Who are we – Those / Us embedded and imbued in the Museum of the Future – Hanging onto or from the chains of the Industrial Art Complex? What are we here for? Holding onto our positions as the last Refuge of being and time. Us and those who commodify our ‘creative’ productions in the guise of humanist progression?

In this Contemporary Collective Cultural, Communal, Capital, Commercial, Conceptual Art Practice Paradigm. We are here / Here we are, interested, tearing ourselves apart in the pursuit of phenomenology, ideological objects / identity & post-structuralism / Justice – We continually analyze & profess how these concepts are represented in materials, objects, sounds, sculpture, paintings, video, installation, performances and relationships. We are ‘Interdisciplinary’, ‘Multidisciplinary’, ‘Multi-Cultural’, ‘Multi-dimensional’. Promoting ideas and activating knowledge is essential to our project – we attempt to secure and validate our worth in the industrial cultural art complex.  We investigate a wide range of phenomena and material we live by to make and / as an attempt to inhabit the cultural economy as livable.

We believe in collaboration, collectives and shared praxis - Re-referencing provides a model for analyzing histories and ideas, allowing us attempts to capture essential essences and process relationships within communicative systems and in the (cultural/economic) environment. We understand the  exhibition as a means for a public sphere. We rely on it as the social and political stage of our voices. We recognize exhibitions / installations / referencing / Curating / Performing / Museology and Dialogue as social action, a discipline and engage with its theory and practice. Furthermore, we employ strategies of disinterment to produce new works that strive to open unique pathways. Referencing various points in time and cultural space, we consider the connections between people, artists and artworks. Through collaboration and re-contextualization, we are exploring the plurality of contemporary art practice and the ‘exhibition as medium’. Our research aims to provide a lens for looking at different approaches to exhibition concepts and forms especially between Australia & Japan. Through & In sculpture, painting, photography, video and installation, artists explore the sociopolitical and personal implications of making, viewing and experiencing art.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century the museum has been both a theme of artist’s reflections and a target of their criticism since it represents a central locus of power in the cultural economy of modernism. Initial museum – critical literature (futurism, Dada and Russian [Productivism] by artists is influenced by anti-bourgeois cultural critique and expressed in iconoclastic polemics or as revolutionary manifestos. It would be a separate and thoroughly worthwhile project to examine in greater detail the pre-history of artists’ criticism of the institutions to be found in the writings of the historical avant-garde. The reason that this book starts with documents from the sixties lies in the fact that its view of the history of museum criticism is determined by current questions. The image of the museum as representing an old world, the epitome of conservative values, a bastion against the progressive and new and thus as an institution which deserves to be utterly destroyed (symbolically, at least) (Marinetti) is now outmoded. Museums and cultural institutions have long since been together renewed to such an extent that they no longer pose a fundamental opposition to the “avant-garde” of economics, the entertainment industry and even artistic production. Moreover, art has given up its self-deceptive picture as a revolutionary force outside the social contract. Instead, it has taken a critical position, fully conscious that it has always been a part of the structures it criticizes. The continuing loss of revolutionary pathos, rather than make the artistic criticism weaker, has increased its precision. Apodictic judgements are being replaced by increasingly concrete and differentiated analyses [1] .

According to this type of analysis, the art world is entirely occupied by various commercial interests that "in the last instance" dictate the criteria of inclusion and exclusion that shape the art world. The artwork presents itself in this perspective as an unhappy, suffering commodity, one that is utterly submissive to the power of the market and differentiates itself from other commodities only through its ability to become a critical and self-critical commodity. And this notion of a self-critical commodity is, of course, utterly paradoxical. The (self-) critical artwork is a paradox-object that fits perfectly in the dominating paradigm of modern and contemporary art. There is, therefore, nothing to say against this kind of (self-)critical art from within that paradigm — but the question arises if such art can also be understood as truly political art.

In a discourse of art history, the concept of the ‘artist genius’ is arduously rehashed in the usual ways art is understood and conceptualized. Studying art parallels the manner in which an author is regarded in a literary discourse. Yes, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach, but the mindset of art history’s old-fashioned discourse is not easy to dislodge, given that this was the prevailing discourse for centuries. The paradigm runs like this: if one wants to get to know art better, what can be done is to get to know the life of the artist, look at her other works, and her oeuvre will answer any of our questions as what to make of any singular expression. Her name, if she’s famous enough to be recognized, stands in for her style, her discourse, and so on. Once, for instance, the name Meret Oppenheim is mentioned we get that the discourse is about surrealism, one quickly forgets that her Object (Fur Breakfast / Le Déjeuner en fourrure) was made within a social milieu that then went far beyond her immediate circle and context of surrealist/artist friends, Breton, Picasso, et al. Closer inspection disperses authorship. “The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning.” Foucault expressed this sardonic statement in his essay, also from the 1970s, “What is an Author?” His quote is another way of saying that the author (artist) is one small part of the larger discourse. But what is at stake in a discourse when one is deploying Foucault’s strategy? The short answer is that to study the dominant discourse opens up the way meaning is controlled. The manner in which a traditional discourse usually operates isolates, and stifles meaning to only one category, re: that of the singular author. These could be the reasons why Foucault prefers to use the (philosophical and post-structuralist) term: subject, meaning that the author, in Foucault’s context, becomes subject/ed to the forces of power that surround her. The roles are then reversed. The author is fixed in a web of influence and cultural control. Such moves are important, if only to comprehend the interplay of the larger structures that created the artist. One might forget that the artist is just as pliant as the materials with which she works. It is impossible to imagine that Foucault can be summarized in such a short space, but it is easy to posit that an author, the mythic genius, need not be the sole framing device in any discourse, whether it is in the field of art history or beyond.

As for the question of how there can be a transformation of created, negated meaning that is also de/coded within the context of a particular discourse, Derrida’s famous (or infamous, depending on your affiliations) mode of philosophy, aptly named deconstruction, is brought to the fore. Here is yet another example of how a single idea speaks volumes, therefore, to give a full explication of the diffusion of his radical project is not within a comprehensible range. Still, one has to start somewhere, and since the topic at hand is aesthetical, there is “Parergon,” a chapter from Derrida’s book The Truth in Painting from the 1980s. In these highly erudite pages both Hegel and Heidegger’s aesthetics are considered and up for inspection. While Heidegger was looking for the origins of a work of art, Hegel presumes that art is a firm and stable category to begin with. Derrida shows that the question of what art is, or what are its origins “assumes that we reach an agreement about what we understand by the word art.” The ways in which one asks a question and the very questions themselves aggressively gesture toward the expectation of the answers. Buried deep within Derrida’s deconstructive methodology is the ghost of his phenomenological past, since the reader is consistently asked to re-inquire Hegel and Heidegger’s presuppositions about works of art. Even within this inquiry one is tempted to think that Derrida is wishing to come to some definitive conclusion, or that this is a kind of critique aimed to get on to a better line of argumentation. These objectives are not his goal. All we need to do is decode the work of art, and then we’ll understand it—is not where he’s going. If common understanding desires a univocity of meaning, Derrida’s deconstruction shows that meaning is only a settlement of naturalized codes of convention, history, discourse, culture, and the like.

With Derrida, post-structuralism and postmodernism take to full stratospheric flight, yet he didn’t work in a vacuum, Barthes’ Text and Foucault’s critical discourse are also factors that make for alternative vectors of open study and inquiry. In Barthes’ theory, where semiotics and structuralism still predominated, the Text becomes a playful anecdote to the stolid work. One reads a Text like a musician plays Bach. Then, with Foucault, there is the overarching power of culture, society, and hegemonies that deployed to inculcate the subject to abidingly operate inside the structures of particular epistemic discourses. Finally, as mentioned, with Derrida, there is a full dispersal and unfolding of meaning, whereby one is left to question the very means by which things are understood, defined and philosophically regarded. Post-structuralism destabilizes structures that we were not even aware of, and the question remains: what can we do to avoid becoming their victims?

[1] The text was taken from a book, ‘Museum as Arena’, which was published about 2001. The editor is Cristian Kravagna, one of important critics on decolonization, representation, critique and cultural discourses in western Europe. At the time when he published this book, there was a big flow of those studies in Vienna, mainly circled in the academy of fine arts Vienna and European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policy (eipcp), Hito Steyerl was actively involved when she was doing PhD in the academy and not famous as an artist back then. Christian is still teaching in the academy. The text is the preface of the book written by him.