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After the neo-avant-garde? New-genre conceptual art and the institution of critique.

Article Excerpt
Alexander Alberro and Sabeth Buchmann, eds. Art after Conceptual Art. Cambridge, MA, and Vienna: MIT Press/Generali Foundation, 2006. 240 pp., 75 b/w ills. $30 paper.

John C. Welchman, ed. Institutional Critique and After. Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2007. 400 pp., 76 b/w ills. $25 paper.

The new volumes Art after Conceptual Art and Institutional Critique and After speak to a present crisis in writing on critical art. Predictably, the nature of this crisis is hardly coherent, neither within the individual volumes nor between them. Both seek to revise the canon of critical postwar art that the emerging generation of art historians encountered in college syllabi as genealogies of avant-garde movements. At certain points, this project seems to arise from a paradigm shift in artistic production and, at others, merely from a generational shift among critics. Indeed, the afters in Art after Conceptual Art and Institutional Critique and After refer as much to the reigning definitions of conceptual art and institutional critique as they do to a historical break, whether real or imaginary, with these art movements.

For many contributors, the object of critique has shifted. Issues such as globalization and the demand for art to address localized audiences necessitate a rethinking of the prevailing definitions of critical art, which are generally understood in relation to aesthetic and institutional concerns. Some of these positions look to new strategies of artistic practice that have come to prominence in the last fifteen years, associated with the models of new-genre public art and relational aesthetics, identifying in them relevant, new directions to engage with the reoriented object of critical art. Others cite the current art's mode of critique. For proponents of this position, the emergence of new media presents new aesthetic criteria that problematize the genealogies of the avant-garde that have come to stand in for histories of critical art.

A less radical position supposes institutional critique's obsolescence now that it has achieved "official" critical art status in both the museum and the academy. Against such claims, some contributors recuperate the prevailing narratives, positioning recent artistic strategies as part of an unbroken trajectory of the postwar neo-avant-garde; what comes after institutional critique, then, is an evolution of it. We also encounter critiques of these artistic strategies, arguing for the continued relevance of the traditional model of institutional critique in the present.

Art after Conceptual Art is divided into...

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