Building Without Permission Chapter 5

“For the philosophy of praxis the superstructures are an objective and operative reality. It explicitly asserts that men become conscious of their social position, and therefore of their tasks, on the terrain of ideologies, which is no small affirmation of reality.”—Antonio Gramsci

1. The Mechanism#

[1] This thesis has argued that artistic practice produces the most durable counter-hegemonic force by building, within the dominant order, the material foundations of an alternative. Across three chapters, I have traced that construction through practices that share a structural kinship while operating at fundamentally different scales. Anatsui enters the museum and makes it accommodate an object it cannot fix. Bradford gives the museum an object it can fix and denies it access to what the object knows. Gates builds institutions that provide what the museum structurally cannot. The arc across these three practices—from intervention within existing institutional frameworks to the construction of alternatives beyond them—is not a typology. It is an argument about how counter-hegemonic force escalates, each stage exposing a limit that the next stage attempts to exceed.

[2] That argument becomes newly urgent in a political moment when the relationship between state power and institutional narrative is being renegotiated in the open. The Smithsonian crisis that opened this thesis—Executive Order 14253, the review of eight museums, the 120-day deadline for content corrections—looked, at first glance, like a story about political overreach. I would argue that it reads as confirmation of something these artists have understood for decades: that the museum has never been the neutral stage it presents itself as, and that the institutional apparatus through which the dominant order produces its account of the world—its systems of display, classification, and interpretation—has always been available for recalibration when that account is threatened.

[3] What the Smithsonian reveals, read through the framework this thesis has built, is not the drama of censorship but its banality. The institution does not refuse outright. It softens wall text, covers a student mural, and proposes conditions for a retrospective that make the artist’s vision untenable. Each adjustment is small enough to be rationalized, and each one confirms what Williams described as hegemony’s saturation of the whole process of living. When the state intervenes directly, the museum discovers what it always was—not a neutral space but a technology of the dominant order, one that functions smoothly only so long as its operations remain aligned with the interests of those who govern it.

[4] These claims, though, carry tensions that deserve direct engagement—tensions I have been navigating across the preceding chapters and now want to press harder on. It would be dishonest to present the framework without reckoning with the difficulties it raises: the limits of hegemony as an analytical concept, the question of who has the authority to name a practice counter-hegemonic when the artists themselves use different language, the problem of what counter-hegemonic force becomes if it succeeds, and the uncomfortable possibility that the art world’s own machinery of recognition—its prizes, biennials, and auction records—may have already learned to reward the very resistance this thesis describes, converting destabilization into prestige.

2. Field of Operations#

[5] Taken together, the three artistic practices map a spectrum of engagement with institutional power that no single case could reveal. The spectrum matters not because it ranks these artists—Anatsui is not a lesser version of Gates—but because it exposes the structural fact that institutional power is not one thing. It operates simultaneously through physical control, interpretive authority, and existential claim, and no single practice can contest all three at once.

[6] The museum’s physical authority—its control over how objects are displayed, conserved, and classified—depends on fixity. An institution that cannot say this is what the work is cannot exercise the classificatory power on which its epistemic legitimacy rests. Anatsui’s sheets strip that foundation. But the institution that loses control over the object’s form does not lose its claim to be the necessary site where the object is encountered. The Turbine Hall adjusts. It does not close. The museum’s interpretive authority—its claim to translate objects into meaning—depends on legibility. Bradford’s surfaces arrive stable enough for the institution to manage procedurally, but the civic knowledge they carry was produced through informal economies and tactical circulation in communities whose survival required illegibility to exactly the kind of institutional gaze the museum represents. The wall label can name the materials. It cannot reconstruct what they archive. And the museum’s existential authority—its claim to be the necessary infrastructure for the encounter between art and public life—depends on the absence of alternatives. Gates builds one. But the alternative he constructs remains entangled with the markets and institutions whose monopoly it refuses: tar paintings fund archives, Art Basel buys “bank bonds,” and the spaces that reject the market’s measures of value survive because the market sustains them.

[7] Each dimension of institutional power, contested individually, regenerates. The museum absorbs nonfixity by celebrating its own flexibility. It accommodates opacity by framing illegibility as aesthetic complexity. It metabolizes even the construction of alternatives by exhibiting the artist who builds them. What the spectrum reveals is that counter-hegemonic practice in contemporary art is not a position but a field of operations—and the force of what these three artists have built lies in the fact that, taken together, they press against physical procedures, interpretive claims, and existential monopoly simultaneously, from incommensurable positions. No single accommodation can neutralize all three at once. That irreducibility is itself the argument.

3. Inhabiting the Contradictions#

[8] A thesis that argues for counter-hegemonic practice using the concept of hegemony owes its reader an honest reckoning with what that concept can and cannot do. Gramsci’s framework has become so pervasive in cultural criticism that its limitations are easy to forget. The most serious problem is that of totality. If hegemony truly saturates the whole process of living—if it reaches into how space is organized, what materials are valued, whose labor counts, and whose history enters the record—then it becomes difficult to identify anything that stands outside it. The concept threatens to become unfalsifiable: every institution is hegemonic, every accommodation is co-optation, every success is absorption. When the analytical frame explains everything, it risks explaining nothing. A concept that cannot specify what would count as evidence against it is not an analytical tool. It is a disposition.

[9] I have tried to guard against this by locating counter-hegemonic force in material practice rather than in discursive positioning—in what the work does rather than what it means. This moves the argument from the terrain of interpretation, where the hegemony concept tends to swallow its own objects, to the terrain of physical fact: the sheet shifts under gravity whether or not anyone calls it counter-hegemonic; the merchant poster withholds its knowledge whether or not a theorist is watching; the Arts Bank opens its shelves whether or not Gramsci would have recognized the gesture. Material behavior provides a falsifiable ground. Either the conservation team can stabilize the object, or it cannot. Either the wall label can reconstruct what the material archives, or it cannot. Either the community uses the institution, or it does not. These are conditions that can be observed, tested, and—crucially—disproven. This thesis stands or falls not on whether its theoretical framework is internally coherent but on whether the material practices it describes actually produce the structural conditions it claims they do.

[10] But grounding the argument in material behavior does not resolve the question of who gets to name these practices counter-hegemonic in the first place. Anatsui speaks of nonfixity and nomadic aesthetics. Bradford talks about materials and the civic knowledge embedded in South Central’s surfaces. Gates speaks of love, administration, and iteration. None of them frames what they do as a war of position. The framework I have built illuminates structural kinships between these practices that the artists’ own vocabularies do not name—but it also risks organizing those practices around a theoretical center they did not choose. I have tried to mitigate this by developing the four dimensions inductively, revising them when they failed to account for what I was seeing, and insisting that the artists’ own words lead wherever possible. But the analytical authority this thesis claims exists in tension with the decentering of institutional authority it advocates.

[11] The methodological question opens onto a deeper one: whether the war of position, as Gramsci conceived it, aims not at permanent resistance but at a new hegemony—and what that means for the practices this thesis examines. Gramsci did not conceive of the war of position as permanent resistance. He conceived of it as transitional—a strategy for building, within the institutions of civil society, the foundations of a new hegemony that would eventually replace the old. The endpoint was not endless contestation. It was a different order of power. If that is what the war of position aims at, then the practices this thesis examines must be measured not only by how effectively they contest existing institutional authority but by what kind of authority they would produce if they succeeded. If Gates’s model of institution-building were to scale—if archives organized around community use rather than market price became the norm rather than the exception—would they eventually produce their own orthodoxies, their own exclusions, their own technologies of control? The honest answer is that they probably would. Every institution, however counter-hegemonic at its origin, tends over time toward the consolidation of its own authority. The question is not whether this tendency can be permanently defeated—it cannot—but whether practices whose material foundations are built on instability, illegibility, and iterative revision carry structural features that resist calcification longer and more effectively than the institutions they contest. Whether that resistance holds across generations remains open. It may be the most important question the war of position faces.

[12] There is one more difficulty. The artists this thesis examines have not received institutional recognition because they perform resistance. They have received it because the work is extraordinary—formally ambitious, materially dense, and operating at scales that command attention on any terms. But the art world does not only reward excellence. It also has a demonstrated appetite for work that challenges its own authority—transgression attracts collectors, disruption generates institutional prestige, and the museum that stages the most challenging exhibitions enhances its own credibility as a progressive institution. These incentives do not invalidate the work. They do, however, make the distinction between counter-hegemonic force and institutionally rewarded performance of that force difficult to maintain with certainty. The question is not whether these artists are sincere—I believe they are, and sincerity is beside the point. The question is whether institutional celebration, however earned, dulls the edge of the very practices this thesis has argued remain sharp.

[13] I do not think this tension is disqualifying, but I think it is permanent. It cannot be resolved—only inhabited. The practices examined in this thesis do not escape the art market. They operate within it, and the market’s capacity to metabolize dissent is one of the conditions under which the war of position must be waged. What distinguishes these practices from the mere performance of transgression is that the material conditions they produce persist independent of their market value. The gap—between what the market can capture and what the material refuses to yield—is where counter-hegemonic force survives. It is a narrow margin. But it is real, and it matters.

4. Building Without Permission#

[14] One of the things this thesis taught me is that I began it with the wrong expectation. I expected to find artists who had solved something—who had discovered, in their materials and methods, a way to operate outside the reach of the systems they contested. What I found instead were practices that had made peace with the impossibility of that position and built anyway. The bottle cap does not escape the commodity chain that produced it. It passes through the studio and re-enters circulation as a luxury object, traded at auction for prices that would have been unimaginable when the cap was pried off a bottle in a roadside market. The merchant poster does not escape the city that discarded it. It enters the Tate’s permanent collection—an institution funded by the same networks of global capital that produced the conditions of abandonment Bradford’s materials document. The archive does not escape the market. It survives because tar paintings sell. There is no clean position. There never was.

[15] And yet these practices are not cynical, and they are not futile. The distance between what I expected to find and what I actually found is, I think, the distance between two conceptions of freedom. The first—the one I brought to this project—imagines freedom as a condition achieved: a moment when the counter-hegemonic formation displaces the dominant one, and something genuinely new begins. Gramsci’s own writing can be read this way, and much of the scholarship that invokes him proceeds as though the war of position has a victory condition. The second conception is harder to hold and harder to name. It does not imagine freedom as a destination. It understands freedom as the capacity to act within constraint—to take materials saturated by the operations of power and reorganize them into forms that assert a different possibility, knowing that the reorganization is provisional, knowing that the systems being contested will adapt, knowing that the margin between what the institution absorbs and what the material refuses to yield is narrow and must be defended again tomorrow.

[16] There is a version of this argument that romanticizes endurance and mistakes persistence for progress. A bottle cap stitched into a sheet does not dismantle the trade routes that produced it. A building purchased for a dollar on Dorchester Avenue does not reverse the policy decisions that hollowed out the South Side. The war of position, honestly described, offers no guarantee that the positions won will hold, no assurance that what is built will not be absorbed, no promise that the next generation will inherit anything more than the obligation to keep building. Gramsci himself wrote the Prison Notebooks from a cell. He did not live to see the order he theorized against replaced. The theory he produced is a theory of how to work under conditions where the outcome is uncertain and the timeline is not yours to control. But hegemony, as Williams insisted, is a process, not a structure. It must be continually renewed, continually defended. And it can be continually altered by pressures not its own—acts too small to register as threat, too persistent to be dismissed as noise.

[17] When I walked into the Turbine Hall and encountered Behind the Red Moon for the first time, I did not have the language for what I was experiencing. I knew the surface was doing something to the space—reorganizing how my body moved, refusing the architecture’s certainty, holding me in a state of attention I could not resolve into understanding. Writing this thesis has been the work of finding language adequate to that experience—Gramsci’s, Williams’s, Stoler’s, and also my own, developed through the specific labor of sitting with these three artists long enough to see what connects them without flattening what makes each irreducible. I do not know whether the framework I have built will prove useful beyond these pages. I do know that the practices it describes will continue—that tomorrow morning, in a studio in Nsukka, someone will twist a wire through a piece of metal; that in Los Angeles, a poster will be stapled to a telephone pole outside a shuttered storefront; that on the South Side of Chicago, someone will walk into the Arts Bank and pull a record from a shelf.

[18] These acts will not appear in any archive of political resistance. They will not register on any scale that the dominant order uses to measure threat. They are not revolutions. They are the slow, continuous, material labor of making a world that does not yet exist inside a world that would prefer they stop. That labor is what counter-hegemony actually looks like. Not the manifesto. Not the barricade. The wire, the poster, the open door.