ABSTRACT
Toward the close of The End of Art Theory, Victor Burgin is at pains to stress that theorising art’s specificity institutionally and historically, rather than essentially and formalistically, offers no support for a politics of art which would situate itself outside its object. To the contrary, the shift of focus entailed by this perspective deprives ‘outsiderism’ of any possible coherence. For since, viewed institutionally rather than aesthetically, art comprises a complex heterogeneity of discourses and practices, it ‘offers no singularity which may be confronted from an unproblematical “outside”’.1 To recommend art’s subversion, therefore, is merely a gestural politics, a form of ultra-leftist posturing which fails to take account of the real conditions-institutional and discursivewith which political strategies must engage if they are to have any effect on the conduct of artistic practices or the reception of works of art. This being so, Burgin concludes:
Rather than play Samson between the pillars of the museum, —which is, anyhow, futile-we should recognise that the museum is no more ‘irretrievably bourgeois’ than is, for example, the movie theatre, or the classroom-all such spaces are sites of perpetual contestation over ‘what goes on’ in them, what gets shown, what gets discussed, what issues get raised and taken out of the museum into the surrounding social institutions: in short, what truths are (re)generated as prisms of perception and frameworks of action.2
