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This article explores the relationship between institutions and parasitic practices within the realm of artistic production, focusing on the organization INSISTER SPACE based in Stockholm, Sweden. Grounded in Michel Serres' concept of the parasite, it examines parasitism as a dynamic catalyst for micro-political changes within institutions. Emphasising the potential of convivial, collective and critical counterstrategies, the text also addresses the impact of neoliberal and populist forces on the art field. Proposing parasitism as a strategic response, the article contributes to discourse on navigating and resisting socio-political dynamics in contemporary art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the possibilities of using critical pedagogy inside and outside the art school to counter the effects of neoliberalism. Developed from an initial transcript of a conversation between three graduates of the Royal College of Art (United Kingdom) about our education-as-art projects, it takes the form of a constructed dialogue that mirrors our approach to working collectively. We discuss particular issues that arose for us whilst studying, as we experienced how the neo-liberal art school conceptualized a form of education and arts practice that promoted individualized paths and set competitive dynamics between students. We are interested in how art practices characterized as being social, collaborative and democratic can resist the neo-liberal art school. Advocating for process-based methods that facilitate learning between groups of students, we aim to open up space for embodied and situated knowledges. Bringing critical pedagogical approaches to the inside of the university creates a porosity with the alternatives we experienced outside. Through re-practicing historically radical methods and creating supportive structures, we challenge the dominant ways of communicating and managing the student-body. We argue that students and artists can organize their own cultures of learning in opposition to those that the university-as-business wants to promote, whilst creating supportive models that take students' needs into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across the art school, there are explicit forms of welcoming, of hosting, and othering. From the process of admissions to the structures of critique to the hiring process of both precarious and instrumental academic labour, the art school centers values built on invisible hospitalities that actively foreclose emancipatory social and political practices and continually reasserts dominant expectations of market-based practices. This essay traces the ways in which invisible hospitalities inform curricular, infrastructural, and administrative processes, while charting a course for cultivating new forms of hospitality that can support plural, complex, and radical forms of creative self-determination and artistic practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most common form of restaging is that of the retrospective exhibition, for it can be used to provide a platform for the museum to reaffirm the original exhibition and in turn reaffirm itself as host. For Harald Szeemann, the role of the curator was that of a mediator who, through the exhibition, should attempt to halt the abovementioned closed-circuit of affirmations by questioning existing boundaries and canons. His own work, however, has been repeatedly restaged in recent years. This article focuses on two restagings: the Prada Foundation's When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013 (2013) and the Getty Research Institute's Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions (2018). I argue that restaged exhibitions can take two different forms: they can be focused on revising traditional canons and hierarchies, or they can serve to reaffirm the exhibition and the hosting institution. The two forms are interdependent, however, and most restagings contain a mixture of the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Risk in education in the creative field of communication design is usually seen in connection with creativity as subjective expression and innovation as desired impact. This article positions risk in relation to the political in design education. It puts forward the argument that a particular type of risk-taking in education can work towards shifting design from a position of a service-providing activity towards a more emancipated practice, which would not comply with the pressures of neoliberal capitalism. To counter the current state of compliance this article suggests a three-level model of extradisciplinary risk-taking as institutional critique. The case of Memefest and Design Futures is discussed. Theoretical analysis is combined with (auto) ethnography and qualitative research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Change' is the locus of the avant-garde's revolutionary character. Historical claims and contemporary theorizations of the avant-garde enforce methodological distinctions between radical and conforming attitudes that fluctuate according to existing political agendas. This process of instrumentalization renders the avantgarde susceptible to the conformity of institutionalization. More importantly it prescribes the avant-garde with a subservient role that controls its operational means and deflates its capacity to produce politics. What is to be done, if the avant-garde achieves its goal for socio-political change? Are we to abandon the spirit of critical reflection and surrender to the conditions of the next system? How can there be an avant-garde after capitalism if its ends are solely confined in the substitution of one system with another? This article traces out this problem, assessing what kind of emancipatory potential we might expect, or hope for, from a post-capitalist avant-garde, by advancing a critical examination of recent theories of political subjectivity, the dialectics of change and the reconciliation of the institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assembling a wide range of protest objects produced since the late 1970s, Disobedient Objects at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2014-15) aimed to present the expansive material culture of social movements from a global perspective while charting a 'people's history of art and design from below'. This article examines the critical intentions behind the exhibition, compares it to other recent large-scale exhibitions on activist art and situates it within a broader field of museum activism, demonstrating how it displayed not only a collection of disobedient objects but also a model for disobedient curating by directing institutional resources towards ongoing movements and campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Revolutionary Time and the Avant-garde (2015), John Roberts argues that a 'strange, morally tinged discourse of avant-garde failure' tends to foreclose critical debate about the avant-garde. This article examines Roberts's point through an investigation of the term 'institutional critique'. According to Andrea Fraser, the distinctive critical politics of institutional critique are provided by its recognition of the failure pre-ordained by art's institutional mediation. In order to problematize Fraser's position, the article will focus on debates that took place in the journal The Fox, published for three issues between 1975 and 1976 by Art & Language, New York. The first use of the term 'institutional critique' in print came in this journal, though Art & Language are not conventionally included in the canon of institutional critique. Fraser's institutional critique was connected to a simplification of the stakes involved in this term that came about through the writings of art critics associated with the journal October. This point is used to pose the problem that concludes the discussion: how might art history reflect upon the part it plays in stabilising the meaning of failure and neutralizing avant-gardes? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a contextual analysis of Andy Warhol's landmark exhibition Raid the Icebox 1 (1969) at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design. Unconventional in both content and installation, it is one of the earliest exhibitions organized by an artist from a museum's permanent collection. Unlike previous studies, which analyse the exhibition through Warhol's biography or artistic practice, this article focuses on the institution and the artist-curator. While the museum sought to render its historical treasures relevant to a younger generation, I argue that Warhol enacted a form of institutional critique that undermined hierarchies of display, value and authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shifts the conversation around ethics in social practice art from a focus on individual artist's engagements with particular communities towards a critical exploration of the discursive practices that are bringing 'socially engaged art' into being as a field. Drawing from social theories of work and labour, and traditions of institutional critique in art practice, along with providing an analysis of the author's own artistic research projects in Moscow and New York, this article addresses the ethical implications of the means by which socially engaged art is produced as a profession, or a form of skilled labour. The article presents socially engaged art as defined by particular habitual interactions, often within the context of institutions, and proposes practical ways by which to address ethics in the production of socially engaged art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the 1993 Whitney Biennial, its focus on identity politics, and the exhibition's position within the methodological debates between Art History and an interdisciplinary Cultural Studies. It identifies where and how the voice of the exhibition came to be defined and observes the relations between the institutional framework, the curatorial agenda, and what the art itself performed. With emphasis on the artworks of Andrea Fraser, Renée Green, and Daniel J. Martinez, I argue that contemporaneous critical reception missed the Biennial's art historical contribution, which highlighted artists synthesizing historically incompatible modes of practice, and bringing identity politics to bear on institutional critique and conceptual art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents and discusses an ongoing fellowship project entitled 'Space for Interference', conducted under the Norwegian Programme for Research Fellowships in the Arts. Two concrete site-specific art projects produced under Space for Interference serve as a point of departure for an investigation into methods of interference and the forms of address that artists use when intervening in other specialized fields in society. The institutions that provide the site for an art project have different social functions. We ask what may be their motivation for allowing artists access to their physical environments, apparatuses, procedures, systems and discourses. The fact that the artists' projects in these contexts function as a means of self-observation for the institutions seems obvious. Nevertheless, we seek to investigate the various economic and political factors that allow these institutions to include potentially critical activities, which aim to modify or transgress their systems, and thereby displaying how they are malleable and mobile bodies. One assertion we make is that by doing so the involved institutions prove to be modern, self-critical and flexible, thus complying with political requirements to adapt to the rapidly changing environments of the information and communication age. The perspective from systems theory in the Luhmannian tradition has proved useful since it shows how the issues of art may also be the problems of science, business, politics and the law in the complex and decentered social universe of today. The issues of contingency, insecurity, paradox and autoreflexivity, surplus meanings and the complexity and decentering of the subject are at the heart of contemporary art. Systems theory provides a way to link such practices theoretically with scientific discourse and with the advanced problem solving and criticality of other social domains, like politics, business and the media industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]