From tools of criticality to mechanisms of control: Instructions in art from the 1960s to the 1990s

Abstract

This research examines instructional texts in art practices from the 1960s to the 1990s. Instructional texts refer to written words by artists for thought experiments and participatory actions. Scholars have previously examined the interplay between instructions and the specific art forms they generate, revealing the complex relationship between control and freedom, order and disorder, as well as organization and risk. However, these relationships are contextually nuanced. By incorporating the social function of instruction as a critical tool and control mechanism, this research adds complexity to the current scholarship on instruction between participatory agency and authorial control. This research focuses on two historical periods: the 1960s and the 1990s. Whereas the 1960s signaled the transition to a post-industrial society that sought creative labor and adopted a more flattened organizational model, the 1990s witnessed the standardization and globalization of demands for entrepreneurial and artistic labor. To explain the resurgence of instructional texts in the 1990s, this research contextualizes these texts within a broader social framework. It argues that commercial co-optation has transformed these instructions’ critical power against the bureaucratic top-down management model in the industrial era into an apparatus of control over creative laborers cultivated in the post-industrial age.

Keywords

• Instructional texts
• Work culture
• Socially engaged art
• Participatory art