• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

STATUS, POWER AND as the marketplace, collectors, and museums. With Everything must go/Liquidation totale, Provost fits into this long-standing tradition by exploring the phenomenon of the commodification of art and artist through product-making. Further, she self- reflectively situates her experience as an artist within the critique by way of a liqui- dated assemblage of her own artwork. Provost’s wryly crafted installation achieves its particular brand of institutional critique by drawing from “Canadian-content” art history, marrying this content to commercial and populist design practice, and figuring herself as a practising artist within the hypothetical (yet very real) art world of her own THE ARTIST subversive installation. What is this “art world” and where did it come from? Fraser pinpoints the late 1960s as THE INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE the time when an idea of a social-structure that included the museum, artist, administra- tor, art studio, art magazines, and collectors, or, as she put it, “the entire field of art as a OF MICHÈLE PROVOST social universe” developed.5 Along with this model emerged a recognition of an insider/ outsider status, highlighted by the performative work and conceptual projects by New York City artists such as Daniel Buren, Michael Asher and German artist Hans Haacke. For example, in 1970, Haacke polled visitors to the MOMA as to their political opinion of Catherine Sinclair Norman Rockefeller, who sat on the museum’s Board of Directors, thereby calling into question the activities and direction of the organization.6 In Canada of 1969, conceptual In 2006, Bristol-based street artist Banksy, famous for his anonymity and critical graf- artists Iain and Ingrid Baxter, as N.E. Thing Co. (NETCO), installed a production and fiti art, issued a series of silkscreens entitled “Morons” in which he depicts the scene of sales office for a generic corporation in the lobby of the National Gallery of Canada. an art auction. The animated auctioneer stands next to an ornate frame encompassing Administrative activities of the company linked art to the everyday corporate world, a few censorious words that are especially effective for their simplicity: “I can’t believe such as daily fax transmissions of work to the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. In the you morons actually buy this shit.” Condemning the capitalist impulses of the art world 1980s these practises continued in Canada with the likes of the Toronto-based collec- 1 Murray Whyte, “Toronto’s massive Banksy show misses the point,” Toronto Star (Wed., June 13, 2018). is one of Banksy’s signature moves; his self-imposed low profile defies the publicity tive General Idea and in the United States with such figures as Andrea Fraser herself. Fraser’s work Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (1989) had her impersonate a gallery Retrieved August 13, 2018 https://www.thestar. sought after by self-fashioned celebrity artists, just as his public street art — free and com/entertainment/visualarts/review/2018/06/ accessible to all passers-by — evades commodification and institutionalized practises. docent using the worst art-speak she could muster, and culminated in her eloquent 13/taking-the-art-of-banksy-all-the-way-to-the- Or at least, that’s the idea. Despite his intentions, Banksy’s success has led to some praise of a functional water fountain. While these works addressed mechanisms such bank.html as the boutique, office, board structure or the art-speak of docents, what of the artists? ironic twists, not least of which is the star status he bears (borne in part by the intrigue 2 Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions of his anonymity) and evidenced by the circulation of an unauthorized retrospective to an Institution of Critique,” Artforum 44 (Sept. exhibition of his art,1 as well as a seemingly unstoppable market-value for his work. Artists have just as much effect on this art world as they are affected by it, according 2005), 278 – 286. Retrieved online August 13, 2018. to some. In 1974, Haacke characterized the role of artists as active participants within https://www.artforum.com/print/200507/from- this system when he wrote: the-critique-of-institutions-to-an-institution-of- Contrary to what the art world might like to think of itself (if it had a collective brain), critique-9407 it is not void of the “product making” that is the basis of our capitalist society. That ARTISTS, AS MUCH AS THEIR SUPPORTERS AND THEIR ENEMIES, NO MATTER 3 Ibid product can be the art itself or a composite of art and artist. As is the case with OF WHAT IDEOLOGICAL COLORATION, ARE UNWITTING PARTNERS... THEY Banksy, the personality of the artist can add market value to the art object. What 4 PARTICIPATE JOINTLY IN THE MAINTENANCE AND/OR DEVELOPMENT OF Randy Kennedy, “Michael Asher, Conceptual Artist, is uniquely two-faced about the art world’s engagement in this capitalist system, Dies at 69,” The New York Times (Oct. 17, 2012). however, is that it purports to offer us meaning and criticality while simultaneous- THE IDEOLOGICAL MAKE-UP OF THEIR SOCIETY. THEY WORK WITHIN THAT Retrieved online August 13, 2018. https://www.ny FRAME, SET THE FRAME AND ARE BEING FRAMED.9 times.com/2012/10/18arts/design/michael-asher- ly asking us to buy into these offerings, whether they are an artist, artwork, or gift artist-dies-at-69.html shop umbrella bearing a reproduction. Historically, and presently, the art world has had a contentious relationship to commercialism, oscillating between the desire to Fraser agrees, explaining that artists have their own interest in maintaining the existing 5 Fraser remain both distant from commerce yet innately tied to it. In a 2005 Art Forum essay, frame of the art world: 6 Helen Armitage, “Andrea Fraser: Too Shocking for performance artist and critical writer Andrea Fraser characterized the contempo- EVERY TIME WE SPEAK OF THE “INSTITUTION” AS OTHER THAN “US,” a US Retrospective,” Culture Trip (11 January 2017). rary art world as an era of “mega-museums and the 24-hour global art market” that Retrieved August 13, 2018. https://theculturetrip. celebrates corporate collections, charges high admission fees, and swallows up WE DISAVOW OUR ROLE IN THE CREATION AND PERPETUATION OF ITS com/north-america/usa/california/articles/andrea- CONDITIONS. WE AVOID RESPONSIBILITY FOR, OR ACTION AGAINST, THE fraser-too-shocking-for-a-us-retrospective/ critical practices. She names the players in this game and includes on the roster artists, collectors, patrons, cultural workers, and critics.2 The place of the artist within EVERYDAY COMPLICITIES, COMPROMISES, AND CENSORSHIP — ABOVE 7 Sandra Dyck, “Toys are us,” Michèle Provost: Selling this system, whether deliberate or inadvertent, is explored by Gatineau-based artist ALL, SELF-CENSORSHIP — WHICH ARE DRIVEN BY OUR OWN INTERESTS Out (Ottawa, ON: Carleton University Art Gallery, Michèle Provost in her new installation Everything must go/Liquidation totale. 10 2010), 23. IN THE FIELD AND THE BENEFITS WE DERIVE FROM IT. 8 Armitage Artists have engaged in what has been coined “institutional critique”3 since the Both Haacke and Fraser point to the same conflict: on the one hand, an artist de- 9 late 1960s and the rise of Pop Art. Institutional critique is a type of performance or sires to remain independent of the influences of the perceived social structure and Hans Haacke, “All the Art That’s Fit to Show,” in Museums by Artists, 152, quoted in Fraser. installation art that focuses on “the web of underlying and often hidden conventions commercial entrapments of the art world, and on the other hand, the artist inevitably that surrounded art and how art [is] viewed, valued and used in society,”4 such contributes to it. The fabrication of the art object itself is inevitably effected by factors 10 Fraser 6 7 that the artists must contend with, operating as they do within the art world. It is this Gauloises Bleues unfiltered into the great hotels of New-York.] The deliberately unref- often contradictory place for both artist and artwork that Provost explores through erenced quotes are combined with found images from Provost’s obsessive collection of her practice. illustrated and antique books from which she clips and borrows regularly. The pairings of found word and text are presented in stacks of picture frames as stock images as Provost has critically deconstructed the art world throughout her two-decade-long would be found in Ikea’s marketplace (and their mass-reproduction status compro- career. Her exhibition Selling Out (2008) also addressed the role of personality within mised by the fact that each one is drawn by hand). The pairings are also used in two the art market. Using her signature multi-media, handmade technique as a counterbal- framed mock graphic novel pages, and two extensive biographical volumes, hand- ance to mass-production, this series consisted of a large collection of cult-personality stitched, collaged and digitized for easy reading, to tell his story. collector cards of artists such as Daniel Buren, Cindy Sherman, Rembrandt van Rijn and Pablo Picasso. There were also toy action figures (complete in plastic packaging) of Removed from their contexts, the quotes reveal the biases and labels stemming marketable elements of their art, for example a tiny hand-made version of Jeff Koons’ from the two countries the icon called home. For example, the title of Provost’s French iconic stainless steel sculpture Rabbit (1986). biographical volume bears the title “La vie colorée du trappeur supérieur,” the Canadiana name given to him within the French art world by the famous Surrealist French poet, Such appropriation has held an important place within practices of institutional cri- André Breton. This myth-making of art history books is a key part of Provost’s institu- tique.

Load more

  3

Copy Link