, and the erosion of the public sphere by political philosopher Jürgen Habermas ascended in academia, their ideas came to inform the work of many artists concerned with social conditions.
The generation of postmodern artists and educators who went into academia did not, like the Bauhaus teachers with their Ruskinian values, attempt to reform public taste, and smooth the way to rationalist, scientific modernist design. Instead they strove to preserve the ethical imperatives that had driven their work, and the theoretical backgrounds that had inspired them. These philosophies, and the critical methods called postmodernist, became predominant throughout the humanist academy during the 1980s and ‘90s.
By the 1990s a neoconceptual way of working had taken hold among a group of nomadic professionalized artists, working mainly in Europe, which came to be called institutional critique. Art institutions, faced with mounting demands to reflect diverse constituencies in a globalizing world, often turned to artists to perform modernizing analyses and exhibitionary exercises on their institutions. This phenomenon led Andrea Fraser, together with a number of artists working in this way, to specify the conditions of their new role. Fraser wrote of this in a text she called “How to Provide an Artistic Service.”
The often brilliant work of artists involved in institutional critique has been and continues to be an important impetus for change in attitudes of the public and the personnel of art and cultural institutions. Fred Wilson’s work is a clear example. However the inventive work these artists did with the particular social worlds of art institutions was fully accepting of what Robert Smithson called “cultural confinement.” This problem is a hangover for the more recent formulation by French curator Nicolas Bourriaud of relational art.
Artists who critique institutions are seen more than artists who work outside them. The Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, who cooks meals in carefully constructed situations in galleries and museums, appears on everyone’s list of social sculptors. In her succinct online essay “Notes on Social Architectures as Art Forms” (2003), Sal Randolph also fingers Ben Kinmont, Rainer Ganahl, and Christine Hill. Oakland-based artist Ted Purves has located the key to this kind of work in the gift economy.
Bourriaud’s clearly written and engaging aesthetics has been widely influential since the turn of the century. Happily, according to one critique, he emphasizes “process, performativity, openness, social contexts, transitivity and the production of dialogue over the closure of traditional modernist objecthood, visuality and hyper-individualism.” Yet Bourriaud’s conception is only vaguely political. Grant Kester’s formulation of a dialogical aesthetics, on the other hand, privileges political work. For Kester, evaluation of dialogical art is ethical, based in the social relationships it produces. His roster of artists who use dialogical practices includes the collectives Wochenklauser and Park Fiction, and the artist Adrian Piper.
Kester is at University of California, San Diego, an academic center of socially directed cultural work. Herbert Marcuse put a strong early stamp on the school. The émigré Frankfurt School philosopher, who conceived the idea of “repressive tolerance” and wrote An Essay on Liberation (1969), was so beloved of 1960s student radicals that the governor of California, Ronald Reagan, tried to fire him from his tenured position. Among Marcuse’s students were the artist and theorist Martha Rosler and the transgressive writer Kathy Acker.
Lately UCSD faculty have tackled issues around the U.S.-Mexican border, starting with Fred Lonidier, an artist closely identified with the union movement. Lonidier tackled the issue of the exploitative polluting maquiladora factories through collages, billboards, and recently a circulating info-center truck. Lonidier is an artist who has moved between generations, between different conceptions of political art, from the modernist to the postmodernist, from agitatio