Le Merle – Institutional Critique Flair Button

This issue explores the relationship between the work and the act, sensitive to what (dis)orders life and confounds the binary opposition between code and errancy. Faithful to what is garbled, excessive, crooked, or just “off”—and led by the uncertain outlines of the work and the verticality of the act—it offers up ways of doing and words that break open. It was compiled by François Lemieux.

In corporate culture, “flair” refers to the buttons and badges that employees on the front lines of retail or foodservice are often encouraged to wear as part of their working attire. Typically the mandate to wear flair will be couched in the rhetoric of “employee self-expression”—despite the fact that such seemingly good-humored adornments are explicitly designed to promote fixed corporate agendas.

Institutional Critique Flair Button (2011) is a freely distributed button that democratizes art discourse while playfully suggesting the co-optation of critique through scripted marketing. It was originally produced as a public art intervention by Invisible Venue for Southern Exposure during a San Francisco conference hosted by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and subsequently as part of the exhibition “Scripts for Art” presented at Walden Affairs in The Hague.

This artist’s edition will accompany the first 50 copies of the spring 2012 issue of Le Merle. For more on the artist’s work go to charlesgute.com