The bogus religiosity of the art institution and the ‘institution of art’

“art used to be made for illusion; now it is made from illusions.”

O’Doherty Brian

Today, it is almost common sense to perceive art as a secular religion for creating meaning in life (Theodor Zeldin once said “art is, nowadays, our new religion and museums are our cathedrals”). With contemporary art gaining more and more popularity and the art market growing in size, W. Benjamin’s concept of aura, as a quality that gives artworks “special status equivalent that of a sacred object” (Leitch, 1164), is still very much illuminating for comprehending how we perceive art and how it relates to our lives. Most specifically, museums, as institutions at the top of the cultural hierarchy that most often appear as the authorities deciding what is art, what is culture, and what gets to be included in the historical narrative it is crucial to become aware of the ways in which they become authorities. And for understanding the nature, function, and implications of this phenomenon, W.Benjamin and J. Berger offer useful ‘ways of seeing’.

In his famous book, Berger argues that in modern society artworks have gained a specific type of impressiveness that isn’t related to what the work displays or means -as it used to be- but rather related to their market value which fetishizes ‘originality’. Significantly he points out that because in the modern period the magical and the religious authority of art have died out (because it is no longer used for magical or religious ends), its nevertheless continuing authority is rather a fake one. A close analysis of the art world today shows that the fake aura of the artwork comes from another source as effective as the nostalgic handling of the market: the art institution[1]. The experience created by the art institutions (especially the exhibition areas like galleries and museums) is what maintains the bogus religiosity so vehemently. Hence, within the scope of this article, I will be arguing the pseudo-aura of today’s artworks[2] to be an extension of the transcendental authority of the museum space and examine the ways in which art institutions produce this authority, on material and discursive levels. Further, I will be examining Hans Haacke’s practice of artivism and in specific, his two works titled “Viewing Matters: Upstairs” and “On Social Grease” to emphasize the ways of demystification of the museum space in relation to Benjamin’s notion of ‘politicizing of art’.

For Berger, what he calls the ‘bogus religiosity’ (which is an act of recuperating the authority of art) is created based on the objects’ past (Berger, 21). The certification of the ‘originality’ of the artwork becomes the most significant aspect of its value and results in the viewing of the artworks as nostalgic objects, to be admired or consumed in a way that ignores historical, political, and social realities comprised in them. This nostalgic view connects the artwork to the past and detaches it from the present. Such an approach, Berger explains, causes the discussion and presentation of the artworks as though they are “holy relics” that have managed to survive to the present day (Berger, 21). While the ‘bogus religiosity’ continues to this day, its source seems to have shifted to a large extent, especially in the context of contemporary conceptual art. The cause for the religious aura of the artwork have shifted from its ‘nostalgic’ handling to the ‘institutional’ handling. Its contemporary pseudo religiosity seems to have to do with two phenomena: the actual material space of the museum and the brand values of museums.

The perception of the museum space by the viewer as a religious space (Berger, 24), is no coincidence but a construction. Benjamin’s notion of distance is remarkable in examining the ways in which the museum or gallery space creates an aura. Defined as a “unique phenomenon of a distance however close it may be” (Benjamin, 1171), aura quite crucially renders the artwork unapproachable, physically and conceptually. This quality ultimately defines a specific type of relationship between the viewers and the artworks as well as defining the characteristics of the space itself. The museum space is strictly formed in a similar manner to religious spaces, both in temporal and spatial parameters. O’Doherty Brain underlies that the experience in an art institution[3] as close to those inside religious spaces throughout time, to Paleolithic painted caves, Egyptian tombs, or Medieval churches, as all mark a “specially segregated space”, that is a “kind of non-space, ultra space, or ideal space where the surrounding matrix of space-time is symbolically annulled” (McEvilley, 8).

The sealed windows, monochrome walls, the clear lighting of the museum or the gallery -whether it is a modernist or contemporary one[4]- create a space that is in contrast to the outside world, in its orderliness, silence, and sterility. The result of this controlled environment of the museum space is the rendition of the idea that it is outside or beyond the immediacy and actuality of life as it unfolds. Because the sense of aliveness is gotten rid of within the sterility of the space, and the artwork is located in such space, it appears unnatural, alien, and external to the individual perceiving it. Arguably, the unapproachability comes from these qualities too — that one of the most basic impulses of humans -creativity- is transformed in such a way inside this closed, limited, sterile, controlled, and artificial space that the one gets alienated from it. The illusory experience of art as being “untouched by time and its vicissitudes” (Brian) renders everything in the so-called ‘outside’ world — the history, social relations, and politics- as well as the awareness of them, irrelevant. Therefore the artworks, or the Art as defined in the exhibition space, appear almost ‘timeless’, eternal, and holy.

Such atmosphere renders the artwork unapproachable, even when the artwork itself demands engagement. The institution having its own strict codes, the relation between the artwork and the viewer, is defined by distance. While this physically finds its expression in the untouchability of the works (Susan Stewart describes the museum as an ‘elaborately ritualized practice of refraining from touch’) it also comes to be embodied in what can be called the ‘mannerism’ of the exhibition space, which necessitates a distinction between the space of the artwork and the space of the viewer. These don’t mix with each other: very strictly one is there to look and the other to be looked at (in more experimental institutions where art is viewed as a process rather than an end product, this distance between the two vanishes. Art becomes something to be experienced, participate in, and created rather than being observed). The concept of distance also defines the viewer’s experience of their selfhood within the boundaries of the museum. The eye, as the observer, becomes separated from the self. Because conforming to the norms of the museum, to its defined mannerism necessitates a certain ‘way of looking’. Within the museum space, the act of looking necessitates the reduction of life and self: “for the sake of the intensity of the separate and autonomous activity of the Eye” (Brian, 35) one suppresses and limits all the other activities of the body. Laughing, talking, eating, drinking, lying down becomes things to refrain from.

It is in this sense that the museum does not only decide what is going to be exhibited but also determines how and in what ways the exhibited artworks are going to be received. Simply, the controlled environment becomes controlling. The museum area holds foremost the ‘showroom’ quality, within the context of which everyone exists in a tacit contract that what is being seen is felt, understood, and ultimately conveys meaning in a way that needs no discussion or open conversation. There, artworks are to be absorbed with a thoughtful face and in deep contemplation. Therefore, on another level, the distance is created by the production of the passive, conforming, and consumer status of the viewer as well.

The second phenomenon that contributes to the aura of the artwork is the brand values of star museums. The art world today is shaped most prominently by the ‘mega’ museums, which are the most established and institutionalized ones like the Guggenheim, MoMA, Tate, Whitney, MET, Centre Pompidou, etc. These institutions, having their own brand value decide what is art and what is not. These star museums mark a position that makes the ‘chosen’ artworks gain a ‘respected status’ due to the economic, cultural, and social capitals that the museum holds. It is once the artwork gets to be exhibited in these places that it takes on an aura — a value that takes it higher in the hierarchy of artworks. An installation one views in an artist-run independent space never feels the same as the one viewed in Tate. Because Tate (or any of these star museums) offer a whole spectacle, a unified experience of seeing art. Once the artwork gets to be exhibited in these institutions or get into their collection, it benefits from their brand image, their cultural authority, from the building itself, from its relationality to all the other ‘chosen’ artworks and celebrity artists, from the professional curatorship and so on. These further and further construct the artwork as an object to be respected and admired unquestioningly. It becomes, more and more the property of the institution that surrounds it with its own authority. In one word, this process can be called the ‘institutionalization’ of the artwork.

The writer of the “Seven Days in the art world”, Sarah Thornton remarks that an artwork does not just exist or come to be, but it is made by the actors of the art world (Thornton, 17), and the most influential of them are the museums. The existence of such aforementioned monopolies in the art world results in the coming together of the two polar values that Benjamin specifies: the “cult value[5]” and the “exhibition value” (Benjamin, 1172). In other words, because being exhibited in these institutions is (made) a big deal for the value of any artwork to be justified, for it to be seen as art, whatever exhibited in these museum spaces is taken as a product of ‘individual genius’ and is to be treated as such. The artistic function that underlies the exhibition value starts to be viewed through the ‘cult of genius’. The context makes the content valuable, but valuable in a specific way: the fetishized and essentialized art based on this myth of individual genius. And because geniuses are rare and seen as a unique condition of humanity as something beyond the normal, the rarity of the artwork that Berger talks about as the main source of fake aura, transforms into the rarity of the genius that has created it, who is confirmed and in the act of confirmation, constructed by the institution. It is in this sense that the “art institution” (the museum) becomes the leading representative of the “institution of art” -what it chooses to exhibit, to award, to add to its collection becomes canonical, becomes Art with a capital letter. It’s not so much that the institution chooses it to exhibit because the work has the essence of being canonical in itself but, rather the work becomes canonical by the institution’s choice, but the museum creates the illusion that it is the case of the former: that what they exhibit is being exhibited because it is, in essence, ‘good’ art. This creates the mysterious aura of the artwork. In these given conditions, what is perceived in a mode of ‘sacred reverence’ comes to be not about the artwork being ‘the original version’ (especially in the case of contemporary artworks of today) but about the sacred status given to it by the context.

All these gathered, based on the material and discursive construction of the museum, the casual spectator is being manipulated into believing in the myth of “pure” art and that the museums as the defender and holder of it. The context-less rendering of the exhibition space (out of time and forces of life) provides the basis and source for such apperception. This ignores and hides the fact that what is shown in any exhibition is a result of a selective process inflected by ideology just as the art institution itself. Such is the usefulness of the fake aura of the “institution of art”: the promotion of the idea of “pure art” -a field beyond the economic, social, and political- becomes useful for the governing elite of these institutions. Because then, art turns into a thing that stands in an elevated status beyond criticism. The fake aura of the art institution, its loftiness, exclusivity, unapproachability, serves the governing elite to continue benefit from art for their own benefits: as an instrument of improving public image, as investment stock, and soft power. It is in such given that Berger’s examination of the artworks’ social and political context becoming hidden as a result of the mystification (Berger, 13), happens on a larger scale -in the art institutions and the institution of art. The pseudo-aura of the space, not as an extension of the pseudo-aura of the artwork but rather its precondition and source, therefore, equals to a transcendental space that “does not speak of this world but another” (McEvilley, 11). Avant-garde artists like Yves Klein, Arman, Duchamp, and many more have subverted the experience of these spaces by their installations and performances and dissolved the aura and authority they were seen as “dangerous” and therefore devalued by the art world later on. With the disillusionment created by the avantgardes of the sixties and seventies gone, “illusions are back, contradictions are tolerated” (Brian, 87). Hence, today’s shiny bubble of the art world holds the democratic exclusory showrooms and commodified secular relics.

Against such regime of the museum, activist art, or artivism, defends the necessity of bringing the transcendental institutions back to this world by the exposé of their close relation to the social, political, and economic. Activist art is often not viewed as a movement as it lacks a unified style or subject among its practitioners. However, most fundamentally, art activism implies two distinct processes brought together. While activism challenges power relations and aims for a “discernible end” and hence, creates effect; art generates affect as it is more about “stimulating a feeling, moving us emotionally or altering our perception” (Duncombe, 118). Building on this, artivism is what can be defined as the “political practice of art and not a practice of political art” (Clavel) and it is, therefore, a practice corresponding to what Benjamin calls the ‘politicizing of art’.

Hans Haacke, as the leading figure of Institutional Criticism, which is a form of artivism that focuses on art institutions, engages with the ‘institution of art’ “as a network of social and economic relationships” (Fraser) and exposes the interrelatedness of art institutions, businesses, and the state. Such an approach challenges the ‘holiness’ and ‘purity’ of art and the dogmatic belief that art institutions are free of ideology. Institutional critique, at its core, demystifies the authority of the art world which functions, seemingly, autonomous from the social, political, and economic reality of the society. It does so, based on the logic that the aestheticization and fetishizing of art results in the suspension of its social and political function and ultimately renders it ‘meaningful’ only for the small portion of the wealthy elite who profits from the viewing of art as luxury object, investment stock, and soft power. This results in the promotion of the art of spectacle and celebrity artists while making the socially, politically, and culturally meaningful art of the wider public irrelevant and valueless. Based on such tradition, quite significantly, Haacke’s practice draws spectators’ attention to the structures and inner workings of the museums that remain invisible to the museum-goer and therefore appear as an element that greatly contributes to the mysteriousness of the artwork and the institution.

In “Viewing Matters: Upstairs”, the artist commits the simple act of bringing artworks from downstairs (i.e storeroom) to upstairs (i.e the exhibition area). However, through a subversion of the usual way of doing things: he brings them up exactly the way they were stored in the downstairs of the museum, with dollies and tools around. The works were put in the exhibition space with no distinction being made among period, format, subject, movement, artist, and so on. His act of intervening the sterility of the space, not treating to the artworks in the usual revered way, dismissing the spatial composition, not minding the distance and emptiness balances, in short by treating artworks as mere items function as a ‘reality check’ and diminishes the mystery created around the artworks. The installation ‘banalizes’ the idea of an artwork, so to speak; while at the same time neatly demonstrating what creates the authority of the artworks in a museum. Hence, the installation does not only damages the fake aura of the artwork that renders it so unapproachable and alien to the spectator, but further, through creating a striking contrast to the ‘usual business’ of the exhibitions, emphasizes the circumstances on which the aura of the artworks and the space is constructed on. The question of what really gives the bogus sanctity of the artworks and the museum space gets answered, at least to some extent: the arrangement of space in relation to the artworks, deciding on sizes, subjects, artists; deciding the distance, gaps, the overall spatial composition, the lightening, and the atmosphere; the contextualization through a theme, and so on. The dismissal of all these calculated details robs the artworks and the space from their ‘unapproachability’, making them more humane and more ‘close however distant they may be. In the last instance, it makes the spectator realize that these works do stay in a storeroom, that they are being brought to the exhibition space by art workers, that they are being classified and displayed as a result of human choices, and that the whole experience is indeed one that is thought and planned beforehand. These all show the ‘human’ and ‘normal’ side to the spectacle.

In an act of ‘iconoclasm,’ the work also undermines the authority of the institution in terms of the epistemological regime it forms. The self-given authority of museums creates the illusion that what they display is “a reliable account of history” when, in fact, the “canon is an agreement by people with cultural power at a certain time. It has no universal validity” (Haacke, Art is a Weapon). The mixture of works of art from different movements and periods functions as the reminder of the changes in the narrative of art throughout history: the installation “tell us about the ideological functions these works performed: … how and to the benefit of whom they represent the ever-changing notions of the Good, the True and the Beautiful (Haacke, Viewing Matters). Benjamin’s notion of art as an ever-changing phenomenon, with its different functions and values, then gets to be embodied through the installation. The work, by showing the contingency of the aesthetic ideals, also points to the illusory authority of the museum that argues these ideals to be natural and necessary.

In one of his interviews, Haacke remarks that he aims to enable the visitors to have “the information they need in order to make sense of what they are exposed to” (Haacke, Exposing), which equates to increasing awareness regarding the ways in which the ‘institution of art’ renders the art object unapproachable exactly because it is being transformed into an asset class that is being fetishized and essentialized in cultural temples. The information Haacke provides in his works renders what is invisible visible, what is incomprehensible understandable, what goes unchallenged challenged; which ultimately dissolves the mystery. This for the large part, finds expression in his examination of the ‘corporization’ of art. In an analogous manner to Benjamin, who saw the diminishing of the artworks’ aura as art becoming “independent of being an apparatus of a religious ritual” (Benjamin, 1172), Haacke too in his practice tries to free it from the instrumentalization for political and economic interests by politicizing his art. Benjamin’s differentiation between the ‘aestheticization of politics’ and the ‘politicization of art’ is especially seen at play in the work titled ‘On Social Grease’. An installation made up of metal plaques holding political and business administrators’ — including David and Nelson Rockefeller, Nixon, Robert Kingsley, and Douglas Dillon- thoughts and statements on art, the work demonstrates how art is being used by figures of power for furthering their interests while also at the same time covering up their ethically dubious actions in political, economic and social fields.

In one of the plates Nixon’s statement on art’s “capacity to help heal divisions among our people and to vault some of the barriers that divide the world” is seen, the public affairs advisor Robert Kingsley talking about art as a tool for ‘lubricating the environment’ for growing the business of EXXON, which is one of the main sponsors of art since 1970 and a supporter of the apartheid government of South Africa, and others who are board members of established museums that create discourses on art in a space that is supposed to be democratic but simultaneously investing in mining companies in third-world countries. Conveyed in six metal panels, the statements strikingly demonstrate the profit-driven instrumentalization of art that reduces it into a mere investment field to further the interests of business aligned with capitalist ideology -that art is “essential to business” and valuable to the extent that it provides “direct and tangible benefits” from a strictly economic perspective.

The so-called philanthropy of these figures to be only profit-driven strategic business plans, which ultimately enables them to ‘art wash’ their ethically dubious actions in other fields, becomes apparent through the work. This is exactly what Benjamin talks about when he talks about the ‘aestheticization of politics’. Then, the ideologic construction of the museum space, its “life-erasing transcendental ambition” can be more clearly seen to be “disguised and converted to specific social purposes” (McEvilley, 12) of the governing elite of the museum, its board members, and sponsors who benefit from the status quo under the neoliberal economy in which art is used as a “vessel/symbol/marker” (Berger) of power.

The exposé of the ideology-driven epistemological regime of the museum demolishes the bogus transcendentality of the institutions and the eternal view of art by showing that they are, in fact, contingent, temporary, and constructed. And further, renders what is inexplicably mysterious, mundanely explicit to the public. Forthrightly reminds that museums, being the cultural authorities that form and shape the historical and cultural narratives, should be criticized and held accountable, especially on the basis of their championing of the value of “art for art”, or as Benajmin puts, the theology of art (Benjamin, 1172).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin Books. New York, 1985. Printed.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. 1163–1186. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Norton. New York, 2001. Printed.

Brian, O’Doherty. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Lapis Press. San Fransisco, 1986. E-book ed., Monoskop. https://monoskop.org/images/2/29/ODoherty_Brian_Inside_the_White_Cube_The_Ideology_of_the_Gallery_Space_1986.pdf

Fraser, Andrea. “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique”. Artforum. https://www.artforum.com/print/200507/from-the-critique-of-institutions-to-an-institution-of-critique-9407

Haacke, Hans. “Hans Haacke: Exposing Systems of Power”. Tate. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/hans-haacke-2217/hans-haacke-exposing-systems-power

Haacke, Hans. “Art is a Weapon: Hans Haacke on How Art Survived the Bush Administration”. Artspace, 2017. https://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/book_report/art-is-a-weapon-hans-haacke-interview-political-art-54590

Leitch, Vincent B. “Walter Benjamin 1892- 1940”. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Norton. New York, 2001. Printed.

McEvilley, Thomas. “Introduction”. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Lapis Press. San Fransisco, 1986. E-book ed., Monoskop. https://monoskop.org/images/2/29/ODoherty_Brian_Inside_the_White_Cube_The_Ideology_of_the_Gallery_Space_1986.pdf

Stephen, Duncombe. “Does it Work? The Æffect of Activist Art”. Social Research, Vol. 83, №1, THE FEAR OF ART (SPRING 2016), pp. 115–134. The Johns Hopkins University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44283398

Thornton, Sarah. Seven Days in the Art World. W. W. Norton & Company Ltd. New York, 2008. E-book ed., Apple Books.

[1] A topic only briefly touched upon by Berger, mainly through his survey showing people’s likening of musesum to churches and the examples on museum catalogues.

[2] By today’s artworks I especially mean the period after 80s to present and the contemporary conceptual art works.

[3] O’Doherty examines the gallery space as a White cube, but it is quite possible to see the similarities with the museum space.

[4] Contemporary art space is of course more different than the modernist one in its experimentalism, however, as I will be explaining in the coming parts of the article, it does too conforms to the most defined and consolidated forms of the exhibition regime, especially after the 60s and 70s.

[5] By cult value Benjamin means the ritualistic function in which the art work transforms into “a vessel/symbol/marker for worship or veneration”.