Institutional Critique and After

Volume II of the SoCCAS series

“Institutional Critique and After” explores the history and contemporary reassessment of the Institutional Critique movement launched in the late 1960s by artists including Michael Asher and Hans Haacke.

One of the movement’s key aims was the exposure and ironization of the structures and logic of museums and art galleries. The movement was redeveloped in the 1980s and after by Andrea Fraser, Renée Green, Fred Wilson, and others who engaged in more interactive and performative interventions; and has been vigorously reoriented in recent years to address issues such as globalization.

The publication will explore histories, theories, diverse locations and different kinds of institutional and alternative space. It will touch on traditional forms of art, but also on installations, performance, new media practices, and cultural activism. Its central questions will turn on the critical potential of art (and institutions) and whether—and if so how—they can stimulate social or political change.

With texts by art historians, critics, curators, and artists such as John Searle, Hans Haacke, Alexander Alberro, Maria Eichhorn, Andrea Fraser, Isabelle Graw, Martin Sastre, Renée Green, Lynn Zelevansky, Monica Bonvicini, Christiane Paul, The Guerilla Girls, Juli Carson, Javier Téllez, Astrid Mania, Amy Pederson, The Yes Men, Lauri Firstenberg, Jens Hoffmann, Mike Kelley, and Ricardo Dominguez.

Published with The Southern California Consortium of Art Schools (SoCCAS), as the second volume of a series of anthologies dedicated to contemporary art issues.