Text by David Bussel

“Something that changes our way of seeing the streets is more important than something that changes our way of seeing paintings.”

— Guy Debord, Report on the Construction of Situations (1957)

Infrastructure is everywhere and nowhere, both visible and invisible, at once a means of production, circulation and distribution. As a systematic mode of transfer, it is an internal and external support for movement, a form of maintenance and an operating system for daily life. It equips and organises societies with utilities, communications and transport, and regulates education, housing, social and healthcare systems. But like most systems, and indeed as the system of systems, there is always an entrenched and unevenly distributed hierarchy of use and access, behind the appearance of neutrality.

As a “below” structure, infrastructure is a technology largely rendered invisible and taken for granted, such that things appear to happen by themselves until the structure is disrupted. Through a kind of social rhythm, infrastructure reproduces norms, habits, standards and power relations, often unconsciously perceived or reflexively enacted. And since infrastructure is always evolving, these relations pose questions about how it works and for whom, and the political economies it emerges from. Because infrastructure is tied to the flows and stoppages of goods and services and the movement of people, it can also be understood as a directed process that facilitates as much as it impedes. Infrastructure fosters social metabolism yet undermines the neediest; it harnesses nature but depletes and despoils its free gifts, as our needs and the earth’s materials become privatised and monopolised assets for future rent extraction, underwritten by the state, rapidly exhausting the resources requisite to all life.

If we look at infrastructure as a set of forms and material conditions, organised by the state, often in partnership with private capital, and that shape relations of class, race and gender, it becomes increasingly abstract. Infrastructure embeds us in multiple systems across social apparatuses and institutions. When these “critical” systems are in crisis from social unrest, war or environmental degradation, or are “broken” by technological failure or organised abandonment, a temporal breach of visibility opens up. Systems temporarily reveal their constructedness and disaggregate their power, exposing their material and discursive relations. According to the late theorist Marina Vishmidt, it is precisely the arrest of social motion where the horizon for contestation and change occurs. Infrastructure becomes legible and actionable beyond the art world, unfolding across different modalities and institutions, implicating their stakeholders and the public. Vishmidt calls this “infrastructural critique”.

Infrastructural critique attempts to reconfigure the terms of institutional critique, a current of conceptual art that has sought to interrogate the artistic field – galleries, museums, the studio, magazines, dealers, curators, collectors, etc. – as a totalising system of political, economic and social power. Speaking about conceptual art and the social field of production, artist Andrea Fraser writes: “Art is art when it exists for discourses and practices that recognise it as art, value and evaluate it as art, and consume it as art, whether as object, gesture, representation, or only idea. The institution of art is not something external to any work of art but the irreducible condition of its existence as art. No matter how public in placement, immaterial, transitory, relational, everyday, or even invisible, what is announced and perceived as art is always already institutionalised, simply because it exists within the perception of participants in the field of art as art, a perception not necessarily aesthetic but fundamentally social in its determination.”

Art for Fraser is nominalist: it names art as art within a delimited social field without horizon. Vishmidt, however, sees infrastructural art as fragmented rather than totalising: it is the cracks and faults of the system, “from the bottom up and inside-out”, where she locates the tools to unleash emancipatory social forms by abolishing the allegiances and justifications institutions require to reproduce themselves as such. Infrastructural critique is “the link between the material and ideological conditions of the institution of art in a way that de-centres rather than affirms it”.

Infrastructure is a technology largely rendered invisible and taken for granted, such that things appear to happen by themselves until the structure is disrupted

As art institutions absorb and neutralise critique, is there any space left for critical analysis and practice? Artist Alexi Kukuljevic writes: “If we take art’s relation to the institution (to the museum-gallery-biennial complex) as integral, the problem concerns how to locate art’s antagonism.” The solution, he maintains, lies in contradiction, since the artist is both “a cultural worker integrated into the field of cultural production and an artist antagonistic to the ideological functions he [sic] is forced to serve. The artist is at once within and against the field of cultural production, integrated into the institution but politically opposed to its ends. Even if the artist and the museum remain integrated at the economic level… the artist remains forever in contradiction at the political level.” We are left with the double antinomy of the artist vis-à-vis the institution: both a contradiction from within and a contradiction from without.

What might an infrastructural intervention look like within these relations of antinomy and antagonism, of horizons and limits? Is infrastructural critique more feasible for art-adjacent collectives than individual artists in the field? If so, the more difficult question would be how can infrastructural critique be put to work when most art that references infrastructure largely points to or describes it metonymically as a structure in a system rather than employs it as a model for aesthetic and political intervention. But then again, the focus here is on art objects, or more precisely, readymades, material forms that act as representation and function as (real) infrastructure because infrastructure itself is lived as, or rather, appears as, both real and imaginary, concrete and abstract.

Here we might look at Radiator (2024) by artist Coumba Samba, exhibited at Red Gas at Arcadia Missa in London in 2024. The “assisted” readymade sculpture features two vertical wall-mounted, coiled metal pipes, painted maroon as part of a series of colour-coded radiators of varying shapes and sizes. The show title references Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the countries’ imperial and anti-colonial histories, and the international “interruption” of flows of gas, movements of capital and state alignments since the start of the war. As a monochromatic readymade, Radiator figures a world “spiralling” out of control in a race for natural resources, where an infrastructural “break” in time and its circulatory logic have wreaked havoc on a global order that no longer exists.

Infrastructure also works to “rearrange” the movement of people and things through the intervention of modes of production and consumption, where the cyclical movement of capital comes to a temporary halt. In Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (2016), critic Joshua Clover gives an historical account of labour struggles and collective action within infrastructures. For Clover, the strike is a contestation of wages and working conditions at the site of production – the factory, the call centre – whereas the riot is the expropriation or destruction of private property at the site of consumption. These acts mirror the violence of dispossession in reverse: first, for the strike, through the extraction of surplus value or profit from labour time; second, for the riot, through the state’s redistribution of the social wage or “common wealth” to the rich. These are “movements” of temporal suspension through spatial occupation that trouble the hardened order of things in crisis.

Another form of spatial occupation is trespass on private property; another form of (anti-)consumption is theft. In art collective Claire Fontaine’s Passe-partout series, these acts of violation and expropriation converge as pure potential, like infrastructural counter-movements in latent form. Each work’s bracketed titles names a place, structure or event specific to it, such as Chinatown/Year of the Pig (2006) or Paris, 8ème (2009). The Passe-partout sculptures, or “master keys”, are assembled from modified lock-picking blades, keys, chains, pins, clips, and trinkets – objects that, as artworks, literally retain the capacity for forced entry and plunder. They double as portraits of a locale or event, as in Passe-partout (Tower of London / Ceremony of the Keys) (2015), which evokes the ritual nightly locking of the Tower’s gates.

By contrast, Cameron Rowland’s Pass-Thru (2014) inverts Fontaine’s property relation, from violation to protection. The work consists of a clear perspex revolving open cube set within a larger, stationary open cube – a reproduction of a security window for exchanging money and goods, generally found in commercial locations where theft and safety are concerns. The infrastructure this object reproduces does more than stage an exchange of value in miniature: it also materialises the politics of consumption, reproducing the conditions of bare subsistence for buyer and seller alike, both of whom live and transact at “the frontier of capital”. Rowland reinscribes this frontier across his artistic practice, employing various legal and financial instruments to disrupt his works’ speculated value and foreclose the art world’s ownership of them.

Can a critique of the political economy of infrastructure reconfigure, or even revolutionise, the ways we organise our everyday lives? Each of these artists offers a provisional model through which to understand infrastructural and social relations differently, proposing tools for collectively reimagining emancipatory futures from below.