Confronting the Institution in Performance

Abstract

Weaves together the various voices for the art collective to offer readers both an analysis and an experience of the group's performance: the inner voice of the performance; the critical voice of the witness; and the frustrating redactions reflecting Tate and BP's hidden contracts. Where Liberate Tate's open, participatory performance Hidden Figures experienced the public gallery as a public space able to initiate new encounters and reflect on social issues, Tate's closed reaction to information requests exhibited a dark underside to the notion of the gallery as public: an institution that eagerly invites visitors through its doors, but blocks those thresholds swiftly and firmly when too many questions are asked. Tate's remit should be to act in the public interest, but by redacting and withholding information they revealed a divide; a split between public and private interests. London is one of the global centres of the oil industry. Headquartered here, BP uses the city to extract a combination of financial, political, legal and technological services that enable them to produce, pump, transport, refine and sell oil and gas. They unfold a network of relationships between oil and gas companies and the government departments, regulators, cultural institutions, banks and other institutions that surround them. Museums are porous. This carbon web also runs through Tate, instrumentalising the museum's presentation as a public institution. But just as the various governances of the carbon web drip through Tate as an institution, it is also fuelled from below by the publics which flow through it. Its institutional status as public sphere and state commons opens it out into a circulation of public institutions and flows of emergent undercommons and counterpublics, upon which it depends. The farthest flung infrastructural reaches of the carbon web, in the institution of oil pipelines or docks, made these sites key points of political leverage and struggle for social movements. The attempt to incorporate museums into this ecocidal infrastructure makes them too a point of leverage. Liberate Tate builds up pressure upon the museum to be a better public institution by leveraging the channels of its own public flows.

Notes

1 One can see these two perspectives rupturing locally in New York, between acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) activist-art and October magazine's academic critique, in the 1987 October special issue, AIDS: Cultural analysis/ Cultural activism, which combined academic and activist voices, but also resulted in the expulsion of its young editor, art historian Douglas Crimp, from the journal's editorial board (Danbolt 2008).

2 Key moments may be On Direct Action as One of the Fine Arts in 2000 at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) or The Interventionists in 2005 at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MOCA), USA. See also Lippard (1991).

3 The film of our performance Hidden figures was shown soon afterwards as part of the public programme of London's Whitechapel Gallery's exhibition Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract art and society 1910–2015. It was also presented as part of the public programme of London's Victoria and Albert Museum's (V&A's) exhibition Disobedient Objects.