Infrastructural Critique and Art Historiography: A Footnote to Marina Vishmidt
The 1960s saw the start of an increasing tendency in art history, practice, and theory to recognise the importance of the contextual framework for its critical analysis. Prominent among these reframing devices include the notion of the art world, per George Dickie, an institutional theory of art, per Arthur Danto, first, second, and perhaps now third waves of institutional critique, the theoretical expansion of a sociological theory of art, recognition of the embeddedness of galleries and museums within wider structures of gendered and racial domination, and so on. Though there are conceptual tensions within this field and the different contributions often draw on different disciplinary configurations, this tendency has produced an analytical expansion that variously recognises and emphasises different structural, institutional, subjective, socio-political, geopolitical, and historical elements central to producing, displaying, receiving, and thinking art. In this paper, I revisit Marina Vishmidt's introduction of the notion of 'infrastructural critique' from the standpoint of this expanded philosophical contextualism to draw out some of its latent historiographical ideas and concerns. Foremost among which is the proposition that the art institution is a limited and falsely totalised horizon, allowing us to consider a revisionist history of conceptual art that accounts for a broader set of 'non-artistic' practices. By reconfiguring this central claim through a conceptual history of the theory of art, I aim to develop this view of infrastructural critique as a metacritical and strategic intervention driven by given political exigencies that can open up new horizons of critique and intervention.

Supported by the Leverhulme Trust, Louis Hartnoll is a postdoctoral researcher in the History of Art Department at the University of Amsterdam and the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. He serves as a member of the Editorial Board of Historical Materialism.

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