« Institutional critique and after explores the history and contemporary reassessment of the Institutional Critique movement lauched in the late 1960s, redeveloped in the 1980s, and vigorously reoriented in recent years to address issues such as globalization. In this publication, the histories, theories, diverse locations, and different kinds of institutional alternative space are investigated, looking at traditional forms of art but also at installation, performance, new media practices, and cultural activism. Its central questions turn on the critical potential of art (and institutions) and whether–and if so how–they can stimulate social or political change. »--

An anthology of writings and projects by artists who developed and extended the genre of institutional critique. "Institutional critique” is an artistic practice that reflects critically on its own housing in galleries and museums and on the concept and social function of art itself. Such concerns have always been a part of modern art but took on new urgency at the end of the 1960s, when—driven by the social upheaval of the time and enabled by the tools and techniques of conceptual art—institutional critique emerged as a genre. This anthology traces the development of institutional critique as an artistic concern from the 1960s to the present by gathering writings and representative art projects of artists from across Europe and throughout the Americas who developed and extended the genre. The texts and artworks included are notable for the range of perspectives and positions they reflect and for their influence in pushing the boundaries of what is meant by institutional critique. Like Alberro and Stimson's Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology this volume will shed new light on its subject through its critical and historical framing. Even readers already familiar with institutional critique will come away from this book with a greater and often redirected understanding of its significance. Artists represented include Wieslaw Borowski, Daniel Buren, Marcel Broodthaers, Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel, Hans Haacke, Robert Smithson, John Knight, Graciela Carnevale, Osvaldo Mateo Boglione, Guerilla Art Action Group, Art Workers' Coalition, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Michael Asher, Mel Ramsden, Adrian Piper, The Guerrilla Girls, Laibach, Silvia Kolbowski, Andrea Fraser, Fred Wilson, Mark Dion, Maria Eichhorn, Critical Art Ensemble, Bureau d'Études, WochenKlausur, The Yes Men, Hito Steyerl, Andreas Siekmann.

'Institutional critique' is best known through the critical practice that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by artists who presented radical challenges to the museum and gallery system. Since then it has been pushed in new directions by new generations of artists registering and responding to the global transformations of contemporary life. The essays collected in this volume explore this legacy and develop the models of institutional critique in ways that go well beyond the field of art. Interrogating the shifting relations between 'institutions' and 'critique', the contributors to this volume analyze the past and present of institutional critique and propose lines of future development. Engaging with the work of philosophers and political theorists such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno and others, these essays reflect on the mutual enrichments between critical art practices and social movements and elaborate the conditions for politicized critical practice in the twenty-first century.

This book explores, discusses, and assesses the actual and potential sense of subjectivation in a variety of contexts. In particular, it reflects the genealogies, connections, variations, and practical implications of various theories of subjectivity and subjection while providing an up-to-date and authoritative account of how to engage with the ‘subject’. Rather than addressing the ‘subject’ merely in theoretical terms, this book explores subjectivation as a seminal expression of subjective practices in the plural. To the extent that subjectivity and subjection are key terms in a plurality of discourses and for a number of disciplines, Subjectivation in Political Theory and Contemporary Practices advances a trans-disciplinary reading by taking into account relevant debates that stretch from poststructuralism via postfordism to postdemocracy. In this sense, the book introduces readers to current approaches to subjectivation by displacing conventional understandings and suggesting unexpected reformulations.

While institutional critique has long been an important part of artistic practice and theoretical debate in the visual arts, it has long escaped attention in the field of music. This open access volume assembles for the first time an array of theoretical approaches and practical examples dealing with New Music’s institutions, their critique, and their transformations. For scholars, leaders, and practitioners alike, it offers an important overview of current developments as well as theoretical reflections about New Music and its institutions today. In this way, it provides a major contribution to the debate about the present and future of contemporary music.

Since the turn of the millennium, protests, meetings, schoolrooms, reading groups and many other social forms have been proposed as artworks or, more ambiguously, as interventions that are somewhere between art and politics. This book surveys the resurgence of politicized art, tracing key currents of theory and practice, and mapping them against the dominant experience of the last decade: crisis. Drawing upon leading artists and theorists within this field – including Hito Steyerl, Marina Vishmidt, Art & Language, Gregory Sholette, John Roberts and Dave Beech – this book argues for a new interpretation of the relationship between socially-engaged art and neoliberalism. Kim Charnley explores the possibility that neoliberalism has destabilized the art system so that it is no longer able to absorb and neutralize dissent. As a result, the relationship between aesthetics and politics is experienced with fresh urgency and militancy.

Faced with waning state support, declining revenue, and forced entrepreneurialism, museums have become a threatened public space. Simultaneously, they have assumed the role of institutional arbiter in issues of social justice and accountability. The canon of Institutional Critique has responded to the social embeddedness of art institutions by looking at the inner workings of such organizations. In After Institutions, Karen Archey expands the definition of Institutional Critique to develop a broader understanding of contemporary art's sociopolitical entanglements, looking beyond what cultural institutions were to what they are and what they might become.