Institutional or Non-Institutional?

My contribution this week is in response to the reading 'institutions, critique, and institutional critique' by Alexander Alberro. Over the past three weeks we have been discussing why artists have been making the works they do under the label of 'relational aesthetics' but we haven't really explored what has led up to the creation of these artworks that have been predominately made in the 1990s: Artists rallied against the confines of the bourgeois system of the museum and gallery by making works that dissected the heirachal and power structures of these institutions. However, as the reading states upon remarking on Andrea Fraser's "From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of critique" (2005) - "in their efforts to redefine art and reintegrate it into everyday life, artists have not escaped the institution of art... but have brought more of the world into it. The underlying relations of power remain the same." Therefore what has resulted is a confusion of the boundaries between art and life. Artists have not all reacted against the confines of the institution by existing inside it, but outside of it, ie. the collective WochenKlauser that I mentioned in my entry last week. Perhaps this provides a much greater critique of the institution as for art to remain democratic in the institution, it can't exist in it at all.