Institutional Critique

In art, institutional critique is the systematic inquiry into the workings of art institutions, such as galleries and museums, and is most associated with the work of artists like Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Andrea Fraser, John Knight (artist), Adrian Piper, Fred Wilson, and Hans Haacke and the scholarship of Alexander Alberro, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Birgit Pelzer, and Anne Rorimer. Institutional critique takes the form of temporary or nontransferable approaches to painting and sculpture, architectural alterations and interventions, and performative gestures and language intended to disrupt the otherwise transparent operations of galleries and museums and the professionals who administer them. Examples would be Niele Toroni making imprints of a No. 50 brush at 30 cm intervals directly onto gallery walls as opposed to applying the same mark to paper or canvas; Chris Burden's Exposing the Foundation of the Museum (1986), in which he made an excavation in a gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, to expose the literal concrete foundation of the building;, Andrea Fraser inhabiting the persona of an archetypical museum docent in the form of a live performance or video document, or art group monochrom who sent the fictitious artist Georg Paul Thomann to the São Paulo Art Biennial. Assumptions about the aesthetic autonomy of painting and sculpture, the neutral context of the white cube gallery, and the objective delivery of information are explored as subjects of art, mapped out as discursive formations, and (re)framed within the context of the museum itself. As such, institutional critique seeks to make visible the social, political, economic, and historical underpinnings of art. Institutional critique questions the false distinction between taste and disinterested aesthetic judgement, revealing that taste is an institutionally cultivated sensibility that differs depending on the intersection of any one person's class, ethnic, sexual, or gender subject positions.