ABSTRACT
Adrian Piper’s determination to find new locations for her performances points to a recurring cycle in the presentation of art. Avant-garde artists in the sixties and seventies lacked sufficiently sympathetic public museums or commercial art galleries, and were also dissatisfied with the context they provided. They therefore sought something other. They created new types of exhibitions and they colonized redundant spaces in a cycle of frustration, energetic independence and, over a number of years, eventual institutionalization. The interests and initiative of these artists, rather than the demands of audiences, forced changes in the exhibiting system. Indeed some artists shifted role completely from artist to dealer in the process. Artists in Western countries then imagined alterity or otherness in what they had achieved: in the so-called ‘alternate galleries’, in a new generation of commercial galleries, in the ‘spaces’ of artists’ networks, publishing and broadcast media, and, eventually, in new forms of museums. Three sharp questions asked by Ingrid Sischy in 1980 were hard to avoid: ‘Alternative to what? to whom? and for whom?’ However, their eventual failure to avoid an ‘institutionalization of dissent’ does not diminish the effects that these exhibition spaces have had on the system as a whole. The new spaces colonized by artists, the ‘alternate spaces’, were not created as museums with collections, nor as commercial galleries as such, nor as spaces run by collectors or lovers of art (as in the German Kunstverein), nor as institutes of contemporary art, nor as city-sponsored Kunsthalles, nor as the spaces controlled by traditional art societies. Those institutions were also going through important and not always dissimilar changes between 1960 and 1990, but the dominant new model became the North American ‘artists’ space’. It emerged as an image as much as an institution. Artist May Stevens conveyed this common self-consciousness in 1980:
The alternate space is the equivalent of ‘dressing down’, wearing jeans and knowing what’s in, intellectually, aesthetically, politically-in the sense of artworld politics. Money is nowhere to be
seen…. The dinginess or long climb on creaking stairs to the clean white space, the unexpected content: government office building, broken down loft, business district, etc., proves sincerity.3
