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Institutional Critique.
Term used to describe a strand of conceptual art that takes the art establishment as its subject of investigation. Working since the 1960s and 1970s artists such as Michael Asher (b 1943), Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, John Knight (b 1945), Adrian Piper and Mierle Laderman Ukeles questioned the hidden assumptions, ideologies and operation of institutions such as galleries, museums, publications and private collections, their artwork serving to reveal the frameworks of classification and circulation that give art its meaning or value. Michael Ashers strategic interventions highlighted the preexisting conditions of the institution by revealing the economic system of art, and thus demystified the alleged neutrality of the white cube modernist display space. For his exhibition at the Claire Copley Gallery, Los Angeles (21 Sept 12 Oct 1974), Asher removed the partition wall that separated the exhibition gallery from the office and storage area, placing on display the backroom activities, exhibiting the material and social realities of art instead of art objects. During the 1980s, as the term Institutional Critique was defined in art history and criticism, artists such as Louise Lawler and Allan McCollum focused on the conventions of labeling, arrangement and the condition of the fine arts as high art. Soon thereafter the performances and writing by Andrea Fraser (b 1965) questioned art as a matrix of social and psychoanalytic relations, redefining Institutional Critique as a feminist practice. Filmed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1989, Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, features Jane Castleton, the character of a docent Fraser had been performing since 1986, whose behavior reveals information about, and multiple attitudes towards, the museum. Using a post-colonial perspective, Fred Wilsons installation Mining the Museum at the Contemporary and Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, 19923, demonstrated how Native and African American history was suppressed by the taxonomy and display systems at this and, by extension, other museums. Taking on the role of a curator scholar Wilson rearranged the collection, manipulated lighting and sound, and rewrote labels, unveiling not only the hidden history but also how institutional policies and practices served to sustain racial discrimination. As it coincided with the annual conference of the American Association of Museums in 1992, this installation was widely influential in the US.

Bibliography
H. Foster: Subversive Signs, A. America, lxx (Nov 1982), pp. 8892 A. Fraser: In and Out of Place: Louise Lawler, A. America, lxxiii (June 1985), pp. 1229 B. Buchloh: Conceptual Art 19621969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions, October, lv (1990), pp. 10543 F. Ward: The Haunted Museum: Institutional Critique and Publicity, October, lxxiii (Summer 1995), pp. 7189 B. Buchloh: Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, MA, 2000) A. Fraser: From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique, Artforum, xliv (Sept 2005), pp. 27883, 332 J. C. Welchman, ed.: Institutional Critique and After (New York, 2006) K. Peltomaki: Affect and Spectatorial Agency: Viewing Institutional Critique in the 1970s, A. J., lxvi (Winter 2007), pp. 3651 Nizan Shaked