On the 22nd of September, a massive general strike took place in Italy in support of Palestine. Dock workers shut down the harbors of Genoa and Venice, public transport was halted, and tens of thousands walked the streets of Milan, Bologna, and Rome. Blocchiamo tutto. By coincidence, I happened to be in Cesano Maderno – just outside of Milan – on this day. Not to walk the streets in support of Palestine, but to speak at a conference about free Palestine actions in Dutch museums. I decided to be a ‘productive strike breaker’ – explaining to myself that my voice at the conference would make a bigger difference than it would on the streets. I’ll leave it to you to judge if I was right. What follows is the text I presented at ‘Reframing the Present: Contemporary Art, Cultural Heritage, and Social Justice‘ in Caseno Maderno, annotated and slightly expanded.
‘Eyes on the prize: the ultimate target is the infrastructure of global capitalism’. – Manuela Zammit and Alina Lupu, Kunstlicht no. 44.
Talking about art, heritage, and social justice today, it seems impossible to ignore the defeat of social justice as a political discourse by so-called ‘anti-woke’ rhetoric of the right. The proof of this defeat is the surprising degree to which anti-wokeness is adopted on the left as of recent. We do not have to look across the Atlantic Ocean to see that this development is as crippling to the public function of art as it is to legal systems and media. Art institutions throughout Europe pro-actively self-censor politically sensitive programs, anticipating political backlash and potential de-funding. Diversity, inclusion, and social justice are out, neutrality and ‘countering polarization’ are in.
Among art workers, this development feeds into a growing sense of institutional nihilism. If art institutions are so easily corrupted, might we be better off without them? This sentiment comes in at least two flavors.
First, it is evident in the recent popularity of ‘cultural abolitionism’, which holds that art institutions are integrally part of the colonial project and should be gradually or immediately abolished. Sometimes, cultural abolitionism is careful and nuanced. For instance, Max Haiven argues that once ‘a massive, relatively peaceful economic shift’ has happened, ‘we can figure out if landmark galleries, museums, and the other traditional institutions of yesterday’s “art world” are indeed the best vehicles for supporting, elevating, celebrating and enjoying the greatest cultural and creative achievements of our species. My suspicion is they will not be, and will need to be abolished as such.’ Often, though, cultural abolitionism is more insistent. As Mijke van de Drift of the art and research collective Red Forest stated during MetaForumX – PermaCrises: ‘The only thing we can do is to destroy every single institution we have. As long as we keep on thinking as institutions, and try to give ourselves the Law – whereby we harbor the kind of bourgeois liberalism that is the problem – the crisis will always be there. And we are it.’ The abolitionist attitude is, to echo Harney and Moten’s famous phrase from The Undercommons: to be within and against. In the framework of cultural abolitionism, boycott, protest and Trojan Horse tactics remain the only valid types of institutional engagement.
Furthermore, there is a rising belief that legacy art institutions are incapable of sensing relevance and urgency amid platform capitalism and information overload. I recently heard the Artnet staff critic Ben Davis, in a conversation with artist Joshua Citeralla, coin the term ‘post-institutional art’. Davis’s hypothesis is that post-internet artists like Citarella are trailblazing a new style of artist career. Facing the decline of public institutions (or ‘the public’ in general) and the ubiquity of social media, these artists have initiated a pivot from artist to ‘content creator’, making pay-walled video essays, newsletters, and podcasts. They market their Discord servers as online club houses that replace the meatspace underground scene as well as traditional learning institutions. ‘Post-institutional art’ might not appear as a desire (both Davis and Citarella have defended institutions), but it is posited as the near-inevitable endgame of the on-going privatisation drive.[1]
The rise of institutional nihilism begs the question: is it time to give up on the dream of art institutions as emancipatory, critical public entities? Whenever, in recent times, I sat with this frustrating question and tried to organise my thoughts, I kept coming back to two stories of Free Palestine support in Dutch museums. I’d like to share a comparison of these cases with you, trying to tease out some insights in the political agency of art institutions in the process.
Bakunin’s Barricade
In 2020, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam acquired the artwork Bakunin’s Barricade (2015-2022) by artist Ahmet Öğüt.[2] The work is a barricade made up of one or more car wrecks, fences, traffic signs, rubble, and about eight original and, most importantly, valuable artworks from the exhibiting museum’s collection. The concept is based on a myth about the revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. In 1849, when Prussian troops tried to defeat the socialist insurgency in Dresden, Bakunin allegedly proposed to place paintings from the National Museum’s collection in front of the barricades, speculating that Prussian soldiers wouldn’t dare destroy the works and therefore pass the barricade. The proposal was never executed but it survived as a thought experiment. Bringing the concept into the contemporary art museum, Öğüt hoped to raise questions about the value of art in times of sociopolitical change: ‘Should valuable artworks be used to defend democratic values? To whom do artworks in public collections belong? What cultural heritage should be preserved – and who decides?’
Installation view of Ahmet Öğüt, Bakunin’s Barricade, 2015-2022, at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Photo: Gert Jan de Rooij.
As part of the ownership transfer, Öğüt and the Stedelijk Museum signed a contract, which was exhibited alongside the barricade and in which the museum agreed:
to loan the Barricade to the Public in the Netherlands in order to be used as a barricade if these parties request this loan in the context of extreme economic, social, political, transformative moments and movements which engender high levels of public concern relating to fundamental human rights, including those defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Three years after the purchase, in October 2023, such transformative moment appeared, with the largest and most well-documented crime against humanity of the 21st century carried out by the Israeli Defense Force against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. Protesting against the genocide and the lack of action from Western governments and institutions, students of the University of Amsterdam had set up a protest camp on university premises and faced police violence and eviction. This risk presented a sudden, real need for functional barricades in Amsterdam.
Student protesters assembling a barricade with a Swapfiets bike during the UvA’s Oudemanhuispoort occupation on May 7, 2024. Borrowed from Jordi Viader Guerrero, ‘Input ↔︎ Output | Part 4: Barricades‘.
An impromptu collective of Amsterdam-based cultural workers, artists, and activists submitted a request to the Stedelijk Museum to loan Bakunin’s Barricade. (Alongside Alina Lupu, Emin Batman, Esmee Schoutens, Jeftha Pattikawa, Juha van ‘t Zelfde, Macarena Loma Yevenes, Maren Siebert, Mitchell Esajas, Pieter Paul Pothoven, Raul Balai, Rowan Stol, and Stephanie van Gemert, I was a member of this collective.) In the spirit of Bakunin’s proposal, we wanted to use our collective property to protect protesting students and, by extension, the global movement for Palestinian liberation. We also wanted to pressure the Stedelijk to speak out against the genocide after more than half a year of institutional silence. The museum had actively supported the Black Lives Matter movement and Ukraine in the Ukraine-Russia war, but looked away from the crimes in Palestine for fear of backlash, as an extreme-right government coalition was in the making at the same time.
The museum director, Rein Wolfs, invited us for a conversation but refused to install Bakunin’s Barricade at student encampments that had previously been under police violence. Instead, he proposed to set it up at the encampment of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, which was unlikely to be evicted with violence. He also invoked a clause in the contract which allows for the use of replicas of original artworks from the Stedelijk’s collection. The public, Wolfs emphasised, would not be made aware that the works were mere replicas. In other words, the museum director proposed to forge artworks from his own collection and display them publicly. It became painfully apparent that the declarative social justice politics of Bakunin’s Barricade suited the museum’s interests – but that it was never the intention to actually put the work into action. Moreover, by agreeing to add the forgery clause to the contract, undermining the whole point of Bakunin’s proposal, the artist showed that this had been a prize he was prepared to pay for the institutionalisation of his work. To our collective, this aestheticiszation of politics was not acceptable, and we rejected the proposal. After that, statements were issued from all sides and art media made a bit of fuzz, but, materially, nothing changed. Bakunin’s Barricade became a monument to missed opportunities. In the following months, the Stedelijk Museum changed its policies and retro-actively retracted its public support for BLM and Ukraine.
The Bakunin’s Barricade tragedy is a prime example of what Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò calls ‘elite capture’. Outwardly critical exhibitions or programmes are, in fact, rescue operations for the institution designed to rejuvenate the museum’s collection and canon, reaffirm its position as the guardian of art history, and give it the appearance of social engagement.[3] Of course, this reality feeds anger. Every time art workers try to turn institutions into sites of political action, and every time these institutions refuse or co-opt, the frustration and disappointment grows. We may call to mind that already in 2006, Hito Steyerl wrote: ‘Isn’t it pretty absurd to argue that something like [an institution of critique exists], at a time when critical cultural institutions are clearly being dismantled, underfunded, and subjected to the demands of a neoliberal event economy?’ As we descend from neoliberalism into whathever cataclismic mess it is we’re in, it is no wonder that people start to ask, What do we need museums for in the first place?
Picasso in Palestine
Yet, Dutch art institutions can and have supported the Palestinian people’s right to freedom and self-determination. I would like to take you back to 2011 for a moment – to maybe not the most recent but still arguably best example for our purposes. In this year, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and the International Art Academy Palestine in Ramallah co-produced Picasso in Palestine. The project’s premise was simple: Khaled Hourani, an artist and the director of the Palestinian art academy, invited the Van Abbemuseum to bring its 1943 cubist painting Buste de Femme to Ramallah to be exhibited to the general public.
Pablo Picasso, Buste de Femme, 1943.
Reality was less simple. Due to the extensive security precautions and negotiations and the legal and administrative restructuring required, a loan that would have normally taken a few weeks to arrange took two years. The museum had a difficult time to insure the artwork with an insurance value of about 1 million euros for its journey into a country not recognised under Dutch law. It was equally difficult to find a transport company that would take on this gig, especially given the curatorial decision that the art work would have to travel the same route an individual would take – including the many slow, intrusive, kafka-esque checkspoints we probably all know at least from media coverage. At some points during the journey, the minivan with the artwork and its handlers was protected only by the cultural and monetary value of Buste de Femme – amplified by live media coverage. Moreover, for the painting to be exhibited in accordance with the Van Abbemuseum’s conservation standards, a climate-controlled white cube had to be constructed in Ramallah. When Buste the Femme finally arrived, it was the first face-to-face encounter with a Picasso for many visitors.
Willingly, the Van Abbemuseum staked one of its most financially valuable pieces of art for the artistic project instigated by Hourani, laying bare great social injustice in the process. Because, when looking at the painstaking effort put into Picasso in Palestine, one wonders: Why do we need to do this? Why can’t Palestinian West Bank residents make the 20-minute drive to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, to see many works equivalent to Buste de Femme – which is to say, universal masterpieces – on almost any given day?
Khaled Hourani, Picasso in Palestine, 2019, acrylic on canvas.
The International Art Academy Palestine and Van Abbemuseum achieved something that the Stedelijk Museum, with all its talk of ‘platforms’ and ‘dialogues’, could have never done. Today, Picasso in Palestine lives on as a monument to the possibility of art institutions creating material change. The difference between these two institutions is plain and simple: one accepts the call to political commitment, the other refuses it. Furthermore, from this comparison, we may be able to grasp the nature of the political agency at play. The Van Abbemuseum did not run a poster or social media campaign, which the Stedelijk likes to do. They did not declare a program, like a political party, nor claimed a representative function, like a union. If an art institution is a political organisation, I would argue, it is so on another level.
Infrastructural Critique
Trying to understand this, I found it useful to read Marina Vishmidt’s text ‘Between Not Everything and Not Nothing: Cuts Toward Infrastructural Critique’. In this short, lyrical, and kind of viral essay, Vishmidt coins the refreshingly provocative notion of ‘infrastructural critique’. The suggestion is to, ‘move from the practices and theories of institutional critique in the arts and expand these ideas into an infrastructural critique of the present’. If institutional critique sought to ‘expose’ or ‘confront’ institutional realities, infrastructural critique prioritises ‘the “real” (the irreducible, the traumatic, the chaotic) over the delimited, instrumental impact over symbolic action, agency over indexicality.’ If the legacy of institutional critique has shown that the institutional black box can be rendered transparent, infrastructural critique is here to ask: can it also be used as a projectile? May we turn even turn it into a building block?
So, what is exactly ‘infrastructural’ about ‘infrastructural critique’? Vishmidt draws on the theoretical work of Keller Easterling on infrastructures, which defines them as the repetitive structures that sustain everyday life. Because infrastructure is everywhere around us, and sustained by habit, it is invisible. If turn on the tap, I do not really perceive the plumbing and water management system. Infrastructures only become apparent once they falter: a water faucet that stops working, the removal of public benches from train stations, or a stock market crash. At such moments of break-down, history and power relations can be seen. The malfunctioning faucet indicates the careless privatisation of water management systems, the bench-less station the hostile architecture of public spaces, and the stock market crash the unlimited trust in competing AIs to manage the global flow of capital. Such ‘temporal cuts’ are spaces of agency where material change can be set in motion and where ‘the speculative force of aesthetics can clarify, open up, and re-purpose these infrastructures in investigative and/or transversal political situations, as well as dis-appropriate them or their constituent parts for other ends.’
To bring this back to the museum: no matter how total, how impenetrable an infrastructure seems, temporal cuts will always appear if we look in the right places. Infrastructural critique implies a shift of focus from the opaque social system of the ‘art world’, with its eye-catching exhibitions, scandals, reputations, management issues, and gossips, to the material production chain of art, consisting of money flows, patronage, political influence, as well as climate control, cloud services, and the labour conditions of museum guards. Importantly, infrastructural critique, to Vishmidt, exists in a productive register – maybe even as production. She associated it with Jonas Staal’s New World Summit, the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise, and Casco Art Institute’s ‘Climate Justice Code’. Others have since further elaborated on infrastructural critique or associated their own work with it. For instance, the book Between the Material and the Possible: Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art from 2022, edited by Bassam El Baroni, foregrounds the closeness of art and financial speculation, sketching a kind of amazing spectrum of infrastructurally critical practices.
Returning for a second to Picasso and Palestine, it’s quite self-evident how the notion of infrastructural critique applies. The project confronted, and pushed through many faltering infrastructures: from difficulties finding an insurance, and the absence of a climate-controlled exhibition space, to the clash between the modernist universalism represented in Picasso and the repression of the Israeli apartheid regime. The International Art Academy and the Van Abbemuseum operated the politics of art world infrastructures. In the act of transporting and exhibiting Buste the Femme in Ramallah, the abnormal normality, the terrorizing absurdity of the apartheid regime became pertinently tangible. Importantly, while the project’s infrastructural implications extend far beyond the art world, it remains – as Khaled Hourani insisted – primarily artistic. Slavoj Žižek, who traveled to Ramallah for the occasion, remarked that in the cubist painting we can now discern an ‘oppressed face’: one cold and metallic eye raised painfully above the other. This changing face of the artwork shows that Picasso in Palestine was, if anything, an aesthetic operation. Exactly on this level, art institutions were, are, and will remain political organisations.
Conclusion
Quite obviously, the time of performative social justice declarations is over. Average high-profile exhibitions will no longer read like progressive liberal political party programs. And, indeed, museums might have a hard time coping with the information overload era. But before we jump to the conclusion that institutionality is and always has been oppressive, based on the admittedly copious amount of anecdotal evidence, or that a post-institutional art world is inevitable, we might give ourselves some time. Who knows, we might find that shaking off the declarative politics that dominated art in the previous decades is good riddance. There might be social justice after the defeat of social justice.
The tricky, dirty work ahead of us is to figure out case-by-case which institutions and other parties have the courage and artistic intelligence to engage in infrastructural critique. To find ruptures. To stay with the frustrations. Of course, to periodically reassess tactics and strategies. In other words, to remain committed to artistic and therefore political work in the material conditions at hand. Like L’internationale, the Institute of Radical Imagination, lumbung, the Arts Collaboratory, the Museum of Arte Útil, Company Drinks, and the Office for Postartistic Services do.
After all, if we want a world without institutions, we can just sit back and enjoy the view of their on-going eradication. But no one will defend cultural institutions as ‘public’ or ‘common’ goods, if not the people who are the angriest at them right now.
Open letter from the lumbung community, after the closing of documenta15 on September 10th, 2022.
My many thanks go out to the Not Surprised Collective for keeping me politicized; Mia Lerm-Hayes for introducing me to Picasso in Palestine; Francesca Pola, Diletta Caimmi and Lisa Sanguineti for inviting me to the Reframing the Present: Contemporary Art, Cultural Heritage, and Social Justice conference at the beautiful Palazzo Borromeo; Nora Sternfeld for an inspiring key-note lecture and fellow contributors for fruitful exchanges; Sebastian Olma, Sven Lütticken, Kuba Szreder, and Ruben Stoffelen for great conversations and feedback.
References
[1] If you’re interested in what this endgame might look like in practice, read the brilliant introduction to Davis’s Art in the After-Culture.
[2] The story of Bakunin’s Barricade was featured before on this blog, when the Not Surprised Collective published its statement. See: https://networkcultures.org/ourcreativereset/2024/06/28/stedelijk-museum-fails-to-loan-artwork-by-ahmet-ogut-to-protect-students-in-amsterdam.
[3] I discussed this at more length in a review of Karen Archey’s After Institutions: https://networkcultures.org/ourcreativereset/2024/07/03/review-of-after-institutions-by-karen-archey