From institutional critique to infrastructural critique?

In the field of contemporary art, it might have been thought that the artists associated with institutional critique (APG, Asher, Broodthaers, Buren, D’Arcangelo, Haacke, Knight, Laderman Ukeles, Piper, Rosler, Smithson, etc.) followed by those of the so-called second generation (Aareen, Armaly, Eichhorn, Fraser, Green, Guerrilla Girls, Wilson, Group Material, Thomas, etc.) had definitively settled the institutional question. By challenging the art institution – the museum, the art centre, the art magazine, the commercial gallery,… – these artists seemed to have completed a radical introspective examination. This was without taking into account the belated realisation of a deficit that still afflicts most artistic approaches: the realisation that artistic autonomy, though hard-won in the course of modernity, was suffering from a blind spot. For the next generation, it was no longer “just” a matter of exposing ideological structures and power relations, pushing back the restrictions on emancipation imposed by the institution, or making room for the identities of the formerly colonised. It was still necessary to examine the reductionism and privilege of the foundation that supported these critical gestures and actions: the autonomy  of the artistic field itself. In other words, the foundation that constituted this autonomy was historically, ideologically and racially situated.

What do we do once the statues have been toppled and the pedestals have lost their usefulness? Recreating a horizon beyond the institution and its critique and decentring would require recognising the infrastructural nature of the institution and therefore of its participation in a wider network.

As the 90s drew to a close, it was as if the artist, having identified the flaw in a dysfunctional site, had realised that he had not been the ingenious repairer, still imbued with tactical know-how, but that he had discovered himself to be a cog, or even the lubricating oil, pre-programmed by the system. Against all expectations, the artist, although an operator within the institution, found himself almost de-subjectivised. Propelled, in spite of himself, into becoming an ever more advanced automaton , he was reduced to a corrective impulse. He thought he was making history through the radical nature of his work. But in the end, was his role nothing more than to regulate and reproduce one of the infrastructures of the system, while at the same time providing the institution with a critical conscience?  The latter was always at liberty to hide behind its role as guardian and to reiterate the terms of its conservation mission in order to avoid any structural transformation.

Wasn’t the artist then rediscovering himself as a proletarian in the sense understood by the philosopher Gilbert Simondon? For Simondon, the proletarian is de-individualised by the machine that has grammatised and automated his knowledge. Proletarianisation affects not just the worker, but everyone who is deprived of their knowledge. Since then, Bernard Stiegler, also a philosopher of technology, has drawn our attention to the fact that the loss of knowledge has invaded all strata of society, right up to the decision-makers and the owners themselves. Everyone who is an employee of a dissociated environment, in other words nearly every inhabitant of the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene, whether rich or poor, has become a proletarian.

How else can we de-proletarianise than by regaining a communal grip on certain knowledge that has been delegated to technology, invisibilised and confiscated? By using infrastructures critically?  Does this mean that institutional critique should mutate into infrastructural critique? The art critic Marina Vishmidt, one of the first to raise this question, spoke of infrastructure not only in terms of its material aspects but also in terms of its epistemic and theoretical implications. She approached infrastructure as a ‘conceptual diagram that allowed thought to develop’, in other words as a tool for investigating the conditions of possibility of expanding critique itself.

Like the technology that materialises it and the knowledge that inhabits it, infrastructure is neither good nor bad a priori. Everything depends on the ownership that governs the use of its logistics.

In the age of social networks and artificial intelligence, the normative power of social reproduction through infrastructures is more than ever visible and alarming.  At the other end of the spectrum, artistic practices are being created that work to undermine the system. These forms, which are intended to be performative, are often accompanied by an ethical agenda reflected in behaviours linked to social justice. Drawing on the legacy of feminism – which has highlighted the socially structuring role of maintenance and care – and institutional critique, these practices are aware of the risks of social instrumentalisation, but are nonetheless determined to build new commons.

How can we do this? By using infrastructure to organise and invent practical and functional spaces for acquiring and sharing confiscated knowledge.

Artists who pride themselves on developing a critical practice have always known that efficient critique could only be infrastructural, that is to say heteronomous, non-exclusive and therefore popular. Taking the form of assemblages, assemblies, protocols, contracts and conventions, scripts, tools and operational forms  that are at once poetic, pragmatic and anti-hierarchical, self-managed or co-operative, this infrastructural critique has one main vocation: to disarm proprietary logics while avoiding ‘making a system’. For artists and cultural workers, de-proletarianisation could mean avoiding systemic catastrophe by helping to invent non-proprietary relational infrastructures.

Eavatea, a digital platform for cooperative artistic research, is one such attempt that we invite you to discover.

 

Vincent Meessen, 2025

This text was written in the context of Archipelago of Artistic Practices, a Research Summit organised by Jubilee and M HKA. The programme and exhibition are built around Eavatea, a digital infrastructure for mapping research-based and transdisciplinary practices. Archipelago of Artistic Practices take place in conjunction with M HKA’s major exhibition The Geopolitics of Infrastructure and includes the participation of many of its exhibiting artists.