[- Progressive Art Institutions in the Age of Dissolving Welfare States
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By geraldraunig, Section guest host history Posted on Tue Feb 10th, 2004 at 07:14:33 PM EURODISCORDIA TIME
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as our institute, the eipcp, is organizing a conference on public art policies and the function of critical art institutions (vienna, 26-28 feb 2004) - as we know them since decades at least in Europe -, i would like to use the opportunity here on discordia to discuss the main questions of this issue.
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"The final word of power is that resistance is primary", Gilles Deleuze wrote, and there is hardly another statement that as aptly expresses the indistinguishability, the interweaving of power and resistance in the postmodern setting. Yet there is also hardly another statement that better describes the contradictory situation, the opportunities and the traps, in which progressive art institutions increasingly find themselves in the dissolving European welfare states: although resistance and criticism are primary, it is power that has the final word.
On the one hand this statement from Deleuze and the associated theorems from Foucault illustrate the functions of the institutions of the art field in the pacification, assimilation and instrumentalization of political practices, themes and phenomena. As power is nourished from the productive force of resistance, the art institution as an (out-sourced organizational form of the) state apparatus seems to be dependent on constantly new portions of critical art, which keep both the mediating institution and the apparatus (in the narrow sense, the state) alive.
On the other hand, in the neo-liberal process of transforming the welfare state into a particle of a globalizing network of transnational corporations, supra-state institutions and powerful nation-states, the art institutions themselves seem increasingly to be losing their basis for being able to deal with critical, anti-state and anti-capitalist phenomena: along with the financial constraints of the art institutions, the financing bodies exert an increasingly direct influence on the programs.
In this twofold dilemma it is a matter of discussing the status quo of what is regarded as the primary self-definition of the contemporary in art: criticism, resistance against what is established, minoritarian concerns. At the same time, though, it is also a matter of the elementary survival of progressive art institutions in a field that is dominated more and more by conservative colossuses of culture and the neo-liberal business of spectacle culture.
There is no need to recapitulate the pathos of the subversive role of the art producer with regard to the state and institutions, but rather to explore the strategies of the actors in the art institutions themselves for at least temporarily emancipating themselves from the grasp of state and capital. This involves both self-criticism and precarious attempts to break out of the logic described above: what are the responses of the art institution that regards itself as progressive to the hypostatizing of the concept of the audience, the political demand for ever "new audiences", to a populist tendency to simplification, sometimes even to the recollection of the old masters whose aura can also be exploited for spectacles? How could the function of the art institution as a medium between state apparatus and production be read/turned in an emancipatory way?
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