Nevertheless, there is a world of difference between practices of adapting oneself to the existing institutional arrangement and contesting the institution by occupying it differently. Art’s existing institutions can be reused independently if they are treated as contested spaces. Independence, resistance and dissent have to be manufactured. Flight from trouble is not always an effective technique for generating radical independence. Establishing a physical distance from the existing institutions often turns out to be a red herring, failing to guarantee independence in a fuller sense. It is clear that a number of artist-run spaces are set up entrepreneurially to catch the attention of the market and art’s leading public institutions. Such spaces may be funded and managed as independent concerns, but they are in no way ideologically or culturally independent of art’s institutions. A stronger brand of independence would entail some substantial divergence from business-as-usual. The first condition of art’s independence is not art’s isolation but its contestation of the cultural field, either by setting up alternative spaces or by occupying existing spaces differently.

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Info Centre, a project space set up in East London by Henriette Heise & Jakob Jakobsen in the late 90s, broke the taboo on art’s institutionalisation through what Heise & Jakobsen call ‘self-institutionalisation’. The first info sheet of the Info Centre stated: ‘We are committed to an understanding of art practice that is not exclusively related to the making of art works, but also includes the establishing of institutions for the experience and use of art and generally the making of institutions for human life.’ This statement by Info Centre attests to the need to institutionalise alternatives in order to care for them. The taboo on institutionalisation in art is effectively the refusal to underwrite alternative practices with the institutions that they need and deserve in order to thrive. We do not need to avoid institutionalisation, we need fuller, wider, and more diverse forms of institutionalisation. Institutionalisation for the few needs to be replaced by institutionalisation for all.

- Dave Beech