Marie Leduc
PhD Candidate, University of Alberta
“To understand is first to understand the field with which and against which one has been formed.” [1].
Pierre Bourdieu, Sketch for a Self-Analysis
In a short book written late in life, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu conducted a socio-self-analysis. Recognizing the “conventional and illusory” [2] nature of the autobiographical form, Bourdieu approached his self-analysis not as a chronological narrative but as a sociological study. Judy Freya Sibayan performs a similar reflexive assessment of her career as an artist, curator, and writer in her e-book publication, The Hypertext of HerMe(s) (2014) [3]. By analyzing her artistic life as part of the field that has shaped her, Sibayan constructs an insightful picture of the complex relationship between artist and institution.
Sibayan is best known for her conceptual-performance pieces Scapular Gallery Nomad and the Museum of Mental Objects (MoMO). In Scapular Gallery Nomad (performed from 1997 to 2002), Sibayan wore a portable museum on her body in the form of a fabric pouch. Her curated collection of artworks were stored inside the pouch and taken out to be assembled as exhibits in homes, cafes, buses, and other locations outside the conventional space of the museum or gallery. Her aim was to establish a position ‘off-center’ to the art institution. [4] She followed Scapular Gallery Nomad with MoMO (2002 to present), a performance that takes the idea of a portable museum even further. As Sibayan reveals, MoMO “is a self-parody of Scapular Gallery Nomad.” [5] Apart from Sibayan’s body (or that of her collaborator, Matt Price, who embodies a second MoMO), MoMO eliminated all physical manifestations of the museum and the artworks. The MoMO collection is installed in Sibayan’s memory by artists who whisper their works into her ear. The works are then ‘exhibited’ whenever Sibayan chooses to ‘open’ her museum and perform (recite) the artworks as she remembers them. By ‘becoming’ the museum, Sibayan actively resists the conformity of the institution and takes control of her own ‘materialization’ as an artist.
As an autobiography, The Hypertext of HerMe(s) is both a genealogy and an analysis of Sibayan’s materialization as an ‘ex-centric’ artist. [6] The book is presented in six primary chapters or sections along with a preface (“Dear Reader”) and summary. Each section – “The Book of HerMe(s)”; “Constructing the Autobiographical Self”; “Problematizing Artistic Labor”; “Problematizing the Institution of Art: Towards an Institutional Critique”; “Embodying the Institution of Art: Further Institutional Critique and Agency”; and “Agency and the Production of Discourse” – considers Sibayan’s artistic development from a different theoretical and analytical perspective. Sibayan, however, does not number the sections or provide a prescribed order to follow.
If there is a heart or center to this collection of chapters it is found in “The Book of HerMe(s).” This is the most personal and “lyrical portion” of Sibayan’s self-analysis. [7] With Hélène Cixous as her mentor, Sibayan considers the “life-changing five-year hiatus” [8] she took from the art world from 1989 to 1994. Just prior to this period, Sibayan had a successful career as an artist and curator at the center of the artistic world in the Philippines. After studying fine art at the University of the Philippines in the early 1970s and completing a master’s degree at the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles (1984), Sibayan was employed as the director of the Contemporary Art Museum of the Philippines, the “most powerful contemporary art museum” in the nation. [9] By 1989, disillusioned by the political and administrative demands of the job and her own misgivings about artistic agency, Sibayan retreated from the art world altogether. “I needed to find a more tenable position so I could make and believe in art again,” she explains. [10] Guided by her muse HerMe(s) – her ‘imagination’ – she re-considers her place and role within the art world and ‘births’ herself from the confining ‘white cube’ of the museum with Scapular Gallery Nomad. It is this work, ironically, that reintroduces Sibayan back into the art world and brings her even closer to its global center. Invited by curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Sibayan participated in the Vienna Secession exhibit, Cities on the Move (1997-1999). The exhibit traveled to cities around the globe, including London, New York, Vienna, and Bordeaux, France, where Sibayan performed Scapular Gallery Nomad on the streets and in museums. The experience gave Sibayan the “confidence” to “go in and out of any mausoleum without fear of being coopted. Scapular existed independent of these white cubes.” [11] Yet, as Sibayan realized, such artistic independence is only possible with the recognition of the very institution she aims to resist; an artist cannot be ‘ex-centric’ without being recognized by the center.
In the remaining sections of The Hypertext of HerMe(s), Sibayan provides a studied analysis of the slippery and elusive challenge of maintaining an ‘ex-centric’ position within the institution of art while being valued by it. Central to this analysis is the realization that:
the only art that is free from the powers of the debasing system of commodity production is the art that is invisible. But the art that never gets seen within and processed by the power structures of the culture industry never gets counted as art! [12]
In “Problematizing Artistic Labor,” Sibayan lays out this theoretical dilemma, one she attributes to the failure of the historical avant-garde. Citing Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-garde, Sibayan explains how the avant-garde initiated “an attack on art as a bourgeois institution.” [13] The avant-garde, she proposes, “saw themselves apart from the art they were problematizing” [14] and the institutional practices that made art, art. Thus, Sibayan distinguishes two distinct stages in her career: her period of “being an avant-garde” and her “practice of Institutional Critique.” [15] Her ‘avant-garde’ period includes her early artistic practice before her five-year hiatus. During this time she was consciously “mimicking the Western avant-garde,” [16] creating performance and installation pieces that challenged the institution but without recognizing the reciprocal and necessary relationship between artist and institution. Following Andrea Fraser’s definition, Sibayan explains that Institutional Critique recognizes the failure of the avant-garde and “accepts art’s and the artist’s condition as contingent on being part of the institution of art.” [17] The institution of art is therefore not abandoned, only recognized as “a social site that needs to be problematized and changed.” [18]
With this understanding, Sibayan turns to performance and parody as a strategy for critically responding to the power of the institution. Parody, with its “‘essential reflexivity’” and “capacity to reflect critically back upon itself,” [19] provides Sibayan with the means to explore how the institution of art creates its own objects. Mikhail Bakhtin explained parody as the crossing of two languages or discourses – the performance and its invisible Other which is the object of the ironic critique that we recognize but cannot see. It is in the comedic contrast of the jester’s parodic performance of the king that the invisible power of the empire is revealed. [20] In a performance such as MoMO, Sibayan plays the entire institution of art by conflating its various roles (curator, exhibition space, collector, educator, artist), and in doing so makes visible that “with which and against which” every artist is formed – the actual institution itself.
The Hypertext of HerMe(s) performs a similar reflexive challenge. Different art world discourses, including Sibayan’s own, are crossed and explored not just through performance but through writing. Writing is integral to all of Sibayan’s work, as an archival trace and as an academic contribution to the field (Sibayan is founding editor and publisher of the on-line art journal Ctrl+P). [21] In “The Book of HerMe(s),” for example, Sibayan’s extensive footnotes provide an objective exegesis of her more personal and subjective narrative. In the section “Embodying the Institution of Art,” her conceptualization and development of MoMO is related through theoretical and practical discussions in a lengthy e-mail exchange between Sibayan and her collaborator Matt Price. Throughout her chapters, Sibayan liberally employs her own published writing and excerpts of other writers’ analyses of her work. These texts are further expanded by the inclusion of 390 hyperlinks that connect the book, and the reader, to the wider fabric of the Internet, that “archive of all archives” where a virtual social field is recreated in web pages, images, and texts. [22] As Sibayan explains, this multi-layered autobiographical form “allows me to act reflexively . . . , to see myself acting on and being acted upon by the world through my art.” [23] What emerges for the reader is not only an understanding of Sibayan and her work, but how art and the artist are necessarily bound by the multiple agents and discourses that are the institution of art. Like Sibayan’s performance works, The Hypertext of HerMe(s) does not affect any substantial ‘change’ to the institution of art. Rather, her reflexive self-analysis reveals the complex and integral relationship between artist and institution and opens up the larger question of how artists might problematize the institution through their practice – that is how they might address the failure of the historical avant-garde in the contemporary.
References
- Pierre Bourdieu, Sketch for a Self-Analysis, trans. Richard Nice (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008), 4.
- Bourdieu, Sketch for a Self-Analysis, 1.
- Judy Freya Sibayan, The Hypertext of HerMe(s) (London: KT Press, Kindle Edition, 2014). The Hypertext of HerMe(s) was supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
- Sibayan, The Hypertext of HerMe(s), “ Dear Reader.”
- Sibayan, The Hypertext of HerMe(s), “ Embodying the Institution of Art: Further Institutional Critique and Agency.”
- Sibayan, The Hypertext of HerMe(s), “Dear Reader.”
- Sibayan, The Hypertext of HerMe(s), “Constructing the Autobiographical Self.”
- Sibayan, The Hypertext of HerMe(s), “Problematizing the Institution of Art: Towards an Institutional Critique.”
- Sibayan, The Hypertext of HerMe(s), “Problematizing Artistic Labor.”
- Sibayan, The Hypertext of HerMe(s), “Problematizing Artistic Labor.”
- Sibayan, The Hypertext of HerMe(s), “The Book of HerMe(s).”
- Sibayan, The Hypertext of HerMe(s), “Embodying the Institution of Art: Further Institutional Critique and Agency.”
- Sibayan, The Hypertext of HerMe(s), “Problematizing Artistic Labor.”
- Sibayan, The Hypertext of HerMe(s), “The Book of HerMe(s).”
- Sibayan, The Hypertext of HerMe(s), “Problematizing Artistic Labor.”
- Sibayan, The Hypertext of HerMe(s), “Problematizing Artistic Labor.”
- Sibayan, The Hypertext of HerMe(s), “Problematizing Artistic Labor.” See Andrea Fraser, “What is Institutional Critique?” in Institutional Critique and After, ed. John C. Welchman (Switzerland: RP Ringier, 2006).
- Sibayan, The Hypertext of HerMe(s), “Problematizing Artistic Labor.”
- Sibayan, The Hypertext of HerMe(s), “Dear Reader.”
- M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Carly Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), 76.
- See Ctrl+P Journal of Contemporary Art at www.ctrlp–artjournal.org.
- Sibayan, The Hypertext of HerMe(s), “Dear Reader.”
- Sibayan, The Hypertext of HerMe(s), “Constructing the Autobiographical Self.”
Bio
Marie Leduc is an SSHRC scholar and interdisciplinary PhD candidate in sociology and art history at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Her PhD dissertation considers Chinese contemporary art as a case study for understanding how contemporary art is recognized and valued in the West.