The Politics of Taking No Position: Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda

Abstract

Since the 1970s, thinking about the social dimensions of artmaking has been dominated by two lines of inquiry: firstly, regarding artists’ decisions to make one kind of work versus another, and secondly, concerning the curators, critics, collectors, and viewers who together determine art’s meaning and value. Works of Institutional Critique following in this lineage argue that artworks are permeated by the social relations that predominate in their immediate context. Works’ meaning and value emerge, immanently, in relation to this ground. Yet thinking about the social dimensions of artmaking has failed to account for the way that contemporary art’s representational conditions impact artistic production. In this paper, I fill a gap in art discourse surrounding the stakes of artistic production amid what Kobena Mercer calls “inclusionism.” Work by the duo Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, I argue, reveals that––within contemporary art’s prevailing representational paradigm––of similar importance to the position one takes, is one’s position as subject. A series of exhibitions produced by Chung and Maeda between 2009 and 2021 prove that one of the primary meanings of Institutional Critique within the field of contemporary art production is the possibility of refusing the reduction of a work to its maker’s subject position. Chung and Maeda’s work can be seen as articulating insight into the objective conditions of contemporary artistic production, distribution, and reception––specifically regarding the gallerists who invited the duo to exhibit––and thereby pointing beyond contemporary art’s representational double bind.