REWRITING CONCEPTUAL ART Critical Views [Critical ViewsIn the list—PL same series please insert] The New Museology edited by Peter Vergo Renaissance Bodies edited by Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn Modernism in Design edited by Paul Greenhalgh Interpreting Contemporary Art edited by Stephen Bann and William Allen The Portrait in Photography edited by Graham Clarke Utopias and the Millennium edited by Krishan Kumar and Stephen Bann The Cultures of Collecting edited by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal Boundaries in China edited by John Hay Frankenstein, Creation and Monstrosity edited by Stephen Bann A New Philosophy of History edited by Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner Parisian Fields edited by Michael Sheringham Sculpture and Its Reproductions edited by Anthony Hughes and Erich Ranfft Voyages and Visions Towards a Cultural History of Travel edited by Ja´s Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés Mappings edited by Denis Cosgrove REWRITING CONCEPTUAL ART Edited by Michael Newman and Jon Bird REAKTION BOOKS Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 79 Farringdon Road, London ec1m 3ju, uk www. reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 1999 Copyright © Reaktion Books Ltd 1999 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Birgit Pelzer’s essay was translated from the French by Robert Vallier. Photoset by Goodfellow & Egan Publishing Management Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Rewriting Conceptual art. – (Critical views) 1. Conceptual art 2. Conceptual art – Influence I. Newman, Michael, 1954 – II. Bird, Jon 700 isbn 1 86189 052 4 Contents Notes on the Editors and Contributors vii Introduction Michael Newman and Jon Bird 1 1 Siting the Page: Exhibiting Works in Publications – Some Examples of Conceptual Art in the USA Anne Rorimer 11 2 Mappings: Situationists and/or Conceptualists Peter Wollen 27 3 Conceptual Art and/as Philosophy Peter Osborne 47 4 Still You Ask for More: Demand, Display and ‘The New Art’ William Wood 66 5 Minding the Body: Robert Morris’s 1971 Tate Gallery Retrospective Jon Bird 88 6 Cleaning Up in the 1970s: The Work of Judy Chicago, Mary Kelly and Mierle Laderman Ukeles Helen Molesworth 107 7 Conceptual Art History or, A Home for Homes for America David Campany 123 8 A Media Art: Conceptualism in Latin America in the 1960s Alex Alberro 140 9 Matter of Words: Translations in East European Conceptualism Desa Philippi 152 10 Giulio Paolini Stephen Bann 169 11 Marcel Broodthaers: The Place of the Subject Birgit Pelzer 186 12 After Conceptual Art: Joe Scanlan’s Nesting Bookcases, Duchamp, Design and the Impossibility of Disappearing Michael Newman 206 References 222 Select Bibliography 243 Photographic Acknowledgements 245 Index 246 Notes on the Editors and Contributors michael newman is Principal Lecturer in Research at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, The London Institute. From 1994 to 1998, he was Head of Art History and Theoretical Studies at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. He holds a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Leuven, Belgium. Newman has written extensively on contempo- rary art, as well as theoretical and thematic texts on modernism and the relation- ship between criticism and philosophy. jon bird is Professor of Art and Critical Theory at Middlesex University and a tutor in the Theory Department at the Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht. He has published extensively on contemporary art and cultural theory and has curated exhibitions, including Leon Golub’s forthcoming retrospective at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Bird was a founder editor of the journal Block and a co-editor and contributor to the ‘Futures’ series of conferences and books. alexander alberro is Assistant Professor of Modern Art at the University of Florida. He is also the editor of two anthologies, Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (1999), and Two-Way Mirror Power: Dan Graham’s Writings On His Art (1999), and is preparing a book, Deprivileging Art: The Politics of Conceptual Art, for publication. stephen bann is Professor of Modern Cultural Studies at the University of Kent. He has published widely in the field of contemporary art, and was co- editor of the anthology Interpreting Contemporary Art (Reaktion, 1991). Bann also authored the introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition Global Conceptualism currently touring North America. His present field of research is the interaction between printmakers, painters and photographers in nineteenth- century France, a study which forms a sequel to his Paul Delaroche: History Painted (Reaktion, 1997). david campany is an artist and Senior Lecturer in the History and Theory of Photography at the Surrey Institute of Art and Design. He is currently conduct- ing doctoral research with Central Saint Martins School of Art in photography and the reproduction of art. Recent publications include ‘Art Photographed: viii notes on the editors and contributors Some Notes on Painting and the Book’ for the exhibition catalogue Postcards on Photography (Cambridge Darkroom). An essay on Campany’s public art prac- tice by Cynthia Rose will appear in Trade Secrets (forthcoming). helen molesworth is Assistant Professor of Art and Curator of the Amelie A. Wallace gallery at SUNY at Old Westbury. Founding editor of Documents,a journal of contemporary visual culture, Molesworth has published extensively on modern and contemporary art, including feminist issues. peter osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and director of the graduate programme in Aesthetics and Art Theory at Middlesex University, London. He is also an editor of the journal Radical Philosophy. Osborne is the author of The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (1995) and editor of A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals (1996) and From An Aesthetic Point of View (forthcoming). He is currently preparing a book on Conceptual art. birgit pelzer studied philosophy at the universities of Louvain, Cracow and Heidelberg. She is Professor of Modern Aesthetics and Philosophy at the Ecoles Supérieures d’Art Plastiques St-Luc et Erg, Brussels. Pelzer has published widely on literature, feminism and contemporary art in monographs, catalogues and periodicals. desa philippi is a writer and art historian based in London. Her art criticism has appeared in Artforum, October, Artscribe International, Art&Design, Third Text, Parachute and the Oxford Art Journal. anne rorimer specializes in post-war art, with an emphasis on the 1960s and ’70s. A former curator in the Department of Twentieth-century Painting and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, she has published widely on Conceptual art and was co-curator of Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965–1975, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1995–6. peter wollen is Professor of Film Studies and chair of the Department of Film and Television at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969), Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture (1993) and Singin’ in the Rain (1993). william wood is a critic and art historian with numerous publications on contemporary art. He has held editorial posts with C magazine, Vanguard and Parachute, and has taught at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Introduction jon bird and michael newman This book is not a history of Conceptual art. It does not make any claims to a geographically comprehensive coverage and it does not advocate a conceptual-type approach to art practice as superseding other approaches or definitively breaking down the barrier of the aesthetic. So what are our aims in compiling this collection of essays? As the title sug- gests, the book looks at ways in which Conceptual art is currently being ‘rewritten’, gathering together, for the first time in a single volume, con- tributions from a number – although by no means all – of the younger art historians who have been researching the movement and are beginning to publish, as well as pieces by critics and historians who were contemporary with, or followed closely on, the development of the movement. We have also attempted to indicate the importance of the extension of the history of Conceptual art (or ‘Conceptualism’ in its broader sense) to include centres other than North America and Western Europe; indeed, to recog- nize its local specificity and its global reach – a project that has already been pursued on a larger scale by the important exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, initiated by the Queens Museum of Art, New York, in 1999.1 Furthermore, the process of ‘rewrit- ing’ is one of reflection and reinterpretation, leading to a reassessment of historical and critical evaluations in the context of new insights from both theory and practice. The trace of Conceptualism in contemporary work is addressed here, as well as essays which review a specific moment in the narratives of Conceptual art, or reconsider the significance of par- ticular artists and their relationship to media forms, institutions and sites for practice. The increasing importance in both art practice and the expanding field of studies in visual culture of the museum as an expression of national, cultural and ideological interests, of strategies and techniques of classifi- cation and modes of display, and of the interrelationship between the institutions and contexts in which artworks are located, is reflected in 2 jon bird and michael newman essays by Jon Bird, William Wood and Michael Newman. Bird’s essay on Robert Morris’s 1971 Tate Gallery retrospective examines an early moment in Conceptual art’s critique of social and cultural value systems and the possibility of a different kind of relation between work and viewer, and emphazises the porousness of the categories of Conceptual art, Minimalism and performance.