Edel O’Reilly: Gestural Systemics: Contemporary Art programming and the organisational mimetic driving it

20 minute presentation for AEROPONIC ACTS  - growing roots in air, DAI's 3 day marathon of lecture-perfomance acts, May 2019.

This presentation looks at the adoption of increased bureaucracy in arts organisations in order to maintain funding and curatorial programming. Who are the beneficiaries of the administrative standardisation of arts organisations and how is it impacting curatorial programming practices?

Ana Teixeira Pinto, Ghalya Saadawi, Laura Harris and Antonia Majaca responded to the question:

What is the role of reporting when there is an absence of regulation?

Report by Ayesha Hameed:

This talk made in the dark against a projection of a bibliography and quotations, analyses bureaucracy in the curatorial context among disciplines and systems of administration, including mental health institutions. It is neither a refusal nor a thinking through of alternatives. Rather, it treats bureaucracy as inevitable. As such, it suggests the need to dispense with autonomy given organizations rely on external funding. The visible and less visible constraints on curatorial programming are addressed along with governance and its relationship to content, and form and structure as an impact of shadow-state bureaucracies. A call is made for a diagnostic position from which to understand what might work and best practices. In both the non-profit industrial complex and the military industrial complex, the artist noted that government and services mutually support one another to facilitate the flow of capital. 

Having left the non-profit sector for the academy, Laura Harris empathized with the artist’s return to the lecture format in the context of the art school. ‘What other forms might this presentation take?,’ she asked. She suggested one possibility might be looking into ‘the prevalence of rational and irrational processes in the sector, and accommodations and improvisations that draw on the irrational.’  

In light of her own past involvement in the non-profit sector, Antonia Majaca thought it might be interesting to use DAI as a platform to explore many practices including those of future policymakers. 

Ana Texeira Pinto appreciated the desire to tell the big stories. She recounted the story about the abysmal work conditions around the installation of Michael Serra’s work in Qatar – a work everyone still describes as beautiful. ‘The problem at the root of aesthetics, is its severance from the social,’ she said. ‘What does the designation of what is real art manage to do in its justification of this severance?’ Further, she suggested the artist look into taxation and how art institutions benefit from it.

‘Even if the form of art is experimental or anti-institutional, it does not make it safe from the concerns raised here,’ said Ghaliya Saadawi, who pushed for a localization of the invocations of the state’s role in this presentation to avoid generalizations. Concrete examples are the crux of these relations, she stressed, and are as crucial to how capital works.