Art as Critique

In the 1964, Bianchini Gallery had an "American Supermarket" exhibition. A new role of installation art brought the art world's attention. Within the wide and wild usage of everyday objects and already-mades, a close relationship between artworks and the notion of "retail experience" became the focus of discussion. Those commercial objects and our relations with them entered into the so-called "high-browed" fine art places. Actually, there're several groups of art critics are working on the discussion on the relationship between the art objects and the everyday objects. Following the Marxism philosophy, all art objects are essentially commodity, and then must obey the rule of "use value, exchange value and sign value". It is interesting to think about that in relating the role of installation artwork within its critical function in commenting on the relation between viewers/consumers and arts/commodity, as well as the critique of the global capitalized situation.

So that makes me think about the role of installation art working as a critique more when Claire Bishop articulated the idea of Institutional Critique. After Vietnam war and the rise of Feminism, scholar like Richard Flood pointed out that the younger generation started to acknowledge that the politically disengaged art could be seen as complicit with the status quo, and argued that any art object that gratified the market implicitly supported a conservative ideology in which capitalism dovetailed with patriarchy, an imperialist foreign policy, racism and a host of other social problem.

Therefore, the work of Hans Haacke made us rethink about the relationship between artists and museum patrons, trustees, politics and business, I thought about Haacke's project "Calligraphie" as the perfect example to support his idea on that. The "Calligraphie" proposal was finally turned down by the museum because the artist's choice on the Arabic translation of the French declaration of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity", which was ironic because the spirit of those three words should not be limited by language or the ideology behind a language. But the museum's rejection on that actually was expected and made the soul of the critical role of Haacke's piece.