Still Hemmed-In? – Hew Locke, The Procession, and History

“If I wasn’t an artist, I would have been a historian”
Hew Locke in an interview for CRAFTS magazine

While recently re-reading a collection titled Institutional Critique and After, I repeatedly came across the names of Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, Dan Graham, and Michael Asher, then Andrea Fraser and Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics. Unlike the relatively conceptual strategies deployed by those artists, Hew Locke brings a more lavish materiality to bear on his form of institutional critique, dressing his contributions in a purposeful abundance. We might say that Hew Locke critiques the institution physically, culturally, dynamically, engaging directly with its architecture, filling its spaces, testing its possibilities and constraints. Ultimately his interventions implicate the institution’s own sense of time and history, along with that of the audience.

Paper given at Tate Britain/Paul Mellon Centre.