Starting in the Middle: NGOs and Emergent Forms For Cultural Institutions, Irit Rogoff
Irit Rogoff
I get up each morning fully recognizing that my task is to confront capitalism and finish each day fully aware that I am unable to do it—what are the gestures available to me to engage indirectly? —A graduate student lament, 2015
I start with a question driven by a recognition—that the notion of success or achievement or engagement or significance in the realm of public culture has been hijacked. These are currently conventionally measured by visitor numbers, outreach and inclusionary rhetorics, media chatter, market alliances, hyper signification, and celebrity and celebratory events. On occasion we find performances of engagement that index the major dramas of the day through forms of representation, easily recognized and equally easily shelved as having delivered a reflection upon our joint conditions and mutual imbrications.
A functioning vocabulary has been integrated into the life of these institutions and structures that allows for the easy flow of critical, political effects and attitudes into forms of enunciating, exhibiting, performing, and recognizing. If we are to go beyond this easy flow that takes the form of representations of the woes of the world seamlessly placed alongside the affirmation of traditional aesthetics, what are the potential forms available to us to establish another form of operating? Are there structural possibilities to engage with new modes of critical knowledge production within cultural life under present conditions that do not tally with the consensus of what the outward indications of achievement might be? Is there a possibility of developing another language for the potential significance of political aesthetics? If visitors are not simply in search of structures of identification, recognition, and edification, how can their subjectivity come into play within such structures?