Kolb, Lucie
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Interviews with the Swamp Thing, the Poacher and the Healer
Interactions with and within institutions have characteristic qualities, styles, personalities, and tone. These aspects of institutional life are difficult to capture through formal description or professional obligation. Institutions comprise performed characters, each activating infrastructural scenography in their way, infusing physical, procedural architectures with particular tonalities. How might we trace these performers? What are these performances, and for whom are they enacted? Transcribed here are conversations with essential practitioners. These are the characters of art institutions, tracing outlines of who they are and what they do, and how they perform it. Necessarily veiled and anonymized, these personnel profiles have monikers following their ways of life within the institution: Swamp Thing, Poacher, and Healer. They recount and refract dimensions of the critically indivisible person-professional-practitioner entities that people in arts and cultural institutions find themselves impelled or compelled to become. Such exchanges about practices in institutions reveal how these contexts demand that we enact reactionary and curative roles, composed within the constraints and affordances of the scenographic infrastructure of buildings and publications, policies and procedures, presumption, and tradition.
'Counter-conscious’ Ways of Life
In his opening address to the symposium Art Creating Society at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford in 1990, Stephen Willats compelled participants and the audience to contribute their viewpoints on the development of a new vision for art, one that extends its social meaning beyond the institutional territory to which it has traditionally been confined. This statement is an example of his pronounced intention to have his artworks intervene into the functioning of society at large, developing models that provide both critical outlooks and promising perspectives. Willats’ approach is connected to the «interactive communication networks» he creates in contemporary art. He also creates a network between artists and others through the magazine Control he has been publishing since 1969. The magazine’s title should be read in the sense of «agency» and «interaction» and not in the authoritarian sense beloved of the critics of cybernetics, as historians like Andrew Pickering pointed out.