Is the Museum Obsolete?
Andreas Petrossiants and Jose Rosales
Advocating a position that sees the “material world” as more necessary for changing social relations than the ossified aesthetic regimes of art, Guy Debord wrote something to the effect of: that which changes our way of seeing the street is more important than that which changes our way of seeing a work of art. On its face, this Situationist provocation is an invitation to reject participation in the art system and to upend social relations embodied in the street—that is, a space of revolt, of riot, of looting, and perhaps, of critique. However, if read in the context of Strike MoMA—a durational period of collective action fostering a space from which to imagine the mechanics of post-MoMA futures— another meaning emerges. It becomes a call for the abandonment of the illusory supposition of art’s autonomy from labor or political economy, from the street. Or, to use the terms of the Strike MoMA Working Group, it is an invitation to engage in a “diversity of aesthetics.”
After decades of political antagonism that has taken the museum as a site of contestation, whether through the artwork or otherwise, it is more widely understood that the museum is not an institution that should be reformed, restaffed, or even critiqued, but rather one that has failed its historical claims to curating art and publics. Even Daniel Buren, a central progenitor of institutional critique—the historical precedence for art that explicitly targets the museum in the artwork itself—wrote in his canonical 1970 text “Function of the Museum” that the museum’s historical role has always been “a careful camouflage undertaken by the prevalent bourgeois ideology, assisted by the artists themselves.”
Following after decades of the institution folding critical art into a performative self-reflexivity, Marina Vishmidt argues that much critical artistic practice today functions as a kind of “reconciled realpolitik not all that different from the kind that anointed liberal democracy as the least-worst form of government still standing after everything else has ostensibly been tried.” In light of this, we also see that beginning in the late 60s, if not earlier, a shared sensibility began to establish itself among various, dissident currents of the left paralleled by critiques of the art system: the rejection of the inherited institutions of historical communism including the union, the worker’s council, cultural propaganda in the service of building class consciousness, the party-form, or the state itself. In other words, in certain spheres of militant theory and art practice, there emerged coterminous rejections of the museum and the organizational forms characteristic of previous cycles of struggle.
The task now is to continue developing strategies and tactics “inside” and “outside” of the museum to unravel its connections to global systems of violence; to do this means to cease being precious about our movements or our institutions, and to acknowledge that to abolish capitalism, the police, and settler colonialism may also mean to abolish the foundational terms of the modern museum as such—what has historically been a receptacle for the spoils of colonial looting on the one hand and a vehicle for legitimizing nationalist prestige on the other. That said, if we do in fact acknowledge that the boundary between the street and the museum (or the political party, the supermarket, the airport) is a false one, then on the level of strategy, we can also ask: when is it better to look out and see the street and when better to maintain the illusory spaces of (aesthetic) autonomy? How to enter or exit the spaces and functions of the institution and act in such a way that cannot be recuperated, or wherein the recuperation is beneficial to abolition and struggle?
Over the last few months, we have been thinking with comrades and friends about similar questions. In solidarity with the Strike MoMA initiative, the ten week pop-up de-occupation taking place across from the museum, and MoMA workers, we would like to share the three lines of inquiry for collective research that we have been following (the results of which will be published as individual pamphlets in the coming months).
Inside and Outside, an Infrastructural Critique
In some recent organizing efforts targeting cultural institutions for their material connections to the carceral and surveillance apparatuses, to displacement, to occupation and (neo)colonial violence, an important characteristic has been the involvement of organizers and militants from outside the realms of cultural production. Contrary to efforts in the past, many of these recent struggles have attempted to delegitimize the boundaries between ostensibly autonomous art and other forms of waged or unwaged labor and their incumbent forms of exploitation, even as they strategically abide by them when necessary. With that in mind, where can we isolate spaces conducive to collectivity, and do they need to respect the lines sketched by power and its opposition? How can groups activate the MTL+ collective’s call for an “arts of escalation” in and out of those realms considered part of the art system?
Value and the Destituent Potential of the Human Strike
Could Mario Tronti’s claim that the working class is simultaneously the articulation and dissolution of capital be rephrased for thinking cultural production and cultural workers, even as art production is falsely considered to be an exceptional form of work? Insofar as value remains a fundamental social relation, ever efficient at recuperating activity, it gives the lie to the relative autonomy of the aesthetic as a privileged type of activity under capital. From what we have seen thus far, the various attempts to reappropriate its institutions have shown themselves to be short-lived at best, reactionary at worst. If that’s the case, then the question would be what to do with that social relation, value, and how to abolish it?
Looting (convened by Vicky Osterweil)
Of the various images from Nanni Balestrini’s reconstruction of NYC and Italy in 1977, it is the scene of a fifty year-old woman who, upon entering a store, announces that “today she shops for free” that remains especially dear to us; if second only to the poem’s autonomist refrain: “we’re going to take what we want and what we want is what we need.” Balestrini’s poetic dictum of want and need was renewed during the George Floyd Rebellions of last summer. In a video from an “autonomous zone” in Minneapolis, someone says: “people just came and shopped for free.” No longer valuable given their subtraction from exchange, and no longer useful vis-a-vis the requirements of the production process, commodities are devalorized and their functions recomposed. In the spheres of art’s custodianship especially, the value of art has historically been produced through the colonial looting and violence of Western capital. How then, to loot back without enshrining art’s value? If only to prove the anarchist dictum that property is in fact, and has always been, theft—and though the ideologies of modern art have attended to art’s exceptionality to/in capitalism—the foundations of modern art in Indigenous and working class dispossession make that exceptionality seem overstated at best. Given this historical context, could we say that looting is the theft of property that no longer presupposes the property-form?
The legacy of Adorno’s claim to the problematic nature of the autonomy of art finds echoes in the neoliberal art world today, one that agrees with critical positions so long as they are articulated mimetically.
In his 2018 remarks, director of the Whitney Museum Adam Weinberg defended (former) vice chair of the board Warren Kanders, notwithstanding his career as an investor and weapons manufacturer, as follows: “Even as we are idealistic and missionary in our belief in artists ... the Whitney is first and foremost a museum. It cannot right all the ills of an unjust world, nor is that its role. Yet, I contend that the Whitney has a critical and urgent part to play in making sure that unheard and unwanted voices are recognized.” (The italics are ours) Today, Glenn Lowry employs a similar counterinsurgent tactic to discredit Strike MoMA, pointing to the museum’s commitments to “equity, diversity, and inclusion.”
The irony of this PR strategy—to open MoMA’s archives and wallets to historically oppressed and marginalized communities from whose exploitation they have also profited—is not lost on us. If only for the simple fact that the museum’s staff is already diverse, though many of those workers of color are concentrated in security, sanitation, and human resources. MoMA appears to be making the preparations necessary for the terms and stakes of this confrontation, wherein talks of diversity are but one element in a strategy of counter-insurgency. Seeing that decolonization is not a discourse on the universal, and that there is little point in engaging in a debate with MoMA’s current stewards, we détourn Marx and Engels in reply:
You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend. Just as you view the disappearance of class property as the disappearance of aesthetic production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is, for you, identical with the disappearance of all culture. What you call culture is simply the place where power always finds accomplices."
