While the overall coda of the research I have undertaken could be framed through the question: how to curate infrastructure (how to understand the fields, actions, operations and interconnections of infrastructure, its promises, aims, worlds and how this interacts with more established question in curating/the curatorial — and how that practice and modes such as the exhibition fit in, or not)? A key, and we might say first order problem is how art can operate as a function of infrastructure: that is technically and aesthetically, symbolically and operationally. These further questions are what will allow a move from those position art as an infrastructure, or infrastructure as a poetics to a critical practicing of infrastructure. These starting positions are useful bridges in an infrastructural turn in the arts and literary studies insofar as they contribute to more nuanced explorations of art’s utility — at least within an infrastructural frame of reference. But relying on an open-ended concept of impact or potentiality as their critical mode and horizon, they fall short of agency because they rely on already-instituted notions of art’s critical autonomy as a space in which to test new categories or identities and reinstitute them, and which are therefore in fact limited by their institutional parameters. If infrastructure can be shown to institute differently to the institution, and as such requires discrete critical manoeuvres to change that instituting, the question I hope to provide an answer for is how art can operate as a function of infrastructure beyond those limits of institutional art; instead within the parameters of infrastructural art.

This can be achieved with a comparative analysis of case studies in to contemporary conditions and theory and in relation to historical examples which have sought to engage in similar questions of art’s social-material engagement, utility and systemticity, but which saw art as critically unmoored from the infrastructural conditions that prompted them while also dependent on modes of making public such as the exhibition.

To engage these questions now is in part a reflection of changing attitudes and conditions to how cultural artefacts operate, convey meaning and are operationally meshed in the cultural field and others by changes to infrastructural conditions (advanced technology, austerity), and in part a heightened awareness of the use of infrastructural forms of governance to functionalize cultural and political imaginaries and actors. Art has, like many other fields, turned its attention to these infrastructural conditions. The question is if those practices associated with art have the adequate tools to act on that attention, and what this would enable.

Refs.

https://www.academia.edu/29892145/Art_as_Infrastructure?email_work_card=view-paper

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0263775816645989