Institution is a Verb (Aver!) some editorial rhetoric
This text portends the forthcoming project Institution is a Verb, a compendium of materials archiving, remembering, and discussing 7 years of operations at 104 Meserole Street in Brooklyn NY (the PPL lab site). It is one of many opinion pieces written as part of this compendium.
AS the urgency of abolishing the USA’s police forces, dismantling systems of carceral slavery, and halting the mechanisms of colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism escalates across spheres of society, immense pressure is placed on “institutions” as the societal vehicles reproducing and maintaining what Achille Mbembe terms necropolitics (2011). Ana Duvernay (2016), Angela Davis (2012) both describe institutionalization as the formal procedures through which ideological reproductions of white supremacy and capitalism become legal and political oppressions. And, as Kimberly Jones teaches in her viral video (2020), institutions are “who” have broken social contracts and divested Black persons from participations (let alone agentic construction of society based on Black ideas, ethics, beliefs, experiences, and values). The institutions themselves are White (capital “W”), and thus inhuman(e); Whiteness serves capitalism and colonial hegemony, not any of the life (human or otherwise) on Earth.
“Artworlds” are a part of this “society,” as such. Social contracts between state and subject promise pursuit of happiness, open exchange of ideas, and cultural self-recognitions but control and withhold these through procedural processes of institution. While art’s principle “role” in society, as many theorists across melenations and cultural-historical locations have described, is to evince freedoms (so complexly), arts institutions take up the task of commodifying what is felt, described, and envisioned through art, reifying artistic expressions and reflections into serviceable contributions participant in control-oriented contracts and capitulations. Political and social theory here meets lived experience and the desires of individual artists as each differently confronts procedural systemics that enable and disable, include and exclude, recognize and ghost, reward and punish.
While artists have no choice but to seek the safety of commodification and value-assignment, we may also turn to institutionality itself as both material for artistic work and as the site of our own resistant political activity.
Thus, through both academic artworld interests in “the institution as a work of art itself” and through popular uprising and political address, institutions and their predominately white and/or upper class, institutionally educated, culturally authorized administrators and powerholders are forced to re-orient around new and ancestral forms, ideas, ethics, beliefs, and values. Of course, however, “institution builders” largely do not intend to relinquish power or the core presentations and enactments of the arts institution, they desire reconciliations and reforms, offering “participation” and “access,” re-writing social contracts that largely re-stage the same old paradigms.
So what are the arts institution’s “core presentations and enactments” and are they reformable?
Most generously, we might say that the arts institution presents and enacts itself through formation of institutional memories/histories, institutional recognitions, and institutionalized identities. These formations are indeed valuable if one believes in large-scale or centralized “society” or “singularity of culture” at all (longer debates are always necessary on this issue).
Many thus argue that if the memories/histories, recognitions, and identities are expanded and “diversified” then the powerholdings and paradigms themselves may be left as they are.
Unless, however, an infinite quantum catalog is to be made that “includes” every and all work of art and every single individual artist, arts institutions must somehow determine which art and artists are worth remembering, recognizing, and identifying. These evaluations and frames for value are the very acts of instituting themselves:
Arts institutions construct and select for memories/histories, recognitions, and identities which are valuable and salable within markets. Arts institutions provide value(s) to/through participations and accesses: curated artists become historicized, recognized, identified within and on the terms of capitalism and its value-based (hegemonic) corporealizations. The arts institution is solely and constantly selling itself and its assets to funders, ticket buyers, and to society “itself,” via regulating how and through which schemas (histories, recognitions, identities) certain selected artists should be seen as worthy of remembering, seeing, identifying within dominant paradigms for value and mattering. This appraising or valuing and then selling of enculturation itself is the arts institution’s predominant performativity across and throughout operations; these are the ways in which the arts institution institutionalizes artistic practices and expressions.
Within capitalist markets, arts institutions must, as one consequence amongst many, maintain a higher place for “art” above “community”-based cultural expression. Making art and being seen as “an artist” must be professionalized and specialized, and the luxury consumer class must be represented. No art that structurally evinces freedom can be circulated inside the walls of post-consensual capitalism; as the workings are institutionalized, “an art” appears as an autonomous and disembodied product, as does the “branded” artist as both producer and product themself.
In the arts, the language of “community” is used to disguise the hegemonies and default modes of production constituting an institution, allowing “The Institution,” as an entity, to pretend that its labor systems, programs, aesthetics, and economic investments are organic and somehow “natural,” emergent from the “free activities” and value(s) of workers, spectators, shareholders, members, and other participants rather than oriented around and directly designed by the paradigms, valuation schemas, and systems we currently term capitalism, white supremacy, cis-hetero-patriarchy, citizenship (and so on).
While institutions operate in these ways, they cannot be let stand.
And so we ask, in the face of all of this monolithic pessimism, what can we posit as the difference between an “institution” and a “community” (or, as we might later prefer, “a cultural embodiment”)? This is a question for “the arts” but it also interrogates movements for and against contractual/incorporative society “itself.”
In what Michael C. Dawson terms “pragmatic utopianism” and curiosity regarding social relations, always entangling embodiments across spheres of life, performance artists in particular have some perspectives to offer that may help us re-locate these enormous questions within experiential presentations and enactments.
Because performance artists have been operating on the fringes of mainstream artworlds, resistant to commoditization throughout our disciplinary history, and largely working through smaller-scale “projects” and exhibitions we organize for and by ourselves, we have been testing whether or not (and, if so, how) Institutional presentations and enactments of cohering, identifying, programming, economic structuring, and other organizational performativities, can be oriented around lived critical interrogation, affective experimentation, and bodily liberation. (Further, the demographic identities of performance artists in particular are not the same as those in other “high art” disciplines; we are almost solely (variously, differently) intersectionally located as Others…this fact is simply visible in the identities of today’s performance artists).
While it is clearly biased and perhaps idealistic to argue that performance art is a “more purely revolutionary” form of art due to who makes it and how, what we can perhaps say is that from the perspective of performance art and performance artists come experiential proofs that it is quite possible for groups of persons performing instituting acts to perform as artists, to institute anti-capitalist elements of relational organization in ways much more like a performance ensemble, a collective, even a movement of the art-historical and/or political sort, as a community.
Institution hereby becomes a much more tangible verb, describing ways that communities emergent from social relations do and can remember, recognize, and identify ourselves and each other in ways (ideally) at least partially irrelevant/irreverent to the default agenda to accumulate capital and other forms of power within totalitarian markets.
How so?
Of course, ways in which institutionality can be performed otherwise is an ongoing learning process. This text is supposed to be about a particular project, a compendium of instances, examples, and memories called Institution is a Verb. In describing this project, which itself refers to a 7-year period of laboratory exploration through a site in Brooklyn, NY called Panoply Performance Laboratory, I use these three words, “instances,” “examples,” and “memories” very deliberately. There are currently many trending artworld attempts to reify institutional performance as a commodifiable critical experience and various theoretical attempts therefore to frame institutions as “art.” These reifying and framing texts are participant in the predominant modes of performativity constituting institutionality: they are selling (out).
While the pieces comprising Institution is a Verb do have self-reflective, autonomizing, historicizing, and justifying abilities, they are also moving around and through a “community” of artists that uses semblances (theatricalizations, or intentionalizations) of institutionality to support their “own” artworkings. This “our own” can be seen as artists owning our own means of production, it can be seen as an owing to cause rather than to capital, and it can be seen aligned historically, theoretically, and emotionally with the Indigenous, Black, queer (etc) (r)evolutions that are currently and always underway.
Questioning the definitions and holdings in/of “community” is one way of entering and operating through revolutionary strategies, always practicing discourse and directly materializing what one (individually and in groups, often temporarily, always diffractively) means by “revolutionary” and by “freedom,” in and around “artworldings” and as (an) embodied artist(s).
Subjectively (how could I ever speak otherwise), what I’ve learned from the immensely valuable opportunity to experience what it feels like to be a part of a “performance art community,” is that communities are different from institutions in that they/we are:
1) centralizing and valuing differences between persons, respecting (p)articularity rather than enforcing homogenizing embodiments, thereby enabling criticisms of any “centralized society” to remain always present and problematic
2) mobilizing processes around states and situations of flourishing rather than around extraction and exploitation from persons for the health of the centralized institution “itself”
3) formally incoherent to dominant paradigms and rigorously critical of itself and any and all descriptions of it(self) en total.
The first claim is more complex than it seems. It involves direct confrontation with socio-political representations throughout every interaction and process. “Community” involves active decision-making that correlates personal experiences and social behaviors with the most structural of paradigms (race, class, gender, language, religion, and so on) usually because those actual persons involved have no choice but to confront their/our own Blackness, Indigeneity, queerness, transness, feminization, poverty, etc. etc. in every moment, in situ. We are always asking if there is a “we” and making intentional decisions about when, how, and if to enact such cultural embodiments.
The second claim is perhaps more simple than it seems, declaring that communities are made up of persons who pay attention to each other, who value each other, who attend to one another when we are most vulnerable, and practice ways of being together that emphasize and constantly negotiate the safety, health, stimulation, and pleasure (these are all extremely broad and fraught concepts) of those present.
Finally, the formal incoherence of “a community” that becomes as and via artistic practice, performing institution as a verb in particular, is a delicate act of suspension, keeping organizational and community-driven performances both autonomous and uncanny enough to be felt as “performance art” themselves (e.g. horrific, tender, risky, abject, presence-based, vulnerable to agentic [e]motions and motivations), and critical enough to move and build for reasons and on purpose, to keep adapting and learning, preserving the remembering, recognizing and identifying (i.e. taking a stand, identifying with and as) abilities of organizing through time via instituting processes.
This text is not, finally, a statement of solidarity or presentation of institutional ethicality to systemic arbiters of worth. PPL (Panoply Performance Laboratory) not “An Institution” and I do not speak on behalf of any coherent entity in any representational way. This is not a statement at all, it is a one person’s attempt to participate in a community of revolutionaries via some discourse. As the organizer of this project (once a book, now a website and maybe later a book) and as one of the lead organizers of the lab site the project discusses, my acts of instituting (such as writing this text) are personal, perlocutionary and always out of order (not only as issuant from a white body, also non-valuable in other ways), one small voice declaring to people I know best and hold most dear to my heart, Aver!
Dawson, Michael C. 2011. Not in Our Lifetimes: The Future of Black Politics. University of Chicago Press, see also: https://unitforcriticism.wordpress.com/2019/04/02/race-capitalism-the-current-crisis-conundrums-for-those-who-envisage-a-socialist-future-a-lecture-by-michael-dawson-u-of-chicago-response-by-peter-thompson-history/
Davis, Angela. 2012. The Meaning of Freedom: And Other Difficult Dialogues. City Lights Publishers. Print.
DuVernay, Ana. 2016. 13th. Netflix. Documentary Film.
Mbembe, Achille. 2011. Necropolitics. Duke University Press. Print.
Jones, Kimberly. 2020. How We Can Win. CARJAM TV. YouTube Video.
