10. Entertaining the institution

“Cuteness is a way of aestheticizing powerlessness. It hinges on a sentimental attitude toward the diminutive and/or weak, which is why cute objects—formally simple or noncomplex, and deeply associated with the infantile, the feminine, and the unthreatening—get even cuter when perceived as injured or disabled.”

- Sianne Ngai (2011) Our Aesthetic Categories: An interview with Sianne Ngai. Cabinet Magazine. (Fall). Available at: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/43/jasper_ngai.php 

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Ghosting caused trouble. It incited rich debate between participants, and hot frustration across Toynbee Studios. The ghosts’ clumsy disregard for the silent codes of etiquette between organisational staff and freelance artists led them to be widely banished within a short space of time. The project quickly became a stress-test of the building: it turns out that it only takes half-an-hour for an administrator of an outdoor participatory arts organisation to tell a ghost to ‘Fuck off!’, for simply standing beside a framed poster proclaiming that one should ‘Stand By Your Practice’.

But we are suspicious of Ghosting’s critical promise. We overheard someone mutter to a colleague that “these ghosts are cute but they’re also really annoying”, and suspect that most wrote the day off as simply unusual and unproductive. The institution slows down, and staff have a (paid) day of amusement, annoyance and (fingers crossed) a little reflection or thought. Were we just performing for them? Merely entertaining the institution? Did it even register as protest? Or, worse: was it providing an outlet for guilt, without the organisation actually needing to do or change anything? Sara Ahmed, reflecting on a race equality document she produced at her place of work, notes how the critical gesture can be taken as a symbol of the institution’s progressive nature: “when you confront the institution with what it has failed to do, you can still end up being used as evidence of what has been done.”

How much should we respond to the institution, or go beyond them? Mick Wilson reminds us that it is necessary “to inhabit something of the unpleasant mechanical means-end reasoning of institutions in order to contest it.” But in the lead up to the workshop we were privately cautioned about the risks of artists getting sucked in to doing unpaid consultancy. One can get too closely absorbed by the institution’s agenda, even in the anxiety to resist it. 

These contradictions are not new, and lack neat resolution. Andrea Fraser wrote in 2006 that “institutional critique is dead, a victim of its success or failure, swallowed up by the institution it stood against.” Institutional critique is at risk of its own desirability – how troubling can something be if it is permitted, invited or commissioned? Our answer to this bind changes with the project, the context, and our own shifting mood and capacities. In this case (and in many others) we asked the question: what is being centered – the institution, or the participants? The pleasure, needs and urgency of the ghosts was our priority, and determined (for us) whether or not the workshop was a ‘success’.

There was a debate between the participants. Was Ghosting a ‘game’? Was it ‘work’? Some argued that our cultural and political context seeks to harness and instrumentalise every aspect of our lives. As such, there is an urgency to resist articulating value and purpose, and to instead gleefully wallow in unjustifiable pleasure. One group of ghosts quickly gave up on haunting the lower floors, and took over the largest and most expensive studio in the building which was otherwise completely empty over the two days. They lay about, played piano, looked out the huge windows overlooking London, and slept.* Their pleasure and rest was a commitment to the long-term, and a refusal to exist solely in response. If we are going to transform these institutions, then we (or at least, some of us) need to survive them. 

* One participant proposed this might have been a haunting from the future, and predicted a day-long occupation by humans in October 2020. However, the Covid-19 pandemic has made time go a bit funny. We suspect their vision might have actually been seeing events from 2021….

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- Sara Ahmed (2018) Presentation at ‘Confrontation? Doing Feminist and Anti-Racist Work in Institutions’, Cambridge University. May 1. Available at: https://feministkilljoys.com/2018/05/04/confrontation/

- Mick Wilson (2015) ‘Artistic Research between Inquiry and Revolt: Artistic Research, the University, and the Trajectory of a Deleuzian Motif’. At The Dark Precursor, International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research. DARE 2015, Orpheus Institute, Ghent, Belgium https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/224029/224030 

- Andrea Fraser (2006) ‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique’, in John C. Welchman (ed.) Institutional Critique and After. Zurich: JRP Editions, pp. 123-135