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Once More on Publicness: A Postscript to Secret Publicity

Sven Ltticken
Among the decisive experiences of the 1990s, for me and many others, were the
encounters with relational sociability in art. Often, the practices in question seemed to
be all too complicit with a self-representation of the art world as a sphere of relaxed
togetherness. My book Secret Publicity, which was assembled in the summer and fall
of 2005 and published in February 2006, collected essays from the preceding years,
going back to the late 1990s.1 Without, for the most part, engaging in overt polemics
against the product known as relational aesthetics, the book still attempted to shift the
terms of discussion, trying to analyze the specific characteristics of the art world and its
media/institutions as a form of publicness. How do art and its institutions create
publicness, and what are the specific problems and possibilities involved, seen within
the context of the public sphere at large?
Looking through the book in 2010 reveals a pleasing mixture of the well-known and the
outr, of the canonical and the heterodoxif nothing else, I managed to produce a
book whose index combines entries on Clark Gable and Hans Haacke, on Jeff Wall
and Wilhelm Reich, on Olinde Rodrigues and Stan Douglas, David Thomas, and....
However, the book is still marked by the organized amnesia that I encountered in
(Dutch) academia and the art world of the 1990s. Writing art criticism is an attempt at
self-education in public, and to some extent it is dependent on a curriculum set by
others. While part of criticisms task is to criticize this curriculum, it is regrettable that I
did notin keeping with the books call for the creation of forms of counterpublicnessamend it more consistently by seeking out alternative genealogies and
unearthing marginalized practices.
To me, the books line of inquiry still seems to be a valid one, and the response to the
book suggests that Im not alone in this. However, after more than four years, the terms
in which I see the matter have shifted somewhat, mainly because of developments in
the field of art. Looking back at the time when the book appeared, it is intriguing to note
that the period saw the emergence of what has been called New Institutionalism: the
emergence in Europe of an increasing number of institutions that differed in a number
of ways from traditional models of showing contemporary art. For one thing, these
institutions no longer necessarily considered the showing of art to be their primary
function. New Institutionalism was/is both an institutional practice and a form of
discourse produced on, and often by, the institutions in question. Since my experiences
with this double phenomenon have had a significant impact on my current
understanding of the limitations of Secret Publicity, I will take a closer look at a text that
helped define the phenomenon.
In the September 2006 issue of frieze, Alex Farquharson listed curators/directors and
institutions such as Nicolaus Schafhausen at Frankfurter Kunstverein and Witte de
With, Rotterdam; Catherine David at Witte de With; Charles Esche at Rooseum, Malm,
and then Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Maria Hlavajova at BAK (basis voor actuele
kunst), Utrecht; and Vasif Kortun at Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul,
as characteristic exponents of the New Institutionalism, most of them located on a
social democratic axis in north-central Europe: the Nordic countries, the Netherlands
and Germany.2 Farquharson noted that, far from privileging exhibitions, the new type
of institution instead places equal emphasis on a range of other functions, especially
research, discourse, and education: Many new institutions run international residency
schemes for artists, curators and critics under the same roof as their exhibition spaces,
their guests being active during their stay in lectures, screenings, workshops,
conferences and so on.... Production doesnt necessarily happen prior to and remote

from presentation; it happens alongside or within it. Reception, similarly, refutes the
white cube ideal of the individual viewers inaudible monologue, and is instead dialogic
and participatory. Discussion events are rarely at the service of exhibitions at new
institutions; either they tend to take the form of autonomous programming streams, or
else exhibitions themselves take a highly dialogic mode, giving rise to new curatorial
hybrids. New institutions are deeply interested in education in its widest sense:
learning consists of equal exchanges among a peer group in which the ambitious level
of discussion is not compromised.
While Farquharson remarks that the New Institutionalism represents an absorption of
institutional critique by the institution itself, he presents this as a step beyond the
institutional critique of the 1970s, which pitted artists against the institution. What is
remarkable, however, is how little the now-aging New Institutions seem to be capable
of actual self-criticism, of autocritique. Most seem content to repeat slogans from years
ago, many of them listed in Farquharsons text: the New Institution as a compensatory
public space, an oasis of openness that functions as a radical alternative or
successor to the dissolved bourgeois public sphere theorized by Jrgen Habermas: an
institution bringing together competing publics in an antagonistic pluralism, which,
according to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, is a prerequisite of radical
democracy. This is quite a spectacular exercise in re-branding: far from being
structures marked by hierarchical power relations, sites that submit the subject to
ideological interpellation, institutions now became agents of radical democracy.
It should be noted that Farquharson already sounded a note of warning: If new
institutionalismcannot create these publics, it will remain an ambitious prototype, as
hermetically sealed as the white cube it shrugs off. Without these publics it wont begin
impacting on the real social forces beyond its walls. This is precisely the situation now,
and there seems little interest among the established New Institutions to come to terms
with this. In part, this has to do with their organization and management; today,
Farquharsons comparison of the New Institutions seemingly non-hierarchical
educational activities with the anti-psychiatry of the 1960s, with R. D. Laing and Flix
Guattari, seems even more laughable than it did in 2006. Experience with New
Institutions suggests that the model in practice is often that of neoliberal cultural
management. In ones darkest moments, one may wonder if the New Institutionalism
has been anything more than a movement to propel some people towards bigger
biennales and, perhaps, even documenta.
However, it would be facetious to leave it at that. If, on the organizational level, there is
a discrepancy between image and reality, between ideology and practice, this
manifests itself on the level of content as a retreat into abstraction and into
megaprojects that pride themselves on their discursivity but that seem designed to
prevent any pointed investigation or exchange from occurring. This is not to say that
one should expect such projects to have quantifiable results; Secret Publicity is, after
all, concerned with marginal forms of publicness, including that of secret societies such
as Georges Batailles Acphale. While such initiatives are often highly problematic
manifestations of political and cultural deadlocks, the imperative of maximum visibility,
either for a general audience or among a more narrowly defined group of peers and
bureaucrats, is at least as problematic. A major problem with many New Institutionalist
projects is that they suffer from a positivist emphasis on quantity and a technocratic
approach to collaborationcollaboration as networking, as a means of achieving or
simulating growth and dominance.

Since Max Weber, many authors have elaborated on the autonomy of different social
spheres and disciplines as a constituting element of modern societyand, as Harold
Rosenberg argued in the 1950s, each of these social sectors tends to develop a purist
streak, developing its procedures in terms of its own possibilities without reference to
the needs of any other profession or of society as a whole.3 Sadly, his words seem all
too applicable to many New Institutionalist projects. There is a faux-Habermasian
idealism at play, the institution positing itself as an uncorrupted ffentlichkeit in which
people from different academic backgrounds can gather; however, a lack of precision
often leads to a simple juxtaposition rather than dialogue or confrontation, and the
publicness boils down to a convivial simulation of debate and discourse. In this way,
New Institutionalism is ultimately complicit with relational art, operating as its discursive
double.
Secret Publicity was deeply concerned with examining the art world and its institutions
and media as possible sites for counter-publicness (Gegenffentlichkeit); to some
extent, the New Institutions seem to follow a similar course, but their form of counterpublicness often seems to be an unwitting caricature of Habermass idealized
bourgeois public spheres, resulting in massive conferences at which various silverback
self-performers explore the wilder shores of advanced sophistry. New Institutions are
seemingly places of great hybridity, which they are indeed as far as different academic
and artistic disciplines are concerned; however, ultimately they represent a cheaper,
more flexible, post-Fordist way of doing things. In so far as, in a place like Holland, they
seem to have taken over part of the job of academia, it is because they are leaner,
more efficient, mainly by using temporary contracts and freelance labour. Seemingly,
the New Institutionalism has widened the scope of art institutions with its discursive
programs, yet the result of this hybridity often is a new kind of purity: the purity of subacademic conventions. Associated with notions such as knowledge production and
artistic research, these New Institutions often end up producing a simulation of
discourse and a parody of intellectual exchange.
To be sure, these are polemical exaggerations, neglecting some of the good work done
by practitioners of the New Institutionalism (many of whom are, understandably, not
keen on the term). To my mind, by far the most interesting among the
curators/directors associated with New Institutionalismapart from Catherine David,
who may be considered hors concoursis Charles Esche; although projects such as
Forms of Resistance (2007) suffered from some of the problems addressed here,
Esches practice at the Van Abbemuseum seems increasingly willing to address such
issues and refine and challenge its own parameters. However, in the mainstream
form outlined by Farquharson, the New Institutionalism is a solution that has quickly
become part of the problem.
What seems to be urgently needed at present is an exploration of impurity: the creation
of tactical overlaps between different spheres, of montagesor, if you will, of
transversal connections. The name Guattari is absent from Secret Publicity, and
although he is responsible for many an intellectual meltdown, Guattaris cogent
passages on transversality might have enabled me to make one extra step, going
beyond the need to take critical stock of a given contextin the manner of institutional
critiquetowards a theorization of publicness as montage. To be sure, the essay The
Worst Audience4 already hints at such a conception, albeit tentatively; more
fundamentally, the practice of tactical impurity is in fact part and parcel of Secret
Publicity: many of the collected texts were first published either in the New Left Review,
and thus not in an art publication, or in De Witte Raaf, a freely distributed art
newspaper that in its pages brought together art critics, philosophers, and theorists and
that once played an important role in the Dutch-speaking art world.5

A successful montage of different forms of publicness does not entail the eradication of
characteristics peculiar to art. This, in fact, is precisely the mistake made by many
recent projects, which seem all too keen on completely dissolving art into a discourse
that is neither specific nor abstract enough, a discourse that does not attain any kind of
intellectual rigour because it glosses over those pesky little details, the symptoms that
make art interesting in the first place. To be loyal to those symptoms, the opaqueness
of art, without romanticizing or mystifying it: this is the point of the Adornism of Secret
Publicity.
Some have commented that the presence of Adorno in the book was more pervasive
than the number of references to Adorno listed in the index suggested. There is
something to be said for this. On one level, the books Adornism is a consequence of
its investigation of the inherent dangers and limitations of art-world publicness; weary
of buying into hype, distrustful of all the grandiloquent social and political claims being
made by various art equivalents of used-car salesmen, I probably overemphasized
arts limitations, in the process sounding all too Eeyoreishtoo Adornian in tone. On
the other hand, and more productively, I used Adornos philosophy quite explicitly
against the Habermasian tendency to posit an ideal of completely transparent
discursive rationality. For Adorno, part of the value of art is in its structural sabotage of
the rule of concepts, in its refusal or inability to be completely assimilated into the
sovereignty of purposive-discursive reasonof which the New Institutions are often
bulwarks, with programs based on grand terms that create a sham universalism.
It is crucial at present to go beyond the instrumental approach to art that has become
all too common in the wake of the New Institutionalism and to take art seriously as a
discipline that produces (re)distributions of the sensible, to use Jacques Rancires
term. In the past five years, Rancires writings on the modern aesthetic regime of art
have become almost suspiciously popular in the art world; Rancires statement that
Aesthetic art promises a political accomplishment that it cannot satisfy, and thrives on
that ambiguity seems to generate a pleasant vagueness, legitimizing anything and
everything.6 However, one could and should in fact see it as an incentive to examine
possible correspondences and points of connection, however fraught with difficulty,
between art and different (especially political) interventions in the sensible realm. In the
case of my recent work, for instance, this involved a montage of artistic iconoclasm and
various forms of religious, philosophical, and terrorist iconoclasm.7
Other more or less recent projects that are relevant in this respect include the
exhibitions Territories (2003) and No matter how bright the light, the crossing occurs at
night (2006) curated by Anselm Franke at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin,
the Social Diagrams (2008) project at Knstlerhaus Stuttgart, the re-presentation of
Martha Roslers If you lived here... (200910) at e-flux in New York and Casco in
Utrecht, andto use a non-European examplethe Vancouver [de]Tour Guide 2010,
with its topological distortion of the official Vancouver presented to visitors during the
Winter Olympics. Furthermoreto return to Europeunder Charles Esche, the Van
Abbemuseum has co-produced a number of artists projects that highlight aspects of
the contested nature of visibility, both legally and politically: Bik Van der Pols
performance Close Encounters (2008), which involved a tussle with the Philips
corporations over the right to depict their Evoluon building; the project Read the Masks,
Tradition Is not Given (2009), in which Petra Bauer and Annette Krauss discovered that
to criticize the blackface Zwarte Piet tradition in the Netherlands quickly reveals the
limits of the free speech that is being celebrated by right-wing populists; and
SUPERFLEXs FREE SOL LEWITT (2010), which tests the limits of copyright law
through the production of copies of a LeWitt wall piece owned by the museum.8

In the latter cases, we are dealing with individual projects whose qualitiesat least to
this observerseem to outstrip those of the institutional mega-projects of which they
formed part. If institutional rhetoric is now intent on presenting the institution as
productive, this is true only in so far as it enables artists, critics, and curators to perform
very specific acts (aesthetic, discursive, social acts) that may, if all goes wrong in the
right way, generate a publicness that is more than mere publicity.
Notes
1. The book was scheduled for November or December 2005, but my brand of
laissez-faire perfectionism delayed things slightly. The publication date in the
book is still 2005, for reasons unknown to me.
2. Alex Farquharson, Bureaux de Change, frieze no. 101 (September 2006),
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/bureaux_de_change/.
3. Harold Rosenberg, Everyman a Professional, in The Tradition of the New
(London: Paladin, 1970), 70 (originally published in 1959).
4. See Sven Ltticken,The Worst Audience, in Secret Publicity: Essays on
Contemporary Art (Rotterdam: NAi, 2005).
5. The New Institutionalist emphasis on curatorial institutions goes hand in hand
with a decline in the role of independent periodicals and of art writing that is not
thinly veiled PR. It seems to me that the role of journals and magazines urgently
needs to be strengthened.
6. Jacques Rancire, The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes, in New Left
Review no. 14 (MarchApril 2002), http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2383.
7. My iconoclasm project included an exhibition, lecture program, and publication
done with BAK (the complete New Institutionalist package, in other words) and
culminated in the book Idols of the Market (2009).
8. All these projects, of course, deserve a fuller treatment, and I feel bad for simply
listing them; however, it should not be too difficult to find more information about
them online and to assess their use value.
Image: Andrea Fraser, Kunst Muss Hngen, Performance, Galerie Christian Nagel,
Cologne 2001. Photo: Simon Vogel. Image courtesy of Galerie Christian Nagel,
Cologne/Berlin/Antwerp
About the Author
Sven Ltticken is a Netherlands-based critic and historian. A regular contributor to
catalogues and art magazines such as Artforum, New Left Review, Afterimage, and
Texte zur Kunst, he is the author of Secret Publicity: Essays on Contemporary Art
(2006) and Idols of the Market: Modern Iconoclasm and the Fundamentalist Spectacle
(2009). He teaches art history at VU University Amsterdam.

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