Institutional Recognition and New Curatorial Practices

The demands of the entrepreneurial shift that took place in museums and artist-run centres in the 1990s and the need for greater visibility gave rise to new institutional constraints on exhibitions. Some curators — even the most “independent” — were submitted to unprecedented economic, financial and administrative imperatives and began thinking of institutions as critical entities, potentially creative, and deserving of more recognition. Similarly, at the start of the 2000s, curatorial approaches with a particular taste for ephemeral or process-driven artistic forms emerged, inspired by the conceptual practices of the 1970s and put forward by artists like Michael Asher, Daniel Buren or Hans Haacke. In using the strategies of institutional critique espoused by artists, such curatorial approaches literally entered into competition with the work exhibited, and sometimes gave the impression that a veritable effort to erase artists’ work might be in play. 

Following Charles Esche and Lene Crone Jensen’s experiments at the Rooseum in Malmo in 2003,¹ 1 - Nina Möntmann, “The Rise and Fall of New Institutionalism: Perspectives on a Possible Future,” Transversal/EIPCP (April 2007). [http://eipcp.net/transversal/0407/moentmann/en/#_ftn1]. Consulted January 2008. Jonas Ekeberg elucidated what had begun to be described as a new institutionalism in curatorial practices. It was a question of redefining contemporary art institutions by taking as an example those organizations² 2 - The term “institution” in this text will often revolve around the notion of the organization as a structured and functional body with precise objectives. concerned with the artworks’ “flexible, temporal and process-driven” modalities,³ 3 - Jonas Ekeberg, “Introduction,” in “New Institutionalism,” Verksted No. 1 (2003): 10.  notably founded on participation in a dialogue, an event, rather than on the passive consumption associated with objects.⁴ 4 - Claire Doherty, New Institutionalism and the Exhibition as Situation, “Protections Reader,” (Graz: Kunsthaus Graz, 2006). [www.situations.org.uk/_uploaded_pdfs/newinstitutionalism.pdf, 12] The economy of this institutionalism attempts to foreground a type of production that grows out of a “deproduction,” but its main objective is programmatic. The issue for curators no longer lies in limiting themselves to the development of exhibitions by bringing together artists, but in modifying institutional structures and functions in order to help put forward the creative, which is to say the aesthetic, dimension of institutions in a critical context.⁵ 5 - Claire Doherty, ibi., 2; “New Institutionalism,” Verksted No. 1 (2003) : 12; Art and its Institutions (London: Black Dog Publishing: 2006); Claire Doherty, “The Institution is Dead! Long Live the Institution! Contemporary Art and New Institutionalism,” Engage No. 15 (Summer 2004); Alex Farquharson, “Bureaux de change,” Frieze No. 101 (September2006). The beginning of the Palais de Tokyo with Nicolas Bourriaud’s “relational” projects is a good example.