What to do with art institutions? A discussion of the use-value of the spaces of display (Part 1)

Conversation between Cira Pascual Marquina, Chris Gilbert, and Elena Sorokina

This conversation between took place in February 2005 as an exchange of e-mails.

Elena: Let's begin. Activist practices versus white cubes: Do you think there is an inherent incompatibility?

Cira: Generally, yes. But let me reshape the question. Activist practices vs. institutions and the white cubes they inhabit: Are they incompatible? I would say that in our context (the U.S., with the market dominating art institutions through the bourgeois funding structures that are in place), activist practices are incompatible. With some exceptions. As an organizer now working in the context of a mainstream art museum, the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, I have benefited a great deal from shifts and crises in the institution—gaps in which I have been able to facilitate projects that are linked to radical organizers primarily, and only on a secondary level connected with art discourses. These have been politically productive exercises that have inhabited the physical white cube that is the Contemporary Museum—the white cube becoming Infoshop.

Chris: I wholly agree with Cira that the question has to be taken away from architecture, to be a larger question about institutions. Institutions are often symbolically, from a bourgeois perspective, taken to be a matter of architecture (consider how architecture is used by the bourgeoisie to stand for a museum; how a certain kind of signature architecture—in my opinion mere marketing—is taken as the figure for a museum). If we accept the term "white cube" to describe an institution or its spaces, I believe we are repeating and in a sense buying into that displacement. And it's right to raise the issue of class—this is a far better way to describe institutions. I should add that the phrase "inherent incompatibility" is problematic. We don't believe that contradictions are inherent, but that they are produced historically. Such contradictions can be productive—especially when we understand them to be effects of, and sites for, class struggle.

Elena: In Marx's writings on historical materialism the question of space isn't elaborated, but rather marginalized. In contrast, Henri Lefebvre, who reasserted the notion of space in critical theory, states that "the class struggle is inscribed in space," meaning, of course, social space. Besides representative architecture, the institutions dispose of spaces, and the valorization of art happens through the act of exhibiting it in space. Exhibition spaces are part of social spaces, which are allocated according to class, and their political economy, like all economies, is based on the idea of scarcity. I believe it is useful to think about how such spaces are produced, experienced, and how they can be modified or challenged.

Chris: True, Elena, not all discussions of space are reducible to architecture, let alone signature architecture. Space can be approached critically—as Lefebvre and David Harvey do. My sense, however, is that many discussions of the economy of space, especially those that take shape these days under the rubric "white cube," fail to engage adequately with questions of institutional power.

Elena: The institutional part of the problem is indeed important—mainstream institutions do write history, provide support to some artists and deny it to others, include and exclude. Activist practices can challenge institutions, create alternative institutions, or use museums for their own goals. You certainly know that WochenKlausur—to mention just this historical example—developed and realized proposals at the invitation of art institutions, using them as offices. But let me hold on the notion of exhibition space for a sec: What do we do with display? Cira, you are talking about inhabiting the physical space or white cube, becoming an Infoshop. During our year at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program we became aware of the contradictions between the active nature of some projects and the traditional "display" we would provide through an exhibition. We were trying to think of some different ways of collaboration between museums and activist practices and questioning possibilities of the institutional involvement with them.

Cira: Well, actually, I don't think that collaboration between activists/artists and the U.S. mainstream art institution is possible. That is, if the practice is more than nominally political. I may be an institutional curator—although this does not bring a process of identification—but my relationship with a project is one of full participation. And as a participant, the institution operates as tool. I'm relying on—even exploiting/instrumentalizing— the institution for its visibility, resources, etc.

Chris: I think that between display and more apparently "social" projects, neither inherently has more use-value. It depends on the possibilities of the situation; in some situations, social and organizational work is easily co-opted, by being made into spectacle. In these cases, one welcomes the autonomy and portability of more representational strategies, which can become vehicles for kinds of resistant, even radical work. It depends, as we say, on the situation and the possibilities, which vary greatly from one institution to another, from one place to another. Presently, after having worked for some years on generating a resistant sociality in and around spaces, I'm now turning to more documentarian strategies that may be closer to what you call display. Yet I would not call them strictly representational, nor are they in any way neutral or "objective." I'm proposing to put pressure on the term media in a way that would point to documentarian strategies that are committed and aligned, that see themselves a products of labor and hence creative contributions to struggles as much as documents thereof. (It is becoming increasingly clear that behind the fetishes of "neutrality," "objectivity," and "balance" is simply the will of those in power to promote and maintain the status quo.)

Elena: The proliferation of art institutions is specific to the "global north"—there are a lot of countries without or with very few art institutions. To give you one example I know (sorry for this detour), the so-called Radical Actionism in Moscow developed in the '90s under conditions of a total absence of art institutions. Artists such as Anatoly Osmolovsky, who were engaged in critical practices, used strategies of direct communication through mass media as their way to reach a public, or anyone at all. Actually, I would say, they worked in sync with the idea of demonstrating that resistance is taking place, of trying to make people believe that it is so. However, this situation affected the nature of their work. If we change the perspective, all institutional questions you address become less self-evident. I can't help but agree with your analysis of institutional power in the United States. Could you explain on what scale you base the notion of class struggle (global or local), and how you acknowledge it if you are working outside of the United States—for example, what do you want to achieve as one of curators of the Gwangju Biennale?

Chris: You're absolutely right to observe that our practices grow out of a specific situation and that whatever critical value they have is a response to that situation; also to point out that many discussions of institutions tend to be limited to, or rather tend to universalize, a condition of institutional all-powerfulness. I've recently had occasion to return to Deleuze's essay "Instincts and Institutions," in which he argues for the productive, even constitutive nature of institutions. The shift in perspective you refer to—and Deleuze's work is in fact quite useful (in spite of its many misuses in our context) in conditions of actual emergence—is nowhere better illustrated than in Venezuela, where, for example, the Universidad Bolivariana, the various misiones, and the network of community television and radio stations (medios comunitarios) are far more radical and significant than most "critical" positions, whether launched from the academy or from self-organized groups, in the global north. And in fact, it's with institutions of this kind that we plan to work in the Gwangju Biennale.

Elena: Cira, I am curious to know about the exhibition "Headquarters," which you are preparing at the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. It seems that you have a very specific position about how to use the institution and its spaces.

Cira: Frankly, I'm struggling with "Headquarters." As you know, originally "Headquarters" proposed to transform the museum into a center of operations for progressive art practices redefining social space. One concern was that the gallery or museum as a simple showroom was no longer adequate for the expanded field of political practice. In order to respond to this development, "Headquarters" was to transform the gallery space into a knowledge station and training ground for a series of projects in Baltimore. "Headquarters" would acknowledge the museum as one command center, but it would also bend the term to refer to mobile spaces, continually shifting loci of political/discursive processes that are neither conceptually static nor geographically constant. Working with YOMANGO, campbaltimore, Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, and others, the projects were to mobilize collectives (activate organizing) and strategize toward specific radical goals in Baltimore's fucked-up political landscape. So why is there a crisis in "Headquarters" now? I am concerned, very concerned, that I will not be able to facilitate these projects (push them toward calculated political strategizing along the lines of the Brigada Rosa) in the current institutional context. I also cannot figure out how to keep the projects from being co-opted. So I think and I talk to organizers here. Let's see if we can figure it out.

Cira Pascual Marquina, Chris Gilbert, and Elena Sorokina

Cira Pascual Marquina is Curator at the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore. Chris Gilbert is Matrix Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive. Gilbert and Pascual Marquina are curating the Latin American section of "The Last Chapter" for the Gwangju Biennale 2006.

Elena Sorokina is an independent curator, guest editor of "Active Spaces," March 2006 for artwurl.org, and writer based in New York. Her next show, "Contested Spaces in Post-Soviet Art," will take place at the Sidney Mishkin Gallery, New York, in March.