Artists Space

On the Necessity of Art's Exit from Contemporary Art:
4. Institution

Talk
June 14, 2013, 7pm

Suhail Malik, with responses from David Joselit and Tirdad Zolghadr

  1. Institution
    In which art's avowal of its institutionality is shown to grant art the traction contemporary art seeks but must deprive itself of.

Artists Space presents the final event in a series of four talks and discussions led by Suhail Malik, writer and Co-Director of the MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths, London, based on his research and writing on the conditions and shortcomings of contemporary art. Each session involves the participation of guest artists and writers as respondents, providing scope for sustained dialogue and responses to Malik’s propositions.

A screenshot of the google images results page for the search query "institution".
[A screenshot of the google images results page for the search query "institution".]

Malik concludes the series by demonstrating that the exit from contemporary art requires the transformation of art, the terms of its reception, and its discourse as a necessarily institutional effect. In this, art is unshackled from its current limitations as a post-negational celebration of differences and gains traction on its present via its content –that content now including art itself as, in any instance, an occasion of power.

Suhail Malik writes on political economy, theory, and the axioms of contemporary art. Malik holds a Readership in Critical Studies at Goldsmiths, London, where he is Programme Co-Director of the MFA Fine Art. For 2012-13, Malik is Visiting Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York.

Recent publications include: "The Politics of Neutrality: Towards a Global Civility" in The Human Snapshot (2013), “Tainted Love: Art’s Ethos and Capitalization” (with Andrea Phillips) in Art and Its Commercial Markets (2012), “Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Participate Again—Communism, Its Recurring Nightmare” in Waking Up From the Nightmare of Participation (2011), “Why Art? The Primacy of Audience” Global Art Forum, Dubai (2011); “The Wrong of Contemporary Art: Aesthetics and Political Indeterminacy” (with Andrea Phillips) in Reading Rancière (2011); “Educations Sentimental and Unsentimental: Repositioning the Politics of Art and Education” in Redhook Journal (2011); “Screw (Down) The Debt: Neoliberalism and the Politics of Austerity” in Mute, 2010; “You Are Here” for Manifesta 8 (2010).

Suhail Malik with responses from David Joselit and Tirdad Zolghadr: 4. Institution. Talk documentation, June 14, 2013, Artists Space. [Three seated men speak in turn in front of a projected screen with key phrases.]