Art and Organization in the 21st Century: Contemporary Art’s Strategic-Organizational Complex

In the aftermath of the popular movements of the past decade, political theorists have paid renewed attention to the question of how to transform the powerful yet transient coming together of people in public assemblies into sustainable forms of organization. A similar reconfiguration has taken place within contemporary art discourses. Here we can see a shift in focus from interventionism and the tactical to a broader interest in practices driven by longer-term, strategic-organizational approaches.

Practices in the strategic-organizational complex of contemporary art conceptualize and initiate, negotiate for, and sustain organizational forms, habitually involving varying degrees of fiction. This complex encompasses a diversity of manifestations. We can start with practices located around archives, as exemplified by the work of Walid Raad, nongovernmental organizations as explored by Khalil Rabah, museums reimagined as artworks in the practice of Not An Alternative, artistic research agencies like Forensic Architecture, learning platforms such as The Silent University, local cooperatives co-initiated by Jeanne van Heeswijk, and ersatz parliaments as envisioned by Jonas Staal, among others. While situating these practices within the broader art historical discourses from the 1960s to 1990s, this dissertation takes its cues from political theories of organization as put forth by scholars such as Judith Butler, Jodi Dean, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter, and Rodrigo Nunes.

Conceptualizing organization as a “shared worksite” in line with the insights of Nunes, this inquiry challenges the notion that the development of complementary organizational forms is confined to socially engaged art, where organizing and sustainability are commonly emphasized. Instead, the strategic-organizational complex outlined in this dissertation extends its reach to critical-archival practice, research-based art, and institutional critique. The argument in this dissertation is that the discussed practices are indicative of a critique of short-term “project work.” They instead reflect an increasingly pronounced inclination towards longer-term strategic collaborations involving actors from diverse social and political spheres. The dissertation explores the implications of a temporal shift from short-term to long-term, an operational transformation from tactics to strategy, and a functional transition from project to organization. This serves as a springboard for a discussion on aesthetic, epistemic, and political dimensions of contemporary art.