Institute – Exchanges and fragments on design

In 1975, Alison Knowles (born 1933), founding member of Fluxus, and experimental composer Annea Lockwood (born 1939) co-edited and self-published Womens Work, a magazine of text-based and instructional scores written by women primarily for music and dance performance. The magazine appeared in two issues between 1975 and 1978. This superb facsimile edition, comprising a book and poster housed in a printed folder, gathers the work from both issues, by artists Beth Anderson, Ruth Anderson, Jackie Apple, Barbara Benary, Sari Dienes, Bici Forbes, Simone Forti, Wendy Greenberg, Heidi Von Gunden, Françoise Janicot, Christina Kubisch, Carol Law, Mary Lucier, Lisa Mikulchik, Pauline Oliveros, Takako Saito, Carolee Schneemann, Mieko Shiomi, Elaine Summers, Carole Weber, Ann Williams, Julie Winter and Marilyn Wood. This is an important reissue, collecting as it does works in a field whose “classics” are typically confined to male-dominated publications.

Institute offers a space for a more granular, forthright, technical, and messy discourse about new forms and new ideas in design. A halfway house for whatever can’t fit into the syllabus or the portfolio, in the exhibition or its monograph.

Meaning: a focus on alternative practices and pedagogy; craft questions of material, process, and manual methods; diaspora and decolonizing; performance and publication; critical, cultural, and curatorial dimensions of design.

I like that the idea of standing up, with its echoes of both statuary and activism, is carved into the verb “institute.” The noun initially denoted a designed thing. The abstract crossing into the concrete. Its sense today — as an organized group — reaches back to the French Revolution, to the Institut national des Sciences et des Arts, the learned society that replaced the royal academies abolished in 1793. It reaches back, you could say, to that epochal movement from top-down structures toward a way of reasoning and imagining together, from vertical to horizontal.

These Enlightenment ideals of equality and unbridled thinking that drove the formation of that body, and the parallel spirit of critique and social change behind the Institut für Sozialforschung, frame this zone of shared inquiry.