March is a journal of art & strategy.

Counter-Infrastructures, part 1

Sarrita Hunn

December 2024

The Counter-Infrastructures: Art & Activism symposium, convened last December at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) in Dublin, Ireland, gathered together a cohort of international practitioners and theorists to consider the role of “counter-infrastructures” in supporting long-term, meaningful, and resilient activist art practices. Through a combination of theoretical discussions and practical workshops organized around three infrastructural frameworks — the curriculum, the archive, and the institution — the symposium asked: How can artistic strategies help us to develop durable and meaningful infrastructures that support social formations beyond the timescales of the immediate moment, project timeline, or crisis?

Laboratory for Insurrectionary Imagination, Institute of Cultural Resistance workshop at Counter-Infrastructures: Art & Activism symposium, NCAD, Dublin, Ireland, December 2023.

For me, at least, a discussion concerning counter-infrastructures implies an emphasis on praxis; which is to say, to consider questions not only in theory but also in a tangible practice. Therefore, in the spirit of the symposium itself, I would like to take a practical approach to the topic by mapping out the practices of those involved, with an emphasis on additional references and further reading in order to form a kind of counter-infrastructures reader.

Counter-Cultures / Social Practices

As one of my graduate school professors, Larry Sultan, was known to say: Art history begins with you. And so, to start from my own positionality, I come to the topic of counter-infrastructures with a specifically American West Coast sensibility. After living in downtown Oakland during my first year of graduate school, I moved to San Francisco at the bottom of the first dot-com bust in 2002. For context, my third of our total rent still cost more than an entire comparable apartment in my hometown in Missouri, Netflix still actually sent DVDs in the mail, and the first Web 2.0 conference (not to mention YouTube and Twitter) wouldn’t happen for another couple of years. Beyond the “countercultural” history-turned California Ideology for which the Bay Area is known, I attended California College of the Arts (CCA) at a pivotal moment marked not only literally by a name change from California College of Arts and Crafts in 2003,1 but also by the start of both the Curatorial Practices MA degree and the Social Practices program within the MFA Fine Arts degree.

After graduating from the MFA Fine Arts (Painting/Drawing) program in 2004, I worked closely with the Oakland-based socially engaged artist Ted Purves through my job in graduate admissions to help recruit an inaugural class for “the nation’s first Social Practice program.”2 At the time, Purves was working with his partner Susanne Cockrell (under the rubric of Fieldfaring) on Temescal Amity Works, a project centered around fruit grown in the community backyards of their East Bay Temescal neighborhood. However, as Jordan Kantor wrote for Artforum on Purves’s untimely death in 2017, “in the context of art history and theory, Ted Purves will likely be best remembered for the anthology of texts he edited on relational art practices.”3 First published in 2005, and later revised and expanded, the discussions gathered in What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art survey “artistic productions that both model and occupy the various forms of exchange within contemporary society”4 with a focus on the promises and pitfalls of “generosity” within the cultural field — a sometimes contentious discussion that ultimately formed the backdrop for my own increasingly collaborative practice. As Kate Fowle and Lars Bang Larsen write in their essay “Lunch Hour: Art, Community, Administrated Space, and Unproductive Activity” in What We Want is Free:

Art production and acts of generosity are fundamentally generative, but nonlinear, expenditures of time and resources. In this way they contradict the accepted function of production and utility that are associated with meeting society’s basic needs, or the process of its expansion. Each could therefore be seen as potential processes of liberation from the inevitable progress of production and, consequently, as associated with an element of speculation or risk. Having undetermined, or at least non-quantifiable, attributes that bear no relation to the functional development of a community, they create a space in which “irrational” behavior is possible. Arguably, it is around this kind of expenditure or value system that culture is defined, arising out of the surplus or excess generated by society. . . . [However, following the privatization of culture by the] church, state, or king . . . art was enlisted to endow glory and give an impression of generosity in hierarchical terms. The ruling classes utilized the arts to maintain their hegemony, and as a result there was mutual progression towards a more benign tone. Following this, it is easy to see how the notion of generosity became associated with colonial power or the privilege of nobility, and how spectacles became ways to control rather than inspire community.5

Not coincidentally, perhaps, it was many students in the newly launched Curatorial Practices MA program, developed by founding chair Kate Fowle, who deeply engaged these ideas in their multifaceted and hyphenated practices. Unfortunately, many of these examples have been lost with time, but a 2007 interview by the Vancouver-based publishing organization Fillip with CCA curatorial alumnus Joseph del Pesco on the occasion of his Collective Foundation exhibition (curated with the artist Scott Oliver) at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts provides a time capsule overview of del Pesco’s prolific practice, which was not only particularly inspiring for me and many others but evolved and manifested in various forms that continued for many years.6

The Collective Foundation originally began with Shotgun Review, a short-form exhibition review platform built on the then-recently developed content management system used to make multi-author blogs (i.e., WordPress). In its first two years, over 150 reviews were written by 60 individuals (both established and new critics alike), and the first 100 were chosen for the print-on-demand publication 100 Shotgun Reviews (2007). A few years later, Patricia Maloney integrated Shotgun Reviews (alongside Happenstand, Bad At Sports, and later Daily Serving) into founding Art Practical as a distinctly collaborative publication effort that continued until 2020. However, it was the re-granting programs that the Collective Foundation developed that were perhaps the most innovative. In the interview, del Pesco explains:

As included in the Collective Foundation statements, Georges Bataille notes that it’s how a society uses its surplus that defines its culture. There’s plenty of surplus available, so it’s just a matter of figuring out how to transform it into a useful resource as quickly and painlessly as possible. We chose to start out by looking at the surplus of the art community. For example, the first grant we awarded leveraged the surplus server space of a web hosting account. Most new accounts come with several gigs more space than any one artist needs for a website . . . so we hosted five artists on the Collective Foundation server (where they retain their previous domain names) and instead of paying their yearly fee directly to an Internet company, we asked them to pay it into a fund. These artists then became the jurors for a $500 grant. The artist who won the grant, Amy Balkin, typically visualizes and contextualizes her practice on the Web, so it ended up having a topical reciprocity. She actually used the grant to support her trip to the Arctic in September of this year, where she developed research for projects around climate change.7

Another $500 grant was developed by “collecting surplus publications from Bay Area art spaces to form a library of over one hundred art books and exhibition catalogs” that were then sold to the Institute of Contemporary Art San Jose, while another grant was developed around collective playlists with the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.8 del Pesco continues:

Stepping back to look at the mechanisms involved in these grants, it’s apparent that they involve several kinds of distribution . . . their structure uses neither of the default ways of raising capital in the art world: grants received from foundations (or other granting bodies) by nonprofits and the sale of art objects within the existing market. In addition to opening up a conversation to a third funding option, the grants are also intended to produce mutual benefit rather than loss and gain (i.e., artists pay into a fund, but they receive Web-hosting services in exchange; galleries donate books but they also directly support artists and distribute their history, both part of their general mission).9

In the years that have passed since that formative time in the Bay Area, some national attempts at discussing and developing strategies around a “third” option in the United States have come and gone. Inspired by the open structure of Shotgun Reviews, I co-founded Temporary Art Review (with James McAnally) in 2011 with a national network of volunteer contributors aimed at decentralizing these conversations around contemporary practice by emphasizing the breadth of projects taking place outside of traditional art centers. We published essays, reviews, interviews, and profiles of various “alternative” spaces and projects (first in the US and then internationally), and in 2014 we began experimenting with an “anti-profit” model which used a bartering system based on ad space as currency. In 2015, we also began experimenting with a collective review structure by organizing a “social response” to the Hand-in-Glove 2015 convening (founded by Threewalls in Chicago in 2011), which launched the Common Field network — a formal nonprofit that aimed to connect, support, and advocate for the artist-centered field until its sunsetting in 2022.

Collectivism

When I was honored to be invited to the Counter-Infrastructures symposium by convening artist Tom O’Dea in Dublin last year, I was deeply struck by the parallels to the Bay Area two decades ago. For starters, the event was organized in concert with a newly founded MA/MFA in Art and Social Action at NCAD, “focused on trans-disciplinary practice and thinking that privileges collaborative approaches to production and creative approaches to social transformation, emphasizing the capacity of arts practice to imagine our world differently.”10 At the same time, the city of Dublin itself has been going through a radical economic transformation fueled by the rise of tech companies that call the city, and increasingly the greater region, their European home. I wondered: Could this same combination be a mere coincidence?

Perhaps the final question in the interview with Joseph del Pesco mentioned earlier regarding collective practices provides a clue. To answer, del Pesco quotes from the chapter “The Production of Social Space as Artwork” in Collectivism after Modernism (2007) by the late curator Okwui Enwezor, who was the Dean of the San Francisco Art Institute at the time. Here, I have expanded the original quote (in italics) to give broader context:

While collectivity portends a welcome expansion of the critical regimes of the current contemporary art context that has been under the pernicious sway of money, a speculative art market, and conservative politics to make common cause with its counterintuitive positionality and therefore avoid participation in the cooption and appropriation of its criticality, it is important to connect collectivity today to its historical genealogy. This may mean going as far back as the Paris Commune of the 1860s, the socialist collectives of the Russian Revolution in 1917, the subversive developments of Dada, the radical interventions of “neo-avant-garde” movements such as the Situationist International, and activist-based practices connected to issues of class, gender, and race. The nature of collectivity extends also into the political horizon constructed by the emancipatory projects of the liberation movements of the mid-twentieth century. They are registered today within the strategies of anti-globalization movements.

If we look back historically, collectives tend to emerge during periods of crisis, in moments of social upheaval and political uncertainty within society. Such crises often force reappraisals of conditions of production, re-evaluation of the nature of artistic work, and reconfiguration of the position of the artist in relation to economic, social, and political institutions. There are two types of collective formations and collaborative practices that are important for this discussion. The first type can be summarized as possessing a structured modus vivendi based on permanent, fixed groupings of practitioners working over a sustained period. In such collectives, authorship represents the expression of the group rather than that of the individual artist. The second type of collective tends to emphasize a flexible, nonpermanent course of affiliation, privileging collaboration on a project basis rather than on a permanent alliance. This type of collective formation can be designated as networked collectives. Such networks are far more prevalent today due to radical advances in communication technologies and globalization.11

Considering this increasing role of “communication technologies and globalization” in shaping our collective activities and the changing role “of the artist in relation to economic, social, and political institutions,” it is probably also not a coincidence that Tom O’Dea’s own practice has mechanical engineering roots in computational data and is focused on the relationship between technology and society. His interests in the political implications of knowledge production and organization in contemporary society may be easily demonstrated by one of his working monikers, Department of Embedded Knowledge, which attempts to formally recognize the relationship between lived experience and administration in the city of Dublin. More recently, his work has focused on both analog and digital radio transmission through collaborative projects such as Tírdreacha/Krajobrazy/Landschaften/مناظر الطبیعة and 2 Channel Land (with Frank Sweeney). Beyond his position as a lecturer in Sculpture and Expanded Practice at NCAD, O’Dea also co-chairs the Network Ecologies research theme at CONNECT – Ireland’s SFI Centre for Future Networks at Trinity College, is a member of the artist-research Orthogonal Methods Group (OMG), and is one of the organizers of the Dublin Art and Technology Association (DATA). A recent paper co-authored by O’Dea, “The Arts Within Enterprise,”  summarizes:

The dynamic and entangled relationship between art and technology has inevitably reflected major changes over time in the roles and status of artists, scientists, technicians and industrialists. In earlier periods and cultures in which art has served as the primary medium of communication for religion or state power, for example, technologies have in turn served the purposes of the arts. At times when the lines between artists and scientists have been more blurred and exerted a stronger mutual influence on technological developments, the results have often been spectacular — seeming almost to shape the ethos of whole civilisations. With the growing division of labor and specialization of disciplines throughout modernity, however, artists and scientists have come to pursue their professions in increasingly separate worlds.

This disconnection between the spheres of artists and technologists and producers became especially strong from the late nineteenth century onward as power shifted still further in favor of capital and industry. And while artists responded in myriad ways to industrialisation, with some celebrating and others critiquing — or even “romantically” rejecting — the technologies driving this revolution, the distance between artists and scientists has only widened ever since.12

One thing we have learned from the expansive wealth of Silicon Valley is that, unlike their historical predecessors from the Renaissance to Industrialization, the Information Age and its resulting wealth have not led to an overall parallel boom in funding for the arts and humanities.13 Certainly, this “growing division” is just one of many developing “crises,” but the question remains whether “culture is defined” by this perceived scarcity or by “the surplus or excess generated by society” moving forward.

Rukmini Kelkar. Notes taken during the Counter-Infrastructures: Art & Activism symposium, NCAD, Dublin, Ireland, December 2023.

Constitutive Power / Instituent Practices

While experimental institutional practices continued to develop elsewhere over the last couple of decades, a very particular conversation was happening in Europe in relation to the phenomenon of New Institutionalism as the social turn on that continent. My entry point into this discussion was through attending Vessel’s International Curatorial Workshop (ICW) in Bari, Italy, in August 2017, which was developed “around the notion of para-institution and how the process of instituting from a grass-root perspective challenges, complies with, and/or imitates traditional institutional forms.”14 To do this, Vessel looked to Gerald Raunig’s concept of “instituent practices.” As discussed in Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique (2009), Raunig’s premise is “that a new ‘phase’ of institutional critique will now emerge, following the two previous ‘phases’ — the first beginning in the late 1960s, the second in the late 1980s.”15 This new phase is defined in the publication’s preface:

Deriving from Antonio Negri’s concept of “constituent power”, understood as a permanent process of constitution, instituent practices thwart the logics of institutionalization; they invent new forms of instituting and continuously link these instituting events. Against this background, the concept of “instituent practices” marks the site of a productive tension between a new articulation of critique and the attempt to arrive at a notion of “instituting” after traditional understandings of institutions have begun to break down and mutate. When we speak of an “instituent practice”, this actualization of the future in a present becoming is not the opposite of institution in the way that utopia, for instance, is the opposite of bad reality. Nor is it to be understood simply in the way that Antonio Negri’s concept pair “constituent power/constituted power” is conceptualized, necessarily in relation to being instituted or constituted power. Rather, “instituent practice” as a process and concatenation of instituent events means an absolute concept exceeding mere opposition to institutions: it does not oppose the institution, but it does flee from institutionalization and structuralization.16

Building on the discussions we had during Vessel’s gathering, I worked closely with fellow participants over the course of fall 2017 and spring 2018 to publish an extended Instituent Practices feature on Temporary Art Review, which aimed to address the legacy of institutional critique and consider “the ways in which institutional thinking incubating in Europe and embodied practices in the United States could be brought into productive tension.”17 A few years later, James McAnally and I were invited by the Institutions as a Way of Life research group at the Critical Media Lab IXDM/FHNW in Basel, Switzerland to develop an informal reader to consider what comes after “instituent practices.”18 The resulting publication, From New Institutionalism to New Constitutions: Annotating Instituent Practices, not only anthologized our editorial thinking behind Temporary Art Review’s active publishing period between March 2011 and 2019, but marked our own transition to this current “journal of art & strategy.” The first essay, “On Care and Parrhesia,” by ICW 2017 participant Lucy Lopez, succinctly summarizes this inquiry:

Can a practice of instituting also be a practice of care? In his paper “Instituent Practices: Fleeing, Instituting, Transforming,” Gerald Raunig discusses the potential of “instituent practices” as a process of ongoing instituting, rather than a process of gradually “becoming institution in the sense of constituted power.”19 He describes the process as one of exodus — not in terms of withdrawal from the institution, but rather through “betraying the rules of the game.” This entails a departure from the two previous iterations of Institutional Critique by drawing something from each: working from a position of ongoing self-questioning (not imagining an artificial distance from the institution), but also not fixating on complicity within it. In his development of this theory, Raunig draws on Foucault’s writing on parrhesia (developed in “The Courage of Truth” lectures at the College de France from 1983–84) as a form of uncompromising truth-telling: to practice parrhesia is to speak frankly from a position of exposed vulnerability, to speak truth to power and in doing so to practice a kind of radical care of the self.20

During the intervening years, Vessel continued their own inquiries, which I invited them to reflect on for the Publishing As Protocol feature I organized for MARCH in 2022. Their introductory essay, “Vessel: A Meridian Practice,” transcribed from a lecture given by founding members Viviana Checchia and Anna Santomauro on July 8, 2021 with the Innovative Training Network FEINART (The Future of European Independent Art Spaces in a Period of Socially Engaged Art), outlines Vessel’s collective, socially engaged curatorial practice. Of particular note for our current discussion is a reflection by Claire Louise Staunton on her participation in Giant Step, “a multi-year program organized by Vessel from 2011 to 2012 that aimed to develop the concept of an ‘ideal’ institution, which entails the necessities of supporting and developing culture and creating critical dialogue,” alongside the resulting publication, Giant Step: reflections on institutional critique (2012/2013). As summarized by Rachel Pafe in her introductory essay, “What is considered a Giant Step?”:

Giant Step has its theoretical roots in the historical legacy of institutional critique. While it is helpful to look at these artistic actions that began in the early 1960s, several distinguishing factors are important to note. The 1990s experienced the emergence of relational and socially engaged practices, which made their way into mainstream theoretical and social networks within contemporary art. At the same time, urban regeneration efforts often relied on cultural components, which created a large question mark about the relationship of these practices and commercial production. Lastly, the 1990s saw the start of the now omnipresent biennale, which has resulted in a generation of itinerant art practitioners. These factors necessitate a different approach from early institutional reform efforts; they point away from early artists criticizing the institution and its structures, and towards institutional participation in self-reflexivity and reform. The resulting globalized culture formed institutional networks that allow marginal spaces to work together to realize improved methods of connecting, collaborating and programming.21

Permaculture

Considering this deeply overlapping history, I was excited to hear that Viviana Checchia was recently appointed the new director of the Void Art Centre in Derry, Northern Ireland and was available to join us for the introductory panel discussion at the Counter-Infrastructures symposium. While working with the MA/MFA students to execute a color-coded note-taking and question-gathering technique she learned from working with Fucking Good Art, Checchia began her talk by asking: Counter to what?

Since founding Vessel in 2011, Checchia has largely been focused on countering the exhibition format, which for her has involved looking at whatever structures are already there and then asking: How can I do otherwise? She first looked at the rise of apartment galleries in Russia in the 1990s as a way to inverse the tendency toward hegemonic dynamics and create “alternative” infrastructures in oppressive situations.22 While this meant initially focusing on how to better support politically and socially engaged practice, the ultimate goal was to counter the idea of subaltern knowledge. For Vessel, this meant working with interdisciplinary practitioners in the Puglia region of Southern Italy to experiment with different formats integrating food, tourism, sports, and so forth, in order to create a more horizontal local understanding, alongside bringing in international practitioners (through the International Curatorial Workshops in particular) to experiment with formats coming from other disciplines. This practice was then carried over into her later work as Public Engagement Curator at the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, and is now being developed in Derry at Void Art Centre with a focus on the pillars of (social) permaculture: healthcare, people care, and fair share. In a 2022 talk for the JeJu Biennale, Checchia explained:

I am talking about permaculture since I am currently applying permaculture principles even more to my ongoing curatorial practice. I always engage with the site or the institutional circumstance at my disposal by observing and interacting with what already exists, what is there. I then try to catch and store the energy generated by the situation and to develop from there. I do it slowly, conscious of my non-infinite energy and resources. If possible, I tend to acquire renewable resources and to produce as little waste as possible. I design from patterns, create adaptable formulas, and then look after the specificities emerging from the details. I integrate all parties involved (colleagues, participants, temporary users) rather than segregating them. My solutions are small and slow. They are soft adaptations, sometimes imperceptible. I value diversity and actively look for it. I use the edges more than the mainstream and value the marginal. My response to change(s) is creative and propositive: things can always be done otherwise.23

Rukmini Kelkar. Notes taken during the Counter-Infrastructures: Art & Activism symposium, NCAD, Dublin, Ireland, December 2023.

Counter-Power

From this historical juncture then, what exactly do we mean by Counter-Infrastructures? In 2016, while still working under our previous publication Temporary Art Review in collaboration with Common Field, we commissioned the curator Joshua Simon, then director of Museums of Bat-Yam (MoBy) in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, to attempt to answer this very question.24 His resulting essay, “The Dual Power of Arts Organizations,” also addresses the “widening” gap between arts and technology as a contributing factor but, like Kate Fowle and Lars Bang Larsen, he places it in the larger political context of privatization:

Technological and legal devices monopolize access by territorializing even immaterial things to the extent that they behave like fenced land. The realities of our digitized present confront us again and again with different practices of accumulation by dispossession. As Fredric Jameson put it: “Postmodern politics is essentially a matter of land grabs on a local as well as a global scale. Whether you think of the question of Palestine, the settlements and the camps; or of the politics of raw materials and extractions; whether you think of ecology and the rain-forests for example; or the problems of federalism, citizenship and immigration; or whether it’s a question of gentrification in the great cities as well as favelas and townships, and of course the movement of the landless — today everything is about land.”25

In the face of this reality, Simon turns again to American literary critic and philosopher Fredric Jameson, who revisited Lenin’s idea of dual power (also called counter-power) in An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army (2016):

In Lenin’s short essay [“The Dual Power,” written] in the transitional days of the spring of 1917, prior to the victory of the revolution, he describes a form of feedback sovereignty in which the then provisional government (pre-Bolshevik) and the network of already existing soviets (workers and soldiers councils) cooperate. Jameson compares this to the Black Panthers whose organization included daily services (food kitchens, garbage collections, health care, water inspection, etc.). . . . Dual power includes a centralized confrontational strategy together with a decentralized practice of social organizing in communities. These operate side by side as parts of the same project. Dual power therefore generates a shadow state that takes care of the people and makes them realize they can do away with the current state. Alongside a direct political assault on the current regime, this network of dual power makes it wither away. . . . Therefore, dual power could be a useful reference for us when we come to discuss the ways we can organize ourselves. Maybe not for art initiatives to gain political domination (yet), but at least to achieve some form of sustainable infrastructural networks.26

Interestingly, we can now look to the work of the Indonesia-based collective ruangrupa, particularly in their role as artistic directors of documenta fifteen, “with that journey of ours called lumbung,” to see how this might start to manifest on a larger scale. As Karen van den Berg writes in “Fragile Infrastructures for an Art of Conviviality: Learning from documenta fifteen” for FIELD: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism in Fall 2023:

There have been few other major exhibitions in recent years that have prompted such intense fundamental debates on the social role of art as documenta fifteen curated by the Indonesian collective ruangrupa . . . The project-initiated discussions about morality within the art world, artistic autonomy and the limits of artistic freedom, as well as the suitability of existing institutional infrastructures for artistic practices that deviate from those which prevail in Euro-American art history. Documenta fifteen, more than any other biennial or major contemporary exhibition before it, provided an occasion to re-consider the possibility or impossibility of a de-colonized “art world,” and the viability of the concept of the world art exhibition. Remarkably, both its leading defenders and those highly critical of the exhibition, noted that after this documenta, the art world can no longer simply persist with the same set of theories and hegemonic institutional structures. […] It was already clear in the build-up to this documenta that collectives from the Global South would not only show works that dealt with the consequences of colonial rule, they would also determine the point of view, and alter the operating system of the institutional art world. The fact that the so-called global art world with its existing infrastructures was inadequately prepared for the consequences and contradictions that this entailed, and that there is still a long way to go in terms of decolonization, was made abundantly clear by this documenta edition.27

For van den Berg, documenta fifteen was not only about “real points of contention in the postcolonialism debate, such as the relationship between anti-Semitism and racism” but importantly “the development of an alternative operating system for the arts.” In an interview published by MARCH early last year, farid rakun (of ruangrupa) explains:

From the outset, we asked the people we worked with how they could use this opportunity to be part of documenta to sustain their practice. Different answers came up, but it’s still documenta . . . the exhibition-making logic is still prevailing. […] Within that context, we forced ourselves to think about documenta as a bank of resources. We also asked [documenta] to think about themselves that way. It was not easy. On paper, conceptually, of course, it’s nice and sunny, but then, when it comes to the practice of this idea . . . I think we knew that it was going to be a challenge. I think one of the most important lessons for us is that this practice relies on an almost daily basis of struggle and negotiation. In other words, ruangrupa is running with a particular operating system while others are running with different operating systems. So, what can be done? I don’t think it’s going to happen that often — these different operating systems being forced to clash — even after documenta fifteen, but we think it’s very valuable to do it.28

This essay continues in Counter-Infrastructures, part 2.

Footnotes

  1. “‘From the beginning the unity of arts and crafts was the most important principle at C.C.A., just like it would be at the Bauhaus, which was established 12 years later,’ said Peter Selz, professor emeritus of art history at the University of California, Berkeley.” Christopher Hall, “Where ‘Art’ Has Met ‘Craft’ for 100 Years,” New York Times, November 11, 2007. [link]
  2. Around the same time, CCA alumni Harrell Fletcher founded a similar program at Portland State University that currently claims to be “the oldest running Social Practice MFA program in the world.”
  3. Jordan Kantor, “Ted Purves (1964–2017),” Artforum, September 25, 2017. [link]
  4. Ted Purves and Shane Azlan Selzer, eds., What We Want Is Free: Critical Exchanges in Recent Art, 2nd. ed. (Suny Press, 2014), back cover.
  5.  Kate Fowle and Lars Bang Larsen, “Lunch Hour: Art, Community, Administrated Space, and Unproductive Activity,” in What We Want is Free, 39–40.
  6. Joseph del Pesco, “From the Hip,” Fillip 7 (Winter 2008), https://fillip.ca/content/from-the-hip.
  7. del Pesco, “From the Hip.”
  8. While the intent of these grants was more of an experimental model than a long-term structure, a $1000 Travel Grant For A Bay Area Artist was developed with The Present Group that continued in various forms for ten more years.
  9. del Pesco, “From the Hip.”
  10. “MA/MFA in Art and Social Action,” NCAD, accessed December 26, 2024. [link]
  11. Okwui Enwezor, “The Production of Social Space as Artwork,” in Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945, ed. Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 224–225.
  12. Fiona McDermott et al, eds., The Arts Within Enterprise: A guidebook supporting artists’ critical engagement with enterprises for a more inclusive digital transformation, December 2023, DOI:10.13140/RG.2.2.29727.12961.
  13. See, for example, Hua Hsu, “How Can We Pay for Creativity in the Digital Age?,” New Yorker, September 7, 2020 [link]; and Ellen Loots et al, “New forms of finance and funding in the cultural and creative industries,” Journal of Cultural Economics 46 (2022): 205–230. [link]
  14. “ICW 2017,” Vessel, last modified July 21, 2017. [link]
  15. Gerald Raunig, “Instituent Practices: Fleeing, Instituting, Transforming,” trans. Aileen Derieg, Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique, ed. Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (May Fly, 2009), 3.
  16. Raunig and Ray, eds., Art and Contemporary Critical Practice, xvii.
  17. Sarrita Hunn and James McAnally, eds., From New Institutionalism to New Constitutions: Annotating Instituent Practices (Institutions as a Way of Life, 2020), 1. Available at: link.
  18. Another reader in this series, “Unbuilding Infrastructures,” edited by fellow ICW 2017 participant Tom Clark (with Susannah Haslam), builds on Jack Halberstam’s text “Unbuilding Gender: Trans* Anarchitectures In and Beyond the Work of Gordon Matta-Clark” to consider “unbuilding” as “a tool for dis-arranging what a structure stands for and stands as.”
  19. Emphasis added by the author. Gerald Raunig, “Fleeing, Instituting, Transforming,” transversal texts, trans. Aileen Derieg, January 2006. [link]
  20. Lucy Lopez, “On Care and Parrhesia,” Temporary Art Review, October 12, 2017. [link]
  21. Rachel Pafe, “What is considered a Giant Step?,” Giant Step: Reflections on Institutional Critique, ed. Jerlyn Marie Jareunpoon-Phillips, Vlad Morariu, Rachel Pafe, and Francesco Scasciamacchia (Vessel, 2012/2013), 9–10. See also Claire Doherty, “The Institution is Dead! Long Live the Institution! Contemporary Art and New Institutionalism,” Engage Journal 15 (2004): 1–9. [link]
  22. I am reminded here of a similar influential phenomenon that happened in Chicago in the 1990s/2000s. This history has been partially documented in the Chicago Social Practice History Series, four books published by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with the University of Chicago Press. Of particular note for this discussion is Support Networks by Abigail Satinsky (2014). See also https://midwestcompass.org/deep-routes/.
  23. Viviana Checchia, “ENG-3rd JEJU Biennale 2022 Academic Program International Curator Talk,”  November 22, 2022, posted by 제주도립미술관, YouTube, 1:38:00. [link]
  24. This essay was commissioned for Field Perspectives, a co-publishing initiative with The Miami Rail, Temporary Art Review, and Common Field for the 2016 Common Field Convening.
  25. Joshua Simon, “The Dual Power of Arts Organizations,” Temporary Art Review, October 14, 2016, link, quoting Fredric Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” New Left Review 92 (March–April 2015): 130–131.
  26. Simon, “The Dual Power of Arts Organizations,” referencing Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “The Dual Power,” in Lenin Collected Works (Progress Publishers, 1964), Volume 24, 38–41, first published in Pravda 28, April 9, 1917. See also link.
  27. Karen van den Berg, “Fragile Infrastructures for an Art of Conviviality: Learning from documenta fifteen,” FIELD 25 (Fall 2023). [link] See also Hito Steyerl, “Context is Everything, Except When It Comes to Germany,” &&&, June 4, 2022 [link]; and Gregory Sholette, “A short and incomplete history of ‘bad’ curating as collective resistance,” e-flux, September 21, 2022. [link]
  28. James McAnallly and farid rakun, “Triennials Out of Time: ruangrupa and documenta fifteen,” MARCH, February 2023. [link]

Sarrita Hunn is an interdisciplinary artist, editor, curator, and web developer whose often collaborative practice focuses on the culturally, socially, and politically transformative potential of artist-centered activity. She is a Founder and Editor of MARCH: a journal of art & strategy; Assistant Director of Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art; and in 2021 a Curator for Activist Neuroaesthetics, a festival of events celebrating the 25-year anniversary of artbrain.org.