The Institution as Performative Fiction: The “Role” of a University Art Gallery (2010)

A presentation to the University and College Art Galleries Association (UCAGAC) April 25, 2010 in Quebec City.

The Institution as Performative Fiction: The “Role” of a University Art Gallery

I hope that you can hear the quotation marks in “role,” making it a performance as well as a function. Of all the models offered to curating, what would the university suggest to it (beyond a university art gallery being an exhibiting and collecting space)? That is, situated at a university, what would make an art gallery an intellectual institution (rather than perhaps—another model—a teaching institution: teaching curatorial practice)? That is, not assume curating there to be an intellectual practice (differing in some way from a public art gallery, which it is also) but the institution itself as an intellectual entity.

When I inherited the AGYU, it had modelled itself on the European kunsthalle giving itself the excuse, being at a university, of a research-oriented experimental laboratory. (We all give excuses to the university to protect our freedom as contemporary art galleries; and what I say here should not imply any lack of respect for the good situation Loretta Yarlow left me.) Doing so, however, (that is offering itself the excuse) it disengaged itself from the university (and from any form of outreach), protecting itself under the mantle of the freedom of artistic practice. I believe this to be an elitist model that no longer is possible given the changed conditions of both the art world and the university itself. For all the faults of this model, besides what it offered to artists it did not assume for itself. It did not assume the freedom to be a creative institution. It was a static, closed entity, a box, in which something else—protected in its freedom—happened.

Freedom would be a model. Freedom would be an excuse to another means of working—that is, if freedom can be an excuse: a mere philosophical quibble.

Freedom sometimes derives from constraints where a negative condition becomes a positive possibility. Out there would be such a condition, at first a constraint then an operative, liberating concept. “Out there” some of you will recognize as the AGYU’s brand or slogan—indeed our vision. At the AGYU, we operate according to our out there vision, which was first formulated ironically (and aggressively: there is no irony without aggression) to counter the prejudice that it was too far to go to York University to see an exhibition. Yes, we are out there, further out in every sense of the phrase. The Performance Bus, created by Emelie Chhangur, was the first outreach strategy invented to work innovatively and collaboratively with artists to develop new audiences—as well as functionally to bring them from downtown to our openings. Our out there vision was developed by Emelie Chhangur and myself working symbiotically.

“Out there” is not only a vision, it is a concept. Extending itself constantly, it is a transformative concept: that is, it is a concept of difference that in differing from itself constantly evolves and transforms—moving further “out there.” The institution itself is a “concept” and as such is subject as well to transformation while being an agent of it. The institution as a whole therefore is a creative enterprise. However, this is not a general concept—a mere vision—but one applied practically to all institutional functions. Here is how it is done: Every aspect and function of the contemporary art institution is an intellectual endeavor (modelled on artist’s strategies) and an artist’s project. We are therefore an institution in perpetual transformation led by the artists we collaborate with. Thus, we change and are willing to change with each exhibition we present and with every collaboration with an artist that we undertake.

Unmistakably, curating exhibitions reflects our character as curators, so much so that it could be called autobiographical. Directing is presumed otherwise, obedient supposedly to other responsibilities. Could directing be thought otherwise as a creative enterprise? Could directing be for me—a writer—a writing project? Could the institution be a stage on which I perform in public, not to rhetorically aggrandize myself but to perform through all its functions? In other words, could the institution be a performative fiction?

 So how is this put into practice? Let’s look at the two examples: the first being the AGYU’s Winter 2007 newsletter (when it all began to come together) devoted to an exhibition by New York artist Matthew Brannon (curated by PM) and a multi-faceted project by Toronto artist Derek Sullivan (curated by Emelie Chhangur).

• Click here for A Proposal for a Tax in Support Toronto Artists

 Print oriented: Both artists basically are printmakers, although their practice is expanded, so we made this print newsletter reflect their principles.

By the way, the artist Ken Ogawa designs our newsletters and is given full freedom. Each one has its own system. He’s more out there than we are!

-This newsletter is a model of collaborating with artists and giving institutional resources over to them. (This new direction was the impetus of Emelie Chhangur.)

Brannon did his own print advertising design, including the one here; he himself commissioned L.A. painter Lari Pittman to do the exhibition poster.

-The newsletter inhabited the genre or format of the front page of a newspaper, but also of a political broadsheet. Besides a mailing, it was also posted downtown, including the financial district—which coincided with a Sullivan poster campaign.

-Like Brannon’s prints, the newsletter was seductive from a distance, then aggressive up close—that is, in the reading.

The “lead story” addressed the then current Toronto context: on the one hand, of the so-called Cultural renaissance brought about by cultural building; of the seduction of the city’s political and cultural elite by Richard Florida’s notion of the creative class; on the other hand, of the history of art community on Queen and its gentrification displacement. And, thus, combining the two, of the relation between economic and cultural privilege.

-It was ironic yet serious. It basically named names. Institutions do not take positions or name names.

-It was playful while intelligent (playful to engage public): we make fun of ourselves first before we make fun of others. (Rick Rhodes said: “the very funny Philip Monk.” Who would know? Directing does odd things to people!)

-It was one element of larger narrative that people pieced together over time that included the newsletter, retail bags, which read: “The Queen Street art community made this town”; or “it’s a fight for the city … and it’s a fight for the money”.

 Using common institutional products, we give ourselves the license to perform in public, in the process conceiving the institution as a public intellectual, and if we need the excuse—which we don’t—protected by the free speech guaranteed by the university. Backed up by Derrida in pull quotes, we say with him:

 “This university demands and ought to be granted in principle, besides what is called academic freedom, an unconditional freedom to question and to assert, or even, going further, the right to say publically all that is required by research, knowledge, and thought concerning the truth.”

—Derrida, “The University Without Condition”

At the AGYU, we are unconditionally out there.

 Derrida also says, elsewhere in Rogues: “Is it not also democracy that gives the right to irony in the public space?” At the AGYU, we’re all for irony in the public space!

So, instead of using our newsletters merely to advertise our program in a didactic fashion, we use our resources to advocate for artists. (Also see Michael Maranda’s Waging Culture: a report on the socio-economic status of Canadian visual artists, AGYU, 2009).

We use all our resources to collaborate with artists by involving them in all institutional functions and products (dispensing and circulating $45,000 a year in artist fees).

We use all our institutional products as means to interpret our exhibitions, mimicking the exhibited artists’ strategies. Thus, for instance, newsletters change form and style every exhibition.

Second example: It was while thinking last summer about the advertising campaign for The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion (exhibited fall 2009) that we fully realized these strategies of interpretation, at the same time fully realizing that we were the perfect host for General Idea, who had already pioneered these strategies.

The question: How far can you go in implicating the institution in artists’ strategies? How far can you take performative fictionality in representing artists’ work—and exposing the institution in and to fictional models?

General Idea’s work, of course, is all performative fiction. The AGYU exhibition precisely recreated two exhibitions from 1975 and 1977 shown at the Carmen Lamanna Gallery, basically the erection and the destruction of The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion, which of course, as you know, never existed other than as a conceptual framework for GI’s enterprise. Our fiction was that we were rebuilding the Pavillion on the basis of the original plans and drawings and fragments of the ruins. The newsletter story runs: “Thirty-two years after a disastrous fire destroyed The 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion in 1977, the Art Gallery of York University has set itself the heroic task of reconstructing the Pavillion along the lines of its original plans. The AGYU has combined resources with archaeologists, archivists, and the museums and collections that house its remnants to bring together material for public view as the first stage of restoring the Pavillion to the shell of its past glory.”

In reality, we only showed the exhibitions as the artists originally presented them. We extended GI’s fiction—a fiction of a fiction, a fiction elaborating another fiction—using their strategies as means of interpretation while respecting the work all the while. We made it contemporary while respecting its historicity—but through their same means, spirit, and fictionality.

Similarly, the newsletter continued the fiction using GI’s strategies to implicate the AGYU and its Director in this overarching fiction (performativity is implication), detourning documentary photographs without actually altering—as with the exhibitions—what they were. The newsletter mimicked FILE in its aspect as a gossip magazine but now as the scandal tabloid ELF!. Just as FILE imitated LIFE, so ELF! imitates FILE.

• Click here for General Idea newsletter

I wrote new texts and captions to accompany unaltered archival photographs. The first page has an archival photograph of General Idea’s dealer Carmen Lamanna standing in front of GI’s Hoarding from the 1975 exhibition. The implication is, “Who is this mafioso-type and what is he hiding behind this hoarding?” A side-bar has a photograph of me, taken by Jorge Zontal in 1982 and published that year in FILE, exposing me as if a celebrity crying in front of the media after having been found out in a scandal. Another photograph by Zontal seems to have me slapping my head for being such an idiot about GI in the past. One story exposes my past lack of support of GI; another condemns the waste of taxpayer dollars on the “rebuilding” of the Pavillion.