펠로우쉽에서 커먼프랙티스라는 팀을 알게 됐고(사실 예전에 듣긴 했는데 듣고 바로 까먹었다) 검색해보니 최근 이런 세미나를 개최한 것 같다. 조슬릿이 글을 썼네! 보기가 불편해서 조슬릿 글을 발췌해 블로그로 옮긴다. 오..주옥같다.
Following the 2008 financial crisis, the slogan
“Too big to fail” gained wide currency in the
United States. Despite its urgency, this phrase
was nothing new. It was merely the latest
iteration of a principle as old as capitalism
itself: “Grow or die.” Nonetheless, “Too big
to fail” neatly summarized a set of values that
often go unchallenged in the context of art.
It contended that a bank (or any other kind of
corporation of comparable magnitude) is so
fully integrated in the national economy that
its collapse will lead to systemic crisis. More
insidiously, “Too big to fail” implicitly asserted
the public good of capitalism, which when
having attained a scale at which it is “too big
to fail,” must receive public funds.
A certain equation is at work here:
BIG=PUBLIC.
The risks of bigness in finance, as when
ordinary home mortgages are packaged and
repackaged so many times that their potential
“toxicity” is buried within countless layers of
securitization, is occluded by a fuzzy sense
of public good (i.e., making mortgages more
widely available; stimulating the economy)
without acknowledging wildly disproportionate
benefits to the 1%. With the exception of
Occupy, there has been little serious acknowledgement
that, in fact, BIG=PRIVATE when
it comes to the profits reaped from businesses
that are “too big to fail.” On the contrary,
as demonstrated by the bailout of General
Motors, our leaders act on the possibly cynical
presumption that BIG=PUBLIC.
There is a converse dynamic when it comes
to small institutions. If some enterprises are
“too big to fail,” others are presumably “too
small to survive.” Why do they refuse to grow?
If growth is necessary for success, staying the
same size means you are destined to disappear.
When it comes to art institutions, “bigness”
is measured not simply by dollars but also by
collection, and attendance. The Metropolitan
Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern
Art ranked third and thirteenth respectively
on the Art Newspaper’s 2013 global survey of
museum attendance—their contribution to
New York’s tourist revenue is significant, but
does this enhance or detract from their status as public institutions? They seem to conform
to the equation, BIG=PUBLIC, since a large
number of people visit their galleries. But
if “public” describes access rather than gross
audience numbers then these large museums
have failed us on two grounds. First, there is
shockingly limited access to the collections
that our tax dollars directly or indirectly help
to acquire. Based on information on their website,
it seems that MoMA exhibits something
like 1% of their collection at any one time.1
And yet, unlike the New York Public Library,
where patrons may request virtually anything
in the stacks, the right to view this 99% of
our “public” artistic heritage is extremely
difficult to obtain, even for scholars.2
There
are certainly legitimate practical concerns and
expenses in moving art out of storage and into
public view, and yet, how can an institution
that functions like a bank, hoarding its assets,
be credited as genuinely public—like a library?
Shouldn’t there be more serious innovation
around genuinely accessible “open storage”
that would allow for wider enjoyment and
study of what is held in New York’s great
museum collections? And second, with the
exception of the Metropolitan Museum, which
requests a recommended donation, our big
museums are so prohibitively expensive as to
prevent many citizens from entering (outside
of the short and oppressively crowded weekly free hours). The newly reopened Whitney
Museum charges $22 admission, which is over
two times minimum wage in New York. Do
we really believe that a “diverse” audience is
desired when admission is a quarter day’s pay
for many New Yorkers (including presumably
many artists and art handlers), and when the
target audience is visitors to the Highline
(which is free), many if not most of whom
are presumably tourists? In explaining the
Whitney’s decision to raise its admission price
from $20 to $22, Director Adam D. Weinberg
(inadvertently) gave a brilliantly concise
definition of how his institution defines the
public, in a comment to the New York Times:
“There was some debate internally, he said,
about raising the price to $25, the cost of the
Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art.
But he argued for $22, partly in recognition
of the public spirit that fueled the city’s $57
million contribution to the project.”3
In other
words, the Whitney’s obligation to the
public vis-à-vis its cost of entry is to provide
middle class visitors the extra cash to buy
a Starbucks coffee.
On the other hand, the institutions included
in Common Practice New York (and all the
other small arts organizations in this city and
cities around the world) are often considered
elitist, and therefore not deserving of significant
public funding—or even the insignificant public funds that remains for the arts.
Here then are the official assumptions with
regard to the question of scale and the public
good: BIG (capitalization of finance or
audience)=PUBLIC. SMALL (capitalization
of finance or audience)=ELITIST.
But in fact this equation inverts the actual
situation. It is the “public” (too big to fail) that
disproportionately benefits elites, whereas
it is the “elitist” (too small to survive) that
serves communities in ways that other, larger
organizations cannot. Might this ideological
inversion be just as insidious and frightening
as it sounds? Is it possible that artists in New
York City are not only supposed to decorate
the salons of hedge fund managers—and thus
be implicated in financial elitism—while also
taking the rap for intellectual elitism through
their lively participation in specialized
art discourse?
The term critique is tossed around as
though it were a grenade with its needle pulled.
But where does “critique” inhere? In my view,
it is generally ineffectual in individual works
of art, whose transgression can be easily
neutralized in the halls of BIG. No, our political
challenge is to maintain alternate forms of
public space for exhibition and debate. To do
so, we must exit the ethos of “Too big to fail.”
What follows is a seven-point litany “in praise
of small.”
ONE The Institution Is a Proposition
One of the great inventions of conceptual
art was its redefinition of the artwork as a
proposition. This meant, as Lawrence Weiner
famously declared, that whether or not a
work of art were physically produced, and
in what form, does not matter at all. On the
contrary, what does matter is the capacity of
the proposition, as a kind of “germinal force,”
to generate many possible forms. It is no
coincidence that the rise of “alternative spaces”
corresponds historically to that of conceptual
art, since such institutions are themselves
propositions. A.I.R. gallery, for example, was
founded in 1972 in response to a proposition
that might be phrased something like this:
“There are important women artists working
in New York City and beyond, but there is
no space for them to exhibit and develop a
common conversation in the art world as it is
currently organized, a space that A.I.R. plans
on providing.”
These propositions should be a strong
and precise version of the conventional
mission statement (which too often pertains
to programmatic content but not the institution’s
form itself). The exigencies of survival
can make it very difficult to maintain an
institutional proposition. For that reason,
proposition-based institutions (which are typically but not always on the smaller side)
must continually evaluate both the validity of
their proposition and the degree to which it
is realized effectively. Importantly, it should
be recognized that sometimes the usefulness
and energy of a proposition may wane. In such
cases, a perfectly legitimate solution would be
terminating the institution.
TWO Produce Networks,
Not Audiences
The term community is habitually misused.
Too often it designates little more than a
market niche based on shared identity markers,
such as the “gay community,” the “black
community,” or the “Jewish community.”
When institutions say they serve “communities,”
what they wish to prove is that their audience
possesses a demographic diversity that
warrants public approbation. There’s nothing
wrong with this, of course—even much that is
right. But such communities act like an audience
(composed of isolated witness-consumers)
as opposed to a public, which is united around
a shared set of concerns.4
If an institution succeeds as a proposition,
the public (as opposed to community) it constitutes
will include those that hold the value of
that proposition in common. This commonness
of purpose is premised on a dynamic set of relationships rather than a supposedly stable
shared identity. For this reason, propositions
may generate networks—defined as a
constellation of relationships—which need
not be geographically restricted to the physical
location of the institution.
I would argue that such networks are the
most important product of many small institutions.
As a market, the art world is thriving,
but the entire world of artists who may or may
not make commercially viable art is under
threat in New York City and elsewhere, precisely
through forms of gentrification that make it
difficult for them to live and find workspace
affordably. Now it is collectors, not artists, who
tend to live in lofts, and those arts institutions
that cannot afford big new buildings like the
Whitney’s Renzo Piano-designed headquarters
at the end of the Highline (funded, of course,
by collector-trustees who expect their tastes
to be exhibited) must struggle to find spaces
close to public transportation anywhere in
the five boroughs. What is needed is not merely
the ostensible product of art spaces and
museums—more exhibitions and performances
to bring in the crowds—but rather more
publics, more networks. This is what small arts
organizations focused around a proposition
can produce—in part because instead of trying
to attract a mosaic of communities, they wish
to constitute a dedicated public. Without such organizations New York’s art world will cease
to be dynamic and alive—it will become just
another distracting circus, another sanitized
spectacular Broadway drawing in tourists at
exorbitant prices.
THREE Size Matters
I have already claimed that capitalist values
insist that “bigger is better,” making it very
difficult to justify an institution’s choice to
stay small. One of the greatest dangers of
“Bigger is better” is that an institution may
be overcome by the exigencies of survival: of
keeping the lights on and the program going in
a “bigger and better” space. Suddenly the need
might be felt to attract a broader audience,
and in so doing the values of programming
must be “adjusted” in order to appeal to
such an audience. Before you know it, the
proposition that generated the institution is
secondary to the pressure to fill space and to
meet expanded budgets.
For this reason, the question of infrastructure
should be pursued creatively. What
kinds of facilities are necessary, and afford
maximum freedom? How can they be shared
with other institutions? How can they be
seized upon opportunistically, either in public
or through other means? Is it necessary to
have a permanent site, or to own one? What is the optimal ratio between virtual and physical
space? Thinking about infrastructure creatively
also allows for thinking about “crossprogramming”:
for instance, can or should an
exhibition space also have a bar where people
can meet informally and socialize? Must
white boxes be separated from “black boxes,”
resulting in media as isolated from one another
as different demographic groups have become
in the city? The point is: infrastructure has
a more determining role on an institution
than is often assumed. Infrastructure is not
passive: it is a physical proposition. Its design
and assessment should be taken as part of the
creative work of the institution.
FOUR Resignify Art
Regardless of all else it is, art is a tool of
gentrification. In New York City it is painfully
clear that the widening gap between rich and
poor is beautified by the art world’s glamour
and its paradoxical whiff of populism—a sense
of public-ness, which, as I’ve argued, is very
difficult to sustain in actuality. What should
the responsibility of art institutions be at a
time when the verb to curate has migrated
from the context of museums to describe, for
instance, the choice of amenities in a luxury
real estate development, or the selection of
artisanal cheeses? In this context to curate belongs to a long line of ideological practices
for producing distinction. Do those of us
involved in “curating” (artists, critics, art
historians, institutional curators, engaged
patrons) need to assume responsibility for this
massive appropriation of “art” as a tool for
prettifying the dominance of the 1%?
Yes, I think so, but the problem is complex.
What goes for politics in art is often little
more than a good faith effort at preaching to
the converted—and indeed in recent years it
has typically soft-pedaled any direct critique
of the patron class. Conversely, the small
proportion of artists who do manage to earn
a living from their work, whether politicized
or otherwise, risk being considered sell-outs.
There are no simple answers in response to
these conditions, and this is why we need
proposition-based institutions where debates
around them can develop with nuance and
over time. Here, different models may be
tested and evaluated. Indeed, like conceptual
artists, such conceptual institutions redefine
what art practice can be: they participate in
the resignification of art by confronting its
discursive corruption through gentrification
and huge wealth disequilibrium. The bigger
an institution in the United States becomes,
the more it is imbricated in the values and
objectives of its patrons—just as in politics,
where out-of-control super PACs have outsize influence in American elections. Needless to
say, smaller arts organizations cannot solve
these problems, but they can keep them on
the agenda. It is an endless process, an endless
discussion. But a sure way to kill this debate is
allowing the disappearance of public spaces in
which it may flourish.
FIVE Speculate
In its colloquial sense, speculation is a future oriented
method of extracting profit from
volatile markets. It is also a term with rich
philosophical overtones, whose Latin roots
encompass the meanings, “to spy out, watch,
examine, observe.” In other words, speculation
is an optical model as well as an economic
and philosophical one. What distinguishes
speculation is its futurity; in art’s context, it is
a type of vision that aims to foresee, even to
regulate how an artwork will behave once it
enters the world.
A proposition is also a speculation on
its own future. As its prefix suggests, the
proposition takes a position forward into the
future, opening onto various formats, actual
and virtual. It is worth remembering that
art’s time signature is distinctive, and largely
unsuited to direct engagement in political and
economic events in real time. The artwork’s
temporality enfolds a long succession of pasts into its speculations in the present, which, in
turn, are directed toward possible futures. The
artwork is a temporal knot. Its deregulation
of commodified time (measured in hours
in the factory; in micro- or even milli-seconds
in high-frequency trading) is precisely its
philosophical and affective value.
Speculation refuses the false dichotomy
established by some historians and critics
between a withdrawal and surrender to
capitalism—or, in other words, between
resistance and selling out. This is because, while
speculation is based on engagement, it refuses
to engage with the conditions of the present
as they are, but rather projects an array of
possible futures. In other words, the speculative
object (or institution) extracts itself
from political exigencies by extending them
backwards and forwards in time, and outward
in space. Speculation makes an object out
of time.
SIX Document
Conceptual art demonstrates the plasticity
of information. The term plastic encompasses
three registers: a now obsolete designation
of sculpture, for instance, as a “plastic” art; the
malleability and mold-ability of plastic as a
material, including its capacity to be recycled;
and the biological meaning of plasticity as a capacity for adaptation. Conceptual art
demonstrates how new types of value may be
produced by configuring and reconfiguring
information. Art is one realm in which information
is theorized, but unlike in advertising,
or even in science, art’s attention to informational
plasticity is seldom primarily geared to
practical ends.
The legacy of proposition-based institutions
is in their history—in the succession
of different realizations of their proposition.
Because such results are ephemeral, and rarely
reside in any stable way in single objects that
may be collected and maintained, documentation
is essential. One might say that documentation
is the collection of such organizations.
Think of the Judson Church for instance. The
events that took place there during the 1960s
and 1970s have come to occupy a central
position in twentieth-century art history, and
yet they are known only very partially, largely
through a limited number of documentary
photographs.
Documentation should not be an afterthought,
but rather an essential component of
the proposition itself. If there is any truth to
the assertion that art, since Conceptualism,
has largely dedicated itself to the plasticity of
information, then there is little reason to treat
“documentation” any differently from other
forms of creative expression. Indeed, documentation is one of very few products that may
outlive a non-collecting institution’s program
of events and exhibitions. It should be devised
creatively, and remain at the center of its
propositionally based mission. Documentation
is and can be more than installation photos
or a video recording. The question What is a
document is one that many artists have explored,
in order to test the limits and contours
of “truth effects.” It is through documentation
that institutions can speculate on history.
SEVEN Politicize
Information
The struggle over information as property, and
the corresponding struggle over information
as a commons where individuals and groups
have overlapping rights of access, as opposed
to exclusive rights of ownership, are among
the central political questions of our time.5
The list of examples of such conflict is long,
and ranges from questions of international
policy such as Edward Snowden’s disclosures
regarding the NSA, to the very intimate and
personal threat of identity theft. What rights
do we have to prevent the “harvesting” and
subsequent monetization of “our” information
every time we use a credit card or turn on our
cell phones—or enter a hospital for treatment?
Information radiates out from our bodies, as
it invades their interiors: our “selves” are the provisional and artificial construction of a
contingent ratio between the alienable and
the inalienable—or in other words between
the information drawn from us that may
be bought and sold (i.e., alienable), versus
that which cannot circulate separately from
us without destroying our personhood (the
inalienable). Art, in its capacity to explore
and express the plasticity of information, and
in its ability to speculate on new forms of
information, can probe this shifting terrain.
While large institutions canonize—i.e., turn
information into history—small arts organizations
may pluralize its shapes (as in all
species of conceptual art), as well as the stories
it can tell. To make information malleable and
mobile again in unexpected ways, and to resist
its enclosure by elites and its reification into
dominant narratives is to make art political.
Endnotes
1 My research assistant Joseph
Henry made this rough calculation
based on comparing the
number of works stated as on
view on MoMA’s website with
their stated number of objects
in the collection (excluding
films and film stills). At the
time of his calculation the percentage on view was less
than 0.68%–1%. Of course,
I acknowledge that the number
can’t be absolutely verified
without more careful research
(though Henry sought
confirmation), but it gives an
accurate sense of the magni
-
tudes involved. Interestingly it
is not only the 1% who funds
museums; MoMA also shows
1% of their art.
2 Incidentally, it is impossible
to bring a group of students
to MoMA (who have paid
admission) and speak to them
in the galleries without getting
a special permit.
3 Robin Pogrebin, “Whitney
Museum Contemplates a
Bigger Future, With Bigger
Expenses,” New York Times,
April 1, 2015; accessed online
http://www.nytimes.
com/2015/04/02/arts/design/
whitney-museum-contem
-
plates-a-bigger-future-witha-higher-admission-fee.html,
6/28/15
4 See Martha Rosler, “The Birth
and Death of the Viewer: On
the Public Function of Art,”
in Hal Foster, ed., Discussions
in Contemporary Culture #1
(Seattle: Bay Press, 1987)
5 For a definition of the commons
in light of rights to use
see Lewis Hyde, Common
as Air: Revolution, Art, and
Ownership (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2010)
source: http://commonpracticeny.org/assets/CPNY_NearContact_2016.pdf
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