Refusal

ICI, a consortium of international curators, is a curatorial organization that doesn’t have an affiliation with a particular museum. It is an open-source curatorial model that any institution can take part in. ICI has been touring the Creative Time exhibition Living as Form to various international venues, including the Technion, a university in Israel. The installation of the exhibition at the Technion was met with a public letter of protest and boycotts from artists, because the university researches and develops drones that attack the West Bank and Gaza. Boycotts sometimes help reveal underlying politics to artists and the art world, but they also raise the question of whether it is more effective to show controversial art in spaces with contested politics, or to withdraw. Another recent boycott was of Manifesta 10, being held in St. Petersburg, because of Russia’s discriminatory policies toward LGBTQ citizens. While these are very different issues, each prompted boycotts and refusals for political and ideological reasons. In protests, it can be argued that one side claims ethical superiority. In the case of the show in Israel, it could be said that the West knows best and is ethically and morally “superior” to the East. This can be problematic because it can translate to a superior attitude towards cultures that aren’t your own.

In recent years there have been many examples of refusal in which artists withdrew from exhibitions because they disagreed with the practices of the hosting institution. These include the Sydney Biennale, which was funded by a private prison company, as well as the Louvre and Guggenheim Museums in the UAE. A group of artists and activists led by Walid Raad were active in an organized boycott of the Guggenheim. Other artist protests include Gulf Labor and the 2011 Sharjah Biennial. Lee Lozano’s refusal to stay in the art world culminated in her last work, the Dropout Piece.

In all of these instances, artists were faced with the decision to participate or withdraw, and had to determine whether it would be better to participate and show their work as an act of protest, or to withdraw from the exhibition and protest in the form of a boycott. Artists whose work is political are often faced with issues of participation and refusal. One has to determine on a case-by-case basis whether to show work in specific institutions. If showing the work engages people and moves the conversation about such issues forward it can be a useful strategy. One must be aware that this decision can also be misconstrued as being in support of unethical institutions and practices if care is not taken to dispel this notion. In my own practice I will, no doubt, be required to make such decisions in the future; I can think of instances in which either response would be appropriate.