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Changing spaces: Machine project, critical pedagogy and reinventing the museum

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Changing spaces: Machine project, critical pedagogy and reinventing the museum

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CHANGING SPACES: MACHINE PROJECT, CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND
REINVENTING THE MUSEUM

by

Jennifer Lieu

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES/MASTER OF PLANNING

May 2011

Copyright 2011 Jennifer Lieu
ii
DEDICATION

For my loving cousin, Sherri Bui
(1969-2010)
iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am deeply grateful to my committee members Karen Moss and Ken Ehrlich for
their tremendous support in completing this thesis. It has been a pleasure to work with
them and I could not have asked for a better set of individuals to assist me with my
research and writing. I would also like to thank the USC Public Art Studies graduate
program faculty and staff for their support. In addition, many thanks need to be given to
my fellow colleagues, especially Melinda Guillen, Zemie Barr and Sarah Brin for their
advice and encouragement throughout this process. And finally, I would like to thank my
family and friends their continuous support, especially my brother Ryan Lieu for
tolerating the numerous unwanted conversations about art theory that he was subjected to
over the last two years. The time spent with each and every one of the individuals
mentioned above gave me the confidence that I needed to reach this goal and I could not
have done it without them.
Jennifer Lieu
March 2011

iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
List of Figures v
Abstract vi
Introduction 1
Chapter 1:
Mark Allen and the Development of Machine Project 8
Learning Through Links 11

Chapter 2:
The Legacy of Institutional Critique 19
The 1970s: A Turning Point for Institutional Critique 24
Crossing the Line: Institutional Critique in the Social Realm 25

Chapter 3:
Revisiting the Museum in the 21
st
Century 33
The Evolution of Institutional Critique 46
Chapter 4:
The Relevancy of Critical Pedagogy in Art Practices Today 59
Critical Pedagogy as a Form of Institutional Critique 61
Conclusion 67
Bibliography 73
v

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. The Machine Project storefront in Echo Park. 2
Figure 2. Machine Project during a Pop Up Pie Shop event on November 19, 2010. 6
Figure 3. George Maciunas, Various versions of Flux Year Box, 1965. 20
Figure 4. Allan Kaprow, Fluids, 1967. 22
Figure 5. Adrian Piper, My Calling (Card) #1, 1986. 26
Figure 6. Suzanne Lacy, Three Weeks in May, 1977. 28
Figure 7. A few of the houses at the Project Row Houses site in Houston, Texas. 30
Figure 8. Concerts in the Elevator during the Field Guide event at LACMA, 2008. 36
Figure 9. Performance in commons area of the Ahmanson Building at LACMA, 2008. 37
Figure 10. Performance in commons area of the BP Pavilion at LACMA, 2008. 38
Figure 11. The Public School, Richard Serra Reading Room, 2008. 40
Figure 12. Fallen Fruit, Public Fruit Jam, 2006. 47
Figure 13. Fallen Fruit, Public Fruit Maps, 2004. 48
Figure 14. Proposal process flow chart for The Public School. 49
Figure 15. Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989. 51
Figure 16. Machine Project, Needlepoint Therapy Kit, 2010. 54
vi

ABSTRACT

This thesis will focus on a discussion of Mark Allen’s Machine Project and other
select Los Angeles-based artist collectives in order to examine the efficacy of critical
pedagogy as a progressive and nuanced form of institutional critique. First, I will analyze
how Machine Project’s practice is informed by art production found in institutional
critique as well as methods of critical pedagogy used by artists from the 1960s onward.
Then, I will unpack the complexity of these two themes as they are used in Machine
Project’s practice in order to examine the efficacy and level of agency in challenging
institutional processes within the museum. My analysis of these topics will be supported
by an in-depth investigation of two different interventions by Machine Project at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art and the Hammer Museum.
1

INTRODUCTION
The artist dwells in the circumstances the present offers him, so as to turn the setting of
his life (his links with the physical and conceptual world) into a lasting world. He
catches the world on the move: he is a tenant of culture.
1

— Nicolas Bourriaud

Since artist and technology enthusiast Mark Allen first conceived Machine
Project in 2003 it has existed as both a production space and a loose collective. Allen has
used many analogies to describe the somewhat spontaneous and idiosyncratic operational
framework of Machine Project. For Allen, the idea to start Machine Project was a bit
unexpected. While searching for an apartment in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los
Angeles, he came across a storefront that was nestled in a small row of buildings right
next door to the neighborhood’s local library branch (see Figure 1). Not wanting to pass
up the great location, Allen rented the space on the spot and came up with the contents
for the space later. Since then, the tiny storefront has been used as a venue for a myriad
of activity including but not limited to an exhibition space, theater set, classroom, pie
shop, kitchen and research lab – all of which have been executed by individuals that
would not primarily describe themselves as artists.

1
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (France: Les Presses du Réel, 2002), 14.
2

Figure 1. The Machine Project storefront, Echopark, 2011.

Source: Google maps

This thesis will closely examine Machine Project in order to gain a deeper
understanding of why at this particular moment – in the first decade of the 21
st
century –
a plethora of collectives similarly comprised of artists and interdisciplinary practitioners
from various fields have emerged specifically in Los Angeles. These collectives –
including Fallen Fruit, the Public School, the Los Angeles Urban Rangers, and the
Finishing School, to name a few – are comprised of mostly artists with occasional
collaborations with scientists, computer engineers, musicians, biologists, historians or
writers. They use the Los Angeles landscape as their canvas or various institutional and
non-institutional exhibition spaces to create and show their work.
3
Located under the miscellaneous section of his personal website, Mark Allen has
accumulated a small database of websites dedicated to “his favorite markallens.” In this
portion of his website, Allen provides brief descriptions of the correspondence that he
occasionally receives from strangers that are meant for someone else named Mark Allen.
The descriptions of these other “markallens” are quite humorous, and these mistaken
identities range from a publishing and communications company named the Mark Allen
Group to a triathlete who finally won the Ironman Triathlete Championship in 1989 after
competing and losing six. This compilation of links and descriptions is a product of
Allen’s research and sleuthing after receiving a number of obscure emails with confused
queries about booking hotel rooms for 200-300 people and requests for advice about
participating in a 10k race despite a doctor’s warnings. Even though this portion of
Allen’s website is extraneous in regard to his work as an artist, his impulse to present this
bit of idiosyncratic information to those curious about his work provides insight into how
he approaches life and learning in general.
Mark Allen received his BFA from Skidmore College in New York in 1993 and
shortly after moved to Southern California to pursue an MFA at CalArts in 1999. His
formal education in art was mostly dedicated to producing work related to sculpture, new
media and performance. During his time at both Skidmore College and CalArts, Allen
assisted in teaching printmaking and multimedia programming classes. After completing
his MFA at CalArts, Allen was part of the visiting faculty at UC San Diego until 2005
when he took a position as an assistant professor to teach digital art at Pomona College
where he currently works. In 2001, Allen co-founded the Los Angeles artist collective C-
Level where he held workshops on developing multimedia and computer programming
4
skills, and also helped to produce large-scale projects that involved collaborative efforts
from a variety of artists, engineers and programmers. Given his background in new
media and his passion for teaching and collaborating with others, Allen wanted to create
a space to teach classes that would cover a variety of subjects. He imagined a type of
creative and educational space where novices and experts could learn new things from
the instructor of the class and more importantly from each other. Shortly after joining C-
Level, Allen decided to focus his energy toward the development of his own vision,
which was appropriately named Machine Project.
In addition to producing his own artwork, teaching and exhibiting, Allen was also
involved with the development of several artist-run initiatives and spaces based out of
Houston and Los Angeles. As Allen became more involved with the development of
collectives and alternative art spaces, he moved away from creating the type of work that
he did during graduate school and shifted his role as an artist to that of a director, curator,
facilitator and educator. His endeavor to create Machine Project and to further develop
its philosophy transitioned him into a position to facilitate other artists’ projects. In this
respect Machine Project, functioning as a production space and loose collective of artists,
occupies the place of the “art object” in Allen’s practice. Replacing the creation of
objects in his practice with the direction and facilitation of other artist projects
complicates his role as an artist. This complication and oscillating tension between the
role of the artist and the curator underscores Allen’s desire to create a space to direct,
develop and formulate collaborative efforts with and between other artists.
When asked to pinpoint Machine Project’s purpose and mission more specifically,
Allen replied by saying that attempting to categorize and narrow down its existence is
5
like attempting to define what one’s life is about.
2
Is one’s raison d’être food because
one enjoys eating it? Or is life only about politics because one enjoys discussing it?
Trying to limit Machine Project’s purpose and scope to a single category or task would
be a futile exercise because this is exactly what it resists. Defining Machine Project as an
organization that performs as both a presentational and educational space and as a
network of artists is significant in expanding the identity of art because each of these
platforms work in relation to one another to develop its multifaceted identity and purpose.
This unique characteristic is one that sets Machine Project apart from many other
collectives and is arguably the defining element of its practice. The ability to operate in
this way with a clear vision for both platforms expands the possibilities for the people
involved and the utilization of the space.
Machine Project’s capacity as a storefront in Echo Park has served as a gallery,
meeting place, pop-up store, research laboratory, and film production set (see Figure 2).
Functioning as a collective of artists allows the activities that occur within the storefront
to be mobile and to move in and out of larger institutions, which in turn allows for the
further dissemination of the experiments in art and culture that take place within the
space. The looseness of the collective allows for the expansion of artists and
practitioners from a various disciplines to move in and out, which in turn creates
conditions to continuously expand the collective’s network exponentially.

2
Mark Allen, interview with the author, January 7, 2011.
6

Figure 2. Machine Project during a Pop Up Pie Shop event on November 19, 2010.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/machineproject/5190281182/ (accessed February
18, 2011)

Conditions set by the events of Allen’s generation created a particular cultural
moment that significantly informs the development of Machine Project as a vehicle for
expanding and challenging the hegemonic understanding of art. Chapter One will unpack
these ideas and will show how the collective’s “artistic form” is not so much possessed in
the work that they produce, as much as it lies in each of their individual organizational
frameworks and overall vision. Within this chapter, I will also argue that the
development of Machine Project is driven by the desire to present a new and evolved
form of institutional critique, which employs the use of critical pedagogy within their art
practice as a vehicle for a model of positive progression. Chapter Two will show how the
7
conceptual underpinnings of Machine Project have emerged from a few key influences,
which can be identified in the contemporary avant-garde, beginning with 1960s
Conceptualism. Chapter 3 will further unpack these ideas and discuss how a collective
and space like Machine Project is shifting the dynamics of institutional critique and
expanding the discourse beyond narrow binaries by partnering with institutions to evolve
the museum’s purpose, and to ultimately convert it into a site of opposition to the neo-
liberal market hegemony. Chapter 4 will discuss how critical pedagogy is integrated as a
significant part of Machine Project’s organizational structure and method for a nuanced
type of institutional critique. The introduction of critical pedagogy methods into
museums by these collectives has helped to re-position the educational role of the
museum in an effort to reestablish the institution as a constituent of the public sphere.
Machine Project can be examined by using a number of different approaches. In
this text I will analyze Machine Project by looking closely at its conceptual foundation
through the lenses of institutional critique and critical pedagogy. By examining Machine
Project through these two types of lenses I hope to gain a better understanding of several
central issues concerning: the significance of authorship, the changing conditions of the
collective both inside and outside of the institution, the role of pedagogy as a method to
introduce democratized platforms for accessing and understanding art, and most
importantly how all of these issues influence the artist’s ability to critique the institution.

8
CHAPTER 1

Mark Allen and the Development of Machine Project
Before we can discuss Machine Project’s conceptual foundation and its relation to
processes of institutional critique and critical pedagogy, we must thoroughly examine
Allen’s background and his influences for developing it. During his time at CalArts,
Allen worked closely with conceptual artist Michael Asher. One can see that the work of
Machine Project is influenced by Asher’s take on institutional critique. What Allen
gained from working with Asher in particular was his experience in Asher’s post studio
critique course. This course enabled Allen to inhabit other people’s subjectivities
through extensive critique sessions, which gave him a new set of eyes to see the world
through. Despite the fact that Asher’s post studio critique classes were at times much
longer than most people could bear to spend contemplating a single work, Allen was
fascinated by the opportunity to experience someone else’s creative process temporarily
and discover something interesting that he may have overlooked before . This was the
kind of experience that Allen aspired to recreate for others who did not have the
opportunity to partake in a class like Asher’s. He expresses that “Machine Project is
useful as an institution because it allows people to project onto it what their needs, desires
and fantasies are for what a community space would mean to them.”
3
While the
influence of Asher’s work is prominent in Machine Project’s agenda and list of activities,
Allen confesses that the time that he spent working with him was not as important as the

3
Ibid.

9
time that he spent working with and learning from other students. Equally important to
Allen was the network of relationships that he built while in school. He learned very
quickly that his relationships with others would allow the learning process to continue
long after he received his MFA from CalArts. Each of these factors in combination with
one another play significant roles in the development of Machine Project because they
provided a conceptual basis for both the organizational structure and premise for its loose
and rhizomatic
4
growth.
Various types of activities – disparate in form and content – support Machine
Project’s aim to provide a venue for people to indulge their creative and curious impulses
and to share this kind of experience with others. These activities range from poetry
readings to making jam to the production of a dog opera to the re-creation of a pirate
shipwreck complete with the installation of a life-size scaled sinking ship to the
construction of a pop-up pie shop. Workshops are organized at the Machine Project
space at least once a week and vary in nature to include anything from learning how to
crochet a pair of fingerless gloves to learning about MIG welding. These workshops
comprise the bulk of Machine Project’s programming and are organized through a simple
proposal process. Anyone can propose a workshop to teach a particular kind of skill with
very little restriction on behalf of Allen and his small staff at Machine Project. Allen
chose to set up the workshops this way so that one would have the opportunity to learn
through the process of inhabiting multiple subjectivities instead of one, which would

4
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use the term rhizome and rhizomatic to describe
theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data
representation and interpretation. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guttari, “Introduction:
Rhizome,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 7-16.
10
posit an extremely different kind of learning experience in addition to expanding the
qualitative and quantitative amount of information to be gathered and disseminated.
Operating as a storefront located in Echo Park informs the idiosyncratic
characteristics that compose the space’s unique identity and the individuals that occupy
it. As discombobulated and erratic as the structuring of what goes on in the space may
seem to be, the Echo Park community and surrounding neighborhood have proven to be
the most stable in the city considering the diversity of its classes and ethnicities.
However, as the conditions of Los Angeles change to meet the needs of entities seeking
to capitalize on the area’s unique characteristics, the groups of people that comprise its
diverse socioeconomic status are gradually being displaced. In spite of changing
socioeconomic conditions, the Echo Park community and Machine Project stand united in
their mission to provide alternative forms of education for self-improvement and
empowerment.
Machine Project’s close proximity to an eclectic and culturally diverse
community and its distance from museum institutions, art schools and explicit art districts
releases it from being automatically associated with the art world, which inherently
causes the space to be more inviting to various publics who may be curious about what
happens there. Echo Park’s community of residents, businesses and cultural institutions
are encouraged to participate in the occurrences at Machine Project, which is supported
by the wide range of workshops, performances and creative opportunities offered at the
storefront. Pedagogy is a language that transcends all boundaries of class, ethnicity and
social affiliations and functions as the common thread that connects all of these unique
and obscure happenings to one another.
11
Creating a community and network of collaborators through learning is part of a
philosophy that is consistently re-iterated by Allen when speaking or writing about his
intended vision for Machine Project and one that informs his work as an educator deeply.
The underlying function of Machine Project to aid in the exponential dissemination and
democratization of knowledge is inherently absorbed into the pedagogical activities of
the collective’s participants. Therefore, it is important to note that the disseminated
knowledge is not exclusively arts oriented, but includes other fields and disciplines that
can be used to investigate questions about how art and culture function and exist.
Collaboration between artists and people from other fields encourages the reciprocal
sharing of skills and information and expands the network to increase opportunities for
learning and pedagogical experimentation.
Machine Project: Learning Through Links
By instilling a broad and equivocal set of goals for Machine Project both as a
venue and collective, Allen has been able to avoid the complications and issues that often
arise and aid in the dismantling of large collectives. Participating in the project as more
of a curator, facilitator and director as opposed to as an artist working alongside a set
group of other artists allows Allen to see that the purpose of Machine Project is met and
to simultaneously channel his creative impulses into the selection of his collaborators,
institutional partners and projects. Navigating between the roles of artist and curator in
this way affords him the ability to be fully engaged with the projects at hand and not
simply as an administrator that is removed from the development process.
By taking on multiple roles in cultivating Machine Project, Allen attempts to
maintain a level of anonymity in the collective in order to support freedom from artistic
12
authorship, non-hierarchical development and a pre-conceived or pre-determined
organizational structure. However, a more critical examination of Machine Project’s
inner workings as a collective will reveal two fundamental ways that it operates against
itself in trying to oppose hegemonic development around a single ideological framework.
Artist Pablo Helguera describes the first of these two characteristics as such:
First, the image of the artist-star never disappears; while it is well disguised at
some points as a fictional institution or collective, the symbolic capital of the
transaction – that is, the authorship of the work – usually remains with the artist.
5

Helguera observes that there is a tension that can be detected between embracing a
radical pedagogy where power is in relinquished to the student and maintaining the
position of an ignorant schoolmaster. The inclusion or exclusion of individuals in the
Machine Project collective is predicated on the decisions made by Allen as the director of
the Machine Project space along with suggestions made by individuals existing in the
collective at that moment. While Machine Project posits itself as functioning as a loose
collective, it can be stated that the collective’s development is significantly influenced by
the overall leadership and vision of a single individual. However, it can also be argued
that much of Machine Project’s developmental process was not entirely dictated by the
actions of Allen alone and that the contributions of many individuals have shaped the
collective into what it is today.
The second contrasting characteristic that Helguera describes follows his thoughts
on authorship and the dynamics behind how the network or collective is formed. He
observes,

5
Pablo Helguera, “Notes Toward a Transpedagogy,” in Art, Architecture, Pedagogy:
Experiments in Learning, ed. Ken Ehrlich (San Francisco: Blurb.com, 2010), 109.

13
In the contemporary art realm, however, a radically democratic approach goes
against the structure of its highly hierarchical system. This hierarchy is hard to
escape for some artists, who in the end create works that appear to cater to these
democratic ideals while at the same time maintaining a structure that is ultimately
selective.
6

The circumstances that Helguera describe here are similar to the situation that Allen has
created for Machine Project. At the heart of a vision that prides itself on creating an
alternative platform to support a democratized organizational framework and pedagogical
environment is a core value that is driven by the selective processes of a single
individual, Mark Allen. Even though Machine Project posits itself as a free-forming
network of individuals that is structured to grow exponentially and across multiple fields,
its content is limited to theoretically dense art discourse and the relatively small group of
individuals who have been identified by Allen as members of the collective. For
example, while the Machine Project collective presents topics that cover a wide variety of
fields and disciplines in their programming, the scattered and idiosyncratic nature of it is
carefully orchestrated by Allen’s vision. However, there are moments in the collective’s
programming that aim to draw in the participation of many different kinds of people from
the Los Angeles community by providing workshops and projects that are accessible and
interesting to everyone. This particular characteristic is underscored by the vague and
amorphous nature of Allen’s vision for Machine Project to “exist to encourage heroic
experiments of the gracefully over-ambitious” and to “be about absolutely anything that
we are personally interested in.”
7
As Helguera suggests, this hierarchical system is

6
Ibid, 110.

7
Machine Project, “F.A.Q. and Other Information: Big Picture Questions,” Machine
Project, http://www.machineproject.com/faq#meta (accessed December 12, 2010).
14
difficult to escape for some artists, but as Allen has proven, one can definitely try to
oppose it.
The unique element that sets Machine Project and similar collectives such as
Fallen Fruit and the Public School apart from other collectives is that more often than not
they operate in the field as covert experimental pedagogical workshops and participatory
performances that rely on the collaboration of the public to execute them. For instance,
Fallen Fruit organized a series of tours in neighborhoods around Los Angeles to teach
people about sources of fruit available in local public surroundings. Although artists
founded each of the collectives mentioned here, the projects they produce are
interdisciplinary in nature, directly resulting from collaborations with practitioners from a
wide scope of disciplines that help to inform each of their own broad, overarching
concepts. Together these collectives have defined a new generation of artists in Los
Angeles that is challenging the institution by bringing forth a nuanced form of
institutional critique which focuses on methods of critical pedagogy as their medium of
choice.
Artists and theorists have discussed these types of projects in a number of ways. I
would like to discuss these types of projects within the context of institutional critique as
a tool to be used for the progression and expansion in the way we learn and how we
define the parameters of art. Helguera has proposed the term “transpedagogy” to
describe projects by artists and collectives that blend educational methods and art
production in ways that do not follow the conventions of art education or museum
15
institutions.
8
Theorist Henry Giroux, defines critical pedagogy within the context of
cultural practice as a method that can be used to suggest the invention of a new language
for resituating teacher/student relations within disciplines that open up rather than close
down the borders of knowledge and learning.
9

Collectives using methods of critical pedagogy as a significant theme in their art
production have emerged in tandem with the rise in interest by major museum institutions
in Los Angeles to create programming that is specifically geared toward enhancing public
engagement and the visitor’s experience and interaction with art and culture. I propose to
argue that this particular cultural moment – one that lies somewhere between the end of
the 20
th
century and at the beginning of the 21
st
century, defined and influenced by the
advent of networking technology and the Internet – has forever changed our experiential
relationship with art and culture. In relationship to this argument, scholar of cultural
media Steven Johnson notes:
The explosion of media types in the twentieth century makes it possible for the
first time to grasp the relationship of form to content, medium to message,
engineering to artistry...what makes it possible to concoct slogans like the ‘the
medium is the message’ in the first place, is the sheer velocity with which
technology now advances.
10

The explosion of the Internet in the early part of the 2000s and its quick move to become
a central part of our daily existence marked the beginning of a shift in our relationship to
various forms of media that would radically change the way that we communicate,

8
Pablo Helguera, “Notes Toward a Transpedagogy,” in Art, Architecture, Pedagogy:
Experiments in Learning, ed. Ken Ehrlich (San Francisco: Blurb.com, 2010), 99.

9
Henry A. Giroux, Border Crossings (New York: Routledge, 2005), 148.

10
Steven Johnson, Interface Culture: How Technology Transforms the Way We Create
and Communicate (New York: Harper Collins Publishing, 1997), 3-4.
16
exchange information and relate to one another. The rise of instantaneous forms of
communication and information sharing, not merely across regions but globally,
democratized the social realm in a way that allowed for a do-it-yourself culture to emerge
which encouraged the contribution and direct participation of people to formulate their
own definition of what art and culture meant to them. This technological network is an
all-inclusive forum where the roles of experts and amateurs are remixed in an endlessly
mutating web of teaching, learning and experiencing. In this way, the Internet has
allowed us to further diversify the notion of what we identify as art and culture in the 21
st

century.
The founding of Machine Project in 2003 came shortly after the dot-com bubble
burst in 2000, the launch of the world’s largest encyclopedia and most popular online
reference tool Wikipedia in 2001, and the waning popularity of what was being defined at
the time as net art with the first generation of artists working on the World Wide Web.
This particular moment is crucial to note in the development of Machine Project as a
collective and art space because it was at this moment that conditions coalesced to reveal
the artistic form that Machine Project would take. Allen states
Machine [Project] is like a blog come to life. It’s like I just looked at a Web page
on carnivorous plants and then looked up Rick Springfield’s first album and want
to talk about it. I think the gallery space ends up fulfilling the same function, but
physically.
11

Looking back at Machine Project’s institutional growth will reveal a continuously
expanding rhizomatic network -- the Internet and World Wide Web personified.

11
Finkel, Jori, “Arty Subversives Storm the Museum,” New York Times, November 28,
2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/arts/design/30fink.html?_r=1 (accessed
January 8, 2011).

17
Another contributor to the growing network that comprises Machine Project is
Allen’s commitment to strengthening community through education. This plays an
integral role in his art practice, clearly indicated through the types of projects he chooses.
His teaching experience has provided him with several important characteristics that
clearly inform and underscore his vision for Machine Project. Allen’s teaching
philosophy and vision emphasize the importance of research, collaboration, community,
and contextualizing one’s practice within the historical and contemporary art world. He
states:
Just as collaboration provides a method for production, community is a powerful
model to conceptualize about how art is received and distributed. The
conversation, critique, dialogue and support that comes from being part of a
community of artists has been incredibly important in the development of my
practice.
12

The prioritization of collaboration and community naturally inform and support the
pedagogical aspect of Machine Project’s operations and structure. Because the
collective’s base develops alongside the network that is responsible for both the
production and dissemination of knowledge, this is where collaboration and community
intersect with each other.
While Allen notes that there are many positive aspects of collaborating with
others, there are also aspects of working collaboratively that can also be inhibiting. The
creation of Machine Project was born out of a necessity for Allen to be able to pursue the
objectives, ideologies and idiosyncratic visions that he desired for his own work. Allen
created the project as a collaborative effort between various artists and interdisciplinary

12
Mark Allen, “Teaching Philosophy,” Mark Allen,
http://www.markallen.com/about/teachingphilosophy.php (accessed December 12, 2010).
18
practitioners that were interested in developing an expansive network of cultural
producers by engaging in a process of exchanging skills and specialized knowledge.
The intersection of Allen’s efforts and involvement with other collectives, and the
extensive time that he has spent experimenting with various forms of art and pedagogy
culminated in a collision of spaces. Liminal spaces occupied by both artist and curator,
art world types and non-art world types, Echo Park residents and non-residents. An
analysis of Machine Project’s activities in relation to its location, both literally and
figuratively speaking, will show that its objective to present and teach investigations of
“art, technology, natural history, science, music, literature, food, and whatever else
humans like to do” attempts to be all inclusive and with that explodes the notion of where
and how to place art and culture in society.

19
CHAPTER 2

The Legacy of Institutional Critique
One may argue that the process of exchange between the artist and their
collaborating public has been one of primary concern for many decades. Beginning
primarily during the 1960s, the number of artists whose work addressed institutional
critique, and aspects of collectivity, performativity and engaging with the public,
increased dramatically. In this chapter I will discuss several historical examples of artists
who worked in modes relevant to Machine Project.
Fluxus – like Machine Project, which operates as a loose and constantly changing
network of artists – emerged in response to the rules of formalism and consumption that
dominated the art world in the early 1960s. Promoting a do-it-yourself aesthetic that
valued simplicity over complexity like Dada before it, Fluxus included a strong current of
anti-commercialism and an anti-art sensibility, disparaging the conventional market-
driven art world in favor of a more democratic creative practice. As a result, much of the
work produced by Fluxus artists at this time centered around the idea of collaboration and
public participation to complete their projects. Producing the work in this way
challenged the myth of the single artist as creative genius and aimed to democratize the
field of art production. In essence, anyone could possess the skill and materials to create
a Fluxus work. For instance, the Flux Year Box (see Figure 3), assembled by George
Maciunas, contained small boxes and printed scores written by different Fluxus artists
that could be performed by anyone. These types of projects moved through the world as
20
both obscure yet recognizable works of art, especially since at the time it was being
circulated strictly outside of the museum system.

Figure 3. George Maciunas, Various versions of Flux Year Box, 1965.

Source: http://fluxusheidelbergcenter.blogspot.com/2009/02/museum-of-modern-art-
acquires-gilbert.html (accessed February 18, 2011)

Allan Kaprow’s “Happenings,” which first emerged in the late 1950s as a series
of performances, events and seemingly random occurrences walked a fine line between
being recognized as an art work and being a natural event of everyday life. As Kaprow
notes:
21
When art as a practice is intentionally blurred with the multitude of other
identities and activities we like to call life, it becomes subject to all the problems,
conditions, and limitations of those activities, as well as their unique freedoms
(for instance, the freedom to do site-specific art while driving along a freeway to
one’s job, rather than being constrained by the walls of a gallery; or the freedom
to engage in education or community work at art). The means by which we
measure success and failure in such fleeting art must obviously shift from the
aesthetics of the self-contained painting or sculpture, regardless of its symbolic
reference to the world outside of it, to the ethics and practicalities of those social
domains it crosses into. And that ethics, representing a diversity of special
interests as well as the deep ones of a culture, cannot easily be disentangled from
the nature of the artwork. Success and failure become provisional judgments,
instantly subject (like the weather) to change.
13

This oscillation between art and life was a product of a very loose process, with only a
few working parameters and the element of chance for the random group of participants
to engage with. Kaprow authored the environment that the work would develop in, but
he could never fully determine the outcome of the work: he was more fascinated with
open-endedness, which is democratic and challenges the mind.
Kaprow devised Happenings first as a strategic method to expand the meaning
and boundaries of art and culture past the walls of a gallery or museum. For example, his
Happening titled Fluids (see Figure 4) was comprised of a series of rectangular structures
built using blocks of ice that would slowly melt and disappear under the blazing sun.
Staged outside of an exhibition space, Fluids required random spectators to build it. As
time passed, Kaprow’s practice and the Happenings evolved to engage social issues such
as education reform and the antiwar movement rather than the discourses of the art world.
Whether or not one could recognize his work as art or non-art was to Kaprow a debate

13
Allan Kaprow, “Success and Failure When Art Changes,” in Mapping the Terrain, ed.
Suzanne Lacy (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 157.
22
that proved to be non-productive and narrow in scope; ambiguity allowed one’s mind and
the discourse to expand and be open to discovering greater possibility.

Figure 4. Allan Kaprow, Fluids, October 1967, Photo by Dennis Hopper.

Source: http://www.artsetsocietes.org/a/a-index16.html (accessed February 18, 2011)

Reflecting upon the work of artists during the 1960s and 1970s, art historian
Alexander Alberro writes:
It had become especially crucial for artists who took up the challenges of
institutional critique to expose the institution of art as a deeply problematical
field, making apparent the intersections where political, economic, and
ideological interests directly intervened and interfered in the production of public
culture. At the same time, however, that reality was countered by a call for a
careful reassessment of what is lost when the museum — which, as I noted earlier
was founded as a democratic site for the articulation of knowledge, historical
memory, and self-reflexivity, and as an integral element in the education and
social production of civil society — is infiltrated by political and corporate
concerns. For as rigorous as many of these early critiques of the institution of art
clearly were in juxtaposing the myths that the institution perpetuates with the
network of social and economic relationships that actually structure it, they
ultimately championed and advocated for the institution: the critiques culminated
23
in a demand to straighten up the operation of this central site of the public sphere
and to realign its actual function with what it is in theory.
14

Artists like Marcel Broodthaers focused on the museum’s frame — one that over
determines what it encompasses — that is inherently ideological and comprised of many
different cultural, social and political elements. Broodthaers’ work utilizes the
institution’s internal contradictions to criticize it in its own terms. Other artists
formulated many different forms of critique, including organized meetings and protests,
disseminating pamphlets and performing actions, and other demonstrations that sought to
radically transform dominant institutions.
These Conceptual artists used these forms of criticism as tactics to simultaneously
disseminate their work and to directly challenge the hegemonic structures of the museum
institution, conventional art market, and gallery systems. While attempts to escape these
systems were bold and valiant, a reflection on the outcome of these efforts reveal that
they were not really attempts to escape the ivory tower of the institution because once
they had made it out of the window, they were climbing around the outside and could not
let go. As Lucy Lippard observes,
Communication (but not community) and distribution (but not accessibility) were
inherent in Conceptual art. Although the forms pointed toward democratic
outreach, the content did not. However rebellious the escape attempts, most of
the work remained art-referential, and neither economic nor esthetic ties to the art
world were fully severed (though at times we liked to think they were hanging by
a thread). Contact with a broader audience was vague and undeveloped.
15

14
Alexander Alberro, “Institutions, Critique and Institutional Critique” in Institutional
Critique: An Anthology of Artists Writings (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 7-8.

15
Ibid, xvi.

24
Lippard believes these strategies did not work because the discourse surrounding the
work of Conceptual artists in the 1960s was too insular. The conversation always
revolved around art referencing itself and this was the problem. The objective of
Conceptual artists to create work that would critique the institution proved to be effective
in terms of widely disseminating their ideas. However, it is one thing to effectively
disseminate one’s ideas and another for those ideas to be received and comprehended.
Following the 1960s, a conflation of artistic practice and political action carved a
place for itself within art world discourse and in many ways provided broader audiences
with a point of accessibility into complex concepts that were being played out in the form
of political opposition. The elements of communication and distribution that Lippard
attributes as inherent to Conceptual art but not effectively executed, were later carried
over into the work of feminist art practices of the 1970s and activist practices of the
1980s.
The 1970s: A Turning Point for Institutional Critique
Suzanne Lacy’s artistic practice continued the legacy of institutional critique from
1960s Conceptual art in that her work aimed at reaching broader audiences and mostly
took place outside of the museum setting. Her work, in addition to the work of others
working during an experimental and tumultuous time, was more about challenging
broader social and political issues that were at the forefront of that particular moment
rather than primarily focusing on art making and the institution. Lacy’s practice began
with an interest in feminism and performance during the 1970s when she worked closely
with artists Judy Chicago and Allan Kaprow while getting her MFA at CalArts. A close
examination of Lacy’s work will reveal an artistic practice that has evolved to take on the
25
subject matter of current social issues during several decades. Lacy’s interest in the
dynamics of social relationships in her practice are informed by her educational
background in science and psychology, as well as her timely emergence as an artist
during the experimental and turbulent cultural era of the 1970s.
Crossing the Line: Institutional Critique in the Social Realm
Art practices rooted in feminist issues during the 1970s began to expand the
discourse beyond attempts to surpass the imagined boundaries of art and seeped into the
broader social realm. Artist practices during these volatile political decades also marked
the beginning of a period when artists incorporated pedagogical methods in their work as
another way to develop paths of intersubjectivity between themselves and their audience,
and at the same time to expose society’s inherent contradictions.
Lacy’s piece titled Three Weeks in May (see Figure 5) took the form of a complex
umbrella of work that was composed of performances, protests, art exhibitions and
demonstrations. Extensive media coverage and Lacy’s community organizing around the
events of her piece were both used as strategies to educate the public about the growing
rape crisis in Los Angeles and throughout the country. Lacy placed maps in highly
trafficked public areas and would update the maps daily by stamping each location where
a rape was reported by the Los Angeles Police Department. Alongside these maps were
ones that provided locations of women’s support agencies. The combination of media
coverage and Lacy’s methods of dissemination increased public awareness and educated
people about issues that were otherwise overlooked and largely ignored by the media.
26

Figure 5. Suzanne Lacy, Three Weeks in May, 1977.

Source: http://18thstreet.org/public-programs/currentprojects-and-exhibitions/pacific-
standard-time/suzanne-lacy-leslie-labowitz-starus (accessed February 18, 2011)

During the course of nearly four decades, many have attempted to analyze Lacy’s
practice strictly in relation to feminist issues, which has proven to be an extremely
narrow and unproductive way to examine the much more complex concepts behind her
work. Relational art work similar to the work being done by feminist artists in the 1970s
continued into the 1980s and 90s to focus on issues including gay rights, AIDS
awareness, homelessness and racism. Therefore, it is much more useful to look at Lacy’s
work in relation to its social and historical context in order to move past this reductive
analysis of the work’s content as being either art or activism, as it includes both. In
addition to being known as an artist and writer, Lacy is also recognized as an educator
and theorist. Focusing on the form in relation to a contextual analysis of the content will
reveal that Lacy’s body of work and writing is vested in understanding how broad
audiences embrace art and how art can engage with social change.
27
Lacy coined the term “new genre public art” in order to describe an emerging type
of artwork that sought to “communicate and interact with a broad and diversified
audience about issues directly relevant to their lives.” She says that “the inclusion of the
public connects theories of art to the broader population: what exists in the space between
the words public and art is an unknown relationship between artist and audience, a
relationship that may itself become the artwork.”
16
In his writing about relational
aesthetics Nicolas Bourriaud made a similar set of observations. He notes, “The role of
artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of
living and models of action within the existing real.”
17
Both Lacy and Bourriaud make
important contributions here in understanding the desire and impulse for artists to devise
strategies for more democratic outreach and accessibility in art production.
However, one must take these theories a step further in order to define what is at
stake for the artists of these projects. Art historian and critic Grant Kester states,
It is clearly not sufficient to say that any collaborative or conversational encounter
constitutes a work of art. What is at stake in these projects is not dialogue per se
but the extent to which the artist is able to catalyze emancipatory insights through
dialogue.
18

Kester relates this idea of being able to catalyze insights through dialogue with a shift
away from the “privileging of the object and toward a process of intersubjective

16
Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995),
19-20.

17
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (France: Les Presses du Réel, 2002), 9.

18
Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication in Modern Art
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 69.

28
exchange that is responsive to the specific situation of both the artist and his or her
collaborators.”
19

In his text, Kester uses Adrian Piper’s piece titled My Calling (Card) #1 to
illustrate how the artist uses text to raise questions about both her own subjectivity and
broader social interactions of how we perceive those who are different from ourselves.
This piece functions as both a performance and text-based work where Piper would
distribute “calling” cards (see Figure 6) to anyone that would make a sexist or racial
remark. Calling attention to their ignorance Piper uses satirical language to produce a
cathartic moment of recognition for the recipients of her card and in this way creates a
vehicle for self-reflection and intersubjective exchange between herself and her audience.

Figure 6. Adrian Piper, My Calling (Card) #1, 1986.

Source: http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/saltz/saltz4-23-
08_detail.asp?picnum=32 (accessed February 18, 2011)

19
Ibid, 71.
29
While this example posited by Kester focuses on the development of an
intersubjective relationship between artist and audience, I would argue that his examples
lack the core element of collaboration between artist and audience in the development of
the artwork as a whole as Kaprow, Fluxus and Lacy. The element of collaboration that is
developed through the intersubjective relationships that are created between artist and
audience lies at the crux of what is at stake for projects of this nature. The development
of these intersubjective relationships in art practices are significant in challenging the
authority of capitalist ideology in visual culture because they enable spectators to
participate in the creation of meaningful yet mutable conjunctions between and among
cultural experiences posited in the artist’s work.
During the course of two years, from 1988-1990, artist and homeless advocate
John Malpede took up residencies in art institutions all over the country to execute his
project LAPD Inspects America. In each city, Malpede and his small team of artists
would go out and recruit locals to lead a workshop and help to develop a production
specific to that city. These local players would be recruited from day centers, welfare
offices, shelters, abandoned warehouses and the streets in order to encourage them to
share their stories in the form of a play to the citizens of that particular city. The plays
were a manifestation of collaborative efforts among local inhabitants to publicize raw and
detailed accounts of lives that were otherwise censored by other forms of media.
During the mid-1990s, artist Rick Lowe shifted from making paintings and
sculpture about social issues to formulating creative solutions and strategies that he could
implement in the community he lived in. Lowe initiated the development of Project Row
Houses (see Figure 7), which started as a small lot of shotgun style houses in the blighted
30
third ward of Houston, Texas and has expanded into 40 properties; including twelve artist
exhibition and residency spaces, seven houses for young mothers, office spaces, a
community gallery, a park, and low-income residential and commercial spaces. By
working together with members of the community and teaching them about the proper
methods and providing them with the right tools, Lowe was able to begin a rehabilitation
process that the public was able to carry out on their own.

Figure 7. A few of the houses at the Project Row Houses site in Houston, Texas.

Source: www.projectrowhouses.com/about (accessed February 18, 2011)

Many contemporary artists of the 2000s are emerging in the form of semi-defined
artist collectives, which are represented by an assemblage of artist-practitioners with a
variety of interdisciplinary backgrounds. While unified under a single yet broad
31
objective, these collectives are usually loosely comprised of a set of individuals with
seemingly disjunctive, segmented and disparate practices. The figurative and literal
unification of these disparate practices under the guise of a single collective will create an
“errant, ‘undecidable’ condition where meaning is continually negotiated and teaching as
a position of absolute authority is rendered ‘impossible.’”
20
Therefore, the form of the
artist’s practice as a collective of artists in conjunction with the development of
intersubjective relationships between these artists and audience through collaboration
creates a condition that allows this kind of art production to continue the democratic
dissemination of art, and to more importantly challenge broader hegemonic structures in
the social arena.
Each of the artists mentioned above indefinitely expanded the duration of their
projects by educating their audiences about the underlying implications of broader social
issues that were relevant to everyone at those particular places and moments in time. The
pedagogical aspect of their projects embodied the development of intersubjective
relationships that was needed to effectively communicate the artist’s vision and level of
agency. Highlighting the use of critical pedagogy as a primary medium in artist
collectives today requires a “redefinition of aesthetic experience as durational rather than
immediate” in order to “develop a new aesthetic and theoretical paradigm of the work of
art as a process – a locus of discursive exchange and negotiation.”
21
The way in which
these artists collaborate with practitioners from different fields in addition to those who

20
Charles R. Gaorian and Yvonne M. Gaudelius, “The Spectacle of Visual Culture,”
Studies in Art Education 45, no. 4 (Summer, 2004) 308.

21
Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication in Modern Art
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 12.
32
have been traditionally referred to as spectators enable them to produce work that,
“instead of offering superficial solutions, they expose society’s inherent contradictions;
and instead of pursuing absolute truths, they offer complexity, ambivalence, and at times,
aggressive confrontations with the status quo.”
22
Borrowing from the theoretical
frameworks of both Bourriaud and Kester one can identify two main ways that art
challenges hegemonies. One way is to formulate an art practice that aptly responds to the
specific social, political and economic conditions of the cultural moment. The second
way is by incorporating aspects of pedagogy into an artist’s practice. One way to
examine the each of the approaches posited here is to deconstruct the conceptual
underpinnings of Machine Project functioning as both a network of individuals and also
as an art institutional space. To begin this deconstruction of complex development, we
are going to look at two specific projects by Machine Project.

22
Charles R. Gaorian and Yvonne M. Gaudelius, “The Spectacle of Visual Culture,”
Studies in Art Education 45, no. 4 (Summer, 2004): 309.

33

CHAPTER 3
In all of our institutional collaborations, we expand the museum’s role as a place that
preserves valuable cultural artifacts into a site of possibility in which each work of art
may be taken as a proposition, inviting the viewer to allow it, for a moment, to re-frame
the world.
23

— Mark Allen
Revisiting the Museum in the 21
st
Century
The work of Machine Project and other collectives like it are challenge the
conditions of the museum’s identity in art and culture today. In a world where the visual
dominates our daily lives and where one can step into a museum half way around the
world by opening their web browser, the function of museum has been transformed.
Through the use of live streaming video feeds, live chats and interactive user interfaces,
the Internet allows us to virtually walk around a museum such as the Louvre in Paris.
The Internet allows people to define their own terms for art by providing access to
a global platform to share their own views with people all over the world. Its growing
presence in our everyday lives has shifted our perception of what the visual experience is
and does, which causes us to reevaluate how we identify and engage with it. Machine
Project and the collectives in question in this investigation respond to a desire from the
public for a more sophisticated and interpersonal type of art and cultural experience that
they now expect when they visit the museum. Not only are they reframing the conditions
of the museum by providing these new kinds of desired experiences, but they are also

23
Mark Allen, “Flash Point: How do we experience art? – Machine Project: A.I.R. at the
Hammer,” Art:21 Blog, entry posted July 12, 2010,
http://blog.art21.org/2010/07/12/machine-project-a-i-r-at-the-hammer/ (accessed January
8, 2011).
34
providing a platform for reflection to question our own positions within the hierarchal
structures of learning and interpretation.
The interdisciplinary nature of work done by Machine Project and other
collectives such as Fallen Fruit and the Public School make it difficult to place their
respective practices within a particular genre of art production. In this way, it can be
argued in the words of Hal Foster that, “this work does not bracket art for formal or
perceptual experiment but rather seeks out its affiliations with other practices (in the
culture industry and elsewhere); it also tends to conceive of its subject differently.”
24
He
goes on to observe that,
...the artists active in this work use many different forms of production and modes
of address, and yet they are alike in this: each treats the public space, social
representation or artistic language in which he or she intervenes as both a target
and a weapon. This shift in practice entails a shift in position: the artist becomes
a manipulator of signs more than a producer of art objects, and the viewer an
active reader of messages rather than a passive contemplator of the aesthetic or
consumer of the spectacular.
25

The type of art production that Foster describes can be traced in the work of artists such
as Daniel Buren, Michael Asher, Hans Haacke and Marcel Broodthaers who constructed
their practices as a way to “open up the conceptual critique of the art institution in order
to intervene in ideological representations and languages of everyday life.”
26
Of the four
artists mentioned above and as noted earlier in this thesis, the work of Asher is most
closely related to that of Machine Project’s institutional intervention projects. Foster

24
Hal Foster, Recodings, Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1985), 99-
100.

25
Ibid.

26
Ibid.
35
writes “Asher, with his (dis)placements of different gallery/museum objects, services and
spaces, has foregrounded the functional delimitation of all artistic activity sited there.”
27

Allen approached the institutional intervention projects done at both the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art and the UCLA Hammer Museum by playing with the
displacement of services and spaces within each institution in order to remix the roles that
are assumed by different parties within the institutional setting. Machine Project forced
LACMA to accommodate many of its projects in unorthodox spaces (such as the
elevators, hallways, and building courtyards) (see Figures 8-10). In doing so, Allen and
the other artists in the collective created curatorial and operational situations that were
never encountered before at LACMA. By creating these situations and then nuancing his
role to be the artist, curator, and negotiator between realizing his project, Allen has taken
Asher’s work one step further to explode the identity and position of the artist within
these institutional frameworks.

27
Ibid, 101.
36

Figure 8. Machine Project concerts in the Elevator during the Field Guide event at
LACMA, 2008.

From Machine Project: A Field Guide to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Exhibition Catalogue, 2008, p 127.

37

Figure 9. Machine Project performance taking place in the common area of the
Ahmanson Building, LACMA, during the Field Guide event at LACMA, 2008.

From Machine Project: A Field Guide to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Exhibition Catalogue, 2008, p 75.

38

Figure 10. Machine Project performance taking place in the common area of the BP
Grand Entrance Pavilion during the Field Guide event at LACMA, 2008.

From Machine Project: A Field Guide to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Exhibition Catalogue, 2008, p 158.
39
Allen describes Machine Project’s collaboration with LACMA in 2008 as
culminating in a “burst of possibility” where the one-time occurrence, aptly titled The
Machine Project Field Guide to LACMA, “opened up conversation about the museum as
an arbiter of cultural value and invited visitors to engage with the terms of that discourse,
including questions of authenticity and appropriation.”
28
For example, Machine Project
invited the Public School collective to hold a workshop on the subject of ekphrasis where
participants were prompted to compose artistic responses to a piece of art (which in this
case was Richard Serra’s piece titled Sequence) while they sat inside of it in order to
figuratively fill in the untold pieces of the work’s narrative while they literally filled the
space as an alternative classroom setting (see Figure 11). Machine Project challenged the
operational boundaries of the museum’s institutional structuring by staging over sixty
events that required a type of unusual attention compared to the rather ordinary type of
care that the installation of sculptures or paintings would call for.

28
Mark Allen, “Flash Point: How do we experience art? – Machine Project: A.I.R. at the
Hammer,” Art:21 Blog, entry posted July 12, 2010,
http://blog.art21.org/2010/07/12/machine-project-a-i-r-at-the-hammer/ (accessed January
8, 2011).
40

Figure 11. The Public School, Richard Serra Reading Room, 2008.
Source: Machine Project: A Field Guide to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Exhibition Catalogue

This process was supremely unstructured compared to the conventional and linear
process that typically unfolds during the proposal and development stage for museum
exhibitions. It was comprised of a series of informal walk-through meetings between
Allen, LACMA curator Charlotte Cotton and a few of the event participants where they
41
would walk about and explore the opportunities that existed in the physical structure of
the museum’s campus. During these meetings Allen and his colleagues would propose
ideas and they immediately would be considered by Cotton and the rest of the group to
determine the logistical and bureaucratic feasibility of the proposed work. A few of the
ideas proposed by Allen and his collaborators were immediately deemed as being too
outlandish to be accommodated for the event, but many of them were surprisingly well
received. In this instance, Allen and his collaborators were negotiating and testing the
limits of the institution and the expectations put forth by the museum’s curatorial team.
However, in a test of negotiation such as this it is difficult to locate each party’s role in
the process. When the artist and curator become collaborators, can the expectations of
both parties be met? What are these expectations and how have they changed in the
process?
Reflecting upon her experience working with Mark Allen and Machine Project on
the Field Guide event at LACMA, Cotton observes
Over the course of the year that I worked with Machine Project and their cohorts to
realize their Field Guide, my curatorial life at LACMA was inspired by the
remembrance of what it felt like to engage with museum collections and spaces
with fresh, playful eyes and the precedents already set by encyclopedic museum
curators and the theatrical leaders of photography. It didn’t feel irreverent or at all
out of keeping with the city and its creative energy to offer up the museum as a site
for our celebration of contemporary energies. Just as Machine Project embodies the
spirit of artistic practice and the closeness art-making has to the lived experience of
the city, LACMA’s collections felt ripe for it’s harvesting.”
29

29
Charlotte Cotton, “Say it With Flowers” in Machine Project: A Field Guide to the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art ed. Allen, Mark, Jason Brown, and Liz Glynn, Los
Angeles: Machine Project Press, in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of
Art, 2008. Published in conjunction with the exhibition “Machine Project: A Field Guide
to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art” shown at the Los Angeles County Museum
of Art, 115.

42
Cotton’s account and confessed inspiration for choosing to collaborate with Machine
Project comes from a position that is optimistic for the transformation of museums into
spaces of genuine discovery and for the generation of knowledge. She hopes that
providing collectives like Machine Project with the opportunity to showcase their work to
a broader audience will assist them in progressing hegemonic structures within
institutions.
As Foster remarks about the practices centered around themes of institutional
critique by artists like Asher, this work “is limited, first of all, by its very attention to the
institutional frame, which determines its production no less for being exposed in doing
so; by its deconstructive posture, this work diminishes its own transformative potential.”
He goes on to note,
...this practice runs the risk of reduction in the gallery/museum from an act of
subversion to a form of exposition, with the work less an attack on the separation
of cultural and social practice than another example of it and the artist less a
deconstructive delineator of the institution than its ‘expert’.
30

Practices involving institutional critique in the 2000s have evolved the conditions of this
type of work to gain back its transformative potential by engaging in practices which
expand beyond the institutional frame. The work that Machine Project artists and
practitioners produce surpasses the confines of art production that is typically exhibited
within the museum context because these projects collectively function as a service to the
institution as opposed to work that can be put on display in context with other works
within the museum. The service that Machine Project and other similar collectives
provide within their respective projects function on several discursive levels, which aim
to interrogate the hegemonic structures within the institution, subvert the economic

30
Ibid, 103.
43
systems within the art market and to challenge the escalating privatization of art, culture
and education.
Today’s society craves diversity and a certain level of multidisciplinarity to exist
within art and culture due to the advent of network technology and its influence on how
we gather and share information. We have always relied on art and science to be
continuously innovative in their development. Therefore, in order for art to progress and
evolve, the venues we look to in order to showcase and teach us about this evolution also
require innovative change. These types of arguments and observations have always been
apparent in art discourse and traditionally serve as the grounding premise for institutional
critique. As artist Pablo Helguera notes that,
Sometime later in the 1990s, however, it became clear that in order to move
forward with institutional critique it was necessary for artists to do two things:
first, move beyond the traditional artist/museum opposition (which amidst the
increasing global growth of the art market started to feel dated), and second,
assume their own institutionality, acknowledging their implication in the social
and economic fabric of the art world. In other words, the discourse shifted from
an antagonistic stance to a more propositive one, where artists explored their
ability to generate independent communities and networks with their own agenda
and interests.
31

This change in thought and execution resulted in artists deciding to launch organizations,
collectives and small enterprises that were not confined within the subject of art. And as
Helguera observes,
Most importantly, they did not have to be art groups, but they could operate under
conceptual art guidelines while at the same time engaging other fields of
knowledge, like geography, commerce, science, and pedagogy. This new
generation of artists and collectives appeared to adopt and embrace their own

31
Pablo Helguera, “Notes Toward a Transpedagogy,” in Art, Architecture, Pedagogy:
Experiments in Learning, ed. Ken Ehrlich (San Francisco: Blurb.com, 2010), 103-104.

44
institutionality in a direct, and often disarming way, referring back to
Broodthaers’ light rhetoric.
32

By embracing their own institutionality and engaging with other fields through the
framework of conceptual art, artists from this generation have discovered a way to escape
the insular discourses formulated around destroying and criticizing the institution while
still engaging in a process to challenge and transform the inner workings of the museum.
They have nuanced the conventional themes and analytical perspectives usually found in
institutional critique in order to respond to the tensions that exist within the given
configuration of forces and to subvert their forms of articulation. Injecting their own
institutionality within the hierarchical frameworks of the museum results in a type of self-
reflexivity, which is void of appointing a critical tone that implicates any one single
party. Works engaged in this way provide a level of transparency in deconstructing
institutional frameworks to museum audiences, which includes them in the process and
attends to the need for a new kind of museum experience.
Political theorist Chantal Mouffe indicates “In the artistic and cultural domain,
[the ‘exodus’]
33
perspective suggests that critical artistic practices can have efficacy only

32
Ibid, 104.

33
Mouffe cites the terminology of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in her assertion that
“political action should withdraw from existing institutions so that we might free
ourselves from all forms of belonging” and that “all institutions are perceived as
monolithic representatives of forces to be destroyed, every attempt to transform them
dismissed as reformist illusion.” Chantal Mouffe, “The Museum Revisited,”
Artforum.com, Summer 2010, http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201006&id=25710
(accessed January 8, 2011).

45
if they take place outside cultural institutions.”
34
However, Mouffe is convinced that
engagement with institutions is crucial because “...the success of counterhegemonic
practices depends on an adequate understanding of the relations of forces structuring the
key institutions in which the political antagonist is going to intervene.”
35
Art collectives
such as Machine Project and Fallen Fruit are two examples of collectives to be discussed
further in this chapter, utilizing the methods and embodying the perspectives that both
Helguera and Mouffe describe above. Both of the one-day exhibitions that Machine
Project and Fallen Fruit produced for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art aimed to
expand the curatorial and operational boundaries of the institution by collaborating with
the museum’s staff to negotiate the unusual exhibiting conditions, content and form of
each artist’s work involved with the events. The institutional interventions that were
staged by each of these collectives not only challenged boundaries within the institution,
but were also creating conditions to visualize the museum as a space for resisting the
growing privatization and commercialization of art. Mouffe concludes, “...instead of
celebrating the destruction of all institutions as a move toward liberation, the task for
radical politics is to engage with them, developing their progressive potential and
converting them into sites of opposition to the neoliberal market hegemony.”
36
While
one may argue that the work of Machine Project and Fallen Fruit are far from being
politically radical, it is important to recognize their awareness and attention to these

34
Chantal Mouffe, “The Museum Revisited,” Artforum.com, Summer 2010,
http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201006&id=25710 (accessed January 8, 2011).

35
Ibid.

36
Ibid.
46
issues in each of their engagements with institutions no matter how politically overt or
covert their agendas may appear to be.

The Evolution of Institutional Critique
The projects being produced by collectives in the 2000s are somewhat disparate in
content and lack the kind of critical message in their work that could be easily identified
in the work of collectives from past decades. The work of Machine Project includes
puppet shows, ice cream socials, the production of an opera starring only dogs, as well as
a number of workshops and classes to teach any skill ranging from multimedia effects to
crocheting. Shortly after Machine Project was founded in 2003, artists David Burns,
Matias Viegener and Austin Young established the collective Fallen Fruit in 2004. This
was followed by the initiation of the Public School in 2007 by Sean Dockray who also
serves as the director of another collective called the Telic Arts Exchange in Los
Angeles. Examples of work by Fallen Fruit include Public Fruit Jams (see Figure 12),
where people are invited to bring several fruits of their choice in order to learn how to
make their own jam, and a number of Public Fruit Tours (see Figure 13) where people
are given a tour and taught about public sources of fruit hidden throughout the urban
landscape of Los Angeles. The Public School operates primarily out of the Telic Arts
Exchange space in Los Angeles to provide an open platform for people to propose and
hold educational classes on virtually any subject (see Figure 14). While these various
types of projects do not necessarily exude an overt political message at first glance, upon
closer examination one will be able to see that the criticality in their work lies within the
47
conscious decision made by these groups to function without wearing their politics on
their sleeve. Helguera elaborates on this generation’s new approach to art production,
This unassuming approach proves highly effective, as it doesn’t carry the weight
of the critical tone that has now made a lot of political art feel didactic or
alienating. By eliminating or satirizing impersonality, and taking a Brechtian
approach to sharing the transparency of a particular process, these tech-savvy
artists now speak to ‘users’, and not to a faceless public.
37

This kind of disarming and unassuming approach has allowed them to operate as more of
a neutral entity that does not aim to use the institutional arena as a platform for criticism
or disavowal of the museum, but rather as a space for the public as well as the institution
to recontextualize and reimagine their relationships with art and culture.

Figure 12. Fallen Fruit, Public Fruit Jam, 2006.

37
Pablo Helguera, “Notes Toward a Transpedagogy,” in Art, Architecture, Pedagogy:
Experiments in Learning, ed. Ken Ehrlich (San Francisco: Blurb.com, 2010), 104.

48
Source: http://www.fallenfruit.org/wp-content/uploads/web-1.jpg (accessed February 18,
2011.

Figure 13. Fallen Fruit, Public Fruit Maps, 2004.
Source: http://www.fallenfruit.org/index.php/archives/public-fruit-maps/ (accessed
February 18, 2011)
49

Figure 14. Proposal process flow chart for The Public School.
Source: http://la.thepublicschool.org/about (accessed February 18, 2011)

One could argue that choosing to collaborate with an institution at the curatorial
stage of the exhibition process and then pushing them to question their own conventional
methods of operation is a step toward shifting from known discourses structured around
institutional critique to a more transformative and progressive dialogue that is also
designed to include the public. Allen, who studied with Michael Asher at Cal Arts,
readily admits that he is putting a soft spin on notions of institutional critique. He
expresses that “All those things are obviously hugely influential in my work, but because
50
it’s a different cultural moment, I have a different agenda, a different mission.”
38
For
Allen, engagements with these institutions are not about carrying out an agenda that seeks
solely to comment on the narrowed evolutionary scope of the museum, but are about
filling a curiosity about how the museum works – organizationally, socially, spatially,
sonically – in an effort to make it work better and to resonate more aptly with the
conditions in which we experience art and culture today.
Machine Project’s mission to democratize the fields of art and cultural education
also informs a less overt goal to democratize the semi-public and semi-private space of
the museum. The playful tactics employed in Machine Projects Field Guide event are
similar to Andrea Fraser’s work on institutional critique. In her performance titled
Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (see Figure 15), Fraser acts as a museum docent
leading tours through the museum while using verbose and overly dramatic terms to
teach visitors about the liminal and non-art spaces in the museum. Fraser’s writing and
work speak to the traditions of institutional critique, but approach it in a way that is
humorous, playful and implicative of her position within the institutional system in the
process. While Machine Project aims to stage an institutional intervention by utilizing
methods of experimental pedagogy within the museum environment, they are also
introducing and maintaining a level of experienced intimacy between the artists and their
audience. An intervention like this is comparable to Fraser’s museum tour because it
complicates the working dynamics of the museum space while providing a transformative
and intimate kind of experience that museum patrons desire. This type of relationship

38
Holly Myers, “Machine Project,” Art Review, September 2010,
http://plus1plus1plus.org/wiki/uploads/dream-
in/Art_Review_Sept2010_MachineProject.pdf (accessed January 8, 2011).
51
between art and audience within exhibition spaces is one that institutions have begun to
reevaluate in their programming because of the shift in the way that artists are producing
work and a rising demand from the broader public for a more engaging museum
experience.

Figure 15. Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989.

Source: Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser text

Machine Project’s residency at the Hammer Museum included a series of nearly
40 onsite programs during the course of an entire year. This residency was the first of its
kind at the institution and was spearheaded by the museum’s Public Engagement
department. Allen’s role during this residency was similar to the dual role that he
52
undertook while assisting in the development of the Field Guide event at LACMA. The
format and content of the residency at the Hammer was similar to that of the Field Guide
event in that the institution served as a showcase for a series of workshops, performances,
lectures, artist installations and events which in this case spanned over the course of an
entire year instead of a single day. An observation of the duration of each of these events
should not be dismissed because the time that was spent in collaboration and negotiation
with these institutions significantly influenced not only the expectation and outcome of
the project at hand, but also the evolution of institutional structuring and exhibition
programming.
As part of the various events that took place during their residency at the Hammer
Museum, Machine Project organized a needlepoint therapy group in the museum’s
portrait gallery with psychologist Dr. Ellen Medway. Over the course of several weeks,
participants were able to develop a more personal and kinesthetic connection to the
painting that they chose to create a needlepoint of and throughout the process they were
able to share a social experience in the gallery as well (see Figure 16). Allen expresses
that Machine Project’s challenge at the Hammer was to “develop projects that propose
other ways of experiencing the museum that can be smoothly integrated into its everyday
operation.”
39
These kinds of durational projects “induce a giddy uncertainty about where
the aesthetic experience is located and what constitutes that experience.”
40
Machine

39
Mark Allen, “Flash Point: How do we experience art? – Machine Project: A.I.R. at the
Hammer,” Art:21 Blog, entry posted July 12, 2010,
http://blog.art21.org/2010/07/12/machine-project-a-i-r-at-the-hammer/ (accessed January
8, 2011).

40
Ibid.
53
Project’s nuanced versions of institutional critique at LACMA and the Hammer museum
represented a series of multifaceted gestures that momentarily ruptured the daily
workings and hegemonic frameworks of the museum. These ruptures can be compared
with Bourriaud’s “hands-on utopias” or “micro-utopias” that he describes in his analysis
on relational aesthetics, and align with methods of institutional critique that Conceptual
artists were experimenting with during the 1960s. These daily experiments use imitation
as a strategy to not directly criticize. Instead, the goal is to learn from and reveal the
opportunities which are hidden under the operational patterns embedded within every
institutional framework. Bourriaud observes, “Social utopias and revolutionary hopes
have given way to everyday micro-utopias and imitative strategies, any stance that is
‘directly’ critical of society is futile.”
41
Like Bourriaud, Allen believes that gestures such
as these serve as a series of tiny eruptions in the museum’s ideological fabric that strive
not to destroy it, but to create enough holes so that one may be able to see through to the
other side.
Cultural theorist Chantal Mouffe underscores Bourriaud’s observation by stating
that,
...this new perception of the nature of public institutions is that, instead of
celebrating the destruction of all institutions as a move toward liberation, the task
for radical politics is to engage with them, developing their progressive potential
and converting them into sites of opposition to the neoliberal market hegemony.
42

41
Ibid.

42
Chantal Mouffe, “The Museum Revisited,” Artforum.com, Summer 2010,
http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201006&id=25710 (accessed January 8, 2011).
54
Conceptual art of the 1960s sparked a conversation that involved art practices in broader
issues that were unfolding outside of the museum by formulating practices that focused
on creating democratic outreach strategies as well as work that could not be easily
marketed by museums and galleries. The uses of these particular strategies to oppose the
“neoliberal market hegemony” continue to be seen as significant themes in art practices
today. The creation of art as a collective or group instead of a single artist is one clear
strategy, which aims to eliminate the reification of novelty that is embedded in
authorship. The work from collectives such as Machine Project, Fallen Fruit and the
Public School have at times been challenging for museums and galleries to accommodate
operationally for this reason.

Figure 16. Machine Project, Needlepoint Therapy Kit, 2010.
Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/machineproject/4876532622/ (accessed February
18, 2011)
55

Allen is acutely aware of the influences that sway the positions of directors and
curators at institutions today from wanting to be progressive in their programming to
devising new forms of entertainment. There is a significant difference between these two
objectives that Allen chooses to navigate by focusing his agenda on serving the interests
of his audience and not the institution. As an individual who is truly vested in enriching
the relationships that people have to art and culture, Allen testifies that he approaches his
work “with the conviction that complex content can be made accessible and engaging if it
is presented with enthusiasm, and if it offers multiple perspectives from which it can be
approached.” He goes on to observe, “Machine Project facilitates collaborations among
artists who treat audience experience as a primary facet of the work. This reflects a wider
trend in which cultural institutions are increasingly interested in curating the experience
of art, as well as art objects.”
43
As an advocate first and foremost for changing the
environments of institutions to better the experience of art, Allen supports the
convergence of art and pedagogy and incorporates this in Machine Project’s objectives to
reveal other modes of approaching and valuing art by suggesting less formal encounters
that one can experience in the museum.

43
Mark Allen, “Flash Point: How do we experience art? – Machine Project: A.I.R. at the
Hammer,” Art:21 Blog, entry posted July 12, 2010,
http://blog.art21.org/2010/07/12/machine-project-a-i-r-at-the-hammer/ (accessed January
8, 2011).
56

CHAPTER 4
As public institutions seek to move towards privatization amidst struggle and resistance,
private institutions may become even more exclusive and more expensive. It is in this
context that educational experiments inevitably become political projects and move
beyond the confines of institutional corridors.
44

— Ken Ehrlich

In Los Angeles, artists and cultural producers are continuing the legacy of
institutional critique by partnering with the city's major museum institutions. Together
they have begun to shift discourse around institutional critique to engage in institutional
interrogation in order to more broadly challenge the larger hegemonic structures at play.
This type of institutional interrogation can be viewed as a nuanced type of critique, which
productively questions rather than criticizes the institutions at large. Negotiating the
terrain in this way aims to work together with the institution in order to better understand
the inner workings of system by inhabiting the subjectivity of the institution. As we have
seen, collectives such as Machine Project, Fallen Fruit and the Public School have
emerged with their own unique agendas and organizational frameworks, but they all
employ the use of critical pedagogy in their practice and are formulating something that
is as esoteric as much as it is accessible to the larger public.
The work that these collectives are engage in walks a fine line in terms of how to
identify and locate it within art and life. A large part of the reason for this slippage that is
present in the work is that this art is no longer the kind of Conceptual work that looks in

44
Ken Ehrlich, ed. Art, Architecture, Pedagogy: Experiments in Learning. San
Francisco: Blurb.com, 2010.
57
only on itself. These artists are embracing the conditions of the moment to not only bring
about awareness but also to make an attempt at causing institutional change. They are
directly involving the public in their discussion by making teaching a significant part of
their practice to bring awareness and, more importantly, to empower individuals to make
their own change. The agendas of these collectives seek not to completely eradicate
existing hegemonic structures but to challenge them and restore balance, and this feat
cannot be done with narrowed perspectives.
What is different about the majority of these collectives is that their agendas are
not politically overt like those of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s because their practices are
tied to two realms of discussion. One discussion aims to challenge the legacy of art
world economic models left in play by the avant-garde. The other discussion takes to
task larger issues surrounding privatization of culture by presenting methods of
democratization. They are devising methods in their art practice that arise from the
continuous desire of artists to break free from modernism and to develop innovative ways
to interrogate the world we live in. As Bourriaud explains “The artist sets his sight more
and more clearly on the relations that his work will create among his public, and on the
invention of models of sociability.”
45
In other words, the artist’s focus must shift from
being fixated on originality and authorship and expand to involve investigations of the
artist’s relational surroundings. It is in this way that the space of art itself becomes
democratized and the myth of artistic genius begins to be forgotten.
Historically, the emergence of grass roots artist collectives that engage directly
with the public have risen from a dissatisfaction with existing conditions within the art

45
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (France: Les Presses du Réel, 2002), 28.
58
institution and conventional art market systems. Machine Project, Fallen Fruit, The
Public School and a number of other collectives working similarly have emerged
predominantly out of the Los Angeles area within the last decade. These collectives, with
or without a physical home base, were organized with the common objective to instill
education as the primary area of focus for each of their respective practices because they
had set out to develop a network of organizations providing alternative resources for
education. Even more unique to these collectives are their relationships to the network of
art schools in Southern California. These informal educational institutions have not been
set into motion to serve as direct critiques of the existing art schools in Los Angeles but
instead function more as supplements to them.
During a time when education has become increasingly privatized and public
funding continues to decrease, it is important to consider why more and more artists are
engaging with educational experiments. The issues that are at stake for these artist
collectives began as a battle for the democratization of education and for the shrinking
public sector within society that is rapidly being privatized from all sides. Machine
Project aims to “promote conversations between scientists, poets, technicians, performers
and the community of Los Angeles as a whole,”
46
which illustrates their desire to elicit
and impart a type of cultural experience that is interdisciplinary in nature and not tied to
pre-existing art curricula that are laced with esoteric theory. Instead artistic practices that
engage in pedagogical methods like those used by Machine Project, Fallen Fruit and the
Public School approach theory in terms of experience and hands-on learning.

46
Machine Project, “F.A.Q. and Other Information: Big Picture Questions,” Machine
Project, http://www.machineproject.com/faq#meta (accessed December 12, 2010).

59
The Relevancy of Critical Pedagogy in Art Today
While the objectives of Machine Project’s practice focus primarily on
collaboration, and the creation and support of communities, the main locus from which
these two objectives spring is critical pedagogy. As one of the founding theorists of
critical pedagogy, Henry Giroux explains that within the context of cultural studies,
Critical pedagogy is understood as a cultural practice engaged in the production of
knowledge, identities, and desires. As a form of cultural politics, critical
pedagogy suggests inventing a new language for resituating teacher/student
relations within pedagogical practices that open up rather than close down the
borders of knowledge and learning. Disciplines can no longer define the
boundaries of knowledge or designate the range of questions that can be asked.
Similarly, critical pedagogy within the tradition of an older cultural study ruptures
the dominant notion that culture as pedagogy is about transmission and
consumption.
47

Pedagogical experimentation occupies every aspect of the objectives outlined in Machine
Project’s practice and it is where they are attempting to provide a transformative
dimension to the trajectory of institutional critique. By structuring their practice around
the idea of providing free sources of alternative education, these collectives can earn the
financial support from larger institutions that is needed to keep them running. Most
importantly, the unique way that these collectives employ these workshops allow their
practices to fall directly in line with Giroux’s concept of critical pedagogy within a
cultural context.
For example, the facilitators at both Machine Project and The Public School do
not solely dictate the content of their programming. It is decided through a proposal
process where anyone is open to submit an idea for a workshop or seminar that they

47
Henry A. Giroux, Border Crossings (New York: Routledge, 2005), 142.
60
would like to hold. These proposals are then considered by the facilitators of each space
with very little restriction on the type of subject matter or method for execution for the
proposed workshop, seminar or performance. Allowing the content of their practices in
this way truly underscores the idea of collective authorship. And it is in this way that
these collectives entertain Giroux’s idea of critical pedagogy as a form of cultural politics
because they are inventing a new language for resituating teacher/student relations to
explode the borders of knowledge and ways of learning. By defining themselves as art
collectives and incorporating the discussion of topics outside of traditional art discourses
within their organizational milieu, groups like Machine Project, The Public School and
Fallen Fruit are creating platforms to expand the notions of how we define, experience,
create and learn about art.
The use of critical pedagogy as a means for art production serves as the backbone
for this particular generation’s own institutionality as described by Helguera in the
previous chapter. Generating their own institutionality and using it to engage in a
dialogue with pre-existing institutional hegemonies, produces a new type of interaction
between artists, the public and the museum. For example in The Public School’s Richard
Serra Reading Room and Machine Project’s Needlepoint Therapy sessions, Machine
Project presented work to be part of the larger institution’s exhibition format, and
simultaneously developed grounds to withhold their own subjectivity and serve their
purpose without being tremendously compromised by the higher levels of power. Being
able to negotiate the terrain in this way placed their engagements with these institutions
somewhere between collaboration and institutional critique.

61
Critical Pedagogy as a Form of Institutional Critique
Within the field of cultural studies, the use of critical pedagogy within an art
practice can contribute to discourses around institutional critique in two ways. The first
is that critical pedagogy can be used to break down existing ideological hegemonies and
reveal the multiple ways one can experience and define art and culture. For example, the
nature of the projects led by Machine Project at LACMA and the Hammer Museum was
all significantly different from any endeavor that these institutions had had experience
with because of the unique shift in power dynamics exposed by working relations
between the collective and the museum’s staff. Machine Project and the other collectives
they worked with each had a unique operational framework which represented their own
institutionality and helped to create grounds for them to negotiate the terms of their place
and purpose within the hegemonic order of each of these museums. By formulating their
curatorial premises around a series of educational workshops and experimental
interactive performances, Machine Project was able to guarantee that the types of
experiences that participants would have — with the work presented by themselves and
the museum’s existing art collections — would be entirely up to the participants to
decide. Machine project posits the workshops and experimental performances as a series
of open-ended hypothetical scenarios, which they leave for participants to dictate. This
type of approach contrasts with the rules and customs of the museum as a cultural
institution, which have traditionally tended to frame the visitor experience as one of quiet
contemplation and measured distance in relation to art objects.
The second way that critical pedagogy can be used as a vehicle for institutional
critique is that art practices centered around themes of critical pedagogy are able to elude
62
the influence and control of art market hegemonies because it is a form that cannot be
easily thematized and therefore easily commodified by galleries, museums, curators and
critics who help dictate the value of art production. Machine Project’s Field Guide to
LACMA event and year-long residency at the Hammer Museum were both comprised of a
wide variety of activities that touched on a myriad of subject matter. The type of art
practice that Machine Project and other collectives engage in to produce works like the
Field Guide event at LACMA and the artist residency at the Hammer Museum can be
best described as “project-based” since these practices can not be fixed within traditional
art media such as sculpture, painting or even performance.
Author and art theorist Peio Aguirre argues that the use of “project work” as a
descriptive term helps to avoid the pitfalls of attaching “educational art” rhetoric to the
work, which leaves it vulnerable to becoming thematized and “ready for packaging and
consumption.”
48
It can also be argued that the works described here may fall somewhere
in line with Allan Kaprow’s “Happenings,” however, while the type of practice in
question is non-object based and dependent on chance, it does not call for the same type
of spectatorship or controlled participation of Kaprow’s works. Moreover, the work
created within the context of critical pedagogy practices stress the significance of
multiple authorship where the parameters and development of each project is dependant
upon the input of many players and not a single authorial figure. Therefore, the inability
to contextualize work using critical pedagogy within traditional art-making media
combined with the need for multiple authorship to produce the work contributes to the

48
Peio Aguirre, “Education with Innovations: Beyond Art-Pedagogical Projects,” in
Curating and the Educational Turn, ed. Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson (London: Open
Editions/deAppel, 2010), 176.
63
subversion of theorization and discursiveness needed to support the underlying functions
of the market hegemony.
While the arguments made here may convince one to readily contextualize art
practices focused on critical pedagogy within the discursive realm of institutional
critique, Aguirre makes a compelling argument that questions the motive behind practices
driven by “the so-called educational turn”
49
:
What we should seek here is to draw a subtle distinction between the idea of art as
experience and that of art as knowledge (and here I am not referring to
widespread notions of ‘artistic research’ or ‘knowledge production’). In a similar
way, there is a need to recognize the distance between education simply for the
sake of educating (as a social responsibility or as an accepted social imperative)
and those other educational ‘projects’ that have recently emerged onto the scene.
The scare quotes around the term ‘projects’ are apposite because it is as if, in this
context the terms education and project are mutually exclusive. For my part, I
cannot see these two terms working together in harmony. Project suggests a
purpose or goal and, while it seems untenable (or at least curious), in our time, to
talk of ‘art for art’s sake’, is it still possible to imagine education for education’s
sake, for the pleasure of doing it, i.e. without a means-ends rationale, without
taking any benefit from it? Obviously, what this seemingly simple question hides
is the issue of economic profit and I do not mean the salary or the fees transacted
from the art-education operation itself but the profitability of these projects in the
symbolic economy of the cultural field, as art projects and not as education.
50

In order to contextualize the conceptual aspects of Machine Project’s work in relation to
Aguirre’s argument, let us first examine Machine Project’s practice in light of Fraser’s
discourse on artistic service. In her text titled, How to Provide an Artistic Service: An
Introduction Fraser observes that, “related variously to institutional critique, productivist,

49
When someone starts talking about making a project on education then it ceases to be
education and becomes something else. That “something else” is what Aguirre refers to
as “the so-called educational turn.” Peio Aguirre, “Education with Innovations: Beyond
Art-Pedagogical Projects,” in Curating and the Educational Turn, ed. Paul O’Neill and
Mick Wilson (London: Open Editions/deAppel, 2010), 176.

50
Ibid, 177.
64
activist, and political documentary traditions as well as post-studio, site-specific, and
public art activities, the practices currently characterized as ‘project work’ do not
necessarily share a thematic, ideological, or procedural basis.”
51
She points out that what
they do share is an amount of labor that cannot be transacted as or along with a product.
Fraser refers to this “labor” in economic terms as “service provision,” which includes
“the work of public education in and outside of cultural institutions” and the “advocacy
and other community-based work, including organizing, education, documentary
production, and the creation of alternative structures.”
52
Under these pretenses, the use of
education in a project would be used only as a tool to illustrate the economic condition of
the project work as well as the nature of the social relations under which it is carried out.
Contextualizing Machine Project’s work within Fraser’s concept would allow it to fall
under the second form of institutional critique, which was outlined above, that positions
critical pedagogy in the work of Machine Project strictly as a means to evade the art
world’s thematization strategies.
Conversely, one can argue that the element of critical pedagogy in Machine
Project’s work is about experimentation in art and culture through the lens of pedagogical
practice and vice versa. However, these focal points are difficult to discern in the scope
of Machine Project’s practice because of its non-linear and web-like development, which
puts the concepts behind this work in danger of being trivialized and easily co-opted by
“collaborating” institutions. Aguirre explains,

51
Andrea Fraser, “How to Provide an Artistic Service: An Introduction,” in Museum
Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser, ed. Alexander Alberro (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2005), 153.

52
Ibid, 152.
65
We are afraid of the kind of impoverishment that appears to arise whenever one
attempts to avoid the discursive in order to focus on the experiential or the
phenomenological or the affective or the cognitive. But, then, we also urgently
need well developed and astutely applied critical theory in the arts.
53

The scope of Machine Project’s practice is so multi-layered, free flowing and amorphous
in its structuring and development that it is difficult to identify its objectives and motives
in wanting to collaborate with these institutions. However, Helguera would argue that
education artworks are produced precisely with the goal of undermining the
traditional conventions of educational structures and refuse to commit to anything
remotely resembling ‘learning outcomes’ or ‘goals’ due to the fear of appearing
doctrinaire or didactic. [The] concern comes not only from the need to distance
oneself as an artist from what is perceived as conventional education but also to
make sure that the resulting artwork retains an aura of ambiguity, something I
would define as ‘abstract education.’
54

Without this kind of discursive agency and critical background, is it possible for these
kinds of practices to maintain the level of criticality required to spark progress and
transformation? Rather, can ambiguity and looseness be resilient in a theory and practice
that is aiming to generate effective change? How do objectives play out in such an
environment where there is no apparent author with a clear vision to identify what is at
stake? Helguera leaves us with these final thoughts to consider,
Because of the strengths of the communities created through transpedagogical
experiments, authorship becomes tenuous at best, and the process of exchange
becomes so important that the visible outcome to an outside observer – ‘the
product’, in an art market sense – may never be that relevant or even materialize.
Finally, the boundaries between artwork and experience are blurred, in the same
way in which authorship and collectivity are blended, documentation and
literature are one, and fiction is turned into real experience and vice versa. All

53
Peio Aguirre, “Education with Innovations: Beyond Art-Pedagogical Projects,” in
Curating and the Educational Turn, ed. Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson (London: Open
Editions/deAppel, 2010), 178.

54
Pablo Helguera, “Notes Toward a Transpedagogy,” in Art, Architecture, Pedagogy:
Experiments in Learning, ed. Ken Ehrlich (San Francisco: Blurb.com, 2010), 105-106.
66
components of a traditional structure of production and interpretation are turned
around and resignified.
55

Fixating on the efficacy of these kinds of interdisciplinary pedagogical experiments
within the context of institutional critique prevents us from backing up to see the entire
landscape. Interstices found between the conflation of art and other disciplines, such as
pedagogy, are made into concrete experiences by artists so that our relations with art can
evolve and become richer over time. While it is important to be critical of these types of
works when they are presented within institutional contexts, we must remain open to the
fact that in the end these collectives move through the world as artists who engage with
processes of art making, whether or not it is immediately recognized as such, and have
set out with a purpose that has been at the helm of art-making for decades – not to
represent accurately, but rather to re-present, so that we can discover new questions.

55
Ibid, 111-112.
67
CONCLUSION

The mid-2000s marked a tipping point for the United States economy that
quickly declined and went into a recession so deep that it has been compared to the Great
Depression of the 1930s. During these periods of economic recession public funding and
state budgets are tremendously reduced, and all too often education and art are the targets
of these budget cuts. An examination of the current state of education and the arts in Los
Angeles will reveal significant hikes in tuition rates for the state’s university system, and
a serious consideration to eradicate funding for LA County’s Department of Cultural
Affairs. Public funding for art and education have for the most part always been
expendable targets during times of economic hardship and artists, especially those with
any kind of formal education in art, are extremely aware of this fact. Therefore, it is both
ironic and understandable that a significant number of non-profit collectives and spaces
like Machine Project, Fallen Fruit and the Public School would thrive during a period
when funding for these types of projects are scarce. However, it is precisely during these
periods of cultural turmoil that organizations such as these feel that their critical eye and
innovative presence is most needed.
Machine Project and other similar collectives have developed an augmented,
evolutionary, and interdisciplinary type of social practice that utilizes methods of critical
pedagogy and institutional partnership within the field of visual art and cultural
production in order to bring new relevance to the political and its relation with artistic
practices. The work being produced by these collectives should not be misread or
overlooked as lacking criticality or theoretical rigor simply because their methods appear
68
ordinary, easily digestible or practical. In an age where information can travel at light
speed between people all over the world, empowering everyone to be disseminators of
knowledge, authority lies in the hands of both no one and everyone.
They have risen with similar agendas to create strategies for cultivating the art of
human interaction above and beyond any desire to simply develop a new form of art
production. Advancements in technology have allowed us to shift from communicating
via snail mail to email and voice message to text message in just a few decades. The
rapid evolution of the way we communicate with each other has drastically altered the
way that we learn and exchange information with one another. They also discourage us
to convene and partake in the physical as opposed to virtual version of the afore
mentioned activities. These collectives have resurrected platforms for this type of human
interaction and progressive thinking with the various workshops and interactive
performances they have formulated as part of their conceptual and organizational
frameworks. It is precisely this kind of generated human interaction that will perpetuate
the evolution and progression of art and culture and the reason why museums have
become increasingly interested in working closely with collectives like these.
While museums desire to partner with these collectives in order to help them
become relevant and repurposed in the public eye, collectives also seek to develop
collaborative relationships with museums because they provide the institutional support
that they need to be released from any financial burden in the development of their
practice and provide the opportunity to engage with an expanded audience. The manner
in which these collectives negotiate their partnership with museums in the execution of
projects – like those done at LACMA and the Hammer Museum by Machine Project –
69
shape the political core of objectives as well as outline their level of agency within their
practices. Some might expect Machine Project’s involvement with LACMA and the
Hammer Museum to reveal an elaborate agenda to reform the institution from the inside
out, however neither one of the collaborations with these institutions proved to overtly
project this kind of objective. It would be absurd to expect a single collective to be
responsible for completing a task such as this. However, what Machine Project is
attempting with their elaborate series of idiosyncratic and unorthodox experiments and
interventions is arguably not to execute a complete reform of the institution, but instead
use them as a way to interrogate and bring to the fore scenarios that would otherwise be
buried beneath the hegemonic operational frameworks of the institution.
As art critic and theorist Boris Groys observes, “The context, meaning, and
function of these calls to abolish the museum system have undergone a fundamental
change since the days of the avant-garde, even if at first sight the diction of these calls
seems so familiar.”
56
Machine Project and other collectives like it can be identified as
part of the “new avant-garde” that Groys describes above. They recognize that in our
time the museum has been stripped of its normative role and that they should seize the
opportunity to exploit the space where museums are attempting to repurpose themselves.
However, one can argue that it is still not entirely clear who is doing the exploiting.
When the dynamics in the relationship are unclear, it makes it difficult to determine what
Machine Project’s true intentions are. How far can one take institutional critique when
they are attempting to be critical of a bureaucratic system that they have chosen to work
within? For the artist to emerge unscathed from this type of an encounter they must hold

56
Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge: The MIT Press 2008), 18-19.
70
steadfast against the manipulative hand of the sponsoring institution. Machine Project
challenged the operational workings of both museum institutions with their far-fetched
proposals and unusual methods.
A close examination of Machine Project’s inner workings as a space and
collective in addition to their temporary habitation at LACMA and the Hammer Museum,
reveal slippages that further complicate, rather than resolve the relationship between artist
and curator in these institutions. The role of the artist into a curator complicates the
transition of power from those already in curatorial positions. When an artist assumes the
role of a curator as a method employed in their practice the position of power is no longer
clearly defined and instead becomes an area of negotiation.
Allen’s role as the founder, director, facilitator and artist of Machine Project is a
facet of the collective and its dual function as a space that complicates its objective to
exist as an amorphous creative entity. This is an issue that was most apparent during
Machine Project’s time at the Hammer as their artist in residence. Occupying this kind of
position within an institution as a collective provided the opportunity for many artists to
participate in the residency and also allowed for the residency to manifest both on and off
the museum’s grounds. These elements put forth exciting and varied programming for
the museum. However, much of the residency appeared to be comprised of work by only
a select handful of the many artists that Machine Project has shown to work with in the
past.
Another issue that is brought to the fore is that the majority of the discourse
written on projects done at both LACMA and the Hammer reflect the thoughts of Allen
and a select number of Machine Project artists. Allen’s voice is dominant in representing
71
the collective, which ultimately creates a continuous tension between embracing a radical
pedagogy where power is distributed completely to the students or in this case the
Machine Project collective and participants, and maintaining the position of ignorant
schoolmaster. While one cannot blame this activist-artist for the compromises he has
made to remain a player in the global art scene, Allen will continue to struggle with this
issue of authorship as long as he continues to be recognized as the director, facilitator and
curator of Machine Project.
Since the projects by Machine Project were the first of their kind to occur at both
LACMA and the Hammer, Allen and the contributing artists were surprised that they
were granted permission to execute most of their proposed ideas. In a work by Machine
Project artist Jason Brown titled, The Ones That Got Away: A sestina for Machine
Project at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 15 November 2008 Brown creates a list of
the hundreds of proposed projects that did not make the cut. The first three of the
rejected proposals include: garden on top of the elevator, student driver parking valets
and child docents. While these ideas were dismissed by various members of LACMA’s
curatorial team for whatever reason, what should be noted here is the fact that these ideas
were proposed and seriously considered by curatorial staff to be included in the
exhibition.
While Machine Project’s message of critique toward the institution may not have
been embedded in a concert that took place in a museum elevator or in a needlepoint
class, it was embodied in their methodology and carefully negotiated approach in
working with the museum. Proposing a slew of unorthodox and unconventional projects
caused the museum’s curatorial staff to reexamine, question and in most cases work
72
around existing operational procedures in order to execute Machine Project’s proposals.
On November 15, 2008 Machine Project changed LACMA for one day and in 2010 they
changed the Hammer for almost an entire year. Their presence in the processes to
negotiate the institutional terms and conditions that were challenged when these projects
were brought to fruition re-routed the way for other artists to continue challenging
hegemonic frameworks in the art world.
Groys best describes the current state of institutional critique: “The current protest
against the museum is no longer part of a struggle being waged against normative taste in
the name of aesthetic equality but is, inversely, aimed at stabilizing and entrenching
currently prevailing tastes.”
57
Machine Project is at the helm of this struggle and
recognizes the opportunities that have been presented by institutions to create a new
platform for engagement that can simultaneously progress the purpose and function of
museums and to develop a space for the public to be a chief constituent in the process.

57
Ibid.
73

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This thesis will focus on a discussion of Mark Allen’s Machine Project and other select Los Angeles-based artist collectives in order to examine the efficacy of critical pedagogy as a progressive and nuanced form of institutional critique. First, I will analyze how Machine Project’s practice is informed by art production found in institutional critique as well as methods of critical pedagogy used by artists from the 1960s onward. Then, I will unpack the complexity of these two themes as they are used in Machine Project’s practice in order to examine the efficacy and level of agency in challenging institutional processes within the museum. My analysis of these topics will be supported by an in-depth investigation of two different interventions by Machine Project at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Hammer Museum.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Lieu, Jennifer A. (author)

Core Title Changing spaces: Machine project, critical pedagogy and reinventing the museum

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Public Art Studies / Master of Planning

Degree Program Public Art Studies / Planning

Publication Date 05/02/2011

Defense Date 03/07/2011

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag art,collaboration,collective,Criticism,institutional critique,OAI-PMH Harvest,pedagogy

Place Name California (states), Los Angeles (city or populated place), USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Moss, Karen (committee chair), Decter, Joshua (committee member), Ehrlich, Ken (committee member)

Creator Email jennifer.a.lieu@gmail.com,lieuj@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3823

Unique identifier UC1141298

Identifier etd-Lieu-4537 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-457160 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3823 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Lieu-4537.pdf

Dmrecord 457160

Document Type Thesis

Rights Lieu, Jennifer A.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu