MANIFESTO FOR AN INSTITUTION AS A PLACE OF DISQUIET

by Antonio Grulli

The following text comes from a letter written for the Forum of Contemporary Art held at the
Centro Pecci in Prato, where Antonio Grulli had been invited to coordinate a round-table
debate on the theme of public institutions as places for discussion, debate and thought.

The public institutions devoted to contemporary art are living today a dynamic but at the
same time very risky period. The art world in recent years has expanded enormously and this
is definitely a positive factor. But right now, globally, we are in a situation where the art
market has a strength and an economic power that the institutions cannot even come close
to, and this imbalance stands out sharply. The art institutions of the past could count on
public funding, which allowed them to take the lead over a group of very few collectors, who
were buying in a small number of galleries. By contrast, in recent years we have seen how
even the most important museums in the world have been suffering from the influence of a
trading system that has become bigger than them and against which they have no means to
resist. Issues such as the questioning of the concept of permanent collection are an example
of this: it comes from the need to rethink the very idea of museum and art work, but more
than a suspicion arises that in recent years it has been dictated especially by the needs of a
market that requires the cyclical turnover of worlds such as that of fashion, or the quest for
ever-new events by an easily-bored mass tourism. And this is the best scenario. And what
about the institutions, often with an important history behind them, which are not lucky
enough to be in the big cities of the world and therefore cannot even be the subject of
speculative interest in the art market? This is the case, for example, of Italy, a country of
contemporary art museums that are structured neither from a financial point of view nor with
regard to their collections, often poor or disorganized. So why not try to react against the
international trend of an art system that moves faster and faster and more and more
superficially, where artists are valued not for their work but for the academy they attended,
the person they have studied with or for their CV, in which there must be no stain or
slowdown? What we are witnessing every day is that there is no time to try to figure out what
artists are really attempting to bring to the radical innovation in making art. As art curators
we only have half an hour for each of these people, and they must be able to conquer us
with a portfolio of very few pictures, a strong statement and their shrewdness. No one is
really interested in looking for quality, but only in understanding what the galleries are about
to promote and be able to get on the latest winner’s bandwagon before others. And that
goes for the institutions too, except in rare cases. Conformism and boredom reigns
everywhere, and the names that we see going around the world are always the same, offered
over and over again with no chance of a surprise. We know very well who yesterday’s and
today’s artists and intellectuals are that we have to look up to. Why then can’t a museum
director act like Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lars von Trier or Gilles Deleuze? Why do we study today
exhibitions like the one Harald Szeemann set up to feature his grandfather, but it is very
unlikely that something of that kind could happen in a museum in 2016? Why is it so hard to
imagine for example an artist as the director of a museum or a public institution? Can the
institution be a producer of sense, or should it limit itself only to be a re-producer of
meanings already established elsewhere, already frozen and therefore already
commonplace? This is where in my opinion the concept of establishment as a production of
thought and discussion comes into play. Because reflection can only come from an initial
feeling of disorientation, of crisis, of craving to understand what is really new. The institution
must not become a place of appeasement, only called to put its own stamp on things which
have been already decided. It must be a place capable of producing a surplus of meaning
compared with normality, able also to give scandal, a place that is alive, that can
accommodate the obscene or anything that is not already on the scene. This is why I speak
of disquiet. I use this term because I like to imagine these buildings as if they were endowed
with feelings and passions. As if they were persons, capable of shaking with their fears, their
flaws and their tendency to make mistakes. I especially want institutions to have
“limitations,” the only thing able to define the character, making something unique and
interesting. Do we want the institutions to be bureaucratic entities trapped between the two
polarities of paternalistic education and entertainment, or do we want them to be real places
of culture and reflection with all that this entails? Why should we ask a museum to live a life
that we would never want for ourselves? I would like the institution to be a place from which
to ignite conflict, with the ability to become a place of resistance to the prevailing clichés. It
must be a restless, telluric, almost criminal place, where parents are afraid to allow their
children to go, and not a place of deportation, concentration and detention of hordes of
children with felt-tips in their hands. Only then it will become a place of reflection, and not a
place of reassurance of our most banal platitudes.