Institutions: Between Public and Private

Permanent Forum’s subheading reflects a crucial question of art institutions: the space it occupies between the public and private spheres. Even private collections are part of the national and international heritage. Therefore the critique of this heritage is more than lawful: it is the responsibility of those working in the art sector – museum directors, art critics and historians, artists, museum staff, art teachers.

Moreover, when talking about artistic heritage, we are not only referring to museum collections: we are also referring to the future heritage, to the establishment of the necessary conditions for the support of new artistic productions, ideas and thoughts.

The Journal of the Permanent Forum is intended to be an observatory for the management of this cultural heritage. How will the critique, the praise, the reflection be made? From the classical idea of submitting texts for publication to the wiki pages that can be used as a medium for artistic production, the forum is intended as a studio for the elaboration of a critical discourse that can be textual, visual, hypertextual, video, etc.

There are several examples of institutional critique in the recent history of art, be it in the arts, in architecture, or in text: Dada, Fluxus, Mail Art, Desconstrutivism; Robert Venturi, Lina Bo Bardi, James Sterling, Bernard Tschumi, Peter Eisenmann; Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Broodthaers, Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein, Allan McCollum, Joseph Kosuth, Hans Haacke, Daniel Buren, Vito Acconci, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, Andrea Fraser; Hélio Oiticica, Cildo Meirelles, Nelson Leirner, Júlio Plaza, Regina Silveira, Carla Zaccagnini, Ricardo Basbaum, Dora Longo Bahia and many others.

                Copyright © 1989, 1995 by Guerrilla Girls

However there is a special example that we would like to emphasize because of its collective nature: the Guerrilla Girls who, in the 80s, would show up in exhibition openings in New York wearing gorilla masks as a form of protest against the machismo of art institutions.

Despite working in our fame-driven times, nobody has ever claimed authorship of the Guerilla Girls’ actions. No one knows exactly who they are (by the way, they’re still going and have a website: http://www.guerillagirls.com) and among the ‘suspects’ are some artists, museum staff and art critics.
The mixed participation of many cultural agents might explain the perseverance and longevity of this irreverent group. Acknowledging the strength of collective actions, we hope that Permanent Forum will bring together different groups and opinions supporting cultural policies that are beneficial to our national heritage.