Catalogue essay by Astrid Wege for Beziehungsarbeit - Kunst und Institution, Künstlerhaus, Vienna, 2011. The opening and closing paragraphs are shown here in the English version. A link in the text opens the relevant documentation in a new window.
View the whole article in German and English.
The admission of visitors to the opening of the 6th Berlin Biennale on 10 June 2010 was strictly regimented by cordons and security personnel: in accordance with the gender distribution of participating artists at the exhibition, a ratio of thirty-three men to twelve women were admitted. Hardly surprisingly, the queue of waiting female visitors to the exhibition began to swell rapidly. Now and then, the criteria for entry were changed so that at short notice, only women were admitted. Einlasspolitik, oder ich beiße die Hand, die mich futtert (Door Policy, or Biting the Hand that Feeds Me) was the title given by Marlene Haring to her artistic contribution to the Berlin Biennale and, as a result, effectively transferred the curatorial selection process in the run up to the exhibition to the flood of visitors on the day: the disproportionate gender distribution in a ratio of 3:1 — itself a piece of information readily available in the accompanying exhibition documentation for anyone who wanted to know — was palpably staged by means of this action. Undoubtedly, it will have provoked thoroughly contrasting reactions among the visitors, in as much as the criteria for the accelerated or delayed admittance were not immediately apparent. The ‘improper’ element equally inherent in Haring's action, which challenges one in no uncertain terms to criticise one's benefactor, i.e. in the metaphorical sense, ‘to bite the hand that feeds you,’ is directly addressed in the subtitle of the piece.
Marlene Haring's action places a central aspect of art institutional policy in the foreground: the fact that the institution Art is made up of a variety of convoluted processes of inclusion and exclusion beyond manifest demarcations of what — with regard to subject matter, form, material, medium and method is considered to be art — might be deemed worthy of communication, exhibition, description, criticism or acquisition; not to mention the question relating to the actual identity of its main audience. The criteria for such demarcations are not always easily understood and have been ignored or embellished to an extent. For example, the fact that it is ultimately the quality and not gender of the artist which determines inclusion or exclusion — a statement which the activist association Ad Hoc Women Artists' Committee countered with the practical demand for a greater number of female artists to participate in the Whitney Annual of 1970 and which was challenged from the 1980s onwards by the wittily provocative actions and poster initiatives by the Guerrilla Girls who focussed upon structural sexism in the art industry; or the notion that art is universally accessible in civil society, a received ideal which, for example, Hans Haacke’s Polls tellingly disrupted between 1969 and 1973; they forged a clear connection between an affinity for art and demographic facts, such as class background.
The history of questioning, analysing or rendering visible the parameters, which determine art as an institution, is impressively long and ramified.
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...the order of the day is to perform active resistance to a logic of exploitation and a continued functionalisation. This is of course predicated upon the notion of a ‘relative autonomy of the artistic field’ — to use Pierre Bourdieu's terminology — and its institutions, which seems to be increasingly difficult to assert, both practically and theoretically, notwithstanding the widely acknowledged paradoxical function of relative functionlessness indelibly stamped upon these institutions from the outset. No less relevant then is the question about art as a space for the publicly-aired discourse incorporating the conflict regarding what is visible, which forms of the public arena can be negotiated and which ones represent particular values. Along with the definition of the art institution as public space, i.e. the reference to a public space engendered by art, we are taking on another wide-ranging and conflict-ridden piece of terminology. And thus questioning the possibility of such a public area in the radicality of its gesture seems to be more attractive at times than the plea for further contemplation of the framework conditions, i.e. the development of institutional models and practices which are not geared towards utility value, disambiguation and security, but rather towards ambivalence, ambiguity, permeability, mobility, in short, to kick-start new production and discourse. However, neither is the existence of public art institutions beyond question — as the current cultural political debate in Germany and elsewhere shows, for mainstream media's much-vaunted quick recovery on the part of the German economy ‘after the financial crisis’ by no means led to a respite from the trenchant budget cuts in many places, which is not the sole, but perhaps one of the important conditions for the continued existence of public art institutions; nor indeed do art institutions continue to be or were ever monoliths, which their development alone over the past forty years clearly demonstrates — the very period in which the works of ‘relationship building’ shown in this exhibition were originated. By the way, this time it’s 2:1. The work continues on every level.