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Fidelity, Betrayal, Autonomy: In andBeyond the Contemporary Art MuseumGregory SholettePublished online: 25 Aug 2010.

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Fidelity, Betrayal, Autonomy:In and Beyond the

Contemporary Art Museum

Gregory Sholette

Certainty, fidelityOn the stroke of midnight passLike vibrations of a bell W.H. Auden, Lullaby, 1937

Today, the socially committed artist, writer, curator or administrator mustface one very unpalatable fact: how and why large, basically conservativeinstitutions, including museums and universities, eventually charm eventheir most defiant critics and radical apostates. If the end of the Cold War(and of modernism) has brought a new level of inclusiveness to thesecultural institutions, then what has become of the once defiant notion ofa counter-culture? Writing as a heretic, it is my experience that whileinstitutional power is certainly no phantom, the institutional function (tore-work a term borrowed from Foucault’s essay What is an Author?) isseldom precisely directed. Rather, museums, universities, evencorporations are rife with redundancy and internal conflict. Their greatesteffectiveness is often more the result of a magnitude of scale thanorganisational efficiency. Naturally, administrators and curators will, inthe last instance, always side with the institutional function, but at anypoint prior to that critical juncture there arise intrigues, affairs andinfidelities of great potential to political activists. And if institutionalpower persists in attracting even its opponents, perhaps it is because welove it, or at least the unselfish image it projects, more than it could everlove itself. This is the scandal my essay seeks to comprehend.

I want to begin by describing my troubled history. I am someone whohas worked inside art institutions as well as outside and against them. Iwant to address this space of ambivalence, but I also want to confess adeeper, long-standing disloyalty – towards the practice known ascontemporary art, and towards the increasingly global market thatsupports it. As a practising artist, and a curator who teaches in an artsadministration programme, this confession is nearly seditious. Yet, like all

Third Text, Vol. 16, Issue 2, 2002, 153-166

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DOI: 10.1080/09528820210138290

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complex relationships it also betrays my co-dependency on institutionalauthority as a means of achieving what are, in effect, frequently contrarydemocratic goals.

I can trace my declining faith in the institutions of art back to 1979,the year I graduated from the Cooper Union School of Art. No longera student, I began to attend meetings where other artists spoke notabout their art but instead discussed their opposition to racism andapartheid, sexism and militarism. Rather than visiting studios orplanning exhibitions our focus was to support Third World liberationmovements, labour unions, the ecology movement and public housing.Art was at best a vehicle for accomplishing these ends and, besides,there was serious work to be done that had nothing to do with careerbuilding. Among those active at these gatherings was the critic LucyLippard, the writers Clive Philpot, Irving Wexler, and Barbara Moor,and the artists Ed Eisenberg, Tim Rollins, Jerry Kearns, Richard Myer,Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, Janet Koenig, Mike Gleir, Mimi Smith, HerbPerr and Rudolph Barinik. Many were veterans of other organisationsincluding Artists Meeting for Cultural Change (AMCC) and thefeminist group Heresies. Before long, an organisational mission wasbeing formulated that would transform these informal meetings held inLower Manhattan into a coherent association with its own offices andbank account. In principle the new group was to centre its activities onarchiving and circulating the many boxes of materials about politicaland activist art that Lippard had been collecting for several years. Atthe moment of institutionalisation Clive Philpot, then the director ofthe Museum of Modern Art Library, proposed the appellation PoliticalArt Documentation or PAD. When several members raised concernsabout the service-oriented connotation of this name it was modified tobecome Political Art Documentation and Distribution or PAD/D.1

The PAD/D archive was intended to be an instrument for expandingleft-wing activism among artists. By accumulating and thendistributing models for politically engaged practices, the archive wouldserve as a sort of tactical toolbox. The greater expectation was that thisinformal network would grow into an entirely autonomous system fordistributing and exhibiting activist culture. This counter-circuit wouldbe woven out of a combination of new and existing sites not stronglytied to the dominant art world. It would include university art galleries,community centres, labour union halls, and various public venues.Work would also be made for demonstrations and picket lines. Notehowever, that most alternative art spaces were not part of this networkbecause these artist-run institutions were perceived as outposts andstepping-stones for the very cultural hegemony that PAD/D opposed.To underscore this desire for critical autonomy, consider the group’smission statement from 1981 in which PAD/D proclaimed that it:

…can not serve as a means of advancement within the art worldstructure of museums and galleries. Rather, we have to develop newforms of distribution economy as well as art….2

Today, even the most formal art claims social relevancy. As BruceFerguson noted in his opening statement for the Second, BanffCuratorial Summit, for contemporary curators, critics and artists, ithas become almost de rigueur to make explicit reference to issues of

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1. For more on PAD/D seemy essay ‘News fromNowhere: Activist Art &After: Report from NewYork’, Third Text, No.45, Winter, 1998–99,pp 45–62.

2. Political Art Documentation/Distribution, 1st issue,New York, February 1981.

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politics, cultural diversity, gender and sexual identity (although I mustadd seldom to class or economic inequality). Indeed, such routines canbe lamentable for political as well as for artistic reasons. Yet, from theperspective of a politically engaged, activist artist or organiser this kindof intra-institutional, liberal ambition can indeed be useful iffrustrating. Useful, because a certain amount of actual political workcan be ‘leveraged’ through it. At the same time, this tendency to displayone’s politics on the sleeve (or via an interpretive wall text) isfrustrating because curators, artists, museum administrators, andacademics easily confuse the kind of symbolic transgression that takesplace inside the museum with the political activism that occurs at thejudicial, penal, even global levels of society.

The reflex to make art socially relevant is itself a recentphenomenon (as well as a return to a much older one). It appears tohave accelerated following the demise of the Soviet Union and the endof the Cold War. Perhaps this is because US artists no longer needed todisplay to the world an uncompromising individuality exemplified byabstract expressionism. At the same time, however, new grounds forjustifying culture were needed. Social purposefulness and community-based art fitted that need. By contrast, in the late 1970s and early1980s, art with an overt social subject matter was dismissed asutilitarian or as protest art. As difficult as it is to imagine today, in1975, resistance to any sullying of high culture with politics actuallyhelped topple the short-lived editorial team of John Coplans and MaxKozloff at Artforum. Kozloff and Coplans brought to the influentialtrade magazine a raft of radical art historians and essayists includingCarol Duncan, Allen Sekula, Larwence Alloway, Alan Wallach, EvaCockcroft and Patricia Hills. These writers dared to suggest that artwas not an autonomous expression of transcendental truth but anintegral part of the social world. Hilton Kramer, then the principal artcritic for the New York Times as well as an ardent cold warrior, openlycalled for art dealers to boycott the magazine. In what might beconsidered a virtual coup d’état both Kozloff and Coplans were soondislodged from their positions.3

Meanwhile, by the late 1970s, politically engaged artists werebecoming increasingly sophisticated in mixing the symbolic realm ofart making with the practical needs of political activism. Unlike anearlier generation, exemplified by Donald Judd or Carl André, whoboth strongly opposed the Vietnam War yet remained devoutminimalists, many post-formalist artists collaborated with each otheras well as with environmentalists, anti-nuclear and housing activists,and community workers, and produced a heterogeneous range ofartistic forms and styles that directly addressed social causes. EvenPAD/D soon veered away from its stated archival and networkingmission to make performances and agit-art for public rallies anddemonstrations including the 1981 action in lower Manhattan entitledNo More Witch Hunts. The Reagan administration had recently passedanti-terrorist laws giving the government expanded powers ofsurveillance over US citizens. Many understood these so-called anti-terrorist laws as a thinly disguised legal justification for spying ondomestic supporters of the FMLN (the Farabundo Marti NationalLiberation), a Salvadorian-based insurrectionary organisation which

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3. A decade later LucyLippard was herselfousted from her post atthe Village Voiceostensibly because herpolitical enthusiasmprevented her fromwriting ‘objective’ artcriticism.

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was opposed to the US-backed regime of José Napoleon Duarté. NoMore Witch Hunts brought together religious activists, a localprogressive union, legal activists and artists. Meanwhile, GroupMaterial, another New York City-based artists collective foundedabout the same time as PAD/D, performed a mocking, militaryinfluenced disco-dance outfitted in hybrid ‘uniforms’ that graftedtogether standard GI camouflage with the bright red colours of theFMLN. Such reflexive and playful use of visual signifiers marked theincreasing experimentation and confidence of a new ‘political art’ thatwas consciously distancing itself from the banners and murals of thepast.

Along with PAD/D and Group Material, a partial list oforganisations that operated in the New York area between 1979 and1982 would include the anti-nuclear organisations, Artists for Survivaland Artists for Nuclear Disarmament (AND); the community-basedAsian-American group, Basement Workshop; media activists includingDeep Dish and Paper Tiger Television; and the feminist art collectivesNo More Nice Girls, Heresies and Carnival Knowledge. And this listcould be sorted differently by highlighting specific projects includingThe Women’s Pentagon Action and the Anti-WW III Show; the RealEstate Show (an anti-gentrification exhibition organised by a splintergroup from Colab that was staged in a squat space on the Lower EastSide); Bazaar Conceptions (a pro-choice ‘street fair’ organised byCarnival Knowledge); and an art auction to help fund a women’scentre in Zimbabwe, organised by the ultra-left Madame BinhGraphics Collective (some of whose members later served time atRikers Island in connection with the infamous Brinks Robbery inupstate New York).4

Therefore, when one speaks about political activism taking placeinside the museum, as a prominent Chicago curator of contemporary artrecently pronounced, it is important to contrast the sort of critical andmaterial engagement that I have described above with attempts to‘subvert the institutional frame’ or to ‘transgress’ conventions ofrepresentation or modes of display. Needless to say, and for reasons toodetailed to go into here, by the later part of the 1980s the category‘political art’ become widely accepted, even as PAD/D itself dissolved.Meanwhile, the PAD/D archive is now housed in the mother of allestablishment art institutions, the Museum of Modern Art in New YorkCity. And while activist, cultural work continued to evolve withinorganisations such as Act Up, Gran Fury and the Guerilla Girls, by thetime the Museum of Modern Art organised its 1988 ‘political art’ surveyentitled Committed To Print, the very possibility of an alternative orcounter-network of affiliated, activist artists and autonomous exhibitionspaces such as PAD/D proposed could no longer be sustained, either inpractice or in theory. Perhaps even more disconcerting is that today, some20 years later, much of the art documented in the PAD/D archivesremains invisible, in spite of the apparently ‘required’ observance ofpolitical correctness within the contemporary art world.

The degree to which collectives like PAD/D or Group Material, orthe Women’s Building on the West Coast, participated in thisnormalisation of politically and socially engaged art has yet to bestudied. Nevertheless when the term ‘political art’ or ‘multiculturalism’

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4. My list is compiled fromthe first and second issuesof 1st Issue, thenewsletter of Political ArtDocumentation andDistribution, both 1981.

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5. An example of leveragingis the series of exhibitionsentitled Mumia 911 thattook place across theUnited States in theautumn of 1999, whichnot only called attentionto but provided materialsupport for confrontingpolice brutality andinstitutionalised racism.Mumia 911 was made upof dozens of exhibitions,installations, and concertsand helped garnersignatures and publicsupport for an impartialretrial of the outspokenAfrican-American activistMumia Abul Jamal whohas been onPennsylvania’s death rowfor the last 17 yearsaccused of murdering aPhiladelphia policeofficer. Internationalhuman rights groups havecondemned his convictionas legally flawed, evenpolitically motivated by avindictive policedepartment known for itswidespread racism andcorruption. Along withbuilding support for anew trial the coalitionfocused public attentionon the disproportionatenumber of non-whitepeople incarcerated andon death row across theUnited States.

6. Despite a recentsuspicious fire,Peterman’s facility is inthe process of rebuilding,but along withPeterman’s studio thebuilding housed a bicyclerecycling andwoodworking business,as well as the offices ofthe Baffler, aniconoclastic left-wingjournal featuring articlesabout global culture,media culture and the so-called ‘new economy’.

7. Some of those whoworked on the solartechnology project alsodeveloped the start-upcompany US Roboticsthat later merged with3COM with combinedassets of US$8.5 billion.

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or more notably ‘activist art’ is invoked today, it raises for me specifichistorical as well as theoretical questions regarding definitions andcontext. It also reminds me that history is premised on such lostopportunities, just as activism is a process of recovering what the pasthas betrayed.

To briefly summarise, then, from the perspective of a politicallyengaged art practice, whatever the motive is for the post-Cold War artworld’s dalliance with social content, it must be read as a potential sitefor rendezvous. To think otherwise, to remain opposed to allinstitutional intercourse, is to assume the most ideologicallyaccommodating position possible. It leaves the institution in the handsof those administrators and intellectuals who dismiss the impulse foreconomic and political justice as impractical and who instead turn to amelancholy exploration of personal meaning or an unreflectiveindulgence in popular culture. Therefore, the current fashion for‘Political Correctness’ (to use a term that I despise but one that makesperfect sense in this context) is useful if for no other reason than itprovides leverage for a certain measure of engaged, political work.5

Perhaps the clearest way to frame this dilemma is in the form of aquestion. How can artists learn to siphon off a portion of institutionalpower, while maintaining a safe distance and margin of autonomy fromthe institution? At the same time, we need to ask what ethical questionsthis raises – not only for artists, but also for sympathetic curators andarts administrators working on the ‘inside’. In other words, what is thenature of the contradiction such potentially dangerous liaisons canproduce? One answer can be found in the work of severalcontemporary artists including Dan Peterman and his associates on theSouth Side of Chicago and the collective REPOhistory. Dan Peterman’smost recent project, Excerpts From The Universal Lab: Plan B, was ondisplay in the summer of 2000, at the David and Alfred Smart Museumof Art at the University of Chicago’s urban campus. The Smart Museumis located not far from Peterman’s multipurpose studio that also housesa publishing office, organic garden and recycling centre.6 On one level,the artist’s project for the Smart Museum resembles an unassumingdisplay of outdated scientific equipment painstakingly arranged on acylindrical platform or dais. The initial effect gives the appearance of adisplay meant for a science fair that was mistakenly delivered to thewrong institution. But the ‘excerpts’ that Peterman used in theinstallation were in fact drawn from the collection of a formerUniversity of Chicago research associate named John Erwood (theman’s actual name but Peterman chose not to identify in his project). Itis by using the history of this collection that the artist is able to launchhis subtle process of leveraging institutional power.

For several decades John Erwood had been diverting scientificmaterials from the university into a warehouse north of the campus.Initially, Erwood’s accumulations formed the basis of an unregulatedscience laboratory under the utopian-sounding name Universal Lab orUL. This ‘laboratory’ was intended to be a free space in which scienceprojects that were not sanctioned by the university could be exploredby almost anyone wearing a lab coat. (And at least one viable scientificproject involving solar-voltaic technology did result from the workdone at UL.7)

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The Universal Lab was therefore something of an institutionalparasite. It recycled outmoded equipment and materials while remaininginvisible to any oversight by the university it fed off. However, Erwood’sfree space eventually became so choked with discarded apparatus andhazardous chemicals that it no longer served as anything but a storagedepot. By 1999, the Universal Lab devolved into piles of Geigercounters, autoclaves, lab ovens, oscillators, computers, radio equipment,plastic buckets of mercury and hundreds of chemicals in brown glassbottles all of which were stacked from ceiling to floor inside a cavernous,former factory on Chicago’s South Side. If the University of Chicago wasnot concerned with this pilfering it may have been because Erwood was‘disappearing’ obsolete, even dangerous holdings that would have beenexpensive to dispose of in the proper manner.

UL might have remained invisible indefinitely, if not for thebuilding’s ownership changing hands a couple of years ago. In the

Dan Peterman, Excerpts from the Universal Lab, 2000. Presentation of assorted non-chemical items from the Universal Lab.Installation introduced inventory procedures and generated a database to assist in distribution and appropriate reuse ofmaterials. Commissioned for Ecologies: Mark Dion, Peter Fend, Dan Peterman, 2000 curated by Stephanie Smith at theDavid and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. Photo by Tom van Eynde

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8. Ecologies: Mark Dion,Peter Fend, DanPeterman was curated byStephanie Smith and ranfrom 6 July to 27 August,2000 at the David andAlfred Smart Museum ofArt, University ofChicago.

9. From Stepahie Smith’soverview of DanPeterman’s project in theexhibition catalogueEcologies: Mark Dion,Peter Fend, DanPeterman, Chicago,David and Alfred SmartMuseum of Art,University of Chicago,2001, p 125.

10. Even a year after theexhibition closed,Excerpts From TheUniversal Lab: Plan Bcontinues to haunt theuniversity. Shortly beforecompleting this text theUniversity of ChicagoDepartment of RadiationSafety, under thesupervision of the IllinoisDepartment of NuclearSafety (IDNS), enteredthe UL site and identifiedand removed fourpotentially dangerousradioactive items.Following this theuniversity again absolveditself of any responsibilityfor the clean-up. As ofnow, Erwood’s formerlaboratory remainsquarantined until a finalradiological survey can bemade.

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meantime, John Erwood had become destitute. With nowhere to turn,and no cost-effective way to dispose of the mountains of archaictechnology, the new owner called on the assistance of the CreativeReuse Warehouse (CRW), a Chicago-based, non-profit recyclingorganisation. Closely associated with Peterman’s own recyclingprojects, the CRW allowed the artist to selectively catalogue some ofthe anonymous equipment and display it at the Smart Museum as partof an exhibition entitled Ecologies: Mark Dion, Peter Fend, DanPeterman that was organised by curator Stephanie Smith.8 Byphysically relocating some of the University of Chicago’s lost ‘assets’back to its campus, Peterman was able to provoke a series of politicaland aesthetic challenges that extend beyond the immediate art context.As the exhibition curator Stephanie Smith notes:

Through this collaborative project, these objects, many of whichwere gathered from the university’s loading docks and trash bins,spiraled back in a new context. They did not complete a circle/cyclebut instead accrued new layers of use, value and meaning as theywere temporarily incorporated into the systems and physical spacesof the University of Chicago’s art museum.9

If the apparatus Peterman transported to the museum is viewedsimply as art, then it neatly falls into the now familiar and relativelysafe category of found object. However, if Excerpts From TheUniversal Lab: Plan B is looked upon as materials momentarily freeze-framed, yet still in a process of circulation and recovery, thenPeterman’s project raises a far broader spectrum of issues. Perhaps themost provocative are legal questions about the University of Chicago’sresponsibility towards environmental safety in the largely African-American community surrounding its South Side campus. The projectalso brings up questions of a more theoretical nature including howUL, an extremely unconventional model for scientific experimentation,could exist, even briefly, in the shadow of an enormous institution suchas the University of Chicago. Again, in terms of practice, what wouldit take to ensure the stability of a ‘free space’ like UL? Equallycompelling is the way that the moment Universal Lab was made visiblewithin the legitimising authority of the museum it was transformedinto both a cultural asset (as ‘art’) and a danger to the institution. Infact, the University of Chicago’s legal department has since disavowedany responsibility for the hazardous materials now stored at UniversalLab.10 The importance of these questions depends on how Peterman’swork is contextualised. With little more than a shift in discourse thework veers between an engaged artistic practice that uses the museumfor its own, extra-artistic purposes, and the now familiar mode ofinstitutional critique, a point I will return to.

Yet, if artists can leverage the institution’s tendency to confusesymbolic and actual political action, this same ambivalence can alsoserve the interests of the institution. For instance, the semblance of self-criticism and a move towards cultural inclusivity can have directeconomic benefits for the museum. This has become especially true ina funding climate where guidelines for (what is left of) public money inthe United States explicitly call for ‘outreach’ to ‘under-served’communities. Notably, within the hierarchy of the museum this

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outreach usually falls to the education department, even if theeducation department and its staff seldom recuperate the financialrewards for such virtuous work. Needless to say, power and status inthe museum come down to how much of the budget you receive(regardless of what you earn) and how much programming space youhave to command.

Much of the practice of the artist’s collective REPOhistory alsoremains largely invisible within the institutional discourse of the artindustry. One possible reason for this is that REPOhistory (aninformal group of artists and activists established in 1989 by theauthor and several dozen other individuals) produces work that isunapologetically didactic and appears to subjugate visual imagery tostrategies of communication. By ‘repossessing’ lost histories thegroup simply, and in some ways naively, assumes that an intelligent,concerned citizen actually exists and will take the time to read theoften bounteous information REPOhistory posts in public spaces.More than that, the group holds out a genuine belief that someportion of the political and social critique REPOhistory is raisingabout the representation of history and the use of public space willbe communicated, even acted upon. The New York-based group hasbeen doing this over the last 11 years and while no empirical proofhas been collected regarding this model of what Habermas would callcommunicative action, the sizeable amount of mass-media (asopposed to art) press, as well as the negative response by city officialsto several REPOhistory projects, suggests that the group’s operatingassumptions are not entirely baseless. Perhaps the project that bestillustrates this is the 1998 public installation Civil Disturbances:Battles for Justice in New York City.

Civil Disturbances developed out of a unique collaborationbetween the REPOhistory collective and a non-profit law office: NewYork Lawyers for the Public Interest. The latter provides legalassistance to poor and under-represented people and communities inthe New York City area. Working with a team of socially concernedlawyers REPOhistory established 20 topics and sites that designatedpivotal battles in defence of the legal rights of the politically andeconomically disenfranchised. Using the same approach the groupdeveloped in past projects, in which artist-designed street-signs aremounted on city lampposts temporarily permitted through theDepartment of Transportation, Civil Disturbances aimed to publiclymark subjects such as the mistreatment of citizens by members of theNew York Police Department, the legal fight to save various publichospitals, a class action suit brought against the Giulianiadministration in defence of abused children and the passing of lawsto protect women from domestic abuse and to provide low incomepublic housing. Yet, in spite of the group’s record of obtaining twotemporary installation permits for its public work from the city in1992 and 1994, REPOhistory was first stonewalled and then refusedpermission by the Giuliani administration to proceed with theinstallation of Civil Disturbances. It required the intervention of amajor law firm, Debevoise & Plimpton, to force the city to relent.However, the victory over City Hall in August of 1998 did not endthe battle over Civil Disturbances. Once the project was installed

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following several months of delays taken up with legal tactics, severalindividual artists’ signs ‘disappeared’ from city streets. Among thesewas Janet Koenig’s work documenting the Empire State Building’sprolonged non-compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act,Marina Gutierrez’s piece critiquing housing discrimination by the cityagainst Puerto Rican families in her Brooklyn neighbourhood, and asign by William Menking that ‘landmarked’ the site of an illegal,‘midnight’ demolition of low-income housing on the lot where aluxury hotel now graces the ‘new’ Times Square. As it turned out ineach case, the art was being removed by building managers or localpoliticians. 11 This underscores a principle about so-called publicspace: it is never ‘empty’ or simply waiting to be filled. Instead, it isalways already occupied by political and economic power that claimsentitlement to that space regardless of its designation as ‘public’.

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11. For more on the battleover Civil Disturbancessee David Gonzalez,‘Lampposts As a ForumFor Opinion’, New YorkTimes, 20 May 1998,Metro section, p B1, andStuart W Elliot, ‘SomeLegal History Still BeingOverturned’, New YorkTimes, City Section, 15November 1998, p 5.

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REPOhistory artist Marina Gutierrez with television reporters just prior to re-installing her work for the third time after itwas illegally removed in Williamsburg, New York. Gutierrez’s sign graphically depicts the 20-year battle by the local Latinocommunity to end housing discrimination by the New York City Housing Authority that favoured white tenants. The signwas part of REPOhistory’s 1998–99 project entitled ‘Civil Disturbances: Battles for Justice in New York City’. Photo byGregory Sholette

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Nevertheless, these lessons in Realpolitik that REPOhistory,PAD/D and Peterman endured have a counterpart within themuseum. For many cultural labourers of my generation (those artists,critics and scholars educated during the late 1970s and early 1980s)the inner workings of museums and other art-related institutionswere rendered visible through the artistic practice known asinstitutional critique exemplified by Hans Haacke and Daniel Burenin the 1970s and continuing today with Andrea Fraser and FredWilson among others. The institutional critique is characterised bywork that is less concerned with the formal aspects of art than withthe unseen economic and social structures that buttress art’sinstitutional setting. These unseen forces include the boards ofdirectors, corporate underwriters, wealthy benefactors and affiliateddealers and collectors for museums, foundations and similar culturalentities. What has been revealed by the institutional critique thereforeis one persistent and disturbing fact: that many cultural institutionsare led by the private interests and personal taste of an invisible elite,rather than by their stated philanthropic and educational missions.Yet, while the institutional critique has focused significant attentiondirectly on this contradiction for the past 30 years, it now appears toprovide a degree of closure for the institution by reinforcing thenotion that the museum offers an uncompromising democratic zonefor engaging in civic dialogue. Even the preservationist obligations ofthe traditional museum are being redeemed in the work of MarkDion, whose installations have increasingly become less anexposition of institutional limits than a rediscovery of the primaryconservationist role of the museum. Once again, it is Dan Peterman’swork that proves the more nuanced. Indeed, if there is the possibilityof leveraging the all too conspicuous benevolence of the art museumand of proceeding where the institutional critique has left off, it isthrough work that extends off-site politics into the museum and thenpropels it back out again into the public arena. Yet this begs stillanother question. Just who and what is outside the museum and howdo these off-site, institutionally resistant spaces and practicesperceive their relationship to the authority of the institution?

Speaking from my own experience, those artists working out ofabandoned warehouses, in basement workshops, cooperative centresand urban squats believe that large institutional structures operatewith a military-like precision to strategically defuse grass-roots andresistant practices. In response, any viable counter-practice iscompelled to constantly re-establish itself at an ever-greater perimeterfrom the expanding hegemonic zone of the institution. Yet evenwithin this outermost post, at a safe distance from the discourse andeconomy of the museum, there is a form of unspoken fidelity to themuseum’s institutional marrow. There is a vague recognition, even,that the passion which drives and sustains opposition is motivatedjust as much by an affinity for the failed ideals of such institutions asby any overt hostility to institutional power.

What does it mean therefore to suggest that even a criticaldiscourse that refuses to serve the institution can remain faithful toit? Simply this: that informal, antagonistic formations such as DanPeterman’s Universal Lab, REPOhistory or PAD/D actually share a

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pivotal semblance to what they, by their very constitution, mustnecessarily reject. However, in the case of these small, anomalousorganisations this similarity is based on an allegiance to what manymuseums and universities always already abandoned in practice, ifnot also in theory: the passionate commitment to explore the social,political and aesthetic dimension of art coupled with the desire totransform the material world into an egalitarian and de-alienatedliving environment.

There is yet another level at which the institution and its antagonistsconverge. Even the most fleeting and decentralised collective, art groupor political collaboration requires some form of operating structure,

Andrew Castrucci and Nancy Goldenberg of the Lower East Side squat collective Bullet Space installing a self-descriptivekiosk for the July 1998 exhibition Urban Encounters at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. Curatedby the author, Urban Encounters also included installations by the artists’ groups: Godzilla, an Asian-American artcollaborative; World War III illustrated, and underground comic collective; the Guerilla Girls, the ‘conscience of the artworld’; ABC No Rio, the oldest art and activist space still operating in NYC; and REPOhistory, dedicated to relocating lostor repressed histories at specific urban sites. Photo by Eva S. Stürm

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some kind of institutional arrangement, however ad hoc or informal.12

To think otherwise is to naturalise and mystify what is a specific typeof contractual relationship between individuals with common concerns(among them is often the actual or perceived threat of being crushed byinstitutional hegemony!). At some level, both the museum and its other– those resistant, residual and informal cultural organisations –

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12. For more on thestructural nature ofcollectivity see my essay,‘Counting On YourCollective Silence: Noteson Activist Art asCollaborative Practice’,Afterimage, 27:3,November/December1999, pp 18–20.

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‘Not For Sale/Art for the Evicted: a Project Against Displacement’ was a 1994 street projectby Political Art Documentation and Distribution (PAD/D). Approximately 20 artists mademultiple posters that were then regularly pasted into four specific sites on Manhattan’sLower East Side. These locations were given the names of mock galleries including‘Another Gallery’ (2nd Ave between 4th and 5th streets), and the ‘Guggenheim Downtown’where the exhibition’s opening took place. Photos: Gregory Sholette

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13. Michael Hardt andAntonio Negri, Labor ofDionysus: A Critique ofState Form, Minneapolis,1994, p 281.

14. ‘News from Nowhere:Activist Art & After:Report from New York’,op. cit.

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recognise that the centralised institution proper does not exist. Insteadit is constructed within a field of ideas as well as economic variablesthat are jointly, if unequally, shared by the centre and the margins.What this means is this: activists must develop the cunning to see themuseum, as well as the university or corporation, as virtuallypredicated upon the collective productivity of those whom it regulates.In the case of the museum this naturally includes artists, but also themuseum staff, as well as the public that patronise it. To paraphrase thephilosopher Giles Deleuze, the institution is an apparatus of capture.But what does it seize? The answer is the enthusiasm of artists such asPeterman or REPOhistory or PAD/D. And, at least for a brief moment,it manages to entrap this dynamism. (Yet, one must also ask, whatdangerous, even treasonous ideas now spread within the institution asa result of this abduction?)

Finally, in order to describe oneself as both artist and political being– or what Pierre Palo Pasolini termed a citizen poet – one must remainill at ease with the neo-liberalism of post-Cold War institutions.Especially those which seem all too willing to embrace a prudent formof political dissent, including the unstated demand that curators beculturally inclusive and socially progressive. And despite thisuncertainty, and regardless of one’s divided loyalties, we mightseriously consider re-approaching the idea of critical autonomy thatPAD/D as well as the Universal Lab previously sought to establish over20 years ago. I am not referring here to the modernist notion ofautonomy in which the art object is celebrated as something solely inand for itself that transcends everyday life. Rather, I want to propose are-introducion of the concept of a self-validating mode of culturalproduction and distribution that is situated at least partially outside theconfines of the contemporary art matrix as well as global markets. Inother words, a self-conscious autonomous activism in which artistsproduce and distribute an independent political culture that usesinstitutional structures as resources rather than points of termination.As the theoreticians Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt argue in theirbook Empire, capitalism may be evolving into a circulating phantomin the global arena but:

…around it move radically autonomous processes of self-valorisation that not only constitute an alternative basis of potentialdevelopment but also actually represent a new constituentfoundation. 13

Naturally, such critical autonomy could not exist in close proximityto voracious institutions like art museums, Kunsthallen orinternational biennials for very long. That lesson was learned from the1980s all too well when a select group of artists were chosen torepresent ‘political art’ within the mainstream culture industry.14 No,what is required is a programme of theft and long-term sedition aimedat rupturing and re-appropriating institutional power for specificallypolitical purposes. Once more, the work of autonomous collaborationsincluding Dan Peterman and PAD/D, as well groups such asREPOhistory , RTmark, Colectivo Camba lache, Temporary Services,UltraRed or Ne Pas Plier, to mention a few now active in the UnitedStates and Europe, can serve as provisional models.

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But what of us? Us faithless intellectuals, artists, curators andadministrators – myself included? We need to actively forget theconvoluted nature of our predicament. We need to break with theguarded routines of fidelity and betrayal that circulate both inside andoutside the museum and move towards recognition of the radicalpotential already present in collective action. As Pasolini mused:

Corporeal collective presence:you feel the lack of any truereligion: not life but survival.15

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15. Pier Paolo Pasolini,Poems, trans. MormanMacAfee, Noonday Press,New York, 1982.

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