Perspectives on institutional critique. Lea Lublin and Julio Le Parc between South America and Europe.

ISABEL PLANTE

Rio de Janeiro

Congreso; New Worlds: Frontiers, Inclusion, Utopias; 2015

Comité brasileiro de historia da arte (CBHA), Comité international d?histoire de l?art (CIHA) y The Getty Foundation

During the sixties and seventies, a significant number of artists saw museums more as problematic spaces rather than as mere environments for exhibition. In diverse and distant cities, there were many art projects which pointed to cultural institutions as managers of conservative social representation, particularly of bourgeois self-representation. The tactics used to destabilize these Enlightenment-born institutions and their unfulfilled promises of creating a public sphere for culture went from boycotts and self-exclusion to thorough analysis of the exhibition apparatus. These art proposals have been studied ?mainly by the Anglo-Saxon academy? in terms of ?institutional critique?. The notion was coined in 1975 by Mel Ramsden from the English Art & Language group and it has been useful in articulating the aesthetic practices with the progressive political radicalization of those years, without restricting the analysis to iconographic issues. However, in resonance with the widespread anti-Americanism of the mid-sixties, Ramsden had thought of the institutional critique particularly in relation to the New York scene: how the art institution, co-opted by the market and the art ?bureaucrats?, was being used there to reinforce American and capitalist hegemony. In this sense, although Ramdsen conceived it more as a critical practice than as a theoretical definition, the notion of ?institutional critique? tends to be understood as a universal category; one which presupposes a series of standardized characteristics even of institutions alien to the art scene (and to the art market) within which these concepts and historiographic tools were born. And this is even more problematic when considering that one of the strongest criticisms of cultural institutions during the sixties and seventies was, precisely, that they naturalized modern art and bourgeois taste, disguising this alienation as ?universality?.Through the analysis of two cases, this work proposes a situated reflection on institutional critique practices which consider the differential inscriptions of art institutions within their particular cultural scenes and contexts. Some productions of Julio Le Parc and Lea Lublin, two Argentinians based in Paris since 1958 and 1964 respectively, will enable us to approach the geopolitical asymmetries between the institutional landscapes of Paris and Buenos Aires or Santiago de Chile. Both migrant artists not only knew well those different cultural scenes but also looked at them with a critical eye and integrated these asymmetries into the very fabric of their art work or public exhibition.