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by Marco Baravalle The interest around the topic of institutions is not a recent phenomenon in the field of contemporary art. Since the establishment of institutional critique, this field has been periodically probed and recently it has started to inspire several artists and collectives. Please allow me to begin with a brief explanation of a theoretical genealogy that, although not exhaustive, can be useful to decipher the terminology around the current aesthetic/political debate about institutions and their role in relation to art. In Commonwealth (2009), Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt surprisingly bring into play art in order to allude to the continuity which needs to characterize social conflict if it aims to trigger a true revolutionary process: Whereas revolt may be episodic and short lived, there is running throughout the revolutionary process something like a will to institution and constitution. We have in mind here, as analogy, the great Viennese art historian Alois Riegl’s notion of Kunstwollen, which although difficult to translate can be rendered as “will to art”. Riegl analyzes how, in another period of transition, late Roman art revolts against the ancient forms and establishes not only new techniques and a new “industry” but also new ways of seeing and experiencing the world. He conceives the late Roman Kunstwollen as the force governing this transformation of the plastic arts, the desire that articulates all the singular artistic expressions as a coherent institutional development, demonstrating not only the continuity but also the innovation of the process. The Kunstwollen accomplishes both the overcoming of the historical threshold and the organization of exceeding, overflowing social forces in a coherent and lasting project. A revolutionary process will have to be governed by Rechtswollen, that is, an institutional and constitutional will, which, in a parallel way, articulates the singularities of the multitude, along with its diverse instances of revolt and rebellion, in a powerful and lasting common process. (Hardt and Negri 2009, 375) So, if institutional will is one of the pillars of revolutionary processes, what are their institutions? Institutions are based on conflict, in the sense that they both extend the social rupture operated by revolt against the ruling powers and are open to internal discord. Institutions also consolidate collective habits, practices, and capacities that designate a form of life. Institutions, finally, are open- ended in that they are continually transformed by the singularities that compose them. This notion of institution corresponds closely to what we called earlier “training in love” in that it does not reduce the multiplicity of singularities but creates a context for them to manage their encounters: to avoid the negative encounters, which diminish their strength, and prolong and repeat the joyful ones, which increase it. Institutions thus conceived are a necessary component in the process of insurrection and revolution. (Hardt and Negri, 2009, 357) The first theoretical core, then, is represented by Postoperaist studies which in the mid-2000s prompted networks of researchers related to social movements to explore the notion of ‘institutions of the common’. Their reflection revolved around a fundamental question: what is the ‘common’? And, consequently, what are the forms of its organisation, which would stabilise the common, but without reifying it, in other words: how do you establish constituent power without turning it into constituted power? A second theoretical core is the work of Gilles Deleuze.Since the 1950s the French philosopher had dealt with the topic of institutions on numerous occasions. The way he approached the topic was to a certain extent not very methodical, but he provides us with some general directions. Deleuze sets at the centre of the construction of society the idea of institution, seen as a mobile and flexible way to answer social demand that constantly change. Institutions for Deleuze are the opposite of law and strictness of the State. In contrast to the state apparatus, they organise society’s productive capacity more creatively, responding to the flow of desire. The law, in fact, is a limitation of enterprise and action, and it focuses only on a negative aspect of society. […] The institution, unlike the law, is not a limitation, but rather a model for actions, a veritable enterprise, an invented system of positive means or a positive invention of indirect needs. (Deleuze, 1953, 45-46) What does all this have to do with art? Deleuze, referring to cinema and literature, introduces the category of ‘fabulation’, meaning the intrinsic power of art to create social identifications working towards what he defines as ‘becoming minor’. What does this phrase mean? It means any process of social production, of the aesthetic, of the political and any process of subjectification that avoids traps such as identitarianism, fascism and crystallisation of the apparatus. It is known that for him the terms like minor and minority can never be split from becoming,one ‘isn’t’ minor, one ‘becomes’such. In their book about Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari claim that when literature becomes minor it presents three essential characteristics (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 16–27): 1) We can’t speak of a becoming minor of literature when, for example, a minority writes in its own language, but when it writes in a major language deterritorializing it (such as Kafka, a Jew from Prague, who wrote in German, lingua franca in the Austro-Hungarian empire), making it a hybrid, a creole, triggering a process of becoming minor. Please note that, according to Deleuze, even a person who is not a member of a minority could and should have a minor approach to the language. 2) A minor literature is always political and escapes the Oedipal triangle: it is possible that it represents family issues or other typical topics in bourgeois literature, but they are represented as a political matter, because they inhabit the narrow space of a context, delimited by social and cultural issues; they are located. 3) In a literature that becomes minor everything has a collective value. Starting with the ‘utterance’ that is never ‘individuated’. Dark Matter Super Colider, Sale Docks, 2017 All Work And No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy. All Work And No Play Makes Someone Else a Rich Boy, Sale Docks, 2018, Exhibition View. Photo: Veronica Badolin" Literature’s revolutionary trait is to become a ‘collective utterance’, while other forms, such as politics, aren’t able to do so. Deleuze and Guattari remind us, for example, that according to Kafka ‘literature is the affair of the people’: not of masters, heroes, authors or characters (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 18). Here, despite an apparent echo of Alberto Asor Rosa reading of the Gramscian understanding of revolution as a major ‘people’s fact’ (Asor Rosa 2019), we are far from populism. Unlike a simplistic application of Mouffe’s and Laclau’s studies, this is not the theorisation of an antagonism between establishment and lower classes, in view of the transformation of the latter into ‘major people’, marked by patriotism and sovereignistic rhetoric. It brings to life a criticism to the being-major of people, to the advantage of its becoming-minor, in favour of minorities, of the exploited and the non-conforming. Something similar happens with cinema, for example with the so-called ‘Cinéma vérité’ by the Canadian Francois Perrault, a cinema which, specifies Deleuze, paradoxically does not search for reality nor for truth (as issuing truth claims is a privilege of for winners and colonisers), nor the retaliation of reality over fictional (Deleuze 1989, 147–55). In this gap between reality and fiction fabulation comes into play: cinema of fabulation documents a process of becoming of real characters, who, moved by the presence of a camera, start to produce their own fiction, contributing in this way to the creation of minor people. At this point it is convenient to clarify the argument by breaking it into two points. 1) How can we define the process of creation of alter-institution? To begin with, we could simply define it as the process of becoming minor of institutions. 2) If we follow Deleuze’s thought, arts can play a revolutionary role in this game. Because, on the one hand, they wield the power of fabulation that allows them to venture upon the fields of creation and struggle for becoming-minor of people (which is not negligible), and because on the other hand, they can direct this power towards their own institutional architectures. As a matter of fact, arts are organised through institutional devices that respond to the social need of artistic education, production, distribution, consumption, use and socialisation of cultural products (from the most common to the most sophisticated). In the following paragraphs I will expand on the second point of this argument, reflecting upon practicalities of becoming-minor of the artistic institutions. In other words, I will discuss the operations and emergence of cultural alter-institution. For the sake of clarity, I will divide the subject of my analysis into two separate categories of governmental and autonomous alter-institutions. Please note that these two types are not binary. They are substantially different, but not stable, one typology can evolve into the other and political assemblages between the two are possible. Both models of alter-institutions can form a variety of relations, some more problematic, like relations of dependency or parasitism, but there is also a potential for them to form a radical inter-institutional assemblage. Governmental (art) alter-institutions They are created within the official art system. They are often created and exhibited as if they were artistic objects, they follow a logic of individual authorship, as often they are presented as if they had a sole, individual creator (i.e. as works of an artist). In their case, both the potentials and limitations of art as a governmental device are expressed. They often create spaces aimed at a critical reflection upon social problems, and critically question the function of art and artistic institutions. They respond to social and political urgencies, such as the exclusion of individuals or groups from social welfare and mechanisms of representative democracy. They operate within a humanistic perspective, on experimentation with new technologies and we can say that most of these governmental alter-institutions operate ‘at the limit’ of what an artistic institution can do and try to push that limit a bit further. It is also possible to reverse the perspective: i.e. to identify these alter-institutions as an advanced capture space aimed at neoliberal valorisation. Trapped in their status as works of art signed by an individual author, even if they show the Deleuzian traits of a becoming-minor, they rarely evolve in real collective processes of social self -organisation. Instead, they come out as do-it-yourself services commissioned by artistic institution, in the context of increasingly limited welfare state and dramatic rise of the neo-fascist and reactionary politics. Finally, governmental alter-institutions are always intrinsically dependent on the institution that finances them, what makes it virtually impossible to become independent, or to force them to seriously rethink themselves, to transform their structures and governance models in a democratic and radical way. It is certainly possible to make links between governmental and autonomous alter-institutions, likewise it is possible to establish relations between the latter and official institutions who are interested in becoming-minor . But in such a case, their objective cannot be reduced to production of mere art works, contributing to the success of yet another artist, curator or director, but rather to build autonomy within and against neoliberal art. Creating these links is fundamental to fulfilling the radical political and aesthetical function of alter-institutions. Going back to governmental alter-institutions we should try to summarise, even if not comprehensively, the debate that surrounds them, referencing a couple of examples. Ahmet Ögüt’s
Alter-institutions and art. Between governance and autonomy. Capture, subjectivity, decolonization, governance, acceleration, queering, prefigurative economics1
There are projects that aim to become a platform for self-representation of collective or individual subjects, otherwise excluded from the liberal public sphere , such as the New World Summit by Jonas Staal and the Immigrant Movement International by Tania Bruguera.
Another type of governmental mock institutions owes most to institutional critique, problematizing the line between institutional fiction and reality. For example, the Museum of Nonhumanity by Terike Haapoja and Laura Gustafsson is described as a ‘temporary museum [...]. The museum will present the history of the distinction between humans and other animals and the way that this imaginary boundary has been used to oppress human and nonhuman beings’ (Gustafsson 2019) , deconstructing the role played by institutions in maintaining this imaginary boundary.
The Zoological Institute for Recently Extinct Species by Jozef Wouters (2011-), is installed in a wing of the Royal Institute of Natural Sciences of Belgium, in Brussels. This work investigates the role of museums (in particular of natural history), situating the history of human species in the context of broader, ecological inquiries. Usually human activities are guided by ignorance about the ecological consequences of one’s actions. How can one organise a natural history using images that do not correspond to Linneaus’ taxonomy? That do not cater to the illusion of complete knowledge of a world, neatly catalogued?
Therefore, in general ‘ fictional institutions’ work in juxtaposition to the ‘real’. The confrontation between the two questions the distinction between reality and fiction. If we are led to consider existing institutions like ‘natural facts’, ‘ fictional institutions’ should reveal the discursive underpinnings of institutions, deconstructing fiction that produces institutional reality.
Governmental alter-institutions have been recently exposed to well-grounded criticism. Sven Lü tticken, for example, posits that para-institutions often present three recurring traits. First, a pedagogical intent. Second, they are created to satisfy the needs of individuals who are made invisible by the deprivation of their citizenship rights. Third, the use of digital technologies plays an important role (Lütticken 2015, 5–20) .
According to Ekaterina Degot, by creating new institutions, artists more and more often occupy the positions of managers or directors, looking at the bureaucratic dimension as a space where the practice of aesthetics is possible (Degot 2015, 21–27) . Degot raises some concerns in regard to these types of operations that would make a jump from what can be defined as ‘imaginary communism’ to forms that remind the ‘actually existing socialism’, a sad reality of totalitarian socialist states that repressed dissent.
Daniel Blanga Gubbay and Livia Andrea Piazza focused on ‘fictional institutions’ as powerful tools to emphasise the imaginary nature of existing institutions (Blanga-Gubbay and Piazza 2016). Pascal Gielen states that neoliberal economy has ‘flattened’ cultural institutions, forcing them to set aside any serious evaluation criteria in favour of those geared towards quantitative measurement of commercial performance (Gielen 2013, 1–7). What used to happen in the past is not possible anymore. Gielen states that artistic institutions that have given up on historical depth and canonical authority won’t be able any longer to defend art forms from the dictatorship of market indicators.
Even art historian Claire Bishop, who expressed herself in favour of autonomy of art works, has, in recent years, approached the theme of institutional re-invention. In her book Radical Museology she studies three cases of European museums attempting to radically transform their traditional roles. She is analysing the transformational processes of Van Abbesmuseum in Eindhoven, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid and MSUM in Ljubljana. In the deleuzian taxonomy proposed above, these three museums express their ambition of becoming minor, and they do it by deconstructing nationalistic narrations of their collections, producing projects that sustain activist archives, ringfencing them against the privatisation and, last but not least, become places of expression of what Claire Bishop calls ‘dialectic contemporaneity’. As she says: ‘It is an anachronic action that seeks to reboot the future through the unexpected appearance of a relevant past’ (Bishop and Perjovschi 2014, 61).
Nevertheless, this lively debate rarely faces the fundamental dependency of governmental alter-institutions on the neoliberal sphere of influence. Before discussing this issue at length, I will define autonomous cultural alter-institutions.
Autonomous Cultural Alter-institutions
They emerge from collective processes, following a similar pattern: the squatting of a space followed by establishing a model of self-management that harks back to the macro-field of autonomous politics. In Italy such models are exemplified by activist cultural centres such as S.a.L.E. Docks in Venice and Macao in Milano.
Of course, while they can express differing political views and management models, and might respond to varied contexts, autonomous alter-institutions present some common traits that differentiate them from the governmental ones: the aim of their foundation is to reclaim unused spaces for common use (especially, but not exclusively, through artistic activities), preventing their privatisation. They start as conflictual acts against neoliberal transformation of urban areas, and at the same time are against neoliberalisation of art. They formulate a concrete criticism of precarity and the devaluation of cultural jobs and look for alternatives to gentrification and to parasitism of real estate speculation and rentierism. Furthermore, they are ‘bound’ to one space, therefore they have to spread their roots in a given context, facing all consequences of such stabilised affiliation. This characteristic of ‘root-taking’ (that should not degenerate into localism) is mostly absent in the circuit of governmental alter-institutions, which are only affiliated to the neoliberal space-time of artistic circulation; this state of rootlessness enables them to plug in different locations, for periods of time of varying lengths, commissioned by cultural institutions, biennales or art festivals. Governmental alter-institutions occupy a smoothless, neoliberal zone of flows, pacified and seemingly purged from conflicts that underpin mobillity.
There are examples of collective processes that, even though they do not tick the definition of autonomous alter-institution, share a couple of core traits and values. I’m referring to the collective projects that emerge in the context of social mobilisation. The ‘season’ of Arab Springs and of the Occupy movements, for example, radicalised many artists and cultural producers, fundamentally redefining their social roles and modes of production. For example, the Occupy Museums collective was established in the Zuccotti Park during the period of Occupy Wall Street (2011). A recent project of this collective is titled DebtFair, investigating the structure and consequences of student loans incurred by young, USA-educated artists to support their education.
Another example of this tendency is the Moisireen collective, founded during 2011 Egyptian revolution, in Cairo. Until 2014 the collective managed a space in the capital, an important hub for media-activists and many others. The space does not exist any longer, but more recently the collective has launched the project https://858.ma, an impressive archive of video material of the revolution, created using Pandora, an open source tool to create audio-visual databases that can be textually indexed.
Moreover, autonomous alter-institution challenge power relations defining the institutionalised field, safeguarding their own autonomy against governmental capture, or in the worst case scenario struggling against the attempts to repress dissent. Ultimately, it doesn’t only mean to secure one’s own institutional reproduction, but to transform the field of art, particularly its reactionary or neoliberal elements. On the one hand, it entails refusing the allure of governmental support, where one exists, on the other, it implies a struggle against censorship exhorted by authoritarian states. The latter is a daily bread of artist living in places like Turkey, where freedom of expression is practically suspended, where dissident voices are silenced, marginalised and jailed.
It is clear that these two models of state coercion (repression and allure) are never entirely separated. Just like democratic governments can exhort violence and censor art, authoritarian regimes can ‘enlist’ avant-garde languages. It has happened in the past, and it is happening still.
There are no blueprints for constructing an autonomous alter-institution, but there is a joint need to identify the field of forces and act with the aim to radically change social relationships. It is possible to tactically alternate (as they would say in the past) moments of open opposition to official institutions with attempts to form progressive assemblages with the latter, as long as it supports autonomy rather than facilitates capture. One should not lose a strategic vision of saving art from its double bind. The first danger entails a growing financialisation of artistic activities resulting in what Gregory Sholette calls ‘bare art world’ (2017), as aesthetics pretences are subsumed in the processes of capitalist accumulation and class reproduction. The second danger is the reduction of art to a propaganda tool for identarian, reactionary and fascist politics. Fascisation and the growing importance of finance in art are not conflicting tendencies, they operate in accord.
How to avoid, then, the danger of binarism intrinsic to this schematic classification? A useful example could be the attempt of forming an assemblage linking the Data Workers Union (a fictional institution), S.a.L.E. Docks and the student's collective of Li.S.C., formed at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. The Data Workers Union has been initiated by activist and artist Manuel Beltran as part of an installations titled Data Production Labor. This, in turn, is an element of a bigger project, the Institute Of Human Obsolescence (that appears to be the author/producer of the work of art).
In 2018 the installation Data Production Labor was exhibited at S.a.L.E.-Docks. It presented a technological device accompanied by a series of prints. This device is interactive, the viewer is requested to lay his/her smartphone on it and to use his/her Facebook profile for two minutes. Principally basing itself on the information gathered through the use of a webcam and a tablet where a facial recognition system is installed, after two minutes of use, the machine emits a ticket with different information. First of all it presents all the data that theoretically Facebook would have gathered during the time frame of the use of the platform, then it shows the amount of money that the social network should pay the viewer for the production of the captured data. This figure is calculated using the average Italian income per hour as a standard.
This work provides yet another argument for considering the production of data, freely appropriated by digital platforms, as a form of invisible and unpaid labour. Moreover, where today the technical composition of living labour is individualised, atomised and fragmented along hundreds of micro and macro lines of division (with the effect of weakening collective responses to exploitation), what today unifies all the workers is their status as data producers and the fact that harnessing data brings in huge profits. To emphasise this point Beltran decided to create the Data Workers Union, the fictional unionist extension of his installation.
How to approach this fictional institution? Frankly nobody needs to hear another critique of ‘real’ unions, whose crisis (apart from some cases of radical independent unions) has been there for decades for all to see. For S.a.L.E. Docks, it seemed more interesting to facilitate an encounter between the Data Workers Union and the students collective of Li.S.C., already well established in Venice, because of their successful occupation of a historical university building with its beautiful public garden that saved these premises from privatisation. The meeting between Beltran and Li.S.C. was organised as a public workshop held inside a self-managed classroom at the university. The gathered assembly generated an idea of organising together a campaign to study how the university uses the data produced by students and analyse the process of financialization of education in Venice. Indeed, at Ca' Foscari, the student's badge is an actual prepaid card, issued by a famous French bank with which the University made a partnership deal. All the scholarships and all the college workers’ wages are paid on this card. Through its microchip the card stores all the data on students mobility between the school's venues, on their possible financial transactions, on their consumption and much more. All this provided a fitting theme for the process of co-research and political campaign. At the moment of writing (2019), it remains unknown whether and to what degree this collaboration will evolve into a truly functional assemblage, but it is important to underline that this exercise does not aim at transforming the Data Workers Union from a fictional union into a ‘real’ one. Instead it attempts to activate as an imaginary element to support campaign organised by the actual social movement. Thus, in the process the Data Workers Union will cease to be a mere artwork, instead it will become minor, transform itself into an imaginary social machine. However, the initiators of this process are not interested in re-instigating an avant-gardist strategy, it is not about merging art and life as a counterpoint to the end of art. On the contrary, it is important that while becoming a collective utterance (instead of being attributed to an individual artist as his symbolic property), while exceeding the limitations of the discrete art object and while being employed as a tool for co-research and campaigning, the Date Workers Union still claims its own space within the institution of art, carrying the struggle from within, activating or recovering forms of autonomy against the neoliberal capture, politically reactivating the aesthetic dimension. The Data Workers Union is an act of rebuttal geared against the hegemonic forms of art that refuses to abandon the field of art, instead reframing it as a field of struggle.
The challenge is certainly complex, but crucial. At this point, after having delimited the different fields of the governmental and autonomous alter-institutions, I will proceed by listing seven problems of alter-institutionality.
Seven Challenges For Art Alter-institutions
The list that follows is far from being exhaustive, still it refers to some fundamental issues to be addressed when embarking on a process of becoming minor as an art institution. The Deleuzian notion is useful here in order to clarify a political ambition. If, as argued in the first part of this article, we can’t speak of the becoming minor of language in absence of a critical engagement with a major language, so alter-institutionality is not an activity of creation of happy islands, places that are safe from the contradictions of our time (a romantic illusion that fits the needs of public programs of corporate art foundations and biennials), instead it is a practice inseparable from a critique of the neoliberal institutional landscape and the goal of its radical transformation.
Capture
Despite a growing success of reactionary political options all over the world, and a more and more worrying consubstantiality between art and finance, cultural institutions still largely work as neoliberal governmental devices, capturing radical imagery and thinking, without questioning the social relationships that structure these very institutions and the social function of art. A cultural alter-institution is never solely a space for freedom of expression, but it must provide an infrastructure for the social activation of radical drives. So it requires a continuous work on itself and, at the same time, a continuous deterritorialisation, a continuous process of exceeding its material, cultural and disciplinary limits.
Subjectivaisation
A cultural alter-institution must provide a space where alternative subjectivisation possibilities for artists and cultural workers are shown and supported. Possibilities that go beyond the dominant neoliberal entrepreneur of the self (where, no matter how radical your artwork is, its landing space is always the confined territory of the market) and beyond the disappearing artist on the welfare dole, both unified by a highly individualised form of life and by a hyper-mobility designed to impede collective self-organisation. The point is certainly not to go back to the local or to give up the transnational space. The point is to find new ways to build social ties within the global dimension, to organise other circuits of mobility beyond the neoliberal infrastructure of art events. Who is the subject of cultural alter-institutionality? As Gerald Raunig puts it, referring to the issue of authority and authors of the act of instituting:
Transposed to artistic practice, this terminological bifurcation of au(c)thority recalls the distinction between the paternalistic artist, on the one hand - who identifies an audience or a community and chooses it as her / his object, predicting and preceding it - and the artistic singularity, on the other, who / which enters into the machinic stream that leads to instituting, where sometimes more, sometimes less artistic skill is needed. In this second mode there is no talk of the avant-garde, of the artist predicting or even preceding, but rather of becoming-common as experimenting with forms of social organisation, with instituting and composing singularities (Raunig 2016) .
The cultural alter-institution tries to find answers to the question of the artistic singularity, that does not ask ‘how can I be an artist (or curator, critic, cultural manager)?’ but ‘what is it possible to do with art?’ But what does an alternative subjective option look like? There are no recipes, but some clues can be found by analysing the struggles. For example, one of the most radical effects of the wave of occupations of theatres and cultural spaces that spread throughout Italy in 2011, was the discovery by thousands of artists and cultural workers that their art or expertise could play a crucial role against the privatisation of our historical-architectonic heritage, it could be a relevant factor in redefining the contemporary right to the city and the functioning/role of public art institutions. Sure, this movement lost its energy after three intense years, still it changed the way a generation of artists/cultural workers looked at their work. A work that could finally find a meaning outside the narrow borders of the market, the established institutional circuits or the academy. And evidences of something similar exist in relationship to the impact of Occupy Wall Street on the subjectivisation processes of USA or New York based artists.
Juridical structure and governance
A cultural alter-institution must force the boundaries of law and must be a terrain of innovation on the ground of traditional juridical codes that usually underpin cultural institutions. Of course this political work is aimed at building more democratic governance systems. It is important to clarify that no political use of law can guarantee the success of instituent practices without the presence of favourable social and political conditions, and it is worthy to remember that alter-institutions, as architectures of constituent desires, reject the fetishism of the code.
Political geography and decolonization
When operating on the local level, a cultural alter-institution must not support gentrification processes, it must avoid becoming a vehicle for boosting real estate market. On the contrary, it must reclaim urban spaces, filling them with new use values and sheltering them from speculative appetites. That is why the act of occupying is often the generative event of alter-institutionalism. In a city where gentrification presents itself as ruthless class war of the rich against the poor, the Brooklyn Museum hosted the 2015 Brooklyn 6th Annual Real Estate Summit, a closed meeting for urban developers. In contrast, in Venice, S.a.L.E Docks hosted a public assembly organised by the Committee Against Big Cruise Ships (September 2017) where more than 200 environmental activists from all over Europe came to discuss possible common strategies in our age of climate crisis.
An alter-institution has to be aware that the history of Western alter-institutions is linked to that of colonialism. This intertwining is clear when looking at the names of founders and patrons, walking through the collections of a museum, noticing the whiteness of a theatre audience, unmasking eurocentrism behind the idea of culture and art as universals.
When operating on the global scale, or on a scale other than the local, an artistic alter-institution must choose its political geography, it must ask itself what kind of translation processes (both in terms of language, practices, cultural attitudes, politics) must be implemented and must avoid the mannerism of global ‘engaged’ art institutions. This is possible only if the institution embraces a permanent process of decolonization of its narratives, history and actions.
The problem of binarism between slowing down or accelerating
In a recent article Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez advocated for slowing down of artistic institutions (Petrešin-Bachelez 2017). Many of the points she makes are crucial in order to rethink present organisational models. She asks the urgent question on how we (as artists or cultural workers) can work within or with institutions in a time of political and ecological crisis, that bears heavily on prospects of achieving gender, racial and economic justice. She argues that art institutions must:
- become resilient;
- acknowledge the limits of growth and consequently to opt for a de-growth of Biennials and all other manifestations of art as ‘event economy’;
- become part of the reparation movements to fully decolonise themselves and accept ‘the productivity of shame’, because their origins are moored in the centuries long history of colonisation;
- end any complicity with the white cube as the dispositif that granted contemporary art it's hypocritical neutrality;
- slow down, where slowing down means to adapt to climate change, to explore new (and common) relational forms, to look for quality instead of immediate profit, to go back to the archive of history instead of adhering to the digital speed of neoliberal development machine (Petrešin-Bachelez 2017).
All of these are crucial concerns and their implementation would, no doubt, generate a true institutional revolution. Still, Petrešin-Bachelez too easily identifies acceleration with neoliberalism and slowing down with the only possible means of resistance.
What I suggest instead is to go beyond this dichotomy. As Matteo Pasquinelli puts it, the Anthropocene has now developed ‘carbonsilicon machines’, generating a ‘cyberfossil capital’, a union of energy and information regimes, where the extraction of fossil fuels is completely intertwined with proprietary use of algorithms (Pasquinelli 2017). Against this backdrop it is quite optimistic to identify a possibility of effective de-growth without a parallel action of re-appropriating the algorithm for common use, reclaiming the prefix ‘cyber’ and accelerating by radical forces. In short: a cultural alter-institution must work on alternative ways of accelerating, in order to slow down.
Queering
Starting from her experience as a teacher/administrator in a US college, Tara Pauliny writes about the transformative power of queer persons on the institutions they work for:
Although queer theory is most often recognised in relation to sexuality and gender identity, it is, at its heart, about disruption. It is an approach that most often encourages subjects to recognize the shifting and unstable nature of their positions and identities and to work toward an unveiling and ultimately, destruction, of regulatory norms (Pauliny 2011) .
A cultural alter-institution must embody this queer disruptive potential. The deconstruction of gender binary logics, the end of sexual harassment and abuse of power by men in positions of authority over women or queer employees/students, and the refusal of any sexist attitude must not be regulated by norms that acknowledge gender rights. Instead these results must be achieved thanks to the adoption by the institution itself of a queering strategy for the definition of its identity. That means a continuous work of re-definition and re-thinking of the self, beyond any risk of crystallisation and against not only any heteronormativity, but against any normativity as such.
This also leads to the theme of the autonomy of the institution. Simon Sheikh has recently addressed the difference between institutional autonomy and heteronomy. Referring to the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, he writes:
Again, here, autonomy does not imply anti-institutionalization, but self-institutionalization as a continuous project of self-alteration. [...] In contrast, the members of heteronymous societies do not think of their societies as self-instituted. and thus necessarily as perpetually self-alterating, but rather attribute their imaginary order to something outside society itself (Sheikh 2017) .
Radical (Prefigurative) Economics
How to financially sustain an enterprise such as a cultural alter-institution? From self-funding programmes in illegally occupied spaces to partnerships with public or private institutions, plus everything that stands in between these two poles. The dividing line (once the cooperation with ethically compromised funders is excluded) should be marked according to the way an institution approaches the six previous points, plus the obvious fact that it must not rely on a massive use of unpaid or devalued labour. Olav Velthuis defines ‘imaginary economics’ - a peculiar form of knowledge that artists dealing with economy have been generating, from Duchamp until the 2000s (Velthuis 2005). According to him, art can work as a healthy interference on the market of economic knowledge, a market free only in theory, but actually monopolised by neoliberal thinking. In this perspective, autonomous alter-institutions can certainly offer new ideas to create spaces of autonomy for art in relation to capitalist economy (yes, it is actually possible, even if we are not referring to an absolute autonomy): from the design and use of crypto-currencies that embody solidarity and cooperative models of production, to the programmatic reuse of materials dismissed by local cultural industries, one could enlist a number of interesting experiments that could fall under the category of imaginary economics and, at the same time, provide means of actual sustainability.
That is the point. It is clear that the horizon of a radical non capitalist economy that would sustain a global constellation of cultural alter-institutions is far from materializing, but any singular alter-institution resisting the present economic conditions of surplus artistic labour and individual financial Darwinism, is a precious space because it is here that radical economy can be imaginary (in a sense that any example of it can be put in relationship with the field of art, in dialogue with its operators or with other artworks) and real at the same time, meaning that it provides precarious but effective ways to sustain long term projects.
(Temporary) conclusion
Capture, subjectivity, governance, geography, acceleration, queering, imaginary economics. These are some of the fields where the challenge of alter-institutionalism must be launched. There is no universal formula for this autonomy, it can be built by a combination of tactics: through exodus from existing neoliberal or reactionary institutions (with the occupation of physical spaces, the invention of juridical persons, the construction of alternative symbolic circuits, the diffusion of counter-hegemonic subjectivation processes for creative singularities); through protesting, boycotting, attacking existing institutions, and finally through the attempt of creating assemblages with those cultural institutes that decide to enter in a process of self-criticism geared against the state apparatus and direct emanations of the financial power. The goal is not only to shed light on alter-institutions, a portion of that unofficial artworld and fabric of social creativity that Gregory Sholette defined as artistic dark matter (2011), a conglomerate of activism, amateur practitioners, precarious and unpaid labour, audiences, indebted students, and non-neoliberal art forms. Visibility can be a resource and a trap at the same time, especially if it is not accompanied with autonomy.
Marco Baravalle is a member of S.a.L.E. Docks, a collective and an independent space for visual arts, activism, and experimental theater located in what had been an abandoned salt-storage facility in Dorsoduro, Venice, Italy. Founded in 2007, its programming includes activist-group meetings, formal exhibitions, and screenings. Baravalle is a research fellow at INCOMMON. In praise of community. Shared creativity in arts and politics in Italy (1959-1979), a project hosted by IUAV, University of Venice. He teaches Phenomenology of Contemporary Art at the MA in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies of NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan). He is a member of IRI (Institute Of Radical Imagination), a collective inviting political scientists, economists, lawyers, architects, hackers, activists, artists and cultural producers to share knowledge on a continuous base with the aim of defining and implementing zones of post-capitalism in Europe’s South and the Mediterranean.
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Footnote
A disclaimer. This article continues the reflection started with ‘Art Populism and the Alter-Institutional Turn’ published in March 2018 in the e-flux journalhttps://www.e-flux.com/journal/89/182464/art-populism-and-the-alter-institutional-turn/