In this essay, I put forth the concept of support as a theoretical framework for examining how such elements of institutional structures inform the creation, presentation, and circulation of artworks within and between institutions. Support is an inherently relational notion that carries many meanings across logistical, organizational, architectural, financial, affective, and ideological registers. Just some of the manifold forms of support that are present and exchanged within art institutions include physical and emotional labor, administrative templates, architectural surfaces, funding, and intellectual engagement. Across its many manifestations, support is often understood to function in a “constructional sense” as something that bolsters an extant, autonomous entity: a physical scaffolding constructed around a building is emblematic of this reading of the term. However, following architectural theorist Mark Cousins, it is valuable to recognize the way support additionally operates in “a logical sense—what philosophers would call the condition of something.”[4] On this interpretation, support acts as an essential foundation that enables other entities, ideas, and relationships to come into being. To acknowledge support’s role as such creates opportunities to reorient our axes of attention in the world: “Looking through the lens of support opens one’s eyes for the process by which things can originate or exist.”[5]
Within the context of art institutions, “looking through the lens of support” entails widening the frame around artworks to consider how a wide range of actors, systems, and influences contribute to their development, display, and reception. A lineage of artistic and curatorial projects dedicated to the endeavor of interrogating such institutional features traces back to the emergence of Institutional Critique in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Invested in scrutinizing the institution of art—encompassing entities including art institutions, artists’ studios, the commercial market and publications, as well as the discourse surrounding artworks—the practices of Institutional Critique aim “to undercut the fallacy of art’s and its institutions’ autonomy,” by exposing their ties to physical and organizational structures as well as “their relationship to the broader socioeconomic and political processes of the day.”[6] One of the ways artists affiliated with this genre highlight these entanglements is by enacting physical or performative gestures to shine light on the institution of art’s apparatus. In so doing, institution-critical artworks reclassify the accentuated institutional parameters as the subject of their work.
Taking up the legacy of Institutional Critique, a group of directors, curators, and other art administrators working primarily in mid-size, publicly funded institutions in Europe from the mid-1990s to early 2000s began to pursue a set of practices aimed at rethinking the role of the art institution. Coined New Institutionalism, this approach aimed to transform the institution from within through activities that experimented with non-traditional methods of programming and administration. Moving away from the “established showroom function” of presenting artworks within exhibition settings, curators organized hybrid programs that encompassed displays of artworks alongside other formats such as process-based residencies, educational initiatives, discursive events, self-reflexive publications, and architectural interventions.[7] Through alterations to programmatic and physical structures, practitioners of New Institutionalism went beyond the institution-critical practice of pointing toward institutional conditions to instead treat the framing device as a medium that they could mold into new forms.[8]
In recent years, curators and art workers have built on the traditions of Institutional Critique and New Institutionalism to develop programming that fills the gap between artworks that make the institutional apparatus visible and curatorial practices that make alterations to it. Instead, these newer programs grapple with the ways artworks are necessarily intertwined with the institutional frame, both in their creation and in their presentation. The aim of these approaches is to “shift attention away from art as something that is exhibited to reflect on the circumstances under which its production occurs.”[9] In the book Unlearning Exercises: Art Organizations as Sites for Unlearning (2018), Casco Art Institute’s director Binna Choi and artist Annette Krauss describe the potential for these forms of programming to “move forward” the strategies of Institutional Critique and New Institutionalism. By examining how the institutional apparatus enables artworks and exhibitions to come into being, such initiatives “activate the front and the back of an institution, the visible and the invisible, to operate in tandem.”[10]
In dialogue with Choi and Krauss’s formulation, I posit that concurrent activations of an institution’s front and back sides represent a mode of “museum-ing.” As I define it, “museum-ing” here is a curatorial methodology that focuses on making institutional structures transparent with the intention of prompting artists, art workers, audiences, and other stakeholders to take stock of how these structures act as supports for the creation, presentation, and circulation of art and, as a corollary, how artworks bear traces of the conditions that give rise to them. While examples have proliferated in the past several years of programmatic initiatives that take up the practice of reconsidering how support structures function within discrete institutions, what remains less common are curatorial strategies examining the networks that allow for the exchange of support between institutions of varying scale and type.[11] In what follows, I begin with a case study of an exhibition that demonstrates the potential of the contemplated form of museum-ing as an intra-institutional practice before turning to a proposal for how curators and other practitioners could extend these tactics to function inter-institutionally.
To illustrate how this form of museum-ing functions in practice, I turn to an exhibition I curated that took up the concept of support as both a thematic and methodological framework. On view from November 2021 to March 2022 at The Kitchen in New York, In Support featured new work by four artists—Fia Backström, Francisca Benítez, Papo Colo, and Clynton Lowry—whom I invited to join me and my colleagues in the project of parsing various dimensions of support as related to institutional activities.[12]
The exhibition’s focus on support bore relevance to a pair of overlapping institutional milestones at the time of its staging: the fiftieth anniversary of The Kitchen’s founding as an artist collective in downtown New York in 1971 by video artists Steina and Woody Vasulka and the announcement of plans to renovate the organization’s building at 512 West 19th Street in Manhattan, which it has occupied since 1986 (fig. 1).[13]
Figure 1. Facade of The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, New York, New York. Date unknown (ca. late 1980s). Photographer unknown. Courtesy of The Kitchen.
The notion of support loomed large in different ways for each. Whereas the anniversary brought questions of what organizational and ideological supports to foreground in the telling of the institution’s history, the renovation plans called attention to the limitations of the building as a physical support, given the project’s guiding aims of bringing the building up to code, increasing the functionalities of the spaces for artists, and improving artist and visitor traffic flow across its three floors. Both milestones additionally entailed emphasis on donor support, with campaigns dedicated to raising funds for the continuation of the institution’s programming in future generations and for the new building. These Kitchen-specific considerations dovetailed with the ongoing conversations that our staff, like many of our peers in the United States and around the world, was having internally about the extent to which institutions could address seismic current events, including the COVID-19 pandemic and racial justice uprisings of 2020. Such discussions confronted questions ranging from how institutions could channel financial support to performing artists at a time when live artistic production was curtailed to how they could express meaningful forms of political support for and solidarity with communities experiencing racial and gendered violence.
To underscore the pertinence of this subject to The Kitchen as it negotiated a period of institutional flux, I established a reflexive method for interrogating support within and beyond the institution that built on the precedent of other institutions who have implemented similar working processes at transitional moments. For instance, Casco Art Institute inaugurated their new building in 2014 with the exhibition New Habits, featuring a project with artist Annette Krauss, Site for Unlearning (Art Organization).[14] A collaborative endeavor enacted by the artist and the organization’s team, Site for Unlearning was a four-year initiative to examine Casco’s “often invisible and unquestioned organizational structures” and “experiment with different ways of working together.”[15] The experimental nature of such programming responds to the ways that established institutional structures often loosen during periods of change due to forces that are both physical (like the movement of materials out of or into a site) and ideological (like a mandate to rearticulate an institution’s mission and values). As such, these instances are prime occasions to take up processes that expose and inspect the institution’s inner workings.
In the context of The Kitchen, I sought to align In Support’s form and content by initiating a curatorial methodology that would not only make the institution’s structural supports transparent but also create opportunities for the artists to embed into, challenge, or expand on them. To this end, Céline Condorelli’s call in the book Support Structures (2009) inspired the exhibition’s guiding premise: “Not to think about support, but—tautologically perhaps—be supportive to it, and think ‘in support.’” As a strategy to enable myself, my colleagues, and the participating artists to go beyond the “survey, investigation, and analytical study” of the concept and instead to “[perform] its primary proposition (‘I support’),” I conceived of a non-traditional spatial framework.[16] I prompted the artists to develop and propose projects that would respond to and be displayed within the interstitial areas where institutional support activities often transpire, such as the lobby, production workshop, administrative offices, and roof. Given that many of these spaces were typically closed to the public and had never been used as presentation sites, the work of collaborating with the artists to devise plans for installing their proposed work and to coordinate audience viewing access required navigating questions of support pertaining to structural safety, staffing, mediation, and more. The ensuing processes of negotiating The Kitchen’s existing support systems throughout the development and realization of the works significantly informed the final shape of the artists’ contributions. As I will go on to show, what makes In Support an instance of the form of museum-ing I have posited is its twofold operation: not only did the exhibition activate the institutional apparatus as a material that the artists, my colleagues, and I could engage with while formulating the exhibition, it also turned the apparatus outward in the public presentation, inviting audiences to reflect on how the artworks were entangled with the conditions of their production and display.
In Support’s location in the in-between sites of the building acted as a foundational gesture of turning the institution inside out. Featuring artworks installed on and between all three floors and three mezzanine levels of the building, including in typically staff-only sections that remained active as sites of labor during gallery hours, In Support collapsed the distinction between the institution’s public and private areas.[17] The effect was to call attention to the architecture as a physical support overall, while also revealing how the subdivided spaces within it create distinctive conditions in which different kinds of actions unfold.[18] The elimination of boundaries between designated areas echoes a seminal work of Institutional Critique, Michael Asher’s installation at Claire S. Copley Gallery, Los Angeles, from September 21 to October 12, 1974, for which he removed the partition wall that stood between the gallery’s office and its front exhibition space. For Asher, the gesture of bringing the traditional “abstracted aesthetic context” of the viewing space into contact with the site of the business operations that connect artworks to the market system was the substance of the piece; his summary of the work states that the “day-to-day activities of the gallery were disclosed to the viewer in the unified office/exhibition space.”[19] Alternatively, in the case of In Support, the exposure of the building’s behind-the-scenes areas was just the first step in creating an expanded context for the production and presentation of artworks.
As a starting point for what I call museum-ing, the exhibition’s siting allowed the artists to explore material and conceptual ties between their artworks and the physical supports on which they would be displayed. For instance, with her building-spanning project Riego (2021), Francisca Benítez installed photographs, videos, a sound piece, and a wall drawing in locations that underscored the work’s investigation of the labor practices and tools that define an irrigation method common to Central Chile. Echoing the process of rerouting water that enables this form of irrigation, the artist used her work to trace a channel from the building’s top mezzanine down to the ground floor, with individual pieces installed in thoroughfares like stairwells and in sites of maintenance work such as administrative offices. A central component of her work was the video Riego (Río) (2021), documenting the river that serves as the main artery for irrigation in the region in question, which the artist projected directly onto the beams and pipes of The Kitchen’s office ceiling (fig. 2).
Figure 2. Francisca Benítez, Riego (Esteban), 2021 (foreground, right). HD video (wall projection, color, sound; 27:22 minutes). Riego (Río), 2021 (background). HD video (ceiling projection, color, sound; 6:27 minutes). Installation view, In Support, The Kitchen, November 18, 2021–March 12, 2022. Photo by Kyle Knodell. Courtesy of The Kitchen.
The embedding of the video into the office space’s architecture is emblematic of how museum-ing serves a dual function by calling attention to an institutional support and creating reciprocal occasion to consider how the work in turn absorbs the imprint of its frame. In a formal sense, Riego (Río) gained physical texture in its merging of image and surface on the flame retardant-coated steel joists. On a practical level, the artist’s desire to position this component of Riego in this location impacted the duration of its presentation, since we had to contend with two incompatible needs in the space: the projection required low light levels to optimize its quality, but the office needed to remain lit to allow it to be used as an office. Additionally, the space had to function as a site of display for another of the artists, Fia Backström, who proposed presenting a work there that would use spotlights to emphasize extant materials in the building. Through conversations among Benítez, Backström, and my colleagues whose desks were on the floor, we reached a compromise solution to alternate the lights and audiovisual elements in the office space every thirty minutes while the exhibition was open. This method of switching between states of darkness and light created appropriate viewing conditions for Benítez’s and Backström’s pieces respectively at a pace that my colleagues and I agreed would not distract from our ability to conduct work at our desks. Bearing the traces of this negotiation, Riego (Río) and a second video, Riego (Esteban) (2021), that was projected elsewhere on the floor, were presented as timed screenings rather than on a loop.
The tailored temporal solution for presenting Benítez’s work indicates one way the framework of In Support allowed for investigation of how time, like physical space, acts as a type of support within institutions that shapes the emergence of artworks. I worked with each of the artists in the same way as I did with Benítez to determine a timescale that aligned with their individual project needs: in addition to the alternating settings of lights and audiovisuals for Benítez and Backström’s works on the third floor, Backström’s project unfolded in stages over the course of the exhibition, and Papo Colo’s installation was visible in full only during scheduled evening showings outside of standard visiting hours (fig. 3).
Figure 3. Detail of Papo Colo, Ceremonies, 2021. HD two-channel video (color, sound; 7:51 minutes). Installation view, In Support, The Kitchen, November 18, 2021–March 12, 2022. Still from video documentation shot by Iki Nakagawa. Courtesy of The Kitchen.
As a result of these distinctive project schedules, what was on view in the exhibition varied on any given day or time. The presence of different temporalities under the umbrella of a single exhibition bears a similarity with a practice associated with New Institutions such as Kunstverein München under the directorship of Maria Lind from 2002 to 2004: the creation of seasonal, annual, or multiyear programs comprising interrelated series, events, and exhibitions with distinct durations. At Kunstverein München, the variations in scheduling were a means of adding texture to their overall program, which the curatorial team described in holistic terms as a weaving on “a loom, whereby each additional thread can be seen and where the surface of relations between the various elements gradually becomes visible.”[20] This method treats temporality as an element of the programmatic framework to mold in the interest of developing a new, overarching institutional rhythm. As an alternative approach, In Support goes beyond the exercise of molding the way time operates in relation to programs. The exhibition models the potential for a kind of museum-ing that both makes temporality visible as a condition of art’s creation and presentation and calls attention to the ways that each artwork bears the traces of decisions various parties make about how to contend with institutional protocols pertaining to time.
To introduce one method of experimenting with timescales in In Support, The Kitchen’s team and I initiated the commissioning process with artists using a model different from what is typically associated with group exhibitions: instead of establishing a fixed deadline by when every artist’s piece would need to be installed, we invited the artists to complete and install their work anytime between fall 2021 and spring 2022. However, from the outset, Benítez, Colo, and Clynton Lowry confirmed that it would be in their best interests to finish their projects by the fall. Backström was the only artist to take up the offer for a different timeline, noting that she would not be able to complete a new work until early 2022 due to pre-existing professional obligations. In recognition of the majority alignment, the artists, my colleagues, and I decided to define an opening date for the overall exhibition in November 2021, but we also allowed Backström to work on her own schedule by determining how, if at all, she would want to mark her project’s presence in the show before it was complete.
Throughout the exhibition’s development, the strategy of transparently naming time as one form of support allowed me and the artists to treat it as a “condition of possibility” rather than as a limiting deadline.[21] What this meant for Backström was that she could devise a means of making her artistic process visible at the opening date, even though she had not yet completed her work. To do so, the artist realized a series of initial gestures in November 2021, including the addition of spotlights discussed previously, that marked a web of associations across what she had identified as the set of pre-existing materials in The Kitchen’s building that would be central to her project (fig. 4).
Figure 4. Detail of Fia Backström, The Last of US—that safe spot in the dot above I in the word life, 2021. Tarp with duct tape holding cork, walls painted by Publicolor. Installation view, In Support, The Kitchen, November 18, 2021–March 12, 2022. Photo by Kyle Knodell. Courtesy of The Kitchen.
Following this first phase of her overarching project, titled The Last of US—that safe spot in the dot above I in the word life (2021–2022), Backström went on to install a series of sculptures, sound works, and animations in February 2022 and to stage a culminating performance in March 2022 (fig. 5).[22]
Figure 5. Detail of Fia Backström, The Last of US—that safe spot in the dot above I in the word life, 2021. Robert Mapplethorpe, Laurie Anderson, 1987 (left wall). Gelatin silver print, 28 1/2 x 27 3/4 in. (framed), edition 4 of 10. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Courtesy of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, New York, and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels. Plastic sheeting, gaffer tape, tie line. Language Holder (pigment prints on clear film, dimensions variable), theater light with orange gel (background). Installation view, In Support, The Kitchen, November 18, 2021–March 12, 2022. Photo by Kyle Knodell. Courtesy of The Kitchen.
The significance of The Last of US’s multipart form can be read in at least two ways: as a practical choice made in response to the condition of the opening date, and as a manifestation of one of the project’s conceptual investments in drawing out associative connections across layers of time and history.[23] I suggest that, when understood on the terms of museum-ing, it is necessary to acknowledge that these practical and conceptual motivations are equally relevant. The shape that The Last of US took reflects how the artist molded her creative choices in part around the support systems present at The Kitchen, including the given timeframe for presentation.
In tandem with its explorations of space and time as institutional supports, In Support probed the labor structure within The Kitchen as an additional condition that impacts the creation and display of artworks. The inquiry into this form of support emerged primarily through dialogues between myself, The Kitchen’s Production Manager Zack Tinkelman, and Lowry, who developed for the exhibition a series of work that brought to light some of the forms of maintenance work that are required to keep The Kitchen running. In a series of six videos titled Invisible Art Handler (2021), Lowry portrays standard tasks in The Kitchen’s building—such as mopping the floors, changing a theater light, chopping wood—with the person enacting them removed from the frame (fig. 6).
Figure 6. Video still from Clynton Lowry, Invisible Art Handler (Chop Saw), 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 6. Video still from Clynton Lowry, Invisible Art Handler (Chop Saw), 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
Offering commentary on the typically unseen, and often uncredited, labor of art handlers and other production crew members who produce projects within institutions, Lowry’s videos showcase these individuals as absent presences. Invisible Art Handler operates in the tradition of Institutional Critique to expose how the institutional apparatus traditionally hides the traces of technical labor. However, within the context of In Support, the artist’s critical observation became a prompt for me and the other members of The Kitchen’s team to build a strategy into the exhibition’s didactic materials to fill in the gap that the artist identifies: Lowry, Tinkelman, and I worked together to create an expanded crediting system for the exhibition.[24] Going beyond The Kitchen’s pre-existing method of identifying only the curator in exhibition credits, In Support broadened the list to make visible the various individuals who worked on the show and, in a manner closer to film credits, identified the “extensive division of labor” across their roles related to the overall exhibition and the production of each artwork, including project management, installation and art handling, lighting design, video editing, exhibition booklet design, front of house, and administration. [25] In this way, In Support demonstrates the possibility for a form of museum-ing in which the exhibition framework functions in concert with the artwork to both expose and make revisions to the institutional apparatus. By reinserting the presence of the laborer into the frame of the exhibition, Lowry’s videos and In Support’s credits work together to prompt audiences and staff to consider how each piece shows the imprints of the various forms of support that the technical crew contributed to its making, installation, and maintenance at The Kitchen.
Thus far, I have examined In Support as a case study of a mode of museum-ing that makes the apparatus of the institution visible with the two-part aim of interrogating how existing support structures inform the creation and presentation of art and highlighting how artworks show signs of this entanglement with institutional conditions. Building on the example of In Support, which focuses primarily on the role that such structures play within a singular institution, I posit that it is possible to extend curatorial and museological practices to enact a form of museum-ing that would bring transparency to the mechanisms that serve to connect institutions of varying scales and types across the ecosystem. In Support’s method of intra-institutional museum-ing collapsed distinctions between what Choi and Krauss call the front and back of the institution to reveal the relationships between art and its circumstances of production. In like manner, the proposed form of inter-institutional museum-ing would experiment with methods of revealing the linkages between the different sides of the art ecosystem—whereby the smaller-scale institutions occupying the less visible position at the back establish the originating conditions that enable artworks to circulate into larger institutions holding more prominent places at the front. Such acts of museum-ing would have the potential to prompt reflection on the ways artworks displayed in museums and other larger institutions carry with them the traces of the institutions that initially nurtured them through the processes of commissioning and initial presentation.
As I have discussed, the exhibition at The Kitchen used various strategies for activating and turning inside out aspects of the institution’s infrastructures—including space, time, and labor—in order to consider the ways they inform the emergence and reception of artworks. To extend this procedure to function between institutions would require animating and exposing specific conduits of institutional interdependency that impact how artworks circulate between contexts. For instance, the financial support institutions provide to artists is a fundamental condition that links parties across the ecosystem. As Sarah Thelwall asserts in Size Matters, when smaller-scale institutions put funds toward the production costs of new commissions, they “[invest] in risk-taking and the development of work.”[26] These investments shape how commissions come into being, for example by making it feasible for artists to experiment with different materials, processes, or timescales than they would for projects that do not have the same kind of funding. The fact that, in many cases, the resulting works later go on to be shown in larger institutions indicates the way in which “small organizations act as an unofficial support mechanism for larger organizations.” [27] On the terms of museum-ing I have put forth, a necessary first step in establishing the groundwork for a broader examination of the relationship between institutional investments and the circulation of artworks across the ecosystem would be to put into place a protocol for naming the commissioning body in all future sites of an artwork’s presentation.[28] Going beyond the aim of simply asserting an institution’s financial stakes, this strategy for recognizing the originating context would establish a baseline for further consideration of how artworks bear the imprint of the conditions that shaped them, even when they are on view in a new setting.
I suggest museum tombstone labels could function as site for enacting this naming protocol by building upon their traditional role as repositories of basic information about an artwork’s medium, dimensions, and ownership. On this new model, curators and art workers could include additional details about the forms of support that are relevant to the artwork’s emergence and circulation between institutions. While I have focused on the financial investment of commissioning bodies, this is just one element that could be highlighted on a more comprehensive label as evidence of the interconnected support structures across the ecosystem; further examples include the access to specialized equipment or expertise that certain institutional settings afford and the exchanges within an engaged community of professional peers that transpire in others. Here, as was the case with the enhanced crediting system at play in In Support, the labels would highlight the “division of labor” that exists between institutions of varying scales and types—which is to say the ways that each makes distinctive contributions to different stages of an artwork’s realization and its subsequent presentations.[29] The placement of this information on a label below the line that lists an artwork’s media would serve the additional purpose of underscoring the ways that institutional supports act as another material for artists to manipulate in the making of their artworks.[30]
To realize this proposed approach to intra-institutional crediting, the artists, staff from the current presenting institution, and representatives from institutions that commissioned and/or previously displayed the work would need to be in dialogue to determine which details about support are salient to a holistic understanding of the artwork and how to convey this tailored information effectively. For example, in the case of a commission that took shape as a multipart, durational project—such as Backström’s The Last of US—the traveling of the project to a new setting would necessitate the establishment of a working group to create an appropriate credit line. If the presentation included only one part of the work, those individuals could decide to shed light on the work’s commissioning conditions by including a timeline of its original presentation illustrated with images of the artwork from each phase. Alternatively, if the display included all components of the project, they could choose to offer a window into the qualitative context of the work’s emergence and initial presentation by making available selections from oral histories with the artist, The Kitchen’s staff, and/or visitors who experienced the work in its original state.
The very process of creating the credits along these lines would animate the ties between institutions as material for interpretive negotiation: stakeholders would need to grapple with the significance of how and when their institutions provide or rely upon support, while also working together to communicate this information publicly in a manner that is representative of their respective and intersecting affiliations to the artwork in question. As such, the proposed approach to comprehensive crediting represents a method of intra-institutional museum-ing that aligns the form of interpretation with its content through a supportive process of collective reflection and articulation. The result would exceed the familiar methods of individual institutions putting forth a traditional didactic summary that portrays each artwork as an autonomous entity within a given display context. Rather, this collaborative practice of museum-ing through interpretation foregrounds the ways artworks both mold and are molded by support structures within and between institutions. If they were to take up such an interpretive approach, artists and art workers would have the potential to turn labels into dynamic resources that encourage audiences to reorient their thinking “in support of” more dimensionalized understandings of the interdependencies that fuel the art ecosystem.
Alison Burstein is a curator at The Kitchen in New York, where she organizes exhibitions, artist residencies, archival research initiatives, and digital programming, and edits digital and print publications. She previously served as Program Director at the nonprofit art space Recess and as a member of the education departments at MoMA, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum (all in New York City). She has curated programs and exhibitions for institutions including Southern Exposure (San Francisco); Tenthaus (Oslo); The Luminary (St. Louis); Knockdown Center (Queens); Mana Contemporary (Jersey City); and the Museum of Jurassic Technology (Los Angeles). Her writing has appeared in artist monographs and in publications including Tate Etc.
[1] The Nordic Network is a composite network based on three pre-existing associations: Klister in Sweden, Kunsthallene i Norge in Norway, and the Danish Association of Art Centers (FKD) in Denmark. The networks I reference—Common Practice and the Nordic Network, which represent organizations in the US, UK, and Europe—are just two of many examples that operate on regional, national, and international levels. I highlight these two because I draw from their findings most directly in the present article, including the following studies: Sarah Thelwall, Size Matters: Notes towards a Better Understanding of the Value, Operation and Potential of Small Visual Arts Organizations (London: Common Practice London, 2011); Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, Value, Measure, Sustainability: Ideas Towards the Future of the Small-Scale Visual Arts Sector (London: Common Practice London, 2012); Carla Cruz, Practising Solidarity (London: Common Practice London, 2016); David Joselit, Amy Lien, and Enzo Camacho, Near Contact (New York: Common Practice New York, 2016); and Jonatan Habib Engqvist and Nina Möntmann, Agencies of Art: A report on the situation of small and medium-sized art centers in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, commissioned by Nordic Network of Kunsthalles (Oslo: OK Book, 2018). The term I use here, “arts ecology,” widely circulates in contemporary discourse, but it is of relevance to note that Thelwall’s report used the term “ecology” to describe the field. In Common Practice London’s second report, Value, Measure, Sustainability, Gordon-Nesbitt notes that there are potential drawbacks to using this term based on the way “it [naturalizes] the existing order, potentially delimiting critical analysis of a notionally stable system, and thereby inhibiting its disruption” (Value, Measure, Sustainability, 5).
[2] Thelwall’s report is the first to introduce this concept under the term “deferred value” (Size Matters, 7). Engqvist and Möntmann reference the impact the concept has had on the Nordic region and take up study of this phenomenon in their own report (Agencies of Art, 48).
[3] Engqvist and Möntmann, Agencies of Art, 22. While the Nordic Network and Common Practice do not focus on this topic, it is relevant to note that college and university galleries also act as hubs for some of the same forms of innovation and experimentation. For example, see Amy Athey McDonald, “University museums as ‘laboratories’ for creativity in higher education,” YaleNews (May 12, 2014). Additionally, within larger museums, examples of program frameworks that allow artists to test new ways of working do exist but are often developed by education departments. For example, see Sheetal Prajapati, “Museum as Laboratory: Artists Experiment,” MoMA Inside/Out, January 6, 2014.
[4] Céline Condorelli, “An Interview with Mark Cousins,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 24 (Summer 2010): 122.
[5] “Support” in Facing Value: Radical Perspectives from the Arts, eds. Maaike Lauwaert and Francien van Westrenen (Netherlands: Valiz with Stroom Den Haag, 2017), 373.
[6] Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 14.
[7] Charles Esche, “What’s the Point of Art Centres Anyway? – Possibility, Art and Democratic Deviance,”
Transversal: Institution (May 2004). For more on New Institutionalism, see Lucie Kolb and Gabriel Flückiger, eds., “New Institutionalism Revisited,” in OnCurating: (New) Institution(alism), no. 21 (January 9, 2014).
[8] The extent to which New Institutionalism was successful in remodeling the institutional framework was subject to criticism. On the one hand, writers such as Alex Farquharson have observed that New Institutional methodologies overshadowed the work of artists by placing too much emphasis on the institution. See, for example, Maria Lind and Alex Farquharson, “Integrative Institutionalism: a Reconsideration,” in The New Administration Of Aesthetics, eds. Tone Hansen and Trude Iverson (Oslo: Torpedo Press, 2007), 111. On the other, writers such as Binna Choi and Annette Krauss have argued that New Institutionalism operated “in self-reflexive yet only discursive forms, making discursivity the medium of presentation.” See Binna Choi and Annette Krauss, “Afterword: Have You Had a Productive Day?,” in Unlearning Exercises: Art Organizations as Sites for Unlearning, eds. Choi, Krauss, and Yolande van der Heide (Netherlands: Valiz and Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, 2018), 167.
[9] Helena Reckitt, “Support Acts: Curating, Caring and Social Reproduction,” Journal of Curatorial Studies 5, no. 1 (2016).
[10] Choi and Krauss, “Afterword,” 166.
[11] Initiatives that address the topic of support (and related subjects including care and access) as it relates to contemporary art institutions are wide-ranging in format and approach, spanning research initiatives, exhibitions and program series, residencies, multi-institutional collaborations, and activist initiatives. A non-exhaustive list of examples includes: The Bureau of Care (2020–ongoing), State of Concept Athens, Take Care, a five-part series of exhibitions, performances, publications, and workshops curated by Letters & Handshakes at The Blackwood, University of Toronto Mississauga (Ontario), September 11, 2017–March 11, 2018, ; Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying, curated by Taraneh Fazeli, 2016–2020, comprising exhibitions, public programs, and community projects at Red Bull Arts Detroit, Bemis Center for the Contemporary Arts (Omaha, Nebraska), The Luminary (St. Louis, Missouri), Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space (New York City), and Lawndale Art Center and Project Row Houses (Houston, Texas), Artist Residency: Lea Clements, part of General Ecology Initiative at Serpentine Galleries, London, October 2020–ongoing; Board of Trustees Artist Residency: Jack Tan (2021–2022) and Rehana Zaman (2022–2023), FACT Liverpool, Islands of Kinship project between Jindřich Chalupecký Society (Prague), Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (Riga), Frame Contemporary Art Finland (Helsinki), Július Koller Society (Bratislava), CCA Temporary Gallery (Cologne), Faculty of things that can’t be learned (Bitola/Skopje), New York-based initiative Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E., founded in 2008,); and the Art + Museum Transparency initiative (founded in 2019).
[12] In Support was on view from November 18, 2021 to March 12, 2022. Project management for the exhibition was provided by Zack Tinkelman, Production Manager.
[13] The Kitchen initially rented the space from the owner, Dia Art Foundation, before purchasing it from them at a below-market rate in 1987. Press clipping from Dance Magazine (July 1987) in The Kitchen Archive.
[14] New Habits, 2013–2014.
[15] Choi and Krauss, “Afterword,” 165.
[16] Céline Condorelli, Support Structures (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009), 13.
[17] The act of displaying artworks in the private administrative spaces built on the recent precedent of the benefit exhibition Ice and Fire: A Benefit Exhibition in Three Parts, which artists and The Kitchen board members Wade Guyton and Jacqueline Humphries organized with The Kitchen’s curatorial team from October 2020 to March 2021, to raise funds toward the building’s renovation. Ice and Fire featured artworks hung in private administration spaces, but it was not open to the public given that it was mounted during the early stage of the pandemic. As such, access to the exhibition occurred primarily online—with installation images presented on a custom-designed website and via a limited number of by-appointment, in-person guided tours led by members of The Kitchen’s staff.
[18] The fact that In Support was open in the months leading up to the renovation added heightened significance to the invitation to attend the building’s physicality, as it was one of the last opportunities to do so before the space undergoes significant structural and cosmetic changes. Similarly, installation photos and videography now serve a dual function as both documentation of the included artworks and records of many previously overlooked or undocumented areas of the building.
[19] Michael Asher, in collaboration with Benjamin H. D. Buchloch, Writings 1973–1983 On Works 1969–1979, ed. Buchloch, 1983, reissue (New York: Primary Information, 2021), 96.
[20] Søren Grammel, Maria Lind, and Katharina Schlieben, “In Place of a Manifesto,” in Spring–Fall 2002–2004
Gesammelte Drucksachen (Collected Newsletters), eds. Maria Lind et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, 2004), 22.
[21] Condorelli, Support Structures, 45.
[22] In February 2022, Backström installed sculptural pieces titled Language Holders, animations, and sound works, and in March 2022 she presented a 45-minute performance, which she performed four times with Andrea Sisson.
[23] While I was preparing the press release and texts for the exhibition guide, the artist and I deliberated about the terms we could use to introduce both the form and content of her project. It was telling that, in the first version of the exhibition guide printed at the time of the opening in November 2021, I shied away from acknowledging the practical impetus for her project’s phases, and instead described the durational arc solely as an extension of her conceptual investments. Only through subsequent reflective conversations did Backström and I realize that it was important to name outright the offer of a customized timeline as an intentional form of support—a change that I made in an updated, second printing of the guide.
[24] It is important to note that The Kitchen’s credits on performance programs have long followed the standard of listing technical crew members such as lighting and audio designers (though not front of house or installation staff). Since In Support, The Kitchen applied the extended crediting format that I describe here equally to the programming formats of performances, exhibitions, and other hybrid events.
[25] Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 13. Becker discusses film credits as a model for the art world to adopt to articulate the roles that various people play in realizing artworks. See “Chapter 1: Art Worlds and Collective Activity” in Becker, Art Worlds, 1–14. The Kitchen’s efforts in the arena of crediting run in parallel with those of an increasing number of institutions, including museums, who have started listing exhibition contributors across institutional departments on introductory wall texts and placards. For more on this subject, see Michelle Millar Fisher, “Acknowledging the Intellectual Labor of Curators in a Museum,” Hyperallergic (July 31, 2018), accessed March 14, 2023.
[26] Thelwall, Size Matters, 6.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Engqvist and Möntmann discuss the fact that the role smaller institutions play in commissioning and presenting artworks is often rendered invisible in the historical record because “artists who get to a certain point in their careers tend to drop earlier exhibitions from their CVs” and because smaller institutions often don’t produce catalogues due to lack of funding. See Engqvist and Möntmann, Agencies of Art, 58.
[29] Becker, Art Worlds, 7. The proposal to add credit for the institutions who support the creation of the piece expands on the already standard practice of naming fiscal support in wall labels via a credit line that names individuals or institutional funds involved in an object’s donation or acquisition into the collection.
[30] While, to my knowledge, didactics that cite previous institutional conditions are rare, the labels for the group exhibition Day Jobs at the Blanton Museum of Art offer one example of how this didactic material can serve an augmented role in connecting an artwork to the systems that surround it. The labels appended the creators’ standard biographical information with the titles of the jobs they previously held or continue to hold outside their work as an artist, thereby identifying what might be understood as a personal support structure rather than an institutional one. As such, the labels give visibility to the exhibition’s central claim that, in addition to serving a practical function as an essential condition of sustainability for many artists, day jobs are relevant to the interpretation of artworks given the ways they “indelibly [shape] [artists’] practices.” See: Introductory text for Day Jobs at Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas, February 19–July 23, 2023. Organized by Veronica Roberts, former Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, with Lynne Maphies, former Curatorial Assistant, Blanton Museum of Art.
The Museum Reinvents Attention