Butt, Danny. “Ethics and the Infrastructure of Artistic Research: Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument.” In The Meeting of Aesthetics and Ethics in the Academy: Challenges for Creative Practice Researchers in Higher Education, edited by Barbara Bolt and Kate MacNeill, 25–37. London: Routledge, 2020. [Accepted version]

The relationship between the political and the ethical is one of the timeless questions of political aesthetics, and the historical tension between the two is clearly echoed in attempts to manage the ethics of artistic research today, whether they occur within the academy or institutions commissioning and presenting artistic work. In the Western tradition, through colonial expansion the modern nation state transforms its model of governance from one based on kinship to one based on territory. With this transition comes a mode of citizenship based on the human subject who is ruled by an authority that governs the city or polis, this authority resting in an infrastructure we call political. Actual participation in the governance of the city is, however, reserved for the governing representatives who solicit expert input, or more commonly, financial investment, which they use to justify their decisions on behalf of the polis. The nation-state’s political structures manage lands and the production of subjects that inhabit them, but at such a scale the state is less able to intervene directly in the relationships between citizens, except through the passing of laws that hold wrongdoers to account after the fact (even if actual policing has never adhered to the juridical framework). In this democratic mode, therefore, daily behaviours are said to reside in the sphere of the ethical, where conduct is governed by extra-legal relations of responsibility between citizens.

 In modern terms, according to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1995: 70), ‘The ethical is not a problem of knowledge but a problem of relation’ or, as she later revises, ethics are ‘a problem of relation before they are a task of knowledge’ (Spivak, 2004: 531). Ethics in this mode is not conceived as ‘doing the right thing’ in a teachable way: this formulation sees ‘ethics training’ as oxymoronic. Instead, ethics is understood as ‘openness toward the imagined agency of the other’ (Spivak, 2004: 531), an openness that holds the essential calculation of democracy: the ability to see the other as potentially substitutable for oneself. However, we must also attend to the singular difference of the other so our imagined substitutability does not run roughshod over what makes the other both individual and different from us. Between this singularity of ethics and the massification of politics lies an aporia that Spivak (2004: 531) suggests is ‘disclosed only in its one-way crossing’, with no neutral place to understand it without doing it. The crossing of the political via the ethical — the attempt to make the world adequate to one’s own values through one’s relationships — is each citizen’s unique task.

What is the implication of this task for artistic research? At the very least, it questions the university’s protocols for managing institutional research, as the ethical in Spivak’s frame consists in how we handle the political dynamics inherent in our institutional location as university researchers. This is a theme which has been explored at length in critical accounts of qualitative research methods. Cannella and Lincoln (2007: 318) note that our desire to be ‘good’ and ethical researchers cannot redeem our work while the institution’s ethical regulatory systems are more concerned with protection against reduction of funding, degradation of research prestige, and associated legal and liability issues, rather than the actual well-being of communities. While regulatory systems operate ‘on behalf of’ the public interest, and those of us who work in them take such responsibilities, it is hard to take these claims for the system at face value when communities are almost never involved in decision-making or review mechanisms. In a related argument, scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2013) have written on the potential of ‘refusing research’, noting that ‘the ethical justification for research is defensive and self-encircling – its apparent self-criticism serves to expand its own rights to know and to defend its violations in the name of “good science”’ (Tuck and Yang, 2013: 424). The professionalising mechanisms of ‘best practices’ then become barriers to genuine ethical engagement with communities toward just outcomes that exceed their role as ‘stakeholders’. Cannella and Lincoln (2007: 318) propose instead that:

Attention must be given to (a) new forms of imperialism as exhibited in contemporary global hypercapitalism – that construct research and ethics as related to market philosophies; (b) the multiple life positions, locations, and voices of those who have been research participants and created as the Other historically, whether indigenous people, poor women, prisoners, children, or anyone who has been ‘represented’ through some form of research; (c) academia itself and the ethical research perspectives and practices of those who conduct research and train others in those practices; and (d) the contemporary legislative, policy, and enforcement environment that would impose particular behaviours a priori on individual researchers.

This trenchant critique echoes that of Māori researcher Maui Hudson (2009: 127) who points to two levels of ‘ethicality’ in research infrastructure: an ‘internal ethicality’ focused on respect, harm minimisation, compensation and concern; and an ‘external ethicality’ of justice, community engagement and cultural responsibility. The institution seeks to manage the ‘internal ethicality’ of the researcher through ethics review in advance of any engagement between researcher and community, but the ‘external ethicality’ is where the true political impact of research is to be found. Thus, the role of the critical and ethical researcher will be to continually seek and disrupt those locations where bureaucratic machinery appropriates or subjugates the specific and situated life experience of researchers and communities affected by research. Barbara Bolt (2015: 63) points to a distinctive role for artists in exploring these questions as ‘artistic researchers graduate into the artworld, and in that world it is the community and not the ethics committee that will be the arbiter of efficacy and the ethics of the work’. This public accountability would also affect any academic seeking to consider ‘impact’ outside of internally validated mechanisms of the university.

However, to understand how we can engage ethically outside of the university, we firstly need to know exactly how we are interpellated into the university. This is a difficult process when the university appears to us as scholars much like a polluted waterway might appear to resident fish, surrounding and sustaining us in whichever imperfect fashion, regardless of any independent assessment of its value or impact. Rather than asking how we can be more ethical in our practice, we can perhaps figure external ethicality by borrowing from Lisa Weems and Elizabeth Ellsworth (2006: 1103) to ask, ‘Who does ethics think you are?’ This impossible question leads us away from ethical ‘decision-making’ to consider the assumptions of the subjective habits that are normalised in academic infrastructures, assumptions that the ethical encounter inevitably ruptures.

Infrastructure, institutional critique and reflexive institutionalisation

According to the critic Benjamin Buchloh (1990: 105-143), since Duchamp the matter of art as a linguistic convention has become joined with a conception of art as ‘both a legal contract and an institutional discourse (a discourse of power rather than taste)’. The critic and curator Marion von Osten (2010: 69) thus proposes an analysis of exhibitions in general that ‘would need to be read beyond their representational intention or composition of narratives’, including a discussion on ‘how, why and by whom they have been produced, under which conditions and, most importantly, what they finally enable’. Andrea Fraser (2006: 88). has described the professional field of art as undergoing changes in the ‘structure, organisation, and orientation of institutions’, including a ‘growing emphasis on income-producing activities.’ For the critic Isabelle Graw, rather than accepting ‘Institutional Critique’ as a contained history, we must note that the institution can no longer be delimited, and it ‘nowadays consists of a global art industry producing visuality and meaning, with people like us [the “independent” arts professional] more or less “institutionalized” within it’ (Ai et al. 2008: 303). Tom Holert (2012: 31) asks the question this way: ‘What if the “citizenship” of artists and art communities is proven less by their conforming to “civic interests” and “worldly attention” than by their questioning and ultimately attacking the very complicity between art and higher education, research administration, galleries, museums, biennials, government, and social utility? In short, is there an art imaginable that disrupts and splits reality, and makes incompatible claims with regard to what is communally shared?’ We have moved a long way here from quiet contemplation in the ethical encounter with art as a preparation for politics. Instead, the art of institutional critique asks us to consider the political as happening immediately and immanently within our own situation (Butt, 2017).

Fraser’s (2006) account of the generic capitalist forces that are turning the art industry into just another business seem to echo the erosion of academic autonomy through the transformation of the university’s business practices under neoliberalism. Elsewhere, I have outlined science’s limitations as a model for artistic research through its displacement of the independent critical voice and thus the suppression of an ethic of care (see Butt, 2016). However, science is no longer the dominant enterprise in the university as it was at the beginning of the artistic research debates: the major field of study for postgraduate students today is business and commerce, constituting a full quarter of Australian enrolments, compared to fewer than ten percent for the natural and physical sciences (ABS, 2005). This shift in university enrolments reflects the times, for as the critic Marina Vishmidt (2010) has noted, education ‘has become one of the most highly commodified and instrumentalised sectors worldwide and debt slavery and ‘employability’ are the real products of most universities’. Students, it seems, are ultimately seeking education in the financial principles that strictly govern their debt-laden futures in a way that was not the case for those a generation earlier.

Whether education in business as a field of academic study delivers on its promise to students is neither here nor there for artistic researchers, who usually operate in a different faculty. Our own work is challenged by finance not as a topic, but as a dominant governing ratio of the university’s internal organisation. Methodological distinctions between the arts, sciences, and commerce are rendered moot through the evisceration of discipline-specific research infrastructure and the occupation of university research by a new generic set of operations under the ever-expanding category of ‘overhead’: risk management; commercialisation; construction and property services; intellectual property; contract management; security; insurance; service-oriented architectures; organisational reviews; stakeholder management; monitoring and compliance; occupational health and safety; space utilisation charges; governance; business intelligence; and portfolio management to name but a few. These domains of practice will be familiar to any university administrator.¹

There is little of interest to say about the growth of these new domains in the university, except that they are impervious to academic knowledge of the type generated in research. Foucault’s conception of disciplinary society involved an institutional accretion of power/knowledge (puissance/connaissance) that reflexively incorporates the sub-disciplinary forces of pouvoir/savoir (Spivak, 1993: 43). The university, as the self-consciously disciplinary institution, saw its role as intellectually understanding new knowledges emerging in the world, in turn bringing about new university disciplines (engineering, gender studies, or contemporary art, for example). Today, the corporate form that Clark Kerr (1963) called the ‘multiversity’ deliberately insulates itself from its own disciplinary expertise. To take one example, my own university’s high-profile restructuring of professional staffing was not designed or run by our highly-ranked business faculty with their well-promoted intellectual leadership in strategy and change management, but instead by a global consulting firm.² Similarly, universities do not generally seek to implement the innovative designs of its design school; the information technology of its IT faculty; or most of all, the research-based pedagogy of its education professors, outsourced to casuals and assessed by student satisfaction metrics.

These forces rationalising and reformatting university operations can be filed under the generic description of infrastructure. Angela Mitropolous (2012) articulated infrastructure’s binding of the political to the ethical when she defined infrastructure as ‘an answer to the question of movement and relation’. Here, infrastructure is what comes to program relationalities, and her formulation of infrastructure as an ‘answer’ also captures the important point that all infrastructure is also a statement, an assertion, a performance. Increasingly, infrastructure is discussed as a platform (Butt, McQuire and Papastergiadis, 2016). The multilayered life for platform infrastructure is captured in Brian Larkin’s (2013: 329) definitions as ‘objects that create the grounds on which other objects operate’, as ‘things and also the relation between things’. 

Infrastructure as a genre written through global capitalism is somewhat of a challenge for creative researchers, who usually seek to customise, if not autonomously develop, their infrastructure in each artistic situation. How then, is the creative researcher able to resist this new generic infrastructure of non-thought in the university? Jacques Derrida’s (2002) suggestion was to call for a ‘university without condition’, a site of singular actions with an aesthetic signature that would be indigestible by the factory of academic ‘worldwideization’. Since the 1990s, the political and economic conditions of university life have radically constrained the possibility and significance of such individualised gestures. Perhaps instead we can look to the artistic tradition of institutional critique for guidance on the ethics of infrastructural engagement, though as Isabelle Graw (2008: 303) notes ‘critique implies distance, but this distance has to be renegotiated as well on the basis of the critic’s own implication within this system [this] should have consequences on what we assume and how we operate’. In this framing of complicity, Graw puts us in mind of Spivak’s and Gramsci’s interrogation of the institutionalisation of the intellectual, where rather than figuring the democratic inside the artwork – a perennially popular performance of political aesthetics — the artist as activist must consider their own location within circuits of power, working to understand how such labour maintains or is defective for the operation of that power.

Going private: neoliberal artistic subjectivity as infrastructure

Vishmidt (2017) claims that Kant’s distanciated set-up of art’s autonomy comes to be ‘instrumental in the ‘last instance”’ in so far as it forms a ‘universal subject’ that is fully appropriate to the bourgeois era. To what extent is art’s bracketing of the ‘situation’ that allows an intervention that can be read as ‘artistic’ complicit in reinforcing the axiomatics of dispossession that underwrite it? How would those involved in artistic production unpick that complicity toward models that not only situate the question of inclusion among audiences and the work, but also among all those involved in the networked supply chains of art in a debordered or rebordered aesthetics? This requires a more technical analysis of the forces that constitute audiences through all stages of the artistic project’s lifecycle.

For presenting institutions, the tangibility and specificity of information brought about by new technologies have allowed new kinds of measurement, and fundamentally changed the nature of audiences. Audience development is now a key strategy and performance indicator to be tracked and managed. Far from simply producing the traditional ‘blockbuster’, today the cultural institution is required to specify and develop specific audiences, large and small. Various regimes of value attached to funding and revenue streams constitute this variegated public, which links the development of the wealthy patron to the development of education initiatives and other ‘inclusion’ measures such as diversity and outreach programmes, all falling under the domain of stakeholder development. We can understand network technologies as allowing a new relation between these forms of public, where alternative audiences no longer exist outside the institutions of power but are actively managed by it. This multiplicitous, monitored, and above all managed institutional public sphere also rests on an explicitly sociological conception of the artwork’s public. This type of sociological management is not necessarily to do with the academic discipline of sociology, but is visible in the way new techniques of audience segmentation have a statistical logic that can be graphed with an indicator, tracked with a metric, and visualized on a dashboard. From the 1970s through to the 1990s, academic sociologists such as Erik Olin Wright (1985) tested new class schema by correlating an empirical and theoretical class analysis through economic instruments. They were in some ways ahead of their time but behind the technology, trying to retrofit bad statistics onto a preferred analytical reality. Today the active graphing of segmentable audiences means that the statistical indicator in Stiegler’s (2010) terms has an ‘advance’ on social reality, in that it comes to program the reality of the audience.

With this given, it is curious that Boris Groys should use the introduction to his book Going Public (2010) to launch a critique of what he terms the ‘sociological’ mode of art criticism, when this sociological approach is being fully mobilised by administrators in the actual undergirding infrastructure of artistic audiences. Within modernist and post-modernist artistic production there has always been a kind of generalised resistance to Kant’s diagnostic of the aesthetic experience, a position that sees the viewer as the site where art’s political effects become visible. Most dissenters, like Groys, adopt some version of Nietzsche’s critique that Kant ‘instead of envisaging the aes­thetic problem from the point of view of the artist (creator), considered art and the beautiful purely from that of the “spectator”’, leaving the disinterested definition of the beautiful in which ‘a lack of any refined first-hand experience reposes in the shape of a fat worm of error’ (Nietzsche, 2010: 104). The perspectival seeing and thinking that is the hallmark of the artist is deprioritised in Kant’s critical framework, where he attempts to understand a universalisable and thus ‘democratic’ freedom of the viewer, while the producer is altogether more materially constrained.

Groys is rightly anxious to avoid the illustrative fallacy of political art, where it exhausts its ability to do aesthetic work precisely once it is a recognisable portrait of a political situation. An aesthetic politics should be in the work’s own movement rather than in its representation of the political, it should make the polis rather than talking about it. Yet, Groys seems to turn to a kind of sociological argument of his own in diagnosing today’s participatory condition of art, suggesting that because more people are interested in image production than image contemplation – and he was talking in 2010, before the rise of Instagram – that it is necessary to understand artistic production from the point of view of the producer, and the ‘technical and political decisions for which their subject can be made ethically and politically responsible’ in art’s artificiality. Thus, Groys (2010: 15) suggests, ‘poiesis or techne [rather] than as aisthesis or in terms of hermeneutics’. Ironically, in making this move Groys locates the problem of responsibility in an individualist frame, where an independent artist will act and will then be judged in the social world only after the act has occurred – a version of Hudson’s ‘internalist’ mode of ethical responsibility in the liberal/individualist and latently Christian paradigm.³

Groys acknowledges the artistic persona as fundamental but he does not materialise its production in a way that could see the persona as infrastructural. However, seeing artistic identity as a kind of infrastructure allows us to grapple with the sociological conditions that underpin the production of artistic ethics today, a problematic Groys entirely misses by suggesting that a sociological critique has failed to understand the lessons of the avant-garde. Groys and the historical avant-garde’s aging defenders have failed to understand the lessons of feminist and anti-racist critique, particularly as made within institutional critique. We know today that the actions of the avant-garde rely on specific modes of universalised subjectivity that are impossible to dissociate from the neoliberal ideal of the blank entrepreneurial self. The latent claims to authority embodied in this mode of ‘projectile sovereignty’ (I thank Lauren Berlant for the phrase) are what must be made available for critique if the interventions made on behalf of the public are not to reinforce the axiomatics of domination that are all too familiar in artistic production. To take this a step further: if today the contemporary art world relies on an ‘artistic persona’ at the heart of capital-intensive production, works and practices which do not make available their grounding modes of subjectivity to critique will invariably participate in a kind of ‘privatisation’ of practice that reinforces the privatisation of cultural infrastructure.

Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument

The problematics of artistic personae as infrastructure are well illustrated by the various analyses of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument, a project commissioned and produced by the Dia Foundation, located in the Forest Houses, a public housing development of the Southeast Bronx in 2013. The Gramsci Monument was a makeshift building constructed of plywood, tarpaulins and Hirschhorn’s signature packing tape, that for one summer housed a media laboratory and library containing Gramsci publications and ephemera, as a platform for engaging the housing estate as a ‘non-exclusive audience’.⁴ It is one of Hirschhorn’s ongoing attempts to create a ‘universal’ artwork that escapes from terms such as ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ by locating a supposedly public work outside traditional high-visibility public spaces. Julian Rose (2013: 235) describes the Gramsci Monument as ‘the culmination of Hirschhorn’s series of four homages to great thinkers. The evolution of these projects represents a remarkable effort to resurrect both public space and that which has historically defined it: the monument, whether hieratic statue or symbolic space.’ They move from the monolithic Spinoza Monument of 1999, located in the red-light district of Amsterdam, to the Deleuze and Bataille monuments of 2000 and 2002 that are built in collaboration with communities in low-income housing developments and become platforms for a range of community events.

For Gramsci Monument, Hirschhorn sought to dispense with the residual ‘monumental’ aspects of the Bataille monument that he felt distracted from the ‘total artwork’, or the ability to see all the aspects of site that should be associated with the work all at once. As Ara Merjian (2013) notes ‘Hirschhorn has long inveighed against the reduction of art to any moniker – “piece”, “show” or “installation” – that might ossify its necessary, vital precariousness’. This is a clear adoption of the avant-garde position that proposes movement as an important force against the sclerotic tendencies of diagnosed and sociologised culture. The provisional; the temporary; and the improvisational is seen as an expression of freedom or creativity to open up new models of action. The public here is performative, being constructed in the anew at each moment, potentially evading all the forces that constitute it. Hirschhorn thus formulates the ‘non-exclusive audience’ as his target in artistic work (see Rittenbach, 2014). Implicitly, what is valorised here is the force and intensity of the artistic gesture which can create works that could ‘stand up’ and become monumental, even more so by being anti-monumental. The monument would then no longer distract from the artistic persona and gesture. The artist takes these anti-monuments from site to site, demonstrating the possibility of new worlds in a paradigm of mobility and autonomy. Such a mode is particularly ironic in the case of the Gramsci monument, as Gramsci himself noted that intellectuals forged a ‘stratum of administrators, scholars and scientists, theorists, non-ecclesiastical philosophers, etc.’ who come to think of themselves as ‘autonomous and independent of the dominant social group’ (Gramsci, 2009). But for Gramsci this is all an illusion. The production of Hirschhorn’s globally mobile artistic subjectivity that allows such neutrality displaces the very terms of racial dispossession that made the Bronx poor enough to be able to ‘benefit’ from his intervention. Attention to these forces structuring such dispossession have become the grounds for the most effective social movements working from and for public housing communities like those in Forest Houses (Black Lives Matter, for example). The metaphor of the ‘organic’ used by Gramsci points to the fact that one does not choose one’s own institutionalisation into epistemic privilege, something Hirschhorn seems either oblivious to, or wilfully dismissive of.

Responsibility

‘I have always seen my mission’, Hirschhorn (see Oliva and Rezende, 2007) has written, echoing Groys (2010), ‘as taking over responsibility. Responsibility for everything touching my work, but also responsibility for what I am not responsible for.’ As Glenn Ligon’s analysis of the Gramsci Monument noted, Hirschhorn’s taking of responsibility always leads us back to the question of his artistic persona as a type of infrastructure, yet one which remained stubbornly unavailable to the existing people in the site. For Ligon (2013), the way every question led back to Hirschhorn’s position as an artist, however rigorously articulated, resulted in an eventual distancing from the concerns of the community. Hirschhorn’s ultimate accountability to the art world, and thus his artistic persona, was necessary infrastructure – we could think of it like a toll-road – that allowed the Dia Art Foundation to connect to a part of its city that it was not prepared to face directly before this commission. Therefore, when Hirschhorn takes responsibility for his work, rather than sharing it, he performs a privatizing operation that is essential for Dia’s capital to appropriate the Bronx’s difference as an aesthetic opportunity.

Spivak (2004) gave a talk at the monument, and her work on responsibility emphasises that the ability to ‘answer to’ and ‘answer for’ is overdetermined by the institutional constraints that distribute responsibility in advance. ‘At the moment where one “takes” responsibility for authoring one’s actions, one precisely fails to take responsibility for the fact that one can decide to take it’ (Butt, 2016). For Dia’s purposes, as for Hirschhorn’s, the actual events that took place under his responsibility had little effect on the success or failure of how it could be evaluated within the artistic institutions to which they were accountable. In other words, in the formulation of the ethical Spivak provides at the opening of this chapter, Hirschhorn evades an ethical relationship by effacing the opportunity for his responsibility to be held by those he is working with. The problem here can be understood in the developmentalist paradigm as a kind of white man’s burden. The artist becomes machinery that is always looking for a site of investment. Hirschhorn, after all, had a number of meetings in different sites in New York before he was invited to create the monument in the South Bronx.

The most interesting account of the Gramsci Monument came from Fred Moten, as recounted by José Esteban Muñoz (2014: 120):

One interested audience member asked Fred how he felt being there, at the Gramsci Monument, in the Bronx. He talked about feeling good in the space and how rare that feeling could be. He explained that he was always happy to be invited somewhere to speak, but it was a special kind of luxury to really feel good at the place one is happy to be invited to. The audience breathed in that idea of feeling good, on this mild summer day, with the sun shining, in this canyon surrounded by red brick towers where this ship, our ship, had landed. Someone asked him what he thought of Hirschhorn’s project, and he responded by saying that there had always been something here and the installation did not unveil anything new. He used the metaphor of food to elaborate this point. He explained that sometimes, even though not always the healthiest thing to do, one must salt one’s food to really taste the flavor. The bright flavor of this space was brought out by the monument, but that taste had always been there, which is to insist that the effervescence of the actually existing relationality of the Forest Houses and the promise of collectivity was and is always present in such spaces.

To conceive of one’s own work as a kind of seasoning requires us to understand our own work as supplementary to social forces much larger than ourselves, and thus in a certain way to allow responsibility to be held in the meal itself. Salt production occurs in many communities across the globe, and yet no one would want to eat a meal of salt. The conditions of salt production are also, in some places, synonymous with exploitation. Perhaps Moten’s metaphor gives us a way to think about our own institutionalisation in the salt mines of culture: if our aesthetic seasoning were to be produced ethically, what would a cooperative for salt production look like, against the industrially scaled salt makers?

Against the extractive modes of fly-in fly-out aesthetic infrastructure, if we think today about public political movements such as Occupy, or the indigenous-led activism at Standing Rock and the North Dakota Access Pipeline, a prominent mechanism for going public is through refusal to be moved on, and the use of networks not to discover new territories for exploration, but to defend them against instrumental incursions. Against the settler colonial paradigm of movement, these protests speak to an ecological concern with a responsibility for infrastructure that exceeds the individual. On the one hand these movements represent a practice of collective autonomy: the ability to propose a collaborative answer to the question of movement and relation, rather than having it imposed. However, in the case of Standing Rock and other struggles against neo-colonial extraction, it also speaks to an extended temporality of struggle that situates action outside the human-directed event and into an ecological or planetary time to which we become responsible, rather than taking responsibility for it. Such an orientation refuses to override ethical concerns for political ends, or to put it in Derrida’s terms, this mode refuses all externally-mandated conditions, and becomes an ‘unconditional’ commitment that we can understand as the hallmark of the professor. In this ecological terrain, professorial complaints about the changing character of universities as workplaces focused on compliance and profit have a shared basis with student demands for consumer satisfaction and ethical institutional behaviour.⁵ To affirm such demands ethically and politically, that is to say, practically, may require us to subject our own ambivalent positions in education’s economic logic to more stringent critique. This critique will require more organisational and financial literacy than artistic subjectivity has traditionally rewarded, but brings with it the potential for alliance not only with our students but with other groups resistant to neoliberalisation. This would allow us to displace questions of responsibility as right into collective actions that forge solidarities with those from outside the institution’s walls, rather than treating such communities as targets of our natural beneficence. This mode of ethical reflection, which engages the politics of our own institutionalisation, rather than disavowing it, is harder to adjudicate through our inherited academic mechanisms, but it perhaps better serves the communities outside the university who ultimately sustain artistic research.

Notes

1. Universities increasingly contract such functions externally to global infrastructure firms – see for example the University of Newcastle’s award of a five year $88 million integrated facilities management and property services contract to Transfield Services / Broadspectrum in 2015. The potential for this overhead to stifle artistic research is further elaborated in my essay “How Artistic Research Ends” (Melbourne: Research Unit in Public Cultures) 2020. This section includes material published there and in Artistic Research in the Future Academy (2017)

2. For a range of responses to the Business Improvement Program, see Campbell, Marion, and Philip Morrissey, eds. 2016. The People’s Tribunal: An Inquiry into the “Business Improvement Program” at The University of Melbourne. Melbourne: Aboriginal Humanities Project in association with Discipline.

3. I have pursued this problem of responsibility at length in Danny Butt and Local Time, “Colonial Hospitality: Rethinking Curatorial and Artistic Responsibility,” Journal for Artistic Research, no. 10 (2016), https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/228399/264279.

4. For a good account see Valle, Luisa. 2015. “Object Lesson: Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument: Negotiating Monumentality with Instability and Everyday Life.” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 22 (2). 18–35. Also Hirschhorn’s own “Gramsci Monument” in Rethinking Marxism 27 (2): 213–40.

5. This conjuncture was on display in the actions against the University of Sydney taken by students at Sydney College of the Arts. See Joyner, Tom. 2016. “More than 130 Students Take on Sydney University for Alleged Breach of Consumer Law – Honi Soit.” Honi Soit. August 9. http://honisoit.com/2016/08/more-than-130-students-take-on-sydney-university-for-alleged-breach-of-consumer-law/

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