When Marcel Duchamp placed a toilet in a museum and called it art, it was clear that he was critiquing more than our assumptions about art objects. Duchamp knew that art also includes context and environment: the space in which the... [more]

When Marcel Duchamp placed a toilet in a museum and called it art, it was clear that he was critiquing more than our assumptions about art objects. Duchamp knew that art also includes context and environment: the space in which the object is displayed. Once an object enters an art institution, its very nature is transformed. Suddenly, even an everyday toilet glows with an artistic aura. It is the institution itself that brings this transformation about, providing the context for art's status, its definition, its mystique, and its lure. Duchamp's gesture set the stage for the Institutional Critique movement that arose in the late 1960s. In his piece "Grass Grows" (1969), Hans Haacke planted a patch of sod in some soil inside the museum and oversaw its growth. The work critiqued the "mythical time" of the art object: the illusory temporal suspension that the work of art enjoys within the institution, as if art somehow hovered in its own institutionalized eternity. Haacke brought "real time" back to the art object by highlighting the process of organic growth and death, thereby stripping the institution of its eternalizing power. Other artists have focused less on explicit institutional condemnation, and more on an integration of their art with the institution. David Buren creates his work within the space of the museum, using the specific nature of a particular space as both the limitation and inspiration for each of his works. A grid on the ceiling of a room, for example, provides a geometric configuration that carries into the structure of his piece. Buren often paints directly on museum or gallery walls, ensuring that his works have no existence outside the specific location in which they are produced. His aim is both critical and aesthetic, as he creates art that shows no distinction between object and context. He reveals the powerful effects that institutional space has on the production and experience of art objects. Institutional Critique seeks to focus our attention, not merely on the art objects themselves, but on the context that surrounds them. It is an investigation of the effects this context has on the experience of art. It seeks to dispel the illusion that art objects are independent entities endowed with a mystique of their own -- in reality, this mystique is a function of institutional power. [show less]