The term ‘New Institutionalism’ describes a series of curatorial, art educational as well as administrative practices that from the mid 1990s to the early 2000s endeavored to reorganize the structures of mostly medium-sized, publicly funded contemporary art institutions, and to define alternative forms of institutional activity. At least on a discursive level, there occurred a shift away from the institutional framing of an art object as practiced since the 1920s with elements such as the white cube, top-down organization and insider audiences.

For the projects and events that were initiated in this context, institutional practice was not confined to traditional exhibition programs (such as solo exhibitions or thematic shows); the exhibition was also conceived as a social project and operated alongside discursive events, film programs, radio and TV shows, integrated libraries and book shops as well as journals, reading groups, online displays, invitation cards, posters and residencies. The uses of these formats remained adaptable and open to change: production, presentation and reception/criticism were not successive and separate activities; they happened simultaneously and frequently intersected. Solo exhibitions on the other hand might last for a year and show just one work at a time. The art institution thus functioned as a place of production, site of research and space for debate, an “active space between community center, laboratory and academy,” which artists might use as a functional tool that supplies “money for research visits […] or even a computer.”[1] Viewers are usually accorded an active role, becoming part of “artistically conceived social arenas.”[2]

As these new curatorial forms of action and presentation became established, according to the editor of the Verksted-publication New Institutionalism, Jonas Ekeberg, institutional actors let go of traditional characteristics, roles and mandates, and began to treat their position in the cultural-political and social structure self-critically. For example in 2003 Maria Lind, Søren Grammel and Katharina Schlieben, in collaboration with artists Mabe Bethônico and Liam Gillick, worked at Kunstverein München on the project Telling History: An Archive and Three Case Studies, which explored its own institutional history by focusing on three exemplary, controversial exhibitions. Through reflexive examination of the archival material they aimed to discover what curatorial activity in an institutional context can mean, and examine its limits in further exhibitions that would also investigate how certain tendencies of institutional agency develop in particular institutional frameworks—all without leaving the institution itself.

It was not just this type of investigation of institutional frameworks that was decisive for the practices subsumed under New Institutionalism, but the expansion of institutional practice, above all toward forms of social engagement. Charles Esche perceived his role as curator at the Rooseum in Malmö from 2000 to 2005 as an attempt to turn the art institution into a place where artistic work would create other forms of democratic participation and thus pave the way to a “reimagination of the world.” This rhetoric was apparent in the titles of Esche’s exhibitions: his first exhibition at the Rooseum in 2001 was entitled There is gonna be some trouble, a whole house will need rebuilding, a Morrissey quote that points to the direction he wanted to explore in his new position, which he saw as a tool to explore the key question: “can art be a useful democratic device […] to install other forms of democracy than the ones we had?”[3] Taken as a whole, many of the undertakings that are critical of institutions or focused on creating change operate with an understanding of the agency of institutions and social engagement that emerges from the political left.

Exhibition poster of  “There is gonna be some trouble, a whole house will need rebuilding” at Rooseum, Malmö, 10.3-1.4.2001. Design by Andreas Nordström, 2001.

New Institutionalism and its proliferationThe term New Institutionalism was introduced by Jonas Ekeberg in the homonymous first issue of the publication-series Verksted, published by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway in 2003.[4] The publication contains a discussion of a series of institutions and institutional practices, with the aim of presenting “a handful of Norwegian and international art institutions” that were undergoing radical changes and could be viewed as attempts “to redefine the contemporary art institution.”[5] The examples mentioned in the introduction and the individual contributions include Rooseum Malmö, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul, Bergen Kunsthal, Kunstverein München as well as the biennials of Johannesburg and Norway.

The term New Institutionalism has since found its way into the current debates of disciplines such as art theory and art education. There was an entry for it in the dictionary section of Skulptur Projekte Münster 07 as well as the glossary of the recently published curatorial handbook Ausstellungstheorie und –praxis.[6] Occasionally New Institutionalism is interpreted as a new model of “curatorial practice.”[7] However, there is still comparatively little extensive and analytical writing surrounding the concept.[8] One reason for this is that contemporary curators themselves rejected the term and perceived it as artificially grafted onto their practice. Nina Möntmann, formerly curator at the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art (NIFCA), an institution committed to cultural exchange, criticized its introduction without any temporal distance and that its categorizing effect stands in direct contrast to an actual artistic and curatorial practice.[9] Søren Grammel, former curator at Kunstverein München, also suggested that what was flexible and intended to dissolve schematic approaches was immediately codified and canonized.[10] Charles Esche attempted to circumvent this problem when he chose to label his own practice as “experimental institutionalism.” If the prefix ‘new’ inescapably evokes the creation of new models, Esche instead emphasized the unpredictability of the curatorial experiment within the institution.[11] Despite this critique, Jonas Ekeberg regards the discussion on New Institutionalism as a valuable opportunity “to focus on the relation between artistic production, public institutions and social change.”[12]

Jonas Ekeberg (Hg.): New Institutionalism Verksted #1, Oslo: Office for Contemporary Art Norway 2003.

This conceptual bundling under the term New Institutionalism functions as a form of ‘cultural branding’ of various disparate practices in and with experimental art institutions. The concept itself however “was snapped out of the air” and introduced by Ekeberg in a “speculative” sense, never intended as a conceptual model. In addition, there is little congruity between the practice and the discourse that shaped itself around it—the discourse does not write about the practice, and the practice does not illustrate the discourse, but rather they mutually depend on and influence each other. Ekeberg pleads that rather than rejecting New Institutionalism in favor of some other term, “perhaps we should use them all.”[13]

Institutions shape the art of today
The motivation of Ekeberg’s New Institutionalism to group together institutions characterized by a focus on (critical) examination of the organization and disposition of art was also shared by other protagonists and corresponded to a certain necessity, perhaps even a “coherent cultural movement.”[14]

An example is Jorge Ribalta, curator of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), who conceived of institutional practice as “experiments in a new institutionality.” Ribalta spoke explicitly against valuing the exhibition above other activities, instead recommending that institutions develop workshops, lectures, publications or online activities as “alternatives to the dominant models of museums,” which are committed to a traditional view of the art object and to spectacle. His 2001 project Las Agencias situated MACBA as a collaborator of social movements by defining the art institution as a working space for social activists. According to Ribalta, the politicization of the institution by enabling it to become a place for collaboration with activists and thus “part of social struggles” seemed essential.[15]

For curator Jens Hoffmann, who organized the exhibition and seminar Institution 2 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, in 2003, the subject of research was not so much the museum than the practice of ten European art institutions “that manifest a flexible and progressive approach to a critical engagement with art and the exchange with the public.”[16] The declared aim was to explore a variety of institutional models that would illuminate the differences between institutions and their respective strategies.

The Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art (NIFCA) also organized a range of exhibitions and seminars on the subject of the institution under the direction of Nina Möntmann from 2003 to 2006. In close collaboration with artists and curators the conditions of production and forms of emancipatory practice in these new and progressive art institutions were analyzed. The project Opacity. Current Considerations on Art Institutions and the Economy of Desire for example discussed places of retreat for critical practice as opposed to the need for transparent institutions, while Spaces of Conflict by artists Mike Bode and Staffan Schmidt in collaboration with seven institutions in Berlin, Oslo, Copenhagen, Vilnius, Malmö and Helsinki, as well as art students, dealt with physical institutional space.

We would particularly emphasize the conference Public Art Policies. Progressive Art Institutions in the Age of Dissolving Welfare States organized by the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (eipcp) in the context of their project republicart at the Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna in early 2004. The conference reflected on the social function of state-subsidized institutions in central and northern Europe and their relation to structures of financing. In their concept eipcp outlined the situation of the art institution as an outsourced organizational form of the state apparatus that seems to be dependent on constantly new portions of critical art. The conference was intended to “explore the strategies of actors in the art institutions for at least temporarily emancipating themselves from the grasp of the state apparatus.”[17]

A somewhat earlier, comparable approach to the projects described is found in the ‘post-reflexive turn’ of museology. At the end of the 1980s ‘new museology’ came to describe an emerging analysis of the functions and procedures of the classical museum with close attention to their hegemonial western, nationalist and patriarchal narratives and constructs, leading to a greater awareness of the power of institutional presentation.[18] Following this demand for a radical examination of the social role of the museum, the later post-reflexive turn was not confined to deconstructing the conditions and formats of the museum (such as canonized collection display or authoritarian exhibition theses), it also conceived the museum as a democratically organized ‘space of action’ allowing for a shared, multi-voiced practice. Exhibitions were thus often put together with the participation of multiple actors and conceived as political-discursive practices confronting controversial social questions. These approaches, often labeled ‘project-based exhibitions,’ ‘un-exhibition' or ‘non-exhibition-based curatorial activities,’ saw themselves as critical practices and frequently reflected on alternative narratives of presentation in their approach to exhibition topics.[19]

Klaus Rinke, Zwischenmenschliche Beziehungen, between 2, 1969, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. Photo: Bernd Jansen, Düsseldorf.

Towards a historical context
This list remains fragmentary and represents only a snapshot of institutional self-examination around the turn of the Millennium. Why the question of the organization of art was discussed with such intensity at just this historical moment cannot be exhaustively answered here. An important aspect is that the institutional positions discussed above renounced the contemporary tendency towards privatization and the related notion of populist publics. Artist Andrea Fraser has pointed to a strengthening of administrative structures in large US museums, such as the Guggenheim and MoMA in New York, since the 1980s. There was less trust in the independent expertise of curators and leading positions became increasingly occupied by managers without a background in art history or theory.[20]

For our review of the discourse of New Institutionalism it is particularly interesting that these various debates were initially conducted without ties to particular disciplines. The key actors were theorists, curators and artists who discussed their own institutional practice. There was little reference to a possible history of research on institutions or any attempt to write such a history. This is linked to the fact that the historical reflection on exhibition practices only becomes more widely established around the same time as the discourse of New Institutionalism. A little later, in 2010, Charles Esche with Mark Lewis edited the series Exhibition Histories for Afterall Books, thus creating an important platform for the historicizing of the curatorial.

To provide a fragmentary historical background for the practices of New Institutionalism we refer to Düsseldorf Kunsthalle as an example for the transformation of institutional practice. Starting in 1969 the Kunsthalle organized the series between, which was an early example of the relaxation of institutional structures. This temporary format was designed to fill the transitional phases between the usual exhibitions, and while it primarily created a space for experimental short exhibitions, it also enabled the creation of installations, performances and participation in demonstrations far beyond the regular opening hours. However the motivation of the institution emerged from “reflections on a change of direction in the relationships between art institution, artists and visitors.”[21] With the new format the Kunsthalle, then under the direction of Karl Ruhrberg, reacted to a suggestion by artist Tony Morgan, who was campaigning for exhibition opportunities for contemporary artists. Another influence was the protest by local artist collective Politisch Soziale Realität (PSR), which demanded greater participation in devising the program of the institution.

While a (partial) transformation was thus launched in the context of artists’ demands for participatory or democratic formats and a politicized articulation of critique, the emergence of the figure of the author-curator within the institution since the 1960s, whose goals might conflict with the expectations of the institution, played a central role in the examination and transformation of the institutional dispositif.

The dominant and repeatedly cited example for such a stance is Harald Szeemann, especially documenta 5, which he curated in 1972. With its subtitle 100 Days as Event documenta 5 directly implied a transformed understanding of the exhibition and staged itself “as site of programmed events, as interactive space, as accessible event-structure with various centers of activity.”[22] The first, ultimately rejected, concept presented by Szeemann intended a complete turn away from the fixed, museum-like exhibition, and the version that was finally realized still placed a process-oriented approach center stage and operated at the outer limits of the established, canonized idea of art by examining the visual potential of pop-cultural images and socially stigmatized forms of creative authorship. Szeemann broke with the organizational structures of documenta and made the conception of an exhibition “a question of subjective assessment whose criteria need to be neither specified nor legitimized.”[23]

This way of working relates to other expanded forms of practice in relation to the handling and presentation of artwork, which includes catalogues, invitations, interviews and events in public space as curatorial forms of publication on an equal footing with the exhibition. Compared to the case of Szeemann, where the prominent role of the curator turned into an exhibition-auteur function, Lucy Lippard for example saw herself as a critic and sometimes as writer-collaborator of conceptual artists and proponents of institutional critique. Curating, for Lippard, was another form of (art-) criticism. This admixture of the curatorial and journalistic also demonstrates a desire to dissolve the hierarchies between objects, texts, and photographs, among others, and to place various artistic and curatorial methods and approaches at our disposal, to be questioned or re-imagined. Especially the dematerialization of art under the label of conceptual art was for Lippard a weapon “that would transform the art world into a democratic institution,” by producing cheap but expansive international projects that were easy to transport and communicate.[24]

In the course of this opening of the curatorial field and the increasing delimitation of disciplines it was often alleged that the curator him or herself was in the process of becoming an artist. This criticism was leveled at Lippard as well as Szeemann[25], and the argument is repeated in the current debates on New Institutionalism.[26] Without getting further into this issue, it seems important to note that the parallel development of curatorial and artistic practice was already under way forty years ago. The adaptation of institutional formats was on the one hand regarded as a reaction to the demands of artists, on the other hand, individual protagonists were held responsible for the development of a “more experimental […] awareness of curatorial work.”[27]

Here, too, there are evident similarities to the debate on New Institutionalism. While institutional repositioning by protagonists of New Institutionalism was not a response to pressure, it was nevertheless represented as a reflexive reaction to certain artistic methods of work and production, or interpreted as an answer to the problem of what kinds of institution might still find a use for process-oriented, participatory and dialogical work that does not result in a final object and is not dependent on traditional white cube exhibition spaces.[28] Maria Lind emphasized this by asserting that the exhibition is just one of many possible ways in which an institution can frame artistic work.[29]

On the other hand it is claimed that a “ubiquitous biennale culture” has created a whole generation of independent curators who have adopted experimental modes of handling various forms of display and models of work and who import this attitude to institutions quite independently of artistic practices.[30] The term New Institutionalism is sometimes also used to describe the more recent development that these independent curators have increasingly moved into management positions in art institutions.[31] The close relationship of New Institutionalism to individual curators is linked to what has elsewhere been described as a ‘curatorial turn,’ referring to the phenomenon that the curator increasingly plays a “creative and active part within the production of art itself.”[32]

New Institutionalism as new institutional critique?
While the early artistic institutional critique of the 1960s and 1970s was often based on resistance or refusal, “un déni d’exposition” intended to undermine existing authority[33], the ‘second’ phase of institutional critique from the late 1980s onwards also regarded the work of art as something that isn’t object- or image oriented and produced in the studio. But it went a step further by defining the work of art as produced in the “encounter of the demands of the place and the methods of producers.”[34] The structures, hierarchies as well as social functions of the corresponding institutions however were increasingly reflected critically among a community of ‘fellow travelers’—institutional actors together with artists and other cultural producers. Institutional critique in this setting becomes an “analytical tool,” a “method of […] political criticism”[35] that consciously engages with social processes.

The reflexive examination of the conditions of institutional management of art (such as its linguistic and architectural framing) enabled by institutional critique is continued by curators associated with New Institutionalism from their positions as agents within art institutions.[36] In some of the literature it is even suggested that New Institutionalism should simply be regarded as a replacement for the now canonized practices of institutional critique: curatorial practices are interpreted as attempts not only to see art as “always already institutionalized”[37] and to act accordingly, but also to experiment with the possibility of a “pure, undiluted encounter with art.”[38]

We doubt that it is possible to claim New Institutionalism as a new form of institutional critique. For one thing, the roles and speaking positions of the actors involved have remained almost unchanged. Even though curators work more experimentally, the boundary that separates the (speaking) position of the artist from that of the curator has remained untouched. There were attempts at a shared, dialogical practice, where artists were invited to co-develop institutions conceptually and practically, be it through the design of the logo, the entrance hall or the archive, but even in these scenarios curators remained the hosts, and artists the guests.

New Institutionalism evaluated
Ten years on, how can we respond to the discussions and practices surrounding New Institutionalism? Have new institutional models been introduced? Have working conditions and structures been improved, and new audiences created?

It can be misleading to ask about concrete effects and results, since the articulation of the concept and its integration in a (art theoretical) reception history has created a largely discursive frame of reference, which presupposes certain attitudes and forms of engagement. However we can observe several intersecting and non-linear narratives surrounding New Institutionalism: on the level of non-human actors, of medium-sized institutions, New Institutionalism is represented as a failed enterprise.[39] As a result of budget cuts several state-subsidized institutions were closed down, the Rooseum and NIFCA among them. Other institutions, such as Kunstverein München, changed their profile as they changed curators.

The reasons for the closures were identified in the lack of support for critical attitudes by state-subsidized art institutions among the agencies and political bodies responsible.[40] This in turn is linked to the gradual turn towards neoliberal or populist cultural policies in Europe, which demanded the closure of all “leftist expert institutions.”[41] In the case of NIFCA, concrete requests by politicians that art should be populist and support a positivist sense of identity were not met, resulting in the closure of the institution. In Malmö social democratic politicians could not see the point of Charles Esche’s idea of the art institution as community center.

We might counter-argue that this failure cannot be explained entirely with reference to hegemonial political conditions, but that institutions as agents did not manage to constitute or mobilize the (sub-)publics necessary to oppose the closure of an institution under political pressure, and which might by their very existence legitimate the direction of the program. Since most curators are only employed on short-term contracts they often do not build the stable relationships with a local public that are prerequisite for a political project. The demand for the creation of a politicized public or counter-public contained in Charles Esche’s concept of the institution as “part community center” was never fully realized, or as Alex Farquharson writes in his contribution to the present issue of this journal, New Institutionalism “fails to engage much more than a relatively small, invited knowledge community.”[42]

 Superflex, Free Sol LeWitt, 2010. Installation view Van Abbemuseum. Photo: Peter Cox.

However, another aspect of New Institutionalism can be told as an ostensible success story. On the one hand the human actors in this narrative, particularly the protagonists interviewed by us, are all highly successful. Apart from Charles Esche, who is director at Van Abbemuseum, Maria Lind is currently curator at Tensta Konsthall after directing the graduate school at Bard College in New York. Simon Sheikh lectures at Goldsmith College in London and Nina Möntmann at the Royal Institute of Arts in Stockholm. One explanation for these success stories might be the obvious commonalities between the figure of the flexible and experimental independent curator as it emerged since the 1990s, and the ideas of new public management. The figure of the temporarily employed, geographically flexible curator fits the economic conditions of a “project-based polity” in which the structuring of contacts as a wide network and the ability to embark on new projects with a large amount of adaptability and personal dedication are highly valued.

Ubiquitous New Institutionalism?
In his role as museum director Charles Esche continues certain principles of his time at the Rooseum. He creates experimental situations the outcomes of which are not fixed in advance, in accordance with his long-standing interest in open-ended formats. The project Play Van Abbe, for example, investigates the potential of the museum collection as a source for social and political debate and emphasizes the social dimension of the works shown over their status as highlights. Another project, Academy. Learning from the Museum, also refuses the museum’s logic of representation, instead initiating an open, contingent learning process with viewers. This touches on a further aspect of the above-mentioned success story, that ideas associated with New Institutionalism have been partially implemented in large museums. We might say that New Institutionalism “spread like a bug all through the system and upwards in the system.”[43] It has become commonplace to view all aspects of the institution as related to artistic and curatorial work, and almost every large institution operates with a variety of formats, includes a project space or invites artists to engage critically with its collection.

Many of the practices emerging from New Institutionalism appear dislocated and reintegrated in other places within the art system. Yet the institutional approaches discussed here are always subject to the danger of being instrumentalized for the reproduction of the very hegemonial logics of production they critique, and it can be criticized that the rhetoric of politicized institutional acting was nothing more than a “flirtation”[44] which was not able to trouble existing conditions. Still, interventions in the structures of art institutions always contain the potential of rendering the politics of these institutions visible, and thus generating new ways of speaking and thinking about the institutional organization of the art field—changes which in turn constitute new fields of action and enable us to engage with institutions as negotiable entities.

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Lucie Kolb is a Zurich-based artist and researcher. She’s interested in conflictuous undisciplinary practices in the cracks of the art field. She co-founded the radio magazine radio arthur (2007-2013) and is co-editor of the publication This Book is a Classroom (Passenger Books 2012).

Gabriel Flückiger is an art historian working between theoretical approaches and conceptual artistic interventions. He has (co-)initiated several curatorial projects ([balk], ortsverein, Palazzo Wyler) and writes for the art magazine Kunstbulletin.