on the extra-institutional

The extra-institutional is a response to institutional violence. It’s a strategy for navigating and refusing to cooperate with institutions whose structures, conditions, and politics conflict with, neutralize, negate, or repress the intentions or claims of one’s work. 

The extra-institutional is undisclosed, incognito, inconspicuous, covert. It is also often insurgent, ungovernable, recalcitrant. Above all it is public.

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Two central questions have accompanied me during my time in the ISP: What does it mean to be independent? And what does it mean to be a critic? These questions have unfolded onto another: What would it mean for the primary criterion for art, its discourse, and their circulation to be publicness—instead of and against institutional accreditation and its attendant investments in individual celebrity, market value, and capital accumulation?

Given the professional and intellectual variety in our Critical Studies cohort, we’ve had a number of conversations about what this name, “Critical Studies,” means, and what it means to be a capital-C Critic. We’ve established a distinction between, on one hand, writing and publishing in the genre of criticism and thus being a Critic, and, on the other, being foremost a writer, scholar, historian, poet, performer, artist whose work is characterized by criticality, by a methodology of critical thought, analysis, or poetics. 

This distinction echoes what some scholars articulated in seminars this year. More than one of our seminar leaders rejected the characterization of their work as art criticism. I like to press people on this. One of them replied that they don’t see their work as art criticism because, in their estimation, art criticism is about giving a thumbs up or thumbs down on an artwork, and they’re not interested in making authoritative judgements about artworks. However, they said they’re certainly thinking critically and working in the genre of cultural criticism. 

When named as a distinction between art criticism and cultural criticism, I’m no longer convinced that the distinction is useful. I find it superfluous, and also damning for art criticism. Not only because the notion of art criticism as a genre of authoritative judgement-making is outdated and therefore misguided and inaccurate, but also because it forecloses the possibility that art criticism has anything meaningful to contribute to critical artistic and political discourse.

I think that this—unfortunately widespread—misunderstanding of art criticism’s task is underwritten by, or assumes, certain political conditions that don’t apply to our current circumstances. As the lone self-identified critic of the group, I want to advocate for an expansion of the role and responsibilities of the critic and of the genre of criticism, and I want to make a case for them as urgent political practices, especially under the present conditions.

In the last few years, we’ve witnessed a rapidly contracting art publishing landscape that is increasingly dependent on corporate and financial stakeholders. This is, in part, a consequence of decades of privatization, increasingly concentrated wealth, a rising cost of living, and stagnant wages, all of which make publishing, a fundamentally nonlucrative industry, difficult to sustain.

In the last few months, these conditions have been exacerbated. We’ve been witnessing an administration forcibly, relentlessly, exhaustively eliminate essential agencies, organizations, and infrastructure, and withhold funding from institutions unwilling to appease their demands. We’ve also been witnessing institutions acceding to their demands. The resulting atmosphere of fear is compelling many of these institutions to restrict what kind of speech they allow, and to censor programming.

Together, these developments create an environment hostile to independent critical thinking and its public-facing manifestations—they threaten the institutions and infrastructures for learning, practicing, and disseminating critical inquiry. They thus threaten public, civic discourse itself—and that’s precisely the point. 

The question, then, not only of what criticism does or should do but also, crucially, where it can appear and circulate—be published or shared publicly—and how—the material conditions that make it possible—are urgent, and they’re in no way resolved. 

The same week that the new administration assumed office, I read the edited transcript of a 1984 interview of critic Craig Owens by Lyn Blumenthal. In it, Owens speaks about the role and relevance of art criticism, and advocates for its political potential. He says that 

[art criticism] has a chance if it conceives of itself as being in fundamental solidarity with other forms of political activity. I think that it’s necessary for those forms of political activity to be accompanied by a certain critical practice that operates on multiple levels. Critical practices operating within the most supposedly avant-garde, hermetic academic discourse waging battles within the academy. Journalistic criticism waging battles in the media. And so on. Criticism can participate in creating some small transformations in its own sphere of influence that are amplified each time that they’re linked up with others. I have very little patience with those critics and practitioners who sit around and say, ‘Well, art never has changed the world, never will change the world.’ I think that it’s a mistaken idea. We’re attempting to change the terms of the debate that determine how affairs in that world are conducted. And I think that it’s the Right that sees perfectly well that it can go in there and change those things, that it has demonstrated to us in the past five or six years that one can take control and change those things. If we sit back and say, ‘Well, we can’t change the world, this is a hopeless thing,’ we just let other people do it. People are changing the world every minute. And that’s where I feel, ‘Yes, it’s possible,’ but it’s not that one’s going to bring about the socialist revolution tomorrow.1

Owens was speaking in the context of the Reagan administration, a political context in many ways different from our own, but one that also involved shrinking the public sphere, economic policies that exacerbated wealth inequality, and conservative cultural repression. At that time, art’s publications were still a forum for long-form critical writing and debate, so Owens’s assertion that art criticism could be an integral part of political activity and of informing and even instigating transformations doesn’t seem far-fetched. 

In the contemporary context, however, this is a striking idea. What gets written about art and published in the remaining outlets today is largely utterly banal—brief, affirmative promotional material untethered from its political, economic, social, and institutional conditions and devoid of argument or opinion, to say nothing of criticality. Even where longer texts are allowed, those texts tend to stick close to their objects and those objects only, treating them in a vacuum. 

This is, in my assessment, partly a result of the extent to which art magazines’ existence now depends on revenue from advertisers, many of them commercial galleries, and corporate sponsors. Writing that might conflict with the interests of those financial stakeholders, and thus might threaten that revenue, is discouraged, edited away, and outright killed. 

This has created a culture of art writing in which criticism is barely detectable, in which criticism is confused with negativity and mean-spiritedness, and in which criticism has a very tenuous relationship to journalistic independence and integrity. It is an art criticism with little relationship to the tradition or definition of criticism, an art criticism that serves the market before anything else. 

The urgent question then is, how can we recuperate art criticism’s solidarity with other forms of political activity? When the political stakes are so high and the conditions of art criticism’s production so compromised, what are the roles and responsibilities of the politically concerned critic and criticism? What should politically engaged criticism be and do, and what are the conditions that might allow it to emerge in this environment? 

What I mean and want when I refer to art criticism is thoughtful, argumentative, historically minded texts. I mean texts that analyze artworks and exhibitions in relationship to the claims we are told they make, to the exhibiting institutions and their framing, to the political, economic, and social conditions in and out of which they appear. And I mean texts that take a position that is intimately grounded in and responding to the artworks and their historical circumstances.

This includes assessing the efficacy of artworks and exhibitions. This, to me, is a vital part of the responsibilities of criticism and of the critic. This is different from the critic acting as a singular authority asserting an unequivocal and final judgement of an artwork as good or bad. It is instead about holding the work and its institutions accountable to the claims they make, especially but not only when they make political claims. The critic is uniquely capable of making this assessment, not because they’re endowed with some snobbish, enlightened authority, but because they’re the person spending extended, dedicated time thinking closely and critically about the work, the exhibition, the institution. 

Against the short promotional texts that dominate the art press, this kind of criticism produces analytical, critical discourse; it invites conversation and debate; it generates and responds to stakes. And it does all this publicly, for varying audiences. This is the kind of criticism that can underscore and produce art’s political potency. This is the kind of criticism that can change the terms of the debate that determine how affairs in our world are conducted. 

This notion of criticism is not novel or unprecedented, though; it is, generally speaking, what literary and cultural criticism do. However, these practices are perceived as more serious and scholarly, hence why that seminar leader made a distinction between art criticism and cultural criticism. But if we continue to exceptionalize art criticism as something else, something more frivolous and unpolitical, less rigorous, art criticism will continue to be irrelevant, simply an arm of the art market’s value generation, and art’s discourse will continue to suffer for it. 

The core problem, as I see it, is that art criticism’s outlets are unable or unwilling to commission, publish, or host politically oriented texts, let alone any rigorously thoughtful text. There’s a degree to which this is a vestige of the modernist insistence on art’s autonomy—the idea that art is independent from the capitalist means of production and its politics, so what place do these have in writing about art? 

But more immediately, the problem is an institutional one. Art criticism’s dominant publications suffer from the same structural dilemma as museums, and really any nonprofit, philanthropic initiative in this country: they rely on wealth, whether individual or corporate, that derives from and is invested in industries and systems of power, violence, extraction, and exploitation at direct odds with the institution’s supposed constituencies and missions. 

This is what defines art’s institutions: a structure in which financial stakeholders exercise outsize influence on the institution’s activities, typically in the interests of the stakeholders’ own financial and political investments. These institutions include the corporate publisher, the nonprofit museum, the neoliberal university, the commercial gallery, as well as the art fair and the auction house.

So, if the (admittedly few remaining) conventional channels and institutions for art criticism are intolerably or irredeemably compromised, where can criticism appear publicly and circulate? If criticism is the genre that one deploys to probe and confront art’s institutions, to lay bare and unfold these kinds of intolerable conflicts and structures, but its leading institutions disallow this work, where can the politically potent criticism be written, published, read, discussed? I could easily pose these same questions in relation to art, too. 

The strategy I’ve been thinking about for navigating this situation is the extra-institutional: an approach to writing and sharing criticism, to making and exhibiting art, outside of their legacy institutions. 

This is distinct from the more idiomatic “para-institution”: the prefix “extra-” indicates outside or beyond while “para-” refers more immediately to beside, alongside of, or closely related to. The para-institution desires and performs institutionality that is parallel to if distinct from its dominant manifestations.

The extra-institutional eschews the institution entirely. It turns to public space: the street, the park, the subway; the open-access website, the mutual-aid-funded project, the neighborhood bar. The extra-institutional is not object- or product-oriented, but tends to be ephemeral and fleeting, evading conventional modes of circulation and the possibility for ownership. It is texts and artworks that materialize and circulate independently of institutional support, affiliation, or accreditation. 

As such, it refuses and refutes Institutional Critique’s axiom that there is no outside the institution. However, extending that legacy, it maintains a relationship to the institution in that its extra-institutionality is a response to the conditions of the institution—indeed a refusal to submit to those conditions. The extra-institutional is structured and defined in opposition to the institution as it exists right now. It is a reorientation for moving through and engaging with the world and the dominant institutions that structure it.

At the risk of being abstract, I decided not to offer explicit examples of the extra-institutional, since we are, today, inside an institution. The extra-institutional is in many ways about literal site: an insistence that art’s institutions are not where independent criticism is supported or can be freely practiced, at least not right now. That to utter certain words or slogans, to advocate for certain ideas, to make certain arguments or to assert certain realities, is not desired or valued in these spaces. In part because they implicate the institution, because the institution is—in very material, immediate ways—implicated in the violence the critic lays bare. 

But the extra-institutional is also a position: a critical stance in relation to the institution and its representatives, which can unfold inside of it, as I’ve tried to enact today. In this case, the strategy can, I hope, produce some degree of friction that can also produce generative, critical dialogue or debate—friction that can hold the institutional accountable to us. 

At its best, the extra-institutional is a prompt to look, make, write, be elsewhere, to build and sustain other kinds of communities and infrastructures, to reorganize and restructure our received ways of working and circulating. At the very least, my hope is that in raising and naming this strategy, you might experience a reorientation of your own, and find and make such friction everywhere you go.

1 Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield, Craig Owens: Portrait of a Young Critic (Badlands Unlimited, 2018), 24–25. Emphasis my own.

Genevieve Lipinsky de Orlov is a cofounder and editor of The Public Review, and an art historian and critic.