Can Artistic Practices Negotiate the Demands of Cultural Institutions, Public Space, and Civil Society?

'The young conservatives embrace the fundamental experience of aesthetic modernity – the disclosure of a de-centered subjectivity, freed from all constraints of rational cognition and purposiveness, from all imperatives of labour and utility – and in this way break out of the modern world. They transpose the spontaneous power of imagination, the experience of the self and affectivity into the remote and the archaic; and in Manichean fashion, they counter-pose to instrumental reason a principle only accessible via "evocation": be it the will to power or sovereignty, Being or the Dionysian power of the poetic'.

Jürgen Habermas

Looking at 'institutional critique' is relevant in understanding exactly how art practices can think and reflect upon the politics of cultural institutions and how notions of civic society come into play in the art scene. Institutional critique is both a concept and a practice that describes the systematic inquiry into the workings of art institutions, galleries and museums, and is most associated with the work of artists such as Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Andrea Fraser, Fred Wilson, Hans Haacke, alongside many more. While institutional critique practices have been allowed to challenge and push through the boundaries of the art world, the institutional networks, and their dynamics within society, are also worth pointing out. From the 'musealisation' of the 'non-place' (a concept coined by Mark Augé in 1992), whereby ideas of the 'white cube' or the institution are conceived, to the symbolic places of transitions that temporarily house discourse, art practices act as starting points for reflections and discussions that contribute to discourses that deal with our contemporaneity, including the politics of cultural institutions, urban development, and the notion of civic society.