Ordinary extraordinary: the para/pata:institutionalism of Critical Practice

ABSTRACT

This paper considers Critical Practice, the London-based cluster of artists, designers, curators, academics and other researchers who share a commitment to the critical practice of art, its organisation and its education as public goods. I discuss Critical Practice as an open learning culture, contextualising it with reference to institutional critique and the discursive practice of peer-to-peer exchange as general social technique. This leads me to consider ways this exchange can confound elitism and conservatism when conscientiously organised through sensitive formats. I consider two that feature in the repertoire of Critical Practice: un-conferences and future archiving. These formats and the Cluster's relation to its host (Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London) are respectively probed using parainstituting (i.e. self-organisation as social reproduction) and patainstituting (i.e. the self-organisation of aspiration). After discussing each in turn, I propose a nascent framework of pata/para:instituting. I have written this account of Critical Practice as a long-standing member. My interest in better understanding the Cluster's ways of doing and being is not an end in itself, but rather to more effectively grasp the qualities of self-organised practice and/as education in art and design more generally.

KEYWORDS:

• Art education
• future archiving
• institutional critique
• instituent practices
• open
• patainstituting
• parainstituting

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Marsha Bradfield rides the hyphen as an artist-curator-educator-fundraiser-researcher-writer and company director. For more than a decade, she has been affiliated with Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, teaching on BA through PhD. In 2015 Marsha founded Artfield Projects as an international platform for practice-based research in art, design, curating, pedagogy and other forms of cultural production. She lives and works in London, UK.

Notes

1 Some members are faculty, staff and students of Chelsea College but many others have no institutional affiliations. Most live in London but a few are based overseas and connect remotely. Members come and go in keeping with their interests and commitments. As the vast amount of labour in Critical Practice is unpaid, only those who can afford to volunteer are able to do so.

2 I describe the influence of institutent practices as ‘huge’ because there was a period between 2008 and 2012 when they were relentlessly referenced in the summits, conferences and other talks related to cultural organising and instituting that I attended.

3 See Critical Practice: Issue 1 (2007) and Critical Practice: Issue 2 (2008) for further discussion on the early days of the Cluster’s development.

4 It could, of course, be argued the reverse is also true, that formal education feeds off informal education. For discussion of a related situation, see Gregory Sholette's Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (2010) which considers relations between the commercial artworld and the non-commercial art world and how the former is the lifeblood of the latter.