maider López June – September 2010 Courtesy of the artist, SKOR (Stichting Kunst en Openbare Ruimte) and Witte de With (Center for Contemporary Art), image copyright: Bob Goedewaagen

FIGURE 1.2 

4  Critical practice as reconciliation

Polder Cup and the three other projects of ‘Between You and I’ were part of a year-long programme at Witte de With on the theme of ‘Morality’, as conceptualised by then director Nicolaus Schafhausen. Schafhausen commissioned a diverse range of artists’ projects that would engage complex ethical issues from multiple perspectives. As former Witte de With curator Amira Gad (2012) explains, ‘The Morality project came from an idea of wanting to present the grey zones of ethics, to show that ethical decision-making depends on context and time; something can seem right at one point and wrong at another moment’. By demonstrating that ethics concerns much more than following rules but instead entails grappling with the limitations and silences imposed by those rules, Polder Cup aptly embodies the aims of the ‘Morality’ project.

Polder Cup through the lens of critical practice Interventions Polder Cup also encapsulates the primary conceptual strands of this book. It is an intervention, a term that, broadly speaking, signifies the act of interceding to create change. In the social arena, for example, a family might stage an intervention to confront a loved one who has a substance abuse problem in the hopes that they will accept treatment. In the cultural sphere an artist might stage an intervention to interrogate the systems and underlying values of an institution, whether a museum, political organisation, educational concern or some other entity, to transform existing conditions. From an art historical perspective, the advent of the intervention is often traced back to twentieth-century movements from Dada to conceptual art and institutional critique (Robins 2013: 47–83). From a museological perspective, the intervention is an artistic strategy that encourages self-reflective museum practice. Over the last few decades many museums and galleries, including the Witte de With, have commissioned artists’ interventions to help these institutions renegotiate their relationship with their publics. At the same time, some artists have come, uninvited, to intervene in museums’ policies, processes and structures of power. In both scenarios artists contribute to a developing discourse about museum ethics. In the Witte de With intervention that became the Polder Cup, López asks: How do museums, like the institution of football, follow rote rules for conduct without questioning common assumptions? And how are these rules fundamentally undemocratic or underpinned by outdated values and hierarchies that perpetuate inequalities? How does consensus politics in museum and gallery decision-making, like consensus politics in the ‘polder model’ of Dutch democracy, hinder the engagement of diverse stakeholders with revolutionary potential to create change? And how can co-creative practices between museums and their publics, like those of López’s gallery-goers and sports enthusiasts, forge new relationships based on reciprocity? López’s banner across the Witte de With façade both literally and metaphorically frames the ethical questions elicited by the Polder Cup project within the context of the Art Center itself. Polder Cup is an intervention with ethics at its core. It also represents the growing body of work which I call critical practice, appropriating the term from artist Neil Cummings (2012) to encapsulate the convergences between institutional critique and socially engaged practice. Some of the artists I consider have been pigeonholed as part of the institutional critique ‘camp’ whilst others are typically described as enmeshed in socially engaged artistic practice, but most of them fall somewhere in between, as they have been shaped by both yet have their own

Critical practice as reconciliation  5

distinct approach to practice. For the purposes of this study, these identifiers are not particularly relevant and will be used infrequently, in favour of the term ‘critical practice’. This book is the first monograph on institutional critique and socially engaged artistic practice informed by current debates in museum ethics. Through international and intergenerational case studies identifying and analysing key themes in critical practice – from collections stewardship to community engagement to the efficacy of democratic forms of governance – the volume demonstrates the capacity of artists’ interventions to advance ethics discourse towards reconciliation between museums and publics. Whilst these are certainly not the only themes of ethically informed discourse emerging from critical practice, they represent particularly significant and fruitful strands for negotiating new relationships. And whilst the study is by no means an encyclopaedic survey or historical account of institutional critique, socially engaged practice or critical practice, it does illuminate the ethical focus of much of the cultural production that falls within the remit of critical practice. Blurring the boundaries among the fields of art history, museum studies, political science and applied ethics, the book scrutinises the complex positionings of artists engaged in critical practice as both museum insiders and outsiders that facilitates the process of reconciliation. And it will look at how and why museums are drawn to critical practice as reconciliation at pivotal moments in institutional and social history as a means to map the past in order to chart the future. The research design is based upon extensive semi-structured interviews with artists, curators, museum/gallery directors, museum/gallery educators and assorted other art world figures, including an archivist, a collector and an assistant director of academic programs at a university museum. These categories somewhat oversimplify the complex and unstable array of museum job titles and self-identifiers, however, which themselves are shaped by the self-reflective nature of critical practice and include positions that straddle multiple spheres of practice, including curator of social engagement, researcher and director/curator. I mine the data from these interviews to build a series of case studies from both internationally recognised and little known artists, working primarily in the UK, US and Europe but who engage ethical issues with repercussions in diverse parts of the world from Iraq to China. I examine interventions commissioned from a range of institutions, from small university galleries and public art presenters to large municipal museums and biennials, though I sometimes use the terms ‘museum’, ‘gallery’, ‘institution’ and ‘arts organisation’ interchangeably. I also look at interventions that were not commissioned by any arts organisation. Most of the projects that I discuss date from this century, though a few were conceived in the 1990s. Many of them were developed since the economic crisis of 2008 because, as Critchley (Critchley and HernándezNavarro 2013: 36) notes, ‘the crisis has . . . forced people to reflect on questions of ethics and ethical responsibility at the basis of their practice’. As my research concerns contemporary museum practice I have chosen to focus on projects carried out only after 1990. The volume does not discuss interventions such as those in the Museum of Modern Art’s ‘Artist’s Choice’ initiative or the Louvre’s Department of Graphic Arts’ ‘Parti Pris’ (or ‘Taking Sides’) series, in which artists or thinkers from other disciplines such as philosophy are commissioned to curate exhibitions from an institution’s permanent collection that facilitate engagement with the collections but which are not in and of themselves engaged with ethics issues (T. Smith 2012: 120–121; Robins 2013: 4–6). Nor does the research concern artists that test the boundaries of ethical practice – for example, Santiago Sierra who interrogates the exploitation of human labour by employing vulnerable individuals such as sex workers, asylum seekers and homeless people to engage in degrading and often repetitive activities (Montenegro 2013;

6  Critical practice as reconciliation

Möntmann 2013). My study looks instead to artists who believe that museums have an important social role to play and who provoke difficult but important ethical conversations to further this social role. This caring for, and even love of, museums is what curator Dieter Roelstraete (2012b: 36n4) refers to as ‘institutional desire’ as a central component of institutional critique. Roelstraete’s term rightly refutes the notion that critique implicitly signifies opposition to or withdrawal from and rather situates critical practice within a feminist framework of the ethics of care (Clement 1996; Robinson 1999). Referencing Polder Cup as an example, Chapter 1 argues for the museological usefulness of the term critical practice by introducing readers to the tenets of institutional critique and socially engaged practice from which critical practice draws. The chapter also defines the concept of reconciliation from a political and museological perspective; it discusses critical practice as an ethical venture; and it proposes that critical practice can empower organisational change. In addition, Chapter 1 examines how and why museums and galleries might need to engage in a process of reconciliation with their publics and what the literature of reconciliation studies offers to facilitate mutual understanding. Finally, it explains how the museological process of reconciliation is, at heart, an ethical project. It looks at a range of theories of and approaches to institutional critique and socially engaged practice through a framework of museum ethics and links a changing museum to a changing history of artistic interventions.

Institutional critique Defining institutional critique Institutional critique, the systematic inquiry into institutional (often museum) structure, policy and practice, is widely recognised as a key strategy of engagement for artists since the late 1960s and early 1970s. At that turbulent moment, the civil rights movement in the US and Europe and a related growing mistrust of institutions led artists to turn to the precedent of Marcel Duchamp, whose early twentieth-century readymades challenged the veil of neutrality in museums and galleries (Buskirk and Nixon 1996). Artists who had experienced oppression due to race, gender, class, ethnicity and/or sexual orientation developed skills in reading institutional codes that maintain exclusionary practices and in generating strategies to subvert those codes. Feminism was hugely influential in its exposure of and challenge to patriarchal systems (Graw 2006: 143–144; Deutsche 2009: 66–67). And philosopher Michel Foucault’s interrogation of institutional bodies from prisons to hospitals to schools as modes of discipline inspired artists to probe the powers and limitations of the museum as institution (Wallenstein 2006: 114–115). As Cummings (2012) explains, institutional critique ‘created an understanding of what an institution is, something which is not a physical structure but a set of protocols, procedures, habits and behaviours’. Those protocols, procedures, habits and behaviours that together constitute an institution carry heavy ethical responsibilities. Philosopher John Searle (2006: 34) notes: ‘Human institutions are, above all, enabling, because they create power, but it is a special kind of power. It is the power that is marked by such terms as: rights, duties, obligations, authorizations, permissions, empowerments, requirements, and certifications’. Institutional critique probes what those ethical responsibilities are and how institutions might respond. The term ‘institutional critique’ was first introduced by Mel Ramsden of the collective Art and Language in a 1975 essay (Ramsden 2009: 176) challenging the hegemonic power of New York art systems. It was used by artist Andrea Fraser (2005a: 18) as early as 1985, and, as Fraser

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(2006a: 126–127) later recounts, it became shorthand for the phrase ‘the critique of institutions’ among students in New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program and the School of Visual Arts during the 1980s. The designation gained common currency when art historian Benjamin Buchloh (1990: 137) employed it to discuss conceptual art of the 1960s (Zelevansky 2006: 173nn3, 5). Many practitioners of institutional critique think of themselves as conceptual artists for whom ideas – which cannot be possessed and, at least theoretically, circulate freely in the public domain – define the work, rather than a physical object (Wallenstein 2006: 116). This is clearly the case with Maider López in Polder Cup. Institutional critique is practiced both from within the museum, in which an artist is commissioned to create an intervention that comments on the institution, oftentimes with staff as collaborators/learners, and as a guerrilla tactic, where the artist, lacking an invitation, interjects a counter-discourse into institutional narratives. Academic and curator Simon Sheikh (2012: 368) underscores the museological implications of institutional critique: ‘The very term “institutional critique” seems to indicate a direct connection between a method and an object: the method being the critique and the object the institution.’ Some artists involved in institutional critique even adopt a tactical approach of mimicry, recreating museum space or structures askew and often performing the role of curator, educator or archivist, in what artist/activist Gregory Sholette (2011: 152–185) refers to as ‘mockstitutions’ which illuminate the ethical flaws and/or potential of museums. As a method, critique is fundamentally an ethical project, for it represents a departure from normative thinking. Andrea Fraser (2012a) says, looking back, that she used to assume that the primary thrust of institutional critique was on the institution, but now she understands that it is the critique that really matters and that is most difficult to come to grips with. Gender theorist Judith Butler (2002) remarks that critique is ‘a moment of ethical questioning which requires that we break the habits of judgment in favor of a riskier practice that seeks to yield artistry from constraint’. Museum director and curator Maria Lind, acknowledging Foucault’s (1997) essay ‘What Is Critique?,’ defines critique as a strategy to challenge institutional constructions of truth.‘Critique is a certain way of thinking and acting, a particular relationship to everything around us. It means to doubt and to challenge the politics of truth’, Lind (2011: 25) states. Drawing on Butler and Lind, I conceptualise institutional critique as both an ethical questioning of the systems of power underpinning institutions and an ethical gesture towards reconciliation between museums and their publics. Within the domain of art museums, institutional critique interrogates the elitist underpinnings that have shaped and continue to shape its very fabric. As curator Jay Sanders (2012) asserts: Institutional critique showed us that aesthetics – the canon – ignored the social and economic conditions of works and euthanized its production and reception. Art was too grandiose in its claims for impact and critique while it disregarded the realities of art’s social conditions, for example, class privilege and the hierarchies within education and culture. Institutional critique showed us that aesthetics distances us from the ethical and sows our complicity in economic domination. But institutional critique also signals efforts towards a process of reconciliation rooted in the political transformations of the late 1960s. Artist Liam Gillick (2008: 322) explains: [The year] 1968 was the last instance of major change within the art context, supplying us with the critical tools we still use today. . . . The most established museums have

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education programs dedicated to reaching out to multiple publics. Indeed, even the troubled recent discussions about art markets are rooted in debates initiated some forty years ago. Art historians have identified two main ‘waves’ or generations of institutional critique, as they developed in Western Europe and the US, the first dating to the 1960s and 1970s with a focus on the institution of the museum and gallery, and the second associated with the late 1980s and onwards in which the institution being critiqued came to include a range of others beyond museums, from the political to the financial and to the ‘institution’ of the artist as situated within the museum or gallery (Sheikh 2012: 368). The first generation of artists involved in institutional critique commonly positioned themselves as outsiders to the art world committed to what artist Jonas Staal (2012b) calls ‘moral cleansing’. The Guggenheim Museum’s cancellation of Hans Haacke’s (1971) retrospective marks what art historian Terry Smith (2012: 108) calls ‘a turning point in artist-museum relationships in the U.S.’ This occurred because Haacke refused to withdraw his work Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1972, which exposed the unethical business practices of a New York real estate agent and simultaneously implicated the ethics of Guggenheim trustees, who were real estate developers. Some early practitioners of institutional critique conceived of museums in monolithic terms. For instance, Robert Smithson (1972) famously characterised museums and galleries as sites of ‘cultural confinement’ and chose to develop an alternative platform through earthworks. However, most institutional critique of the 1960s and 1970s was not as oppositional as it is sometimes supposed and many artists recognised that they were complicit in institutional systems. Artist Daniel Buren (quoted in Griffin 2005) recounts: Many people got the feeling in the early ’70s that I was one of the very virulent opponents of the institution. But even at that time, when I spoke or wrote on the subject, I always said take great care, for the artist and the institution are linked together; we’re part of the institution. Moreover, as art historian Alexander Alberro (2009: 3) argues, a position of opposition does not mean that the first wave was not interested in possibilities of organisational change and processes of reconciliation: ‘Its aim was to intervene critically in the standing order of things, with an expectation that these interventions would produce actual change in the relations of power and lead to genuine reconciliation’, he states. The second generation of artists involved in institutional critique was more grounded in specific policies and practices of museums as well as those of a range of other institutions, and engaged in projects to reform unethical systems within them and in the larger socio-political arena. Fraser (2006b: 305–306) asserts: Institutional Critique can only be defined by a methodology of critically reflexive site specificity. . . . To say that this reflexive engagement is critical is to say that it does not aim to affirm, expand, or reinforce a site or our relationship to it, but to problematize and change it.To the extent that a site is understood as a set of relations, Institutional Critique aims to transform not only the substantive, visible manifestations of those relations, but

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their structure, particularly what is hierarchical in that structure and the forms of power and domination, symbolic and material violence, produced by those hierarchies. Many of the resulting interventions by Fred Wilson, Fraser and others were performative and participatory. As philosopher Boris Groys notes (2008: 23), this move to post-studio work was central to the critique of institutions as it challenged the fetishisation of museum objects. The art historical trope of a generational shift that focuses on the art world in the US and Western Europe, however, fails to acknowledge many of the complexities of institutional critique as it developed in diverse regions and in response to a host of urgent political concerns. For instance, in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe in the 1980s, as Basis voor Actuele Kunst (BAK) artistic director Maria Hlavajova (2012) explains, where there was little hope of impacting official museum culture, young people committed to change created their own underground institutions: I am Slovak, coming from Czechoslovakia. I come from an environment where what you probably call in the west ‘institutional critique’ would cohere around dissident movements, the Communist movement, perhaps even the leftist critique of Communism. The impulse came from knowing that state institutions were inaccessible, but also knowing one did not want to access them in the form they were. But it was not a resignation; there were exhibitions in private apartments, there were lectures in cellars of various buildings. So it was in a way a parallel culture that developed to the official institutional system without ever thinking that any interference would come to place. We were never even interested in critiquing national galleries. That was never our point of reference. Rather than relating our practice to some official institutions, it was to create our own world. In other contexts, institutions beyond those of or impacting the art world took priority. For instance, the performance artist and mental health advocate who calls himself the Vacuum Cleaner (2012), as a means both to convey the concept of the moral cleansing of institutions and to maintain anonymity when engaging in actions in the public sphere that might be considered vandalism, such as his 2007 spray-painting black the yellow letters D, I, S and D on a disabled parking space in Glasgow so that the word ABLE looms powerfully (Figure 1.3), is more interested in the psychiatric institution and its system of control than in art museums and galleries: I had this period of my life from nineteen to about twenty-three where I was heavily institutionalised. My day was structured around institutional care, around medication, around psychoanalysis. I had contact with social services, psychiatric nurses, and homeless persons units. Somehow, I learnt about the anti-psychiatric movement in this country and I started doing performance because it was a way of regaining that space that I needed to survive. I think institutions have played a massive part in increasing and intensifying my mental illness but they’ve also kept me alive. The thing that I’ve learned is to not allow these institutions to take away my neurodiversity. Over the years, institutional critique has adopted many diverse shapes and motivations.

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FIGURE 1.3 

The Vacuum Cleaner, Able, Glasgow, 2007, courtesy of the artist

The premature burial of institutional critique Museums and galleries are commonly motivated to commission projects of institutional critique as a means towards self-reflective practice and evidencing a progressive sensibility. Art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson (2003: 102–103) declares: To a large extent, the museum has embraced such critiques because it believes its mission to be in accordance with progressive art practices and even politics. It does not think of itself as neutral, but highly receptive and open to criticism. This leads to the question of whether institutional critique has become so embedded in museums and galleries that it has become instrumentalised – meaning it is flattened, coercive and without agency (Thompson 2013: 115). Artists, scholars and practitioners today disagree on the issue of when, and even if, institutional critique died (Bryan-Wilson 2003: 92). Referring to projects of institutional critique from the 1990s, art historian Miwon Kwon (2002: 47–50) remarks that they function as mere commodities of the museum. ‘They can easily become extensions of the museum’s own self-promotional apparatus, while the artist becomes a commodity with a special purchase on “criticality”. ’What they provide now, rather than produce, are aesthetic, often ‘critical-artistic’, services. Indeed, the display of works representative of institutional critique within universal survey museums might be seen as evidence of such a decline. For instance, critic Karen Archey (2012) asserts that the Metropolitan Museum of Art 2012 exhibition ‘Spies in the House of

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Art’, a modest display of video and photography of artists associated with institutional critique including Louise Lawler, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer and Andrea Fraser, ‘illustrates how thoroughly conversations surrounding institutional critique have become neutralized’. Curator of the exhibition Douglas Eklund thinks otherwise, however, as reflected by his cautious approach towards the project; ‘I was hoping to stop a few people who might otherwise have wandered through the museum in an unquestioning way’, Eklund (2012) states. Eklund’s most transgressive tactic for the project was to situate Fraser’s work, a video of her watershed 1989 performance piece Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, not in the temporary exhibition space with the other objects, but in one of the permanent collection galleries hung with nineteenth-century academic French paintings. In Museum Highlights, performed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Fraser enacts the role of fictional museum docent Jane Castleton but with a script of the artist’s own making; Fraser created the script from a collage of texts she carefully compiled (Fraser 2005b) which, together, evoke universal survey museums’ self-affirming narratives that emphasise connoisseurship and canon formation. As Fraser performs the work, the dissonance between the (lyrical) speech and (prosaic) actions of Castleton becomes increasingly acute, for she points out museum ‘objects’ that are clearly not canonical, including a guard’s stool, the coat rooms and the toilets. For the Met exhibition, Eklund installed the video of Museum Highlights (Plate 2) just below Alexandre Cabanel’s The Birth of Venus (1863) a work that the curator and artist imagined Jane Castleton would have admired (Eklund 2012); the video, when the sound emerged from speakers, powerfully interrupted the museum’s unspoken script championing elitist notions of quality. But, unfortunately, Eklund wrestled with competing interests and, after a trial period, resorted to channelling the sound through headphones. Eklund (2012) recounts: The communication of the piece just made me sad. I was so desperate to get it up without headphones. . . . But when the galleries are empty, and she’s shouting, it was very distracting to people. I felt bad. I felt I was polluting beyond where I wanted to go, the other people’s experience of the art. People came to see Cabanel. Eklund’s struggles with the display of Fraser’s work demonstrate the very real transgressive threat of institutional critique in some museum contexts today. Whilst I appreciate the need to be sceptical of the professed radicality of art that has been embraced by those institutions to which the radicality is addressed, from a museum studies perspective I hold that the designation of instrumentalisation unhelpfully reduces the institution to a marketing machine with a set of regulatory motives. It does not acknowledge the diversity of aims and approaches of art organisations (beyond encyclopedic survey museums like the Met), including the impetus to become more socially and ethically responsible. As philosopher Brian Holmes (2009: 58) notes, instrumentality precludes the ability of institutions to change. According to museum director Charles Esche (2012), institutional critique has spawned painful but important moments of self-reflection in museums and galleries which have led to significant shifts in policy and practice. Moreover, the moniker of instrumentalisation denies the complex and fluid web of influence among the various actors involved in critical practice. Speaking of institutional critique, Bryan-Wilson (2003: 91) maps out this web: My focus on critical reception . . . should not suggest that the vector of influence only runs in one direction, whereby the language of institutional critique is first invented

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by artists, then picked up by critics, and finally, in a move that some might consider co-optation, mouthed by the institution itself. On the contrary, its syntax continues to evolve in multiple directions and within a complex nest of identifications; . . . artist, critic, and curator are not distinct positions. . . . And far from the museum system being the endpoint of the interpretive chain, it is also productive, exerting pressures and affording opportunities that artists respond to. The approach of Chicago contemporary artist Theaster Gates (discussed in depth in Chapter 3), for instance, exemplifies this complex vector of influence. In his projects that regenerate deprived urban communities by transforming neglected housing into community-facing micro art institutions, Gates (2012b) asserts that, rather than engaging in the practice of institutional critique, he is introducing new models of museums and galleries that result in critique of institutions: My building a house, or rebuilding a house, is not an institutional critique, it is not a politic ‘you wouldn’t let me in therefore I am gonna do it there,’ it’s just like in addition to you this other thing should live. What we found is that in a city like Chicago when one builds a new institution, and my little projects are kind of like little institutions, the cultural and thought leaders of the city become really curious about those other institutions. If you do that thing well and you do something that another kind of institution isn’t doing, when you put those things together it looks like it is critical, it looks like there is a kind of dialectical system. I like that institutional critique is happening as a byproduct of something that I just believe in. From his vantage point in 1995, art historian Frazer Ward views new modes of the critique of institutions developing, rather than simply a continuation of the historical trends of institutional critique. ‘What is important is not the trajectories taken by individual artists, but how implications in their work may be seen, passed through different theoretical and political matrices, taken up in later work’, Ward (1995: 81) notes. Acknowledging the powerful repercussions of the cancelled Hans Haacke show and censored Daniel Buren works in 1971 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (Spector 1993: 253) – which in 2005 prompted the museum to develop a Buren exhibition with a more open, less guarded approach – Chief Curator Nancy Spector (2012) muses, ‘we are students of that [earlier] period.’ Holmes (2009: 58–59) characterises a major strand of the critique of institutions through collectivity and networks and with a new critical reflexivity towards the public sphere. Indeed, the development of new media art has created opportunities for what might be called a third wave of institutional critique. Academic and new media curator Christiane Paul (2006: 191–193) holds that the collaborative, participatory, networked and variable characteristics of new media art, particularly internet art, have challenged museums to reimagine themselves. Paul (2006: 192) cautions, however, that this influence occurs primarily by implication, not necessarily explicitly as an act of institutional critique: One could argue that new media art [per se] constitutes a form of Institutional Critique by its very nature, in that it questions the traditional boundaries and structures of the museum and is rooted in multiple contexts outside the institution. However, it would be

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misguided to assume that new media art intentionally engages in Institutional Critique as a field of artistic practice. Only in the case of Internet art, which exists in its own potentially global exhibition space and does not need an institution to be presented to the public, did Institutional Critique occasionally become an explicit focus of artistic explorations. Some thinkers argue that, as institutions continue to require critique, artists continue to evolve effective approaches to do so. Amira Gad (2012) notes: Institutional critique is a discursive practice.There is an important history to institutional critique, but I believe that this history is still being written and is ongoing. At the end of the day institutional critique is still relevant and acts as a reference point for how we exchange ideas, given the complex dynamics among the various agents of the art world. Artist Carey Young (2012) concurs. She states that the pressing issues within museums today suggest that institutional critique continues to carry resonance: I’ve heard this view that institutional critique is dead and that’s something that does crop up, repeatedly. I subscribe to that view in some ways myself in the sense that we don’t need yet another project critiquing an art museum, but at the same time we do need to be looking at those sponsored relationships for example or the museum’s role in protecting freedoms or as a form of public space, which is also under great erosion at present. So, these are issues that artists should be defending and discussing and therefore I can see that within a remit of institutional critique. Like Gad and Young, I hold that institutional critique is more than an artistic movement representative of a particular moment in time, but is, in addition, a mode of interrogating the tangled web of ethical positions among artists, institutions and society and that maintains its contemporary relevance. Polder Cup is indicative of this view. Whilst perhaps not a project of institu­tional critique in the strict art historical sense of that term, it clearly critiques institutions – both cultural and political – with an ethical imperative to rethink relations between museums and their publics and between the wider spectrum of political stakeholder groups paralysed by consensus politics.

Socially engaged artistic practice Defining socially engaged practice Polder Cup may function as contemporary institutional critique, but at the same time, it is clearly situated within the domain of socially engaged artistic practice. Over the last two decades, socially engaged artistic practice, also known as social practice and socially engaged practice, has emerged as an artistic strategy that facilitates dialogue, collaboration and reciprocity on issues of urgency to open up possibilities for the construction of new, more socially just relationships (Kester 2004: 8). Like institutional critique, social practice encapsulates many diverse aesthetic and political approaches (S. Jackson 2011: 12–14), but what these approaches

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share is a commitment to critical inquiry about the performing of social roles. Social scientist Chris Mowles (2008) explains: We are born into a world where there is already a play going on. The play arises out of a history of social interaction and creates ways of speaking and acting which condition the way that new actors can speak and act. The way we express ourselves, indeed the very way we think about ourselves, is entirely shaped by the play that we join and the actions and speech of others. Social practice interrupts that play to break down boundaries between institutions and stakeholders and establish new relations based on equality. Social practice encourages participants to write, enact, interrogate and revise new, more ethical scripts about institutions and society that promote mutual understanding.Through performing a radical play about football, for example, Polder Cup revises conventional scripts of museum/visitor dynamics and of consensus politics. Social practice is a performative process which, like institutional critique, has the potential to help museums shed elitist, proprietary modes of thinking and to inspire reconciliations between museums and communities. And, in many ways, socially engaged artistic practice emerged directly from institutional critique. Artist Neil Cummings (2012) remarks: An institution is constructed through social practices; it’s not just a physical building and a collection but also a set of relationships between people. Art that reflects on these relationships and thinks about the conditions that produce it grows logically from institutional critique. Social practice is distinct from institutional critique, however, in that it is by definition coproductive, part of what performance studies scholar Shannon Jackson (2011: 17–18) charts as a social turn that creates opportunities for community engagement and public agency. Socially engaged practice rejects idealised notions of the artist as lone genius and instead fosters collaborative working relationships. It draws upon feminist approaches to listening that eschew judgment and instead convey empathy to generate what art historian Grant Kester (2004: 113–116) calls ‘solidarity creation, solidarity enhancement and the counter hegemonic’. As artist and museum educator Pablo Helguera (2012) notes: Social practice raises the stakes in terms of the quality of interaction. Institutional critique is uni-directional – a political statement of an artist. Social practice is not satisfied by the paradigm of the viewer being confronted but instead involves collaboration that leads to action. In Polder Cup, López thus functions as a facilitator who creates conditions for collaboration; the footballers are the primary agents who invent and enact strategic thinking against the grain. Social practice also orients itself away from the internal problems of the museum and towards a range of human rights and other global concerns with which museums and galleries have an ethical responsibility to engage. Many of those involved in social practice consciously break from institutional critique by taking an inherently benevolent approach towards public institutions struggling with budget cuts and bureaucracy and working to breathe new life into them.

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It is not surprising that, where museum commissions for projects in institutional critique typically arose from curatorial departments, those for projects in socially engaged practice have tended to originate from departments of education, learning and public programming. Mark Allen (2012a) of Los Angeles-based collective Machine Project declares, ‘I’m starting to really see the value of the education department as a rogue space.The less high-art economic and cultural value also creates a space of more freedom’. For departments of education, socially engaged practice offers an opportunity to attract new audiences in a sustained way. As former Hammer Museum Director of Academic Programmes Sue Yank (2012), who collaborated with Machine Project, states: Institutions are really interested in social practice because there’s an ongoing crisis in the museum world in terms of changing demographics and audience development; multiple studies have shown that museum audiences are shrinking. I think that’s certainly true in our institution and many others. By working with artists, museums hope to reach out to people in ways that the institution by itself is struggling to do. Social practice has become a response. Because the concerns of social practice extend to the wider public sphere, projects also are commonly commissioned by alternative spaces and public art commissioning agencies and funded through private foundations and arts councils (Kester 2004: 126–129). Polder Cup represents such a joint commission between an art space and a public art commissioning agency. Socially engaged practice is rooted in artistic milestones of the 1960s and 1970s towards the social, such as Joseph Beuys’s concept of social sculpture as a means to shape society, a range of community and public art movements in the US and Europe and Guy Debord’s ideal of the ‘situation’, itself inspired by Berthold Brecht, in which criticality emerges from the transformation of audience into participants (Bishop 2006a: 12–13). Social practice is equally shaped by key developments of the 1980s and early 1990s. These include Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (2012), first published in 1987, which, inspired by the events of 1968 in France, offers up a theoretical framework for the idea of political action; Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1988), which emphasises the agency of ordinary people to express themselves; Chicago independent curator Mary Jane Jacob’s programme Culture in Action (1991–1993), in which artists and community members together created public works from parades to gardens that piloted new possibilities for a participatory public art (Jacob, Brenson and Olson 1995); and AIDS activism which modelled a new kind of collaborative potential (Holmes 2012: 80–81). Socially engaged artistic practice has a significant but fraught affiliation with relational aesthetics which includes a blurring of boundaries between the two. As defined by critic and curator Nicholas Bourriaud (1998: 113), relational aesthetics is ‘a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space’. Emerging primarily from European practitioners ensconced in the Kunsthalle more than the art gallery, relational aesthetics concerns the ethics of relational encounters, particularly those between museums and audiences, as orchestrated by artists in social space (Buskirk 2012: 275–278). Nancy Spector (2008: 16), who curated the 2008–2009 theanyspacewhatever exhibition on relational aesthetics at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, explains: Each of the artists engages with context, but not in the mode of institutional critique. Their goal is less to reframe and subvert the inherent reifying powers of a museum or

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gallery than to activate their environments, to create slippages between the aestheticizing space of art and the world at large. Carsten Höller’s Revolving Hotel Room (Figure 1.4), for instance, for the Guggenheim exhibition offered visitors who booked in advance an experience of an overnight stay at the museum on a bed positioned on a revolving platform. Critic Jerry Saltz (2008), who took up the offer, reported afterwards, amusingly but also with theoretical savvy: I noticed that I felt refreshed – that the Guggenheim, where I’d been a thousand times, looked utterly new to me. I was in love with the place. The museum had become a cradle of sorts; the environment seemed whole and enveloping. I had the strange feeling of having merged with the structure, like we really had slept together. At the very least, on the level of bodily experience, Saltz’s engagement with Revolving Hotel Room provides a glimpse into the potential of relational aesthetics to create conditions for the staging of new and closer relationships between museums and publics.

The ethics of participation Many of those allied with social practice, rather than relational aesthetics, have charged the latter with formalism, insularity and a lack of activism (Schafhausen in Simblist 2011: 30); as Holmes (2012: 75) explains, critics committed to participation within the wider public sphere hold that relational aesthetics remains sequestered in the white cube of the gallery space.

Installation view: theanyspacewhatever, 2009, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, photograph: David Heald ©The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, photograph: David Heald ©The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

FIGURE 1.4 

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Other critics such as Martha Buskirk (2012: 18, 327), harking back to Guy Debord’s work on spectacle theory, note the paradox that, whilst the experiential qualities of relational practice works such as Höller’s Revolving Hotel Room might seem, at first, shockingly inappropriate for the gallery space, a deeper look suggests that such projects epitomise the more commercial aims of the museum sector as an industry in which success is built upon producing spectacular events. At the same time, the participatory nature of social practice has also generated ethical questions about the power of those directing or facilitating them and the agency of contributors to them. Many project directors/facilitators of socially engaged practice look to Jürgen Habermas’s (2007) theory of discourse ethics, first articulated in the 1990s, which holds that conversations foster mutual understanding. Tom Finkelpearl (2013: 4–6), former director of the Queens Museum and currently Commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, for instance, prefers the term ‘social cooperation’ to ‘socially engaged practice’, as he argues that the former more effectively encompasses the many levels of artists and publics working together along a wide ‘spectrum of activity’. But, as Kester (2004: 108–110) acknowledges, Habermas does not recognise the inequalities of power that exist concerning participation in the public sphere. Indeed, some projects in socially engaged practice do abstract and romanticise notions of audience and tend to lack class consciousness (Blondet 2012). Much of the scholarship on socially engaged practice distinguishes, however, between projects created by artists with participation by publics and projects that are deeply co-­creative with contributions and decision-making power distributed equally between artists and collaborators (Kester 2004). Even so, art historian Claire Bishop (2012: 279) has dismissed projects in socially engaged practice as naïve in their claims for emancipatory results: ‘Models of democracy in art do not have an intrinsic relationship to models of democracy in society’, she warns. Bishop (2006b: 180) also holds that socially engaged practice is instrumentalised – strictly social work – and does not possess the aesthetic and critical rigour of art. I see Bishop’s argument as constructing an artificial dialectic that exceptionalises the history of art as a discipline and denies its museological and moral agency. Shannon Jackson (2011: 16) equally repudiates the charge of instrumentality, cautioning that such arguments provide fodder for political positions that undermine public institutions: If progressive artists and critics unthinkingly echo a routinized language of antiinstitutionalism and anti-statism, we can find ourselves unexpectedly colluding with neoliberal impulses that want to dismantle public institutions of human welfare. The ethical work of socially engaged practice does not preclude aesthetic and philosophical substance; multi-layered, politically nuanced projects in socially engaged practice draw strength from both ethics and aesthetics to produce possibilities for new understandings among the parties involved. As psycho-social welfare scholar Lynn Froggett and collaborators (2011: 48) establish: Ethical and aesthetic issues can align when the artwork is adequate to the ethical complexity it takes as its subject matter – that is, when it can contain and make available for reflection . . . the conflicts it reveals. . . . To the extent that the art refuses to collapse the tensions and holds them symbolically in relation to one another, it performs a reparative function – compensation, perhaps, for the ‘trouble’ it has brought to the fore.

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Sometimes, as Curator of Public Engagement at the Hammer Museum at UCLA Allison Agsten (2012a) admits, there is a challenging learning curve for museums and galleries in this work. She asserts that, when first commissioning these types of projects, productive conflict between museum and artists transpired, as the Hammer expected the project to solve institutional problems whereas the artists understood the commission as an opportunity to interrogate the problem. Speaking of an ambitious year-long collaboration with Machine Project, Agsten (2012a) reflects, ‘If this [solving verses interrogating institutional problems] was where the core of the conflict resided, it was also the gray area that propelled some of our most productive conversations and projects’. From a museological perspective, the social work of social practice is not by definition instrumentalising; the nuances and complexities of Polder Cup for both museums and the larger political sphere strongly refute the argument that social practice is merely a didactic and reductive tool but instead underscore its interrogative possibilities.

Critical practice In its straddling of both institutional critique and socially engaged artistic practice, Polder Cup represents the larger spectrum of interventions that rejects as oversimplified a dialectic between them and instead traverses the overlap that exists. Cummings (2012) uses the term ‘critical practice’ to capture the merging of these approaches, its first word ‘critical’ referencing the critique in institutional critique, and its second word ‘practice’ alluding to the practice of socially engaged artistic practice. Critical practice also has a more pedestrian resonance: Cummings (2012) notes that it serves as ‘a generic term that suggests thinking about your work in a more reflexive way’. At Chelsea College of Art and Design in London, where Cummings teaches, ‘Critical Practice’ designates a particular cluster of artists, researchers, technicians and students (some associated with the art school and others not) in which Cummings is involved that is engaged in cultural production; members contribute to a wiki shaped by a set of open organisational guidelines that fosters transparent, collaborative, distributed and process-based ways of working (Critical Practice 2014). According to Cummings, the open organisational guidelines (openorganisations.org n.d.) are as important to the cluster as is their research, exhibitions, programmes and publications because the guidelines enable the group to situate its own practice within the larger domain of institutional systems. As Cummings (2012) explains, the open organisational guidelines enable the cluster to ‘get away from judging an institution as either good or bad and instead to focus on how our practices make those institutions as they make us’. In other words, the guidelines foster self-reflective practice that, not surprisingly, draws from both institutional critique and socially engaged artistic practice. Like Cummings, I see exploring the convergences between institutional critique and socially engaged artistic practice as more productive to my research than treating them as discrete art historical phenomena. My study is museological rather than art historical; looking at a range of interventions that engage diverse strategies of institutional critique and socially engaged artistic practice under the rubric of critical practice allows me to focus on their contributions to discourse on museum ethics rather than their place within a canon. Some museums and galleries are also calling into question the relevance of these art historical constructs when commissioning projects from artists. Agsten (2012b) of the Hammer Museum remarks: We talk about our projects in the terms of institutional critique and socially engaged practice and everyone we work with is on some level thinking about those things. But

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I don’t think we’re considering those terms when we’re doing this work and many of the artists we work with aren’t self-defining in that way either. Our program would be really hemmed in by defining it through those terms. Considering Polder Cup and the case studies within the body of this monograph through the lens of critical practice opens up opportunities to examine the complex and shifting relationships between artists, museums and ethics.

Critical practice and the project of reconciliation Reconciliation in a museological context My project brings together institutional critique and socially engaged practice through the lens of critical practice in order to examine their impact upon the ongoing project of reconciliation between museums and publics. I appropriate the term ‘reconciliation’ from peace and reconciliation studies and argue for its relevance to museum ethics. As defined by political scientists Bashir Bashir and Will Kymlicka (2008), reconciliation is a framework for redressing the claims of groups historically oppressed by an environment of exclusion and for forging new pluralistic institutions characterised by shared authority and equality of opportunity to participate. Theologian Jonathan VanAntwerpen (2008: 33) acknowledges that non-governmental organisations (NGOs), truth commissions, academics and journalists together convey ‘a profusion of multiple discourses of reconciliation’. I find reconciliation a useful theoretical construct for museum studies. I explore how critical practice can redress exclusions and inequalities inside the museum and out. Over the last few years, persuasive voices in museum studies literature have made a strong case for museums and galleries to forge new substantive relationships with their publics based on a notion of building agency and shared authority but have also acknowledged the challenges that museums face in doing so. Museum director David Anderson (2012) has argued that museums need to recognise the cultural rights of individuals, as articulated by Article 15 of the United Nations 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, through initiatives that generate effective social participation. Museum studies scholar Richard Sandell and museum practitioner Eithne Nightingale (2012) have examined pivotal projects in developing equality of access and opportunities for participation in museums within the context of a long history of exclusion and oppression. Academics Andrew Dewdney, David Dibosa and Victoria Walsh (2012: 99–121) have asserted that the emphasis on canon formation in art museums and galleries has instilled a rationale for prioritising aesthetics over social engagement that must be addressed. And museum consultant Bernadette Lynch (2011) has revealed the difficulties of creating reciprocity in museum/community partnerships, even when museums aim to deconstruct power relations because the language used by museum practitioners is imbued with privilege. In this volume I see such relational work within a larger framework of reconciliation and focus on the unique role that critical practice can play. Reconciliation requires a commitment to difficult conversations among the parties involved. International relations scholar Ronald Fisher (2001: 28) explains: Successful reconciliation between alienated groups cannot take place without an adequate degree of genuine dialogue and conflict analysis of a mutual, interactive nature. That is to say, the conditions and outcomes of successful dialogue and conflict analysis

20  Critical practice as reconciliation

lay the groundwork for the reciprocal enactment of the necessary elements of reconciliation: acknowledgements of transgressions, apologies for these, forgiveness of these, and assurances that such acts will not occur in the future. In order for individuals from the mutually aggrieved parties to move toward reconciliation, they must come to understand the other side – its perceptions, cognitions, motives, strategies, and failings – and the history of interaction that escalated and maintained the conflict. Such conversations facilitating mutual understanding are integral to the reconciliation process for museums and their publics. In the process of political reconciliation, as peace and conflict studies expert Johan Galtung (2001: 4) notes, typically a third party situated outside of the sphere of conflict, but with enough insider knowledge to intuit the dynamics of mistrust, steps in to help foster the kind of challenging but important dialogue that has the potential to forge new relations between groups. In the process of reconciliation between museums and publics, it is often artists who situate themselves as outsiders but with the insider knowledge to intervene through critical practice. As the artist known as the Vacuum Cleaner (2012) declares, ‘Even with the most subversive of intentions if you really want to change institutions you have to engage with them on some level. . . . It’s all a spectrum; you’re not inside or outside’. In this study I show that critical practice is an effective means of supporting museums to enact reconciliation by redressing exclusions, inequalities and relational frictions. I use the term ‘reconciliation’ not to suggest a facile and fixed moment of rapprochement but instead a process-driven negotiation informed by the critical sensibilities of agonism. Like political theorist Chantal Mouffe, I view reconciliation as a pluralistic and conflicted stance without closure. Mouffe (2005) explains: The public space is the battleground where different hegemonic projects are confronted, without any possibility of final reconciliation. . . . According to the agonistic approach, public spaces are always plural and the agonistic confrontation takes place in a multiplicity of discursive surfaces. Certainly, not all artistic production that falls under the rubric of critical practice is part of this larger effort towards reconciliation. But the diversity and depth of the projects under the microscope in my study demonstrate that, together, the case studies underscore the value of reconciliation as a process to the artists engaging in critical practice, the art institutions that stage these interventions and the publics who engage with them.

Critical practice as ethics To date, studies on institutional critique have been predominantly theoretical and art historical in approach. Primary contributions to the literature have provided theoretical analysis (Welchman 2006; Raunig and Ray 2009; Drabble and Richter 2011; Richter and Wolfs 2011), survey overviews (McShine 1999; Putnam 2009) and art historical examination of individual artists (Haidu 2010; Peltomäki 2010). In addition, many artists who engage in institutional critique write about their own work and ideas and/or have done extensive published interviews with art historians and art curators on their projects (Alberro and Stimson 1999; Alberro and Stimson 2009). Much of the literature on institutional critique, however, is dense and abstract, leading to

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an assumption among some museum practitioners that such projects are obtuse and irrelevant to them and their audiences. In fact, much institutional critique has a directness and candour that reflect its roots in conceptual art.The literature also offers a constricted view of the subject area by generally overlooking the museological and ethical implications of institutional critique. Museological explorations of institutional critique have focused primarily on artist Fred Wilson (Yellis 2009; Globus 2011; Marstine 2012a; 2012b), but demonstrate the significant potential of this scholarly direction to understand how these projects can foster new relationships between museums and communities. Museum director/curator Maria Lind (2011) provides a helpful way forward in her articulation of a ‘constructive’ institutional critique that functions like a critical friend. One distinctly alternative approach is Claire Robins’s (2013) museological study of interventions which considers how they enhance museum learning. She has a particular interest in the use of humour as a pedagogic device and argues that irony creates critical engagements that change the balance of power (2013: 89–118). Studies of socially engaged artistic practice are generally more accessible than the literature on institutional critique, perhaps shaped by the prioritisation of publics in the projects themselves, though many publications specifically on relational aesthetics are more obtuse. Key introductions to socially engaged practice emphasise the performative and relational qualities of this work over the art historical (Kester 2004; 2011; S. Jackson 2011) and offer up a range of interviews and case studies (Thompson 2012; Finkelpearl 2013). The philosophical approaches of Nicolas Bourriaud (1998) and prolific artist/writer Liam Gillick (2002; 2003; 2009) tend to dominate discussions of relational aesthetics, though major catalogues (Spector 2008) provide a wider art historical reading. The long-standing challenge to the value of relational aesthetics and socially engaged artistic practice by Claire Bishop (2004; 2006b; 2012) also frames the scholarship in this area, questioning the efficacy of work that Bishop characterises as prioritising ethics and the relational over quality and aesthetics. I instead look to philosopher Simon Critchley (in Critchley and Hernández-Navarro 2013: 29) who asserts, ‘I think that artists can be immoral, and perhaps they should be immoral. . . . But I don’t think that art can be unethical; I think that interesting art is always ethical.’This volume considers artists’ deep engagement with ethics as contributing to the quality and impact of critical practice. Other studies look more broadly at the ethics of commodification of contemporary art. For instance, Martha Buskirk’s (2012) ambitious study of the complexities and contradictions in the relationship between the art market and contemporary art practice, including both institutional critique and socially engaged practice, makes an important contribution to our understanding of the ethics of assigning economic value to art, though it does not frame the research within larger ethical concerns. Another branch of scholarship examines in a quite focused way the ethics of particular genres or subjects of contemporary art. For example, Amanda Boetzkes (2010) considers the relationship between the earth art movement and environmental ethics and Ellen Levy (2011) explores the unprecedented ethical challenges introduced by bio-art and nano-art. Whilst not romanticising the artist as the sole conscience of the museum, my goal is to demonstrate the potential of the artist’s voice as a driver for ethical change. In his discussion of artists’ interventions, Terry Smith (2012: 138) notes how artists leverage both their experiences and their symbolic capital as outsiders to contribute to ethics discourse: The deep ethical import of all of these approaches pivots on conceiving the artist as in part, fundamentally, an outsider to art’s institutions, a stranger in the place ostensibly

22  Critical practice as reconciliation

devoted to his or her unique creativity, a foreign visitor whose otherness is the essence of the entire city. Though I acknowledge Andrea Fraser’s (2006a; 2012b) corrective to the insider/outsider binary which argues that no one can escape the institution and that artists themselves are constituted through institutional structures, I hold that the ‘otherness’ that Terry Smith identifies helps artists who engage in critical practice to recognise and deconstruct the exclusionary codes of institutions. Maria Lind (2011: 25) recognises the complexity of the convergences between insider and outsider positions: Although proximity can certainly be compromising it can just as well stimulate a kind of exchange which allows for the system to be challenged. When this is the case the challenge is carried out from a position which is simultaneously outside and inside, both implicated and distant. These convergences of insider and outsider positions go some way towards fostering reconciliation.

Critical practice and organisational change Numerous artists and scholars have questioned the impact of one-off projects to effect sustained organisational change. Even Neil Cummings, himself a producer of one-off projects, admits that some museums and galleries commission interventions in critical practice to enact a temporal flirtation with challenging ideas, but without committing to learning from these interventions and using this learning to transform the organisation. Cummings (2012) remarks, ‘Museums and galleries might see the payback in terms of a phenomenal amount of publicity and fantastic visitor figures but the project doesn’t touch their core processes or practices so therefore it’s fine’. On the other hand, interventions can be deeply transformative when there is buy-in across an organisation (Marstine 2012a). Oftentimes, this occurs at pivotal moments for an institution, for instance, on an anniversary of its founding or completion of its building; though some museums capitalise on these moments to pursue purely celebratory initiatives, others utilise them to reflect critically on the past and present and to conceive new possible futures. For instance, in 2011, to commemorate its fiftieth anniversary, Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol developed a year-long research theme including exhibitions and public programming called Apparatus, meaning the complex structures of an organisation or system, specifically, in this context, the structures that produce culture (Trevor 2012). A linchpin of Apparatus was Neil Cummings’s Self-Portrait: Arnolfini (Plate 3), which emerged from Cummings’s exploration of institutional practices through the Gallery’s archives and through workshops on possible futures that he led with Arnolfini staff. The resulting work, a timeline produced along the staircase walls of the Gallery, mapped out through colour-coded sprites a trajectory of events relating to the art world (turquoise) and to its wider socio-economic (gold) and technological (purple) context, starting with the Bristol riots of 1831 demanding greater representation in Parliament, which took place just behind the current Arnolfini site, to Arnolfini’s centenary in 2061 in

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which the Gallery gains full consciousness of itself as an organisation (Cummings 2011). Cummings (2012) recounts: It’s very difficult for institutions to think into the future. . . . Everyone’s working flat out to make the next exhibition, and when it happens it’s gone and then they’re thinking about the next exhibition and how to get the funding, the artists, the artefacts and the loans forms, so when you start asking them about what are they planning for five years or fifteen or twenty or thirty they are dazzled. I think that if cultural institutions don’t start dreaming of possible futures that these futures will somehow be done to us by others. To mark the fiftieth anniversary of its Frank Lloyd Wright building, the Guggenheim Museum solicited and displayed visionary proposals for interventions in the rotunda from some 200 artists, designers and architects around the world.The resulting salon-style exhibition, Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum (Figure 1.5), offered up a discourse that was simultaneously utopian and dystopian. Co-curator David van der Leer explains (2012): What was interesting to see were the ideas surfacing from all camps – ideas of how to cross the space, how to quiet the space down, how to make it a softer space, how to work with a light in the space. It was a very good way for us to reflect upon what we had already done in the space over the last twenty years with large-scale installations and also set a tone for what we could be doing with installations over the coming years. We got a ton of ideas out of this.

FIGURE 1.5  Installation view: Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim, 2010, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, photograph: David Heald ©The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

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The advent of the biennial can also prompt critical reflection. As curators Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal and Solveig Øvstebø (2010) assert, whilst biennials are institutions in and of themselves, they can introduce criticality through counter-narratives that challenge canons and the systems that maintain them. For example, discussing Michael Asher’s Open all Day and Night, for the 2010 Whitney Biennial – in which Asher intervened to keep the biennial open 24 hours a day for three consecutive days, creating a bureaucratic nightmare for the Whitney and a melatonin-altering experience for visitors – biennial co-curator Gary Carrion-Murayari (2012) remarks: It was a tool to understand how the museum operates for him and for us and it was an opportunity for the public to experience the museum in a new way. There’s a generosity in that project that the terminology of institutional critique doesn’t capture. Sometimes commitment to transformation through critical practice occurs across a particular city because of certain political, social and economic conditions. Berlin is sometimes mentioned (Mania 2006), but Los Angeles, where artist Robert Fontenot, the subject of a case study in Chapter 2, lives and works, is another case in point. Los Angeles is a contradiction in terms, a place obsessed with fantasy, as fabricated by the entertainment worlds of Hollywood and Disneyland, but equally defined by its cultural vitality, as generated through its racially, ethnically and economically diverse neighbourhoods and record of arts activism (Gonzalez 2012). University programmes in post-studio art and in curatorial studies – such as at California Institute of the Arts where Michael Asher taught for almost 40 years, and at UCLA where Andrea Fraser took up a position in the late 2000s – have helped to create a robust and evolving terrain of critical practice. Agsten (2012b) notes, ‘As a newer city, LA is perceived as not having as much tradition and that’s morphed into a tradition of resisting tradition. . . . The spirit of our city is that we can do things that you couldn’t necessarily do somewhere else’. The vast spread of the city has made rent in grittier areas relatively affordable for artist spaces. Hammer Museum former curatorial associate Elizabeth Cline (2012) adds, ‘LA is so unique in that most artists do offsite projects. They don’t need an institution to make their work public. It’s about LA having the space and artists making work for their communities.’ Moreover, particular projects that have defined the LA cultural landscape have resonated strongly for artists and curators involved in critical practice. Watts Towers (1921–1954) (Figure 1.6), Simon Rodia’s 17 steel, concrete and wire sculptures embedded with found objects and located in the deprived Los Angeles community of Watts, serve as a beacon to the city of the potential social impact of art. According to Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art Rita Gonzalez (2012), Watts Towers ‘embody a sense of possibility in a post-riot ravaged landscape in which the towers exist and thrive, particularly because they were made out of trash with one person’s hands and very simple tools’. Ed Ruscha’s The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire (Figure 1.7) (1965–1968), which depicts LACMA, only just founded in the year Ruscha began the painting, with flames and smoke billowing, has long served as a tongue-in-cheek insurrectionist rallying cry for institutional critique. First exhibited at the Irving Blum Gallery in LA in 1968, behind a velvet rope, as if to shield it from an unruly mob, the painting was accompanied by a telegram to the gallery in which Ruscha announced that the fire marshal would be attending the opening (McShine 1999: 190). And the ambitious Getty-funded 2011–2012 project Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA, 1945–1980 ( J. Paul Getty Trust 2011), which involved exhibitions, scholarship and public programming

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FIGURE 1.6 

Simon Rodia, Watts Towers, Los Angeles, 1921–1954, photo taken by LACMA’s Conservation Center, © 2014 Museum Associations/LACMA, by Yosi Pozeilov

at over 60 Southern California institutions and which was some 10 years in the making, prompted practitioners to reflect on the local roots of institutional critique, including the work of feminists and artists of colour (Gonzalez 2012). Mapping critical practice in Los Angeles reveals a matrix of initiatives, many at small self-organised artists’ spaces such as the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the Center for Land

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Ed Ruscha, The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1965–1968, oil on canvas, 53 1/2 × 133 1/2 in. (135.9 × 339.1 cm.) Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972. 72.252, photography by Cathy Carver

FIGURE 1.7 

Use Interpretation and Machine Project and others at art museums. At LACMA, this is seen in small risk-taking exhibitions of contemporary art in the 1990s and 2000s, particularly through LACMA Lab (Zellen n.d.), a research and development unit established to pilot new models for audience engagement through commissioning art, which Rita Gonzalez (2012) calls ‘institutional critique without the official label’. More recently, LACMA and the Hammer Museum have focused on socially engaged practice through ambitious artists’ residencies by collectives including Fallen Fruit and Machine Project (Los Angeles County Museum of Art 2011; Agsten 2012a). These projects lay claim to interstitial museum spaces for the public sphere, as they challenge what Jennifer Lieu (2011: 39, 53) calls the ‘operational boundaries’ of museums by interrupting their everyday routines so that new ways of working emerge. Moreover, beyond any particular project or place, the larger trajectory of critical practice has become so impactful that it has been a key factor in the turn of museums and galleries towards social engagement (Hooper-Greenhill 2000: 141–142; Buskirk 2012: 9). Most artists who engage in critical practice do so because they believe in the museum’s capacity to change – and in its capacity to change society. Critical practice undoubtedly serves museums but, rather than constituting a weakness, this helps museums and publics to reconcile in ways that benefit a diverse range of constituencies.

Reconciliation: What? Why? How? Political and cultural contexts Reconciliation as a human rights strategy came to the fore when leaders in South Africa established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) (1996–1998) as the centrepiece of the transition from a political system of apartheid to democracy. This strategy soon became a model for other countries in Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe that were emerging from repressive regimes and civil war to stability and the respect for human rights. As Bashir and Kymlicka explain, in the South African context, reconciliation was understood as a process

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that would both facilitate a peaceful process of radical political change and provide a kind of transitional justice. More recently, reconciliation has become an important concept for redressing a diversity of historic injustices in western democracies from slavery to the mistreatment of indigenous peoples. In the twenty-first century, reconciliation has become a significant part of negotiating civic accord (Bashir and Kymlicka 2008: 3–4). Although the TRC was not the first national truth commission, it was particularly impactful because of its wide participation – over 20,000 individuals gave testimony and more than 7,000 others requested amnesty – and because it focused on reconciliation (Murphy 2010: 4–5). Using the Xhosa word ubuntu, a relational term suggesting the connectedness of individuals through generosity, cooperation and empathy, archbishop Desmond Tutu led the TRC to hear the stories of survivors of human rights abuse during the apartheid era and to grant amnesty to perpetrators who offered full disclosure and whose actions occurred in a political or military context. President Nelson Mandela served as an exemplar of forgiveness in the name of social harmony (Krüger 2006: 29, 35–36). There are many ways of approaching reconciliation and, in practice, most reconciliation projects represent a hybrid course of action. Bashir and Kymlicka (2008: 12) argue that reconciliation operates on three distinct but overlapping levels: First, there is a set of tools or techniques of reconciliation, which include reparations and compensation, apologies, commemorations and memorials, truth telling initiatives, rehabilitation and amnesties. Second, there is a set of goals or purposes of reconciliation, which include nation-building, individual and collective healing after trauma, the pursuit of justice in its various forms (retributive, restorative, distributive), the consolidation of the rule of law, and democratization. And third, there are various moral, political, or even religious theories of reconciliation that attempt to provide a normative framework for evaluating the tools and goals of reconciliation, which include Christian theologies of forgiveness, human rights ideologies, and secular theories of nationalism or justice. . . . Real world projects of reconciliation typically involve a complicated mixing and matching of these various tools, goals, and theories, which defy easy categorization. In the context of museums and publics, reconciliation, as a complicated mixing and matching of tools, goals and theories, is a useful concept. This is not a literal approach responding directly to a historical record of museums’ committing atrocities – though in collecting and caring for objects amassed through atrocities without taking responsibility for their complicity in colonial injustices, museums perpetuate trauma on colonised peoples (Lonetree 2012) and, at the same time, in atoning for past wrongs museums have a significant role to play facilitating reconciliation within the political sphere (Barkan and Karn 2006: 10). My appropriation of the concept is based on theoretical understandings of reconciliation as a means to address a diversity of ethical rifts. As cultural institution studies scholar Michalinos Zembylas (2012: 47) asserts, ‘A sustained pedagogical effort for reconciliation offers the potential to reinvent spaces in which similarities and differences may be critically articulated and felt, toward constructing new shared imaginaries.’ In my analysis of case studies in the following chapters, I explore how critical practice is such an effort towards reconciliation and generates the potential to reinvent museum spaces in which similarities and differences are articulated and felt, towards constructing new shared imaginaries.

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Museological reconciliation and public agency Whilst it has long been acknowledged that museums are places people trust in their search for insight (BritainThinks 2013), it has also been demonstrated that substantive gains in cocreation, reciprocity and shared ownership are hard-won (Lynch 2011). Speaking of the museum’s place in the larger campaign for human rights – which has developed since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was passed by the United Nations in 1948 – cultural sector leader Mark O’Neill and museum learning consultant Lois Silverman (2012: xxi) together write that, though museums and galleries have made some progress, to become fully pluralistic institutions characterised by shared authority and equality of opportunity to participate requires a sea change among sector professionals. Charles Esche (in Esche and Borja-Villel 2012) echoes this refrain; he remarks: In the museum we still erect high barriers of knowledge, expertise, class and taste – people too often come to us seeking confirmation of their prejudices rather than dialogue with the other. We have a lot of work to do here. To help chart such a sea change the UK Museums Association (MA) (2013) published the policy document ‘Museums Change Lives’ which sets out a vision for the socially purposeful museum. David Anderson (2012), president of the MA when ‘Museums Change Lives’ was drafted and a key figure in the thinking undergirding the document, makes a persuasive argument that cultural rights are ensconced in the larger rights agenda. He asserts that few museums and galleries have pursued a course necessary to realise the cultural rights of citizens and that, because most people have little knowledge of their cultural rights, they have no real capacity to advocate for them. Anderson notes that cultural rights are not simply rights to consume culture but a more active set of rights of diverse publics to participate in culture towards both self-actualisation and the shaping of museums themselves. Esche places much of the blame for the alienation between museums and publics on neoliberal instrumentalisation of museums as vehicles for economic regeneration. He declares (in Esche and Borja-Villel 2012): The danger we face is that everything is squeezed through the lens of economy and there is no room for any other value systems. . . . The questions we face are how can the museum make more money, how can it bring more visitors, how can it produce more excess. . . . We need to challenge the idea that we are only a tourist attraction, something to produce gentrification, city marketing or money at the door. Dewdney, Dibosa and Walsh (2013) come to a similar conclusion in their analysis of art museums, using Tate Britain as a case study. They acknowledge that public engagement at Tate Britain has improved since the 1990s but argue that its modernist approach to display, quantitative approach to audience research and social deficit model of race and class – targeting particular underrepresented demographic groups – inhibits more substantive and sustained audience development.They find that Tate Britain is too steeped in defining audiences as consumers and exhibitions as spectacle to grapple with the fluidity of identity and to foster the kind of public agency that Anderson champions. ‘Western art museums, by embracing the market, while at

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the same time retaining the discourse of aesthetic modernism, have ignored the challenge of social and cultural difference’, they declare (Dewdney, Dibosa and Walsh 2013: 9). In the chapters that follow I will show that, given this state of semi-paralysis, critical practice can be understood as a gesture towards reconciliation between museums and publics, specifically contributing to public agency. I introduce this notion of gesture not to imply that critical practice has little real impact but, in contrast, to suggest that the interventions that are the subject of this book together convey deep and multi-layered resonances that call for a radical reorientation of museums and galleries to prioritise opportunities for self-actualisation. Gesture is a linchpin of peace and reconciliation studies; the tools of reconciliation that Bashir and Kymlicka identify – reparations, compensation, apologies, commemorations, memorials, truth-telling initiatives, rehabilitation and amnesties – might all be considered as symbolic acts performed to make amends and to repair rifts. In the same way, then, as artist Carey Young (2012) asserts, gesture in critical practice can be conceptualised as productive to museums ‘thinking differently or operating differently or relating differently to their publics . . . and this might be effected through discourse around the work, rather than the work itself ’. Gestures made through critical practice contribute to a museum ethics discourse concerning the relational.

Museological perspectives on critical practice Institutional critique as institutional ‘desire’ In 2012, Utrecht-based artist Annette Krauss conducted a series of workshops in London with groups of 15- to 17-year-olds from Quinton Kynaston School and Paddington Academy. Contemporary art space The Showroom commissioned the workshops as part of its Communal Knowledge programme of collaborative research and discourse with local communities. Krauss’s aim was to empower the young people to identify, analyse and expose common assumptions and hidden agendas operational at their schools, above and beyond the academic curriculum, in the hopes of sparking activism among the students and the potential for organisational change within their institutions. Krauss chose to hold the workshops at multiple sites, including the schools,The Showroom and the larger public sphere to help the young people understand that their growing ability to generate critique would translate across a variety of institutional settings (The Showroom 2012). Emboldened through the workshops with new powers of observation, the license to pose questions, and video cameras for documenting their findings, the students uncovered at their schools a troubling web of systems and processes in place to control their thinking and behaviour. Krauss (in Krauss, Pethick and Vishmidt 2010: 253) recounts: Students learn to compare themselves with others or tolerate unfairness; they learn to anticipate what teachers want to hear or how far they can go in order to access their own interests during their school lives. Authority, dependency, pressure to perform, role models, and standardised thinking are taught and learned, without this necessarily being made explicit or noticed. These other forms of knowledge aren’t fixed. We tried to address the realm of communication within school, with its hidden niches and mute practices, and to develop forms of investigation in order to approach these spaces.

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In response, the young people staged actions, many of them filmed, to resist and challenge this control (Pethick 2012). For instance, as The Showroom’s director Emily Pethick (2012) recounts, at Paddington Academy, a new school where cameras are ubiquitous and security is prioritised, students from the workshops interrogated the Head of Security, asking him, ‘What exactly is it you’re protecting?’ A still from one video captures the spirit of the larger project through the gesture and voice of a student assertively pointing her index finger upward and exclaiming, ‘They don’t have the right to do that’ (Figure 1.8) whilst another student in the foreground captures her on camera. At the conclusion of the project The Showroom exhibited the students’ videos in its gallery space. The project, titled Hidden Curriculum, and staged before and since with other art institutions as well, exemplifies contemporary directions in institutional critique. Pethick (2012) exclaims: It’s just so amazing when the young people themselves are asking these really direct questions and thinking about their environments; they’re seeing the school as a model of an institution and understanding that always in life you have to encounter these institutional structures. For me it makes a really good project in institutional critique because the students themselves, who are the subjects of that system with its rules and its codes of conduct, hold the system to question. Hidden Curriculum explores what Krauss refers to as the ‘unlearning’ of institutionalised practices (The Showroom 2012). This concept of unlearning is at the core of institutional critique, whether directed towards schools, museums, or some other institution; it is through processes of unlearning – of challenging the values and systems that institutions naturalise to legitimise and maintain their power structures as well as the larger power structures within society that support those

FIGURE 1.8

Showroom

Annette Krauss, Hidden Curriculum, 2012, video still, courtesy the artist and The

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institutions – that more equitable and ethical institutions can be forged. Krauss (in Krauss, Pethick and Vishmidt 2010: 252) explains: [Educational] institutions reinforce deep-seated hierarchies in society. What is, of course, more difficult to describe, or even to inhabit, are those existing processes which perpetuate social orders with their power relations and injustices. Hidden Curriculum is an attempt to find points of entry, together with the students, in an attempt to inhabit, or at least address, these processes. Krauss’s use of the term ‘unlearning’ within a project on education also emphasises the subversive nature of institutional critique, as subversion is an effective means to create conditions for imagining alternative, more socially just futures. Pethick (in Krauss, Pethick and Vishmidt 2010: 251, 258) refers to the individual provocations of the students as ‘micro-resistance’ and notes that, together, these provocations sparked new possibilities for equality and shared authority in their schools: While the students were learning, through a period of critical self-reflection, it was also the institution of the school that was learning through the interventions into the school system, and the mixed reactions of the teachers to it, some of whom found it hard to accept the project’s attitude of permissiveness. Hidden Curriculum shows that institutional critique continues to have relevance in the twentyfirst century; the project illuminates how institutional critique has developed and changed over time – from a concern primarily with art museums to an interest in all kinds of institutions and from a provocation with hesitancy and scepticism towards impact to one in which community agency and the potential for organisational change figure largely. Such transformation is indicative that institutional critique today remains dynamic and responsive, rather than representing a movement from the past. In its attention to organisational change Hidden Curriculum also conveys an underlying belief that institutions can be fair and equitable as well as a desire to see schools live up to this ethical potential.Thus, citing Hidden Curriculum as a model, critic Marina Vishmidt (in Krauss, Pethick and Vishmidt 2010: 259) argues that effective critique must acknowledge the positive steps that institutions make in embedding emancipatory policies and practices, as well as their coercive properties. In this context we can see the ‘unlearning’ of Hidden Curriculum as an embrace of new modes of learning and an expression of Dieter Roelstraete’s notion of institutional ‘desire’ (2012a). Speaking of Goshka Macuga (who features in Chapter 4 of this study) and her peers, Roelstraete (2012a) asserts: She is one of a younger generation of artists who obviously have learned a great deal from institutional critique but are no longer interested in critique for critique’s reason – I think these are artists who want to make these various institutions better places. Maria Hlavajova (2012) expresses a belief in the possibilities of institutions in her recollections of engaging in institutional critique in 1980s Czechoslovakia: We understood that in order to cohere we needed some sort of structure. So we did establish some kind of proto-institutional systems for us to actually exist.We had mailing

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lists and we believed in institutions, but we believed we needed to rethink how to institute because this was instituting into a semi-illegal space at the time. But the belief in institutions was there, embracing the possibility it can present for you. Even the work of Fred Wilson, which in the 1990s was quite polemical (see Chapter 3), has become more poetic and multi-layered, expressing his love of and desires for museums. For instance, in 2012, at the sleek brand-new Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Art Museum, in Savannah, Georgia, built on the site of an antebellum train depot, Wilson drew from both the museum’s famed Walter O. Evans Collection of African-American Art and from Evans’s private collection of archival materials of African-American history to construct an installation that spoke to the Museum’s future. Comparing the installation to Wilson’s 1992 Mining the Museum at the Maryland Historical Society, Evans (2012) declared, ‘it’s not so much a protest but a welcoming. . . . He sees a lot of possibilities here. Institutions are changing and Fred’s work has contributed to it’. Using Savannah grey brick – known to have been made in the antebellum period by enslaved individuals at a local plantation foundry, used to construct the original train depot and prized today for its colour and quality – Wilson created both physical and metaphorical connections between artists and authors, past and present, and the museum and its constituents (Figure 1.9). Diverse geometric formations of brick, from stairs to cubes, led the viewer to pivotal juxtapositions between art and history in the installation. Titled Life’s Links, after a small sketch of two links in a chain by nineteenth-century artist Robert S. Duncanson in an autograph book that Wilson situated at the centre of the installation, the project anchored the

FIGURE 1.9  Fred Wilson, Life’s Link (detail), 2012, Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, images courtesy SCAD Museum of Art

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SCAD Museum in the local, specifically local African-American history. Project curator Isolde Brielmaier (2012) explains: ‘127 enslaved individuals worked at Hermitage Plantation outside Savannah making these bricks.This was significant for Fred. He saw the bricks as having a soul.’ Wilson leveraged the concept of links in a chain to reference the realities of slavery as well as a wider array of cultural associations. Wilson (2012a) remarks: Because Duncanson was an African-American man and even though he was not living in the slave states, the chain link does have this irony that I enjoy too. . . . For me it was the links of what I was doing, the links between these individuals over time, links of the art to the documents, and how our life is made of these links. Ultimately, Life’s Links is an appeal to the SCAD Museum to ground itself in the past and present truths of local African-American culture and stand as a counterpoint to a sentimentalised, nostalgic ideal of Savannah, formulated by the tourism industry, as capturing the charm and hospitality of the American South. ‘You get the sense that there are two Savannahs,’ Wilson (2012a) notes. Life’s Links expresses Roelstraete’s notion of institutional desire, the artist’s belief in the potential of museums to be socially purposeful. Wilson’s transformation from the polemical to the poetic acknowledges the fact that, since the late twentieth century, the ethics discourse spawned by critical practice has led many museums and galleries to work towards being more equitable. Cultural sociologist Pascal Gielen (2013: 16) notes that the transformation has been dramatic: If there were to be a third wave of institutional critique nowadays, it could only succeed by making the time-honoured modern values of the art institution its ally. The art institution that was the target of modern and postmodern critique no longer exists. It has been transmuted and eroded to such an extent that it has become unrecognizable when compared to thirty years ago. Nevertheless, in a Lacanian sense, desire is a quest for what can never be had or a relationship to something that is missing (Lacan 2001). The position of institutional critique as institutional desire maintains a utopian sensibility.And what is desired is a more ethically engaged institution – whether a school, a gallery or something else.

‘Collaborators have rights!’ Museological implications of socially engaged artistic practice In 2000, long before the introduction of YouTube, a studio for the production of internet television opened in Coronation Court, Liverpool’s oldest tower block of social housing. There, tenants from public housing across the city created online content for and operated their own channel, including camera work, computer operation and studio management, becoming the UK’s first online television station (Superflex n.d.; Dempsey 2012). Many of the tenants were elderly and few knew anything about digital technology. But they were hugely concerned about plans for the demolition of 67 public housing towers in Liverpool and the processes of rehousing tenants. The high-rises of Liverpool were built between the 1950s and 1970s to modernise neighbourhoods where substandard ‘slum’ housing had been cleared; conditions in the towers deteriorated as funds for their upkeep evaporated. Many who lived in the towers,

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nonetheless, felt a strong sense of belonging that they wanted to preserve: ‘Those who live there are passionate about their home . . . One of the primary concerns that residents had was to keep the community together’ (Superflex n.d.). The Coronation Court studio was the result of a partnership between the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) – Liverpool’s media arts centre – and Liverpool Housing Action Trust (HAT), established in 1993 to take control of the tower blocks from the local authority, reinvest in housing and spark community development (Stanistreet 2006: 22). Together, FACT and HAT commissioned the Danish collective Superflex (Rasmus Nielsen, Bjørnstjerne Christiansen and Jakob Fenger) in collaboration with Sean Treadway to launch the studio as a way to open up opportunities for marginalised local communities to gather, converse, gain technological know-how, create programming and develop advocacy skills (Superflex n.d.). Coronation Court was the second in a network of some 30 studios that Superflex founded and collectively titled Superchannel. Led by HAT Community Development Manager Paul Kelly, and funded by HAT, the Liverpool initiative, eventually called tenantspin, empowered tower residents to become citizen journalists in a virtual community that facilitated communication in real time among residents and between residents and the wider world (Figure 1.10) (Dempsey 2012). Approximately half of the programming concerned social housing issues, from tenants’ rights to urban regeneration, and the other half reflected the wider interests of participants from film reviews to guest interviews with politicians and local celebrities. Some tenants made documentaries about their life in the towers. Participants received training in broadcasting and FACT commissioned artists and writers to collaborate with the group (Stanistreet 2006: 23). It is this sense of agency that defined the project, according to Superflex (n.d.), ‘The Superchannel presents residents

Behind the scenes during a webcast of tenantspin, Liverpool, 2002, concept introduced by Superflex, 2001

FIGURE 1.10 

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with a set of new media tools with which to maintain and develop their community links and to influence decision-making about their future’. Over a 12-year run, tenantspin underwent several major transitions in which new groups of participants shaped its course; in 2003 it moved to FACT’s new building when it opened in the Ropewalks quarter; in 2005 Arena Housing took over from HAT which closed; also in 2005 the studio moved again, this time to the community centre at Sefton Park tower blocks. What remained consistent throughout was the sense that the project created conditions for emancipatory thought and actions. Remarks by Charles Esche (2001) made at the start of the project ring just as true at its conclusion: Firstly, by requiring self-expression to be not only tolerated but essential to the activity of the Superchannel, the initiative generates capacities in both individuals and groups of tenants that might otherwise remain undiscovered. Secondly, the fact that the emphasis is on external broadcast rather than internal communication undermines the dependency culture that many old Labour councils cultivated in order to shore up their electoral support. . . . Most significantly however, Superchannel can change the image of both the tower block itself and the residents – and a negative image is one of the greatest contributory factors in the tower blocks’ twenty-year decline. Key to this empowerment is the fact that neither FACT nor Superflex tried to control the project; both the arts centre and the artists’ collective recognised that if tenantspin were really to generate a new sense of community, rather than simply to foster participation, then they had to share power collaboratively with substantial decision-making given over to residents. Dave Beech (2010a: 26–28) of the collaborative Freee notes the distinction between participation and collaboration in socially engaged practice: Is participation always voluntary? Are all participants equal and are they equal with the artist? How can participation involve co-authorship rather than some attenuated and localised content? The rhetoric of participation often conflates participation with collaboration to head off such questions. Collaborators, however, are distinct from participants insofar as they share authorial rights over the artwork that permits them, among other things, to make fundamental decisions about the key structural features of the work.That is, collaborators have rights that are withheld from participants. . . .We simply cannot have a theory of the art of encounter without at the same time rethinking social relations at large. We need a better map. More importantly, though, we need to change the landscape that is being mapped. As Beech asserts, ‘collaborators have rights’; it is through collaborative relationships, such as that piloted by tenantspin, that publics gain significant authorial control of a project in socially engaged practice. And it is this sharing of decision-making that has the potential to foster reconciliation. Socially engaged artistic practice that is collaborative, rather than merely participatory, can model for museums and galleries an approach towards their publics founded on respect for the expertise and interests of the individual and providing opportunities to embrace and grow that expertise and interest. It can also point outward, beyond the museum walls, to challenge whether the physical space of the gallery is the most appropriate platform for relational initiatives (Blondet 2012). Socially engaged artistic practice, when collaborative,

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can provide the map to which Beech is referring and offers institutions the chance to overcome the power inequalities that for too long have defined relations between museums and communities. In fact, Superflex introduced a radical and subversive approach to unequal power relations between museums and their publics. Curator Barbara Steiner (1999) explains: Superflex’s projects show a changed understanding of artistic praxis.Their starting point is a heterogeneous, complex society. When they assemble not only the project and development team, but also the users, they take into account the specific interests of individual groups, their different opportunities for articulation, their interests and projections. Here, the art institutions and their representatives are not assigned an outstanding role, they simply represent potential partners in cooperation with their own specific interests. In the case of tenantspin, the social housing partners HAT, and later Arena Housing, were seen as expert facilitators who could negotiate the ethical issues of the capacity, safety and wellbeing of potentially vulnerable contributors (Froggett et al. 2011: 60). As FACT’s Head of Collaborative Programme Kat Dempsey (2012) remarks of the art centre’s relationship with HAT; ‘it’s almost like we’re delivering on a service level for them’. This re-drawing of traditional hierarchies between art institutions and their partners helped shift the balance of power. Equally key is that Superflex designed the project for sustainability so that it could continue for many years without further interventions from the artists and until the technology became superfluous. This long-term thinking on the part of Superflex and echoed by FACT and HAT helped tenants to take ownership of the project so that they were collaborators with FACT and HAT, rather than merely participants. Superchannel Programme Manager Alan Dunn (2004: 5–6) explains: The FACT Collaboration Programme is a commissioning department rather than an interpretive education department . . . Investments in people are crucial. . . . The largest issues facing ‘tenantspin’ (and its programme) have been the tenants’ health, their schedules for moving home and their collaborations with architects and landlords. The long-term nature of the project also helped embed its values within FACT as an institution (Kholeif 2012). That is not to claim that tenantspin developed without conflict but, rather, that when conflict erupted, it was respectful and productive. As the project evaluation states (Froggett et al. 2011: 104): It was striking that while the organisations [sic] projects reflected (and reproduced) different fields of tension, they did so in most instances with an exceptional spirit of generosity, measurable in terms of time and rewards, and manifest in terms of an open curiosity and reflective self-questioning.There is something inherently ‘reparative’ in such a stance in the sense that it tends to repair or heal. Its suggestion of concern in allowing others to reveal themselves, rather than imposing views of how they should be, can go a long way to offset the friction involved in any confrontation.

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In creating the conditions for agency among the residents of Liverpool’s tower blocks, tenantspin exemplifies the reparative potential of socially engaged artistic practice to offer up new collaborative relationships between museums and communities. As Beech states, ‘collaborators have rights’. And within the museum and gallery context, these rights do not simply concern the micro-level exercise of an artistic or political decision on a particular project; rather, they extend to the macro-level of cultural rights as human rights.

Critical practice as reconciliation: The Moral Maze When visitors reached the entrance to the summer 1995 exhibition on relational aesthetics ‘The Moral Maze’, conceived by Liam Gillick and Philippe Parreno for the Corsortium in Dijon, they encountered an unexpected obstruction. The normally transparent glass double doors that led to the exhibition were roughly whitewashed with house paint as if to signal that the show was closed or in the midst of installation or de-installation (Figure 1.11). Graffiti, specifically the words ‘Philippe Idiot’, were awkwardly incised into the paint on the right door, suggesting that the galleries were in an unfinished state. The strange sight provoked potential audience members to deliberate: Is the show open? Or is it closed? Is the paint on the double doors a sign not to enter? Or is it a conceptual work of art intended to frame the experience of the exhibition? Indeed, this was a conceptual work by Liam Gillick with the same title, The Moral Maze, as the larger project. He appropriated the title from the BBC radio programme of the same name which examines ethical issues underlying weekly news headlines (BBC Radio Four 2014). The graffiti on the door refers to Parreno and was probably etched into the paint

FIGURE 1.11 

Liam Gillick, The Moral Maze, 1995, installation at Consortium, Dijon

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as a private joke by Maurizio Cattelan, another artist involved in the project (Gillick 2012). As Gillick (2012) explains, a moral maze is a dilemma made unresolvable by defining it through the kinds of binary oppositions that Derrida (1992) problematises, in this case the binary opposition of inside and outside. Gillick (2012) recounts: The place was never closed and it was never open. The real tension in that work was about ‘Can I come in / Am I really part of this or not part of this?’ . . . It’s not communal really or isolated truly. It’s about all those grey areas of strategy, negotiation, compromise. Gillick’s Moral Maze provides an apt metaphor for interrogating the insider/outsider tensions of critical practice.The whitewashed doors to the exhibition made everyone who encountered them reflect on whether and how they belong in the art world, even cognoscenti, who might quickly recognise that the doors are a conceptual work of art but who would be excluded from the humour behind Cattelan’s graffiti prank. Gillick’s acknowledgment of these dilemmas of inside and outside, at heart, serves as an appeal for discourse. The case studies that follow are gestures towards advancing the kind of ethical discourse that Gillick champions. How can critical practice create conditions for museums and galleries to make their publics feel empowered to be, in the words of Gillick, ‘part of this’ – the larger project of cultural rights as human rights? And how can critical practice help us to understand the museum itself as a social field that permeates the larger world? As Fraser (2006a: 129) suggests, ‘Moving from a substantive understanding of “the institution” as specific places, organizations, and individuals to a conception of it as a social field, the question of what is inside and what is outside becomes much more complex’. Individual artists may only gesture towards transformation. Mark Allen (2012b), of Machine Project, notes: ‘we can’t change organisational culture but we can make temporary demonstrations of possibilities’.Yet, the larger trajectory of practice suggests that critical practice can gain traction in the moral maze, advancing ethics discourse towards reconciliation between museums and their publics. In the following chapters I analyse case studies in critical practice to demonstrate their contributions to this ethics discourse. Chapter 2 considers the ways that artists engaged in critical practice explore issues of ethical stewardship of collections. Through analysis of Michael Rakowitz’s Spoils (2011), Robert Fontenot’s Recycle LACMA (2009–2010) and Ansuman Biswas’s Manchester Hermit (Manchester Museum 2009), the chapter shows how critical practice probes contested issues in collections management to foster civic discourse about how an emerging model of shared guardianship could shape museums and galleries in the future. It argues that acknowledging the relational aspects of ethical stewardship – those aspects that bind people together through objects – is a key strand of twenty-first-century museum ethics and central to the project of reconciliation. In Chapter 3 I examine how critical practice draws upon the continually evolving and still useful concept of hybridity as a methodological approach towards social justice. Through projects by Fred Wilson, Matt Smith and Theaster Gates, I demonstrate how artists’ interventions leverage hybridity to help museums make meaningful symbolic reparations towards equality and inclusion. I argue that critical practice engaging hybridity has the capacity to spark the kind of critical, self-reflective thinking essential to organisational change towards equality and social justice; whilst reconciliation is a complex and continual process, hybridity can be an effective concept by which to forge pluralistic institutions characterised by shared authority, reciprocity and mutual trust.

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Chapter 4 considers critical practice through which artists interrogate the ‘platform’ as a device that has the capacity to generate and test out new forms of democracy in the museum and the world. By considering works by Liam Gillick, Goshka Macuga and Jonas Staal, it holds that an ongoing process of negotiating and renegotiating the terms of democracy – for museums and for civil society – is a key strand of critical practice and central to processes of reconciliation between museums and communities. My premise is that inclusivity and participation in and of themselves do not create the conditions for reconciliation between museums and communities and need to be problematised to consider who is being included and on what terms. Chapter 5 concludes the monograph by looking at how the project of reconciliation, as advanced through critical practice, has become ensconced in particular museums and galleries. It considers gestures of reconciliation, as manifested by the projects in critical practice discussed in the volume, as an expression of both the ethics of care and the agonism of productive conflict. It examines how this notion of reconciliation has been absorbed by the ‘discursive’ institution, focused on assessing, critiquing, and addressing its power relationships, as modelled by the ‘new institutionalism’ of the mid-1990s to mid-2000s and further embedded more recently in a range of art museums and galleries which have transformed their policies and practices to facilitate processes of reconciliation. Critical practice has a unique and impactful role to play in addressing imbalances of power between museums and their publics. By examining projects in critical practice through the lens of reconciliation theory, the following chapters illuminate the potential of these works as drivers of ethical change.The projects may be gestures, but reconciliation theory teaches us that gestures have the capacity to foster the reinvention of spaces in which similarities and differences are articulated and felt towards constructing new shared imaginaries.

2 CHANGING HANDS Ethical stewardship of collections

Collections and the relational Spoils New York’s posh Upper East Side restaurant Park Avenue is renowned for both its changing seasonal menu and its changing seasonal architecture and design (Fourth Wall Restaurants 2012). As diners were seated in the fall of 2011, they learned that among the main courses was a dish featuring American-style venison chops, marinated in date syrup imported from Iraq and garnished with tahini, pomegranate seeds, spring onions and pine nuts.Waitstaff served the venison on elegant gold-trimmed and monogrammed china (Plate 4). The venison proved to be a very popular dish (Ko 2012). The preparation, serving and eating of the venison represents a collaborative, socially engaged art project between Park Avenue executive chef Kevin Lasko and Chicago-based artist Michael Rakowitz (Figure 2.1), facilitated by New York public art commissioning agency Creative Time. Entitled Spoils, the project explores the complex relationship between heritage and identity and between ownership of collections and ethical stewardship. Rakowitz is of Jewish-Iraqi descent and often uses food and its associated rituals to map the political and social interconnections between Iraq and the US. Inspired by the family dinners of his childhood, Rakowitz sees the communal meal as a ‘social equaliser, providing a point of entry for everyone around the table’ (Fletcher and Rakowitz 2008: 61). He also views Iraqi cuisine as a corrective to Americans’ prevailing associations of Iraq with oil and war and hopes to spark alternative discourse (Fletcher and Rakowitz 2008: 62). In Spoils, Rakowitz asks diner-participants to examine their ethical responsibility towards the fate of Iraqi cultural heritage. As waitstaff served the venison, they informed diners who had selected it that the china on which it was plated had been looted from former dictator Saddam Hussein’s palaces. Those dishes marked with either the insignia of the House of Saddam or the Ba’ath Party logo were produced for Hussein’s own collection (Figure 2.2); those emblazoned with a crown originally came from the collection of Iraq’s last reigning king, Faisal II, who was assassinated in 1958, and were appropriated by Hussein who had a fascination for the deposed monarch (Rakowitz 2014).

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FIGURE 2.1 

Michael Rakowitz (left) and Kevin Lasko at restaurant Park Avenue, 2011, photo courtesy Creative Time

Creative Time purchased the dinnerware on eBay on behalf of Rakowitz for about $200–$300 per piece; they bought some plates from an Iraqi refugee living outside of Detroit and others from a US soldier who was part of the unit that helped capture Hussein in late 2003. Though the plates may not be antiquities, their presence within a US context alludes to those artifacts looted from the Iraq Museum in 2003 and the profitable international art market that made this possible.Through the intervention, Rakowitz coerced diners to consciously decide if the sumptuous look and smell of the venison would seduce them to partake in the spoils of war or if they were willing to make an ethical choice to walk away from the table. Rakowitz (quoted in Art Daily.org 2011) explains: I am very aware of the complicated nature of this dish, and the project seeks to put the diner into a situation where a set of choices needs to be made. It necessitates a position to be taken, and the diner’s ethics are a part of the work. The meat and its sauce interact geographically – ‘the American deer hunt meets the Iraqi date harvest’, Rakowitz quips (quoted in S. Smith 2013a: 301). They also interact through the senses, as the artist explains, to ‘triangulate the diner’s tongue [with] the sweetness of the date syrup; and the bitterness of this surface it’s served upon’ (quoted in S. Smith 2013a: 302). Thus, through the meal, the diner is provoked to acknowledge within their domain of privilege and to discuss with fellow diners a relationship to Iraqi culture, what Rakowitz calls ‘a tangible connection with Iraq that was cultural, personal, and would invade their own bodies’ (quoted in S. Smith 2013a: 304).

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FIGURE 2.2 

Michael Rakowitz, Spoils (detail), 2011, photo courtesy Creative Time

Though by purchasing the china, Creative Time and Rakowitz were on some level themselves abetting the consumption of war trophies, at the same time Spoils represents an opportunity towards dialogue between those who suffer the losses of cultural heritage and those who profit from them. Rakowitz states that his work is ultimately about the concept of dispossession

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and that it is informed by the symbol of the wandering Jew, that diasporic figure in art and literature struggling for emancipation and marking the fate of the Jewish people as a whole (Cohen 2007; Fletcher and Rakowitz 2008: 58). Tellingly, whilst many diners expressed anger to be confronted by this moral quandary, most did choose to eat – and enjoyed the food; the Spoils represented by the dinnerware did not literally spoil the meal. Rakowitz could not himself in good conscience eat from the plates (Boucher 2011; Ko 2012). Two days before the project was scheduled to close, a cease-and-desist letter arrived at Park Avenue from an attorney, copied to the US State Department and the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Iraq at the United Nations. The letter explained that the china had been deemed cultural patrimony and ordered that it be surrendered and returned to the government of Iraq (Chayka 2011). Iraqi ambassador to the UN T. Hamid al-Bayati stated: ‘Artifacts like these should go back to the palaces, or what are you going to display there? . . . These were the things that Saddam used, and they should be seen by the Iraqi people’ (quoted in R. Kennedy 2011). The restaurant immediately took the venison off the menu and shortly thereafter Rakowitz and Creative Time participated in the packing (Figure 2.3) and repatriation of the plates by US marshals to the Iraqi Mission at the UN in New York. As he walked into the Iraqi Mission (Figure 2.4) to witness the plates being officially repatriated, Rakowitz realised, ironically, that this event was the first time anyone in his family had stepped back onto Iraqi ‘soil’ since his maternal grandparents were exiled in 1946. From the Iraqi Mission the dishes went by train to Washington, DC, where, coincidentally, then Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was meeting with President Barack Obama. Al-Maliki flew the china back to Baghdad on his private plane. Iraqi officials reported that the plates would be returned to the royal palaces which would eventually open to the public. Journalist David d’Arcy (2012) reports that he received

Michael Rakowitz, Spoils, as packed for repatriation to Iraq, 2011, photo courtesy Creative Time

FIGURE 2.3 

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FIGURE 2.4  Michael Rakowitz entering Iraqi Mission to the United Nations, New York, 2011, photo courtesy Creative Time

no response from his 2012 inquiry to the Iraqi Embassy as to when the china would be accessible to visitors. Whilst originally Rakowitz had hoped to keep the plates for another art project, he understood the repatriation as a fitting culmination to Spoils (R. Kennedy 2011). He asserts that the repatriation was ‘a very powerful ending to the work. . . . I saw these events in

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the frame of the project itself, not as something that stopped it’ (quoted in Chayka 2011). Rakowitz was pleased that the repatriation generated a symbolic gesture of social justice. He reports that, as a result of the project, eBay is no longer listing looted items from Iraq for sale (Chayka 2011). He was also gratified that the drama of the repatriation evoked productive discourse beyond that sparked by the dinner itself. Creative Time Artistic Director Anne Pasternak responded that the organisation was delighted to get the cease-and-desist letter because it provided an opportunity to interrogate the boundaries between art and life (Chayka 2011). Though Spoils did not take place in a museum and was not commissioned by a museum, it has great relevance for museums and galleries. By placing participants and himself squarely in the centre of a debate about cultural property and ethical stewardship, Rakowitz implicitly critiques the polarised and arrested discourse about ownership of collections between directors of universal survey museums who commonly cite enlightenment values, cosmopolitanism and the safeguarding of cultural treasures to reject calls for repatriation, and nationalistic culture ministers who typically claim that repatriation is central to the postcolonial rebalancing of power and to efforts towards self-determination. Rakowitz uses performance to show participants their complicity in the politicised negotiations over what belongs to whom and why. And by highlighting the interconnections among people in these complex negotiations – in this case, Saddam Hussein, an Iraqi refugee living in Detroit, a US soldier stationed in Iraq, a JewishAmerican artist whose grandparents were exiled from Iraq, administrators at eBay, the prime minister of Iraq and the president of the US – Rakowitz underscores the relational aspect of cultural stewardship: that ethical stewardship of collections is defined through the relationships forged by objects rather than the objects themselves. Rakowitz also understands that the tug-of-war over cultural heritage is implicated in larger geopolitical issues and that the return of the china represents symbolic as well as tangible reparation for damage done in the war in Iraq. Rakowitz (quoted in Chayka 2011) declares: The timing is impeccable. The news reports today are all about the troops going home, the plates are coming back; there’s some weird exchange there. But also the Times just ran a headline about 20 minutes ago that said that the Iraq war was officially declared over. For Rakowitz, defining ethical stewardship through the notion of the relational is central to the reconciliation process.

Ethical stewardship as a relational notion Acknowledging the relational aspects of ethical stewardship – those aspects that bind people together through objects – is a key strand of twenty-first-century museum ethics. Today in the museum sector there is a focus on experience as the link binding people together through things. Post-structuralist theory, as applied to museums, undergirds this emphasis on experience. For example, reception theory asserts that making meaning from objects is an unstable process dependent upon the perspective of those engaging the object (Hooper-Greenhill 2000: 103). Heritage studies defines material culture as a social process, rather than a body of concrete things (L. Smith 2006: 2). Performance theory holds that museums are a kind of theatre in which culture is produced and enacted through institutional processes (KirshenblattGimblett 2003).

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Likewise, postcolonialism, feminism and digital heritage studies have all contributed to the concept of experience as generating fluid and contingent relationships among people through museum objects. For instance, postcolonial theory critiques the Western reliance on vision as a definitive way of knowing, introducing indigenous paradigms for multisensory and relational approaches to engaging cultural heritage (Edwards, Gosden and Phillips 2006). In addition, the postcolonial paradigm of indigenous museums as cultural centres demonstrates the potential of the experiential to empower communities to thrive (Stanley 2008). The notion of feminist curation as a bodily act underscores the affective possibilities of objects ( J. Fisher 2006). And recent thinking in digital heritage which challenges conventional boundaries between the virtual and the authentic (Parry 2007: 58–81) has created opportunities in museums to mine the relational qualities of networked experience. Privileging experience as a relational device, binding people together through objects, opens up new directions for ethical care and sharing of heritage with diverse stakeholders.This anticipates a corresponding transition from a stance of possession as stewardship to one of shared guardianship. In contemporary museum ethics discourse the concept of shared guardianship is a means towards respecting the relational qualities of heritage and towards sharing in new ways the rights and responsibilities to this heritage (Marstine 2011: 17–20). Shared guardianship is a defining aspect of ethical stewardship; its relational properties contribute to the processes of reconciliation between museums and communities. Guardianship is a notion that anthropologist Haidy Geismar (2008: 114–115) has adapted from Maori culture to critique as consumerist the notion of cultural ‘property’ and to promote instead a position of temporal caretaking, in partnership with originating communities, which respects the Maori concept of taonga or cultural treasures as living embodiments of ancestors. This idea of guardianship, Geismar argues, is a working model relevant not only to indigenous cultural treasures but to all cultural heritage; ‘indigenous discourses around cultural property may in fact provide a productive blueprint for ethical curatorial and collecting processes’, Geismar declares (2008: 110). Shared guardianship carries significant implications for understanding heritage as something animate, to be respected, and communal, to be shared. It signals a shift from the proprietary to the relational, specifically from a Western legal understanding of ownership based on economic value to an ethics-rooted approach that prioritises the relationships among people that objects generate (Marstine, Dodd and Jones 2015: 81–84). In acknowledging that heritage is a relationship, rather than a possession, shared guardianship leads to new thinking about collections management and access to this knowledge as a means of building trust between museums and communities. As former Collections Trust CEO Nick Poole explains, shared guardianship ‘represents a shift from museums conceived as gatekeepers of culture to enablers of culture’. And, as enablers of culture, Poole declares, ‘museums become part of a cultural commons with shared rights of access and shared responsibilities for stewardship’ (quoted in Marstine, Dodd and Jones 2015: 81). Shared guardianship as ethical stewardship prioritises cultural heritage as a human right, as set out by Article 27 of the United Nations (1948) Universal Declaration of Human Rights (D. Anderson 2012), and emphasises the strengthening relationships that the return of cultural ‘property’ inspires. Shared guardianship also implies that repatriation alone is not enough; it suggests, as Nick Stanley (2008: 8), specialist in Asmat art of New Guinea, argues, ‘a consideration of wider issues concerning ownership, rights and identity’. It involves agreements and partnerships with customary owners.

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Shared guardianship as ethical stewardship advances an ethics of sustainability, rather than accumulation. It encourages deliberate thoughtful acquisitions policies and deaccessioning or disposal practices ( Janes 2009: 84–93). It inspires consortiums, collaboratives, mergers and hubs to pool and distribute resources in ways that promote public access to collections, locally, regionally and globally; digitisation of collections, joint acquisitions, long-term loans, transfer of collections and creative commons licensing are symptomatic of this trend. The pooling of resources is particularly critical at times of economic instability (Narzarov 2009). Shared guardianship can be painful; loss of institutional identity may result when, historically, a museum has built its identity upon the collections it holds. But, importantly, shared guardianship serves to remind museums that they acquire title to collections on behalf of their publics. Stewardship as an ethical concept prioritises shared access over institutional sanctity. This chapter will examine the ways that artists introduce critical practice to advance ethical stewardship towards reconciliation between museums and communities. It will show how Robert Fontenot’s Recycle LACMA (2009–2010) and Ansuman Biswas’s Manchester Hermit (Manchester Museum 2009) probe contested issues in collections management, particularly the act of deaccession/disposal, to foster public discourse about what shared guardianship might look like in the twenty-first century. I use the term deaccession, commonly employed in the US, in the context of the US-based case study and the term disposal, which has currency in the UK, in discussing the British-based case study. Whilst in practice the terms are roughly interchangeable, clearly the former suggests a distancing strategy enmeshed in bureaucratic processes and the latter conveys the emotional baggage of rejection and destruction; these resonances reflect the longer histories of and approaches to collections management in the US and UK (Davies 2011) and play a role in the conception of the two projects. Like Rakowitz, whose work takes place in a restaurant but has profound implications for museums, Fontenot and Biswas position themselves literally and/or metaphorically outside the museum (though Biswas’s piece was commissioned by a museum). These outsider positionings indicate how closely held normative values in collections management are within the museum sector; to develop effective interventions on deaccession/disposal, Fontenot and Biswas had to carve out independent space – the former on the blogosphere and the latter both with a blog and in a Manchester Museum tower, sealed off from the world. Fontenot and Biswas leverage their outsider positionings (and their insider art world knowledge) to offer up provocations every bit as sensational as Rakowitz’s: to remake, redistribute and/or destroy works from museum collections. The act of provocation functions as a wakeup call to museums and their diverse publics about urgent issues in ethical stewardship in the institution and the world. The centrality of social networking to both projects, like the social forum of the restaurant to Rakowitz, points to these artists’ focus on the relational character of ethical stewardship. Like Rakowitz, Fontenot and Biswas throw open to the public sphere thorny issues of stewardship to convey individual, community and institutional rights and responsibilities in negotiating these issues. Together, Recycle LACMA and the Manchester Hermit demonstrate the urgency for museums to take up the issue of shared guardianship. As Nick Poole argues, if museums don’t open up their collections towards shared guardianship, they risk becoming irrelevant in an era which values participation and agency (Marstine, Dodd and Jones 2015: 84).

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Sustainability and deaccession: Robert Fontenot’s Recycle LACMA Two pairs of Guatemalan trousers In his 2009 book Museums in a Troubled World: Renewal, irrelevance or collapse?, museum consultant Robert R. Janes identifies the unchecked growth of collections as one of the most problematic issues that museums face today. He cites astonishing statistics: US museums house some 750 million objects with a 1–5 per cent growth rate per year. UK museums possess approximately 200 million items. Janes (2009: 88–89) declares: It’s as if the museum community is in an everlasting state of denial – continuing to collect with no heed to the consequences of elite self-interest, the inability to keep pace with the meaning of objects, disappearing expertise, and the enormous cost of keeping collections forever in accordance with rigorous professional standards. This is nothing short of nonsensical, and reflects the unrivalled status of collections as the museum’s most sacred cow. . . . It is self-evident that museums must either be given the right to treat objects as their own (meaning control over their disposal), or be given appropriate public support to maintain them. Janes makes clear that collections can no longer remain the museum’s ‘sacred cow’. Curatorially motivated deaccession may be a means towards sustainability but, in the current economic climate of deep budget cuts to cultural organisations, decision-makers are also increasingly advocating financial-motivated deaccession that breaches the relationship of trust between museums and communities; by resisting calls for transparency and for civic discourse on the ethical complexities involved in deaccession, including the issue of deaccessioning to fund general operating costs (Marstine 2012c: 7), museums risk alienating their publics. The silences and tightly orchestrated public relations statements concerning deaccession on which many museums rely create a gap in ethics discourse to which the media all too often respond through polarising terms of right and wrong that leave critical thinking adrift (Pogrebin 2011). Recycle LACMA, an intervention by Los Angeles-based artist Robert Fontenot, addresses this gap in ethics discourse on deaccession in a way that has broad implications for developing policies and practices of shared guardianship. Working from outside the museum, without a commission, Fontenot engaged in an institutional critique of deaccessioning at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Institutional critique can be a particularly powerful expression through which to consider deaccessioning because, by its very nature, it interrogates institutional histories, including collecting histories, and how the museum has framed them. Fontenot uses institutional critique to problematise deaccession and reimagine it as a shared decision-making process in which the publics for which objects are held in trust have a voice. As I will show, the power of Recycle LACMA lies in its philosophical ambiguity and museological depth – in Fontenot’s unwillingness to place blame and ability to convey the relational character of ethical stewardship as integral to advancing reconciliation between museums and communities. Trained at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the 1990s, Fontenot interned at the RISD Museum of Art cataloguing pottery and was taken aback by the seemingly fickle museological processes that determine value at any given moment (Fontenot 2010a). At RISD, he was also introduced to institutional critique through the legacy of Andy Warhol’s exhibition

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Raid the Icebox which was held at the RISD Museum in 1970; invited to curate an exhibition of overlooked treasures from the cold stores or ‘icebox’ of the museum, Warhol turned the artistic canon on its head by choosing to display whole collections of objects not traditionally considered worthy of display, from a group of Windsor chairs the museum kept only for the parts useful to repair other more rare examples to a collection of shoes within the cabinet that contained them (Figure 2.5) (Robbins 1969; Corrin 1996; Bright 2001; Martinez n.d.). Fontenot remembers learning about Raid the Icebox whilst a RISD student and searched out images of the project (Fontenot 2010c). In Los Angeles, where he settled after art school, Fontenot was inspired by the interventions of LA-based artists Michael Asher and Ed Ruscha and by a generation of younger artists whose work was shaped by them. In February 2009, at a trio of auctions held by Bonhams and Butterfields, Fontenot purchased two pairs of Guatemalan hand-woven cotton trousers; of unknown date, the trousers were striped with purple and embroidered with trees, peacocks and other birds (Plate 5). Fontenot also bought approximately 50 other textiles at the auctions. These pieces were deaccessioned from LACMA’s Department of Costume and Textiles which holds an encyclopedic collection of over 30,000 objects. The Laguna Art Museum, Palm Springs Art Museum and Museum of Art and Design in New York also deaccessioned artworks at these auctions (Fontenot 2010c). Textiles are among the most expensive of museum objects to store and conserve; thus, though they don’t typically bring high returns at auction, those in poor condition or deemed

FIGURE 2.5  Installation view of Raid the Icebox With Andy Warhol, 1970, courtesy of Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, photography by Erik Gould

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by curators to be of lesser quality are commonly among the first objects targeted for deaccession during budgetary reductions. The textiles are ‘works that were stored in a warehouse, of which we have better examples’, asserts Barbara Pflaumer, LACMA’s spokeswoman. ‘It’s part of an ongoing project to reevaluate our collection. As we go forward, we are looking at it with . . . a more gimlet eye’ (quoted in Boehm 2009). LACMA’s director Michael Govan assured readers of the Los Angeles Times that this was a curatorially motivated deaccession and that proceeds from the auctions would go towards buying other artworks. Govan called the deaccession part of a ‘sift and sort’ process by which the museum develops its collections. ‘It has nothing to do with the economic times’, he argued (quoted in Boehm 2009). LACMA transferred to other cultural institutions, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, the Autry National Center of the American West and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, those textiles pegged for deaccession that were most covetable (Fontenot 2010c). Fontenot is well versed in deaccession ethics and singles out for praise the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s (2014) database of deaccessioned items and the University College London 2009 exhibit (Das, Dunn and Passmore 2011), in which visitors were asked to vote on whether or not objects displayed from the stores should remain in the collection (Fontenot 2010b). It is clear to Fontenot that LACMA followed relevant ethics codes in the deaccession (American Association of Museums 2000; Association of Art Museum Directors 2007) and that sustainability of collections is a genuine concern. He notes of his project, ‘It’s definitely not meant to fault LACMA.They were right in getting rid of a lot of these items – there was damage to some of them, others probably weren’t things they were ever going to show’ (quoted in Steinhauer 2009). Fontenot (2009d) also acknowledges the ethical and legal complexities of deaccession for museums. ‘The decision to deaccession an item is never an easy one nor is the process usually simple,’ he writes. Nonetheless, Fontenot (quoted in Steinhauer 2009) found the defensive posture, lack of transparency and absence of artist and community consultation in LACMA’s deaccessioning process to be extremely disquieting. Fontenot saw in the museum’s handling of the deaccession not only a betrayal of public trust but also of the artist’s trust: I do have some strong issues against deaccessioning. I like to think that if my work ever ends up in a museum, it’s going to stay there. . . . There’s a lot of talk about public trust but very little talk about the artist’s view or what they think. Fontenot was also shocked by the small amount of money that the auctions raised and his own ability to purchase garments in bulk. He paid only $250, for example, for the largest lot (quoted in Anderson, Fontenot and Gonzalez 2009). Fontenot (2009d) reports: Deaccessioning is often about money, but it is not always about large sums of money. While LACMA has earned over $7,000 trimming its costume collection, over 100 items have been sold. Many lots went for less than their low estimate, with some only selling after the opening bid was lowered considerably. Fontenot went to the first of the three auctions with the intention of purchasing only one lot. He imagined a project critiquing the economic and cultural power of influential museum directors by refashioning and thus repositioning a deaccessioned LACMA textile as a banner with the Govan family coat of arms – In 2009 LACMA Director Govan earned about

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$1 million US in salary (Zarembo and Boehm 2009); but when Fontenot saw how inexpensive and compelling the textiles were, the simultaneous revulsion and attraction compelled him to buy up a bigger group of items and to conceive the more ambitious and multi-layered Recycle LACMA project (Fontenot 2010b). Fontenot retained his original notion to refashion – and thus recycle – through diverse sewing and crafting techniques the discarded LACMA textiles into new and ‘useful’ objects.Through this refashioning, Fontenot expresses his perspective that the materiality of objects is a powerful means to facilitate ethics discourse. Museum costume and textile departments and institutes such as at LACMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art are often conflicted spaces. The commercial prerogatives of the fashion industry frequently seduce such departments and institutes to make decisions that manifest conflicts of interest, as for example in allowing fashion houses to sponsor blockbuster exhibitions of their work (Pollack 2012).The Costume Institute at the Met gets no funding from the museum – it is largely industry supported (Koda 2009). But costume/textile departments and institutes also care for objects not in the public eye that are in fragile condition, made even more vulnerable by their gendered and, in many cases, ethnographic identities, as most are made by women and/or ethnic minorities. In the clash between the fashion industry and the humble object, the former often wins out. But, to Fontenot, collections are like people that need to be cherished and nurtured by the museum. He imagines the ethical museum as a kind of ‘assisted living facility where these items will be cared for pretty much until they fall apart’ (quoted in Anderson, Fontenot and Gonzalez 2009). In this way he is reflecting upon collecting as a kind of ‘twin’ or mirror of deaccessioning. Most of the deaccessioned textiles that Fontenot purchased, such as the trousers, came into LACMA’s possession not because they were wanted in and of themselves but because they were part of a group that included coveted objects given or bequeathed by a donor (Fontenot 2010c). Courting donors by making promises that the institution cannot or will not honour is endemic to the secretive and too often ethically compromised practices of museum collecting. Robert Janes (2009: 86–87) explains: Rarely discussed, the opaque world of museum collecting is a Pandora’s Box whose dimensions remain boundless, even now. The meaning is clear, as is the vulnerability – museum collections are not immune from the contamination of self-interest, whether dressed up as civic duty or curatorial authority. In Recycle LACMA Fontenot asks implicitly: what are the ethics of acquisitions policies that allow museums to accept objects they do not or will not value? He enquires explicitly: how can an artist’s intervention provoke museums to develop transparency and shared authority with communities in deaccession policies and practices? Fontenot (2009c) sees objects designated for deaccession as unappreciated and defiled by the museum: Museum deaccessioning through auction or private sale is typically framed as a museum’s collection items being placed into a more suitable home, where they will be put to better use than simply sitting in museum storage. However, nothing can change the fact that the museum has decided that the deaccessioned items are useless to them, and that they no longer take an interest in preserving them for the future. Items slated for deaccessioning are, as far as the museum is concerned, trash.

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Fontenot seeks to develop alternatives to this state of exile by stepping in to care for the textiles himself as he recycles them into objects that become part of his everyday life. In Fontenot’s hand the Guatemalan trousers, for instance, become a pair of teddy bears (Figure 2.6).With meticulous and loving attention to detail, he used a raft of traditional sewing and craft techniques to deconstruct the trousers, and all of the LACMA textiles he acquired, and assign them new identities. Fontenot (2010c) professed of the trousers, ‘I wanted to honor them in their own way.’ Fontenot spent approximately three or four days making each object, methodically removing the thread from hemlines, cutting the fabric and sewing it back together with great care and ingenuity (C. Jackson 2009). With the bears Fontenot (2009b) adapted commercially available sewing patterns, matching the stripes and embroidery of the fabric wherever possible, and stuffed the teddies with fibrefill. Other works in the project have demanded advanced techniques such as working with screens and making rope. To speak to the trauma these fabrics have endured and to assert the museum’s ethical responsibility to the objects, Fontenot embroidered, like a tattoo, the LACMA accession number of each textile onto the recycled item. On the bears, he embroidered the accession numbers over their left chest area where one might imagine a heart to be. Fontenot explains, ‘I want the objects to be sort of tattooed with these numbers, so they will always be with them – sort of their prison numbers, as it were. I want them to always be branded as things that were part of a museum collection’ (quoted in Steinhauer 2009). Together, the stripes and the accession number tattoos make the bears look almost like concentration camp prisoners. Fontenot also reanimates the garments that he recycles by suggesting in them human emotion through staged photographs which become works of art in their own right (as in Figure 2.6). Fontenot (2010c) posed the bears as father and son; they lean in together, one bigger

FIGURE 2.6 

Fontenot

Robert Fontenot, ‘Teddy Bears’, from Recycle LACMA, 2009–2010, courtesy of R ­ obert

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and one smaller. Though without eyes, the pair seems to look up at the viewer because Fontenot tilted their noses and ears downward for the photo as if to convey their vulnerability and the vulnerability of all deaccessioned objects. Fontenot (2009b) worries about the fate of deaccessioned objects in a way that paradoxically both mourns the loss of conventional museum ‘ownership’ as it acknowledges the need to develop new modes of stewardship: ‘Once carefully collected, catalogued, and cared for, these items have now been cast back out in to the world. What will happen to them? Like any other useless item, they will need to be recycled or disposed of.’ And, in a remark critical of stewardship as financially determined, Fontenot (2010b) muses, ‘The person willing to spend the most money is not de facto the best caretaker for a painting – at auction, those paintings could have ended up as part of a hedge fund, or, well, with someone like me.’ Thus, heeding the call of the Bonhams and Butterfields auctioneer who tempted him and other potential bidders with the phrase,‘You can make cushions, you can make pillows’ (Anderson, Fontenot and Gonzalez 2009), Fontenot recycled the textiles as a gesture towards shared guardianship.Together, the teddy bears and the other refashioned objects convey a notion of heritage as something animate – to be respected – and communal – to be shared. Recycle LACMA signals a shift from the proprietary to the relational.

Recycling as ethical stewardship Over a period of approximately 18 months Fontenot recycled some 43 textiles into utilitarian objects. These include a 1967 floor-length James Galanos designer coat which became a car seat cover and an Indian silk embroidered textile from Rajasthan which he transformed into an awning over his toilet. In a declaration of his personal attachment to the garments, Fontenot (2009b) tried to find a use for every scrap of the LACMA fabrics; the few pieces he did not use were ones for which he could not identify an accession number so was unable to add the tattoo-like embroidery of the number on the textile that, for Fontenot, tied the fabrics’ past to their future. Often, one textile yielded several projects, as, for example, fabric from a brocade evening dress which he recycled into an umbrella and a ‘fanny pack’. When asked why he felt the compulsion to use all of the material, Fontenot (2010b) responds, ‘partially because it gives the project a natural end date, even if it’s one that I may never realize, but also . . . what else can I do with the scraps? I can’t just throw them away’. In this stance, Fontenot positions himself in opposition to LACMA. Ironically, Fontenot’s technique garnered accolades from the institution he was critiquing. Whilst curators from LACMA’s Department of Costume and Textiles remained publicly silent, Rita Gonzalez (2009), LACMA’s Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, expressed fascination with the project, even making a studio visit and blogging about it. Gonzalez (2010) found Fontenot’s craft so astounding and his facility so compelling that when she saw the transformed objects in his home, their preciousness paradoxically sparked in her the desire to protect them in Plexiglas cases – as if to repossess and take the life from them.Thus, in a complex and multilayered process common to critical practice, artists reframe collections which the museum, in response, reframes again. As central to the project as the textiles themselves is a blog that Fontenot (2009b) developed to document and share Recycle LACMA.Whilst the blog provides a public forum for debate about the ethics of deaccession and received national press attention from the Wall Street Journal and National Public Radio (C. Jackson 2009; Anderson, Fontenot and Gonzalez 2009), most of Fontenot’s posts

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elicited just a handful of comments.The majority of posters self-identify as museum practitioners, vintage enthusiasts and art world insiders and either praise or critique the project. The blog did not, however, generate sustained discussion. This lack of interactivity reflects Fontenot’s outsider status as he worked without the resources of a museum marketing and web team. It also points to Fontenot’s conception of the blog chiefly as an online diary and catalogue of his artistic and intellectual engagement with the ethics of deaccession and shared guardianship of collections. In the blog Fontenot appropriates the quasi-objective language and format of condition reports, collections catalogues, deaccessioning documentation and, he notes (2009a), LACMA wall texts. For Fontenot (2009a), the blog not only makes the project accessible, it enables viewers to see the transformation process (Figure 2.7), as opposed to a conventional exhibition in which only the final product is displayed. Each entry includes before and after photographs, as much information as available to him on the deaccessioned garment, LACMA accession number and the location of the embroidered accession number on the recycled object. Fontenot offers hyperlinks between objects crafted from the same original textile. He logs his deconstruction and reconstruction process in excessive detail. In an unidentified woven textile which he used to recover the metal coils of a snake in a can surprise gag, for example, Fontenot (2009b) writes clinically: Two snakes were removed from a can of peanut brittle. The damaged fabric was removed from the spring ‘snakes’. The red stripes were cut from the woven textile, and the resulting strips of green and silver stripes were sewn together to create two panels of fabric, each approximately 9" by 60". These were then machine-sewn into tubes, and one end of each was machine-sewn shut. On that end, now the ‘head’ of the snake, two circles cut from a red stripe were appliquéd to form the snake’s eyes.A tongue was also formed from the red stripe and attached to the head of the snake. The springs were slipped into the fabric tubes and the ends were hand-sewn shut. Finally, both snakes were placed in a can of peanut brittle. This deadpan appropriation of conventional museum jargon is a strategy typical of institutional critique, much like Sholette’s characterisation of the ‘mockstitution’ (Sholette 2011: 152–185), as it invites the audience to consider how the artist’s narrative differs from that of the museum and to find humour and critical significance in the dissonance. Los Angeles conceptual artist Michael Asher used this strategy of appropriating museum jargon in his critique of deaccession, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1999), part of MoMA’s 1999 group exhibition ‘The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect’ (McShine 1999: 156). For MoMA Asher produced a small book, subtitled Painting and Sculpture from The Museum of Modern Art: Catalog of Deaccessions 1929 through 1998, which lists 403 works deaccessioned from MoMA’s collections by sale or transfer and which was distributed free of charge to exhibition audiences; in his language and arrangement of the list, Asher mimicked a 1977 MoMA permanent collection catalogue (Rondeau 2008). As Asher recounted, MoMA staff were extremely resistant to his archival research for the project and tried to dissuade him from exhibiting his piece in the fear that it might damage the museum’s reputation (Asher 2012). Asher credits prominent reviews of the piece in the New York Times (R. Smith 1999) and elsewhere for championing transparency concerning deaccession (Asher 2012). Fontenot (2010c) learned

FIGURE 2.7  Robert Fontenot, Recycle LACMA blog, featuring John Galanos coat and a car seat cover Fontenot crafted from it, courtesy of Robert Fontenot

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of Asher’s intervention in the early stages of developing Recycle LACMA and he saw it as an important model. In determining what kind of objects to make with the deaccessioned fabrics Fontenot (2010a) allowed formal properties to dictate the new identity of the garments in most cases. For instance, he chose to turn a Korean men’s jacket into a Christmas tree ornament to focus on its printed decoration. The thick, stiff fabric of a Moroccan silk brocade led to a rigid machete sheath. Usually, he ignored the original cultural context of the textiles. Fontenot (2010a) reflects, ‘At this point, having been filtered through collectors, the museum, and the auction house, they have been so far removed from their point of and purpose for creation as to have lost a lot of their meaning’. Fontenot also considered how the recycled objects would look, as modelled by him or his friends, on the blog.When he first conceived of the project, Fontenot had imagined each transformed object as it might look in a gallery or museum, thus prioritising its display aesthetics, but after a few months came to see that re-situating the textiles back in a museum setting risked rendering them inanimate again. He therefore identified the blog and its associated documentation as the primary medium that would define Recycle LACMA and so shifted to craft objects that photography could effectively capture. Fontenot (2010c) notes: So far the objects have been modeled by either myself, my dog Porkchop, or a few friends who are also fellow artists and arts professionals. Each model was picked specifically for the piece that they are wearing and indeed the pieces were often made with that model in mind. In some cases, however, Fontenot eschews models in favour of animating the recycled object within his domestic surroundings. This can be seen in his ‘after’ photo of a Korean skirt reconstructed as entwined barbeque aprons in opposing colour patterns (Figure 2.8). As they hang from a patio fence, behind a Weber grill, the aprons both signify and parody the trope of a suburban heterosexual happy couple, holding hands. Fontenot’s clever stagings and ironic sensibility function as a kind of camp performance. As defined by Susan Sontag (2001), camp is an aesthetic choice of irony and excess that draws its inspiration from the margins, including the queer. Through its playful exaggeration, camp challenges the hypocrisy of dominant culture. Thus, it is not surprising that Fontenot would appropriate camp as a powerful and telling mode to critique museum culture. But with characteristic self-referential complexity, Fontenot also uses camp to mock his own position. ‘Before’ and ‘after’ photographs on the blog documenting Fontenot’s refashioning – and re-gendering – of a boldly patterned black and white silk twill designer dress into a bandoleer, or ammunition belt, clearly convey this resonant use of camp. Fontenot himself poses wearing the bandoleer in the ‘after’ photo (Figure 2.9), playing the role of revolutionary with a rifle slung over his left shoulder; this reading is interrupted, however, by the chic fabric of the bandoleer and Fontenot’s markedly middle-class khaki jeans and blue Oxford shirt. A mock-heroic performance of hyper-masculinity as an evocation of the queer, Fontenot’s self-portrait both parodies and underscores the revolutionary aims of institutional critique. Fontenot’s works operate both as camp and as useful objects though most, like the bandoleer, snake in a can, awning and teddy bears, are functional in theory more than in practice. ‘I meant them as examples of things that could be done, so they’re not necessarily the most practical applications for my own use’, he says in his distinctive mode of understatement (quoted in

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Robert Fontenot, ‘BBQ Aprons’, from Recycle LACMA, 2009–2010, photo courtesy of Robert Fontenot

FIGURE 2.8 

Steinhauer 2009). Fontenot’s juxtaposition of humour and functionality strategically challenges the notion that deaccessioned objects have no more use to society. In fact, Fontenot does use the objects he makes, as a blog photo of a rubbish bin attests, which Fontenot produced from a LACMA Turkish embroidery (Plate 6). Fontenot carefully choreographs the photograph to demonstrate its use; the wastepaper basket is full of crinkled-up paper, a single piece scrunched up beside it on the floor, as if carelessly tossed by someone hard at work. Fontenot (2010a) reports of his creations, ‘They are scattered about my house. Some, like the wastepaper basket, are used every day. . . . The awning is still up in the bathroom.’ These recycled objects make bitingly sharp commentaries on the ethics of collections management.The rubbish bin, for example, smacks of the irony of institutional critique in its reference back to and denial of deaccessioned objects as trash. Fontenot’s (2010c) choice to remake the embroidery into a rubbish bin allowed him to cherish and highlight what he saw as the beauty of the textile because the project did not require cutting of the fabric and because it resulted in an object that he could use daily. With a torch fashioned from a pine branch in Fontenot’s garden and a fragment of the lining in a white fur-trimmed John Anthony coat (Figure 2.10), Fontenot advances his stinging critique of deaccession practices to its ultimate conclusion. Produced by wrapping the branch

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FIGURE 2.9  Robert Fontenot, ‘Bandoleer’, from Recycle LACMA, 2009–2010, photo courtesy of Robert Fontenot

in the fabric and soaking it in accelerant, the torch alludes to the 2004 video Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire by fellow LA artist Joe Sola; Sola’s video restages Ed Ruscha’s famous painting of the same name (see Figure 1.7) by simulating a fire at LACMA complete with smoke effects (Fontenot 2010c). Fontenot’s torch, with the accession number of the designer coat incised clearly in the pine handle, performs an iconoclastic act. As it literally burns the coat, it metaphorically simulates, like its predecessors, LACMA on fire. Fontenot thus conveys the potential of critical practice to deconstruct and remake the museum.

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Robert Fontenot, ‘Torch’, from Recycle LACMA, 2009–2010, photo courtesy of Robert Fontenot

FIGURE 2.10 

Despite lacing the project with nostalgia for romanticised notions of museum care for all objects in perpetuity, Fontenot acknowledges the complex realities that compromise the life of some museum collections. The operative principle of recycling is his response. And as he recycles cloth, he also suggests a recycling – or transformation – of museums through embedding

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principles of shared guardianship. In this context the resonance of Fontenot’s title, Recycle LACMA, becomes clear. In the blog he offers a range of solutions to model the kind of creative thinking he imagines might help museums to respond to the challenges of sustainability and ethical stewardship. Sometimes Fontenot (2009c) poses theoretical arguments that question art museums’ most deeply held values such as canonicity. In one such post, for instance, he asks whether the deaccession and subsequent recycling of LACMA textiles might be a useful precedent for sustainability through deaccession of canonical works: Marie Antoinette was known to slice up works by Boucher and Fragonard in order to decoupage fragments of the paintings onto furniture. More recently, we could look to the example of Martin Kippenberger turning a Gerhard Richter painting into a table. While some may see these as terrible acts of destruction, they are actually landmark acts of art recycling. We are all being encouraged to recycle as much as possible today, and perhaps museums can look to this model too. What if an inferior Cranach could be turned into a superior someone else? Fontenot (2009b) advocates on the blog readily adaptable recycling solutions as well, such as loan and art rental programs, reserving special praise for NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which loans objects from its collections as inspiration to artists from whom it has commissioned projects and donates items to artists for use as raw materials. Fontenot (2009b) dismisses LACMA’s Art Rental Gallery because it facilitates loans only from local artists and not from its permanent collection. The real strength of Fontenot’s project, however, is the compelling nature of the recycled textiles. The teddy bears and all of Fontenot’s reconstructed objects have resonance because they plead for a second life at the same time that they also speak to the overwhelming problems of unrestrained collecting habits, weak acquisition policies and the need for new strategies in ethical collections management. Fontenot’s approach is not didactic or reductive but instead engages head-on with the realities of museum deaccession today to foster a rebuilding of trust between museums and their publics. ‘I don’t want to condemn or celebrate, I really just want to start a dialogue’, he states (quoted in Steinhauer 2009). Not everyone agrees, particularly costume historians and the vintage clothing community. A 1954 dress by Claire McCardell, a designer who helped create mass-produced high fashion, drew particular ire; Fontenot used it to make three witches’ hats (Figure 2.11) and a bindle. By transforming the dress into items associated with behaviour largely considered transgressive, Fontenot (2010c) admittedly is trying to provoke audiences. One vintage fan (fuzzylizzie 2009) commented on the blog: Are you serious? Since when did a Claire McCardell dress become an ‘unwanted item’? Even if the dress is damaged, it has value as an example of the work of one of the great American sportswear designers. I’m all for recycling, but this is irresponsible. But other readers of the blog recognised the ambivalence inscribed in the project. For example, one post (Pseudoangela 2009) reads,‘Really interesting end product but I admit that a part of me dies when I see wearable garments deconstructed . . .?’

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FIGURE 2.11  Robert Fontenot, ‘Witch Hat’, from Recycle LACMA, 2009–2010, photo courtesy of Robert Fontenot

LACMA’s response: The quandary of the artist as outsider Recycle LACMA has brought discomfort to the Department of Costumes and Textiles at LACMA. According to LACMA colleague Rita Gonzalez, curators in the Department of Costumes and Textiles view LACMA as an institution that goes above and beyond due diligence before making the decision to deaccession. Moreover, Gonzalez (2010) explains, the Department does not want to be the ‘poster child’ for deaccession; trained to present and protect, staff members of the Department of Costume and Textiles see Fontenot’s project as judgmental and are deeply concerned about the implications. Gonzalez (2009) reports: As I sat and discussed the project with our Costume and Textiles curator Kaye Spilker, she wondered aloud if it is the status of her department’s holdings – so undervalued from the standpoint of art history – that made them more available to Fontenot. Would Fontenot have turned a Van Gogh drawing into a witch hat? But, for Fontenot, the appropriation of the undervalued is part of the message. He chose to work with the deaccessioned textiles because their unstable economic status speaks to larger issues about the ways that museum collections are valued and shared. As LACMA’s curator of contemporary art, Gonzalez (2010) appreciates the nuanced quality of Fontenot’s critique and calls it ‘deeply transformative’. Gonzalez (2009) argues on the LACMA blog: Rather than a condemnation of deaccessioning practices, Recycle LACMA is a joyful but biting call to all collecting museums to think more radically about re-circulating these

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objects back into a creative economy. . . . As I continue to sit and grapple with this provocative project, I wonder in the end if what . . . Fontenot allow[s] us to think through is how the curator and artist are the collectors and hoarders who are oftentimes forced to create through purging and construct through deconstruction. It is this act of hoarding, the embrace of collecting as a means unto itself, that Janes (2009: 86–89) argues leads to museum entropy and inertia. Gonzalez’s vision of a new more creative and constructive deaccession process, as shaped by Fontenot, is the kind of out-of-the-box thinking, responding to the contemporary needs of society, for which Janes calls and which marks a pathway towards ethical stewardship. As Gonzalez (2010) explains, the Department of Contemporary Art at LACMA, with the encouragement of Director Michael Govan, has assumed the role of institutional facilitator, sparking dialogue among staff on issues concerning relations between the museum and its publics that were previously considered taboo. Gonzalez (2010) states that institutional dialogue about Recycle LACMA has had a tenor of gravity as it provokes staff to consider ‘a different model for talking about museum questions in a public and transparent way’. Fontenot (2010c) believes, however, that, despite the topicality of his project, the conversations emerging from Recycle LACMA will probably always remain on the periphery of the museum sector because of his outsider status. Whilst the lack of a commission allowed him the intellectual freedom to look critically at collections management practices from his admittedly outsider perspective, it also limited his influence among museum staff and visitors as it denied him access to privileged information that might have been useful to his project. Though Fontenot (2010c) acknowledges the irony that working from the inside can seduce the artist and potentially soften critique, he holds that substantive change towards shared guardianship can most effectively occur with willing institutional partners.

Deep ecology and the threat of destruction: Ansuman Biswas’s Manchester Hermit A hermit at the Manchester Museum The Manchester Museum at the University of Manchester was an institutional partner eager to examine difficult issues of ethical stewardship of collections. In 2009 the museum teamed up with performance artist Ansuman Biswas to develop a project on the links between the natural history collections and the future of the planet. Manchester Museum Director Nick Merriman (2012) had long been interested in environmental sustainability and wondered what kind of contribution the museum could make alongside university academic research on climate change; Merriman was also in 2009 leading a rethinking of the museum’s mission in terms of sustainability including sustainability of collections. Merriman had explored sustainability of collections during his 2004–2005 fellowship with the Clore Leadership Programme, which nurtures promising emerging leaders in the UK cultural sector. Because Merriman’s ideas in his final report for the fellowship inform the Manchester Hermit project, it is illuminating to trace their development, particularly concerning disposal and relational collecting.

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In the report Merriman (2006) suggests that thoughtfully carried out disposal should be a part of sustainable collections management: Museums are continuing to collect far more material than they dispose of, which means that their collections continue to grow inexorably. Even in the unlikely event that such indefinite expansion were matched by a growth in the resources necessary to support them, this makes museums seem inherently unsustainable institutions. . . . Disposal must become an important element within a sustainable approach to museum collections. Merriman justifies his progressive stance on disposal by stressing that collections are not static, definitive representations of curatorial disciplines but subjective, dynamic snapshots of particular individuals and moments in time. Merriman (2006) holds: If we begin to see museum collections as historically contingent and partial . . . then this frees us up to take our own responsibility for active stewardship of collections rather than feeling under the burden of slavish acceptance of our predecessors’ decisions which have to be preserved intact for an indefinable posterity. Beyond the rationalisation of collections and judicious use of disposal, however, Merriman also recommends the reframing of collecting as a relational activity – built on relationships, rather than ownership, and on the concept of shared guardianship between museums and communities to develop collections. He argues that a relational approach to collecting has the potential to foster reconciliations between museums and their publics. Merriman (2006) asserts: A socially sustainable museum in the future may be one whose success is gauged through the development of relationships rather than through the ownership of material. As we have seen, for their entire history, museums have been the bank vaults securing territory and identity through possession of evidence. In the postmodern climate of recognition of uneven power relationships, there is a need for a truth and reconciliation phase in museums in relation to their past, and a need for museums now to be judged less on what they have than on what they do. One way in which this can be expressed is through the generation of relationships between stakeholders in the collections. It is in this sense of the museum’s dynamic interactivity with its diverse audiences that the model of a healthy ecology is best expressed. When he arrived in 2006 as director of the Manchester Museum, just after completing the fellowship report, Merriman (2012) found that negotiating the complex issues of collections management called for truth and reconciliation. Merriman (2012) believed that working with artists was a powerful route towards these ends. Merriman found financial and conceptual support for commissioning an artist to engage innovative thinking on sustainability through the now defunct Northwest Regional Development Agency (NWDA). The NWDA funded a small number of cultural attractions in Manchester to create branding for the city based on the notion ‘original modern’. The NWDA’s ‘original modern’ idea became fodder for Merriman’s interest in advancing ethical stewardship of the museum’s natural history collections; the NWDA, Merriman explains (2012), ‘allowed for a more radical take on museum practice’.

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To facilitate new thinking on sustainability in natural history collections at the Manchester Museum, Merriman (2012) devised a plan to commission an artist to play the role of a hermit-in-residence. Merriman understood that the process of embodying a hermit could open up time and space for an artist to reflect on difficult issues. Merriman identified a little-used tower at the top of the Gothic revival 1890 Alfred Waterhouse Manchester Museum building that would be an appropriate site for seclusion and contemplation (Figure 2.12). Sitting directly above the natural history collections, the tower could be a means for an artist to channel the future of the planet. As Merriman (2012) described it, one could stand at the top of the tower and see beyond the hills to the horizon – beyond the everyday to a better future; Merriman loved the irony of claiming the trope of ‘the ivory tower’ for real-world objectives. The Manchester Museum put out a call for an artist as hermit and 60 people submitted applications. To facilitate creativity, the initial brief was simple and without many parameters: the museum was looking for a performance artist to live in the tower 24 hours a day for some weeks (Merriman 2012); this performance artist was to contemplate the paradoxes of ‘why museums collect and preserve objects, whilst allowing species and cultures to become forgotten and extinct’ (University of Manchester 2009). The review panel chose Ansuman Biswas because he had experience as a durational performance artist; in CAT (South London Gallery, 1997), for instance, he closed himself up in a dark soundproof box for 10 days to ponder quantum mechanics (Arts Catalyst 1997). The panel also was drawn to Biswas because Biswas (2009f) outlined a compelling plan of performing the hermit for 40 days and 40 nights, evoking spiritual associations through numerology with many faiths from Judaism to the Persian ascetic tradition of chilla-nashini.

FIGURE 2.12 

Alfred Waterhouse, Manchester Museum (tower at top centre), University of Manchester, 1890, photo courtesy of the Manchester Museum, University of Manchester

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Biswas, like Merriman, had long been engaged in sustainability issues – though through the lens of the environment, rather than the museum – and the collaboration between artist and museum director proved fruitful.Through the Manchester Hermit project, Biswas tapped into his own growing museological conscience to interrogate literally and metaphorically Merriman’s ideas about the sustainability of collections and the development of a new relational approach to collections. Durational performance art, as Biswas explains, has the capacity to dissolve the boundaries we habitually observe between work and leisure, life and art, and professional practice and individual moralities. According to Biswas (2012), the durational enables the de-cluttering of the mind to concentrate one’s efforts towards introspection and grasping the unity of all things. As a practicing Buddhist, Biswas drew on the Theravada Buddhist technique of vipassana meditation to attain a hermetic contemplative state. Biswas (2009a) sees vipassana, in its potential to catalogue the self, as a fitting metaphor for museums seeking to embed self-reflective practice: My own hermetic training in the vipassana is essentially an exhaustive cataloguing of every aspect of experience, up to and including the cessation of everything.The vipassana yogi, like the Victorian collector, is engaged in taxonomy – a taxonomy of things which are disappearing. Someone practicing vipassana trains his or her awareness on every minute detail of experience, and observes it while it burns away. Originally, Biswas had planned to fast for the 40 days and 40 nights that he was in the tower. He viewed fasting as a means to show his deep engagement with museum sustainability whilst also heightening his own senses. ‘Fasting would have demonstrated my high level of commitment and would have enhanced, through physiological and mental changes, my level of concentration’, Biswas states (2012). He also saw the using up of energy stores in his body as a physical manifestation of sustainability and disposal issues at the Manchester Museum. Biswas (2009f) writes, ‘I wanted to use up what was stored in my body in the same way as what was stored in the museum’. Fasting would have been a powerful gesture of purification for the artist and, symbolically, the museum. Manchester University officials, however, worried that fasting might lead to media sensationalism as well as health and safety concerns, so they did not allow the artist to deny himself food (Merriman 2012). Still, through a timetable dominated by yoga, meditation, vocal work, physical exercise and writing (Biswas 2009h), Biswas was able to meet his artistic, spiritual and political goals. Biswas’s primary interest in the Manchester Hermit project was to foster an engagement with ‘deep ecology’. A term introduced by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess in 1973, deep ecology is a holistic view of the environment that accords equal respect to all living organisms, regardless of their instrumental value to human beings (Naess and Rothenberg 1990). Proponents of deep ecology hold that humanity is dependent on harmonious relationships among the greater diversity of life forms. They also assert that the more we experience interconnections with non-human organisms, the more we strive to create balance within ecosystems (Bender 2003). Biswas (2012) defines deep ecology as a Buddhist approach to environmental activism that has relevance for museums: Deep ecology is an emotional connection with sustainability issues, a connection strong enough that it inspires action. With deep ecology we are conscious of our

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effect on others and recognize that our behavior must change. Within the context of the Manchester Hermit project, deep ecology asks how we might engage emotionally with the facts that museums present to respond to the ecological crisis facing humanity. Biswas sees similarities between shared guardianship of collections, which focuses on relationships built through objects, and deep ecology, which promotes the ethical stewardship of the environment by prioritising the relations among all living organisms. In the Manchester Hermit project, Biswas interrogates the confluences between these two premises. Biswas (2012) feels an urgency to act concerning environmental issues and believes that museums are generally too passive in their response: The clock is ticking; ice sheets are collapsing, storms are coming, creatures are disappearing. The world is in crisis and we need to be shaken awake. Unfortunately, museums are too often self-referential and few look out past the narrow keyhole. Biswas recognises, however, that museums can play a critical role in fostering public engagement towards sustainability and found Merriman a supportive ally towards these ends. The hermit is their primary mechanism. Through hermetic self-isolation, Biswas symbolically enacts loss and death in a way that resonates closely with issues of climate change and extinction. Biswas (2009a) declares: The hermit’s work is to become humble, to erode arrogance to the point that the self itself becomes extinct. This is done by determinedly relinquishing control and clearly cataloguing every aspect of the embodied self. The hermit sees right through himself by fully appreciating the immense variety of phenomena, without either coveting or rejecting any of those phenomena. The hermit examines himself as a specimen. He treats the body as a museum. The sort of museum that should be in museums. As he literally loses himself in the Manchester Museum, Biswas gains understanding of the links between environmental and museum sustainability (Biswas 2012).Through the Manchester Hermit, he asks, ‘how come as a society the same culture that is storing things up, collecting things and conserving them, is also destroying them?’ (Channel 4 2009). Biswas spent several months in early 2009 becoming acquainted with the staff and collections of the Manchester Museum to plan the project (Plate 7). Towards these ends Biswas (2012) led staff workshops; activities included gentle meditation, the burning house exercise (what one object would you save if the museum were burning?) and the sinking ship game (what one object would you toss overboard if the museum were a sinking ship?). Biswas (2012) decided to focus on 40 objects of the more than four million in the Manchester Museum collections – one for each of the 40 days he would sequester himself in the museum tower. The chosen objects ranged from a honeybee to a collection of diatoms to a cupboard of uncatalogued artifacts labelled ‘Africa unlocated’; he engaged exclusively with objects in storage because he thought offering a glimpse of these inventories would conjure up the idea of an iceberg – which exists primarily underneath the surface – and which evocatively captured the state of the Manchester Museum collections.

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Biswas (2009a) imagined that the hermit in the museum tower could function like the human brain towards the spinal column, thus directing the museum’s actions towards ethical stewardship: Perched in a tower as a brain is perched on a spine, the hermit might symbolise conscious agency. The hermit dramatises the dialectic between deliberate, mindful knowledge and the hidden, or forgotten unconscious. I will use his presence to focus questions of stewardship, storage, and conservation, of profligacy, amnesia, and extinction. As he began to contemplate what ethical stewardship of collections might mean, Biswas (2012) was drawn to the notion that some long-forgotten objects might resonate more effectively when redistributed to acknowledge local contexts, landscapes and expertise. He devised a plan to test just what connections Manchester Museum publics felt towards the 40 objects he had chosen and to solicit appeals for shared guardianship. This plan was a deliberate provocation based on a threat: the threat of destruction. As Biswas (2012) recounts, his concept of threatened destruction emerged after a frustrated curator expressed despair over the mind-numbing weight of responsibility for millions of specimens, some which had not been looked at in a hundred years; as the exasperated and only partly joking curator remarked, he could spend all his working hours trying to catalogue one small corner of the stores and wished he could just get rid of everything. For Biswas, the incident provided a potent metaphor to explore the related endeavours of deep ecology and sustainability of collections; by threatening to destroy each of the 40 objects, one each day, Biswas (2012) could help museum practitioners and publics to see ‘beyond the sheer mountain of clutter’ held in the stores and to reflect upon and share the personal meanings they had attached to those objects. As he explained, he required only one person to come forward with a reason to ‘save’ any of the 40 objects but that reason had to have emotional resonance – resonance that evoked the relational character of ethical stewardship and the interconnections of deep ecology. Biswas (2009e) asserts: I have no doubt at all that an intellectual case can be made for or against every object in the museum. What my action is intent on flushing out is who actually cares enough to carry out what they say? I have specified individual responses precisely because only individuals can carry anything out. Each of the objects in the museum was collected by an individual and is now looked after by individuals. . . . Surely it is about time we wrested back personal responsibility? Biswas chose to communicate this threat of destruction to museum stakeholders through a blog (Figure 2.13). Each day, from his position in the tower, Biswas offered up on the blog a different artefact – or collection of aretfacts – from the group of 40, provoking discussions among museum staff and diverse stakeholders to determine the fate of each. Biswas (2009b) announced on the blog: Over the last few months I have been exploring the museum stores and collecting my own little cabinet of curiosities. Each day over the next forty days I will choose an object from my collection and offer it up in a spirit of sacrifice. . . . I will then destroy it. This destruction will inevitably take place unless someone cares for the object.

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FIGURE 2.13  Manchester Hermit weblog with post by Ansuman Biswas, Manchester Museum, University of Manchester, 2009, photo courtesy of the Manchester Museum, University of Manchester

Wall texts positioned at pivotal sites in the galleries announced the hermit’s residency and enabled those who wanted to participate whilst inside the museum to do so; computer terminals and notepads for low-tech messages to be delivered to the artist were stationed nearby (Biswas 2012). For the museum, which was just beginning to construct major social media initiatives, the blog presented a significant opportunity for audience development (Merriman 2012). For Biswas (2012), the blog generated an opportunity for civic discourse on shared guardianship of collections. Indeed, the notion of a contemporary hermit and the metaphor of destruction of collections elicited extensive press coverage (BBC Radio Front Row Broadcast 2009; Channel 4 Broadcast 2009; M. Kennedy 2009; NBC News 2009; Qureshi 2009) which led to wide interest in the blog; the site received over 30,000 ‘hits’ during the period of Biswas’s hermit performance (Merriman 2012). In turn, Biswas’s daily ‘reveals’ of objects under threat and his accompanying commentary drew strong emotions from those who posted comments. Whilst some contributors self-identified as stakeholders with some inside knowledge of museums, for instance artists, archaeologists, zoologists and PhD students, the range of posts indicates a diversity of profiles, including a strong contingent of meditation practitioners from around the world. In retrospect, Biswas (2012) says that he was not fully prepared for the ‘hornet’s nest’ of contested issues that would arise. But he emphasises that he found the provocation productive as it helped a range of individuals to feel personally engaged with the collections. Not surprisingly, Biswas’s threat to destroy collections was a largely rhetorical strategy. The larger shared goal of the project was to inspire action towards sustainability in the museum and the world. Towards these ends, it was decided that, as a conclusion to the performance, the Museum’s Collections Development Panel, in conjunction with Biswas, would decide the fate

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of the 40 objects, based on the discourse that each engendered (Biswas 2009k). Destruction was not up for consideration, but transfer to other public institutions and to private individuals was. Nonetheless, as director of the museum – and as then convener of the UK Museums Association Ethics Committee – Merriman was initially apprehensive of Biswas’s idea to threaten to destroy objects. Merriman (2012) was so concerned about potential misreadings of Biswas’s provocation that he took the project to the Ethics Committee for review; he was reassured when the committee responded that, so long as the project followed MA ethics code guidelines (Museums Association 2008), he had the proper checks and balances in place to proceed. Merriman (2009) did choose to reinforce the metaphorical basis of the provocation in an early blog post: ‘Destruction’ is a very emotive word for museums, because one of their main roles is to look after collections for future generations: they are society’s collective memory. So for any museum – including the Manchester Museum – recklessly to destroy something is unthinkable. What the Hermit is doing is to challenge all of us to think about why we hold large collections in museums, most of them in stores out of sight of the public, while we seem to tolerate the destruction of natural habitats and the extinction of species out of sight, out of mind. I interpret his challenge as provoking us to have this debate, and to appreciate what we have now, whether they are museum collections or the world’s biodiversity. This contextualisation helped set the scene for substantive discourse on the blog concerning the future of collections and museum sustainability. Key also to the success of the project was the tension Biswas maintained between insider and outsider positionings. On the one hand, as a hermit, he was completely alone – and outside the museum. Whilst because of a moisture problem and a lack of circulation, Biswas (2012) used the tower itself only as a retreat, spending much of his time directly underneath it in a suite of rooms which included a purpose-built kitchen, shower and toilet, he had no physical interactions with any other individuals for the 40-day performance; food, messages and objects he requested from the stores were left on the doorstep for him to retrieve. On the other hand, Biswas situated himself both literally and metaphorically at the centre of the museum for the duration. Biswas (2012) notes that, as he hovered inside the building, just above the natural history collections, he perceived himself as a kind of human vivarium on exhibit in the tower. A webcam that captured Biswas’s daily rituals reinforced the notion of the artist as an insider who functioned as a living part of the museum’s collections. Also, the blog made Biswas very much the insider as it forged connections between the artist, museum staff and the museum’s publics. Biswas (2012) perceives this insider/outsider paradox in terms of a spiritual journey; ‘by going nowhere I am on an expedition to experience many diverse landscapes,’ he notes. Biswas explains that the role of the hermit, historically, was socially oriented and that he was tapping into this tradition (BBC Radio Front Row Broadcast 2009).

The value of ‘ordinary ethics’ in visitor-generated content: conversations on ethical stewardship Examining visitor-generated content on the Manchester Hermit blog sheds light on a range of arguments concerning the ethical stewardship of collections. Moreover, it demonstrates the

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museological value of everyday lived experiences and perspectives on ethics, what anthropologist Michael Lambek (2010) calls ‘ordinary ethics’, from diverse stakeholders. Lambek (2010: 1) argues that ethics is not a domain reserved for professionals with specific expertise, prestige and group interests but is integral to the human condition, as evidenced by the judgments and decisions we make every day and convey through speech and action: Human beings cannot avoid being subject to ethics, speaking and acting with ethical consequences, evaluating our actions and those of others, acknowledging and refusing acknowledgment, caring and taking care, but also being aware of our failure to do so consistently. As a species, given our consciousness, our socialization and sociality, and our use of language, we are fundamentally ethical. According to Lambek, ethics is tacit and deeply embedded in our perceptions and conduct. Ordinary ethics is what empowers us to negotiate through judgment the tensions we face at every juncture between obligations and freedoms. Identifying and analysing patterns of speech, action and judgment within visitor-generated content on the Manchester Hermit blog makes visible the ordinary ethics of contributors, individually, and as a whole, concerning stewardship issues. In so doing, it demonstrates the enormous potential of museum publics to help shape ethics discourse, policy and practice. Within the context of Lambek’s approach, Biswas’s blog becomes a vehicle to foster reconciliation between museums and communities; by empowering diverse stakeholders to voice their opinions, take a stand and help determine the fate of the 40 museum objects identified for possible destruction, Biswas engendered shared authority and a sense of shared guardianship. Though he was not familiar with Lambek’s concept of ordinary ethics, Biswas (2009e) defines ethics discourse on the blog as everyday speech and action, rather than abstract theories or professional codes of conduct. ‘It is very easy to make moral pronouncements or have vague opinions. I am asking, however, for a thorough examination of what one actually does. Our real priorities reveal themselves in our actions’, Biswas declares. Biswas (2009j) also stresses that ethics is not a domain limited to experts but one in which all stakeholders have a vital contribution to make: I see little value in a distinction between ‘them’ and ‘us’.The museum is staffed by public servants who are also human beings with ideas, opinions and powers. Every member of the public is also an expert in his or her unique viewpoint. To elicit a spectrum of responses on the blog Biswas developed a compelling persona and mode of storytelling. Looking at Biswas’s techniques of facilitation illuminates the dynamics of ordinary ethics as developed in visitor-generated content. Social media can create captivating storytelling environments, as sociolinguist Ruth Page asserts. Page (2012: 1–23) examines blogs as an episodic and dialogical literary genre in which a range of distinct voices emerges, such as artistic, playful, contemplative and emotional. She identifies ‘tellability’, or the ability to construct social relationships through an engaging narrative, as the characteristic most likely to indicate the success of a social media initiative. Biswas’s combination of gripping personification of a hermit, daily threats to destroy museum objects and rhetorical urging towards action effectively captures this tellability quality. Biswas explains that his strategy to limit the blog to 40 days established a clear narrative structure which he signalled through an introduction, closing and series of scenarios to be contested. Biswas (2012) describes the resulting discourse as literary – specifically Shakespearean –

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and performative, with a cast of recognisable roles which he characterises as ‘fools, knaves, innocent babes, villains and cynics’. Biswas (2012) notes that the internet, like Shakespearean drama, creates an alternative world in which the rules are slightly askew, empowering transgressive voices to emerge that might ordinarily be silenced. Biswas also sees participation on the blog as evidence of the processes of deliberative democracy. Biswas (2012) refers to the discourse produced as ‘distributed intellect’ which, he holds, demonstrates the agency of individuals to create political change in museums and the world. Biswas (2009e) notes: The Manchester Museum is part of a worldwide network of institutions which controls the movement of the world’s most valuable objects. In the age of the internet and of parliamentary democracy why shouldn’t the museum’s dealings also be open? What ethical guidelines forbid all of us from having a say in what happens to our heritage? But the real issue I want to address is much larger than just that of museums. In taking a personal interest in our public institutions, perhaps we might develop a different kind of relationship with the world. One which does not rely on numbed compliance, or resigned powerlessness, or dumbstruck subservience to a priestly elite. But one which, on the other hand, recognizes that each of us has a vital role to play in the creation and conservation of beauty in our everyday lives. Biswas’s emphasis on the dynamic relationships between people, things and the larger world sets a tone for posters to imagine what ethical stewardship – of collections and our planet – might look like and to play a role in setting policy and practice at the museum. Most of the blog contributors clearly understood Biswas’s premise that ‘destruction’ was a trope to empower stakeholders to carry on civic dialogue on difficult stewardship issues. A post from Ruth (2009) responding conceptually to the premise of disposal exemplifies this insightfulness: When we let go, things don’t disappear anyway, we only release them to allow them to change into another shape.The minute I buried my mother’s ashes in the woods last year, I felt her releasing into the ground, into the minerals, into the water, into the plants and animals around her. Many contributors were quick to see that meaning is not fixed but shifts with time and place. In a comment on the Manchester Museum’s brick from the Great Wall of China, poster Ann (2009) notes: Part of the Chinese Wall, this brick is not just Ancient History, but also a constant reminder of the fact that walls can – and often should – be broken down nowadays. For me it symbolises the physical borders that disappeared, and the more metaphysical ones that came into place. Some posters played the role of rabble-rouser.When the Hermit threatened to destroy a specimen of black poplar seed, a poster who called himself Bodger (2009) responds: Tell you what. Don’t destroy it. Chuck them out of the window (hope you have one that opens or yesterday must have been hell). See if the wind carries them away to create new life. Go on. I dare you.

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Such resonant insights by Ruth, Ann, Bodger and others attest to the value and relevance of ordinary ethics as expressed by a range of diverse stakeholders for museums wrestling with a complex and shifting ethical terrain. For Manchester Museum staff, however, negotiating an appropriate persona for the blog proved challenging. Despite the artist’s requests that museum employees drop their professional demeanour to engage with the issues at hand from a personal standpoint – to share their own ‘ordinary ethics’ – Biswas (2012) found most of their contributions largely anodyne. As Page (2012: 13–14, 200–202) notes, though social media is collaborative and offers pathways to revise the asymmetries of power, floor-holding is a complex negotiation that sometimes reinforces offline identities and social hierarchies. Page warns that too much crossover between online and offline identities can constrain the democratic potential of social media. Looking at Manchester Museum staff contributions to the blog reveals a constant struggle between the need to assert expertise and the desire to take risks. Whilst Merriman sees Biswas’s characterisation of staff contributions as largely accurate, Merriman stresses that he was impressed by how strife-free the process was of getting staff ‘on board’. Though one curator chose not to take part in the project, and many initially worried about losing the esteem of their peer groups, there were no threats of resignation and, in fact, much goodwill was accrued, in part because Biswas was himself so personable. Merriman (2012) also explains that many curators saw their role as helping to frame debates on the blog but held back as they saw more and more voices joining in. Biswas himself balanced between the roles of instigator and inspiration. As instigator, he used sarcasm and irony to probe the gaps in logic of apologists for human exceptionalism. For instance, in a post threatening to destroy rare apple blossoms, the Malus niedzwetzkyana from the forests of Kyrgyzstan (Figure 2.14), Biswas (2009i) writes, Dazzled by the cleverness of our blade, we are sawing away at the very branch we are sitting on. . . . No one seems to care much. And the rest of the branch is going to crack under the strain anyway. So, goodbye apples. This threat was so effective that several posters concluded that the museum should use the seeds to propagate a new orchard on its grounds. As inspiration, Biswas introduced an approach of mindfulness expressed through verse, through poetic titles for his posts and through the object photographs themselves. For instance, in a post considering the fate of a giant earwig, from a species now thought to be extinct, Biswas (2009j) wrote: I wonder how many families I break up every time I kick a stone How many quiet voices I never hear In whose home I make myself comfortable What dies with my breath Who is it, after all, that I kill in in my sleep, and fiercely protect when I wake? Biswas titled this blog post ‘Listen’; the accompanying photograph reveals a close-up of Biswas’s face, eyes closed and the earwig about to enter the artist’s ear (Figure 2.15).Together, these devices evoke humanity’s burning responsibility for ethical stewardship of the museum and the planet. At times, Biswas became more emotionally involved in the discussions than he had anticipated. After one particularly heated debate in which he challenged a curator’s reliance on

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Malus niedzwetzkyana (apple blossoms), Kyrgyzstan, Manchester Museum, as photographed for Ansuman Biswas’s Manchester Hermit, 2009, photo courtesy of the Manchester Museum, University of Manchester

FIGURE 2.14 

authority and objectivity, the artist felt the need to apologise.Whilst insisting that the nature of expertise has changed, Biswas (2009g) concedes: We have moved some way beyond the priest-scribes of ancient Egypt, or the high caste Brahmins of India or shamans with access to hidden knowledge, but nevertheless experts are still important. In the age of Google and Wikipedia and the hyperfragmentation of specialized knowledge, experts have a new function to play. And in an information democracy they have a new kind of accountability. This means that the role of the Museum and the Academy is also changing. Manchester University Museum is clearly aware of this change, which is why it’s willing to lay itself open in the way that this project does. My job as an artist is to put some challenging questions but I’d like to put them without being abusive. Forgive me if I sometimes wobble over the mark. The curator, however, never again contributed to the blog. Many of the objects sparked penetrating dialogue reflective of the value of ordinary ethics. Biswas’s reveal of an Anopheles mosquito (Figure 2.16), for example, encouraged contributors to see the ironies of needing to save an insect that they might easily kill on a summer evening without a second thought. Some posters advocated keeping the mosquito in the collections because of its potential significance for research on malaria, its ability to convey challenging issues concerning the developing world and its service to a larger ecology; others rejected this valuation based on instrumentality, asserting that the museum should appreciate and respect the mosquito as a thing of beauty in and of itself (Biswas 2009c).

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FIGURE 2.15  St. Helena Giant Earwig (species last seen alive 1967), Manchester Museum, as photographed for Ansuman Biswas’s Manchester Hermit, 2009, photo courtesy of the Manchester Museum, University of Manchester

The object that provoked some of the most substantive, insightful and yet playful discourse on the ethics of stewardship was that of a human skull. As the first of the 40 objects that Biswas threatened to destroy, a skull was a startling and suspenseful choice; by confronting participants with their own mortality and the direct relationship between stewardship of collections and stewardship of the planet, the skull provided a powerful metaphor with

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FIGURE 2.16  Anopheles mosquito, Manchester Museum, as photographed for Ansuman Biswas’s Manchester Hermit, 2009, photo courtesy of the Manchester Museum, University of Manchester

which to spark a collective conversation capturing the value of ordinary ethics. Biswas was also interested in the skull because the Manchester Museum had been in dialogue with a pagan group advocating repatriation and reburial (Merriman 2012). Biswas’s choice in the blog photograph (Figure 2.17) to cradle the skull in the palm of his hand, as reminiscent of Hamlet in his monologue ruminating on death, reflects the performative nature of Biswas’s approach. Ironically, given that the skull was being considered for disposal and reburial, Biswas (2012) had to persuade museum staff to allow him to hold the skull without white gloves for the photo. Discourse on ethical stewardship of the skull established a general dynamic for the blog that many of the other entries loosely emulated. Upon the initial provocation from Biswas, an ‘expert’ voice from the Manchester Museum identified key issues from a professional perspective and a range of stakeholders weighed in with their opinion and rationale, some issuing a strong ‘no’ to destruction, others a strong ‘yes’ and yet another group of contributors offering up a nuanced museological critique with no clear-cut answer. Biswas and museum staff kept conversations going by responding to key posts. In the collective conversations on the skull Brian Sitch, curator of archaeology at the Manchester Museum, provides the voice of the expert by explaining what is known and unknown about the provenance of the skull and asking what role provenance plays in determining ethical stewardship. Sitch (2009a) also advances the conversation by sharing his own views on potential disposal of the skull and the contradictions this poses to his professional obligations: it is literally my job to ‘care’ for the skull. It goes without saying that museum curators are deeply committed to handing on the collections for which they are responsible in as good a condition as possible for posterity. No-one destroys museum objects without proper consideration. However, some objects in the collection have little associated information and their scientific value is limited. . . .

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FIGURE 2.17 

Human skull, date unknown, Manchester Museum, as photographed for Ansuman Biswas’s Manchester Hermit, 2009, photo courtesy of the Manchester Museum, University of Manchester

This skull has an illegible old label so we don’t really know where it comes from. If we accept that is the case and the skull has no locality or find spot and is, therefore, of limited interest for scientific research, should we condone destruction of the skull? I think there is a case for disposal of the skull but I believe this should be done in a sensitive and respectful way. The approximately 40 individuals who commented on Biswas’s skull post expressed their views in witty and vivid literary terms that attest to the poignancy of ordinary ethics. All of them – whether they believed the skull should be kept or transferred – concurred that the skull has value and should be respected. A majority agreed with Sitch, that the skull should be transferred to an appropriate caretaker, and most argued that it should be reburied. One imaginative

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contributor, appropriately calling themselves Ugotmethinkin (2009), makes a clear call for disposal by embellishing Biswas’s narrative structure with a tale of their own: What would I do? Get the hermit to lower the skull on a rope out the window in the night to a tipsy passer by. Cause a stir. Create a scandal. Make it’s [sic] story live again. Get a wider range of people talking and blogging, thinking, debating this brilliant project. And then give it to a school and challenge them to create and lead an appropriate cermony [sic] and choose its final resting place. Another participant, Reverend M (2009), who identified as a Buddhist contemplative, asserted through a letter addressed to the skull that the skull should not be objectified as a museum specimen but has a spiritual presence that requires transfer to an appropriate guardian. A few contributors contested those views by emphasising the potential scientific value of the skull for the museum, regardless of its unknown provenance. Dan Boatright (2009), for instance, remarks: I am currently a PhD student studying unprovenanced objects from Egypt and the Near East and was actually horrified by the idea of destroying an object because we don’t know much about it! Surely the name of the game in archaeology is to extract as much information from it as possible? The provenance is just one, rather limited, aspect of an object. It is of course important but not the only useful piece of evidence. Only half in jest, Boatright (2009) offers to do the research himself if the museum was uninterested: Just off the top of my head (apologies for the pun) has anyone tried to analyse this skull in the context of others i.e. compare cranial measurements? Has anyone done any reconstruction work to see how the person may have looked? . . . Actaully [sic] hand it over to me now, I’ll look after it and go and do this work myself! Thus, ironically, Boatright makes an interesting case for disposal not as a measure of respect for the dead but as a research intervention. A third type of response to Biswas’s skull post uses the trope of destruction to articulate a salient museological critique. Katy (2009), for example, enquires how museums’ drive to sort and rank collections might impact a desire to dispose of items that don’t neatly fit established taxonomies: Maybe the discomfort with the nameless, un-labelled skull is a symbol of our wish to classify our world. If we don’t have a place for it, surely it’s better to get rid of it than upset our carefully devised arrangement?’ If it has no place, it must not have a purpose. Katy (2009) also suggests that museum taxonomies might negatively impact contemporary life outside the museum. ‘If this [disposal when collections aren’t easily classified] is the case for the deceased, is it also the case for the living?’, she asks. Katy’s acknowledgment of the

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convergences between ethical stewardship of collections and ethical stewardship of the planet is what Biswas had hoped to elicit through his framework of deep ecology. Biswas read the substantive civic dialogue on the skull and the other 39 items from the stores as indicative of the untapped potential of ordinary ethics to advance sustainability in museums and the world. Characterising the objects as markers for collective thinking, Biswas (2009l) argues that individual action, spurred by public discourse, is the materialisation of ethical practice. Biswas (2009k) declares: The museum is here as a public body precisely to hold in trust many of these objects. This public institution becomes an empty shell however, and may even become harmful, unless its purpose and strategy is publicly examined and renewed. Its existence might also become an excuse for us, the public, to ignore our personal responsibilities. It’s very easy to think ‘someone else will take care of it’. In fact individuals have a duty to act. Examining the legacy of the Manchester Hermit illuminates the ways in which Manchester Museum staff took up this ‘duty to act’ to acknowledge the value of ordinary ethics as an approach towards reconciliation.

The fate of the 40 and the legacy of the Manchester Hermit project As contributors to the blog thoughtfully wrestled with the difficult issues of ethical stewardship posed by the Manchester Hermit, museum staff, in turn, responded heedfully to those collective conversations in ordinary ethics that developed. In the short term, the museum’s response was relatively muted, a gesture towards shared guardianship of collections, rather than a dramatic leap of faith. But over the longer term, the museum is developing new policies and practices that attest to the impact of the project. On 3 September 2009 the Manchester Museum’s Collections Development Panel met with Biswas, as promised, to determine the fate of the 40 objects in relation to visitor-generated content. Decisions were recorded on the blog. Not surprisingly, given the metaphorical nature of Biswas’s threat, most of the objects were retained by the museum. None were actu­a lly destroyed. Some were made more accessible or used in new ways. For instance, an unprovenanced hand-axe in poor condition was identified as an object for outreach activities (Sitch 2009b).The rare apple blossom was retained as an impetus for the planting of apple trees in the museum’s living plants display (Leander [Wolstenholme] 2009). Other items, like the human skull, are undergoing a longer process of consideration for potential transfer. A few objects did undergo disposal. SomeVictorian newspapers used to wrap plant specimens (Biswas 2009d) and never themselves properly accessioned were transferred to the Department of Victorian Studies at the University (Merriman 2012). A 1915 coin from British West Africa (Figure 2.18) was transferred to the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge. On the blog, Jonathan Jarrett (2009), research assistant in the Department of Coins and Medals at the Fitzwilliam, had requested the transfer so that he could include the coin in the Fitzwilliam’s ‘Hidden Histories’ project, which explores the many ways objects are collected. The Manchester Museum panel thought the transfer fitting, particularly since Jarrett promised to document just how the coin came to the Fitzwilliam through the Hermit project (Sugden 2009). Paradoxically, as Merriman reflects, the Manchester Hermit demonstrated to staff the value of retaining even largely hidden collections. The staff was surprised and delighted that the blog provoked public interest in even the most obscure of artifacts and recognised that Biswas

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FIGURE 2.18  Coin, British West Africa, 1915, Manchester Museum, as photographed for Ansuman Biswas’s Manchester Hermit, 2009, photo courtesy of the Manchester Museum, University of Manchester

generated this engagement by representing the objects as touchstones of the larger pressing issue of sustainability. As Merriman (2012) asked himself about the longer usefulness of Biswas’s intervention, it became clear to him that it was no longer enough to choose to retain collections as a result of civic discourse but that the museum needed also to develop new collections in partnership with communities. Indeed, the Manchester Hermit has helped the Manchester Museum to appreciate the value of involving communities in developing new strategies towards shared guardianship. Though Biswas’s intervention focused on loss and destruction, in some measure it provided Merriman the traction to move ahead with a series of initiatives on relational collecting, the concept that he had initially explored during his Clore Fellowship (Merriman 2006) to collaborate with communities on developing new collections that address the historical power inequalities of colonialism within the permanent collection and engender a new level of trust between the Museum and its publics (Merriman 2015: 250–256). ‘The Hermit project was a catalyst’, Merriman (2014) asserts; ‘Thinking about disposal and loss led me to think about relational collecting and about life beyond the museum as the other side of the coin.’ Merriman (2012) holds that the project’s impact on ethical stewardship of collections at the museum was a complete vindication of the value of artists’ interventions in stimulating new thinking. Relational collecting at the Manchester Museum has begun with a pilot project on trees that fulfils the museum’s mission to promote intercultural understanding and sustainability (Merriman 2015: 256–261). In a subtle way this initiative may also refer back to the Manchester Hermit blog posts on the rare apple blossom which call for the seeds to inspire the planting of an apple orchard on museum grounds. Moreover, it builds on Biswas’s approach of linking collections to themes of contemporary relevance as a means of building shared ownership and reciprocity with communities. Through the ‘Trees’ initiative, Merriman has defined relational collecting as self-reflexive with both a local and global dimension and an emphasis on processes over product; relationships

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FIGURE 2.19 

Bioblitz event undertaken with the Manchester Museum Youth Board, as part of the museum’s relational collecting initiative ‘Trees’, 2013, photo courtesy of the Manchester Museum, University of Manchester

that develop between staff and Museum publics are at least as significant as works that are collected as a result of these relationships. ‘Trees’ was selected as a theme because it captures many of the strengths of the collections – from botany and vivarium to geology and anthropology. The museum defines this theme from an interdisciplinary perspective and is collaborating with a host of local and international partners to realise the project. It plans a major exhibition and public programme, examining local and global issues including the uses of trees, climate change, and diverse cultural meanings of trees. A smaller exhibition and series of associated events have already taken place (Figure 2.19). New collections include films of individuals discussing their relationship to trees, objects made from local trees and recordings of living organisms in local trees. Digital collections are valued as equally as physical objects (Merriman 2015: 256–261). Like the Manchester Hermit project, the ‘Trees’ initiative is open-ended, with public stakeholders helping to determine the outcomes (Merriman 2015: 262). By empowering communities through co-creative practices, museum leadership hopes that relational collecting will foster a sense of shared guardianship. Relational collecting is part of that larger ethical project of reconciliation between museums and communities, and Biswas’s role in facilitating this reconciliation is considerable.

Iconoclasm and ethical stewardship Though vastly different in their approaches to the institutions and systems that they critique, to the audiences they engage and to the objects with which they stage their interventions, Rakowitz’s Spoils, Fontenot’s Recycle LACMA and Biswas’s Manchester Hermit all advance ethical

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thinking on the stewardship of collections. Practicing not in a museum setting but in the larger public sphere with a commission from an alternative arts agency, Rakowitz serves a meal that shows participants their complicity in the politicised negotiations concerning repatriation. Working in his studio without a commission and with a blog that serves as both diary and catalogue, Fontenot reclaims and refashions deaccessioned museum collections to demonstrate their resonance and value. Collaborating in and with a museum and straddling insider and outsider positionings through his Hermit persona and blog, Biswas holds up to the light 40 artifacts and sparks collective conversations in ordinary ethics about their future and the future of the planet. The three projects together take a hard look at the implications of destruction and loss in a way that evokes the iconoclasm of Ai Weiwei’s performance Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) which Ai documented in a triptych of three photographs (Figures 2.20–2.22). Searching through the historic ceramics in the antique and flea markets of China, Ai, like Fontenot, was simultaneously shocked and moved by the skill and beauty he found in discarded objects (van der Zijpp 2008: 9). And, similarly to Rakowitz, he recognised and exploited the political resonances of china (with a small c). Further, like Biswas – and like Fontenot with his torch – Ai found the concept of destruction a powerful mechanism to convey the need for change. But political and artistic urgency prompted Ai to translate this concept of destruction into action – to do harm to a 2,000-year-old urn as a mode of critiquing Chinese ideals of nationalism, authority and authenticity (Merewether 2008: 59–64; Moore and Torchia 2011: 11–13) and of appropriating the tools of the Cultural Revolution towards civil rights and freedom of expression (Gamboni 2011: 86–91). Ai (quoted in Wellner 2009: 19) recounts: When we were growing up, General Mao used to tell us that we can only build a new world if we destroy the old one.That’s the basic concept: destroying the old to contribute to the new. We were well-schooled in that. In the first of the three photographs Ai holds the urn before him; in the second he purposefully drops it and the camera captures the urn just about to hit the ground; in the final work, the urn lies shattered on the sidewalk and Ai does not flinch at the result. As Philip Tinari (2011: 33) remarks, ‘For Ai, China is a pot.’ I would add that, for Ai, the museum is also a pot. For Ai, just like for Rakowitz, Fontenot and Biswas, enacting loss through artifacts is a means to critique and reimagine museums. ‘I think traditional galleries, museums or institutions that just show art are like dead bodies of past wars’, Ai declared (quoted in Wellner 2009: 24). Also, like Biswas, Ai offered up his blog (Ai 2011) as an alternative co-creative civic space in which relations among people give meaning to culture – until it was shut down in 2009 by Chinese authorities; Ai currently uses Twitter. However, Ai takes a Daoist or ‘Wu Wei’ approach to the potential impact of his interventions, meaning ‘do nothing’ or being ‘detached [from] . . . managing society’s problems’ (quoted in Wellner 2009: 16). He acts but refuses to accept responsibility for what others might take from his projects. ‘I think just walking in the other direction is a smart choice’, he says (quoted in Wellner 2009: 20). By dropping the urn and documenting it through photos, Ai established an unforgettable paradigm that later interventions concerning the ethics of stewardship invoke through default. But in translating this paradigm, consciously or unconsciously, to differing cultural contexts, Rakowitz, Fontenot and Biswas take a more museologically invested approach. In defining ethical stewardship of collections through the relational, Spoils, Recycle LACMA and the Manchester Hermit contribute to the process of reconciliation between museums and publics.

FIGURES 2.20–2.22  Ai Weiwei, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995, three black and white prints, each 148 x 121 cm, photo credit: Ai Weiwei

3 ‘TEMPLE SWAPPING’ Hybridity and social justice

Hybridity as a methodology In 2012, as Defne Ayas assumed the director’s position at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, she asked A. A. Bronson to compose and deliver a queer private blessing for her to mark the transition and provide direction for the future. In a secret place near the rose garden of the Vondelpark, Amsterdam, at midnight of 14 March 2012, Bronson and fellow artist Sands Murray-Wassink sat naked and cross-legged whilst Bronson used tarot cards and spiritually infused accoutrements to predict a course for Witte de With to prosper in the coming years (Ayas 2012) (Figure 3.1). The lone surviving member of the collaborative General Idea, who lived and made art together for 25 years, Bronson has worked independently as an artist, curator, publisher and healer since his partners Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal died of AIDS-related complications in 1994. For director Ayas, the blessing was a means to induct both queer and spiritual ways of thinking into the Witte de With (Ayas 2012). Within the context of Rotterdam with its busy port, large immigrant population and challenges of high levels of illiteracy, Bronson’s blessing can be seen as a divination marking the commencement of a social justice agenda – an organisational commitment to equality and inclusivity (Sandell and Nightingale 2012) – facilitating reconciliation between the Witte de With and its diverse communities. Bronson’s blessing signalled to Ayas a freedom from heteronormative and other binary structures that oppress, an openness to subversive methods directed to breach those oppressive structures and a commitment to serving diverse faith groups too often disenfranchised from museums (Reeve 2012). This move towards reconciliation is founded on an understanding of the hybridity of identity: first, that the labels we acquire – homosexual, believer, museum professional, artist, community member – are fluid, not fixed, and often collide; and second, as the case studies in this chapter will reveal, that negotiating the hybridity of identity sits at the core of redressing power relationships, both inside and outside the museum. As a term connoting ‘of mixed origin’, hybridity is a contested concept. The colonial-era use of the word to castigate individuals of mixed racial heritage and to promote eugenics as a means to racial purity has made some scholars wary of its reappropriation (Werbner and

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FIGURE 3.1 

Documentation of AA Bronson’s Blessing for Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 2012, courtesy of the artist and Witte de With (Center for Contemporary Art)

Modood 1997). However, as Homi Bhabha has argued (1994a; 1994b; 1996), in postcolonial discourse hybridity can create a third space that problematises boundaries and allows for multiple subject-positions. Bhabha (1996: 57) asserts, ‘The partial, minority culture emphasizes the internal differentiations, the “foreign bodies”, in the midst of the nation – the interstices of its uneven and unequal development, which gives lie to its self-containedness.’ These interstitial – or in-between spaces – have the agency to disrupt hegemonic power structures and to enable new, more socially just positions to emerge. In social justice discourse, hybridity is but one way of engaging equality issues. Richard Sandell (2005: 189–194) has acknowledged the importance of other diversity strategies including the compensatory, the celebratory and the pluralistic to accommodate difference. Hybridity remains problematic for some. In We Have Never Been Modern, for instance, Bruno Latour declares that hybridity maintains prior differences as markers of difference within a new hybrid entity, thus perpetuating notions of us and them and the power differentials implicit in this polarity. He argues for a symmetry that critiques what he sees as the asymmetries embedded in hybridity. Latour (1993: 107–108) states: The principle of symmetry aims not only at establishing equality – which is the only way to set the scale at zero – but at registering differences – that is, in the final analysis, asymmetries – and at understanding the practical means that allow some collectives to dominate others. But, as Mark Elam (1999: 14) notes, Latour’s argument is problematic in that he situates himself as outside the hybrid and thus does not examine his own embeddedness within it.

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Ien Ang holds that hybridity is not a means to erase difference; it is a key component of engaging the politics of difference. Ang (2003: 149–150) states: Hybridity is not the solution, but alerts us to the difficulty of living with differences, their ultimately irreducible resistance to complete dissolution. In other words, hybridity is a heuristic device for analysing complex entanglement. As a matter of social urgency and ethical responsibility, negotiating hybridity is an apt subject for the complex and ongoing work of reconciliation. Artist Bharti Parmar pursues hybridity as a mode of reconciliation in her 2003 project for the exhibition True Stories at the Wolverhampton Art Gallery. The project was an intervention directed at the Races of Mankind, a series of photographs taken by conservative British politician, world traveller and amateur photographer Sir Benjamin Stone (1838–1914) and currently held at the Birmingham [UK] Central Library. Parmar reproduced some 21 of these colonialera images through screen-printing without manipulating them but instead making visible the captions, labels and inscriptions added by Stone and subsequent generations of collectors. By juxtaposing the annotations, typically hidden from view through mounting techniques, with the images themselves, Parmar reveals the hybrid identities of the sitters.The multi-layered sensibilities of Stone’s subjects belie the attempt to contain them through taxonomies, the archival box and the white cube space of the gallery. Parmar (2012) declares: What I found most interesting was how the identities of these individuals captured by this white man of means were essentialised through a caption. Their lives were reduced to a word or a phrase. Through the intervention, I hoped to make a small gesture towards reinstating the multi-dimensional identities of these subjects as living, breathing people. The subject of Parmar’s screenprint of a sadhu, or holy man, from 2003 (Figure 3.2), for instance, resists objectification, despite the insistence of the scrawled inscription, which reads ‘High Priest of the Rock Temple with Hair Loose’ in the narrow white border below; by making visible this inscription, originally hidden by a mat, Parmar allows us to see clearly how the figure beckons us to examine the web of colonial and postcolonial interdependencies among sitter, photographer, viewer and contemporary artist. Parmar (2012) remarks: Both photographer and subject are complicit in the gaze.The sitter, a sadhu, is very aware of the power he has over the photographer and, implicitly, the viewer. The image is also highly choreographed; I think the sadhu played a role in this. The agency of the holy man stands in stark contrast to the caption in black biro. Though the caption frames and defaces the image, at the same time, the holy man defies the colonial project of containment. For Pete James, former head of photography at the Birmingham Central Library, the project presented an opportunity to address the serious ethical questions that arise with the introduction of historical cataloguing that today seems insensitive in the public domain, particularly in a city such as Birmingham where diverse communities might claim the sitters that appear

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FIGURE 3.2 

Bharti Parmar, Priest With Hair Loose, 2003, photograph courtesy of the artist

in colonial-era photographs as their ancestors. James (2012) aims to leverage creative practice towards new understandings of the archives and its contents as dynamic, living and open to postmodern interpretive strategies. Thus, the interstitial spaces of Parmar’s interventions make reparations for the hegemonic structures of naming by enabling hybrid subject positions to assert themselves. Parmar’s screen prints exemplify the use of hybridity as a methodology to advance social justice. Indeed, as sociologist Jan Nederveen Pieterse (2001: 238) explains, hybridity is not only a reflection of current realities and future aspirations; it is a powerful methodological approach from which to develop social justice initiatives.The relational aspects of hybridity promote new modes of self-actualisation based on the realities of contemporary life, rather than essentialist

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notions of identity, and new forms of resistance to inequalities. Acknowledging hybridity is thus a way for museums and galleries to recognise the cultural rights of individuals as human rights, as articulated in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and which David Anderson (2012) cites to argue for an ethically based understanding of social engagement. Hybridity is, in fact, a key theme of efforts to facilitate reconciliation in conflict resolution. Grappling with one’s complex interrelationships with others is central to forging healthy group dynamics.Theologian Nico Koopman (n.d.) reflects upon his experiences of the reconciliation process in South Africa: Through the participation in each others’ lives it becomes increasingly difficult to talk about yourself as merely Coloured or South African. Participation in the lives of my black, white and Indian brothers . . . now co-defines me. I am still a Coloured but I am also more than that. I am still South African but at the same time I am more than that. . . . This ‘something more’ applies to all the others that I might mingle, commune, share with and with whom I live in a relationship of interdependency. . . . And where this proximity and mingling, sharing and solidarity grow, there a life of reparative and healing forgiveness also takes shape. As Koopman poignantly makes clear, taking stock of hybridity is a powerful reparative mechanism to creating new and more productive relationships, even among groups with a long history of imposed estrangement and segregation. In this chapter I will explore how artists engaging in a range of critical practices draw upon the continually evolving and still useful concept of hybridity as a methodological approach towards social justice. Through projects by Fred Wilson, Matt Smith and Theaster Gates I will show how artists leverage hybridity to help museums make meaningful symbolic reparations towards equality and inclusivity.With hybridity artists have the potential to subvert hegemonic power structures and to inspire what Bashir and Kymlicka (2008: 19) call transformative justice, justice that ‘seeks to create a new “we”, which requires opening up new possibilities that did not exist before’. Whilst reconciliation is a complex process with no clear end point, hybridity is an effective vehicle to forge pluralistic institutions characterised by shared authority, reciprocity and mutual trust. Sometimes hybridity is a conscious strategy thoughtfully articulated in advance on the part of the commissioning institution; more often it is an inchoate agenda that evolves with the provocations of the artist as third party to the museum and its publics. But in either case, museum interventions that engage hybridity have the capacity to spark the kind of critical, self-reflective thinking essential to organisational change towards equality and social justice. Theaster Gates refers to the methodology of hybridity as ‘temple swapping’, an exchange of values between seemingly unlike groups, in his case the black church and the museum, to explore their interconnections – their relational sensibilities – and, in so doing, to create a new and powerful force for good. And as Gates (2010) exclaims, ‘when the museum and the temple conflate – oh boy, is that sexy’.

Hybridity, art history and museums In art history scholarship, over-determinism of race is a common problem. For instance, as Darby English argues, the art historical treatment of works by African-American artists is commonly reductive and transparent, masking the hybrid nature of identity and preventing a

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complex reading of objects in relation to social, cultural and economic factors. English (2007: 7) characterises this problematic treatment of African-American art: It is almost uniformly generalized, endlessly summoned to prove its representativeness (or defend its lack of same) and contracted to show-and-tell on behalf of an abstract and unchanging ‘culture of origin’. For all this, the art gains little purchase on the larger social, historical, and aesthetic formations to which it nevertheless directs itself with increasing urgency. English likens this essentialist approach to a system of apartheid. English (2007: 11) holds: the rhetorical operations of black representational space separate from works of art elements of their informing contexts that reflect interest in issues other than race. This is how black representational space functions as a kind of tactical segregation. Probably ‘segregation’ has remained, until now, off our list of progressive talking points because its most ardent supporters have no reason to believe that they traffic in the kind of segregation one hollers about. Indeed for many that kind of segregation, exemplified in our time by apartheid . . . enjoys a special status as that against which black representational space, for instance, provides a defense.Yet the same principle obtains whenever there exist regulatory procedures to aver something as self-sufficient, separate, intact, independent, identical to itself, in essence uncontaminated by any relation to alterity. English clearly implicates museums, as well as art history, in the problems of tactical segregation. In fact, addressing hybridity is a significant museological challenge. Simona Bodo (2012: 184) argues that ‘there is a pressing need for strategies and programmes aimed at creating “third spaces” where individuals are permitted to cross the boundaries of belonging and are offered genuine opportunities for self-representation’. But, Bodo (2012: 183) reports, though museums may espouse a rhetoric of defining identity through hybridity, in reality, they have not managed to reframe diversity and equality issues in any substantive way in relation to fluid identity. Dewdney, Dibosa and Walsh argue that pluralism cannot be achieved in museums without engaging hybridity. In their research on diversity at Tate Britain, Dewdney, Dibosa and Walsh recount (2012: 121): cultural diversity was rendered across the networks as a problem to be solved. Such problematisation involved an interpretation of diversity as being characterised through visual markers of racialised difference. . . . In this way the real work of difference becomes obscured. Differentiating between the concept of difference and racialised categorisation opens up the potential for recognising models of power and the institutionally normalised practice which support them and thus creates the space for revision and innovation. Hybridity, Dewdney, Dibosa and Walsh suggest, is a radical, counter-hegemonic method to reimagine the museum through the lens of social justice and to create organisational change that manifests this vision. Underpinning the concept of hybridity as a counter-hegemonic method is the notion that museums have the right and responsibility to redress inequalities and advance social justice in

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museums and in society; museums have social impact beyond the institution itself (Nightingale and Sandell 2012: 3). Sandell (2011: 143) makes a persuasive argument that this moral agency of museums, as evidenced by a growing body of research, supports the case for activist positions. As he explains, activism within the museum context is an organisational commitment not to passively perpetuate hegemonic moralities but instead to consciously combat prejudice through respectful and complex understandings of difference in representation and through fostering equality of opportunity to participate in museum experiences. Sandell (2011: 131) asserts, ‘socially purposeful museums very often seek to engender support for the human rights of different communities whose lived experience of disadvantage and marginalisation have often been reflected in their exclusion from, or misrepresentation within, existing museum narratives’. To be the compassionate and equitable institutions that new museum ethics imagines, institutions must be willing to accept the responsibility of activism. Assuming an activist approach does not imply that the resulting agenda is reductive. Instead, activism opens up debate in the museum around social justice issues, offering opportunities for museum professionals and audiences to re-examine their own and societal assumptions as well as alternative views. Museum activism presumes that such efforts will have an impact outside the museum – that they will contribute to a more just society (Marstine 2011: 13–14). This understanding of activism is anchored in Jacques Rancière’s (2010b) notion of dissensus as a disruption not only of power relationships but also of the assumptions that undergird them; dissensus, Rancière holds, has the capacity to address inequalities in a way that consensus never can. Fred Wilson, Matt Smith and Theaster Gates play a vital role in advancing activist social justice agendas, grounded in dissensus, within museums and galleries.

Truth, fiction and hybridity: Fred Wilson’s An Invisible Life As visitors wandered through the Queen Anne–style Haas-Lilienthal House museum in San Francisco during the summer of 1993, docents sporting official-looking plastic-coated badges delivered scripted tours that highlighted the architectural flourishes of the home and recounted facts and figures about the distinguished life of the deceased yet omnipresent 120-year-old former occupant, Baldwin Antinous Stein. According to docents, Stein was born in the Caribbean and of Jewish heritage. He was a talented linguist who travelled the world as a professional photographer, befriending luminaries from Eadweard Muybridge to Marcel Proust. Stein moved in with the Haas-Lilienthal family in 1906 after the San Francisco earthquake. But for those who looked and listened closely and thought critically about this experience, traces of Stein’s artistic and personal life registered doubts about the veracity of the story being told. Certain details delineated by the docents contradicted one another; the tour’s emphasis on ‘hidden’ architectural elements and ‘faux’ painting lent an aura of illusion. And from books, photographs, art, furniture and, tellingly, closets, a counter-narrative emerged that evoked Stein’s hybrid, homosexual and mixed-race identity and that prompted visitors to ask what was ‘real’ and what was fictive about the house museum and the man represented there. For instance, two portrait photographs in one frame, each capturing a pair of male sailors embracing lovingly, stood at the centre of a mantelpiece, among other assorted photographs of men of various races, ethnicities and twentieth-century moments. Behind

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FIGURE 3.3  Fred Wilson, An Invisible Life: A View into the World of a 120-Year-Old Man (detail), 1993, Capp Street Project, San Francisco, photography courtesy the artist and The Pace Gallery

the grouping hung a large 1887 Muybridge collotype of a male nude athlete in various stages of the shot put (Figure 3.3). A Greek statue of men wrestling dominated the parlour whilst homoerotically charged book titles including Love in Ancient Greece and Of Human Bondage lay scattered around the house, some with aging bookmarks annotated presciently with comments such as ‘a history denied, page 117’. From a living room chair, the hushed voice of a man could be heard asking, ‘Am I alone? Is it only me? Is there no one else?’ At the back of the bedroom closet, a partially obscured video screen projected three different pairs of eyes at set intervals (Figure 3.4). The eyes confronted the viewer, with their diverse racial and ethnic identities, as he or she peered in to take stock of flamboyant suits, hats and ties. The docents did not identify images of Stein among the photographs. Visitors could only speculate, based on their own life experience, who he might be (Crane 1997: 50–51; González 2008: 101–105; F. Wilson 2012a; 2012b). As visitors learned at the exit of the house, what they were apprehending was an installation by New York-based conceptual artist Fred Wilson, An Invisible Life: A View into the World of a 120-Year-Old Man, commissioned by the Capp Street Project, an experimental art centre in San Francisco (now run by the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts) with an artist-in-residency program commissioning site-specific work around the city. With its docents’ script and its elaborate staging fabricated by Wilson to intervene in the HaasLilienthal House, the installation was both performative and alluring; one audience member commented, ‘I was aware that Baldwin Stein was not real but I found myself slowly believing in him (or at least wanting to) because the props were so seductive’ (Capp Street Project Visitor Survey, 1993).

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FIGURE 3.4  Fred Wilson, An Invisible Life: A View into the World of a 120-Year-Old Man (detail), 1993, Capp Street Project, San Francisco, photography courtesy the artist and The Pace Gallery

Seduction, through juxtapositions of ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ which collapse the boundaries between them, was central to Wilson’s conception of the project. Wilson (1993) asserts in his artist’s statement for Capp Street: I was interested in the whole narrative aspect of someone’s house, in the difference between history as displayed by a museum and that actual history of an individual.

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I wanted Baldwin Antinous Stein to be an ordinary person, not a mythic figure or a hero, but one who had an extraordinary characteristic, something that would arouse your curiosity. . . . It’s an installation within an installation, a picture within a picture. Stein’s extraordinary characteristic – his age – makes the unspoken but implied other features of his biography – his mixed race and homosexuality – seem ordinary by comparison. Juxtaposed with the implausible fiction of 120 years of life, hybridity of identity becomes a truth that audiences more readily accept. Juxtapositions between truth and fiction are emblematic of Wilson’s approach to institutional critique. Fictions tell truths that museums do not ordinarily venture to articulate; and what museums uphold as truth collapses as fiction, thus repudiating institutional authority.Wilson’s juxtapositions help museum professionals and visitors alike acknowledge what is missing – or invisible, as the title of the installation conveys – from museum narratives, in this case, hybridity, and to imagine new, more socially just ways forward that make visible in museums and society voices previously relegated to the margins. Wilson is widely recognised for developing an approach to institutional critique in the 1990s that shines a light on the inequalities and injustices perpetuated by museums. His interventions at diverse institutions from the Seattle Art Museum to the Museum of World Culture, Gothenburg, have had a significant impact on artists and on the museum sector. As English (2007: 153) asserts: were it not for the success of Wilson’s interventions, institutional critique itself might not have turned so fully to face the nexus of problems that race difference raises in institutions of art. . . . Still another source of Wilson’s work’s value is the effect of its much-debated didacticism: for by enabling visitors to isolate and examine the rhetorics of marginalization, subordination, and exclusion that organize the museum, Wilson’s projects have let them see for themselves how the institution does and does not answer to the differences brought to it by visitors. Still, Wilson’s probing of hybridity remains largely unrecognised in the scholarship. For instance, English (2007: 153) characterises Wilson’s museum interventions as essentialising: The practice of reading specific museums for and then calling out for display repressed, native inscriptions of differences – especially those kept in place through scopic regimes, as race and gender are – risks promulgating such differences in a legibility, or clarity, that is both consistent with most extant institutional procedures and at odds with modes of living as different. I strongly disagree; whilst race is clearly important to Wilson, I hold that hybridity is pivotal to his engagement with the politics of difference and that this hybridity gives his work a power and radicality that deserves re-examination. In fact, I would suggest that the art historical treatment of Wilson’s work has suffered from the kind of ‘tactical segregation’ that English (2007: 11) abhors. As a gay man of African-American and Caribbean descent, Wilson draws from his own experience of hybrid identity to suggest a new way forward for museums. Nowhere is this clearer than in An Invisible Life: A View into the World of a 120-Year Old Man. ‘I intended it to be a counterpoint to the strict narrative of race in America’, Wilson remarks (2012b). From

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a museological perspective ‘An Invisible Life’ provides a useful and innovative model of grappling with diversity through hybridity as a methodological approach. It has been well documented that historic house museums have been slow to acknowledge the hidden histories of LGBT experience within their walls (Vanegas 2002; Lee 2011). The marriage of black, Caribbean and queer identity has seldom been represented in such spaces. With its large LGBT, African-American and immigrant populations, San Francisco may have been one of the only cities in the US where such a project could have taken place in the early 1990s. For Wilson it was a paradoxical place to develop the work, however, because of the contrast between its relatively ‘out’ LGBT communities where he could be himself and where he engaged in intellectually satisfying research on gay histories for the project and the unacknowledged LGBT identities within museum representation; as Wilson (2012b) explains it, he exploited this irony through the unresolved tensions between invisibility and visibility in the character of Stein. Despite the revolutionary potential of An Invisible Life, it remains obscured by other interventions in Wilson’s oeuvre such as Mining the Museum (Maryland Historical Society 1993) that provide equally compelling but perhaps more subtle constructions of hybrid identity, subtle enough that the art historical literature has overlooked them (Globus 2011). Wilson (2012b) notes that his concept of hybridity for the Capp Street Project emerges from his experience of being pegged as ‘the race man who makes installations about slavery’; as he developed Mining the Museum he kept thinking about what might never be known but was central to the identities of some of the figures in the works he included: homosexuality. Wilson (2012b) recounts that, after finishing Mining the Museum, he strategically turned down commissions from other historical museums that asked him to produce projects on slavery in favour of the art centre context of the Capp Street Project where he did not feel the constraints of predetermination. Wilson (2012b) states that hybridity of character ‘goes to the core of what he is and what he thinks of the world’; An Invisible Life was his attempt to ‘critique the Balkanisation of identity politics in the US – which did not represent my own understanding of self or others – by blurring as many boundaries as I could and keep ideas and people from being fixed’. Wilson (2012b) explains that this first and only direct foray into representing homosexual and racial identity had great resonance for him personally at the time of his Capp Street commission because: I still had one foot in the closet with family members that were then in denial; the persona of Stein became a way for me to think about how to negotiate the world with dignity but without revealing too much about myself. To date there is little acknowledgment of the implications for reconciliation between museums and communities that An Invisible Life may have brought to bear. For instance, no works or documentation from Wilson’s Capp Street Project installation were included in his 2001 retrospective (Berger 2001: 167).This omission led art critic John Perreault (2004) to speculate, ‘Is it that Wilson’s fictional Baldwin Antinous Stein had too many lovingly collected photographs of his male friends?’ And whilst the non-collecting Capp Street Project, with its focus on one-off site-specific initiatives, was in some ways perhaps not an institution equipped to see through the innovative museological implications of the installation, we might also speculate that the subversive nature of An Invisible Life required an experimental, risk-taking institution like Capp Street to allow it to develop. We can acknowledge that the lack of press coverage about An

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Invisible Life during the project’s duration – Wilson (2012b) chose not to speak with the media so as not to disclose the subtext of the installation – may have obscured it. But I see the hybridity in Wilson’s An Invisible Life as so radical for its time that the project has been metaphorically re-closeted. Looking afresh at the installation provides an opportunity to understand the counter-hegemonic potential of hybridity for museums and to recognise how artists have used hybridity as an agent of reconciliation. As Jennifer González (2008: 101) acknowledges,Wilson has asserted that he does not prioritise race over other categories of difference in his work. But he is committed to exploring the complex dynamic between perception, prejudice and museum connoisseurship. Wilson associates the prejudice he has encountered since childhood – prejudice based on others’ assessments of his appearance in relation to prevailing stereotypes of race, ethnicity and masculinity – with the processes of connoisseurship on which most art museums and galleries are founded and which, through the trope of ‘quality’, designate which works are canonical and which are not. Wilson (Berger and Wilson 2001: 37) explains: As a child, I felt misunderstood in all the contexts, outside the family, that I was in. People would see me and make up their own minds about who I was based on what I looked like. They created a history for me, based solely on my appearance. I relate this to museums.They are the ultimate environment where people mark objects and make up stories about them in their own minds, based on how they look. The stories suggested by Wilson’s An Invisible Life prompt viewers to question judgments made solely on appearances and to consider, instead, the complex realities of contemporary hybrid identities. To Wilson (quoted in Marstine 2012b: 42), such critique is at the heart of the agenda for social justice: I had a fire in my belly around issues of social justice because they directly affected me and because, as an outsider, I was able to see the rhetoric of the museum and the profession’s complete denial of the codes in place, codes that exclude, stereotype and reinforce hegemonic power structures. I wanted to explore how museums were talking about culture and what wasn’t being talked about. One thing that museums weren’t talking about in 1993 was hybridity as a configuration of diversity. An Invisible Life offered a way for museums, galleries and historic houses to move beyond defining diversity through singular categories and to invoke symbolic reparations for those who experience inequalities and injustices because of their hybrid identities. With An Invisible Life hybridity becomes Wilson’s methodological tool to spark transformative justice, what Bashir and Kymlicka (2008: 19) refer to as the recognition of new and previously unimagined ways of being. At the Haas-Lilienthal House, Stein served as an autobiographical spectre for Wilson of his own hybrid identity. Wilson fabricated the fictitious Stein as a ‘closeted’ gay persona of mixed race to make visible (and audible) hidden histories of sexual orientation, race, ethnicity and the hybridity that together they entail. The eyes (those of Wilson and his San Francisco artist friends Nayland Blake and Cliff Hengst) projecting cyclically from the closet, the whispered voices asking ‘am I alone?’, the bookmark noting ‘a history denied’ and the other signifiers of

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Stein’s hybrid embodiment manifested the tensions between absence and presence in the historic house – of Stein, of homosexuality and of colour. Stein’s alleged move to the home, just after the 1906 earthquake, suggests that the assertion of counter-hegemonic power through hybrid identity emerges out of destruction, the destruction of neat categories which do not represent contemporary realities. Stein’s remarkable lifespan and immateriality give hybridity a mythical status that speaks to Wilson’s own refusal to be split into two worlds – the gay and the black. In Stein, Wilson drew from the experiences of the unnamed semi-autobiographical protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s (1952) novel of racism Invisible Man (González 2008). But for Wilson the project of making visible what has been rendered invisible is equally about sexual orientation and a host of other categories commonly used to distinguish between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Wilson (Berger and Wilson 2001: 34) asserts: I produce projects around the issues of race when the issue jumps out at me. I don’t go looking for it. If it is not there . . . other issues rise to the surface, such as ecological issues, sexual and cultural difference, gender, class, politics, and even aesthetics. The underlying connection between all the works is my interest in perception. With the fictitious character’s name and age Wilson offered up clues to understanding the strength of hybrid identity. Stein’s surname alluded to art collector and writer Gertrude Stein who was raised in the San Francisco area and whose life and work challenged sexual norms (Corn and Latimer 2011). His given name referred to author and civil rights activist James Baldwin, whose novels and plays speak to inequalities of both race and sexual orientation (Kenan and Sickels 2005). The middle name, Antinous, invokes a young Bythinian man of the same name renowned as a sexual favourite of the Emperor Hadrian; when Hadrian deified the youth after the boy’s drowning, a cult developed that made images of Antinous emblematic of androgynous male beauty throughout the Roman Empire (Vout 2007: 52–135). Stein’s age of 120, according to Wilson (2012b), suggests a life roughly spanning from the birth of Oscar Wilde in 1854 through the activist years of Stonewall; Baldwin Antinous Stein’s biography ‘represents the history of homosexuality in the west’, Wilson (2012b) remarks. The re-examination of Wilson’s An Invisible Life leads to a reckoning with hybridity as a significant theme for artists to conceptualise diversity and to bring transformative justice to the museum. It also helps us to understand in new ways critical practice by other artists equally committed to issues of the multiplicity of identity but engaging it from their own distinct perspectives – ranging from queer theory to theories of hospitality. And though neither Matt Smith nor Theaster Gates would say unequivocally that their work falls under the art historical rubric of institutional critique, both are strongly shaped by Wilson’s use of juxtaposition to evoke hybrid identity.

Hybridity and the queer: Matt Smith’s Other Stories Brighton-based ceramics artist and freelance curator Matt Smith is well known in the UK for his interventions since 2006 interrogating hidden LGBT histories. In projects for Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and for historic homes run by the National Trust, for example, he ‘queers’ institutional collections and narratives. Smith’s early career experience working on

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exhibitions at the Science Museum of London and the British Film Institute led to his desire to critique heteronormative practice by introducing queer approaches. Smith has been heavily influenced by the work of Fred Wilson and states (2012a) that the hybrid identity of Baldwin Antinous Stein in An Invisible Life resonates strongly for him.‘I am struck by the discerning way that Wilson tackles the “double header” of race and sexuality’, Smith asserts (2012a). Recent scholars have argued that queer theory and hybridity have much in common as methodological approaches. Aristea Fotopoulou, for example, contends that both queer theory and hybridity destabilise binary categories of naming as they make visible normative narrative structures. Both, by Fotopoulou’s (2012) estimate, foster an understanding of identity as shifting and fluid. Fotopoulou (2012: 25) asserts: Reducing the concept of ‘queer’ to an identity category in LGBT studies heavily limits its political potential. The critical edge of queer theory lies in the framing of ‘queer’ as a site of ‘becoming’ and of constant questioning of norms. Fotopoulou (2012: 29) argues that hybridity can facilitate queer studies in the production of knowledge, histories and subversive practices. Mikko Tuhkanen (2005) is more unequivocal; she holds that queer theory is a theory of hybridity. Matt Smith has an implicit understanding of the entwined relationship between queer theory and hybridity. He sees the queer as a playful but subversive vehicle to explore a range of experiences of difference, and the complex and overlapping interrelationships among them, rather than exclusively LGBT experience. He views queering the museum not as an exclusionary tactic but an inclusive one that offers a way forward for museums committed to social justice. Smith (2011) notes that his familiarity with the codes developed to assert homosexual identity in a heteronormative society have helped him to identify and question other kinds of codes that distinguish between ‘us’ and ‘them’, including those of museological practice. Smith articulates his vision of hybridity through the queer with his 2012 intervention Other Stories: Queering the University Art Collection for the Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery at the University of Leeds. Overseen by the university’s library, the Burton Gallery boasts a strong collection of English modernism with works by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore, among others, and supplements its program of exhibitions with projects displaying papers from the library’s vast special collections. Other Stories was born of hybridity. As Curator of the Burton Gallery Layla Bloom (2012b) explains, a hybrid relationship between the library archives and the permanent collection inspired the project. The initiative was part of the University of Leeds’ campaign to mark the centennial of Vice Chancellor Sir Michael Sadler’s administration (1911–1923); Sadler had been a strong advocate for the arts and donated many of the gallery’s best-known works. The Burton Gallery chose to commemorate Sadler’s contributions through an exhibition displaying, alongside works from the permanent collection, the papers of Sadler’s close friend, poet, philosopher and utopian thinker Edward Carpenter, which are held by the university library. At the turn of the twentieth century, Carpenter was internationally known for advancing an unusual array of radical causes, including pacifism, gay liberation, communitarianism, mysticism, women’s rights and vegetarianism. In fact, his unique cluster of social justice concerns made him an early representative of hybridity (Gandhi 2006). Bloom (2012b) notes that, as an openly gay man who was not prosecuted for his beliefs and lifestyle, Carpenter made a fascinating model to refute common assumptions about gay and lesbian experience during the

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Victorian period. The Burton Gallery chose to use the papers as a starting point for a project that would resonate particularly during LGBT history month. As Bloom (2012b) recounts, the gallery quickly realised the project required a voice that could connect Carpenter’s ideas to the permanent collection. Bloom perceived this as a significant challenge, however, for she and the rest of the staff could not themselves make connections between the permanent collection and LGBT history. She had seen some of Smith’s earlier work and thought that he might be able to tell stories that would weave the two components together. But she had no idea of how he would use stories to interrogate the collection and the gallery. When asked whether Other Stories is representative of institutional critique, Smith conveys ambivalence, expressing greater comfort with the act of critique than with directing this critique at institutions. Smith (2012a) explains that he is fully invested in critiquing societal attitudes towards difference but that, in his opinion, museums are not nameless institutions but, instead, complex organisations made up of individuals, many of whom may well be trying to help make their workplaces more socially responsible. Smith (2012a) does acknowledge that one of the aims of his interventions is to empower museums to take on issues of affect and emotion, rather than simply clinging to the veil of objectivity; he also remarks that he finds it liberating to work as an artist at the museum, rather than as an in-house employee, for, as an outsider, albeit with insider knowledge, he is expected to voice opinions and he gives the museum agency to do so as well.Through affect and emotion, Smith works to facilitate reconciliations between museums and communities that have been marginalised by the binary and normative structures of representation. Smith (2012a) views this reconciliation process as particularly important for those whose sexuality does not conform to heteronormative categories. Smith (2012a) states ‘because there is little generational passing down of LGBT histories, most lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals have to develop a sense of these histories from scratch; museums have the potential to help fill this huge gap’. Smith approached the commission for the Burton Gallery by identifying modern and contemporary stories that would help him to link Carpenter with the permanent collection. Smith (2012a) explains that, when he began the project, he knew only vaguely of Carpenter but adds that his affinity for Carpenter grew as the intervention unfolded. Smith used papers and oral histories from the Brighton Ourstory: Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual History Archive, in the city of Brighton, as his source material. Smith (2012a) recounts that he activated the archive to examine and redress historical injustices in museums and to acknowledge identities and experiences that had been suppressed. Not unlike Fred Wilson in fabricating the persona of Baldwin Antinous Stein, Smith uses the queer to convey intimacies of hybridity, intimacies that museums and galleries typically avoid. At the Brighton Ourstory archive Smith identified a range of compelling stories of gay, lesbian and bisexual experience which could serve as source material for the intervention. Some of the narratives expressed guilt and shame; others were celebratory. Together, they represented queer experience as fluid, dynamic and diverse. Smith chose to honour what he considered the most resonant of these stories by choosing and embellishing an object for each that would somehow embed the emotion expressed by the author and, in juxtaposition with an object from the Burton Gallery’s permanent collection, create new understandings of the politics of difference. Smith’s strategy of pairings of his own work, each one inspired by a Brighton archive story, with a work from the Burton Gallery, was his way of making visible whilst destabilising normative museum narratives. As an intervention, the pairings show how the methodologies

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of hybridity and the queer can together facilitate the production of knowledge, histories and subversive practices. The title of the exhibition, Other Stories: Queering the University Art Collection, speaks to this aim. As he worked, Smith developed an anachronistic but, all the same, strong affinity for Carpenter as a mentor and inspiration. Smith wished to honour Carpenter’s ideals of social justice and hybrid talents as a polymath. And gradually Smith began to view Carpenter’s life as a corrective to the assumption that it has become progressively easier over time to identify as a sexual minority in the UK. Compared to Carpenter’s experience of relative liberty (which Smith admits differs from that of Oscar Wilde and others operating in the same context), the oppression of the 1950s and 1960s, when men were aggressively prosecuted for same-sex activity, seems particularly brutal. Homosexual sex was not legalised in the UK until 1967. Smith (2012a) came to understand the project as a way to help museums and visitors to ‘be braver about queering what might seem like straight histories and to explore more broadly the fluidity of non-normative sexualities’. The eight objects that Smith introduced to the exhibition were domestic in nature: a tea tray, a cake of soap, champagne glasses, a blanket, christening gowns, a photo frame, an address book and a coffee set. Smith intervened with this seemingly random, hybrid group of objects through inscribing each with excerpts from the texts of the Brighton archive stories. Words are embroidered, stencilled, engraved and incised. Bloom (2012b) notes that the beauty of the craftwork lends poignancy to the pairings. For Smith, the use of the domestic helped make the emotions of the narratives from Brighton Ourstories concrete and impossible not to engage. Inserted into the fine arts sphere of the gallery setting, the domestic also represented another level of hybridity for Smith. Smith’s pairings of domestic objects with particular works from the Burton Gallery’s permanent collection seem rather arbitrary at first glance – they are not reductive affirmations of an artist’s sexuality. In fact, he chooses not to create pairings with artists represented in the collection who are commonly recognised as gay, such as John Singer Sargent. Smith makes connections on a variety of levels from formal to iconographic. Some are linked through references to literature or film. None is straightforward or transparent. All the juxtapositions offer a hybrid multisensory engagement with the queer. In addition, the pairings are scattered throughout the gallery space rather than situated in one area, suggesting that the queer is omnipresent and unable to be contained. Bloom (2012b) remarks, ‘the queer is nowhere and everywhere at the same time’. In one pairing, Smith placed a 1950s-style Stratton Fonopad address book in front of Frank Lisle’s 1955 oil on canvas Bird Cage (Figure 3.5, right).The address book has a similar shape and colour to the background of the painting. On the address book, open to the page for names beginning with P–Q, Smith printed in capitals a text by Dennis, circa 1960, from Brighton Ourstory. Some lines are thick and blurry with ink whilst others are thin and faded, as if to suggest emotional anguish. It reads: I never kept the names and addresses of . . . friends written down, it was in my head but I never wrote it down on anything and I would certainly never dream of keeping a diary because I knew loads and loads and loads of queens who were arrested and then they’d go to their house and go through their rooms and they’d find a diary and they’d go through names in that and it could snowball, it was a terrifying thing.

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FIGURE 3.5  Matt Smith, Other Stories: Queering the University Art Collection (detail), Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds, 2012, copyright University of Leeds Art Collection/ Photo: Norman Taylor, 2012

I always thought it wasn’t safe to have affairs. One night stands with someone whose name you didn’t know and certainly whose address you didn’t know and they didn’t know yours was really a much better idea. Through the pairing Smith conveys the notion of entrapment.The law prevented Dennis from having a stable, loving relationship and imprisoned him, like a caged bird, into a succession of one-night stands. For Smith (2012a), the irony is haunting that, in an era before the advent of the AIDS virus, it was thought safer for gay men to have anonymous sex than a committed partnership. Smith’s juxtaposition refutes the stereotype that gay men are inherently sexually promiscuous. The juxtaposition also evokes Jean Poiret’s 1973 play La Cage aux Folles (and various adaptations) about a gay couple trying to conceal their lifestyle when the son of one of the men brings his fiancée and her conservative family to dinner. Though a comedy, the play acknowledges the struggles of secreting sexual orientation. Smith’s pairing of Trevor Bell’s Image of Blues (1960) with a large square cake of soap, etched with the words of Graham (1989) from Brighton Ourstory, speaks even more intimately of the isolation of living as a sexual minority, a year before Graham died of AIDS-related complications at the age of 41 (Figure 3.6, right). The cake of soap reads: I knew that it was almost make or break, you know, that I’d been feeling ill for the last five or six weeks, you know. I, had a temperature every night, sometimes during the day as well, er, had these different things wrong with me – the, the anal bleeding, the pain, the . . .

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FIGURE 3.6  Matt Smith, Other Stories: Queering the University Art Collection (detail), Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds, 2012, copyright University of Leeds Art Collection/ Photo: Norman Taylor, 2012

As Smith (2012a) explains, soap, with its ephemeral qualities, was an apt medium on many levels; it evoked the indignities of being cared for, the prejudices of those who repudiate homosexuality as abject and the vulnerabilities of being a gay man during the AIDS epidemic. The font of the text inscribed, resembling typed letters but with some irregular waxy edges and deep concavities, suggests the stumbling voice of Graham in his oral history recording. The soap functions almost like a marble tombstone. Smith (2012a) realised only after he made the piece that it made reference to the UK government AIDS awareness campaign of the 1990s that depicted icebergs cleaving and gravestones tumbling with the strapline ‘don’t die of ignorance’. Smith connects the cake of soap to Bell’s work through the title of the painting, Image of Blues, and the expressionistic blue brushstrokes. As Smith (2012a) remarks, Blue was also the name of Derek Jarman’s 1993 film, his last work before his death from AIDS-related causes. Jarman directed the film when he had become partially blind and represents his experience through a saturated blue screen as the backdrop to an audio track with voices of himself and others discussing his artistic vision. Smith’s pairing of a late nineteenth-century wooden tea tray with the Carpenter papers is, conversely, heartening (Figure 3.7, bottom right), reflecting Carpenter’s utopian sensibilities. Cut into the tray is a reminiscence by Carpenter of his budding sexuality ‘At the age of eight or nine, and long before distinct sexual feelings declared themselves, I felt a friendly attraction toward my own sex, and this developed after the age of puberty into a passionate sense of love’. Block letters cut out to make the inscription lay seemingly haphazardly beside the tray. Smith (2012a) admits that destroying a Victorian tea tray to make the intervention gave him

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FIGURE 3.7  Matt Smith, Other Stories: Queering the University Art Collection (detail), Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds, 2012 , copyright University of Leeds Art Collection/ Photo: Norman Taylor, 2012

some trepidation as he recognised that it was an act of aggression; but he concluded that anger over the erasure of history was justified and that the cutting of the tray was a fitting metaphor to express this sentiment. A second look at the jumble of alphabet pieces, however, reveals the phrase ‘I love george’ spelled out – a reference to Carpenter’s life partner George Merrill. This is a poetic way to suggest that the act of looking to the absences in the historical record – suggested by the voids in the tray – can reveal hidden wells of emotion and affect. As Bloom (2012b) declares, ‘In his quiet way, Smith shows us things that were always there’. Seen as a whole, Smith’s intervention – his eight pairings of works from the Leeds University collections with domestic objects he inscribed with texts from Brighton Ourstories – uses hybridity as a methodological tool to queer the gallery. Smith (2012c: 13) states, ‘Trying to reduce history into a single, unified narrative erases the lives of those who lived outside the mainstream and ignores that the past has always been a collection of complex, fragmented and contradictory stories.’ Instead, Other Stories functions like Whitney Davis’s (2011) concept of ‘queer family romance’. Smith (2012b) explains that he drew from Davis’s theoretical premise in articulating new ways of understanding the university collections. As Davis defines it, queer family romance is a psychoanalytic approach to understanding the queering of collections. According to Davis, collectors evoking queer family romance build on particular stylistic and iconographic resemblances to animate collections as a whole in ways that cannot be understood by partial views. Davis posits that queer family romance empowers individuals marginalised from normative family and societal structures because of their sexual orientation to construct alternative, more hybrid structures of belonging through collections. As Davis (2011: 323)

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describes, queer family romance ‘allowed queer significances (homosexual or not) to emerge into visibility even when particular artifacts . . . did not inherently possess a queer iconography or suggest a queer geneology’. Davis (2011: 325) characterises this visibility as an ‘extraconsanguinary mosaic’, a hybrid identity beyond that of blood lineage. Other Stories is Smith’s way of constructing an alternative, more hybrid structure of belonging or extraconsanguinary mosaic. In retrospect, Bloom, who had never before invited an artist to do an intervention, felt the project empowered her and her Gallery colleagues to think differently about the politics of representation. Bloom (2012b) says she was surprised when visitors responded that she’d really made a statement with the project as it didn’t feel like institutional critique; she (2012b) admits, though, that ‘It did overturn a lot of the things we do and the way we do them’. Bloom (2012a) states that she hopes the project ‘will encourage visitors to reflect on alternative and multiple possible interpretations’ of the works in the permanent collection. Smith (2012a) hopes that the project will also encourage museums and galleries to explore alternative labelling and interpretative strategies that foster a sense of ownership among previously marginalised communities.

Hybridity and hospitality: Theaster Gates’s To Speculate Darkly Hybridity through hospitality Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates embeds a culture of hospitality through his projects, hospitality based on notions of hybridity as a relational methodology with the potential to foster reconciliation. This notion of hospitality has radical foundations informed by the theories of Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and contemporary commentators. In his Of Hospitality (2000), Derrida deconstructs conventional assumptions about hospitality through an ethical perspective on French colonial attitudes towards immigration; Derrida problematises the self/other power dynamic embedded in the gesture of welcoming the ‘stranger’ whilst also opening up the conceptual possibility that unconditional hospitality – encounters between self and other in which the host accepts the ‘other’ on their own terms – can be imagined (O’Gorman 2006). Dikeç, Clark and Barnett have extended Derrida’s concept of unconditional hospitality to argue for the possibility of encounters that create new hybrid identities. They look for direction to Levinas. Dikeç, Clark and Barnett (2009: 6) assert: What Levinas reclaims and makes central . . . is the very receptiveness of one person to an Other, that capacity an embodied self has to take its inspiration from what it perceives as the needs of an other self, an other body. His hospitality, we might say, proceeds from that vertiginous moment when one feels bound to the other – the moment that makes possible the ever risky tipping together of unfamiliar lives. This reaching for unconditional hospitality has particular resonance for some institutions and artists attempting to create reconciliations with and among communities. For example, Lorenzo Fusi (2012: 11–13), curator of the 2012 Liverpool Biennial Unexpected Guest project, argues that new hybrid disciplines and approaches such as biopolitics are required to counteract the inhospitable post-9/11 fears of immigration that now define Europe. In the US at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, the 2012 exhibition Feast: Radical hospitality in contemporary art has become an impetus for introducing organisational

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change towards a theoretically informed and self-reflective position of hospitality (S. Smith 2013b). The project is not just a survey of contemporary art that engages issues of food and the rituals around it, although participatory elements of the works and associated events have created an environment where community engagement thrives. It has also become a vehicle for staff to rethink their own and institutional responsibilities towards visitors as guests – thus the ‘radical’ adjective in the exhibition title. Staff members from all departments take turns, for instance, offering a Serbian jam called slatko, to visitors walking in the door in Ana Prvacki’s piece The Greeting Committee (2011–ongoing) (Plate 8). In Serbian culture slatko serves as both a gesture of welcome and a means to ‘sweeten the tongue’, thus discouraging gossip (S. Smith 2013b: 12). Smart staff and their families made the slatko themselves from the artist’s mother’s recipe (Smart Museum of Art 2012). The idea is that performing hospitality for the project instils new ethical understandings of hospitality as it shapes all museum activity. Former Chief Curator Stephanie Smith (2012) explains: We have been thinking hard about what it means to be hospitable as an institution. We have recognised that we haven’t done as well as we could so we have made hospitality an institutional priority. One of the things that the show has really helped catalyse is a wider embrace of the idea of hospitality and the set of actions that would support it on the part of a very wide range of staff. The exhibition has shifted us out of normal patterns of behaviour which we want to extend beyond mere gesture. The show has helped solidify our sense of self as an institution. Key to this process is critiquing the conditional hospitality that art museums, which typically see themselves as global entities, often grant to the local and forging new hybrid relationships built on unconditional hospitality. Stephanie Smith notes of Feast programming: It’s been really important that all of these projects have included aspects of the local in terms of supporting really interesting practices that are happening here in Chicago.We’re thinking about knowledge exchange in and out of the museum and what it means to be a good neighbour. We’re thinking about how to embrace and provide resources for a wider group of creative people who haven’t necessarily been given the same advantages. Thinking locally through hospitality is a key strategy of the Smart’s social justice agenda towards equality and diversity. A featured artist of Feast,Theaster Gates was a pivotal figure to Smith in understanding what it means to be a good neighbour. A musician, ceramist and urban planner who calls himself a ‘cultural producer’ to encapsulate these hybrid talents, Gates is well known for performing acts of hospitality as a form of socially engaged practice. He is currently inaugural director of arts and public life at the University of Chicago. Beginning in 2006, after years of working as a planning bureaucrat, including a stint at the Chicago Transit Authority under Valerie Jarrett, now a senior advisor to President Barack Obama, Gates bought up derelict housing in Dorchester, a deprived area of South Side Chicago, not far from the university. There he has created a home, studio, artist-in-residence accommodations, music venue and archives with material gathered from shuttered stores and the old art history glass lantern slide collection from the University of Chicago. What is now known as the Dorchester Projects (Figure 3.8), an institution in itself, employs a neighbourhood crew as

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FIGURE 3.8 

Theaster Gates in front of Dorchester Projects, Chicago, 2012, photo by Sarah Pooley

its workforce. Gates exclaims, ‘It’s about knowing your neighbors and using whatever cultural capital you have to make the things around you better’ (quoted in Wolff 2010: 22). Gates recycles raw materials from the building sites into art which he then sells, reinvesting the proceeds back into Dorchester. The Dorchester Projects have been so successful that they have spawned similar projects in other failing Midwestern cities. Their success is built upon a model of hospitality which holds profound implications for museums. Gates’s Dorchester Projects have become a meeting ground for diverse groups to discuss issues of urgency over soul food suppers.These suppers, or what Gates calls ‘plate convergences’ (ViverosFaune 2012: 71), are a means not only to exchange ideas but, in the process, to actively perpetuate the formation of hybrid identities through gestures of hospitality. Gates explains, ‘That invitation to eat allows for people to cross racial lines and geographic lines that they normally don’t cross. And I’m excited about that.There is room and reason to traverse’ (quoted in Huang 2009). Gates’s (2012c) approach rejects the power imbalance between host and guest in conditional hospitality, moving instead towards an unconditional or ‘radical’ hospitality that binds parties together. Francesca Wilmott (2011) comments: All too often, community engagement produces an imbalanced relationship and an artist or an institution sees itself as aiding a deprived community. However, Gates freshly appraises the idea of community engagement, elevating it beyond victimization and making it part of a two-way relationship. For the exhibition of Feast Gates constructed Soul Food Starter Kit (2012), a wooden cabinet that he filled with Japanese-style ceramics ware he produced in collaboration with three Japanese potters. Describing this as a ‘mash-up’ or cultural collision of ideas, Gates (2012d) remarks that

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Soul Food Starter Kit allows people to explore ‘acts of generosity and the history of that generosity via food’. For the programming of Feast, Gates brought groups of 20 museum visitors, chosen by lottery, to his home for each of four dinners with selected artists and activists from his grassroots community network (Figure 3.9). Difficult but important conversations about urban failings and the possibilities for urban rejuvenation were facilitated by the rituals of eating and by the Black Monks of Mississippi, Gates’s innovative musical ensemble fusing jazz, gospel and Buddhist chanting (Gates 2012d). For Gates, hybridity proffered through radical hospitality brings greater and deeper hybridity or a boundedness among individuals and groups. To Speculate Darkly: Theaster Gates and Dave the Potter, commissioned by the Chipstone Foundation of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, demonstrates the potential for transformative justice that Gates’s radical hospitality offers. By orchestrating a mash-up or cultural collision of race and class in the Milwaukee Art Museum and its environs, To Speculate Darkly offers a glimpse of what unconditional hospitality might look like as a condition of hybridity or boundedness of one party to another. To Speculate Darkly was a complex performance of reconciliation that helped a museum and its long disenfranchised communities come together in a significant and impactful way. It was Gates’s first major museum project. It shows how Gates adapts elements from institutional critique to create socially engaged practice towards reconciliation. He understood that his work as an urban planner would help him to critique the institutional systems of museums. Gates (2012b) explains: I was trained as a bureaucrat. After studying urban planning I actually worked for a city administration.The gift of that is that you understand that things are built in systems and

FIGURE 3.9  Theaster Gates, The Art of Soul dinner, Dorchester Projects, Chicago, 2012, commissioned by the Smart Museum of Art for Feast: Radical hospitality in contemporary art, photo by Sara Pooley

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structures, and the better you understand the system and structure the better you can manipulate the system and structure. Gates (2012b) notes that he has learned many lessons from Fred Wilson’s interventions. Emblematic of his connection to institutional critique is the window at the Dorchester Projects salvaged from a museum and that reads backwards ‘Museum Hours 9 to 5’ (Cromidas 2011). But Gates’s interest in looking beyond the frame of the museum to its dynamic with other kinds of institutions and his socially engaged, performative mode of creating reconciliations indicate that he is very much ensconced in social practice. Gates says his approach to reconciliation is shaped by his experiences as a graduate student in South Africa, where he witnessed the restorative justice process led by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Gates (2012b) recounts: The best part of the reconciliation project had to do with listening. What I think felt transformative was that a person could be asked a question, answer the question, and people sit there listening, shocked, humiliated, horrified. When one listens to truth, boy it don’t always sound good. Whilst in Cape Town and Johannesburg, Gates absorbed the processes of cosmopolitanism taking shape that acknowledged cultural hybridity. In his projects for museums, Gates thinks of himself as a ‘curator of new institutional engagements’ (quoted in Warner 2009) based on cultural hybridity. The institutional engagement Gates curated for Chipstone began with an estrangement. The Chipstone Foundation, established in 1965 by Stanley and Polly Stone, boasts among the top collections of early American decorative arts. Pieces of the collection sit in the suburban house where the Stone family lived. But Chipstone also shares gallery space with the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM) downtown, known for its sleek 2001 Santiago Calatrava pavilion shaped like a bird in flight (Figure 3.10). The structure contains a movable sunshade which opens to a wingspan of 217 feet during the day, folding over the pavilion at night and in bad weather. Situated on the shore of Lake Michigan, the building is monumental, isolated and far from public transportation. A long stark bridge functions ironically to separate the museum from the city centre, rather than unite them. Jonathan Prown, Chipstone’s director, has tried to create an environment that challenges the isolation of the MAM building. He prioritises museological innovation which, Prown (2012) argues, is essential to the display of decorative arts which is too often exhibited in a chronological narrative or as context for ‘fine arts’ and thus engaging primarily to specialists. Prown is the son of Jules Prown, pioneer of American material culture studies at Yale University; the elder Prown developed what is known as the Prownian method (Jules Prown 2002) of interrogating objects, an approach that encourages letting go of prior assumptions and forming an intimate bond with the object as the researcher describes, deduces, speculates and then finally places the object in historical context. At Chipstone Jon Prown leverages his father’s method to reveal the full sculptural essence of decorative arts. He also commissions artists to help create new connections and understandings between the artifacts and their diverse publics. Emerging from this is a notion of self-interrogation about all that they do. Ethan Lasser, Curator at Chipstone from 2007–2012 and now associate curator of American art at Harvard University Art Museums, was trained at Yale in the Prownian method.When Jon

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FIGURE 3.10 

Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee,Wisconsin, 2002, photo credit:Timothy Hursley

Prown gave him carte blanche to commission artists to help reinterpret the collections, Lasser proceeded to identify artists that could mine the materiality of the collections in ways that would facilitate social engagement. Lasser himself is interested in curating as socially engaged practice. The city of Milwaukee, in America’s industrial ‘rust belt’, offered particular challenges and opportunities to an artist and curator committed to critical practice. The population of Milwaukee’s centre and northwest are 50–100 per cent African-American. Centre-city Milwaukee has been devastated by generations of deprivation and is bolstered by its black churches. The populations of the suburbs are between 2.5–10 per cent African-American and the surrounding counties between 2.5 and 0 per cent African-American (Lubin and Jenkins 2011). A white working class that has endured years of layoffs dominates the outskirts. The most prominent employer is Kohler Company, a porcelain manufacturer best known for its plumbing products, where workers went on strike in 2010 for wage and pension concerns. When in early 2010 Chipstone received a long-term loan of an impressive 1858 stoneware vessel made by the Edgefield, South Carolina, potter and enslaved individual known as Dave the Potter or Dave Drake (Figure 3.11), they commissioned rising star Theaster Gates to interpret the work in a way that would resonate to these diverse audiences. Dave had worked at a pottery factory belonging to his ‘master’, Lewis Miles. Between 1834 and 1862, Dave produced over 100 pots for storing rations that show both physical strength and artistic

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FIGURE 3.11 

Dave Drake, Storage Jar, Lewis Miles Pottery, 1858, alkaline-glazed stoneware. H 25 5/8”, courtesy Arthur Goldberg, photo credit: Gavin Ashworth, private collection on loan to the Chipstone Foundation, originally published in Ceramics in America, 2006. ‘Beneath his Magic Touch. The Dated Vessels of the African-American Slave Potter Dave’ by Arthur F. Goldberg and James P.Witkowski

vision (Goldberg and Witkowski 2006; Lasser 2010: 53). Despite the dearth of surviving material culture created by or belonging to American slaves, a group of ceramics by Dave remains extant. Even more astonishing is that Dave signed and dated many of these pots and inscribed short verses upon them.The piece on long-term loan to the Chipstone is inscribed with the couplet: ‘When you fill this jar with pork or Beef / Scot will be there to get a peace. Dave’ (Figure 3.12). Other pots by Dave reveal a similar use of couplets that challenge laws and cultural codes intended to keep the enslaved voiceless.These verses include ‘Dave belongs to Mr Miles / Wher the Oven Bakes and the Pot Biles’; ‘I made this Jar all for Cash / Though its called Lucre Trash’; ‘I – made this Jar all of cross / If you don’t repent, you will be lost.’ Together, the couplets transgress boundaries between the powerful and powerless in a way that continues to resonate today. Lasser (2012b) commissioned Gates to create a project around the Dave vessel because he imagined that Gates ‘could make that pot sing’. Thus, from the start, the project was defined as

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FIGURE 3.12 

Dave Drake, Storage Jar (detail), Lewis Miles Pottery, 1858, alkaline-glazed stoneware. H 25 5/8” (detail), courtesy Arthur Goldberg, photo credit: Gavin Ashworth, private collection on loan to the Chipstone Foundation, originally published in Ceramics in America, 2006. ‘Beneath his Magic Touch. The Dated Vessels of the African-American Slave Potter Dave’ by Arthur F. Goldberg and James P. Witkowski

a performative conjoining of Theaster and Dave – using the past to address present concerns. What Lasser hadn’t envisaged is that this process would take both artist and curator out of their comfort zones on a journey to conjoin the segregated communities of Milwaukee through the intersections between Dave’s pot and their own lives. Gates (2012b) recounts: Chipstone in the past had a sense that contemporary artists were a tool to . . . talk about old things. I tried to set a task that was much greater than that. What I provided was a way to open up the pot so that it became a conversation about the value of labor and craft production and the history of slave economies. I asked how it could expand our sense of humanity, not just sympathy with history.What worked really well about Chipstone is that they admitted from the beginning that they were entering new territory. The Milwaukee Art Museum was more cautious. Chipstone has to clear its MAM-based projects with the MAM exhibition committee and board of trustees. Usually this is a perfunctory process but, in this case, as Jonathan Prown reports, though the MAM wasn’t hostile, they did want to sit down and talk through the potential implications of the project. Prown (2012) notes: They were aware of the potential reception of the project and its being political in a way that the Museum typically wasn’t. Gates’ engagement of race and class issues and the curatorial approach we took there were pretty far removed from their normative practice.This show tested conventional museum sensibilities. And Theaster loves being the provocateur. The MAM eventually did give its approval but did not fully buy in to the project to the extent that Gates (2012b) had hoped. Nonetheless, almost 150 years after the end of slavery in the US, Gates came to reify Dave’s voice. Gates had studied ceramics in Japan where he learned traditional techniques and aesthetics. In the US, however, he found few other African-Americans working in this medium.When he encountered Dave the Potter, he felt a special kinship; he found Dave’s technical skills heroic and his poems musical; and gradually Gates began to embody Dave. Gates approached the vessel, the museum and the communities of Milwaukee by modelling his brand of radical hospitality. Through his own interpretation of hybridity, or what he calls

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‘temple swapping’, Gates mined the potential of Dave for reconciliation.Viveros-Faune (2012: 68) declares: He would, in the guise of an artist-curator-activist, serve different kinds of communities as an artistic ‘bridge’. Of the many bridges Gates has laid over the years, few prove as nervy or emblematic as those he has spanned between the black church and the contemporary museum. Gates’s temple swapping proved quite a challenge to Chipstone and the Milwaukee Art Museum. Gates and Lasser began by meeting with communities all over Milwaukee. These talks helped them to conceive a three-month exhibition, two years of programming and a longterm installation of the pot all built on the concept of unconditional or radical hospitality. Resistant to the exhibition machine that museums can become, Gates insisted on building into the project sustained investment in engagement, institutional self-reflection and possibilities for organisational change. The project sent Lasser to the black churches of Milwaukee to recruit a choir. Lasser (2010: 55) recounts, ‘We bypassed the venues I knew best. Gates wanted to hit the kind of ground that curators rarely cover’. It sent Gates to Kohler Manufacturing for a three-month residency to learn about modes of workers’ ceramic production (Figure 3.13). Lasser (2010: 56) explains: The factory had rendered these men anonymous, but the artist saw beyond the veil of the factory system. For him, the minds and hands behind the production of small machine parts and clay molds were as creative as the soaring voices of Mt. Zion [Baptist Church].

FIGURE 3.13  Theaster Gates working in the Kohler Pottery during his Kohler Arts/Industry residency, 2010, photo courtesy of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center

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The project sent members of both the black and white communities to the Milwaukee Art Museum. Jon Prown (2012) observes, ‘The object became a conversation in which we found ourselves doing less talking and more listening’. Gates made public these processes of reconciliation through the exhibition and programming which, in their own right, advance the reconciliation process between the museum and its communities. Gates hoped to inspire self-reflective thinking towards unconditional hospitality at the Milwaukee Art Museum; he imagined the MAM rethinking what it might mean to play ‘host’ to underserved communities in ways that move beyond fulfilling inclusion statistics required by funders. And whilst he recognised the difficulties of such a transformation, Gates (2012a) believed that the relevance of the project for all kinds of communities could persuade the MAM of its importance: Radical Hospitality is simply having intentionality about the way in which traditional constructs of invitation and generosity are shared. In the case of the Milwaukee Art Museum, their engagement with the Black Community of Milwaukee was rather low as was their initial interest and continued interest in my work. It was clear to me that their engagement at all is, like many museums, political, and leads to resources for other programming and departments by leveraging their said commitment to underserved communities. The work I tried to tease out with Chipstone was work that would allow for some direct engagement with many different communities, including the amazing work force at Kohler Manufacturing Corporation. The work actually didn’t feel radical at all; it seemed quite reasonable that people from lots of different economic and social strata should see a body of work about an enslaved potter from the middle 1800’s who has become famous 170 years later by working his ass off against the odds. Sounds like many people’s American story. As a gestural performance of this hospitality, Gates required that the Milwaukee Art Museum distribute free memberships to the choir that Lasser recruited. Gates (2012b) asserts: We can do good things even though we don’t believe in them and that is a fine start; those 200 memberships for the cost of printing a paper card show it doesn’t cost anything to brown your museum. To extend an invitation is actually quite a free gesture. Gates’s choreography of such gestures reflects his belief that self-conscious acts of conditional hospitality have the transformative potential to lead eventually to unconditional hospitality.

To Speculate Darkly as radical hospitality The exhibition itself was intimate and sonorous; poetry and song were Gates’s tools to make hybrid the creative forces of Milwaukee’s churches, factories and museums. The title, To Speculate Darkly, aptly captures Gates’s approach. For Gates, the verb ‘speculate’ was key to the project because connecting to Dave, or almost any enslaved individual, involves postulating as documentation is thin. But, as Gates sees it, the fiction he created around Dave is truer than the non-fiction account published by a descendent of Dave’s slave master which is laced with self-justifying rhetoric (Todd 2009). Gates found Wilson’s use

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of fiction to convey uneasy truths, as in Baldwin Antinous Stein, a helpful model. Gates (2012b) notes: I probably think about Fred [Wilson] for a lot of reasons. I do think there is a way in which people who have experienced trauma make up fictions as a way of coping with those histories; they perform those histories intentionally or unintentionally; they reproduce them. The word ‘darkly’ refers both to forgotten African-American histories and to the difficult work of mining the past for insights to present adversities. Gates (2012b) asserts,‘If I sing Dave’s name loud enough and repeatedly enough, people won’t forget it. I am leveraging that big white space and loading it with something that is so fucking absolutely unapologetically black’. Gates thus facilitates radical hospitality at the Milwaukee Art Museum. In the galleries, a long narrow hallway led to Dave’s storage jar (Figure 3.14). Gates blanketed the hallway ceiling with glass lantern slides from his collection representing the canon of ceramics. This canon is Gates’s revision of the one he was taught, as it leads to Dave’s pot and makes a connection that the younger Gates had yearned for to African-American ceramics production. Dave’s storage jar is the centrepiece of a gallery containing a range of works by Gates that respond to the pot and to lingering questions of authenticity, identity and hybridity. This includes several ink drawings that attest to Gates’s training in Japan. For instance, in Untitled (Bitch, I Made this Pot) (Figure 3.15), quick calligraphic style, asymmetry and use of empty space

Installation view of the exhibition To Speculate Darkly: Theaster Gates and Dave the Potter, Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, 2010, curated by Ethan Lasser, Chipstone Foundation, photo credit: John R. Glembin

FIGURE 3.14 

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Theaster Gates, Untitled (Bitch, I Made this Pot), 2010, Ink on paper, 24 2 x 30 in., courtesy of Kavi Gupta, Chicago/Berlin

FIGURE 3.15 

are countered by defiant stencilled phrases that defy any doubts that an African-American man today could craft vases inspired by Japanese tradition or that an enslaved individual of the American South could have crafted the impressive storage jar and the poetry inscribed upon it. Gates’s ironic signature, ‘product’ on the lower right of the drawing, speaks to the question of branding and its impact in objectification – the branding of artists, consumer culture, and slaves. A seemingly elegant vase of Gates’s own making, juxtaposed to Dave’s pot, further interrogates authenticity, identity and hybridity. Titled The Apostle, it bears witness to Dave’s work. Made of composite gold on plaster, The Apostle is a cast of a clay original. Gates (2012a) remarks, ‘It was important for me to use all of the other minor materials associated with clay production to make the work itself ’. The vase is etched in gold leaf with lines inspired by Dave’s couplets and echoing their subversive character. It reads, ‘A plaster cast Makes money fast’ – and underneath, ‘Signature Here:’. In the final gallery, Gates brings together groups that represent the segregated populations of Milwaukee (Plate 9). On the right is a video of the gospel choir Lasser recruited performing hymns Gates wrote with lyrics inspired by Dave’s couplet. On the left is a wall of Kohler sinks Gates wired for sound. The voices of the choir pour out from the drain holes of the ceramic speakers, each of which Gates labels with racially explosive digital product codes, for instance Whyte Painting (NGGRWR0003) (Figure 3.16). In a sketch of the speakers Gates drew whilst at Kohler he signed both his name and the name of the Kohler worker who helped him, Mitch Klarkowski. The drawing, titled Dave Amplified, indicates the words of one of the hymns (Figure 3.17): ‘These speakers are made for thumping’, it reads. The term ‘thumping’ refers to the

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Theaster Gates, Whyte Painting (NGGRWR0003), 2010, porcelain, composite gold, wood. 26 × 32 × 5 in., courtesy of Kavi Gupta, Chicago/Berlin

FIGURE 3.16 

sound that preachers make when they pound the pulpit for emphasis. Gates metaphorically pounds the pulpit in the museum – inducing temple swapping as transformational justice. The hymns speak to the disempowerment of the white laborers of Kohler, to the inhumanity of enslavement and the injustices that it perpetuates for generations. Song speaks to the hybridity of Dave and Theaster, the black and the white communities. The gallery becomes a site for reconciliation which provoked Lasser (2012b) to ask, ‘How had I ignored the enslaved hands in the production of objects? And what else was I ignoring that could help reconcile museums and communities?’ The opening night of the exhibition made Gates’s radical hospitality explicit. The 200-member gospel choir performed live in the atrium of the museum singing a libretto by Dave and Gates. ‘These speakers were made for thumping,’ they sang (Chipstone Foundation 2010). And as they walked across the bridge of the museum in a processional, led by Gates to signal the opening of the exhibition (Plate 10), it was clear that something had changed. Lasser (2012b) asserts: He showed me the value of ‘thinking locally’. We are trained to be part of this international academic community and for him it was all about the assets like the black church that were at your doorstep and how they might inform a historical reading of an object. Those are two things that I have really taken with me – thinking about your responsibilities to your community but also what it can offer you. He made a lot of things plain both about my thinking and about museums’ thinking that we wouldn’t have seen on our own and that are often hard to take.

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FIGURE 3.17  Work produced as part of Theaster Gates Jr.’s Kohler Arts/Industry residency, 2010, photo courtesy of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center

This new boundedness between the Chipstone and its communities shows the efficacy of Gates’s radical hospitality. Two years of poetry workshop in the schools and community centres of Milwaukee analysing Dave’s couplets and asking participants to write and inscribe their own verse on clay tablets extended the process of reconciliation (Lasser 2012a). Anticipating the programming as impetus to organisational change, Gates (2012b) warned, ‘I am going to give you this gift and then you guys have to see it through’. Today at the Chipstone Foundation in the Milwaukee Art Museum, Dave’s pot takes centre stage (Figure 3.18). Writing on the walls to the left and right of the vessel spells out Dave’s couplet. Blue script above the vessel projects thousands of couplets written by Milwaukeeans in response to Dave’s poetry. Visitors can add their own with the tablet computer in front of the pot. The technology makes visible the ongoing process of reconciliation between Chipstone and its diverse communities and among these communities themselves. Symbolic transformative justice occurs through the fusion of texts by Dave, Theaster and Milwaukee’s diverse communities.

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FIGURE 3.18  Installation view from The Dave Project, organised by the Chipstone Foundation in collaboration with the Milwaukee Art Museum, August 2010–ongoing, photo credit: John R. Glembin

The case study of To Speculate Darkly offers important lessons for understanding radical hospitality; through Gates’s project, Chipstone enacted unconditional hospitality as a means of fostering hybridity or relational boundedness towards reconciliation. Wisconsin artist Dan Wang (2010: 64) remarks: With this project, the Chipstone Foundation announces to the world that it understands its place in a history of cultural dominance and now decline, and that its continued significance will be fostered, ironically, through its own deconstruction and critique. Courageous, but also the only option. And though the Milwaukee Art Museum proceeded tentatively with the project, audience research shows that To Speculate Darkly drew more African-American visitors (23 per cent) than other exhibitions and events (9 per cent) (Milwaukee Art Museum 2010: 7). Many visitors commented that it offered a much-needed corrective to hegemonic museum narratives. One (Milwaukee Art Museum 2010: 9–10), for instance, expressed hope that the project could be a model of successful diversity initiatives for other museums: On a recent visit to the Art Institute in Chicago, I was bothered by the art and history not represented; while I noticed most of the patrons were of European descent viewing European-inspired art, the gallery attendants/workers were nearly all working-class African Americans. I did not see art at the Art Institute that represented these workers. It was

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a large disconnect that bothered me so much, I left. ‘To Speculate Darkly’ is a meaningful and timely piece. I hope to see it in other major art museums. As Gates (2012b) notes, the MAM benefitted despite their initial fears. Gates (2012b) also recognises the ideological challenges the project brought to the MAM: ‘The thing that I want to do, it has to be so resonant that they are willing to tolerate the tensions that will rub up. If we can get through this open-heart surgery we’ll all be better’. In the end Gates, like Fred Wilson and Matt Smith, understands the urgency of hybridity because he is asserting his personal hybrid identity as he negotiates the distinct codes of the many different contexts in which he operates. Gates (2012b) resists being a chameleon despite conflicting expectations upon him. ‘It is like having an all-weather coat for sun, rain and snow’, he says. ‘I feel like I am finally speaking one language. I am constantly code-shifting but at the core, the message is the same’. This embrace of hybridity over the singularity of identity is aptly captured by Zadie Smith (2009) in her essay ‘Speaking in Tongues’: Black reality has diversified. It’s black people who talk like me, and black people who talk like L’il Wayne. It’s black conservatives and black liberals, black sportsmen and black lawyers, black computer technicians and black ballet dancers and black truck drivers and black presidents.We’re all black, and we all love to be black, and we all sing from our own hymn sheet. We’re all surely black people, but we may be finally approaching a point of human history where you can’t talk up or down to us anymore, but only to us. He’s talking down to white people – how curious it sounds the other way round! In order to say such a thing one would have to think collectively of white people, as a people of one mind who speak with one voice – a thought experiment in which we have no practice. But it’s worth trying. It’s only when you play the record backward that you hear the secret message. Through temple swapping, Theaster Gates plays the record backward.

Hybridity and superhybridity This chapter argues that hybridity is a dynamic methodological approach useful to museums and galleries committed to equality, social justice and cultural rights. Dewdney, Dibosa and Walsh (2012: 121) argue for such an approach: It is practically possible to avoid the assimilationist closure (multicultural normalisation) and intrinsic failure that comes with the moral and reforming museum, just as much as it is possible to avoid the reproduction of cultural elitism which comes with attempts to shore up aesthetic modernism. Hybridity is a twenty-first-century ethics strategy that facilitates reconciliation between museums and communities. Moreover, Gates’s notion of hybridity as ‘temple swapping’ is a testament to the value of re-engaging and re-appraising influential theoretical concepts as they continue to evolve.

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Together,Wilson’s An Invisible Life, Smith’s Other Stories and Gates’s To Speculate Darkly show that artists have a significant role to play in creating reconciliation through shifting postcolonial notions of hybridity. Such work may be difficult but it is central to the project of social justice. It supports the development of activist museums, as defined by Sandell (2012: 212) ‘that do not simply reflect and reinforce the consensus but actively seek to build public and political support for more progressive human rights values’. Through critical practice Capp Street Project, the Burton Gallery at the University of Leeds and the Chipstone Foundation are all invested in advancing progressive human rights values. Hybridity as a construct to grapple with diversity will not fade from view anytime soon. The immediacy of the challenge is captured by the phenomenon of super-hybridity, a term recently brought to light and probed by art critic Jörg Heiser and collaborators in the international arts periodical Frieze (Heiser 2010: Heiser et al. 2010). In contrast to Homi Bhabha’s 1990’s mobilising of hybridity to emphasise multiple subject positions within a postcolonial political framework, Heiser and his colleagues propose super-hybridity as a means to negotiate twenty-first-century artistic diversity through digitality and through a generation of young people whose lived experience is hybridity and who ask what comes next (Heiser et al. 2010). As Heiser (2010) asserts, super-hybridity emerges from the Internet (that a new generation of artists has grown up with) and the antagonistic, ravenous dynamism of globalized capitalism but also . . . people’s desire to macerate the limits of oppressive traditions, censorship, xenophobia and perception itself. . . . [Superhybridity] has moved beyond the point where it’s about a fixed set of cultural genealogies and instead has turned into a kind of computational aggregate of multiple influences and sources. Understanding the shifting dynamics of hybridity through the cultural collisions of Wilson, Smith and Gates seems all the more relevant with super-hybridity in our midst.

4 PLATFORMS Negotiating and renegotiating the terms of democracy

Platforms, parallels and doppelgänger Two large anodised aluminium frames, or platforms, of equal size hang from the ceiling in Stockholm’s Moderna Museet (Plate 11). Suspended by cables, they hover parallel to the floor, one slightly higher than the other. Each frame contains sheets of Plexiglas and planks of wood, held together by an aluminium grid. An encounter with this work, Liam Gillick’s Twinned Renegotiation Platforms (1998), creates constantly shifting perspectives. As the viewer approaches the platforms, they are required to look up in order to assimilate Gillick’s formal language. But comprehension is fleeting, as the act of looking up creates a ‘blind spot’ in which the whole can never been taken in. Shifting mirror effects and a diffusion of light and shadow, transparency and opacity, enhance the indeterminate nature of the piece. Gillick (2002: 82) explains: There is something quite apparent about the idea of working with overhead panels and platforms as these tend to designate space. They withdraw from your eye line when you are closest to them, so that they float overhead while projecting a subtle presence that alters the colour of shadows. They operate quite delicately with important residual effects. For Gillick, processes of engagement activate the work. Gillick’s twinning of the platforms complicates perception; when the visitor stands beneath one platform, their reflection is refracted into the other. The platforms function as two independent but parallel structures that together create what Gillick calls ‘thought space’ (Gillick and Spira 2002: 18), a built environment that has the potential to generate new insight. In addition this doubling elicits a social proposal; it invites viewers to turn away from the object and engage in discourse. The platforms become a backdrop or social sculpture defined by human relations. The viewer’s frame of reference determines their experience. Along with installations such as Twinned Renegotiation Platforms, Gillick works across a wide range of genres, including fiction, film, manifestoes, criticism, curating and graphic design, and has also produced functional designs for corporations, government and museums. None of

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these other projects help explain the installations but exist in parallel to them without linear or serial development. In fact, Gillick’s work conveys a theoretical complexity that is not easily resolved. Gillick (2012) notes: I am often pointing towards things rather than enacting them, or when I do deploy something, I then step away completely and don’t try to direct it; I am laying something out for others to take responsibility for and if the work has any traction, this is where it comes from. Gillick (2008: 325) reasons that easy resolution merely reinforces the status quo; ‘closure is a denial of critical potential’, he asserts. Much of Gillick’s output does, however, share a theoretically informed vocabulary that is operative in Twinned Renegotiation Platforms. Chapter 4 explores interventions through which artists interrogate the platform as a device that has the capacity to generate and test out new forms of democracy both in the gallery and in the wider public sphere. It holds that an ongoing process of negotiating and renegotiating the terms of democracy – for museums and for civil society – is a key strand of critical practice in contemporary art and central to processes of reconciliation between museums and communities. My premise is that inclusivity and participation in and of themselves do not create the conditions for reconciliation between museums and communities and need to be problematised to consider who is being included and on what terms. I look to interventions that interrogate the many facets and implications of democracy for creating equality in museums and the world and demonstrate that these projects gather their strength by seeing museums as part of the world. Gillick adapts for his built environments a high modernist language of corporate offices and meeting rooms that the titles of the projects – dominated by terms such as ‘conference’, ‘think tank’, ‘discussion’ and ‘negotiation’ – reinforce. Twinned Renegotiation Platforms, for instance, at first glance resembles the dropped ceilings endemic to modern commercial buildings and the word ‘renegotiation’ in the title references the change management jargon of corporate leadership and consultants. Gillick’s installations also draw upon the sleek aesthetics of minimalism but are distinct in that Gillick’s works seek a response from viewers. Disjuncture through an array of strategies, including Gillick’s choice of materials and titles and use of mirror imagery, precludes a straightforward interpretation. In Twinned Renegotiation Platforms Gillick achieves this through the juxtaposition of wood with the highly polished manufactured surfaces of aluminium and Plexiglas, through semantic twists that refuse narrative clarity and through the doubling perspectives of the physical encounter. Gillick’s signature in felt pen on the aluminium adds another ironic flourish (Erikkson 2014). These ruptures provoke a set of questions:What are the platforms that were negotiated? Why did earlier negotiations fail? How can the platforms be renegotiated? Who is doing the negotiation? And why is the work framed by a series of doppelgänger? Understanding the significance of parallel – or doubling – structures in Gillick’s oeuvre is key to addressing the last of these questions. For Gillick parallel structures – among his textbased, film and material constructions, within an individual project such as Twinned Renegotiation Platforms, and between his work and the corporate world – are a powerful means to evoke the complexity and dynamism of the contemporary ethical terrain and, in the process, to challenge the reductive and hierarchal nature of binary thinking (Aguirre 2009: 12). As Derrida (2004: 38–39) argues, the binary oppositions such as white/black and male/female that have shaped modern Western thought create power inequalities in which one of the two terms dominates

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the other. Parallels, in contrast, are based on likenesses and on analogous relations. By insisting upon parallel rather than binary terms, Gillick refutes oppositional discourse and its associated hierarchies, thus generating possibilities for new relations that acknowledge the political and social complexities of contemporary society. Gillick (quoted in Slyce 2009: 2) argues: On an idealistic level, the only way you can use art is as a fragmented mirror of the complexity of contemporary society and you try to produce a system of art production that is just as multifaceted and potentially misleading, based on a series of parallels. Parallels are a means for Gillick to politicise aesthetics. Through parallels Gillick (2003) creates what he calls ‘functional utopias’ or environments that open up possibilities for reconciliation on many different levels. Whilst they are performative, these spaces do not prescribe the terms of engagement. Peio Aguirre (2009: 14) acknowledges: Gillick is not so naïve as to believe that a structure of aluminium and Plexiglas is capable of ‘signifying’ negotiation, delay, discussion, disappointment, resignation and so forth via its very materiality. Rather, his forms play a role, they have a function, becoming bearers of meaning through additional accumulation over time, detour, indirect relations and through the re-writing of former historical forms [such as minimalism]. Gillick’s built environments ask us, instead, to explore the tensions between thought and action that define ethics. In fact, Gillick (2003) defines his primary aim as ethical in nature, ‘scooping up and re-spreading a layer of ethical traces from a sequence of suppressed attempts to actually create a better place and actually have a better time’. Twinned Renegotiation Platforms thus functions to open up possibilities for new, more ethically engaged social relations. Due in large part to the inclusion of Gillick’s work in Nicolas Bourriaud’s influential study Relational Aesthetics, Gillick has long been among those artists most closely associated with relational art. Bourriaud (1998: 51) discusses Gillick as representative of a milieu of artists coming to maturity in the 1990s who ‘find common ground around the priority they give to the space of human relations in the conception and distribution of their works’. This does not mean, however, that Gillick’s main concern lies with participation. In fact, Gillick rejects participation as an objective, arguing that it instrumentalises artistic practice by focusing on reception over the conditions of production. Gillick (2012) remarks: I am very much interested in the institution itself and the functioning of art. But if people read my work as attempting to engage the viewer in a participatory moment, then clearly it fails. I am suspicious of the idea that just by engaging the public, whoever they are, that you can fix things. Central to emphasising the conditions of production over reception, according to Gillick, is differentiating between notions of audience and public. Gillick (2012) views ‘audience’ as overly determined and essentialising and understands ‘public’ to signify the richness and contradictions within contemporary society: An audience is intentional. I think there is too much focus on trying to create an audience and not enough thinking about public. The public is society. I can create an

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audience tomorrow of a very specific type but I will go crazy if I try to do that for every fragmented set of interests. And it still doesn’t deal with this question of the public. I am very interested in the distracted or disinterested viewer. Gillick’s focus on public, as opposed to audience, sheds light, on the questions: What are the platforms that were negotiated? Why did earlier negotiations fail? How can the platforms be renegotiated? Who is doing the negotiation? The term ‘platform’ has several different but overlapping connotations. In the sphere of design a platform is a structure on which someone or something may stand in order to support an activity – from speaking to diving, catching a train to developing technology. In the field of communications a platform is a publication or broadcast by which an individual can publicly express their views and which facilitates civic discourse. In the arena of political science, a platform is defined as a public declaration of principles, values, plans or strategies articulated by a political party or candidate. In the realm of contemporary art practice, the notion of platform has been appropriated and synthesised from all three of these worlds to suggest the emancipatory potential of politically charged and performative projects. For example, the London collective Platform (n.d.) carves out a stage within the public sphere to campaign against the global oil industry through art, activism, education and research. But some artists, such as Gillick, leverage the concept of the platform through a more theoretical engagement. For Gillick, the platform is a discursive trope by which to explore how decision-making takes place within a neoliberal democratic context and how new modes of deliberation might develop. ‘My idealism is rooted in discussion, negotiation, and the examination of compromised states’, Gillick declares (2002: 82). He is particularly concerned by the dominant consensus model of democracy in which divergent voiced are silenced by the majority. Gillick (2012) traces his interest in decision-making back to the early 1990s when, in a project entitled Documents, he and collaborator Henry Bond posed as journalists, ‘crashing’ corporate events to critique through photographs processes of consensus-building in organisations. For instance, a 1991 photograph from the Documents project (Figure 4.1) captures a singularly charmed sea of white faces in grey flannel suits smiling in unison to presentations by motivational speakers including F. W. De Klerk, then president of apartheid-era South Africa, at the UK Institute of Directors annual convention in London’s Royal Albert Hall. None of the directors present seems to disagree with what is being said and the glowing green exit signs behind the orchestra level seats seem to flash their warning messages to no avail. In the three-dimensional platforms that Gillick subsequently developed, including Twinned Renegotiation Platforms, he expands this reach to consider the dynamics of decision-making by individuals, groups and institutions and to interrogate the inherent tensions between consensus and dissensus. Gillick is keenly aware of the potential of his platforms for reframing the power dynamics between museums and their publics. He does not, however, specifically distinguish between modes of deliberation as they pertain to the museum and gallery context and as they impact the wider world. He aims to contribute to novel forms of institutional critique that acknowledge museums’ complicity in a larger system of neoliberal consensus politics. The ironic references in his projects to the corporate domain help frame his interpretation of neoliberalism as the global shift of economic power from the public to private sector. Looking to Rancière for inspiration (Gillick 2007: 265, 341), Gillick is a harsh judge of neoliberal politics as a breeding ground for consensus culture. Rancière condemns consensus culture as an univocal form of domination in which the rights of individuals are dependent

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FIGURE 4.1  Henry Bond and Liam Gillick, 22 April 1991, 14:00, Royal Albert Hall, London England: Institute of Directors Annual Convention; speakers include Norman Lamont, F. W. De Klerk. From the series Documents, 1990 onwards, cibachrome in maple frame, text, 42 cm × 60 cm, private collections, courtesy of the artists

upon the majority, ‘expert’ bureaucrats arbitrate disagreements and democracy is managed and limited. Conversely, Rancière (2010b) embraces dissensus not as conflict for its own sake but as a manifestation of a rupture in which individuals and groups excluded from consensus politics have a platform to speak up for their rights and challenge the systems that naturalise conventional power structures. He argues that critical art practice – which he defines as neither didactic nor focused on shock but instead is nuanced and questions its own efficacy – has the potential to create this kind of rupture and provide a space for equality. Rancière (2010a: 140) asserts, ‘If there exists a connection between art and politics, it should be cast in terms of dissensus . . . artworks can produce effects of dissensus precisely because they neither give lessons nor have any destination’. Gillick looks to Rancière’s positions on dissensus as a means to reinvigorate political discourse through artistic practice. Gillick repudiates neoliberalism as binary in approach and oppressive in its insistence on an illusion of consensus, rather than recognising and respecting differences of opinions. Gillick (2003) asserts: The quasi-rationalisations of neo-liberal thinking are, right now, in full flow. Once again confronting us with a non-choice wrapped in the perversion of moral positioning that renders things binary, unsophisticated and potentially deadly. Anyone opposing the leaden thinking that emanates from the governments of the US and UK and the toolate manoeuvring and poorly articulated positions of the French, German and Russian governments might be called a fool or worse, a utopian thinker.

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Drawing on Rancière’s (2010b) conception of politics as the catalyst for dissensus and the police as enforcers of consensus, Gillick identifies the strategy of police kettling during demonstrations as particularly telling of neoliberal attempts to maintain the illusion of consensus and of the urgency to develop subversive responses. Gillick (2012) explains: Kettling by the police keeps protesters cordoned off, away from an event. There is an attempt to create a clear sense of borders around activity. You have to be mobile and vigilant and as sophisticated or complicated as the model you are critiquing. Twinned Renegotiation Platforms undermines a clear sense of borders in the gallery space. The platforms to be negotiated in Twinned Renegotiation Platforms and in Gillick’s other work do not advocate a specific political position. Nonetheless, given Gillick’s critique of neoliberalism, we might speculate that the failures of earlier negotiation implied in the title of the work lie with consensus culture and the policing of counter-hegemonic positions. Gillick implicitly acknowledges this when he notes that the Plexiglas in his installations is not just a signifier of the corporate sphere, it is also ‘the material of riot-shields and bullet-proof screens’ (quoted in Brisco,Vajda and Gillick 2008). We might also speculate that renegotiation involves explorations of alternative forms of democracy which offer new possibilities for empowering divergent voices through dissensus. Finding ways to acknowledge difference is at the core of Twinned Renegotiation Platforms. Gillick (2008: 325) affirms: The idea that all relationships have to be reassessed and that a permanent form of selfconscious critique has to replace and challenge the hierarchies of the past is a project that still exists as an analytic phantom structure, one that will keep returning as long as specific power structures maneuver over the desire for true difference to be acknowledged and reproduced. In this context the ‘blind spot’ of the encounter with Twinned Renegotiation Platforms – that partial view that the act of looking up creates – can be understood as a means to acknowledge and reproduce difference. As Bourriaud (2010: 14, 16) notes, Gillick’s ‘blind spot’ references Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of the partial view which embodies the subjectivity of the gaze so that one is neither completely inside nor outside a particular phenomenon. The partial and shifting viewpoint that an engagement with Twinned Renegotiation Platforms entails opens up possibilities for renegotiation based on a respect for difference and a corresponding embrace of dissensus. In answer to who is doing the negotiating Gillick does not specify individuals, groups or organisations; he does, however, make it clear that the work can only create conditions for the prospect of renegotiation and that it is ultimately the responsibility of individuals to make renegotiation occur despite the psychological and ethical challenges that dissensus entails. ‘My work is like the light in the fridge’, Gillick (2000: 16) quips; ‘it only works when there are people there to open the fridge door. Without people, it’s not art – it’s something else – stuff in a room’. Given Gillick’s insistence on individuals to activate his projects, it is not surprising that the Moderna Museet staged one of its photographs of Twinned Renegotiation Platforms with people underneath. In fact, the triad of a casually dressed thirtysomething man and woman with an

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infant – the woman is a former curator at the museum (Eriksson 2014) – appears to perform an act of renegotiation in the ‘thought space’ that Gillick designates as a kind of model of activating the work. Tension registers through the arched back of the man, who holds the child in a baby carrier across his chest, and the hand-on-hip gesture of the woman. Though the adults stand directly facing one another, gazing into each other’s eyes, the dynamics of the encounter register both a physical and psychological gulf, made more vivid by the ‘blind spot’ and doppelgänger effects of the platforms. Distorted reflections of the couple suggest that each party, in parallel, has their own partial and shifting perspective. Just what the two are renegotiating in their relations to each other, the child and the world remains open to question. What is important is that, as a signifier of the interactions between and among individuals, groups and institutions, the couple does not attempt to simulate an illusion of consensus but instead represents the potential of dissensus to generate new democratic forms of engagement that, in turn, spawn processes of reconciliation.

Platforms and museums Using Gillick’s Twinned Renegotiation Platforms as a springboard, Chapter 4 examines the platform as an emancipatory strategy that designates space for critical discourse concerning the distribution of power and alternative modes of democracy that empower divergent voices to take part. These explorations on democracy carry significant implications for the processes of reconciliation between museums and communities. The interventions under consideration do not seek to engender participation as an intrinsic value (Frieling 2008); though they sit alongside significant practice-based inroads in opening up the gallery to diverse publics, they are not themselves invested in utopian gestures of collaboration towards social inclusion. Instead they question the assumptions implicit in the ideal of participation by shining a light on issues of equality and inequality inherent in democratic systems. In the process they underscore the ethical complexities and contradictions with which institutions must grapple to open up substantive pathways for reconciliation. At the heart of these projects is an understanding that the gallery is an inherent component of civil society and cannot ethically exist in isolation from difficult political conversations and activity. The gallery has roles and responsibilities in critiquing and transforming the state. The main body of the chapter focuses on a year-long intervention at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, Goshka Macuga’s The Nature of the Beast (2009), which serves as a platform for discussions about the dynamic between art and politics, specifically between the art gallery and community activism. A complex and multi-layered installation which appropriates and re-contextualises historical works of art and documents within a contemporary environment, The Nature of the Beast asks how an intervention as platform might provide opportunities for fresh thinking on democracy. Macuga (quoted in Macuga and Borchardt-Hume 2010: 71) asserts: It is interesting to look at art as a democratic platform and to ask whether it is possible for art to be just that. . . . I also think we have to ask if change is actually possible and, if so, how do we participate in it and what contributions can art and artists make. Gillick and Macuga have distinctly different approaches to their critical practice.Whilst Gillick accepts and even cultivates the use of his built environments as backdrops for reflection on social and political

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relations, Macuga sees The Nature of the Beast – with its web of historical and political references – as foregrounding activity. Macuga (quoted in Macuga and Borchardt-Hume 2010: 71) explains: works of art are often misinterpreted or used simply as backdrops, even if the messages they contain are quite profound. I don’t always worry about how my work is being read, but here I have been a little more concerned. The project has materialized within a particular historical framework of wars, economic crisis, and protests. The effect of these is touching all of us, and we have been questioning the future of democracy worldwide. Despite this difference, the two share an interest in leveraging notions of the platform to ‘stage’ negotiations on the future of democracy. Gillick and Macuga both had formative experiences of the political sphere which sparked an interest in the critique of neoliberalism and wariness of reductive solutions. Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s with a Celtic background in the London suburbs, Gillick learned early on that being elusive could be a powerful political tactic. ‘Dynamic challenged groups are not traditionally aided by the plea for more transparency from the dominant culture’, he declares. ‘Sinn Fein would not have got very far if the working processes of their struggle had been completely transparent at all stages’ (quoted in Lauson 2008: 276). Born and raised in Poland in the 1970s and 1980s, and emigrating to the UK in 1989, during the transition to democracy, Macuga (quoted in Burley 2011) saw the history that formed the basis of her education challenged and shifting: At school you would learn certain historical facts but you would know that there was so much more information that hadn’t been given to you. After the 1980’s the whole thing changed and lots of very significant historical facts were revealed. They had been hidden from everybody for so many years. For The Nature of the Beast commission, Macuga was highly invested in exploring the dynamic between art, censorship and propaganda. As I will show, with The Nature of the Beast Macuga appropriates contested political moments from the past to foster self-reflective thinking on the challenges of representative processes and to generate radical alternatives. The work functions as a platform for negotiating democracy on several levels. It creates a platform as exhibition for Macuga to link past and present in order to interrogate the efficacy of neoliberal democracy; it offers a platform as meeting space for community groups to reflect upon and enact their own forms of democracy and, in so doing, to reclaim the Whitechapel Gallery for the public sphere. Finally, through a surprise intervention that Macuga created in response to developments in the other two platforms, the project generates a third platform as museological critique which serves to situate museums’ and galleries’ complicity in the larger system of neoliberal consensus politics and to renegotiate the terms of democracy.

Art and democracy: The Nature of the Beast Platform as exhibition In the large and pristine new exhibition space, the centrepiece of the Whitechapel Gallery’s 2009 expansion programme on the site of what was once a public library, stood its

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inaugural commission, Goshka Macuga’s installation The Nature of the Beast (Plate 12). The focal point of the installation was the 1955 life-sized tapestry reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica (1937), the watershed painting of protest against the bombing of the city of Guernica by the Luftwaffe supporting Nationalist General Franco during the Spanish Civil War. The bombing of Guernica was the first large-scale aerial attack on civilians and Picasso’s expression of pathos has come to signify both the oppression of the Basque people and the inhumanity of all violent conflict (Clarke 2013: 237–282). Picasso’s Guernica was originally commissioned by the Spanish Republic for the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 Paris International Exhibition as part of a strategy to generate support for the Republican cause. The painting hung beside Alexander Calder’s Mercury Fountain with its streams of mercury, a major Spanish export, running into a circular basin of water; challenging civil war films by Luis Buñuel and other sympathisers were screened to help convey the political agenda (Clarke 2013: 240, 251). Woven by René and Jacqueline de la Baume Dürrbach, the tapestry version of Guernica is a work of art in its own right. Picasso collaborated closely with the Dürrbachs and made some corrections to the preparatory drawings (Altman 2009: 25–27). Nelson A. Rockefeller purchased the tapestry and, since 1985, the Rockefeller family has loaned it to the UN Headquarters in New York as a deterrent to war. At the UN the tapestry hangs just outside the Security Council chambers where press conferences take place. Whitechapel Gallery was able to secure the temporary loan of the tapestry because the UN headquarters was undergoing renovation in 2009 (Altman 2009: 27). In Macuga’s installation, a royal blue curtain hovered behind the tapestry. A plush carpet of the same hue covered the centre of the concrete floor. A round, polished wooden table rested in the centre of the room with 16 Eames-style leather and chrome office chairs tucked into it. Underneath the table’s glass top sat a variety of carefully arranged documents from the Whitechapel Gallery Archive relevant to the history of Guernica, the history of the gallery and contemporary political events (Figure 4.2). To one side of the table stood a bronze bust by Macuga of Colin Powell, former US Secretary of State, delivering his infamous February 2003 speech to the UN Security Council in which he tried to persuade the UN to endorse military intervention in Iraq (Figure 4.3). In the speech Powell held up a vial of a white substance to evidence his assertions that Iraq harboured and provided training for the al-Qaeda terrorist network and had developed weapons of mass destruction. As the New York Times (Weisman 2003) described this dramatic moment: Holding up a vial of white powder, Mr. Powell said that ‘less than a teaspoon of dry anthrax’ was enough to shut down the United States Senate. . . . Then . . . he said that United Nations inspectors estimated that he [Saddam Hussein] could have produced 25,000 liters. Though the UN Security Council did not ultimately authorise military intervention, the war in Iraq began the month after Powell’s speech. The UK and Spain were primary supporters of the US position, and economic pressure created a larger cohort of nations who aligned themselves with the Americans in what then President George W. Bush called a ‘coalition of the willing’ (Schifferes 2003). In 2004 and 2005 Powell acknowledged that many of his

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FIGURE 4.2  Goshka Macuga, The Nature of the Beast, 2009, installation view, Whitechapel Gallery, London, courtesy of the artist and Whitechapel Gallery Archive, photograph by Patrick Lears

arguments in the speech were fallacious (BBC News 2004) and shared his feelings of shame for having lied (quoted in ABC News 2005): I feel terrible . . . [giving the speech] . . . It’s a blot. I’m the one who presented it on behalf of the United States to the world, and [it] will always be a part of my record. It was painful. It’s painful now. In the sculpture Macuga portrays Powell in a style reminiscent of Picasso’s cubism, but it is also naturalistic enough to make the figure easily recognisable. With deep wrinkles, a furrowed brow and strong abstract angles emanating from his chest, Powell conveys a defiant presence. His right arm, vial in hand, aggressively pushes into the viewer’s space. A broadside distributed to visitors contained a transcript of Powell’s speech. In a niche behind the conference table a series of films played, rotated monthly, expressing the horrors of war and, as a series, connecting past and present conflicts (Figure 4.4). These include Fallujah: The Real Story (Ali Fadhil 2005), which captures the grisly aftermath of the US siege on that city; Sir! No Sir! (David Zeiger 2005), which examines the anti-war movement within the US military during the Vietnam War; and Baghdad Stories (Julia Guest 2004), which documents the attempt to set up the first impartial newspaper in Iraq amid the chaos that erupted after the 2003 invasion (Ogg 2009: 64–65). Finally, on the floor in front of the video screenings lay a 2003 Afghan rug embellished with symbols of war. Woven into the fabric is a map of Iraq, along with guns, tanks, bombs, helicopters, planes and the phrase in English ‘Welcome United Nations in Iraq’. Such carpets

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FIGURE 4.3  Goshka Macuga, The Nature of the Beast, 2009, installation view with Colin Powell, 2009, modelled by Aleix Barbat and Hero Johnson, courtesy of the artist and Whitechapel Gallery Archive, photograph by Patrick Lears

were made for tourists but were frequently hung on walls as a form of propaganda (Yazici 2010: 132). What kind of conversation do these seemingly disparate elements create? By blurring the boundaries between art and curation, art and craft, and art and archives, Macuga appropriated

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Goshka Macuga, The Nature of the Beast, 2009, installation view with Sir! No Sir! 2005, written and directed by David Zeiger, courtesy of the artist and Whitechapel Gallery Archive, ­photograph by Patrick Lears

FIGURE 4.4 

imagery of war and conflict into a tapestry of her own (Roelstraete 2011: 324) that weaves together the thematic strands of art, propaganda and censorship to interrogate the efficacy of neoliberal democratic politics. The installation asks: if a figure as sympathetic as Powell can leverage his authority to claim the authenticity of his evidence, then what hope is there for democratic systems as currently defined to stop the cycles of corruption and violence? Macuga (quoted in Spira 2009a, n.p.) states: The events of 2003 are extremely significant in addressing our individual and collective responsibility in regard to international conflicts. The enormous demonstrations that took place globally really raise the question of whether we have any power to change anything. It sometimes seems that we have become passive observers stuck in a Kafkaesque reality. Our sense of empowerment from the mass media and explosion of information may be nothing more than a smokescreen. Questions of authenticity in the tapestry, concerning its relation to Picasso’s Guernica, underscore questions of authenticity in the political machinations of Powell. Compounding Macuga’s lack of faith in the state of contemporary democracy, as crystallised in Powell’s speech and its aftermath, is that Powell delivered it in front of the Dürrbachs’s Guernica tapestry, as was routine for decades at UN Security Council press conferences, but in this case a blue curtain was placed over the tapestry to conceal it. When queried afterwards, UN officials claimed that the composition of the tapestry was too busy for the broadcast and that the media requested a solid background. This act of censorship was widely covered by

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journalists. In an article titled ‘ “Guernica” Cover-Up Raises Suspicions’, the Los Angeles Times, for instance, reported, ‘U.N. officials covered it, but they deny that they were intentionally hiding a symbolic statement about both the horrors of war and the art of diplomacy’ (Farley 2003). Clearly, the UN rationale for covering the tapestry was unconvincing. In its use of the Guernica tapestry loaned from the Rockefeller family, The Nature of the Beast also indirectly alludes to another well-known act of censorship. In 1933, after meeting Nelson Rockefeller, Mexican artist Diego Rivera received a commission to paint murals for the recently opened Rockefeller Center in New York. Upon disapprobation by Rockefeller and the building development agents, workmen destroyed Rivera’s mural, Man at the Crossroads, before he even completed it because it celebrated communism through symbols including a May Day festival, a hammer and sickle and a portrait of Lenin (Gamboni 1997: 141–144). For Macuga, the historical associations of The Nature of the Beast with the Guernica tapestry are equally as significant as those with Picasso’s original painting. ‘The tapestry is a copy, which has its own history. I wanted to use an object in the exhibition which would shift the historical references of the Guernica bombing’, she remarked (quoted in Macuga and Borchardt-Hume 2010: 66). Macuga’s feat of bringing the tapestry to Whitechapel is an emblematic protest against censorship. Whitechapel Archive curator Nayia Yiakoumaki (2009: 35) declares: ‘The Nature of the Beast’ conveyed a symbolic act; bringing the ‘Guernica’ tapestry from the United Nations building in New York to the Whitechapel Gallery in London was equivalent to making it accessible again, revealing it; a direct commentary on the covering of the tapestry in 2003 and a direct renouncement of censorship, misinformation and the media’s manipulation of the information we receive. By reversing the relationship between the tapestry and curtain that defined the Powell speech – in The Nature of the Beast the blue curtain functions as a backdrop that dramatically reveals the Guernica tapestry – Macuga underscores this protest of censorship. The blue curtain also enhances the stage-like aura of the work. In fact, the installation as a whole functions as a cross between an exhibition space and a stage. In this aspect Macuga draws inspiration from a range of other exhibitions of exhibitions, particularly Marcel Broodthaers’s Musée de l’Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles, first created in 1968 in his Brussels home and then expanded through the early 1970s with 11 other manifestations in diverse settings (M. Wilson 2007: 258). Broodthaers’s project, which, in the spirit of political activism of the year 1968, critiqued bureaucracy in Belgium for failing to address the issues of equality and democracy brought to the fore by the uprisings (Haidu 2010: 107–161), had particular resonance for Macuga’s own installation on the future of democracy. Research undergirds Macuga’s artistic practice. With each new exhibition she mines archival documents to study institutional histories and contexts. Macuga views these investigations as the defining element of each project. ‘The processes of research before the work is being made are much more significant for me than the actual work,’ Macuga says (2012b). The research, which enables her to grapple with the complexities, contradictions and ambiguities of an institution, buttresses a project of reinvention or what Macuga refers to as ‘trying to turn them [museums, galleries and biennials] around’ (quoted in Burley 2011). As Dieter Roelstraete (2012b: 36n4) explains, however, this does not come from an antagonistic position but instead from a desire to explore the potential for change. For the Whitechapel project the

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historical nature of the commission – the inaugural work marking the gallery’s new architectural expansion – made this aspiration of setting a direction for the future particularly strong. Former Whitechapel Curator Anthony Spira (2014), who worked with Macuga on the installation, asserts, ‘When an organization undergoes a major transition, it’s an occasion to reflect; we were keen to work with a project that related to the Gallery’s history’. At the Whitechapel Gallery Archive Macuga was most interested in understanding the complex relationship between the institution and its local communities and politics. Originally founded in 1901, the gallery is located in the Whitechapel district of East London, in the Borough of Tower Hamlets, in what has long been among London’s most deprived and overcrowded immigrant neighbourhoods but with a rich intellectual, cultural and political life. In the early twentieth century the neighbourhood had large Jewish and Irish populations and was home to prominent socialist and anarchist groups. The former Passmore Edwards Library – the site that Whitechapel Gallery appropriated for its 2009 expansion and where Macuga’s exhibition was held in the former reading room – was a centre of this rich social life. Known for its clubs, including the Whitechapel Arts Group, and a strong collection of Yiddish books, the library earned the unofficial title ‘University of the Ghetto’ (Mann 2009: 39). Political demonstrations were common and violent clashes sometimes occurred including ‘The Battle of Cable Street’ in 1936 when 100,000 people united in Whitechapel to block a march by the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists, a protectionist and antiSemitic political party led by Oswald Mosley (Kushner and Valman 2000). Demonstrations in support of the Spanish Republican campaign also took place in the late 1930s (Kushner 2000: 117–118). Today, with a largely Bangladeshi community, the Whitechapel neighbourhood remains politically engaged. With grassroots organisations such as London Action Resource Centre, rampART, Whitechapel Anarchist Group, Freedom Press and a broad array of youth groups, it is recognised as a centre of community activism (Spencer 2010). In her archival research Macuga explored how the Whitechapel Gallery situates this vivid history within its remit and how it might look more closely to this past in charting its future. Indeed, from its founding, the Whitechapel Gallery has encouraged local organisations to make use of its space. Gallery Director Iwona Blazwick notes, ‘By choosing to locate in the East End, amidst the poverty of late-Victorian London, our founders made a deliberate statement. It’s a statement that echoes down the decades and still motivates us today’ (quoted in Schwarz and Vaughan 2009: 9). At the same time, the contemporary economic pressures of maintaining its international stature have created ethical challenges for the gallery to negotiate tensions between democratic engagement with communities and growing its ‘brand’. As she searched through the archives to gather ideas for the exhibition, Macuga decided that looking at one particular moment in the Whitechapel Gallery’s history could provide a productive mechanism for critical enquiry. She settled on the particular moment when she discovered that Picasso’s Guernica was exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery for two weeks in 1939. Guernica was loaned to Whitechapel as part of a Spanish Relief Campaign tour to generate support for the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War. The loan was facilitated by the local Communist Party and a group of anti-fascist British trade unions with the help of influential leftist art world figures including Herbert Read and Roland Penrose (Brewin´ska, 2011: 2). A broadside announcing the arrival of Guernica asked for contributions: ‘Women and children are starving in Spain. On their struggle depends your freedom.

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One million pennies will send a food ship from East London. Will you help?’ (Spira 2009b). Picasso requested that every person admitted donate a pair of boots to be delivered to the Republican army (Altman 2009: 25). Exhibiting Guernica in the East End of London had great significance for the local population (Yiakoumaki 2009: 36).The exhibition inspired lectures, political rallies and strong attendance at Whitechapel Gallery (Blazwick and Ogg 2009). A programme of relevant films on the Spanish Civil War accompanied it. Clement Attlee, who was then Labour Party leader, stood before the painting and delivered a rousing speech supporting the Republicans; 15,000 visitors attended the exhibition in its first week (Spira 2009a). What was particularly striking to Macuga about the 1939 exhibition was the way that the communities of Whitechapel appropriated Guernica to create relevance for their own social concerns. Macuga remarks, ‘Instead of being presented as a great work of art, “Guernica” had immediately been appropriated as a political symbol. . . . It wasn’t a conventional art exhibition, but an event that echoed in the community of east London’ (quoted in Spira 2009a). In Macuga’s eyes, the communities of East London used the exhibition of Guernica as a platform for their own political agendas. In the archives Macuga also learned that Whitechapel directors attempted and failed twice to bring Picasso’s Guernica back to the gallery: once in 1952 when, in a Cold War climate, and under pressure from gallery trustees and other influential parties, Director Bryan Robertson decided to abandon plans for a major Picasso show in the fear that the project might suggest the gallery held communist sympathies; and again in 1980 when then Director Nicholas Serota hoped to arrange for Guernica to stop at Whitechapel on its way from New York to Spain and was told the painting was too fragile (Spira 2009a). These attempts, combined with the 1939 exhibition of Guernica at Whitechapel, evoked for Macuga a clear sense that the gallery had itself appropriated Picasso’s work as part of its own identity and also encountered censorship from this association (Spira 2014). Of course, Picasso’s Guernica has been used and reused in many different contexts, for instance in the 1970 protest by the Art Workers’ Coalition and Guerrilla Art Action Group in front of the painting at the Museum of Modern Art; Macuga was well aware of these precedents (Spira 2009b) and was more interested in the ways that meaning shifts than in an idea of original intention. Macuga’s own feminist perspective on Guernica informed her understanding of the ways that meaning changes over time. Macuga (quoted in Burley 2011) asserts: I have this very mixed relationship with Picasso. I think he represents a very particular persona of a male artist. I have a love and hate relationship with him. I admire him because he is the most important artist in the history of modern art, but at the same time his stories with women mean that from a woman’s perspective I despise him. From an artistic perspective I think that he was an amazingly productive and interesting character. By appropriating Picasso’s Guernica for platforms of her own design and those of local communities, and by using the medium of tapestry – traditionally associated with the feminine – to stand in for the painting, Macuga symbolically re-genders the work. In The Nature of the Beast Macuga also re-appropriates an historical example of an exhibition as platform – the 1939 exhibition of Picasso’s Guernica at Whitechapel – to explore the nature

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of power and propaganda in a contemporary democratic context. In so doing she was keenly aware of the fact that she was using the Guernica tapestry, not the original painting, and that this was another form of appropriation which could be mined. Macuga (quoted in Macuga and Borchardt-Hume 2010: 66) explains: At the center of my installation is not the original painting, but a tapestry which was made in the 1950s, and this distinction is very important. The tapestry is a copy, which has its own history. I wanted to use an object in the exhibition which would shift the historical references of the ‘Guernica’ bombing in 1937 to a new time frame. Macuga deploys the tapestry to makes connections among a complex web of political events. It references the tragedy of the 1937 Guernica bombing and its aftermath, whilst at the same time alluding both to the Cold War environment of 1955 when the tapestry was produced and to twenty-first-century war and conflict (quoted in Spira 2009a). The documents Macuga chooses to place underneath the glass in the round conference table together articulate such connections (Figure 4.5). They include materials on three primary themes: the relationship between Guernica and Whitechapel; East London community activism, past and present; and the Second Iraq War (Christov-Bakargiev 2009: 22–23). In her research Macuga conceptualises an archive as a vehicle to parse out patterns and links. Macuga (2012a) notes: The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot in 1975 defined the repetition of patterns as ‘fractals’. Fractals do not only describe the repetition of geometric patterns that can be found in nature, but can also describe repetitions in time and patterns in history. Patterns that repeat into greater patterns, which are structured and conditioned by political and financial systems, not in passive or naïve ways but repeated exactly at increasing scales, repercussions and stakes. My interest in archives is that they hold the evidence of these patterns. Macuga approaches institutional archives as sites by which to set in motion her projects and which can evolve through her interventions. As Spira recounts, one group of documents from the Whitechapel Gallery Archive that was particularly resonant for Macuga came from a local 1930s art and propaganda art course led by Norman King. A 1938 advertisement (Spira 2009b) for the course read: Does your Borough Labour Party, your Trade Union or organization require propaganda material? Do you know you can make your own banners, tableaux, etc?  . . . Improve your propaganda – and you hasten the progress of the whole Left movement. According to Spira (2009b), the course conveyed for Macuga a political fervour which was replicated by Attlee, standing in front of Picasso’s Guernica, and then transformed by Powell – with the tapestry after Guernica concealed behind him. Macuga also sees links between the course’s art as propaganda theme, Guernica and Powell. In Macuga’s installation, Powell plays the role of artist as performer-mediator, torn between

FIGURE 4.5  Goshka Macuga, The Nature of the Beast, 2009, installation view, Whitechapel Gallery, London, courtesy of the artist and Whitechapel Gallery Archive, photograph by Patrick Lears

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personal conviction and political responsibilities and failing at both (Spira 2014). Macuga (quoted in Spira 2009a, n.p.) remarks: In stating the case for war, Colin Powell assembled disparate elements to create a convincing argument. In some ways, this process does reflect the way a journalist, storyteller or artist like myself works, calling into question not only how information is mediated, translated or even censored but also the veracity of the information we are fed. Thus, through the figure of Powell, Macuga also reflects on her own artistic processes of mediation, translation and even censorship. Macuga’s (2012b) understanding of the subjective and personal nature of history, in which meaning shifts, is shaped by her experiences of changing historical narratives in Poland and the UK: The general concept was that history is fluid and you can completely play around with it to create different narratives.You can pick and choose and present it in a very subjective yet completely acceptable way. This is where I come from. In The Nature of the Beast she leverages the fluidity of history to make connections between Whitechapel and the political sphere, a process Macuga (2012b) characterises as ‘translating the small context of a museum into the politics of the world’. Strategic slippages (Christov-Bakargiev 2009: 23–24) between art, propaganda and censorship define her use of the exhibition as platform to interrogate the efficacy of democratic politics: slippages between Picasso’s painting of Guernica and the tapestry; between the tapestry and the Afghan war rug; between the Cubist styles of Guernica and the Powell bust; between Franco’s fascism and the propaganda of twenty-first-century interventionist politics; between the circular table in the installation, the UN Security Council conference table and the circular composition of Calder’s Mercury Fountain that framed Guernica in the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition; between the Spanish Pavilion and The Nature of the Beast; between the films integral to Macuga’s exhibition and those that were screened during the 1937 exhibition of Guernica at Paris and during the 1939 exhibition at Whitechapel; between the bombings of Guernica and Fallujah; and between Norman King’s propaganda course and the speech of Colin Powell. Macuga (2012a) refers to such slippages as ‘half-truths’, juxtapositions that reject the notion of objectivity and instead offer some glimmer of insight in their fragmentary nature: In the way that historical fact only lasts as a fragmented recollection, we still must search and choose what to select from what we are given access to. It is through juxtaposing and entwining these fragments that one is able [to] get a view about the state of affairs: a half-truth, in other words. Yet, whilst she probes the fluidity of history to identify ‘half-truths’, Macuga is simultaneously insistent that the politically charged nature of the imagery in The Nature of the Beast requires a sincere engagement. Macuga (quoted in Macuga and Borchardt-Hume 2010: 71) explains: Works of art are often misinterpreted or used simply as backdrops, even if the messages they contain are quite profound. I don’t always worry about how my work is being

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read, but here I have been a little more concerned. The project has materialized within a particular historical framework of wars, economic crisis, and protests. The effect of these is touching all of us, and we have been questioning the future of democracy worldwide. The project creates for Macuga a compelling tension between her respect for critical practice and her desire to honour the questions, histories and resonances raised by Guernica in its resituated context. What is the ‘beast’ in the title of Macuga’s project? Clearly, it points to the mythological beasts in Picasso’s work which themselves connote the inhumanity of war and of political power corrupted. It also reminds us of the dangers of overlooking the mistakes of the past in forging the political systems of the present and future. As Macuga states, the title ‘refers to the destructive impulse that ignores the lessons of history’ (quoted in Spira 2009a, n.p.). And by giving over the exhibition to community groups as a meeting space, she provides an opportunity for diverse publics to wrestle with this ‘beast’ and to work to defeat it.

Platform as meeting space Whilst the Guernica tapestry was the artwork that anchored Macuga’s installation, the round table served as its ‘epicenter’ (Yazici 2010: 133). To activate the space, Macuga invited groups to use the round table for meetings. Macuga and the gallery extended this invitation widely through the media and through their community networks. Any group could participate; there were no selection criteria and no fee was charged, although Macuga notes that the gallery turned down as inappropriate for the setting a few groups that proposed pro-war agendas. Participating groups were required only to fill out a brief booking form, document the event and transfer a copy of the documentation to the Whitechapel Gallery Archives (Macuga 2012b). More than a hundred different groups convened in the space. Any visitor to the gallery could participate in the meetings or observe. With the offer Macuga hoped to rekindle the political fervour of the East End community during the 1939 exhibition of Guernica at Whitechapel (Watson 2012: 72), but to new ends. Recognising the challenges of keeping a year-long exhibition dynamic, Macuga (2012b) also saw that giving the space up to community groups would keep the project ‘alive and functioning’ within this time frame. By transferring responsibility to others to make new political content (Spira 2014), Macuga created what Whitechapel Gallery recognised as a ‘platform for a myriad of other big and small political events to take place within her project’ (Blazwick and Ogg 2009). Macuga was particularly concerned by the recent trend of gentrification of the neighbourhood in the context of redevelopment taking place as part of the 2012 London Olympics. ‘Small businesses and key institutions that support the community have been vanishing. Are community projects a thing of the past?’, she asked (quoted in Spira 2009a, n.p.). Macuga also recognised her own complicity in the gentrification process; she was painfully aware that the new gallery where her installation was displayed was itself appropriating the site of the former community library – although the library itself was not closed but was relocated elsewhere in the neighbourhood. Macuga (quoted in Burley 2011) notes: The room where the work was shown used to be the old library and for so many years it was used as a source of information and a place where different generations could

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socialize. Then of course the library closed down and the Whitechapel gallery took over the whole of the building. I think there was a real concern for me that this was going to be a space where people come and have a look and then they have to leave. By inviting community groups to use the installation as a meeting space, Macuga hoped to enable a public reclaiming of ownership of the former library space for local activism and the development of a counter-public sphere at Whitechapel; and by requiring community groups to deposit documentation of their meetings with the Gallery Archive, she aimed to generate a new archival collection that would mimic and reify, at least on a metaphorical level, the functions of the old library. With the platform as meeting space, Macuga envisioned that the project would gather momentum by accumulating its own history. Macuga (2012b) declares: Whitechapel was very much a case of really opening a platform for the public to make history of the institution.The material which initially fed from the archive of Whitechapel Gallery instigated a situation where, by creating a platform for the public to very much engage, then fed back to the archive. In returning the space to the public sphere, Macuga hoped to use the past to chart a possible future for Whitechapel Gallery. By establishing a platform as meeting space where groups could reflect upon and enact their own forms of democracy, she aimed to underscore for the gallery its critical role as a political force. Macuga’s deliberate choreography of the installation through its boardroom aesthetic created a sense of gravity where participants felt like this was a space where important political decisions could be made and political feats could take place (Yazici 2010: 132). Spira (2014) recounts that Macuga took great care in selecting every prop, such as the chairs, to evoke the language of governance.The act of redistributing authority by empowering groups to use the space generated some inspirational new thinking and practice concerning democracy. Macuga’s platform as meeting space functioned, in fact, like a quasi-United Nations or what Gregory Sholette (2011: 152–153) refers to as a ‘mockstitution’, an artist intervention that mimics institutional structures and practices to critique and reinvent them. As Sholette (2011: 170) explains, the mockstitution has the capacity to redefine democracy: when viewed as an aggregate phenomenon, the most impressive aspect of these informally organized mockstitutions is the degree to which they breathe vitality back into the corpse of civic society and radical politics. . . . This includes re-imagining corporate ventures as actually entrusted to the common good, proposing that public education be both public and edifying, and re-envisioning museums and cultural institutions as spaces where an ideal public sphere still buttresses conversation. As participants in Macuga’s ‘mockstitution’ conversed, the complex web of relationships between art, propaganda and censorship in The Nature of the Beast provided an impetus to reflect on the nature of authority and equality in democratic systems. Whitechapel initially resisted the idea of opening up the installation for public meetings primarily because of their concern over the administrative resource it would require (Spira

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2014). By the conclusion of the project, however, the staff was convinced of the merits of this strategy. ‘At the end they were quite proud and very much taking it as something that they did in an accommodating way’, Macuga (2012b) reports. Key staff members were clearly supportive of Macuga’s agenda. Whitechapel Director Blazwick and Chief Curator Kirsty Ogg (2009) waxed enthusiastically: The meetings have provided a microcosm of how the political plays out through contemporary British society, from organized political movements, to local government bureaucracy, to activism and self-organized groups gathered around a particular issue. Over the year that The Nature of the Beast was on exhibit, the space was used by art, education, government and community groups for a host of purposes including political rallies, historical commemorations, teaching, seminars, debate and performances. Among the arts groups that gathered in the exhibition were funders, advisory groups, curators, university art and art history courses and departments, contemporary artists, drama students and film groups. Some met specifically to discuss Guernica and/or The Nature of the Beast or to develop new practice inspired by the installation. Others had a wider social justice or antiwar brief. Several internationally known artists participated who, like Macuga, are involved in critical practice, including Carey Young, Jeremy Deller and Gustav Metzger. The education groups engaged with Guernica from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives including business and Spanish language. Local authority departments met in the installation with a strong self-consciousness about their roles and responsibilities. And community activists leveraged the installation to discuss diverse political issues such as climate change, the place of trade unions and the anti-war movement, and to mark important historic moments such as the genocide in Rwanda, the Spanish Civil War and the revolutions of 1989. Whilst of course some groups used the space for business as usual, documentation attests to the impact of the installation environment on the deliberations of most events but particularly those with a political agenda (Ogg 2009: 41–63; Goshka Macuga The Nature of the Beast Meeting Archive 2009–2010). For instance, in a blog post describing the meeting at Whitechapel of Minority Rights Group International (MRG) (Figure 4.6) – a non-governmental organisation (NGO) with consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council and observer status with the African Commission for Human and Peoples’ Rights and working to secure rights for ethnic, national, religious and linguistic minorities around the world (Minority Rights Group International 2007) – MRG media intern Patrick Bodenham (2009) declared: Goshka Macuga, the artist behind the exhibition, brings ‘Guernica’ into its modern context by setting it alongside symbols of the UN’s failure to stand up to pressure from the USA and UK about the necessity to invade Iraq. I found looking Powell in the face in the presence of Guernica a powerful and unsettling experience. . . . Aligning two sets of atrocities in this way . . . Macuga leaves you to make your own mind up about political legitimacy. The ‘Nature of the Beast’ to which she refers is the nature of the international system not to learn from the mistakes it has made in the past, but to repeat them. And I couldn’t help leave without wondering what lessons we will still have to learn next time Guernica returns.

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Goshka Macuga, The Nature of the Beast, 2009, installation view with meeting of Minority Rights Group International, 27 May 2009, Whitechapel Gallery, London, courtesy of the artist

FIGURE 4.6 

Citing the need for binding legislation on aerial bombardment, MRG’s Executive Director Mark Lattimer stressed that Guernica is even more relevant in today’s political climate than it was when the painting was exhibited at Whitechapel in 1939 (Bodenham 2009). An examination of the array of documentation from the meetings indicates that participants thought hard about how to behave as a group: whose voice should be heard and when, how to collaborate, when to challenge authority and engage in protest, and how to empower divergent voices to take part. Macuga (quoted in Burley 2011) describes groups’ encounters with the installation: It was amazing to see how people were using it. There was a certain ritual around it that was really respectful and moving. It was great to see everyone get really involved with the piece and there was a certain aura around the work that had nothing to do with me, it was purely about how people functioned within the work. It made me feel extremely emotional. This aura shaped the discussions among all kinds of groups. Some groups reflected keenly on their own democratic processes. For instance, the SpRoUt artist collective met in Macuga’s installation to develop a new project for an alternative art school; based on the idea of a verbal ‘relay race’ in which ideas would change as they were transmitted from one person to the next,

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the meeting revealed divergent perspectives and led SpRoUt to reformulate its aims and membership (Ogg 2009: 50). The Tower Hamlets ChangeUp Consortium, a newly formed group representing diverse Tower Hamlets charity and community organisations to develop strategies for sustainable collaboration, met at Whitechapel to focus on developing an internal code of conduct. The Tower Hamlets Changeup (2009) agenda states: As a partnership we will respect each other’s views and skills and will actively listen to each other and will discuss rather than argue; . . .We will make decisions by majority vote and all partners will then respect those decisions; We will resolve disputes and disagreements through discussion within the Consortium and not take disputes outside or use them in non-constructive ways that seek to avoid resolution. Democratic processes were also examined by university students and school-aged children staging meetings in the exhibition. An English language study group from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, re-enacted the UN Security Council debates that occurred just before the US invasion of Iraq (Ogg 2009: 51). A group of young children from Columbia Primary School sat around the conference table to discuss challenging issues identified by class council representatives (Ogg 2009: 47). Other groups deliberated more theoretically about democracy. The Take Part Research Cluster (2010; 2014), a research group drawn from four UK universities and a network of third-sector organisations devoted to developing ‘inclusive approaches to active citizenship’ and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, held a seminar at Whitechapel to discuss the need for strengthening democracy. Take Part (2010) asserted: Civil society faces major challenges in the current context. Although governments of different political complexions seem to share common concerns – recognising the importance of civil society for a healthy democratic society – the reality is that civil society’s independent role is under threat, challenged by the pressures of neo-liberal globalisation, as these pressures impact upon government policies for public service modernisation. Despite new opportunities for citizen engagement and community empowerment, the reality has been experienced as more complex and more contradictory. At the seminar, Take Part (2010) discussed how citizens might advocate more effectively in light of the concentration of power within transnational corporations and other international organisations. Other meetings were less academic and more experimental. The International Congress, with representatives from 16 different countries, held a performance exploring communication and cultural identity (Figure 4.7). Facilitated by artist Renata Jaworska (2010), participants recited their national anthem individually and then simultaneously, creating what Jaworska called ‘a cacophony of dissonance, miscommunication and aural power struggles’. The People Speak, a group dedicated to promoting civil discourse through play, hosted what they called a ‘Talkaoke’ event, a candid exchange between strangers, in the exhibition space (Figure 4.8). As The People Speak (2009a) characterised the event in the booking form: Meetings run by The People Speak are always a forum for open, democratic discussion in which everyone has an equal say. . . . Talkaoke is a mobile chat show, based on the

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Goshka Macuga, The Nature of the Beast, 2009, installation view with meeting of The International Congress, 14 March 2010, Whitechapel Gallery, London, © Renata Jaworska / VG Bild-Kunst, courtesy of the artist, Whitechapel Gallery Archive and The International Congress

FIGURE 4.7 

circular ‘UFO of Chat’. The host seated in the centre on a swivelly chair and wielding a microphone, facilitating a dynamic conversation between people who gather around the Talkaoke table to bring their own agenda. By taking this open approach to public debate, talkaoke opens up areas for discussion and exchange of ideas that are unclouded by political dogma, in which genuinely innovative ideas often emerge. Conversation topics were wide-ranging and were generated spontaneously from the constantly changing group (The People Speak 2009b). Some groups meeting in the installation performed acts of political protest. At the G20 Meltdown, a collaborative involving several activist organisations, participants launched an anti-capitalist protest against the 2009 G20 summit in London. At the Open Convention, led by activist Richard Naylor, Naylor and another attendee formally asked the Whitechapel Gallery for a £1 million donation for the families of genocide victims. And during the International Brigade Memorial Trust meeting, held to commemorate those who fought with the Republicans during Spanish Civil War, even an art critic reviewing Macuga’s installation was moved to perform her own act of protest. Catherine Spencer (2010) recounts: Stacked unobtrusively by the door on the way out was a pile of exhibition leaflets, printed in the style of a protest newspaper. Takers were invited to leave a donation of

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Goshka Macuga, The Nature of the Beast, 2009, installation view with meeting of The People Speak, 27 August 2009, Whitechapel Gallery, London, photo: Ricardo Sleiman, courtesy of the artist, Whitechapel Gallery Archive and The People Speak

FIGURE 4.8 

£1, but there was no-one standing over you to check if you did; I fished a coin out of my pocket, adding it to the loose change lying on the floor by the stack and, as I did so, experienced a brief frisson of independent action, interaction and exchange – as one imagines Macuga intended the users of her roundtable to feel. Seen as a whole, the meetings functioned as a platform to examine the complex nature of democracy – who is being included, on what terms and to what effect – for creating equality in museums and the world. As Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (2009: 23), who acquired the installation for the permanent collection of the Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT in Turin, remarks: It is not so much a space for creating collaborative and collective projects through meetings as it is a space to discuss how and why – and even if – collaboration and collective action is possible today. However, the presence of a platform where different groups of people could meet, share their views, discuss problems and issues, or elaborate plans of action, was not a ‘politically-correct’ gesture towards engaged relational art attached to an installation in a gallery. In counterpoint to the apparent heterogeneity of the space of congregation Macuga set up, the platform of enunciations that took place constituted a locus of experimentation of a collective and anonymous murmur. The requirement that each group deposit documentation of its meeting in the archives helped embed these experiments in democracy within the larger fabric of the Whitechapel Gallery.

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Contributions included meeting agendas and minutes, posters, photographs, audio recordings, videos, leaflets, newsletters, brochures, catalogues and other ephemera (Goshka Macuga, ‘The Nature of the Beast’ Meeting Archive, 2009–2010). Some of this documentation was even added to the vitrines over the course of the project (Christov-Bakargiev 2009: 22). This act of building up the archives through documenting community work, at least on a symbolic level, rekindled the political integrity of the activity that had taken place at the same site when it was part of the Passmore Edwards Library.This re-animating of the archives also acknowledged the significance of one of the other key changes to the gallery that the 2009 building expansion provided, with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the establishment of a publically accessible archives and a new permanent post to lead it (Spira 2014). However, Whitechapel Gallery organised other events in the installation space that Macuga had not foreseen, including fundraising galas and the hire of the space for private functions. Over time, she became increasingly troubled that, during these events, the gallery was re-contextualising The Nature of the Beast for what she saw was branding purposes, in effect neutralising the political ramifications of the work. Macuga (2012b) explains: I naively thought that the work would always keep a certain integrity and at least maintain the function of an artwork. I wasn’t aware, for example, that you can hire any art work and any installation for private functions. Even if you have work that has got a very particular message and already instigates what is the use of that art work, it can be easily misused purely because someone wants to use that context for a very particular gathering. I then discovered that there is this whole other [commercial] side of the institution where I really have to question who these people are, how their decisions impact on the whole organization and how the art work is devaluated in the context of those decisions. Macuga was particularly alarmed by an opening event for the gallery expansion where Prince William was asked to speak. He delivered his remarks with the Guernica tapestry as a backdrop (Figure 4.9). As curator Spira recounts (2014), this was a private event for major funders and politicians; as a guest speaker Prince William was guaranteed to bring a flurry of press coverage and a special note of thanks to donors (Figure 4.10). As exhibitions curator, Spira had no idea that Prince William would deliver his speech in front of the Guernica tapestry. ‘I am sure there was no deliberate ideological statement but just the most practical place to be visible before the crowd’, Spira (2014) recalls. Macuga saw great irony in symbolically replacing Clement Attlee against the backdrop of Guernica with Prince William (Spira 2014). She also was perturbed to learn that some of the donors attending the event had made their fortunes in the arms trade which, of course, did not sit well with the anti-war themes of the installation (Roelstraete 2009: 67). The ethical issues that the event raised prompted Macuga to intervene. Macuga (2012b) asked herself, ‘What is my personal obligation? Do I respond to this issue of where the money comes from or do I just pretend to be a naïve artist who wants to create something?’ She chose to make a tapestry of her own which would create new conditions for participation.

Platform as museological critique On The Nature of the Beast (2009) (Figure 4.11) is a tapestry of the same broadly horizontal format as the Guernica tapestry and in a similar black and white palette to suggest the immediacy of photojournalism. Produced from a digital collage Macuga designed using

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FIGURE 4.9  HRH Prince William delivering a speech at the reopening of Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2009, courtesy Whitechapel Gallery Archive, photograph Marcus Dawes

press photographs taken during the opening event of the exhibition (Watson 2011: 143), and translated by a Belgian factory through postmodern machine processes onto a Jacquard loom (Macuga 2012b), the tapestry draws upon the many layers of references in The Nature of the Beast to make a new intervention. Twice removed from Picasso’s Guernica – ‘a tapestry of a tapestry of a painting’, as Roelstraete (2009: 67) characterises it – she created the

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FIGURE 4.10  HRH Prince William with Iwona Blazwick, Whitechapel Gallery Director, at the reopening of Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2009, courtesy Whitechapel Gallery Archive, photograph Marcus Dawes

FIGURE 4.11  Goshka Macuga, On the Nature of the Beast (detail), 2009, Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT, on loan to Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino, GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Torino, installation, mixed media: tapestry, wooden and glass table, leather and metal chairs, bronze sculpture on wooden plinth, tapestry: 290 x 450 cm, photo: Paolo Pellion

textile for a 2009 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Antwerp, titled ‘Textiles Art and the Social Fabric’.

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In Macuga’s tapestry Guernica is again the backdrop, set against a curtained space like the one she assembled for Whitechapel. Prince William delivers his speech before a crowd which includes funders, the mayor of Tower Hamlets, identifiable by his ceremonial medallion chain, the Gallery Director Iwona Blazwick in profile, left of centre, in the light, and Macuga herself, on the far left, who turns away from the Prince. The tapestry, Macuga states, ‘is looking at a group gathered under a symbol and questioning how this symbol is interpreted by each of the participants, including myself ’ (quoted in Macuga and Borchardt-Hume 2010: 71). The symbol is not Guernica but is, instead, Prince William in performance before Guernica. Macuga (2012b) chooses tapestry as her medium both to re-appropriate the Guernica tapestry from Whitechapel and to make clear the political nature of her intervention. The medium of tapestry has a long history as a form of propaganda for state and military institutions because of its ease of transport relative to size, as opposed to paintings and sculpture, and thus its ability to make monumental statements in ever-changing public spaces. Macuga reclaims tapestry as a medium historically used to assert the power of institutions but directs it instead to critique institutions. Grant Watson (2012: 69) argues: Holding a mirror to the institutions in which they are housed, Macuga’s tapestries peel back something of the exterior surface to reveal the diverse elements that go into the making of the complex organism that is a biennial or a museum, its good intentions, its personalities, its contradictions, and its mistakes – all of which are monumentalized and given a public airing. On the Nature of the Beast asks how a gallery as supportive as Whitechapel to Macuga’s political aims could be so compelled by branding to readily abandon this agenda without thought. It is a strategy that ultimately resists instrumentalising of the Whitechapel installation.And by implicating herself through the self-portrait turning away in the tapestry, Macuga conveys her own sense of ethical responsibility in the context of blurred boundaries between art and commerce. My work is ‘as fallible in its accountability as those I critique’, Macuga admits (2012a). Macuga (quoted in Watson 2011: 143) reflects on the tapestry: In a sense it functioned as a critique of my own practice. I had invited groups to come and use the space in whatever way they saw fit, and the gallery hosted over one hundred meetings. This situation quickly got out of my control and the space took on multiple functions, some of which had nothing to do with or even contradicted the principle meaning of Picasso’s work. In this context, the title of Macuga’s tapestry – On the Nature of the Beast – provides another layer of resonance. The simple addition of the preposition ‘on’ suggests that the tapestry is a rumination concerning the earlier intervention. It also connotes a rethinking of what ‘the nature of the beast’ might be and expands this definition to include the twin seductions of money and power that have the power to corrupt both museums and the diverse institutions of the wider world. On the Nature of the Beast has now replaced the tapestry of Guernica in the installation’s new home at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Turin (Figures 4.12–4.13) on long-term loan from Turin’s Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT. The installation continues to be used for meetings and conversations. How Macuga’s tapestry animates dialogue within the larger framework of an institution and historical space quite distinct from Whitechapel is beyond the scope of this study. But clearly it creates another platform to explore the efficacy of democracy in museums and the world – by asking who is being

FIGURE 4.12  Goshka Macuga, On the Nature of the Beast, 2009, Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT, on loan to Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino, GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Torino, installation, mixed media: tapestry, wooden and glass table, leather and metal chairs, bronze sculpture on wooden plinth, tapestry: 290 × 450 cm; table: h. 87 × 400 cm; chairs: 16 elements, 95 × 58 × 56,5 cm each; sculpture: 55 × 86 × 58 cm; plinth: 100 × 62 x 58 cm, photo: Paolo Pellion

FIGURE 4.13  Goshka Macuga, On the Nature of the Beast, 2009, Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT, on loan to Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino, GAM – Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Torino. Installation, mixed media: tapestry, wooden and glass table, leather and metal chairs, bronze sculpture on wooden plinth, tapestry: 290 × 450 cm; table: h. 87 × 400 cm; chairs: 16 elements, 95 × 58 × 56,5 cm each; sculpture: 55 × 86 × 58 cm; plinth: 100 × 62 × 58 cm, photo: Paolo Pellion

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included, on what terms and to what effect. It also speaks to the question of branding in a mode reminiscent of the experiences of Olafur Eliasson (quoted in Griffin 2005) exhibiting at Tate: Why shouldn’t a museum brand itself? But very soon I realized that the engagement with my work was being co-branded.You were having, for example, a Tate ‘experience’ when looking at The Weather Project. This suddenly changed the idea of what it means to see and to be self-reflexive or introspective while doing so. The problem becomes what happens to the body of the visitor. Where in society can we still use our senses to define our surroundings, rather than just being defined by our surroundings by means of the commodification of our bodies? I was hoping that institutions could be the place where your senses, your awareness, would actually have a critical potential. But if the museum brands this experience, it’s no different than going to Macy’s. This is how I see the institution’s loss of potential. To Macuga and Eliasson branding connotes a loss of agency for the artist and for the viewer and thus impedes the larger processes of reconciliation.

Platforms, ethics and the boundaries of democracy In his book The Nightmare of Participation, Markus Miessen (2010: 13) argues that the concept of participation is ‘pseudo-democratic’ and must be problematised: Both historically and in terms of political agency, participation is often read through romantic notions of negotiation, inclusion, and democratic decision-making. However, it is precisely this often unquestioned mode of inclusion . . . that does not produce significant results, as criticality is challenged by the concept of the majority. Shaped by theories of productive conflict in the work on Chantal Mouffe, Miessen (2010: 105–159) champions alternative forms of participation based on dissensus and robust internal wrangling. Both Gillick’s Twinned Renegotiation Platforms and Macuga’s The Nature of the Beast – and On the Nature of the Beast – likewise embrace alternative forms of participation that introduce criticality to the processes of re-making democracy. Gillick and Macuga deploy the trope of the platform to complicate issues of participation and create opportunities to critique, reimagine and perform acts of democracy. They demonstrate that participation in and of itself cannot generate reconciliation but that critically and ethically examining the terms of participation can generate new more equitable power relationships and new forms of democracy. In so doing they show that ethical decision-making undergirds all aspects of relational practice. As Nina Möntmann (2010: 194) declares, ‘Is there something like good censorship? How can we define the fine line between ethics and morality? How far can provocation in art go, before it becomes cynical and abusive?’ Dutch artist Jonas Staal works in that grey zone between ethics and morality to provoke audiences to reflect upon the limits of democracy and the urge to control through censorship. He sees democracy itself as a platform to interrogate though he distinguishes democracy – as an emancipatory and critical mechanism – from consensus-based democratic politics by

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referring to the latter as ‘democratism’, a term that divests sentiment from historical practices of democracy and links it to other political movements with ‘ism’ in their names, such as socialism and totalitarianism. Democracy is, according to Staal (2007), a space or: platform upon which we investigate the ideological contradictions of democratism, its misuses and instrumentalization. It is the place where every political debate is a public debate. It is the place where an engaged minority takes charge versus a passive majority, where we break democratism’s ‘dictatorship of the majority’. It is the place in which democracy becomes not so much a goal in itself, but an enabler for new forms of political organization and concepts of communality. He is particularly concerned by flawed systems of representation in democratic politics. Staal (2012b) asks, ‘How can we rewrite the fundamental principles of democracy in a way that is not based on representation through an outsourced voice?’ Staal sees his interventions as creating conditions for alternative platforms of democracy to flourish. ‘I do not want to create art within a so-called democracy; I want to help shape democracy myself ’, Staal states (2012a). A prolific writer, Staal (2012b) is driven to defend his positions by placing them within a wider theoretical context. Staal generated his understanding of democracy as a platform during the development of his Geert Wilders Works (2005–2008). In this project, which Staal had originally intended to last just one month, he anonymously created and staged 21 quasi-memorials to Geert Wilders, the right-wing Party of Freedom extremist politician, who was (and is) still very much alive and active. Framed photographs of Wilders, along with flowers, teddy bears, candles and other paraphernalia associated with the mourning of public figures, mysteriously appeared at public sites in Rotterdam and The Hague (Staal 2008). The works sparked media speculation about how to interpret the memorial arrangements. Police stated that they did not know whether the memorials were a menace or a sign of public support for Wilders but they took photos (Figure 4.14) as evidence. Wilders argued that the memorials were a threat to his life. Upon Wilders’s claim, Staal (2012b) chose to divulge his identity as the artist of the memorials and voluntarily reported to the police who charged him with threatening the life of a politician. Staal insinuated himself within the public sphere with his ‘memorials’ as a way to spark civic discourse on growing right-wing extremism in the Netherlands. But because, since the Cold War, the state had instrumentalised contemporary Dutch art to signal individual freedom (Esche n.d.; ten Thije 2012), Staal found that there were few mechanisms in place for recognising the complexities of artistic practice with a political agenda. Staal (2012a) explains: In our post-war era, politics had assigned to art the financed duty to be free. Any direct ideological commitment had become suspect, as a result of the role played by art in the Nazi and Stalinist systems. The conclusion of both politics and the art world was that it was better not to be engaged at all, than to be engaged with the wrong parties. A generic politics – a politics that exchanged ideology for management, out of fear for dirty hands – sponsored an equally generic art. Staal’s experience led him to be as wary of censorship in his way as is Macuga in hers. Staal’s trial began in a local court in Rotterdam and then moved to the national Court of Justice in The Hague because there was no relevant precedent. Staal (2012b) considers the

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FIGURE 4.14  Jonas Staal, Memorial, The Geert Wilders Works, 2005, photo: OPS file number 2005137109 (from the police report)

court proceedings as integral to his project and generated works of his own to signify this. These included printed invitations that appropriated the trial as a public debate on art and politics, a manifesto which he published in a widely read Dutch newspaper and which served as his plea and a script, The Geert Wilders Works  – A Trial I–II, in which Staal presents key figures in

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the trial as performers in a play and appropriated court drawings (Figure 4.15) to illustrate the drama. Staal (2012b) says he refused to defend himself in the legal sense of the word because he saw nothing to defend himself from. He claims his interest in the case was in confronting differing notions of truth between the spheres of politics, art and law. Staal (2012b) recounts that the most valuable part of the project was the debate of his manifesto with the judges who were themselves intellectually interested in the situation. Together, they held an aesthetic discussion within a theoretical framework about what constitutes a threat. Staal argued for the multiplicity and reflexivity of the intervention and the judges acknowledged that the reading of objects can create new truths. Staal was eventually acquitted of all charges. Staal (2012b) explains that his prosecution empowered him to scrutinise the limits of legal citizenship and political democracy in new ways. ‘The paradoxical promise of democracy – freedom and the right to difference for everybody – requires an unrelentingly consistent action, which, first and foremost exposes the fear of freedom when the wafer-thin mask of tolerance and openness falls away’, Staal remarks (2011). Inspired since his trial by the Occupy Movement and by WikiLeaks and Anonymous as models of open systems, Staal (2012a) has more recently defined his work as a search for a new visual language for systems to question their own conditions and paradoxes. Probing the boundaries between ethics and the law and between democracy and insurgency, his New World Summit, his 2012 installation for the Seventh Berlin Biennial (with other editions of the project at Leiden, Kochi, Brussels, Utrecht and Rojava in Northern Syria), tests out what Staal (2012b) describes as an ‘alternative parliament’ as a novel form of democracy and a ‘platform through which we can challenge European managerial notions of state, statelessness and supranationalism’. Held on 4–5 May 2012 in Berlin’s Sophiensaele, a former East German theatre workshop and club for craftspeople, Staal’s New World Summit brought together seven political and legal representatives of diverse organisations on the international terrorist list, representing a range of political positions including communist, socialist, anarchist, nationalist, fundamentalist and sectarian,

Jonas Staal, Court drawing, The Geert Wilders Works: A Trial I–II, 2007–2008, depicting from left to right: Jan Hensema, officer of justice D. Van der Heem, Judge M. van Boven, suspect J. Staal and suspect's lawyer R. van den Boogert

FIGURE 4.15 

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to speak about the groups’ efforts towards self-determination (Figure 4.16). Luis Jalandoni, chief negotiator of National Democratic Front of the Philippines; Moussa Ag Assarid, spokesperson for the Tuareg National Movement of the Liberation of Azawad in Mali; Fadile Yildirim, leader of the Kurdish women’s movement in Turkey; and Jon Andoni Lekue, Basque lawyer and independence activist, participated as political representatives. Victor Koppe, a Dutch human rights lawyer who has defended diverse separatist organisations, including the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), contributed as a legal representative, as did Linda Moreno and Nancy Hollander, attorneys known for defending high profile cases in the US. Moreno has represented Sami Amin Al Arian, a Palestinian academic accused of raising funds for Islamic Jihad, and Hollander has served as counsel for the Holy Land Foundation and for several Guantanamo Bay prisoners (van Gerven Oei 2012: 41, 75–85). Staal (2012c) worked closely with an attorney and engaged in difficult negotiations with Biennale sponsors to realise a project that did not break the law but that existed in a parallel political sphere with a parallel law and that tested the boundaries of democratic systems (Kluijver 2012: 14). Discussions among the speakers included the legislative impact of counter-terrorism, defining what constitutes slavery in the contemporary world and ideas for political reform. On the afternoon of the second day the event became a forum for debate between the speakers and members of the audience. Robert Kluijver (2012), lecturer in international relations and curator of the project, moderated the dialogue (van Gerven Oei and Groves 2012). As Staal (2012a) asserts in an accompanying essay, ‘Art in Defense of Democracy’, originally published in a major Dutch newspaper and reprinted for distribution at the Biennale, his aim

Jonas Staal, New World Summit – Berlin, Sophiensaele, Berlin Biennale, 2012, debate, from left to right Jon Andoni Lekue (former member of Batasuna, Basque Peace Process), chairman and former UN diplomat Robert Kluijver, Fadile Yildirim (Kurdish Women Movement), Luis Jalandoni (National Democratic Front of the Philippines), translator Merel Cicek, Moussa Ag Assarid (National Liberation Movement of Azawad), translator Ernst van den Hemel, photo: Lidia Rossner

FIGURE 4.16 

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for the intervention was not to legitimise violence as a political strategy but to challenge the binary opposition between democracy and terrorism through a platform that creates an emancipatory political space. Staal (2012a) describes the work as ‘a space where the boundaries of our current system are mapped out. A supplement to our parliamentary democracy: a platform for its “shadow side” ’. Whilst Staal (2012b) understands that his project raises a host of ethical – and legal – issues, he argues that rethinking the project of democracy requires risk-taking through radical approaches and through agonism. The New World Summit blurs the boundaries between democracy and terrorism to generate insights concerning equalities and human rights in contemporary democratic systems. The project appropriates the performative aspect of an act of terrorism to function as a performance piece itself which, ironically, as Beatrice de Graaf (2012) asserts, also situates counterterrorism as a performance, a mode of political and social control orchestrated by the media, the state and security bureaucracies. According to de Graaf (2012: 67), the New World Summit explores ‘how norms and values of justice and injustice, of acceptable behaviours and deviance are collectively suggested, created, confirmed or discarded’. For Staal (2014), critiquing these norms and values lies at the heart of the messy and ironically conflictual processes of reconciliation which require absolute equal conditions for participation. The political and theatrical history of the Sophiensaele provided a fitting context to emphasise the radical and performative nature of the event. Staal’s installation for and management of the event, co-created with a team of collaborators including a curator, producer, architect, researchers, development specialists and others (van Gerven Oei 2012: colophon), enhanced the theatrical sensibility; it centred on a minimalist but cleverly choreographed theatre-in-the-round which provided a literal stage for the speakers (Figure 4.17). Eight wooden lecterns stood in the middle, surrounded by three rings of folding chairs for the audience, which were further encircled by

FIGURE 4.17  Jonas Staal, New World Summit – Berlin, 2012 (study), drawing in collaboration with architect Paul Kuipers, courtesy of the artists

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a wooden scaffold flying some 75 flags, arranged by colour, of organisations currently or once labelled as terrorist, from Shining Path (Communist Party of Peru) to the Ulster Volunteer Force to Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (Plate 13). The multitude of flags emphasised the diversity of the speakers and the organisations on the international terrorist list and challenged simplistic notions of defining terrorism. The flags asked, what defines these groups beyond the freezing of their bank accounts and the bans against travel and arms trade imposed upon them? As a platform, the discourse unpacked many of the paradoxes held within the terms ‘democracy’ and ‘terrorist organisation’ to model a new mode of democratic action. It considered how organisations labelled as terrorist, though not operating within democratic systems, might privilege some aspects of equalities issues traditionally linked to Western democracy. And it explored how Western democracies, though purporting to administer the principles of equality, have their limits, including the erosion of human rights in counter-terrorism drives and a lack of transparency in generating international terrorist lists which, Staal (2012a, 2012c) asserts, are shaped by geopolitical and economic interests as much as by trajectories of illegal activity. Staal (2012c) sees these weaknesses in democracy as modes of ‘othering’ that need to be redressed: For me democratic action means somehow every time remembering that aspect that we forget, every time confronting ourselves and our communities with that that we exclude or wish to keep out of the picture because it says so very much about our goals and intentions. For me the New World Summit is exactly that. The artist views art as a language and the exhibition as a domain where emancipatory thinking is possible. Staal (2012b) declares: here, democracy is not about dictatorship of the majority but about the radical equality between the minority and the majority – the task is how to imagine where that principle can take shape – not in an administrative bureaucratic sense – but – how can we shape this society ourselves in a Beuysian ‘total work of art’ capacity, each employing a creative capacity. The larger institution of the Berlin Biennale offered its support of Staal’s platform. After Staal’s project was staged, documentation of the New World Summit was exhibited at Kunst-Werke Berlin as part of the Biennale. Staal’s ‘Art in Defense of Democracy’ essay, distributed at the exhibit, was signed not only by all of the project collaborators but also by Biennale co-curators Artur Z˙mijewski and Joanna Warsza (Staal 2012a). Staal’s New World Summit may take to an extreme the notion of the platform as a means of negotiating and renegotiating democracy but, in conjunction with Gillick’s Twinned Renegotiation Platforms and Macuga’s The Nature of the Beast, it provides an opportunity to reflect on new modes of deliberation towards reconciliation both inside and outside of the museum. The challenging ethical quandaries generated by all three projects acknowledge museums’ complicity in a larger system of neoliberal consensus politics and demonstrate that critical practice is a productive driver for interrogating and reimagining processes of political representation. As Los Angeles–based artist John Knight (2009: 68) exclaims, ‘We may not want to go so far as melting down our “discussion platforms” and converting them into shields and barricades, but we can still extract collective assemblages of enunciation from the discursive situation’. Seen together, the platforms of Gillick, Macuga and Staal probe issues of equality and inequality inherent in democratic systems and underscore the gallery’s roles and responsibilities in transforming the state as well as its own hierarchies of power.

5 RECONCILIATION AND THE DISCURSIVE MUSEUM

Introducing the discursive museum This book has examined from a museological perspective the convergences between institutional critique and socially engaged practice as they advance museum ethics discourse. It has identified and unpacked through case studies in critical practice three major strands in museum ethics discourse – ethical stewardship of collections; hybridity as an approach to equality and social justice; and renegotiating the terms of democracy. And it has demonstrated through the lens of reconciliation theory that critical practice, as gesture, plays a significant role in identifying and addressing imbalances of power between museums and their publics. This final chapter considers reconciliation, as articulated through the case studies in Chapters 2–4, as an expression of both the ethics of care and the agonism of productive conflict. It then explores how this notion of reconciliation has become embedded in the values and workings of the ‘discursive’ museum, as developed in the 1990s and early 2000s by the phenomenon of ‘new institutionalism’ and more fully entrenched today in a range of art institutions from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles to the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. The term ‘discursive museum’, now ubiquitous, has been in use for at least two d­ ecades to describe art institutions that define themselves through self-reflective practice. Their self-critical thinking manifests itself particularly in relation to economic pressures and to expectations that their primary role is to turn out exhibitions. Discursive institutions typically challenge the demands of funders to instrumentalise audiences, for instance, through ­box-ticking exercises in quantitative research. They also prioritise knowledge exchange over exhibitions, relying on dematerialised media such as symposia, workshops and residencies; when exhibitions form part of a programme they are social in nature. A 2001 symposium at the Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna (MAK), titled ‘The Discursive Museum’, and related edited volume (Noever 2002), for example, called for museums to think of themselves more conceptually and as a means of liberation from the orthodoxies of collecting and exhibition-making. Philosophers and theorists from Boris Groys to Hans Belting figured largely to ­demonstrate how discourse (or the discursive) could help free museum practitioners from the constraints of common practice.

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I use the term ‘discursive museum’ to recall this history but also to recognise more recent developments in which museum practitioners clearly acknowledge and leverage the advances in ethics discourse sparked by artists engaging in critical practice, as explored in the preceding case studies. The discursive museums to which I refer are committed to unpacking the implications of critical practice for their own work, particularly re-aligning power and resources to facilitate public agency. This discursive museum has a track record of commissioning temporal projects in critical practice and continues to do so; some have even commissioned projects discussed in Chapters 2–4. But, moreover, it responds to concerns that relying on the temporal potentially enables museum practitioners to position responsibility for ethical reflection and critique with the artist. As Goshka Macuga (2012b) muses: In the end, the name is mine and the signature underneath is mine. I am asked to go to a museum and create a new commission which will take me to the history of the institution. I will look at certain things that are problematic and then I, myself, rather than the institution, will bring these things into contemporary discourse. There’s a lack of responsibility or initiative for the museum to bring these difficult things to light. I am the person who in a way takes the responsibility for it. This chapter will show that, within the phenomenon of the discursive museum, organisations themselves assume responsibility for the larger pursuit of reconciliation and wrestle with the conflicts and contradictions that result.

Reconciliation and the ethics of care Over the last five years a new understanding of museum ethics has developed that imagines it as a dynamic discourse, contingent on the changing economic, political, technological and social landscape (Marstine 2011). In this new museum ethics, ethics codes are one part of a larger ethical framework which also includes values/principles and case studies. Where this triad of elements intersects, ethics discourse results (Marstine, Dodd and Jones 2015: 71–75). In this approach codes are regarded as living and breathing, changeable rather than fixed, and equally as concerned about the relations between museums and publics as about the collection, care and use of objects. The UK Museums Association (MA), leveraging the implications emerging from this literature as well the MA’s ‘Museums Change Lives’ document (2013), in 2015 rewrote its ethics code, framing it within a set of principles and linking it to case studies that together empower museum practitioners to contribute to ethics discourse that acknowledges the social purpose of museums (Museums Association 2015). Within this context, reconciliation can be seen as an ethics strategy built on relational values, as expressed in ‘Museums Change Lives’ and the larger ethics framework under development at the MA. In the domain of political science, where Archbishop Tutu’s use of the Xhosa word ubuntu has come to assume a wider symbolic value of interconnectedness, reconciliation is widely recognised as a relational notion (Llewellyn and Philpott 2014). It is also understood to be a blueprint for ethical engagement, as reconciliation theorists Robert Hattam, Stephen Atkinson and Peter Bishop (2012: 4) attest: Reconciliation can be seen as the optimistic ‘bright’ side of our unsettling times; an engaged ethical turn that renews interest in our responsibility for one another; an attempt

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to map out an alternative world view to that proposed by the social depredations of individualistic neoliberalism. As Zembylas recounts (2012: 52–54), this focus within reconciliation studies on the responsibility for one another is shaped by the ethical theory of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (see also Chapter 3). In his essay ‘Without Identity’, Levinas (2006: 64) defines ethics as empathy for and duty to others which, in turn, severs the boundaries between self and others, ‘To suffer by the other is to take care of him, bear him, be in his place, consume oneself by him. . . . From the moment of sensibility, the subject is for the other: substitution, responsibility, expiation’. And, as sociologist Richard Sennett (2012: 21) asserts, empathy is distinct from and more impactful than sympathy, for whilst both connote a connection between people, ‘empathy is a more demanding exercise, at least in listening; the listener has to get outside him- or herself ’. What are the implications of Levinasian ethics for thinking through reconciliation between museums and publics? It highlights the promise that, as museums create opportunities for public agency, museums themselves (and the people that constitute these institutions) will be shaped or ‘affect’-ed by the values and experiences of those ‘others’ undergoing self-actualisation, thus dissolving the binary between self and other. As this monograph has examined case studies in critical practice that foster reconciliation, it has also considered the possibilities that these interventions generate for organisational change. We might also look to a feminist ethics of care – of affect, defined by philosopher Rosalyn Diprose (2002: 75) as ‘the basis of the production and transformation of the corporeal self through others’ – to shed light on the capacity of critical practice to foster reconciliation between museums and publics. First developed by feminist theorists including Carol Gilligan (2003) in the 1980s, the ethics of care, particularly as nuanced by a second generation of feminist scholars including Grace Clement (1996) and Fiona Robinson (1999), proposes that affect (or the personal) and criticality (or the political) do not negate one another but are instead mutually reinforcing and that social justice is best served by melding the two. Arguing for a ‘critical ethics of care’, Robinson (1999: 26) asserts: Care and justice are no longer fixed in a dichotomous relationship; indeed, it is a new kind of moral thinking in which a strong sense of self goes hand in hand with the valuing of human attachment and the focus on abstract, impersonal, distant relations is replaced by a focus on real, concrete, particular relations. Robinson (1999: 30) holds that the ethics of care carries significance beyond the realm of individual relations to relations within institutions and between institutions and stakeholders: Care ethics involves learning how to listen and be attentive and responsive to the needs and suffering of others.This, in turn, involves a thorough understanding of how relations are constructed and how difference is perceived and maintained through institutions and structures in societies. In this way, an ethics of care for the global context must be a critical ethics which eschews complacency about our ability to respond morally, and about our rational competence to acknowledge individuals’ moral standing on the basis of their humanity alone. Understood in this way, the ethics of care can be seen to relate not only to personal and intimate relations among particular individuals but to all kinds of institutional and structural relations in and across societies.

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The embrace of both criticality and affect and the interrogation of institutions that the feminist ethics of care offers makes it a relevant lens, like Levinasian ethics, through which to shed light on critical practice as a means to reconciliation. The ethics of care propels reconciliation both in the museum and in the wider geopolitical context.

Reconciliation and agonism Examining critical practice through the lens of an ethics of care does not, however, prescribe that the processes of reconciliation are seamless or free of conflict; as we have seen in Chapters 2–4, indeed, they are not. In fact, political theories of agonism, as articulated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2014) in 1985 and further developed by Mouffe in the intervening years, lie at the heart at many of the interventions that are the focus of this study. Mouffe (2005) defines agonism as mutually respectful and productive conflict or dissensus that can never be fully resolved. This is opposed to antagonism, which she sees as unconstructive combative behaviour between rivals: While antagonism is a we/them relation in which the two sides are enemies who do not share any common ground, agonism is a we/them relation in which the conflicting parties, although acknowledging that there is no rational solution to their conflict, nevertheless recognise the legitimacy of their opponents. They are adversaries, not enemies. This means that, while in conflict, they see themselves as belonging to the same political association, as sharing a common symbolic space within which the conflict takes place. Recent scholarship in political science has taken up the concept of agonism (Hirsch 2012) to unsettle the conventional paradigm of reconciliation, as established by Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls as a linear, rational system that creates community healing and consensus. Alexander Hirsch (2012: 3) argues that the deliberative paradigm set out by Habermas and Rawls too easily depoliticises and represses victims’ experiences, thus enabling further injustices to be perpetuated. Thomas Brudholm and Valerie Rosoux (2012) hold that the push to forgive suggests that not forgiving is a moral failure when instead it should be recognised as an act of resilience. VanAntwerpen (2008) explains that, as practices of reconciliation in South Africa have been tested and scrutinised, many scholars have come to view them as overly steeped in Christian theology and not pluralistic enough to function effectively in diverse contexts. According to Lawrie Balfour (2008: 98), reconciliation in agonistic terms does not heal rifts between groups but rather creates a new domain of civil society from these rifts. The concept of agonism is a useful framework by which to grapple with the gestures of reconciliation that critical practice enacts between museums and publics. As Carey Young (2012) remarks, reflecting on her own artistic practice, ‘Agonism is productive. Reconciliation, without agonism, seems bland and banal and maybe that’s not helpful for institutional reflection or critique’. Young’s Conflict Management (2003), commissioned by the Museum Ludwig in Budapest and held in the public sphere, in this case a Budapest marketplace (Figure 5.1), but re-staged in marketplaces in other cities as well, is indicative of her position. The work, lasting one day at each site, invited members of the public to discuss a contentious issue with friends, family members or colleagues and work out their differences; it consisted of two noticeboards, one in English and the other in the local language, carrying the words ‘Settle your Disputes Here! Free arbitration service. Any dispute settled. Professional, personal, family, neighbours’, along with

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Carey Young, Conflict Management, 2003, commissioned by Ludwig Museum, Budapest, professional arbitrator, table, chairs, two noticeboards, media advertising, members of the public, © Carey Young, courtesy of the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, photo: Carey Young

FIGURE 5.1 

three portable chairs, a small table and a local professional arbitrator. Shaped by Young’s artistic research when employed at a leftist (non-profit) think tank, Conflict Management appropriates business models to show the blurring of boundaries between corporate culture and the nonprofit sector (Young 2012).Young (in Gressel 2006) explains: It’s important that the tool used in the piece – negotiation skills – is not necessarily a corporate procedure. In fact it is often offered by non-profit organisations who offer their conflict-resolution services to industry, governments and the professional sphere in general. It’s a process that is often associated with the bitter disputes between unions and industry, especially in the 1970s and 80s in the UK, something I remember from my childhood. It is these agonistic roots of the work that make it a gesture towards reconciliation. Young (in Gressel 2006) asserts, ‘the essence of this work, at least to my imagination, is that it acts as a “temporary peace zone”, it is a kind of utopia, a very short-lived mirage because the work is there for just one day’. This mirage-like nature of Conflict Management suggests that, whilst helping small groups of twos and threes to sort out their disagreements, the work exists simultaneously as a site for the larger project of agonistic enquiry concerning the problem of the corporatisation of public and third sector institutions, particularly as it takes place in the context of a marketplace – in Budapest indicated by a McDonald’s advertisement.Young (2012) states: We’re not in a neutral space and we’re not a neutral person any more, we’re already in that conversation. My hope is that what the work does is present a problem or warn us about a future scenario where art has to operate in a fully corporate landscape. What do we want to do about that?

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Mouffe has taken her own explorations of agonism into the cultural realm. Using the terms ‘critical art’ and ‘intervention’ that approximate the body of work that is critical practice, Mouffe (2005) asserts that such projects interject robust counter-hegemonic ways of thinking into the public sphere. According to the agonistic approach, critical art is art that foments dissent; that makes visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate. . . . I am convinced that it is only by recognising the need for a plurality of forms of interventions, taking place in a variety of public spaces, that critical artistic practices can contribute to the constitution of a variety of agonistic spaces where a radical and plural conception of democracy could be fostered. Arguing against strategies of exodus from institutions and alternatives of self-organising that some theorists such as Gerald Raunig (2009) advocate, Mouffe (2013: 68–69) holds that institutions, including museums and galleries, have an important role to play in creating agonistic spaces; she rejects the rationale that artists who collaborate with museums are, by association, co-opted by them: I am convinced that a conception of radical critique fostering a strategy of ‘engagement with institutions’ instead of ‘withdrawal from institutions’ is absolutely crucial for challenging neoliberalism and envisaging the conditions of a radical democratic. . . . Museums, for instance, can under certain conditions provide spaces for an agonistic confrontation and it is a mistake to believe that artists who choose to work with them cannot play a critical role and that they are automatically recuperated by the system. It is useful to think of the array of projects discussed in this book, from Ansuman Biswas’s Manchester Hermit to Liam Gillick’s Twinned Renegotiation Platforms, as capturing Mouffe’s idea of agonistic space. Biswas’s rhetorical threat to destroy museum objects and the designated social space defined by Gillick’s aluminium frames both create conditions for productive conflict. Mouffe (2013: 70) sees a potential for those museums that are shaped by critical practice to resist and challenge the commodification of art. In this way, we might see the range of ethical concerns that emerge from the interventions in Chapters 2–4 as a corrective to the economic values that predominate in museums and as part of a larger counter-hegemonic project of critical practice intent on establishing agonistic space both inside and outside the gallery.This ethical corrective to the economically driven values of museums – particularly art museums where the art historical canon authorises systems of inclusion and exclusion which bleed into the social arena – undergirds the larger project of reconciliation between museums and their publics.

Critical practice and the discursive museum How has the delicate dance in cultivating both an ethics of care and an agonistic space impacted over the long term institutions pursuing reconciliation through critical practice? Tate Britain Director Alex Farquharson (2014: 53) ponders: What happens when the kinds of curatorial innovations brought to bear on individual exhibitions are transposed to the whole institution? What are the stakes for those institutions and their publics? What does it mean for an institution to internalize and commit

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long term to critical and experimental ways of working with artists, with publics and on itself? How, as a consequence, is the triangular relationship between artist, institution and their publics reconceived, restructured and politicized in these situations, and how might that redefine the publicness of institutions of contemporary art? Farquharson (2012) argues that critical practice has helped many museums and galleries to become ‘more porous, more integrative of artists’ positions within the institution and more discursively constructed’. In other words, critical practice fosters a discursive space defined by reflection and critique concerning how the institution situates itself – in relation to artists and publics and through actions taken to renegotiate power inequalities (Mania 2006: 252). As Charles Esche (quoted in Kolb and Flückiger 2014c: 22) remarks of the Van Abbemuseum, ‘I saw the institution as a tool to investigate this question. Can art be a useful democratic device? A device to install other forms of democracy than the ones we had’. The discursive space creates sustained conditions for enactments of reconciliation between museums and their publics.

New institutionalism New institutionalism and critical practice Such discursive spaces took root from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, alongside the ‘second wave’ of institutional critique, the articulation of relational aesthetics and the unfolding of socially engaged practice. Often called ‘new institutionalism’, a term coined by curator Jonas Ekeberg (2003: 10, 15) and borrowed from the social sciences, this name was sometimes contested as constraining amongst those involved in developing these discursive spaces (Kolb and Flückiger 2014a: 6). Esche preferred the term ‘experimental institutionalism’ to emphasise the risk-taking nature of discursive spaces; curator Jorge Ribalta chose to use the moniker ‘relational institutionalism’ to stress the capacity of discursive spaces to create mutual understanding (Kolb and Flückiger 2014c: 25; Kolb and Flückiger 2014b: 19–20). Nonetheless, the approach that represented these discursive spaces quickly spread to a group of small to medium-sized mostly non-collecting art organisations primarily in Northwestern Europe, including the Rooseum (Malmö), the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art or (NIFCA) (Helsinki), the Bergen Kunsthalle, the Witte de With (Rotterdam), BAK (Utrecht), the Kunstverein Munich, the Kunstverein Frankfurt, Kunstwerke Berlin and Shedhalle (Zurich) but with outposts elsewhere in Europe including the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACMA), the Museum Sztuki (Łódz´), the Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius and Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center (Istanbul). Claire Doherty (2004) argues that the new institutionalism also flourished in UK non-collecting art institutions such as Whitechapel, FACT and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. Gillick (2012) sees the post-war Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London as a model. New institutionalism emerged from a distinct set of European political, economic and cultural circumstances. It benefitted from the growth of public spending on museums and galleries in the Northern European social welfare state of the 1990s (Ekeberg 2013: 52, 54). It was an attempt to challenge consensus politics, post-1989, and to eradicate the divide between East and West which had persisted since the Cold War (Esche in Kolb and Flückiger 2014c: 23). It grew from a biennale culture that produced a body of independent curators who subsequently moved into directorships or curatorial positions within art institutions but knew how to selforganise (Kolb and Flückiger 2014a: 10; Sheikh 2012: 366–368; J. Hoffmann 2006: 324). It

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was shaped by the development of critical museology (Kolb and Flückiger 2014a: 8). And it expanded through the championing of discursive spaces in the teaching of curatorial studies programs (Ekeberg in Kolb and Flückiger 2014b: 21). But most importantly, new institutionalism was realised from the ethical advances of critical practice to create conditions for reconciliation between museums and their publics. Clearly, institutional critique was a driving force. Nina Möntmann, former curator at NIFCA, in fact, uses the term ‘institutions of critique’ to describe the spaces of new institutionalism. ‘Institutions of critique’, Möntmann (2009: 155) asserts, connote: institutions that have internalized the institutional critique that was formulated by artists in the 1970s and 90s and have developed auto-critique that is now actively embraced by curators. Indeed, curators no longer just invite critical artists, but are themselves aiming to change institutional structures, hierarchies and functions. For Maria Hlavajova (2012), Artistic Director of BAK, however, institutional critique, whilst central to the organisation’s approach, is understood as implicit, rather than explicit: We constantly think about ourselves and our institution through such banal things as writing a policy plan for the government.This is not a list of exhibitions, it’s a philosophy document stating who you are and how you want to evolve. We’d never use the term of institutional critique for ourselves. I think it’s one of those elements that play into our practice because automatically we engage with the notion of power.You need to adopt certain practices, certain ethos of institutional critique. But it’s not explicitly articulated that way in our practice. For both BAK and NIFCA, as well as the other art galleries and centres of new institutionalism, the key issue was to transform institutional critique from something that was done to the institution from outside to something that was enacted within the institution by practitioners themselves. Moreover, whilst embedding institutional critique, they sought to maintain its radical potential to challenge common assumptions that contribute to the divides of power. Socially engaged practice also played a defining role in the ethical orientation of new institutionalism – towards forging new relational values (Ekeberg 2013: 55). Dave Beech (2010b) of the art collective Freee, notes, ‘The critique and transformation of the gallery . . . is fundamentally related to the emergence of the art of encounter.’ This emphasis on relational values led the new institutionalism to eschew the instrumentalisation of publics that transpired through the demands of funders and museum marketing. Farquharson (2012) declares: One of the important critical positions to new institutionalism is not to treat the public as this kind of mass market, segmented according to consumer types, but to think critically about the role of art in the public sphere. And that public sphere is made up of a plurality of cultural and political actors that are engaged with authentically.

New institutionalism through the ethics of care New institutionalism is characterised by a range of initiatives that together evoke both the ethics of care and agonistic engagements in equal measure though, of course, these two are not

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mutually exclusive. New institutionalism conveys the ethics of care through the interwoven principles of hospitality, collaborative and co-productive ways of working, and prioritising processes (of discourse) that take time and build trust over deliverables (such as temporary exhibitions) that bring short-term gains. Speaking of the focus on process over product, FACT’s Kat Dempsey (2012) declares, ‘we don’t treat community as simply a content provider but instead a long-term investment in which we’re also providing partners to help them navigate the services they might need’. Esche (2012), who was once director of Rooseum, explains that radical hospitality is a core value of the new institutionalism, overturning the museum’s traditional role as gatekeeper and judge. Informed by Derrida’s concept of unconditional hospitality, in which the host accepts the ‘other’ on their own terms (see Chapter 3), Esche holds that, in the museum context, hospitality means little ‘when no one is knocking on your door’; in other words, hospitality empowers agency only when enacted on a micro-scale, investing time with small groups of disenfranchised individuals. Central to radical hospitality is the notion that all parties enter collaborations with expertise and that art historical expertise is no more valuable than other kinds of competencies; as Farquharson notes (2012), hospitality ‘speaks to multiple facets of experience and knowledge, rather than privileging a more art-centric discourse’. Artist and researcher Boo Chapple (2012), who ran several projects at FACT, speaks to the reciprocal relations the organisation endeavours to establish: Part of what I’ve been doing is being the person who coaxes people in and helps them realise that we are changing the model and no we don’t want to own what they produce, we’re co-producing these with them so it becomes a platform for all of us. Chapple’s approach is assertive, grappling in the most appropriate way she can with the very real legacy of suspicion held by marginalised groups towards cultural institutions because of the elitist values that some of them espouse. Chapple (2012) explains that she envisioned her role through the ethics of care: I curate relationships between people. That’s what I love to do; I love to get people talking to each other when I can see there’s a potential shared interest but the parties aren’t yet joined up. I think that my focus is on a politics of public-ness.Where art meets public-ness, that’s what I find really interesting. New institutionalism also expresses the ethics of care through the idea of the ‘museum as hub’ in which discursive art spaces link to cultural and community projects in the developing world to frame local concerns within the context of global issues (Möntmann 2009: 157–158). Initiatives among partners include residencies, exchanges, public programmes, exhibitions and digital projects. As Omar Kholeif (2012) states, ‘the museum as hub was a critique of the rigidity of an institution existing in one place’.This mode of dispersed or distributed activity, rather than franchises (which maintain colonial and corporate power hierarchies), attempts to create an ethos in which all parties involved are equally shaped by the exchanges that characterise it, leading to new relationally sensitive ways of thinking and acting. Sally Tallant (2010: 190) asserts: By undertaking external, place-based or locally-situated projects, it is possible to think about a renegotiation of the role of the gallery and museum as a site of production which

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operates beyond the demands of the market and in relation to wider socio-political concerns. This ethos of reciprocity applies also to activity within the discursive art spaces of new institutionalism so that, rather than following a hierarchal model, organisational structure varies depending on the needs of each project, and curatorial and learning programmes have equal say. As Dempsey (2012), asserts, ‘For FACT, the challenge is seeing the curatorial model of the organisation and the community engagement programme as interwoven, not as two separate strands’.

New institutionalism and agonism Like the ethics of care, agonism equally defines the key tenets of the new institutionalism; in fact, the overarching ethics of care makes productive conflict possible whilst agonism gives import and substance to the ethics of care. As Möntmann (2006: 12) exclaims, new institutionalism generates a ‘democratic, polyphonic place, hence accepting conflict’. Transdisciplinarity, the crossing of conventional borders, academic and otherwise, shapes the counter-hegemonic space of new institutionalism. The organisations that together comprised new institutionalism conceived of themselves as a kind of laboratory, think tank or site of research in which art and art history lose their formerly authoritative status to a discourse informed by politics, philosophy, sociology and other fields relevant to urgent social issues (Esche 2012). Feminist and queer approaches to curating in the early 1990s contributed to this border crossing (Sheikh 2012: 365) in which knowledge production and self-reflective practice take precedence over exhibition making. Artists and other intellectuals undertook guest residencies to develop provocations which were then addressed through many kinds of research. Farquharson (2006) describes what a visitor would likely encounter when entering a space of new institutionalism, ‘The artist-as-researcher is a privileged figure in new institutions; crowded with monitors, reading material, tables and chairs, exhibitions, at a glance, can look like unidentifiable classrooms worked by obsessives’. In this transdisciplinary laboratory/think tank/site of research, failure was seen as productive. Esche (2012) explains, we had a distinctive ‘learning and feedback loop so that researchers had the ability to take a thesis to its limits, to make mistakes and to reflect on what went wrong’. The processes of transdisciplinary research in the new institutionalism are categorically agonistic. O’Neill and Wilson (2010: 13–14) declare: The escalation in discursive events has . . . been at the centre of new and experimental, though often short-lived, institutional models. Adopting a counter-institutional ethos, these discursive productions often implement a durational dialogical process. Along the informal lines of Socratic elenchus rather than prescriptive ‘schooling’ or ‘explication’. In other words, they seem to seek not the masterful production of expertise and the authoritative pronouncement of truth but rather the co-production of question, ambiguity and enquiry, often determined by the simple contingencies of where people happen to begin a conversation. Indeed, the discursive emphasis of the new institutionalism typically made exhibitions and their associated catalogues take a back seat to other kinds of critically engaged ‘publishing’, in

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the largest sense of the word, for instance, public programming, journals, readers and blogs (at a time before the development of more dynamic social media). This publishing activity, whilst focused on exchange, was divorced from that of traditional education departments and ‘top down’ pedagogies of dissemination but instead provided platforms for divergent voices that expressed dissensus, often concerning the roles and responsibilities of the institution to the world. Research activity in the new institutionalism was commonly organised into streams which could last seasons or even a year or longer to foster debate from multiple perspectives. When exhibitions were integral to a stream of research, they formed part of the discursive ‘publishing’ activity. Farquharson (2006) explains: Production doesn’t necessarily happen prior to and remote from presentation; it happens alongside or within it. Reception, similarly, refutes the white cube ideal of the individual viewer’s inaudible monologue, and is instead dialogic and participatory. Discussion events are rarely at the service of exhibitions at ‘new institutions’; either they tend to take the form of autonomous programming streams, or else exhibitions themselves take a highly dialogic mode, giving rise to new curatorial hybrids. ‘New institutions’ are deeply interested in education in its widest sense: learning consists of equal exchanges among a peer group in which the ambitious level of discussion is not compromised. Along with transdisciplinarity and the formation of diverse and durational platforms for research activity, non-hierarchal modes of collaboration are integral to the agonistic potential of new institutionalism. Inspired by patterns of shared authority as seen in artists’ collectives and in the squatters’ movement (Sheikh 2012: 365), the organisational structures of new institutionalism are typically heterarchical. Numerous models emerged for this but typical is that of Shedhalle which adopted a system wherein two curators lead together but step down after approximately three years to avoid the amassing of power. According to former Shedhalle curator Anke Hoffmann, this allows for many divergent voices over time to impact the direction of the organisation. Hoffmann states that Shedhalle makes a consciously feminist choice not to have a director – so as to avoid silencing subversive approaches. Together, the joint curators act as critical friends, alternately challenging and supporting each other, reflecting the tensions between care and agonism (A. Hoffmann 2012).

Ethical quandaries of new institutionalism But with all best intentions, as new institutionalism contributed to the project of reconciliation through the ethics of care and the spaces of agonism, it also embodied a minefield of ethical quandaries, as well as political vulnerabilities that did not sit well with the social welfare governments that were their primary funders, and led to its waning some 10 years after it emerged. Many of the organisations that defined themselves through new institutionalism such as Rooseum and NIFCA closed their doors by the mid-2000s; others including the Palais de Tokyo and Kunstverein Munich adapted to changing circumstances; still others, like BAK, as Maria Hlavajova (2012) recounts, have maintained the core values of new institutionalism but spend a great deal of energy on advocacy with politicians and live from year to year, prepared to shut down, rather than compromise their ideals. Among the most significant of the ethical quandaries and political vulnerabilities that surfaced from the development of new institutionalism is that, despite its commitment to

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emancipatory public engagements, it did not attract very diverse or very large publics. Hlavajova (2012) is frank about these issues: We cater primarily to artists, public intellectuals and students.When we founded BAK, we said there are enough institutions that are oriented towards the general public and we want to take a particular position of producing knowledge and that requires speaking with particular segments of the society.You can’t pretend you can speak to everybody at the same time. We argue that BAK’s potential impact cannot be measured in numbers. We try to provide qualitative rather than quantitative evidence. The concept that the research activity of new institutionalism is a testing ground with a small primary audience but a potentially wider and larger secondary audience because many of those in the primary audience – artists, intellectuals and students – are ‘influencers’ who will later embed the values of new institutionalism within a range of other organisations was not convincing to state funders who used quantitative measures to evaluate success and were not enamoured of critical discursive projects. In addition, the organisational structure of rotating curators favoured by new institutionalism prevented many of these spaces from fostering sustained relationships with particular political leaders and community groups that might have championed their cause (Kolb and Flückiger 2014a: 11–12). State funding agencies also did not understand how to ascertain the value of gallery activity that did not prioritise exhibitions as their main ‘output’. Hlavajova (2012) defends the position of BAK in this regard: We only speak when we have something to say, only when we are at a stage in research when it is respectful to the audience to share with them our findings. There’s a lot happening behind closed doors. We see public projects as a sort of interruption of thinking by action and that comes irregularly. We do need to account to our constituency with certain knowledge that we produce and negotiate with audiences. But essentially, research has to be private work. Sometimes we don’t have an exhibition for six months. But we also have a digital platform with huge numbers of visitors and universities that use it. But even some observers fully invested in critical practice felt that new institutionalism was overly self-absorbed. Liam Gillick (2012) reflects: I think a lot of it is very narcissistic as if these institutions have been in therapy or something. And often, as the artist, you are really just watching – it’s like going back to your parents’ house and watching them having an argument and you’re merely the side attraction. They assume the child is fine so they can fight while you watch. Nevertheless, the key principles of the new institutionalism continue to exert sway over the more diverse sorts of discursive institutions that prosper today, both large and small, collecting and non-collecting, and which are situated in more disparate locales and socio-economic contexts than those of the previous generation (Kolb and Flückiger 2014a; Farquharson 2012). In some cases, directors and curators who piloted the new institutionalism, such as Esche, went on to transform other art spaces; yet, the impact was much more far-reaching than that.

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Dieter Roelstraete (2012) recounts that anyone who is now appointed director of an art space in Europe embeds a process that involves self-interrogation in which the categories between artist, critic and curator have collapsed. As Sarah Thelwall (2011) asserts in research commissioned by Common Practice, a London advocacy group promoting the value of risk-taking small-scale visual arts organisations, the innovations of small experimental art spaces, such as represented by the new institutionalism, clearly impact the wider ecosystem of larger-scale museums and galleries though evidence may not be captured for at least a decade.

The discursive institution today Indeed, many of the values espoused and practices piloted by the new institutionalism have become ingrained in a broader spectrum of art institutions though in some larger art museums and galleries it is specific departments – most often departments of contemporary art or learning and engagement – that have assumed this stance of the discursive. Further, discursive institutions (and departments) today are more directly grappling with the kinds of power and equalities issues central to reconciliation between museums and their publics than were those of the new institutionalism. Simon Sheikh (2012: 372) describes this shift: ‘It is thus not only a question of changing institutions, but of changing how we institute – how subjectivity and imagination can be instituted in a different way, with inclusions and exclusions, representations and well as de-presentations’. In the discursive institution today critical practice and organisational change – or new modes of instituting – are mutually reinforcing in the project of reconciliation, in part because artists and institutions are collaborating at a deeper level than previously. Among the most significant new modes of instituting that have emerged over the last few years are: introducing sustainable platforms for artists to serve as critical friends; thinking and acting mindfully about what it means to build a public; generating novel, ambitious models of a dispersed museum independent of any one site; and treating a permanent collection as a generative tool integral to the cultural commons. In all of these initiatives, an ethics of care frames the agonistic space that is produced by discourse.

Artist as critical friend: The Artists Council Among alternative spaces in the art world, particularly artist-run spaces, there is a long tradition of situating artists in positions of leadership. However, in art museums and galleries, whilst it has become commonplace to have one or two artists on a board of trustees, a larger emphasis on professional practice has traditionally constrained institutions from hiring practicing artists for key staff positions; when this does occur, the individual is typically asked to set clear boundaries between their museum job and their artistic work, as, for instance, Pablo Helguera (2012) does in his roles as director of Adult and Academic Programmes at the Museum of Modern Art and as an artist and performer. But some museums and galleries, inspired in part by the artist-as-researcherrole of the new institutionalism, are seeking to sustain on a long-term basis these kinds of critical engagements. One significant platform to embed the role of artist as critical friend in the museum is the Artists Council, as modelled by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. At the Hammer, the Artists Council meets quarterly (Cline 2012); Council members are paid and serve under three-year contracts. Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer, adapted this platform from Artists’ Space in New York where she worked previously (Lynott 2011).

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Many of the approximately 15 LA-based artists who sit on the council (Figure 5.2) are engaged in critical practice; past and present members include Andrea Fraser, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Liz Glynn, Edgar Arceneaux and Mario Ybarra Jr. (Hammer Museum of Art 2014). Conversations between Artists Council members and Hammer staff are often fraught, in part because the artists maintain a position of autonomy, but the Museum appreciates the productive nature of the agonistic relationship. As Sue Yank (2012), former associate director of Academic Programs at the Hammer, remarks: It’s radical to invite artists into your institutions to tell you what you’re doing wrong and what you should be doing better. What also is radical is that our director really listens. They’ve had an enormous influence on the projects we’ve developed over time. I think they constantly are pushing us. Recently we instituted co-chairs and they started meeting outside the museum and without the staff. it’s added this whole other layer of dynamism, that they’re not being told what to talk about, that they’re actually coming to us with agenda items that they want to talk about. It’s really empowered them. Former Hammer Curatorial Associate Elizabeth Cline (2012) refers to the Artists Council as a kind of ‘institutional critique’ and credits the group with introducing key museum innovations towards reconciliation such as its department of public engagement. Artist Council member Liz Glynn (2014) captures the self-reflective quality of discourse between artists and staff through recounting a conversation on the Hammer’s acquisitions policy: The museum approached the council with a set of questions around its existing informal policy, with the desire to review the existing structure and potentially construct a more

FIGURE 5.2 

Hammer Museum Artist Council and Museum Staff, UCLA, 2014, photo courtesy of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

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formal document.The artists on the council were able to come to a consensus in answering the curator’s questions. . . . But more importantly, the discussion that followed pushed the conversation to larger issues:Who is a collection for? How does inclusion in this collection help artists, and at what point? At the end, we came to this very elegant notion of collecting ideas – seeking works which best embody the most important currents in present practices – rather than focusing on a punch list of artists, certain media, or any kind of branding-oriented strategy. . . . In the room, while many spoke from experience, one never had the sense of any artist advancing their own agenda, or trying to steer the conversation in one direction. The process was genuinely collective. As Glynn’s story of this conversation on acquisitions demonstrates, agonistic discourse springing from the Hammer’s Artists Council acts as a springboard to introduce new modes of instituting founded on the ethics of care.

Thinking and acting mindfully towards building publics Central also to the discursive institution today is a mindful approach to the complex endeavour of building publics. This is, in part, a corrective to the facet of new institutionalism that was sometimes so internally reflexive and focused on micro-scale projects that it neglected external, particularly local, needs and desires. At the same time, contemporary discursive museums strengthen and expand those aspects of the new institutionalism that most contributed to the empowerment of publics, emancipatory strategies that include hospitality, reciprocity, co-production and constructive conflict. This mindful approach to building publics in discursive museums today is represented in some measure by the notion of the ‘educational turn’ (O’Neil and Wilson 2010), the idea that social engagement is central to the curator’s brief and that curators take responsibility for it; rather than giving up curatorial expertise, the educational turn suggests that innovative pedagogy as a domain of research is a key feature defining curatorial expertise. As O’Neill and Wilson (2010: 12–13) assert: This is not simply to propose that curatorial projects have increasingly adopted education as a theme; it is, rather, to assert that curating increasingly operates as an expanded educational praxis. . . . These discursive productions are not only pervasive; increasingly, they are framed in terms of education, research, knowledge production and learning. Furthermore, in many instances, there is a pronounced impulse to distance these platforms from the established formats of museum education and related official cultural pedagogies. This is not simply a reinstatement of the curator as an expert charged with educating a public about the content of a given collection, but rather a kind of ‘curatorialisation’ of education whereby the educative process often becomes the object of curatorial production. With this focus on pedagogies, discursive museums view exhibitions not as a privileged domain but as one aspect of a larger remit of curatorial production which includes public programming, often in conjunction with artists involved in critical practice. In addition, exhibitions that develop within the context of the educational turn typically reveal their own situated-ness, for instance by stating the larger pedagogical aims of the project, and also reference the museum’s

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other relevant modes of engagement both in the gallery and in the wider public sphere. Farquharson (2012) remarks: These kind of experimentations have led not to the demolition of the exhibition but to more awareness around how these exhibitions, even if they are primary in terms of the space they occupy, relate to other ways institutions can represent other practices both inside and outside the walls of the institution. Most critically aware institutions understand that the exhibition is not the be all and end all. Some discursive museums have introduced new positions, such as curator of public engagement, that reflect the straddling of curatorial and learning prerogatives and that are defined by their collaborations with critical practice artists. Ann Philbin (2010), who created such a position for the Hammer Museum, states that she was ‘hoping for a radical approach to visitors’ services through artistic practice’. In fact, the Hammer has no education department but instead integrates learning within the confines of the curatorial. Hammer Curator of Public Engagement Allison Agsten (2012b) explains: Community engagement sits squarely within the curatorial department; we have curatorial titles, we go to all the curatorial meetings, we consider ourselves to be curators. And when we take on a project we do it all.We conceive the project, we produce the project, measure the project, report on the project. This way of working has the potential to cultivate flexibility and transgress traditional boundaries. Elizabeth Cline (2012) notes, ‘Every project requires a new way of problem solving. There’s a mental fluidity. It doesn’t so much manifest in the formal structure of the organization but in the way we all approach this work’. Associate Curator of Special Initiatives in the Department of Education at LACMA José Luis Blondet concurs. ‘My role is to negotiate boundaries between departments, between artist and museums, and between museums and communities, Blondet (2012) asserts. Not surprisingly, the notion of the educational turn triggers many ethical questions, most importantly whether it undervalues the expertise of learning and community engagement specialists and is simply a manifestation of the curatorial appropriating education for its own self-interest (Sternfeld 2012: 336). Eithne Nightingale and Chandan Mahal (2012) argue that responsibility for equality and inclusiveness needs to be embedded across the institution and underpinned by strategic plans and policy. But, as Sheikh (2010: 68) observes, at its best, the educational turn demonstrates ‘new self-reflexivity, a new auto-critique, even towards a new potential of “publicness” and a renewal of how “publics” are conceived and produced’.The educational turn is often a productive strategy for discursive museums to work towards reconciliation with their publics; it encourages curators and curatorial departments to assume responsibility for generating productive conflict and for working relationally – towards dissolving boundaries between self and other – in a domain which has long claimed privilege and authority.

The dispersed museum The dispersed museum takes up the concept of ‘museum as hub’, as piloted by the new institutionalism, but challenges it to more fully dissolve the boundaries between centre and margins.

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What makes these exchanges fruitful is that they are driven by values of equality and social justice, rather than the power of an institution; they generate agonistic enquiry enacted within an ethics of care. Esche (Esche and Borja-Villers 2012), who coined the term ‘dispersed museum’ and pioneered its strategies in his role as director of the Van Abbemuseum, explains, ‘[we] imagine ourselves as a kind of agency or principle that can be enacted almost anywhere’. Indeed, the dispersed museum distributes power and resources to its partners as, together, they challenge and strengthen the values that unite them. L’Internationale exemplifies the model of the dispersed museum. Comprised of Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, SALT in Istanbul and Ankara and the Van Abbemuseum, L’Internationale calls itself a confederation that: ‘proposes a space for art within a non-hierarchical and decentralised internationalism, based on the values of difference and horizontal exchange among a constellation of cultural agents, locally rooted and globally connected’ (L’Internationale online n.d.a). It appropriates the name L’Internationale from the workers’ anthem which, the confederation explains, ‘calls for an equitable and democratic society with reference to the historical labour movement’ (L’Internationale online n.d.a). Inspired by the convictions of the anthem, and working towards reconciliation between museums and publics, L’Internationale aims to ‘build a sustainable constellation of European museums, these civic institutes where art is used for public benefit, for inspiration, reflection and debate’ (L’Internationale online n.d.b). In so doing, they also work on an ad hoc basis with what they call ‘complementary partners’ such as Grizedale Arts and University College Ghent School of Arts which espouse like values (L’Internationale online n.d.b). L’Internationale equally collaborates with a wider spectrum of organisations beyond galleries and apart from the European context. Reina Sophia Director Manuel Borja-Villel (2010) declares: We are organizing a heterogeneous network for working with collectives, social movements, and universities; a network that favors questioning institutions and generating a space for negotiation rather than mere representation. This space is produced by recognizing those other agents regardless of their institutional status – that is, recognizing them as valid participants in the dialogue, as equals in the process of defining goals and assigning resources. Also, and in relation to the above, it is produced by setting aside conventional a priori notions of legitimacy. The six institutions of L’Internationale in partnership explore new models of mobility (Esche 2012). At a time of budget cuts, they have pooled their resources to make joint acquisitions – of video art, at first (because, with the permission of the artist, copies can be made) – but increasingly also of other media. They also engage in staff exchanges for months at a time to intensify their collaboration and critique one another’s practice (Franssen 2012) in a way that yields productive conflict. In the hopes of further strengthening public discourse they are currently collaborating on a five-year project, The Uses of Art – The Legacy of 1848 and 1989, which looks at how art created during and after the pivotal moments in European history of the 1848 French Revolution and the 1989 fall of the Soviet Union helped create civil society (L’Internationale online n.d.a). And, as their online platform shows, they research and publish widely on four key thematic streams, all relevant to the project of reconciliation: the enactment of democracy, decolonisation, new ways of instituting and what they call ‘politics of life and death’, including a range of issues from climate change to faith, war and conflict (L’Internationale online n.d.c).

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The experience of L’Internationale has led the partner institutions also to work individually towards new models of mobility and distribution undergirded by the ethics of care. Reina Sofia Director Manuel Borja-Villel, for instance, argues that the value of a permanent collection lies in its relational properties – its potential to bring people together through affect – rather than authenticity or exclusivity. Borja-Villel (in Esche and Borja-Villel 2012) champions the ideal of a dispersed museum in which, through digitising, long-term loans, making copies and other means of shared guardianship, the collection functions as it does in a library or a cultural commons: What makes us strong is not how many works we have, but how many stories we can share. . . . We should convince our institutions that the logic of scarcity, the logic of capitalism does not have to be the only legitimate logic. There is another logic, the logic of access that already exists in different societies. . . . After all, this must be our first mission: to create this community of affection that connects to art on an emotional level. For the Van Abbemuseum these efforts are made visible through Picasso in Palestine (2011) (Esche 2012), a project that Van Abbemuseum Curator Diana Franssen (2012) calls ‘boundary breaking’. The project came about when the Van Abbemuseum brought to Eindhoven a group of artists, curators and researchers from the Middle East, including Palestinians and Israelis, who ordinarily cannot meet and talk together due to travel restrictions. The museum provided a space for conversation and, as Franssen (2012) recounts, ‘at a certain moment, an artist/curator from the Art Academy of Ramallah, Khaled Hourani, said what he would like to do was to show just once to his people a real Picasso’. The Van Abbemuseum saw this wish as an intriguing opportunity to explore the ironies of people being restricted from travel but works of art, at least theoretically, being free to go anywhere – though, of course, Franssen and the team were well aware that, in reality, economics, politics, law and bureaucracy impede the possibilities for loans of art (Franssen 2012) and the political moment of the Arab Spring introduced additional sensitivities. Hourani’s students chose the Picasso from the collection to be exhibited, Buste de Femme (1943), because it represents the atrocities of war (Gaskin 2013). Thus began the complex and fraught process of sending the work to the Art Academy of Palestine in Ramallah. Van Abbemuseum staff did ask themselves whether the project had imperialist sentiments; was this merely a paternalistic gesture that would reinforce power imbalances? They concluded that, because the project was initiated by Hourani, rather than by the museum, it did not (Franssen 2012). The museum also faced criticism that they were not safeguarding ‘their own’ heritage but rejected this line of argument for its conservative ‘us’ and ‘them’ assumptions (Franssen 2012) that contradicted the ethics of care. Picasso in Palestine is a work of critical practice that exposes the many rules and regulations imposed both by museums and by political and economic forces that hinder the shared guardianship of collections.At every turn, impediments arose that required intense negotiations – from how to insure the painting to how to ship it (Franssen 2012; Salti and Hourani 2011: 42–45). For instance, after testing the West Bank roads on which the work would travel,Van Abbemuseum conservator Louis Balthussen found he needed to design a system of shock absorbers for the crate (Baers 2012). Avoiding import duties by securing a tax exemption number – that a museum would have but the art academy did not – proved a nearly insurmountable hurdle that was only solved days before the exhibit was due to open by exploiting the grey areas between a host of contradictory international treaties (Baers 2012). Hourani (quoted in Gaskin 2013) reflects:

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It’s a requisitioning of the role of the Institution, the role of not only art institutions but institutions in general: customs institutions, border institutions, security institutions, museums as institutions, the art academy itself. . . . It was like an impossible mission. To get Picasso anywhere needs a museum, a state, security, everything. We don’t have a state, we don’t control the borders, so how to build something able to receive such an important artwork? Negotiating the logistics took two years but eventually the Picasso did arrive at the Art Academy in Ramallah. Upon examination by Balthussen (Figure 5.3), which itself took on ceremonial value (Salti and Hourani 2011: 44), the painting was exhibited there for three weeks within a small classroom, temporarily overhauled to create the semblance of a white cube space; accoutrements including red velvet ropes, armed guards and climate control signalled the symbolic and economic value of the work for its Palestinian hosts as well as political resistance to statelessness (Plate 14). Visitors queued to enter two at a time to keep the humidity down. An accompanying photo exhibition documenting the convoluted journey of the Picasso oriented visitors in the foyer of the academy (Figure 5.4). A parallel exhibition took place in Jerusalem at the Al-Ma’mal Gallery, displaying documents that represented the complex negotiations required by the project (Baers 2012).

FIGURE 5.3  Khaled Hourani, Picasso in Palestine, 2011, Art Academy of Palestine, Ramallah, 2011 (conservator performing condition report), from: 24-06-2011 till: 20-07-2011, location: International Academy of Art Palestine (IAAP), curator: Charles Esche (director Van Abbemuseum), Remco de Blaaij (assistant curator), Archives Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, photo: Van Abbemuseum

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FIGURE 5.4  Khaled Hourani, Picasso in Palestine, 2011, Art Academy of Palestine, Ramallah, (Hourani, right, installing photo exhibition), from: 24-06-2011 till: 20-07-2011, location: International Academy of Art Palestine (IAAP), curator: Charles Esche (director Van Abbemuseum), Remco de Blaaij (assistant curator), Archives Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven,The Netherlands, photo:Van Abbemuseum

The significance of the project for the concept of the dispersed museum is fourfold: it demonstrates the potential of sharing resources across borders with publics so disenfranchised they do not have access to museums; it intervenes politically to advocate for disenfranchised publics, in this case championing Palestinian statehood; it exposes, critiques and challenges the many barriers to the dispersed museum; and it represents the potential of critical practice enacted through deep collaboration between museum staff and artists. Picasso in Palestine was not an intervention done to the Van Abbemuseum by an artist from outside the institution; it was a project an artist enacted with practitioners from inside the Van Abbemuseum. As a result, the Van Abbemuseum asserts that Picasso’s Buste de Femme has changed. Franssen (2012) declares,‘The painting is never the same again. It’s back, but it has a history that lives on. People know it and recognise it nowadays because of the publicity around the project. It’s still going on’. But perhaps the larger point is that the Van Abbemuseum itself has changed as a consequence of this experiment in distribution and mobility that Picasso in Palestine represents. Franssen (2012) declares,‘It has given us more guts to fight for other things we believe in’.This includes supplanting the museum’s formerly passive loans policy – waiting until it was approached with a request, typically by an institution already known to it – to a dynamic and forward-thinking lending policy that pro-actively identifies opportunities to share works from its collections within a wider spectrum of diverse organisations and entities in the work of reconciliation (Baers 2012). For Esche (2011: 52), the dispersed museum first and foremost concerns relational values: The Van Abbemuseum has invested time and energy into building relationships across the Middle East . . . though much of it has been invisible to the visiting public. Behind

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the scenes, however, we have slowly built a genuine exchange between very different cultural conditions, establishing mutual understandings where none existed before. Together, we began to speak of the idea of the dispersed museum, one that was present in the relations forged across cultural regions rather than in the art objects held in the collection.That this dispersed museum should manifest itself elsewhere than Eindhoven was a logical consequence of that thinking.That it should appear not as the museum itself but more in cooperation with (one could even [say] in the guise of ) the International Art Academy Palestine was also an obvious if less publicly explicable development. Through the notion of the dispersed museum, Picasso in Palestine creates an agonistic space for constructive conflict concerning the vagaries of policies, practices and politics that impact art loans. Simultaneously, in the spirit of Levinas, it dissolves the boundaries between self and other – between the Van Abbemuseum and the International Art Academy Palestine, between Northern Europe and the Middle East and between state and statelessness.

The permanent collection at play One distinct difference between the new institutionalism (which developed primarily in noncollecting galleries) and the next generation of discursive institution (which evolved in museums with permanent collections) is the latter’s use of collections as generative tools to reflect on institutional histories and imagine new possibilities for reconciliation in the present and future. At the Van Abbemuseum this work has been particularly ambitious and innovative.Van Abbemuseum Curator Christine Berndes (2012) describes the thinking behind their approach: We wanted to use all the freedoms that owning a collection gives you. . . .We were eager to discover all the possibilities that the collection could open up. . . . If you compare the collection to a beautiful coloured glass ball, what we did was smash it on the floor and with the many small pieces that resulted we tried to create something else. . . . Experimenting is our core business. Soon after Esche arrived in 2004 as director of the museum, the team began to reconfigure its approach by inviting diverse stakeholders to curate exhibitions from the permanent collection, not only independent curators and artists but also writers, activists, museum volunteers and museum visitors, among others (Berndes 2012). The museum envisioned this strategy as an opportunity for a cross-section of people outside the institution to use the collections as research and also to challenge the binary construction of permanent collections as fixed and temporary exhibitions as dynamic (Berndes 2012; Esche in Lütticken et al. 2009: 78). The larger methodology for these experiments, drawing from subversive artistic practice of the 1960s, was one of play which, the team hoped, could counter rote adherence to the values of aesthetic quality assigned by the art historical canon (Berndes 2009: 8; Esche in Lütticken et al. 2009: 80). Esche (2012) notes, ‘Play is a process of learning to overcome prejudgments’. However, the term ‘play’ functions not only as a verb here but also as a noun – connoting theatre – for the team devised thematic strands, ‘Plug in to Play’ (2006–2008) and ‘Play Van Abbe’ (2009–2011), with acts, scenes and episodes to be developed through telling stories (Berndes in Lütticken et al. 2009: 80). Through play, the Van Abbemuseum created new opportunities for agonistic discourse within a larger framework of an ethics of care.

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Plug in to Play was a series of 54 ‘episodes’, each staged in its own independent space within the 17 galleries of the recently completed new wing of the museum; some of the ‘episodes’ lasted a day, others a few weeks, some a year and one project three years. Sometimes an artwork would appear in one project, disappear, and then reappear in another one (Franssen 2012). Berndes (2012) likened the programme to a string of beads where ‘you can take out a bead, replace it with something else and the necklace becomes slightly different’. The title ‘Plug in’ referred to the city of Eindhoven which was then where Philips Electronics was based; it dually suggested ‘plugging in’ or connecting the objects to the space, ‘plugging in’ art to contemporary contexts and ‘plugging in’ the community to the museum (Berndes 2012). In the Plug in to Play catalogue, breaking with the orthodoxies of the emotionally distant scholarly voice, Esche (2009: 5) explains this directly to readers, inviting them to engage with the collections in a tone that embodies the notion of radical hospitality: It is our ambition in the museum to create the conditions in which you as a visitor and participant are helped to think critically about the world as well as what we have done. At the same time, we hope you can enjoy the experience of looking at works of art in our collection and feel empowered to construct your own narratives around them. Projects were diverse and wide ranging but each was accompanied by a wall text explaining its aims. Some rooms recreated pivotal moments in the museum’s collecting history. Others staged small one-person shows of artists who inspired, were part of or drew from institutional critique. Still others were museologically daring. For instance, feminist artist Lily van der Stokker was assigned a gallery in which to stage a series of exhibitions with guest curators. Re-gendering the space through décor including wallpaper that purposely recalled the domestic sphere, she created with her collaborators six different installations from the permanent collection that contested the hierarchies of quality imposed by authoritative narratives of canonicity. In Plug in #38, for example, H. W. Werther designed and employed an algorithm to curate the collection (Figure 5.5).The result is, not surprisingly, haphazard but also, by implication, asks whether other more conventional curatorial methods are any less arbitrary. Throughout Plug in to Play, opportunities arose for visitors to assert their own agency in the work of curating. For instance, in Plug in #18, audiences were asked to choose their favourite work from the collection for installation; requests were processed in order of receipt and each work was exhibited for two weeks, alongside the visitor’s motivation for selecting it. Berndes (in Lütticken et al. 2009: 78) sees this project ultimately as a ‘kind of accidental collective curating’. In another space, Berndes collaborated with a designer to chart the changes to the galleries during Plug in to Play; there, visitors could also research the collection, add their own comments and propose new projects (Berndes 2012). The ambitious programme of Plug in to Play served as a testing ground for what a discursive museum might be. Van Abbemuseum Research Curator Steven ten Thije (2012) explains that the larger aim of the Plug ins was to ‘develop a more holistic view of what would be the museum as institute’. The holistic view turned out to be one of continued deconstruction. Alongside Plug in to Play, a parallel yet often intersecting thread developed called The Living Archive (2005–2009), which also spoke to new ways of instituting through collections. In The Living Archive, Esche and the curatorial team agreed to treat the archives, the permanent collection and the library as holdings of equal value (Franssen 2012). The team also decided to mine the archives to share with the museum’s publics typically hidden aspects of museological

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Plug in to Play, Plug in #38, 2008, installation view, Van Abbemuseum, from: 19-05-2008 to: 31-08-2008, Lily van der Stokker (guest curator) & H.W. Werther (guest curator), Archives Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, photograph: Peter Cox

FIGURE 5.5 

processes and to exhibit with equal consideration facsimiles when original documents were too fragile to be put on display or not available (Franssen 2012). The Street: A Form of Living Together (2005–2006) (Figure 5.6), the first in The Living Archive series, was a reconstruction of the watershed 1972 Van Abbemuseum exhibition by then director Jean Leering; it contained no works by professional artists or photographers, only documentation about social life on the streets in the Netherlands and internationally (Franssen 2012). The original exhibition aimed to ‘activate public awareness and participation in cultural and social processes’ (Van Abbemuseum n.d.b). The team chose to recreate it as a way to reflect on how and why the 1972 exhibition became so influential, whether it did indeed activate public awareness and participation and how the museum might now build on this precedent in engaging with publics. The Living Archive functioned much like Sternfeld and Ziaja (2012: 23) imagine the discursive archives as ‘a contested space where the notion of history, historicization, canonization, legitimized actors and objects as well as possible counter-histories are disputed and negotiated’. Insights from both Plug in to Play and The Living Archive came together to shape Play Van Abbe, but in this later project the team prioritised transparency as a means to build self-reflective practice and create shared ownership of the institution with its publics (Berndes 2012). Play remains the overarching methodological approach (Van Abbemuseum n.d.a): Play Van Abbe is a ‘game’ or ‘role-play’ in which the visitors, the artists and the museum workers are asked to play an active role. As a programme it seeks to remain playful while encouraging critical thinking about how artworks got here and what the museum can do with them now that they have arrived. Together with visitors, artists, (guest) curators,

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FIGURE 5.6  The Living Archive: The Street: A Form of Living Together, 2005, installation view, Van Abbemuseum, from: 01-10-2005 to: 23-04-2006, curator: Diana Franssen, Archives Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, photograph: Peter Cox

researchers, and institutions from the Netherlands and abroad, the Van Abbemuseum wants to play the museum like an instrument and learn more about itself and the possibilities of cultural production today. Interventions feature strongly as a means to test the limits of what museums can do in the early twenty-first century. The programme consisted of four parts or ‘chapters’ which ran sequentially, with each part lasting several months. Part 1, ‘The Game and the Players’, examined the history and agendas of the Van Abbemuseum (the game) and the changing tastes and narratives of its directors and curators (the players). For example, the museum juxtaposed reinstallations of past exhibitions by former directors with an installation by Esche, eschewing any suggestions of evolutionary progress. Part 2, ‘Time Machines’, considered pivotal approaches to exhibition making, including a reconstruction of El Lissitsky’s Abstrakt Kabinett of 1927–1928, installations of the ‘mockstitution’ Museum of American Art in Berlin by anonymous artists which simultaneously mimics and critiques modernist exhibition idioms pioneered by Alfred Barr (ten Thije 2012), and a solo show of the Polish artist Andrzej Wróblewski (Vilnius 1927 – Tatra Mountains 1957), To the Margins and Back, curated by Magdalena Ziólkowska. By examining these approaches as constructions, rather than as truths, the Van Abbemuseum attempted to encourage critical engagements with them. For example, in To the Margins and Back, Ziólkowska and the Van Abbemuseum team ask:Why is it that Wróblewski, so well-regarded in Poland, is unrecognised elsewhere? What powers do museums have to make or break artists’ reputations and nationalist narratives? And what ethical responsibilities come with these powers?

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Through a traditional retrospective (Figure 5.7) including 67 of Wróblewski’s works arranged in roughly chronological order, an accompanying conventional exhibition catalogue but also some modest but resonant interventions within the exhibition space, the project addressed these questions. The interventions worked to shine a light on the retrospective as an apparatus of the museum. One intervention was comprised of a simple gesture of gathering all the books from the museum’s library on Wróblewski and two of his contemporaries, Francis Bacon and Karel Appel, then placing them in distinct piles on a pedestal in the gallery (Plate 15). The towering stacks of volumes on Bacon and Appel stood in stark contrast to the small measure of two publications dedicated to the Polish artist; they speak to the dominance of the exhibitionary complex and art markets of Western Europe and the US.The other intervention consisted of a series of diagrams in an adjacent gallery which mapped all the solo exhibitions which occurred over the history of the Van Abbemuseum (Figure 5.8). Underneath the diagrams were statistics on gender, nationality and so on.The intervention exposed the routine discrimination of curatorial practice in the name of ‘quality’. Part 3, ‘The Politics of Collecting/ The Collecting of Politics’, interrogated the motivations behind collecting, the narrative framing of collections and the power of collections and those who curate them to define identity. Through diverse collections from those amassed by artists to that of the Van Abbemuseum itself, this strand of Play Van Abbe looked at how collecting both mirrors and shapes political and social contexts. The Politics of Collecting cast a particular light on collecting (and the inverse – not having access to collections) outside Northwestern Europe, for instance in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe (Franssen 2012). The Picasso in Palestine

Play Van Abbe: Part 2: Time Machines – Andrzej Wróblewski, To the Margins and Back, 2010, installation view, Van Abbemuseum, from: 10-04-2010 tot: 12-09-2010, M ­ agdalena Ziólkowska (guest curator), Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, Archives Van ­Abbemuseum, ­Eindhoven, The Netherlands

FIGURE 5.7 

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Play Van Abbe: Part 2: Time Machines – Andrzej Wróblewski, To the Margins and Back, 2010, installation view, Van Abbemuseum, from: 10-04-2010 tot: 12-09-2010, Magdalena Ziólkowska (guest curator),Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven,The Netherlands, Archives Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

FIGURE 5.8 

project emerged from this strand of Play Van Abbe; within that larger framework, the journey of Picasso’s Buste de Femme from Eindhoven to Ramallah reflects the confluences between the concepts of the dispersed museum and the permanent collection as a generative tool. The final thread,‘The Tourist, the Pilgrim, the Flâneur (and the Worker)’, provided an opportunity for visitor role play. With a survey of the Van Abbemuseum collections in the galleries, visitors could choose any of the four roles of tourist, pilgrim, flâneur or worker as a way to engage with the objects. Four posts, each with the initial ‘T’, ‘P’, ‘F’ or ‘W’, oriented participants to the four personae. From these posts audiences could take and wear a sticker that identified to other visitors which role they had chosen. Additional learning resources such as cards, circulars and audio guides (Figure 5.9) facilitated the role play through provocations including historical context and music, thus, for example, helping those who were playing the role of the worker to make connections with art concerning industrialisation. Sometimes people changed roles or decided to resume their own identities partway through their visit. Still, the project enabled participants to experience the collection from another perspective and to observe and potentially converse with others who had assumed a role different from their own (Franssen 2012). In this way, ‘The Tourist, the Pilgrim, the Flâneur (and the Worker)’ opened a window to the social construction of meaning and collapsed boundaries between self and other. ‘They could all see the same exhibition, but with another eye, and it worked’, Franssen (2012) reported. The extraordinarily inventive Plug in to Play, Living Archive and Play Van Abbe programming streams created myriad diverse opportunities for staff, visiting artists, researchers and museum publics to explore in tandem the generative value of collections (including archival materials). These streams interrogate institutional histories and urgent political moments; expose

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FIGURE 5.9  Play Van Abbe: Part 4: The Pilgrim, the Tourist, the Flâneur (and the Worker), 2011, installation view,Van Abbemuseum, from: 26-02-2011 tot: 20-08-2011, curator: Charles Esche, Archives Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, photograph: Peter Cox

institutional processes and agendas; engage audiences in new ways; help build museological literacy; and instil a sense of public agency, locally and globally. In breaking with the conventional assumptions of what it means to curate permanent collections, these streams also underscore

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the limitations that art historical canons impose on the larger project of reconciliation between museums and publics. Together, the three programming streams function as an exercise in translating critical museology into practice. As Van Abbemuseum curator Annie Fletcher (in Lütticken et al. 2009: 79) remarks, ‘Within all these projects was the idea to consider the museum as a speculative body, rather than an authoritative one’.The ironies of this were not lost on museum staff. As Berndes (2012) recounts, ‘At one point Charles said, “we are becoming a museum of museums” ’. Indeed, the Museum faced challenges in their relations with some local visitors who felt unsettled, as they were accustomed to seeing the permanent collection as a static and fixed entity and framed within an aesthetic and chronological narrative.Ten Thije (2012) comments: We were often critiqued for being too theoretical and having such a complicated story to tell that it was only understandable if you read a review before you came into the museum. . . .We were using our collections to do self-reflection whereas what the public expected of us is that we would make statements about art and about art history. Also, the programmes were too ambitious in terms of delivery for the museum to focus equally on effective mediation with diverse audiences (Berndes 2012). ten Thije (2012) admits: We got overexcited in our self-reflectivity. We were so eager to say that we were not to be trusted as the only authority to say anything meaningful about this world, and that publics should have equal rights to speak, that we threw it out there into our constituency like a kind of a cold shower. At the same time, this moment of unease was perhaps inevitable and a manifestation of productive conflict. ten Thije (2012) continues: I don’t think it was bad that the projects happened in this way because it really shook things up, making it very clear that we were changing something. So if we now return to more traditional formats, but with layeredness, there will still be the understanding that something different is going on. Moreover, as Berndes (2012) asserts, innovations towards shared authority are essential to recognising and building a more diverse public: ‘In these times of globalisation people have totally different cultural backgrounds; even people that were born in the same street don’t share the same cultural background anymore so how can we just tell one story?’ And as Franssen (2012) adds, publics today expect opportunities to participate and want to create their own meanings based on their own knowledge and experiences: The contemporary public wants to engage and comment; they get frustrated when they don’t have these opportunities, when we [the curators] are the all-knowing storytellers.They are experts in their own merits, in their own paths also, and why not use that knowledge? Reflecting principles of the ethics of care, Berndes (2012) sees deconstructing her own learning processes as key to better supporting publics in future: When I look back at the processes of working in these new ways, we as practitioners first had to learn to allow ourselves to be vulnerable.What we need to do now is help visitors to feel secure in experiencing this vulnerability as well.

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Creating the conditions for reconciliation, even for the most committed and risk-taking discursive museums, is a complex and ongoing process.

Conclusion The arguments presented throughout this book demonstrate that the convergences between institutional critique and socially engaged practice, as represented through the term ‘critical practice’, contribute to a developing discourse of museum ethics and create conditions for organisational change towards public agency and shared authority. Examining critical practice from the perspective of critical museum studies and political science, rather than art history, I have analysed case studies on ethical stewardship of collections, hybridity as a methodological approach to social justice and testing new forms of democracy. I have also interrogated the many ways that discursive institutions have embedded the values and vision of critical practice towards redressing exclusions, inequalities and relational frictions. Through this investigation I have shown the potential of artists’ interventions to facilitate the ongoing and agonistic process of reconciliation between museums and publics. Borrowing from literature on reconciliation theory as a human rights strategy, I have established that reconciliation is a useful construct to explore how critical practice and the discursive institutions it spawns play a unique role in recognising the cultural rights of individuals, as articulated by Article 15 of the United Nations’ 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, through initiatives that generate social agency. I have discussed critical practice as gesture but within a larger framework of peace and reconciliation studies that acknowledges gesture as a significant symbolic act performed to make amends and to repair rifts. Further, I have held that the gestures of reconciliation constructed through critical practice convey ‘institutional desire’, defined by Dieter Roelstraete as an ethical caring for museums and galleries that not only expects these organisations to become more equitable but also helps to advance this cause. Rejecting the charge of instrumentalisation as denying the moral agency of museums and galleries, I have demonstrated how artists engaged in critical practice leverage their complex positionings as both insiders and outsiders to the museum world in order to construct gestures of reconciliation that shed museums of elitist proprietary policies and ways of working. I have also argued that, although critical practice undoubtedly serves museums, rather than constituting a weakness, this helps museums and publics to reconcile in ways that benefit a diverse range of constituencies. Whilst acknowledging the dilemma that one-off projects in and of themselves may not effect sustained organisational change, particularly when there is not ‘buy-in’ across the institution, I have asserted that the larger trajectory of interventions in critical practice has become a key factor in the turn of museums and galleries towards socially purposeful endeavours. How will new political and social urgencies shape critical practice and the ethics of museums in the coming decades? How might a wider and more global range of museums and galleries generate new models of the discursive? From this vantage point we can only speculate, but I expect that gestures of reconciliation will play an increasingly significant role.

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INDEX

activism 91 agonism: new institutionalism and 168 – 9; reconciliation and 162 – 4 Agsten, Allison 18 – 19, 24, 174 Aguirre, Peio 122 Ai, Weiwei 81 – 4 Al Arian, Sami Amin 156 al-Bayati, T. Hamid 43 Alberro, Alexander 8 Allen, Mark 15, 38 al-Maliki, Nouri 43 Anderson, David 19, 28, 50, 89 Ang, Ien 87 Anonymous 155 Anthony, John 57 Apartheid 90 Apostle,The 115 Appel, Karel 182 Arceneaux, Edgar 172 Archey, Karen 10 – 11 Arnolfini Gallery 22 – 3 Art Academy of Ramallah 176 – 9 ‘Art in Defense of Democracy’ 156 – 7 artist as critical friend 171 – 3 Artists Council 171 – 3 Asher, Michael 24, 49, 54, 56 Assarid, Moussa Ag 156 Atkinson, Stephen 160 – 1 Attlee, Clement 135 – 6, 146 audience 122 – 3 Auerbach, Lisa Ann 172 Ayas, Defne 85 Bacon, Francis 182 Baghdad Stories 130 Balfour, Lawrie 162

Balthussen, Louis 176 BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art 165 Barr, Alfred 182 Bashir, Bashir 19, 26 – 7, 29, 89, 96 Basis voor Actuele Kunst (BAK) 9, 165 – 6, 169 – 70 Beech, Dave 35, 37, 166 Bell, Trevor 101 Bell,Vanessa 98 Belting, Hans 159 Bergen Kunsthalle 165 Berlin, Germany 24 Berndes, Christine 179 Beuys, Joseph 15 Bhabha, Homi 86, 120 Birmingham Central Library 87 – 8 Birth of Venus,The 11 Bishop, Claire 17 Bishop, Peter 160 – 1 Biswas, Ansuman 38, 47, 84; Manchester Hermit 38, 47, 62 – 81, 164 Blake, Nayland 96 Blazwick, Iwona 134, 141, 148, 149 Blondet, José Luis 174 Bloom, Layla 98 – 100, 103 – 4 Boatright, Dan 77 Bodenham, Patrick 141 Bodo, Simona 90 Boetzkes, Amanda 21 Bond, Henry 123 Borchardt-Hume, A. 136 Borja-Villel, Manuel 175 – 6 Bourriaud, Nicholas 14, 21, 122, 126 Brecht, Berthold 14 Brielmaier, Isolde 33

206 Index

Brighton Ourstory: Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual History Archive 99 – 101, 103 Bronson, A. A. 85, 86 Broodthaers, Marcel 133 Brudholm, Thomas 162 Bryan-Wilson, Julia 10 – 12 Buchloh, Benjamin 7 Buñuel, Luis 129 Buren, Daniel 8, 12 Burley, Isabella 135 Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery 98 – 100, 120 Bush, George W. 129 Buskirk, Martha 17, 21 Buste de Femme 176, 178, 184 Butler, Judith 7 Cabanel, Alexandre 11 Calder, Alexander 129, 138 California Institute of the Arts 24 Capp Street Project 92 – 6, 120 Carpenter, Edward 98 – 100, 102 – 3 Carrion-Murayari, Gary 24 Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art 149 Castleton, Jane 11 Cattelan, Maurizio 38 Certeau, Michel de 15 Chapple, Boo 167 Chelsea College of Art and Design 18 Chicago Transit Authority 105 Chipstone Foundation 107 – 12, 117 – 18, 120 Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn 145 Clement, Grace 161 Cline, Elizabeth 24, 172, 174 Clore Leadership Programme 62, 79 collections: destruction of 81 – 4; disposal and relational collecting of 62 – 81; Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn 81 – 4; and ethical stewardship as relational notion 45 – 7; iconoclasm and ethical stewardship of 81 – 4; new institutionalism and permanent 179 – 87; Recycle LACMA 38, 47 – 62, 81; recycling as ethical stewardship 53 – 60; Spoils 40 – 5, 81; sustainability and deaccession in 48 – 62; value of ordinary ethics in visitorgenerated content 69 – 78 Conflict Management 162 – 3 conflict resolution and reconciliation 89 consensus-building 123 – 6 Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum 23 Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius 165 Coronation Court 33 – 4 Creative Time 41, 43, 45 Critchley, Simon 5 critical ethics of care 161 critically reflexive site specificity 8 – 9 critical practice: convergences between institutional critique and socially engaged

artistic practice in 18 – 19; discursive museum and 164 – 5; as ethics 20 – 2; The Moral Maze and 37 – 9; new institutionalism and 165 – 6; organisational change and 22 – 6; Polder Cup through lens of 4 – 6, 18 – 19; project of reconciliation and 19 – 26; as reconciliation 37 – 9 Culture in Action 15 Cummings, Neil 4, 6, 14, 18, 22; Self-Portrait: Arnolfini 22 – 3 d’Arcy, David 43 – 4 Dave Amplified 115 – 16 Davis, Whitney 103 – 4 deaccession and sustainability 48 – 62 Debord, Guy 15, 17 deep ecology 65 – 7 democracy: consensus-building and 123 – 6; museums and interventions in 127 – 8; neoliberalism and 124 – 5; New World Summit and 155 – 8; paradoxical promise of 155; platform as exhibition in 128 – 39; platform as meeting space in 139 – 46; platform as museological critique in 146 – 52; platforms, ethics, and boundaries of 152 – 8; platforms staging negotiations on the future of 128; police kettling and 126 Dempsey, Kat 167 – 8 Derrida, Jacques 38, 104, 122, 167 Dewdney, Andrew 19, 28 – 9, 90, 119 Dibosa, David 19, 28 – 9, 90, 119 Dikeç, Mustafa 104 Diprose, Rosalyn 161 discursive museum 159 – 60; artist as critical friend and 171 – 3; critical practice and 164 – 5; dispersed museum and 174 – 9; new institutionalism and 165 – 71; reconciliation and agonism 162 – 4; reconciliation and ethics of care 160 – 2; thinking and acting mindfully towards building publics 173 – 4; today 171 – 87 dispersed museum 174 – 9 Documents 123 Doherty, Claire 165 doppelgänger 121 – 7 Dorchester Projects 105 – 6 Drake, Dave 109 – 11, 116 – 17 Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn 81 – 4 Duncanson, Robert S. 32 Dunn, Alan 36 Dürrbach, Jacqueline de la Baume 129, 132 Dürrbach, René 129, 132 Economic and Social Research Council 143 Ekeberg, Jonas 165 Eklund, Douglas 11 Elam, Mark 86 Eliasson, Olafur 152 Ellison, Ralph 97

Index  207

elusivity 128 English, Darby 90, 94 Esche, Charles 11, 28, 35, 165, 167 – 8, 175; on dispersed museum 178 – 9; The Living Archive project and 180 – 1; Plug in to Play project and 179 – 80 ethical stewardship: iconoclasm and 81 – 4; Manchester Hermit and 67; recycling as 53 – 60; relational notion as 45 – 7; value of ordinary ethics in visitor-generated content and 69 – 78 ethics: of care, new institutionalism through 166 – 8; of care and reconciliation 160 – 2; critical practice as 20 – 2; of participation 16 – 18; platforms, and boundaries of democracy 152 – 8; quandaries of new institutionalism 169 – 71 Euskadi Ta Askatasuna 156 Evans, Walter 32 exhibition, platform as 128 – 39 Fallujah:The Real Story 130 Farquharson, Alex 164 – 7, 169, 174 fear of freedom 155 Feast: Radical hospitality in contemporary art 104 – 5 Filipovic, Elena 24 Finkelpearl, Tom 17 Fisher, Ronald 19 – 20 Fletcher, Annie 186 Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT 145, 149 – 52 Fontenot, Robert 24, 84; on deaccession 50 – 1; education of 48; LACMA response to 61 – 2; Recycle LACMA 38, 47, 48 – 62, 81; recycling efforts 53 – 60 Fotopoulou, Aristea 98 Foucault, Michel 6 Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) 34 – 6, 165, 167 Franssen, Diana 176, 178, 186 Fraser, Andrea 6 – 7, 11, 38, 172; on defining institutional critique 8 – 9; on insider/outsider binary 22; at UCLA 24 Freedom Press 134 Frieze 120 Froggett, Lynn 17 Fry, Roger 98 Fusi, Lorenzo 104 Gad, Amira 4, 13 Galanos, James 53, 55 Galtung, Johan 20 Gates,Theaster 12, 38, 89, 91, 97; Kohler Manufacturing and 113, 115 – 16; radical hospitality and 113 – 19; Soul Food Starter Kit 106 – 7; To Speculate Darkly 104 – 13, 113 – 19, 120; ‘temple swapping’ 119; training and background of 107 – 8; Untitled (Bitch, I Made this Pot) 114 – 15; work of Dave Drake and 109 – 12

Geert Wilders Works 153 – 5 Geismar, Haidy 46 gesture 29 Getty, J. Paul Museum 24 Gielen, Pascal 33 Gillick, Liam 7 – 8, 21, 37 – 9, 158, 164 – 5; on audience 122 – 3; on elusivity 128; on neoliberalism 125; on new institutionalism 170; on police kettling 126; Twinned Renegotiation Platforms 121 – 7 Gilligan, Carol 161 Glynn, Liz 172 – 3 G20 Meltdown 144 González, Jennifer 96 Gonzalez, Rita 24, 26, 50, 53, 61 – 2 Govan, Michael 50 – 1, 62 Graaf, Beatrice de 157 Grant, Duncan 98 Greeting Committee,The 105 Gressel, Inka 163 Groys, Boris 9, 159 Guantanamo Bay 156 Shared guardianship 46 – 7, 79 Guattari, Félix 15 Guernica 129 – 38, 147 – 9 Guggenheim, Solomon R. Museum, New York 8, 15, 23 Haacke, Hans 8, 12 Habermas, Jürgen 17, 162 Hal, Marieke van 24 Hammer Museum 15, 18, 24, 159, 171 – 4 Harvard University Art Museums 108 Hattam, Robert 160 – 1 Heiser, Jörg 120 Helguera, Pablo 14, 171 Hengst, Cliff 96 Hidden Curriculum 30 – 1 Hlavajova, Maria 9, 31 – 2, 166, 169 – 70 Höfer, Candida 11 Hoffmann, Anke 169 Hollander, Nancy 156 Höller, Carsten 16, 17 Holmes, Brian 11, 16 Holy Land Foundation 156 hospitality: hybridity and 104 – 13; radical 113 – 19, 167 Hourani, Khaled 176 – 8 Hussein, Saddam 40 – 1, 129 hybridity: art history and museums 90 – 1; hospitality and 104 – 13; An Invisible Life and 91 – 7; as a methodology 85 – 9; Other Stories and 97 – 104; in politics of difference 87; superhybridity and 119 – 20; as ‘temple swapping’ 119; truth, fiction and 91 – 7 iconoclasm and ethical stewardship 81 – 4 Image of Blues 101 – 2

208 Index

Indianapolis Museum of Art 50 insider/outsider binary 22, 69, 161 Institute of Contemporary Arts 165 institutional critique 4 – 5; in critical practice 18 – 19; critical practice as ethics and 20 – 2; defining 6 – 9; as institutional ‘desire’ 29 – 33; premature burial of 10 – 13; third wave of 12 – 13 International Brigade Memorial Trust 144 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights 187 Invisible Life, An: A view into the world of a 120 year old man 91 – 8, 120 Invisible Man 97 Iraq War 40 – 5, 129 – 31; Colin Powell and 129 – 33 Irving Blum Gallery 24 Jackson, Shannon 14, 17 Jacob, Mary Jane 15 Jalandoni, Luis 156 James, Pete 87 – 8 Janes, Robert R. 48, 51 Jarett,Valerie 105 Jarman, Derek 102 Jarrett, Jonathan 78 Jaworska, Renata 143 Kelly, Paul 34 Kester, Grant 14, 17 Kholeif, Omar 167 King, Norman 138 Kippenberger, Martin 60 Klarkowski, Mitch 115 Kluijver, Robert 156 Knight, John 158 Kohler Manufacturing 113, 115 – 16 Koopman, Nico 89 Koppe,Victor 156 Krauss, Annette 29 – 31 Kunstverein Frankfurt 165 Kunstverein Munich 165, 169 Kunstwerke Berlin 165 Kurdistan Workers Party 156 Kwon, Miwon 10 Kymlicka, Will 19, 26 – 7, 29, 89, 96 La Cage aux Folles 101 Lacan, Jacques 126 Laclau, Ernesto 162 Laguna Art Museum 49 Lambek, Michael 70 Lasko, Kevin 40 – 5 Lasser, Ethan 108 – 12, 116 Latour, Bruno 86 Lattimer, Mark 142 Lawler, Louise 11 Leer, David van der 23

Lekue, Jon Andoni 156 Lenin,Vladimir 133 Levinas, Emmanuel 104, 161 Levy, Ellen 21 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam 156 Lieu, Jennifer 26 Life’s Links 32 – 3 Lind, Maria 7, 21 – 2 L’Internationale 175 Liverpool Housing Action Trust (HAT) 34 – 6 Living Archive,The 180 – 1, 184 London Action Resource Centre 134 López, Maider 1 – 4, 7, 14 Los Angeles, California 24 – 6 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) 24, 26, 174; see also Recycle LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History 50 Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, e 24, 26, 58 Los Angeles Times 50, 133 Love in Ancient Greece 92 Lynch, Bernadette 19 Machine Project 15, 18, 26, 38 Macuga, Goshka 31, 39, 127 – 8, 136, 158; on discursive museum 159; On the Nature of the Beast 146 – 52; platform as exhibition and 128 – 39; platform as meeting space and 139 – 46 Mahal, Chandan 174 Man at the Crossroads 133 Manchester Hermit 38, 47, 62 – 9, 164; blog 67 – 78; deep ecology and 65 – 7; fate of the 40 contributors and legacy of 78 – 81; value of ordinary ethics in visitor-generated content in 69 – 78 Mandela, Nelson 27 Mandelbrot, Benoit 136 Maryland Historical Society 32 McCardell, Claire 60 meeting space, platform as 139 – 46 Mercury Fountain 129, 138 Merrill, George 103 Merriman, Nick 62 – 4, 69, 72, 79 – 80 Metropolitan Museum of Art 10 – 11, 51 micro-resistance 31 Miessen, Markus 152 Miles, Lewis 109 – 10 Milwaukee Art Museum 107 – 12; To Speculate Darkly:Theaster Gates and Dave the Potter 113 – 19 mindful approach to building publics 173 – 4 Mining the Museum 32, 95 Minority Rights Group International (MRG) 141 – 2 Moderna Museet 121, 126 Möntmann, Nina 152, 166, 168 Moore, Henry 98

Index  209

Moral Maze,The 37 – 9 Moreno, Linda 156 Mosley, Oswald 134 Mouffe, Chantal 20, 152, 162, 164 Mowles, Chris 14 Murray-Wassink, Sands 85 Musée de l’Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles 133 museological critique, platform as 146 – 52 museological perspectives on critical practice: institutional critique as institutional ‘desire’ 29 – 33; museological implications of socially engaged artistic practice 33 – 7 museological reconciliation and public agency 28 – 9 Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona 165 Museum Highlights: A Gallery Tale 11 Museum Ludwig 162 Museum of Applied Arts,Vienna 159 Museum of Art and Design, New York 49 Museum of Jurassic Technology 25 Museum of Modern Art 5, 54, 171 Museum of Modern Art, New York, The 54 Museums in a Troubled World: Renewal, Irrelevance or Collapse? 48 Museum Sztuki 165 Muybridge, Eadweard 91 – 2 Naess, Arne 65 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 60 National Democratic Front of the Philippines 156 National Public Radio 53 Nature of the Beast,The 127 – 8, 152, 158; Colin Powell in 129 – 33, 136 – 8; ‘mockstitution’ 140; platform as exhibition in 128 – 39; platform as meeting space in 139 – 46; sincere engagement in 138 – 9 Naylor, Richard 144 neoliberalism 124 – 5 new institutionalism: agonism and 168 – 9; critical practice and 165 – 6; dispersed museum and 174 – 9; ethical quandaries of 169 – 71; permanent collection at play and 179 – 87; through the ethics of care 166 – 8 New World Summit 155 – 8 New York Times 54, 129 Nicholson, Ben 98 Nightingale, Eithne 19, 174 Nightmare of Participation,The 152 Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art (NIFCA) 165 – 6, 169 Obama, Barack 43, 105 Occupy Movement 155 Of Hospitality 104 Of Human Bondage 92

Ogg, Kirsty 141 O’Neill, Mark 28, 168, 173 On the Nature of the Beast 146 – 52 Open all Day and Night 24 organisational change: critical practice and 22 – 6; hybridity and 90 Other Stories: Queering the University Art Collection 97 – 104, 120 Øvstebø, Solveig 24 Page, Ruth 70, 72 Palais de Tokyo 165, 169 Palm Springs Art Museum 49 parallel structures 121 – 7 Parmar, Bharti 87 – 9 Parreno, Philippe 37 – 8 participation, ethics of 16 – 18 Partz, Felix 85 Pasternak, Anne 45 Paul, Christiane 12 – 13 Penrose, Roland 134 The People Speak 143 – 4 performance theory 45 Perreault, John 95 Pethick, Emily 30 – 1 Philadelphia Museum of Art 11 Philbin, Ann 171, 174 Picasso, Pablo 129 – 30, 132, 135 – 6, 138, 147, 184 Picasso in Palestine 176 – 9 Pieterse, Jan Nederveen 89 Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center 165 platforms: audience and 122 – 3; connotations of 123; ethics, and the boundaries of democracy 152 – 8; as exhibition 128 – 39; as meeting space 139 – 46; as museological critique 146 – 52; museums and 127 – 8; parallels, and doppelgänger 121 – 7; staging negotiations on the future of democracy 128 Play Van Abbe 181 – 2, 182 – 4, 185 Plug in to Play 179 – 80, 181, 184 Poiret, Jean 101 Polder Cup 1 – 4, 7, 18; as socially engaged practice 13; through lens of critical practice 4 – 6, 18 – 19 political and cultural contexts of reconciliation 20, 26 – 7 Politics of Collecting/The Collecting of Politics,The 182 – 4 politics of difference 87 Poole, Nick 47 postcolonialism 46 post-structuralist theory 45 Powell, Colin 129 – 33, 136 – 8 Practice of Everyday Life,The 15 Proust, Marcel 91 Prown, Jonathan 108 – 9, 111, 113 Prown, Jules 108

210 Index

Prvacki, Ana 105 public agency and museological reconciliation 28 – 9 Queens Museum 17 queer theory and hybridity 97 – 104 radical hospitality 113 – 19, 167 radicality 11 Raid the Icebox 49 Rakowitz, Michael 38, 40 – 5, 47, 81, 84 rampART 134 Ramsden, Mel 6 Rancière, Jacques 91, 124 – 6 Raunig, Gerald 164 Rawls, John 162 Read, Herbert 134 reconciliation: agonism and 162 – 4; critical practice and organisational change and 22 – 6; critical practice as 37 – 9; critical practice as ethics and 20 – 2; discursive museum and 159 – 60; ethics of care and 160 – 2; gesture towards 29; museological 28 – 9; in museological context 19 – 20; overlapping levels of 27; political and cultural contexts of 20, 26 – 7; process in South Africa 89 Recycle LACMA 38, 47, 81; LACMA’s response to 61 – 2; recycling as ethical stewardship and 53 – 60; two pairs of Guatemalan trousers in 48 – 53 recycling as ethical stewardship 53 – 60 relational aesthetics 15 – 16 Revolving Hotel Room 16 – 17 Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) 48 Ribalta, Jorge 165 Richter, Gerhard 60 Rivera, Diego 133 Robertson, Bryan 135 Robins, Claire 21 Robinson, Fiona 161 Rockefeller, Nelson A. 129, 133 Rodia, Simon 24, 25 Roelstraete, Dieter 6, 33, 133, 147, 171 Ronald Reagan Presidential Library 50 Rooseum (Malmö) 165, 167, 169 Rosoux,Valerie 162 Ruscha, Ed 24, 26, 49, 58 Rwanda 141 Sadler, Michael 98 Saltz, Jerry 16 Sandell, Richard 86, 91 Sanders, Jay 7 Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) 32 – 3 Searle, John 6 Seattle Art Museum 94

Self-Portrait: Arnolfini 22 – 3 Sennett, Richard 161 shared guardianship 46 – 7, 79 Sheikh, Simon 7, 171, 174 Sholette, Gregory 7, 140 Sierra, Santiago 5 Silverman, Lois 28 Sir! No Sir! 130, 132 Sitch, Brian 75, 77 SKOR (Foundation for Art and Public Space) 1 slatko 105 Smart Museum of Art 104 – 5 Smith, Matt 38, 89, 91, 97, 119; Other Stories 97 – 104, 120 Smith, Stephanie 105 Smith, Terry 8, 21 – 2 Smith, Zadie 119 Smithson, Robert 8 social justice: activism 91; hybridity in 86, 90 – 1 socially engaged practice 4 – 5; as coproductive 14; in critical practice 18 – 19; defining 13 – 16; ethics of participation and 16 – 18; museological implications of 33 – 7; in the public sphere 15; relational aesthetics and 15 – 16 Sola, Joe 58 Sontag, Susan 56 Soul Food Starter Kit 106 – 7 Soviet Union, the 175 Spanish Civil War 134 – 5, 141, 144 “Speaking in Tongues” 119 spectacle theory 17 Spector, Nancy 12, 15 – 16 Spencer, Catherine 144 – 5 Spira, Anthony 132, 134, 136, 138, 140 Spoils 38, 40 – 5, 81 SpRoUt artist collective 142 – 3 Staal, Jonas 8, 39, 152 – 6; ‘Art in Defense of Democracy’ 156 – 7; New World Summit and 157 Stanley, Nick 46 Stein, Baldwin Antinous 91 – 8, 114 Stein, Gertrude 97 Steiner, Barbara 36 Sternfeld, Nora 181 Stone, Benjamin 87 Struth, Thomas 11 Superchannel 34 – 5 Superflex 36 superhybridity 119 – 20 sustainability and deaccession 48 – 62 Take Part Research Cluster 143 Tallant, Sally 167 – 8 Tate Britain 28 – 9, 164 – 5 tenantspin 35 – 7 theanyspacewhatever 15 theory of discourse ethics 17

Index  211

ten Thije, Steven 186 thought space 121 Tinari, Philip 83 To Speculate Darkly:Theaster Gates and Dave the Potter 104 – 13, 107, 113 – 19, 120 To the Margins and Back 182 Tourist, the Pilgrim, the Flâneur (and the Worker) 184 Tower Hamlets ChangeUp Consortium 143, 148 – 9 Tredway, Sean 34 True Stories 87 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 26 – 7 Tuareg National Movement of the Liberation of Azawad 156 Tuhkanen, Mikko 98 Tutu, Desmond 27, 160 Twinned Renegotiation Platforms 121 – 7, 152, 164 UCLA 24 UK Museums Association 28, 160 Unexpected Guest 104 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 46, 89 unlearning of institutionalised practices 30 – 1 Untitled (Bitch, I Made this Pot) 114 – 15 Uses of Art-The Legacy of 1848 and 1989,The 175 Vacuum Cleaner 9, 10, 20 Van Abbemuseum 159, 165, 175 – 9, 186; The Living Archive 180 – 1, 184; To the Margins and Back 182; Play Van Abbe 181 – 4, 185; Plug in to Play 179 – 80, 181, 184; The Politics of Collecting/ The Collecting of Politics 182 – 4; Tourist, the Pilgrim, the Flâneur (and the Worker) 184 VanAntwerpen, Jonathan 19, 162 vipassna 65 visitor-generated content, ordinary ethics in 69 – 78

Wall Street Journal 53 Walsh,Victoria 19, 28 – 9, 90, 119 Wang, Dan 118 Ward, Frazer 12 Warhol, Andy 48 – 9 Warsza, Joanna 158 Watson, Grant 149 Watts Towers 24, 25 We Have Never Been Modern 86 “What Is Critique?” 7 Whitechapel Anarchist Group 134, 165 Whitechapel Gallery 127, 147 – 8; see also Nature of the Beast,The Whitney Museum of American Art 7, 24 WikiLeaks 155 Wilde, Oscar 100 William, Prince 146, 147, 148, 148 – 9 Wilmott, Francesca 106 Wilson, Fred 9, 32 – 3, 38, 89, 168, 173; An Invisible Life: A view into the world of a 120 year old man 91 – 8, 120; Theaster Gates and 108, 113 – 14, 119 ‘Without Identity’ 161 Wolverhampton Art Gallery 87 Wright, Frank Lloyd 23 Wróblewski, Andrzej 182 – 3 Yank, Sue 15, 172 Ybarra, Mario, Jr. 172 Yiakoumaki, Nayia 133 Yildirim, Fadile 156 Young, Carey 13, 29, 162 – 3 YouTube 33 Zembylas, Michalinos 27, 161 Ziaja, Luisa 181 Ziólkowska, Magdalena 182 Żmijewski, Artur 158 Zontal, Jorge 85

Between You and I – Intervention 3: Morality Exhibition series, Witte de With (Center for Contemporary Art) Polder Cup by Maider López June – September 2010 Courtesy of the artist, SKOR (Stichting Kunst en Openbare Ruimte) and Witte de With (Center for Contemporary Art) mage copyright: Bob Goedewaagen

PLATE 1 

PLATE 2  Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989, videotaped re-enactment of a live performance at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (lower left), as exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Gallery 809): "Spies in the House of Art: Photography, Film, and Video" (February 7-August 26, 2012). New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Neil Cummings, Self Portrait: Arnolfini, installation detail, Arnolfini Gallery, 2011. Photograph, Neil Cummings, Creative Commons Attribution, v.4

PLATE 3 

PLATE 4 

Michael Rakowitz, Spoils, 2011. Photo courtesy Creative Time

PLATE 5  Two pairs of Guatemalan trousers, hand-woven cotton with hand embroidery, date unknown; deaccessioned 2009 from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, photo courtesy of Robert Fontenot.

Robert Fontenot, ‘Wastepaper Basket’, from Recycle LACMA, 2009–2010, photo courtesy of Robert Fontenot

PLATE 6 

PLATE 7  Ansuman Biswas exploring the Manchester Museum collection stores, 2009, photo courtesy of the Manchester Museum, University of Manchester

PLATE 8  Ana Prvacki performing Greeting Committee at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, for the opening of Feast: Radical hospitality in contemporary art, 2012, commissioned by the Smart Museum of Art for Feast: Radical hospitality in contemporary art. Photo by: Jeremy Lawson

PLATE 9  Installation view of the exhibition To Speculate Darkly: Theaster Gates and Dave the Potter, Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, 2010, curated by Ethan Lasser, Chipstone Foundation. Photo credit: John R. Glembi

PLATE 10  Opening event for the exhibition To Speculate Darkly: Theaster Gates and Dave the Potter, Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, 2010, curated by Ethan Lasser, Chipstone Foundation.Photo credit: John R. Glembin

PLATE 11  Liam Gillick, Twinned Renegotiation Platforms, 1998, anodized aluminum, plexiglass, wood planks (Dutch groove), each platform 180 x 300 x 5 cm. Photo: Moderna Museet-Stockholm/ Åsa Lundén

Goshka Macuga, The Nature of the Beast, 2009, installation view, Whitechapel Gallery, London, courtesy of the artist and Whitechapel Gallery Archive. Photograph by Patrick Lears

PLATE 12 

Jonas Staal, New World Summit – Berlin, overview, Sophiensaele, Berlin Biennale, 2012, overview of the “alternative parliament” of the New World Summit in the Sophiensaele, Berlin. Photo: Lidia Rossner

PLATE 13 

Khaled Hourani, Picasso in Palestine, 2011, installation view, Art Academy of Palestine, Ramallah, (IAAP)

PLATE 14 

Play Van Abbe: Part 2: Time Machines – Andrzej Wróblewski, To the Margins and Back, 2010, installation view, Van Abbemuseum, from: 10-04-2010 tot: 12-09-2010. Magdalena Ziólkowska (guest curator).Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven,The Netherlands. Archives Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

PLATE 15