So after another essay, an exam and a trip to New York I return enriched and culturally saturated. My increased freedom post-New York has allowed time for more exhibitions in London and having visited Gabriel Orozco at Tate Modern, Susan Hiller at Tate Britain, British Art Show 7 at the Hayward as well as Modern British Sculpture at the RA my quota of block-busters is full to the brim, and my wallet empty. Even with student concession (and a boyfriend with a Tate staff card) the entry fee to these exhibitions is steep, with Susan the most pricey at £12. I am not going to launch into a scathing rant about this but I think it is a point worth making especially in consideration of my current area of research; expanded art practices.
Since Joseph Kosuth's 'MoMA Annual Pass', a forged replica of the MoMA entry card, stamped with an official-looking Art Worker's Coalition logo, institutional critique has been at the fore front of activist-art practice. The Art Worker's Coalition (AWC) set-up in 1969 began with an open meeting in which artists, writers, critics, museum-employers (anybody who worked in the arts sector) was invited to go along an air their grievances. There was little consensus and to give a short history the group had dissolved in alternative, varied activist practices by 1971. (For a more complete history see Francis Frascina's 'Art Politics and Dissent'). However Kosuth's work, in all its conceptual brilliance parallels a very current predicament. The increasing prices of institutions' 'special exhibitions' in London and the general admission fee in American museums are creating specific social groups of viewers. Ok, so admission fees are not extortionate and necessary, in the current situation of arts funding, but the worrying corollary of this pressured situation is an increase in fees beyond the affordable. Ironically the threat is most evident for those trying to get into the art sector struggling on a part-time wage in the capital to support unpaid internships.
Although Kosuth's card has passed into the institution that it sought to critique, the AWC's brand of collectivity is becoming a model for new art practice. The expanded art practices I cite as my current area of research include collectivity, along with activist art, relational aesthetics, social art and littoral art. These methods of working, outside the institution, interacting in the everyday find their precedent even further back than the AWC, in the Art Worker's Guild and in the Women's Suffrage (although the model is in reverse; politics infringes on art through iconoclasm). The dynamics of interaction between the ever-separated models of art and politics, autonomy and heteronomy, aesthetics and ethics is fought out in these groups. The model of group practice, unlike Kosuth's card, will not be folded down into the museum and although we may register the limits of success of certain groups the resilience of the group, of the collective is surely important.
