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Conceptual 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions Author(s): Benjamin H. D. Buchloh Source: October, Vol. 55 (Winter, 1990), pp. 105-143 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778941 . Accessed: 26/04/2013 16:19

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BENJAMIN H. D. BUCHLOH

This monstercalled beautyis noteternal. We knowthat our breathhad no beginningand will neverstop, but we can, aboveall, conceiveof the world's creationand its end.

- Apollinaire,Les peintrescubistes

Allergicto any relapseinto magic, art is part and parcel ofthe disenchant- mentof theworld, to use Max Weber'sterm. It is inextricablyintertwined withrationalization. What means and productivemethods art has at its disposal are all derivedfrom this nexus. -Theodor Adorno

A twenty-yeardistance separates us fromthe historicalmoment of Concep- tual Art. It is a distance that both allows and obliges us to contemplate the movement'shistory in a broader perspectivethan that of the convictionsheld during the decade of its emergence and operation (roughly from 1965 to its temporarydisappearance in 1975). For to historicizeConceptual Art requires, firstof all, a clarificationof the wide range of oftenconflicting positions and the mutuallyexclusive types of investigationthat were generated during thisperiod. But beyond that there are broader problemsof method and of "interest." For at thisjuncture, any historicizationhas to considerwhat typeof questionsan art-historicalapproach - traditionallybased on the studyof visual objects- can legitimatelypose or hope to answer in the context of artisticpractices that explicitlyinsisted on being addressed outside of the parametersof the production of formallyordered, perceptual objects, and certainlyoutside of those of art historyand criticism.And, further,such an historicizationmust also address the

* An earlier versionof thisessay was published in L'art conceptuel:une (Paris: Mus&e d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1989).

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Erik Statie.Bureaucratic Sonatina. 1917.

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currencyof the historicalobject, i.e., the motivationto rediscover Conceptual Art fromthe vantage point of the late 1980s: the dialecticthat linksConceptual Art, as the most rigorous eliminationof visualityand traditionaldefinitions of ,to thisdecade of a ratherviolent restoration of traditionalartistic formsand procedures of production. It is withCubism, of course, thatelements of language surfaceprogramma- tically within the visual field for the firsttime in the historyof modernist ,in what can be seen as a legacy of Mallarm&. It is there too that a parallel is establishedbetween the emergingstructuralist analysis of language and the formalistexamination of representation.But Conceptual practices went beyond such mappingof the linguisticmodel onto the perceptual , outdis- tancing as they did the spatializationof language and the temporalizationof visual structure.Because the proposal inherentin Conceptual Art was to replace the object of spatialand perceptual experience by linguisticdefinition alone (the work as analyticproposition), it thus constitutedthe most consequential assault on the status of that object: its visuality,its commoditystatus, and its formof distribution.Confronting the fullrange of the implicationsof Duchamp's legacy for the firsttime, Conceptual practices,furthermore, reflected upon the con- structionand the role (or the death) of the authorjust as much as theyredefined the conditionsof receivershipand the role of the spectator.Thus theyperformed the postwarperiod's most rigorous investigationof the conventionsof pictorial and sculptural representationand a critique of the traditionalparadigms of visuality. From its very beginning,the historicphase in which Conceptual Art was developed comprisessuch a complex range of mutuallyopposed approaches that any attemptat a retrospectivesurvey must beware of the forcefulvoices (mostly those of the artiststhemselves) demanding respectfor the purityand orthodoxy of the movement.Precisely because of this range of implicationsof Conceptual Art, it would seem imperativeto resista constructionof its historyin termsof a stylistichomogenization, which would limitthat to a group of individuals and a set of strictlydefined practices and historicalinterventions (such as, for example, the activitiesinitiated by Seth Siegelaub in New York in 1968 or the authoritarianquests for orthodoxyby the & Language group). To historicizeConcept Art (to use the termas it was coined by in 1961)1 at thismoment, then, requires more than a mere reconstructionof the

1. As is usual with stylisticformations in the historyof art, the origin and the name of the movementare heavilycontested by its major participants.Barry, Kosuth, and Weiner, for example, vehementlydenied in recent conversationswith the author any historicalconnection to or even knowledge of the movement of the early 1960s. Nevertheless,at least with regard to the inventionof the term,it seems correctwhen Henry Flyntclaims that he is "the originatorof art, the most influentialcontemporary art trend. In 1961 I authored (and copyrighted)the phrase 'concept art,' the rationale for it and the firstcompositions labeled 'concept art.' My document was firstprinted in An Anthology,ed. , New York, 1962." (La Monte Young's An Anthologywas in fact published in 1963.)

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movement'sself-declared primary actors or a scholarlyobedience to theirpro- claimed purityof intentionsand operations.2Their convictionswere voiced with the (by now often hilarious) self-righteousnessthat is continuous within the traditionof hypertrophicclaims made in avant-gardedeclarations of the twen- tiethcentury. For example, one of the campaign statementsby from the late 1960s asserts: "Art before the modern period is as much art as Neanderthal man is man. It is for this reason that around the same time I replaced the term 'work' for art proposition.Because a conceptual workof art in the traditionalsense, is a contradictionin terms."' It seems crucial to rememberthat the oppositionswithin the formationof Conceptual Art arose partlyfrom the differentreadings of Minimal (and of its pictorialequivalents in the paintingof Mangold, Ryman,and Stella) and in the consequences the generationof artistsemerging in 1965 drew from those readings-just as the divergencesalso resultedfrom the impactof various artistswithin the Minimalistmovement as one or another was chosen by the new generationas itscentral figures of reference.For example, seems to have been primarilyengaged withthe workof Sol LeWitt. In 1965 he organized LeWitt's firstone-person exhibition (held in his gallery,called Daniels Gallery); in 1967 he wrote the essay "Two Structures:Sol LeWitt"; and in 1969 he concluded the introductionto his self-publishedvolume of writingsentitled End Momentsas follows:"It should be obvious the importanceSol LeWitt's work has had for mywork. In the articlehere included (writtenfirst in 1967, rewrittenin 1969) I hope only that the after-the-factappreciation hasn't too much sub- merged his seminal work into mycategories."4

A second contestantfor the termwas Edward Kienholz, withhis series of ConceptTableaux in 1963 (in fact,occasionally he is stillcredited with the discoveryof the term.See forexample Roberta Smith'sessay "Conceptual Art," in Conceptsof , ed. Nikos Stangos [New York: Harper and Row, 1981], pp. 256-70). Joseph Kosuth claims in his "Sixth Investigation1969 Proposition14" (publishedby Gerd de Vries, Cologne, 1971, n.p.) thathe used the term"conceptual" forthe firsttime "in a seriesof notes dated 1966 and publisheda year later in a catalogue foran exhibitiontitled Non-Anthropomorphic Art at the now defunctLannis Gallery in New York." And then there are of course (most officiallyaccepted by all participants)Sol LeWitt's two famoustexts from 1967 and 1969, the "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," firstpublished in , vol. V, no. 10, pp. 56- 57 and "Sentences on Conceptual Art," firstpublished in Art& Language,vol. 1, no. 1 (May 1969), pp. 11-13. 2. For a typicalexample of an attemptto writethe historyof Conceptual Art by blindlyadopting and repeating the claims and convictionsof one of that history'sfigures, see Gudrun Inboden, "JosephKosuth-- and Criticof ,"in JosephKosuth: The Makingof Meaning (Stutt- gart: StaatsgalerieStuttgart, 1981), pp. 11-27. 3. Joseph Kosuth, The SixthInvestigation 1969 Proposition14 (Cologne: Gerd De Vries/Paul Maenz, 1971), n. p. 4. Dan Graham, End Moments(New York, 1969), n.p. The other Minimalistswith whose work Graham seems to have been particularlyinvolved were Dan Flavin (Graham wrote the catalogue essay for Flavin's exhibitionat the Museum of ContemporaryArt in Chicago in 1967) and Robert Morris (whose work he discussed later extensivelyin his essay "Income Piece" in 1973).

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MelBochner. Working and OtherVisible Thingson PaperNot NecessarilyMeant to Be Viewedas Art.Installation, School of Visual Gallery,December, 1966.

Mel Bochner,by contrast,seems to have chosen Dan Flavin as his primary figureof reference.He wroteone of the firstessays on Dan Flavin (it is in facta text-collageof accumulated quotations,all of which relate in one way or the other to Flavin's work).5Shortly thereafter, the text-collageas a presentational mode would, indeed, become formativewithin Bochner's activities,for in the same year he organized what was probablythe firsttruly conceptual exhibition (both in termsof materialsbeing exhibitedand in termsof presentationalstyle). EntitledWorking Drawings and OtherVisible Things on Paper NotNecessarily Meant to Be Viewedas Art(at the School of in 1966), most of the Minimal artistswere presentalong witha numberof then stillrather unknown Post-Mini- mal and Conceptual .Having assembled drawings,sketches, documents, tabulations,and other paraphernaliaof the productionprocess, the exhibition limiteditself to presentingthe "originals" in Xeroxes assembledinto four loose- leaf bindersthat were installedon pedestalsin the centerof the exhibitionspace. While one should not overestimatethe importanceof such features(nor should one underestimatethe pragmaticsof such a presentationalstyle), Bochner's interventionclearly moved to transformboth the formatand space of exhibi- tions.As such,it indicatesthat the kindof transformationof exhibitionspace and of the devices throughwhich art is presentedthat was accomplishedtwo years

5. Mel Bochner, "Less is Less (for Dan Flavin)," Artand Artists(Summer 1966).

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later by Seth Siegelaub's exhibitionsand publications(e.g., The XeroxBook) had already become a common concern of the generationof post-Minimalartists. A thirdexample of the close generationalsequencing would be the factthat JosephKosuth seems to have chosen Donald Juddas his keyfigure: at leastone of the early tautologicalneon works from the Proto-Investigationsis dedicated to Donald Judd; and throughoutthe second part of "Art afterPhilosophy" (pub- lished in November, 1969), Judd's name, work,and writingsare invoked with the same frequencyas thoseof Duchamp and Reinhardt.At the end of thisessay, Kosuth explicitlystates: "I would hastilyadd to that,however, that I was cer- tainlymuch more influencedby ,Duchamp via Johnsand Morris,

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Sol LeWitt.Wall FloorPiece (Three Squares).1966.

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and by Donald Judd than I ever was specificallyby LeWitt . .. Pollock and Judd are, I feel, the beginningand end of American dominance in art."6

Sol LeWitt'sStructures

It would seem that LeWitt's proto-Conceptual work of the early 1960s originatedin an understandingof the essentialdilemma thathas haunted artistic production since 1913, when its basic paradigms of opposition were first formulated-a dilemma that could be described as the conflictbetween struc- tural specificityand random organization. For the need, on the one hand, for both a systematicreduction and an empiricalverification of the perceptual data of a visual structurestands opposed to the desire, on the other hand, to assign a new "idea" or meaning to an object randomly(in the manner of Mallarme's "transposition")as though the object were an empty(linguistic) signifier. This was the dilemma that Roland Barthesdescribed in 1956 as the "diffi- cultyof our times" in the concluding paragraphs of Mythologies: It seems that thisis a difficultypertaining to our times:there is as yet only one possible choice, and thischoice can bear only on two equally extrememethods: either to posit a realitywhich is entirelypermeable to history,and ideologize; or, conversely,to posit a realitywhich is ultimatelyimpenetrable, irreducible, and, in this case, poetize. In a word, I do not yet see a synthesisbetween and poetry(by poetryI understand,in a verygeneral way,the search for the inalien- able meaning of things).7 Both critiquesof the traditionalpractices of representationin the American postwarcontext had at firstappeared mutuallyexclusive and had oftenfiercely attacked each other. For example, Reinhardt's extreme form of self-critical, perceptual positivismhad gone too far for most of the New York School artists and certainlyfor the apologistsof American modernism,mainly Greenberg and Fried, who had constructeda paradoxical dogma of transcendentalismand self- referentialcritique. On the other hand, Reinhardtwas as vociferousas they- if

6. Joseph Kosuth, "Art after " (Part II), in The Makingof Meaning,p. 175. The list would seem complete,if it were not forthe absence of Mel Bochner's and 's name, and its explicit negation of the importance of Sol LeWitt. According to Bochner, who had become an instructorat the School of Visual Arts in 1965, Joseph Kosuth worked withhim as a studentin 1965 and 1966. Dan Graham mentioned that during that time Kosuth was also a frequentvisitor to the studios of On Kawara and Sol LeWitt. Kosuth's explicitnegation makes one wonder whetherit was not preciselySol LeWitt's series of the so-called "Structures" (such as Red Square, WhiteLetters, for example, produced in 1962 and exhibitedin 1965) thatwas one of the crucial pointsof departurefor the formulationof Kosuth's Proto-Investigations. 7. ,Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 158.

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not more so - in his contemptfor the opposite,which is to say,the Duchampian tradition.This is evident in Ad Reinhardt'scondescending remarks about both Duchamp--"I've never approved or liked anythingabout . You have to chose between Duchamp and Mondrian" -and his legacyas repre- sented throughCage and Rauschenberg--"Then the whole mixture,the num- ber of poets and musiciansand writersmixed up withart. Disreputable. Cage, Cunningham,Johns, Rauschenberg. I'm against the mixture of all , against the mixtureof art and life you know, everydaylife."8 What slid by unnoticedwas the factthat both these critiquesof representa- tion led to highlycomparable formaland structuralresults (e.g., Rauschenberg's monochromes in 1951-1953 and Reinhardt's monochromes such as Black Quadruptychin 1955). Furthermore,even while made from opposite vantage points,the criticalarguments accompanying such workssystematically denied the traditionalprinciples and functionsof visual representation,constructing aston- ishinglysimilar litanies of negation. This is as evident,for example, in the text prepared byJohn Cage for Rauschenberg'sWhite in 1953 as it is in Ad Reinhardt's 1962 manifesto"Art as Art." FirstCage: To whom,No subject,No image, No ,No object, No beauty,No , No technique (no why), No idea, No intention,No art, No feeling,No black, No white no (and). After careful considerationI have come to the conclusion that there is nothingin these paintings that could not be changed, that theycan be seen in any lightand are not destroyedby the action of . Hallelujah! the blind can see again; the water is fine.9 And then Ad Reinhardt's manifestofor his own "Art as Art" principle: No lines or imaginings,no shapes or composingsor representings,no visionsor sensationsor impulses,no symbolsor signs or impastos,no decoratingsor coloringsor picturings,no pleasures or pains, no acci- dents or ready-mades,no things,no ideas, no relations,no attributes, no qualities--nothing that is not of the essence.'0 Ad Reinhardt's empiricistAmerican (condensed in his "Art as Art" formula)and Duchamp's critique of visuality(voiced for example in the

8. The firstof the two quotationsis to be found in Ad Reinhardt'sSkowhegan lecture,delivered in 1967, quoted by Lucy Lippard in Ad Reinhardt(New York, 1981), p. 195. The second statement appears in an interviewwith Mary Fuller, published as "An Ad Reinhardt Monologue," Artforum, vol. 10 (November 1971), pp. 36-41. 9. (statementin reaction to the controversyengendered by the exhibitionof Raus- chenberg's all-whitepaintings at the Stable Gallery, September 15-October 3, 1953). Printed in Emily Genauer's column in the New YorkHerald Tribune,December 27, 1953, p. 6 (section 4). 10. Ad Reinhardt,"Art as Art," ArtInternational (December 1962). Reprintedin Artas Art:The SelectedWritings of Ad Reinhardt,ed. (New York: Viking, 1975), p. 56.

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famous quip: "All my work in the period before the Nude was visual painting. Then I came to the idea. "") appear in the historicallyrather unlikely fusion of Kosuth's attemptto integrate... the two positionsin the mid-1960s, leading to his own formula,which he deployed startingin 1966, "Art as Idea as Idea." It should be noted, however,that the strangeadmixture of the nominalistposition of Duchamp (and its consequences) and the positivistposition of Reinhardt(and its implications)was not only accomplished in 1965 with the beginnings of Conceptual Art but was well-preparedin the work of , who in his Black Paintingsfrom 1959 claimed both Rauschenberg'smonochrome paintings and Reinhardt'spaintings as points of departure. Finally,it was the work of Sol LeWitt- in particularwork such as his Structures- thatdemarcates that precise transition,integrating as they do both language and visual sign in a structural model. The surfacesof these Structuresfrom 1961 to 1962 (some of which used single framesfrom Muybridge's serial photographs)carried inscriptionsin bland letteringidentifying the hue and shape of those surfaces(e.g., "RED SQUARE") and the inscriptionitself (e.g., "WHITE LETTERS"). Since these inscriptions named either the support or the inscription(or, in the middle section of the painting,both supportand inscriptionin a paradoxical inversion),they created a continuousconflict in the viewer/reader.This conflictwas notjust over whichof the two roles should be performedin relationto the painting.To a largerextent it concerned the reliabilityof the given informationand the sequence of that information:was the inscriptionto be given primacyover the visual qualities identifiedby the linguisticentity, or was the perceptual experience of the visual, formal,and chromaticelement anteriorto its mere denominationby language? Clearly this "mapping of the linguisticonto the perceptual" was not argu- ing in favorof "the idea" -or linguisticprimacy - or the definitionof the as an analyticproposition. Quite to the contrary,the permutationalcharac- ter of the work suggested that the viewer/readersystematically perform all the visual and textual options the painting'sparameters allowed for. This included an acknowledgmentof the painting'scentral, square element: a spatial void that revealed the underlyingwall surface as the painting's architecturalsupport in actual space, therebysuspending the reading of the paintingbetween architec- tural structureand linguisticdefinition. Rather than privilegingone over the other, LeWitt's work (in its dialogue withJasper Johns's legacy of paradox) insistedon forcingthe inherentcontradic- tions of the two spheres (that of the perceptual experience and that of the linguisticexperience) into the highestpossible relief. Unlike Frank Stella's re- sponse to Johns,which forced modernistself-referentiality one step furtherinto the ultimatecul de sac of its positivistconvictions (his notoriousstatement "what

11. Marcel Duchamp, interviewwith Francis Roberts (1963), ArtNews, (December 1968), p. 46.

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you see is whatyou see" would attestto thatjust as much as the developmentof his later work),12Sol LeWitt's dialogue (with both Johns and Stella, and ulti-

12. Stella's famous statementwas of course made in the conversationbetween Bruce Glaser, Donald Judd, and himself,in February 1964, and published in Art News (September 1966), pp. 55-61. To what extent the problem of this dilemma haunted the generation of Minimal artists becomes evident when almost ten years later, in an interviewwith Jack Burnham,Robert Morris would stillseem to be responding(if perhaps unconsciously)to Stella's notoriousstatement: Paintingceased to interestme. There were certain thingsabout it that seemed very problematicto me. ... There was a big conflictbetween the factof doing thisthing, and what it looked like later. It just didn't seem to make much sense to me. Primarily

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mately,of course, with Greenberg) developed a dialectical position withregard to the positivistlegacy. In contrastto Stella, his work now revealed that the modernistcompulsion for empiricistself-reflexiveness not only originated in the scientificpositivism which is the founding logic of (undergirding its industrialforms of productionjust as much as itsscience and theory),but that,for an artisticpractice that internalizedthis positivismby insistingon a purely empiricistapproach to vision, there would be a final destiny.This destinywould be to aspire to the condition of tautology. It is not surprising,then, that when LeWitt formulatedhis second text on Conceptual Art-in his "Sentences on Conceptual Art" from the spring of firstsentence should programmaticallystate the radical difference 1969-rthe between the logic of scientificproduction and that of aestheticexperience: 1. Conceptual artistsare mysticsrather than rationalists.They leap to conclusionsthat logic cannot reach. 2. Rationaljudgments repeat rationaljudgments. 3. Irrationaljudgments lead to new experience.13

RobertMorris's Paradoxes

The problemhas beenfor sometime one ofideas -those mostadmired are theones with the biggest, most incisive ideas (e.g.,Cage & Duchamp) . I thinkthat today art is a formof .

- Robert Morris,letter to Henry Flynt,8/13/1962

Quite evidently,Morris's approach to Duchamp, in the early 1960s, had already been based on reading the readymade in analogy with a Saussurean model of language: a model where meaning is generated by structuralrelation- ships. As Morrisrecalls, his own "fascinationwith and respectfor Duchamp was related to his linguisticfixation, to the idea that all of his operations were ultimatelybuilt on a sophisticatedunderstanding of language itself."'4Accord- ingly, Morris's early work (from 1961 to 1963) already pointed toward an understandingof Duchamp thattranscended the limiteddefinition of the ready-

because there was an activityI did in time,and there was a certain method to it. And thatdidn't seem to have any relationshipto the thingat all. There is a certainresolution in the theaterwhere there is real time,and whatyou do is whatyou do. (emphasisadded) Robert Morris, unpublished interviewwith Jack Burnham, November 21, 1975, Robert Morris Archive.Quoted in Maurice Berger,Labyrinths: Robert Morris, , and the1960s (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), p. 25. 13. Sol LeWitt, "Sentences on Conceptual Art," firstpublished in 0-9, New York (1969), and Art-Language,Coventry (May 1969), p. 11. 14. Robert Morrisas quoted in Berger, Labyrinths,p. 22.

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made as the mere displacementof traditionalmodes of artisticproduction by a new aestheticof the speech act ("this is a workof art if I say so"). And in marked distinctionfrom the Conceptualists'subsequent exclusive focus on the unassisted readymades, Morris had, from the late 1950s when he discovered Duchamp, been particularlyengaged with work such as ThreeStandard Stoppagesand the Notesfor theLarge Glass (The GreenBox). Morris'sproduction from the early 1960s, in particularworks like Card File (1962), MeteredBulb (1963), I-Box (1963), Litanies,and the Statementof Aesthetic Withdrawal,also entitledDocument (1963), indicateda reading of Duchamp that clearlywent beyondJohns's, leading towardsa structuraland semioticdefinition of the functionsof the readymade. As Morrisdescribed it retrospectivelyin his 1970 essay "Some Notes on the Phenomenologyof Making": There is a binaryswing between the arbitraryand the nonarbitraryor "motivated" which is . . . an historical,evolutionary, or diachronic featureof language's developmentand change. Language is not plas- ticart but both are formsof human behaviorand the structuresof one can be compared to the structuresof the other.'5 While it is worthnoticing that by 1970 Morrisalready reaffirmedapodicti- cally the ontological characterof the category"plastic" art versus that of "lan- guage," it was in the early 1960s that his assaults on the traditionalconcepts of visualityand plasticityhad already begun to lay some of the crucial foundations for the developmentof an art practice emphasizingits parallels,if not identity, with the systemsof linguisticsigns, i.e., Conceptual Art. Most importantly,as early as 1961 in his Box withthe Sound of Its Own Making, Morris had ruptured both. On the one hand, it dispenses with the Modernist quest for medium-specificpurity as much as with its sequel in the positivistconviction of a purelyperceptual experience operatingin Stella's visual tautologiesand the earlyphases of Minimalism.And on the other,by counteract- ing the supremacyof the visualwith that of an auditoryexperience of equal ifnot higher importance,he renewed the Duchampian quest for a nonretinalart. In Box withthe Sound ofIts Own Making,as much as in the subsequent works,the critique of the hegemony of traditionalcategories of the visual is enacted not only in the (acoustic or tactile) disturbanceof the purityof perceptual experi- ence, but it is performedas well througha literalistact of denyingthe viewer practicallyall (at least traditionallydefined) visual information. This strategyof a "perceptual withdrawal"leads in each of the worksfrom the early 1960s to a differentanalysis of the constituentfeatures of the struc- tured object and the modes of reading it generates. In I-Box, for example, the vieweris confrontedwith a semioticpun (on the wordsI and eye)just as much as

15. Robert Morris, "Some Notes on the Phenomenologyof Making: The Search for the Moti- vated," Artforum,vol. 9 (April 1970), p. 63.

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witha structuralsleight of hand fromthe tactile(the viewer has to manipulate the box physicallyto see the I of the artist)through the linguisticsign (the letterI definesthe shape of the framing/displaydevice: the "door" of the box) to the visualrepresentation (the nude photographicportrait of the artist)and back. It is of course this very tripartitedivision of the aestheticsignifier- its separation into object, linguisticsign, and photographicreproduction-that we will en- counter in infinitevariations, didactically simplified (to operate as stunning tautologies)and stylisticallydesigned (to take the place of paintings)in Kosuth's Proto-Investigationsafter 1966. In Document(Statement of AestheticWithdrawal), Morris takes the literal negationof the visual even further,in clarifyingthat after Duchamp the ready- made is notjust a neutralanalytic proposition (in the mannerof an underlying statementsuch as "this is a work of art"). Beginningwith the readymade,the workof art had become the ultimatesubject of a legal definitionand the resultof institutionalvalidation. In the absence of any specificallyvisual qualitiesand due

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to the manifestlack of any (artistic)manual competenceas a criterionof distinc- tion, all the traditional criteria of aesthetic judgment--of taste and of connoisseurship- have been programmaticallyvoided. The resultof thisis that the definitionof the aestheticbecomes on the one hand a matterof linguistic convention and on the other the functionof both a legal contract and an institutionaldiscourse (a discourse of power ratherthan taste). This erosion works,then, not just against the hegemonyof the visual,but against the possibilityof any other aspect of the aestheticexperience as being autonomous and self-sufficient.That the introductionof legalisticlanguage and an administrativestyle of the materialpresentation of the artisticobject could effectsuch an erosion had of course been prefiguredin Duchamp's practiceas well. In 1944 he had hired a notaryto inscribea statementof authenticityon his 1919 L.H.O.O.Q., affirmingthat ". . . this is to certifythat this is the original

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RobertMorris. Untitled (Statement of Aesthetic Withdrawal).1963.

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'ready-made'L.H.O.O.Q. Paris 1919." What was possiblystill a pragmaticmaneu- ver with Duchamp (although certainlyone in line with the pleasure he took in contemplatingthe vanishingbasis for the legitimatedefinition of the workof art in visual competence and manual skill alone) would soon become one of the constituentfeatures of subsequent developmentsin Conceptual Art. Most ob- viouslyoperating in the certificatesissued by definingpersons or partial persons as temporaryor lifetimeworks of art (1960-61), this is to be found at the same time in 's certificatesassigning zones of immaterial pictorialsensibility to the various collectorswho acquired them. But thisaesthetic of linguisticconventions and legalisticarrangements not only denies the validityof the traditionalstudio aesthetic, it also cancels the aestheticof productionand consumptionwhich had stillgoverned and Minimalism. Justas the modernistcritique (and ultimateprohibition) of figurativerepre- sentationhad become the increasinglydogmatic law for pictorialproduction in the firstdecade of the twentiethcentury, so Conceptual Art now instatedthe prohibitionof any and all visualityas the inescapable aestheticrule forthe end of the twentiethcentury. Just as the readymade had negated not only figurative representation,authenticity, and authorship while introducingrepetition and the series (i.e., the law of industrialproduction) to replace the studio aestheticof the handcraftedoriginal, Conceptual Art came to displace even thatimage of the mass-producedobject and its aestheticizedforms in Pop Art, replacing an aes- theticof industrialproduction and consumptionwith an aestheticof administra- tive and legal organizationand institutionalvalidation.

Edward Ruscha's Books

One major example of these tendencies--acknowledged both by Dan Gra- ham as a major inspirationfor his own "Homes for America" and by Kosuth, whose "Art after Philosophy" names him as a proto-Conceptualartist-would be the early book work of . Among the key strategiesof future Conceptual Art that were initiatedby Ruscha in 1963 were the following:to chose the vernacular (e.g., )as referent;to deploy systematicallyas the representationalmedium; and to develop a new form of distribution(e.g., the commerciallyproduced book as opposed to the tradition- ally craftedlivre d'artiste. Typically,reference to architecturein any formwhatever would have been unthinkablein the context of American-typeformalism and Abstract Expres- sionism(or withinthe European postwaraesthetic for that matter) until the early 1960s. The devotion to a privateaesthetic of contemplativeexperience, with its concomitantabsence of any systematicreflection of the social functionsof artistic production and their potential and actual publics, had, in fact,precluded any explorationof the interdependenceof architecturaland artisticproduction, be it

This content downloaded from 146.96.128.36 on Fri, 26 Apr 2013 16:19:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions VARIOUS Edward Ruscha. Four Books. 1962-1966.

SMALLAsommmiLsift X,ASo LINE...... ~~~~...... FIRES.. . . S TATsIONS?... NINE REAL

SWIMMING ESTATE

oPPORTUmms3 POOLS AndyWarhol. From Thirteen Most Wanted Men. 1964.

even in the mostsuperficial and trivialforms of architecturaldecor.16 It was not until the emergenceof Pop Art in the early 1960s, in particularin the work of , Claes Oldenburg, and Edward Ruscha, that the refer- ences to monumentalsculpture (even in itsnegation as theAnti-Monument) and to vernaculararchitecture reintroduced (even ifonly by implication)a reflectionon public (architecturaland domestic)space, therebyforegrounding the absence of a developed artisticreflection on the problematicof the contemporarypublics. In January1963 (the year of Duchamp's firstAmerican retrospective, held at the Pasadena ), Ruscha, a relativelyunknown Los Angeles artist, decided to publisha book entitledTwenty-Six Gasoline Stations. The book, modest

16. It would be worthwhileto explore the factthat artists like ArshileGorky under the impactof the WPA programwould stillhave been concernedwith the aestheticsof muralpainting when he was commissionedto decorate the NewarkAirport building, and thateven Pollock tinkeredwith the idea of an architecturaldimension for his paintings,wondering whether they could be transformedinto architecturalpanels. As is well known,Mark Rothko'sinvolvement with the Seagram Corporationto produce a set of decorativepanels for theircorporate headquartersended in disaster,and Barnett Newman's synagogueproject was abandoned as well. All of these exceptionswould confirmthe rule that the postwar aesthetic had undergone the most rigorous privatizationand a reversal of the reflectionon the inextricablelink between artisticproduction and public social experience as they had marked the 1920s.

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in formatand production,was as removedfrom the traditionof the artist'sbook as itsiconography was opposed to everyaspect of the officialAmerican art of the 1950s and early '60s: the legacy of Abstract Expressionismand Field painting. The book was, however, not so alien to the artisticthought of the emerginggeneration, if one remembersthat the year before an unknownartist fromNew York by the name of AndyWarhol had exhibiteda serialarrangement of thirty-twostenciled paintingsdepicting Campbell Soup cans arranged like objects on shelvesin the Ferus Gallery.While both and Ruscha accepted a notionof public experiencethat was inescapablycontained in the conditionsof consumption,both artistsaltered the mode of productionas well as the formof distributionof theirwork such thata differentpublic was potentiallyaddressed. Ruscha's vernaculariconography evolved to the same extent as Warhol's had fromthe Duchamp and Cage legacy of an aestheticof "indifference,"and fromthe commitmentto an antihierarchicalorganization of a universallyvalid facticity,operating as total affirmation.Indeed, random samplingand aleatory choice froman infinityof possible objects (Ruscha's Twenty-SixGasoline Stations, Warhol's ThirteenMost WantedMen) would soon become essentialstrategies of the aestheticof Conceptual Art: one thinksof AlighieroBoetti's The Thousand LongestRivers, of Robert Barry'sOne Billion Dots, of On Kawara's One Million

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Years,or, most significantlyin thiscontext, of Doug Huebler's life-longproject, entitledVariable Piece: 70. This work claims to document photographically"the existenceof everyonealive in order to produce the mostauthentic and inclusive representationof the human species that may be'assembled in that manner. Editions of this work will be periodicallyissued in a varietyof topical modes: '100,000 people,' '1,000,000 people,' '10,000,000 people,' . . . etc." Or again, there are the worksby StanleyBrouwn or where in each case an arbitrary,abstract principle of pure quantificationreplaces traditionalprinci- ples of pictorial or sculptural organization and/or compositional relational order. In the same mannerthat Ruscha's books shiftedthe formalorganization of the representation,the mode of presentationitself became transformed:instead of liftingphotographic (or print-derived)imagery from mass-cultural sources and transformingthese images into painting (as Warhol and the Pop Artistshad practicedit), Ruscha would now deploy photographydirectly, in an appropriate printingmedium. And it was a particularlylaconic typeof photographyat that, one thatexplicitly situated itself as much outside of all conventionsof art photog- raphyas outside of those of the venerable traditionof documentaryphotogra- phy, least of all that of "concerned" photography.This devotion to a deadpan, anonymous,amateurish approach to photographicform corresponds exactly to Ruscha's iconographicchoice of the architecturalbanal. Thus at all three levels -, representationalform, mode of distribution-the given forms of artisticobject no longer seemed acceptable in their traditionallyspecialized and privilegedpositions. As Victor Burgin put it with hindsight:"One of the thingsConceptual Art attemptedwas the dismantlingof the hierarchyof media according to which painting (sculpture trailingslightly behind it) is assumed inherentlysuperior to, most notably,photography.""7 Accordingly,even in 1965- 66, withthe earlieststages of Conceptual prac- tices, we witnessthe emergence of diametricallyopposed approaches: Joseph Kosuth's Proto-Investigationson the one hand (according to their author con- ceived and produced in 1965);18 and a work such as Dan Graham's Homesfor

17. Victor Burgin, "The Absence of Presence," in The End of Art Theory(Atlantic Highlands, 1986), p. 34. 18. In the preparationof thisessay, I have not been able to finda single source or documentthat would confirmwith definitecredibility Kosuth's claim that these works of the Proto-Investigations were actuallyproduced and existed physicallyin 1965 or 1966, when he (at that time twentyyears old) was stilla studentat the School of Visual Artsin New York. Nor was Kosuth able to provide any documentsto make the claims verifiable.By contrastthese claimswere explicitlycontested by all the artistsI interviewedwho knew Kosuth at that time, none of them rememberingseeing any of the Proto-Investigationsbefore February 1967, in the exhibitionNon-Anthropomorphic Art by Four Young Artists,organized by Joseph Kosuth at the Lannis Gallery. The artistswith whom I conducted interviewswere Robert Barry,Mel Bochner,Dan Graham,and . I am not necessar- ily suggestingthat the Proto-Investigationscould not have been done by Kosuth at the age of twenty (afterall, Frank Stella had painted his Black Paintingsat age twenty-three),or that the logical steps

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Dan Graham.Homes for America (Arts Magazine). December1966.

Americaon the other. Publishedin ArtsMagazine in December 1966, the latteris a work which- unknownto most and long unrecognized-programmatically emphasized structuralcontingency and contextuality,addressing crucial ques- tionsof presentationand distribution,of audience and authorship.At the same time the work linked Minimalism'sesoteric and self-reflexiveaesthetics of per- mutationto a perspectiveon the architectureof mass (thereby redefining the legacyof Pop Art). The Minimalists'detachment from any representationof contemporarysocial experience upon which Pop Art had insisted,however furtively,resulted from their attempt to constructmodels of visual meaningand experience thatjuxtaposed formalreduction with a structuraland phenomeno- logical model of perception.

fusingDuchamp and Reinhardtwith Minimalism and Pop Art leading up to the Proto-Investigations could not have been takenby an artistof Kosuth's historicalawareness and strategicintelligence. But I am sayingthat none of the workdated by Kosuth to 1965 or 1966 can -until furtherevidence is produced-actually be documentedas 1965 or 1966 or dated withany credibility.By contrast,the word paintingsof On Kawara (whose studioKosuth visited frequently at thattime), such as Something, are reproduced and documented.

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By contrast,Graham's workargued foran analysisof (visual) meaning that defined signs as both structurallyconstituted within the relationsof language's systemand grounded in the referentof social and politicalexperience. Further, Graham's dialectical conception of visual representationpolemically collapsed the differencebetween the spaces of productionand those of reproduction(what Seth Siegelaub would, in 1969, call primaryand secondaryinformation).'9 Antic- ipating the work's actual modes of distributionand reception within its very structureof production,Homes for America eliminated the differencebetween the artisticconstruct and its (photographic)reproduction, the differencebetween an exhibition of art objects and the photograph of its installation,the difference between the architecturalspace of the galleryand the space of the catalogue and the art magazine.

JosephKosuth's Tautologies In oppositionto this,Kosuth was arguing,in 1969, preciselyfor the contin- uation and expansion of modernism'spositivist legacy, and doing so with what musthave seemed to him at the time the mostradical and advanced tools of that tradition:Wittgenstein's logical positivismand language philosophy(he emphati- callyaffirmed this continuity when, in the firstpart of "Art afterPhilosophy," he states,"Certainly linguistic philosophy can be considered the heir to empiricism . ."). Thus, even while claimingto displace the formalismof Greenberg and Fried, he in fact updated modernism'sproject of self-reflexiveness.For Kosuth stabilizedthe notion of a disinterestedand self-sufficientart by subjectingboth -the Wittgensteinianmodel of the language game as well as the Duchampian model of the readymade- to the stricturesof a model of meaningthat operates in the modernist traditionof that paradox Michel Foucault has called mod- ernity's"empirico-transcendental" thought. This is to say that in 1968 artistic productionis stillthe result,for Kosuth,of artisticintention as it constitutesitself above all in self-reflexiveness(even if it is now discursiverather than perceptual, epistemologicalrather than essentialist).20

19. "For many years it has been well known that more people are aware of an artist'swork through(1) the printedmedia or (2) conversationthan by directconfrontation with the art itself.For paintingand sculpture,where the visual presence-color, scale, size, location-is importantto the work, the photograph or verbalizationof that work is a bastardizationof the art. But when art concernsitself with things not germaneto physicalpresence, its intrinsic (communicative) value is not altered by its presentationin printedmedia. The use of catalogues and books to communicate(and disseminate)art is the most neutralmeans to presentthe new art. The catalogue can now act as the primaryinformation for the exhibition,as opposed to secondaryinformation about art in magazines, catalogues, etc. and in some cases the 'exhibition' can be the 'catalogue."' (Seth Siegelaub, "On Exhibitionsand the World at Large" [interviewwith Charles Harrison], StudioInternational, [De- cember 1969].) 20. This differentiationis developed in 's excellent discussion of these paradigmatic differencesas theyemerge firstin Minimalismin his essay "The Crux of Minimalism,"in Individuals (Los Angeles: The Museum of ContemporaryArt, 1986), p. 162-183.

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At the very moment when the complementaryformations of Pop and MinimalArt had, for the firsttime, succeeded in criticizingthe legacy of Ameri- can-typeformalism and its prohibitionof referentiality,this project is all the more astounding. The privilegingof the literal over the referentialaxis of (visual) language- as Greenberg's formalistaesthetic had entailed- had been countered in Pop Art by a provocativedevotion to mass-culturaliconography. Then, both Pop and Minimal Art had continuouslyemphasized the universal presence of industrialmeans of reproductionas inescapable framingconditions for artisticmeans of production,or, to put it differently,they had emphasized that the aestheticof the studio had been irreversiblyreplaced by an aestheticof productionand consumption.And finally,Pop and Minimal Art had exhumed the repressed historyof Duchamp (and Dadaism at large), phenomena equally unacceptable to the reigningaesthetic thought of the late 1950s and early '60s. Kosuth's narrowreading of the readymadeis astonishingfor yet another reason. In 1969, he explicitlyclaimed that he had encountered the work of Duchamp primarilythrough the mediation of Johns and Morris rather than through an actual studyof Duchamp's writingsand works.21 As we have seen above, the firsttwo phases of Duchamp's reception by Americanartists from the early 1950s (Johnsand Rauschenberg)to Warhol and Morrisin the early 1960s had graduallyopened up the range of implicationsof Duchamp's readymades.22It is thereforeall the more puzzling to see that after 1968-what one could call the beginning of the third phase of Duchamp

21. See note 5 above. 22. As Rosalind Krauss has suggested,at least Johns's understandingat that point already tran- scended the earlier reading of the readymade as merelyan aestheticof declarationand intention:

If we consider that Stella's paintingwas involved early on, in the work of Johns,then Johns's interpretationof Duchamp and the readymade-an interpretationdiametric- ally opposed to thatof the Conceptualistgroup outlinedabove - has some relevance in thisconnection. For Johnsclearly saw the readymadeas pointingto the factthat there need be no connectionbetween the finalart object and the psychologicalmatrix from whichit issued, since in the case of the readymadethis possibility is precluded fromthe start. The was not made (fabricated) by Duchamp, only selected by him. Therefore there is no way in which the urinal can "express" the artist. It is like a sentence which is put into the world unsanctionedby the voice of a speaker standing behind it. Because makerand artistare evidentlyseparate, there is no way forthe urinal to serve as an externalizationof the state or statesof mind of the artistas he made it. And by not functioningwithin the grammarof the aestheticpersonality, the Fountain can be seen as puttingdistance between itselfand the notion of personalityper se. The relationshipbetween Johns's American Flag and his reading of the Fountainis just this: the arthood of the Fountainis not legitimizedby its havingissued stroke-by-strokefrom the privatepsyche of the artist;indeed it could not. So it is like a man absentmindedly hummingand being dumbfoundedif asked ifhe had meantthat tune or ratheranother. That is a case in which it is not clear how the grammarof intentionmight apply.

Rosalind Krauss, "Sense and Sensibility,"Artforum, vol. 12 (November 1973), pp. 43-52, n. 4.

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reception- the understandingof this model by Conceptual Artistsstill fore- grounds intentionaldeclaration over contextualization.This holds true not only for Kosuth's "Art afterPhilosophy," but equally forthe BritishArt & Language Group, as, in the introductionto the firstissue of thejournal in May 1969, they write: To place an object in a contextwhere the attentionof any spectator will be conditionedtoward the expectancyof recognizingart objects. For example placingwhat up to thenhad been an object of alien visual characteristicsto those expected withinthe frameworkof an art am- bience, or by virtue of the artist declaring the object to be an art object whetheror not it was in an art ambience. Using these tech- niques what appeared to be entirelynew morphologieswere held out to qualifyfor the statusof the membersof the class "art objects." For example Duchamp's "Readymades" and Rauschenberg's "Portrait of ."23

A few months later Kosuth based his argument for the development of Conceptual Art on just such a restrictedreading of Duchamp. For in its limiting view of the historyand the typologyof Duchamp's oeuvre, Kosuth's argument -like that of Art & Language- focuses exclusivelyon the "unassisted ready- mades." Thereby early Conceptual theory not only leaves out Duchamp's painterlywork but avoids such an eminentlycrucial work as the ThreeStandard Stoppages(1913), not to mentionThe Large Glass (1915-23) or the Etantsdonne (1946 - 66) or the 1943 Boiteen valise. But what is worse is thateven the reading of the unassistedreadymades is itselfextremely narrow, reducing the readymade model in fact merelyto that of an analyticalproposition. Typically, both Art & Language and Kosuth's "Art afterPhilosophy" refer to 's notoriousexample of speech-actaesthetics ("This is a portraitof Iris Clert ifI say so") based on the rather limitedunderstanding of the readymade as an act of willfulartistic declaration. This understanding,typical of the early 1950s, con- tinues in Judd's famous lapidary norm (and patentlynonsensical statement), quoted a littlelater in Kosuth's text: "if someone saysit's art, then it is art ." In 1969, Art & Language and Kosuth shared in foregroundingthe ... "ana- lyticproposition" inherentin each readymade, namely the statement"this is a work of art," over and above all other aspects impliedby the readymade model (its structurallogic, its featuresas an industriallyproduced object of use and consumption,its seriality,and the dependence of its meaning on context). And most importantly,according to Kosuth, this means that artisticpropositions constitutethemselves in the negation of all referentiality,be it that of the historicalcontext of the (artistic)sign or that of its social functionand use:

23. Introduction,Art & Language, vol. 1, no. 1 (May 1969), p. 5.

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Worksof artare analyticpropositions. That is,if viewed within their context-as-art,they provide no informationwhat-so-ever about any matterof fact. A workof art is a tautologyin thatit is a presentationof theartist's intention, that is, he is sayingthat that particular work of artis art,which means, is a definitionofart. Thus, that it is art is truea priori(which is whatJudd means when he statesthat "if someone calls it art,it's art").24 Or, a littlelater in the same year,he wrotein The SixthInvestigation 1969 Proposition14 (a textthat has mysteriouslyvanished from the collection of his writings): If one considersthat the forms art takes as beingart's language one can realizethen that a workof art is a kindof propositionpresented withinthe context of art as a commenton art.An analysisof proposi-

24. Joseph Kosuth, "Art after Philosophy," Studio International,nos. 915-917 (October- December 1969). Quoted here fromJoseph Kosuth, The Makingof Meaning, p. 155.

JosephKosuth. Five Fives(to DonaldJudd). 1965 ().

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tion types shows art "works" as analyticpropositions. Works of art that tryto tell us somethingabout the world are bound to fail. The absence of realityin art is exactlyart's reality.25 Kosuth's programmaticefforts to reinstatea law of discursiveself-reflexive- ness in the guise of a critique of Greenberg's and Fried's visual and formal self-reflexivenessare all the more astonishingsince a considerable part of "Art afterPhilosophy" is dedicated to the elaborate constructionof a genealogy for Conceptual Art,in and of itselfa historicalproject (e.g., "All art [afterDuchamp] is conceptual [in nature] because art exists only conceptually"). This very con- structionof a lineage already contextualizesand historicizes,of course, in "tell- ing us something about the world"-of art, at least; that is, it unwittingly operates like a syntheticproposition (even if only withinthe conventionsof a particularlanguage system)and thereforedenies both the purityand the possibil- ity of an autonomous artisticproduction that would function,within art's own language-system,as mere analyticproposition. Perhaps one mighttry to argue that,in fact,Kosuth's renewed cult of the tautologybrings the Symbolistproject to fruition.It mightbe said, forexample, that thisrenewal is the logical extensionof 'sexclusive concern with the conditionsand the theorizationof art's own modes of conceptionand read- ing. Such an argument,however, would stillnot allay questions concerningthe altered historicalframework within which such a cult must find its determina- tion. Even withinits Symbolist origins, the modernisttheology of art was already gripped by a polarized opposition. For a religious venerationof self-referential plasticform as the pure negationof rationalistand empiricistthought can simul- taneouslybe read as nothingother than the inscriptionand instrumentalization of preciselythat order- even or particularlyin its negation- withinthe realm of the aestheticitself (the almost immediateand universalapplication of - ism for the cosmos of late nineteenth-centurycommodity production would attestto this). This dialecticcame to claim itshistorical rights all the more forcefullyin the contemporary,postwar situation. For given the conditionsof a rapidlyaccelerat- ing fusionof the cultureindustry with the last bastionsof an autonomous sphere of highart, self-reflexivenessincreasingly (and inevitably)came to shiftalong the borderline between logical positivismand the advertisementcampaign. And further,the rightsand rationaleof a newlyestablished postwar middle class,one whichcame fullyinto its own in the 1960s, could assume theiraesthetic identity in the verymodel of the tautologyand itsaccompanying aesthetic of administra- tion. For this aesthetic identityis structuredmuch the way this class's social identityis, namely,as one of merelyadministering labor and production(rather than producing) and of the distributionof commodities.This class, having be-

25. Joseph Kosuth, The SixthInvestigation 1969 Proposition14.

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come firmlyestablished as the mostcommon and powerfulsocial class of postwar society,is the one which, as H. G. Helms wrote in his book on Max Stirner, "deprives itselfvoluntarily of the rightsto intervenewithin the politicaldecision- making process in order to arrange itself more efficientlywith the existing political conditions."26 This aesthetic of the newly establishedpower of administrationfound its firstfully developed literaryvoice in a phenomenon like the nouveau romanof Robbe-Grillet.It was no accident thatsuch a profoundlypositivist literary project would then serve, in the American context,as a point of departurefor Concep- tual Art. But, paradoxically,it was at thisvery same historicalmoment that the social functionsof the tautological principle found their most lucid analysis, througha criticalexamination launched in France. In the early writingof Roland Barthes one finds,simultaneously with the nouveau roman,a discussionof the tautological: Tautologie.Yes, I know, it's an ugly word. But so is the thing.Tauto- logyis the verbal device whichconsists in defininglike by like ("Drama is drama"). . . . One takes refugein tautologyas one does in fear,or anger, or sadness, when one is at a loss for an explanation. . . . In tautology,there is a double murder: one kills rationalitybecause it resistsone; one kills language because it betraysone. . . . Now any refusalof language is a death. Tautology creates a dead, a motionless world.27

Ten years later,at the same momentthat Kosuth was discoveringit as the centralaesthetic project of his era, the phenomenon of the tautologicalwas once again opened to examinationin France. But now, ratherthan being discussedas a linguisticand rhetoricalform, it was analyzed as a general social effect:as both the inescapable reflexof behavior and, once the requirementsof the advanced culture industry(i.e., advertisementand media) have been put in place in the formationof spectacle culture, a universal condition of experience. What still remainsopen fordiscussion, of course, is the extentto whichConceptual Art of a certain typeshared these conditions,or even enacted and implementedthem in the sphere of the aesthetic-accounting, perhaps, for its subsequent proximity and success withina world of advertisementstrategists-or, alternatively,the extent to which it merelyinscribed itself into the inescapable logic of a totally administeredworld, as Adorno's notoriousterm identified it. Thus Guy Debord noted in 1967: The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the simple fact that its means are simultaneouslyits ends. It is the sun

26. Hans G. Helms, Die Ideologieder anonymenGesellschaft (Cologne, 1968), p. 3. 27. Roland Barthes,Mythologies, pp. 152- 53.

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which never sets over the empire of modern passivity.It covers the entire surfaceof the world and bathes endlesslyin its own glory.28

A Tale ofMany Squares The visual formsthat correspondmost accuratelyto the linguisticform of the tautologyare the square and itsstereometric rotation, the cube. Not surpris- ingly,these two formsproliferated in the painterlyand sculpturalproduction of the early-to mid-1960s. This was the momentwhen a rigorousself-reflexiveness was bent on examiningthe traditionalboundaries of modernistsculptural objects to the same extent that a phenomenological reflectionof viewing space was insistanton reincorporatingarchitectural parameters into the conception of paintingand sculpture. So thoroughlydid the square and the cube permeate the vocabulary of Minimalistsculpture that in 1967 Lucy Lippard publisheda questionnaireinves- tigatingthe role of these forms,which she had circulatedamong manyartists. In his response to the questionnaire,Donald Judd, in one of his many attemptsto detach the morphologyof Minimalismfrom similar investigations of the histori- cal avant-gardein the earlier part of the twentiethcentury, displayed the agres- sive dimensionof tautologicalthought (disguised as pragmatism,as was usual in his case) by simplydenying that any historicalmeaning could be inherentin geometricor stereometricforms: I don't think there is anythingspecial about squares, which I don't use, or cubes. They certainlydon't have any intrinsicmeaning or superiority.One thing though, cubes are a lot easier to make than spheres. The main virtue of geometric shapes is that they are not organic, as all art otherwiseis. A form that's neither geometricnor organic would be a great discovery.29 As the central form of visual self-reflexiveness,the square abolishes the traditionalspatial parametersof verticalityand horizontality,thereby canceling the metaphysicsof space and its conventionsof reading. It is in thisway thatthe square (beginningwith Malevich's 1915 Black Square) incessantlypoints to itself:

28. Guy Debord, The Societyof theSpectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1970), n. p., section 13. First published, Paris, 1967. 29. Donald Judd,in Lucy Lippard, "Homage to the Square," Artin America(July- August, 1967), pp. 50-57. How pervasive the square actually was in the art of the early-to mid-1960s is all too obvious: the workfrom the late '50s, such as paintingsby Reinhardtand Rymanand a large number of sculpturesfrom the early 1960s onwards (Andre, LeWitt, and Judd), deployed the tautological formin endless variations.Paradoxically even Kosuth's work fromthe mid-1960s- while emphasiz- ing its departure frompainting's traditional object statusand visual/formaldesign -continues to displaythe definitionsof words on large, black, canvas squares. By contrastone only has to thinkof JasperJohns's or BarnettNewman's workas immediatepredecessors of thatgeneration to recognize how infrequent,if not altogetherabsent, the square was at that moment.

This content downloaded from 146.96.128.36 on Fri, 26 Apr 2013 16:19:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions RobertBarry. Painting in Four Parts. 1967. * U

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as spatial perimeter,as plane, as surface,and, functioningsimultaneously, as support. But, with the verysuccess of this self-referentialgesture, marking the form out as purely pictorial,the square paintingparadoxically but inevitably assumesthe characterof a relief/objectsituated in actual space. It therebyinvites a viewing/readingof spatialcontingency and architecturalimbeddedness, insist- ing on the imminentand irreversibletransition from painting to sculpture. This transitionwas performedin the proto-Conceptualart of the early-to mid-1960s in a fairlydelimited number of specificpictorial operations. It oc- curred,first of all, throughthe emphasison painting'sopacity. The object-status of the painterlystructure could be underscoredby unifyingand homogenizing its surfacethrough monochromy, serialized texture, and gridded compositional structure;or it could be emphasized by literallysealing a painting's spatial transparency,by simplyaltering its materialsupport: shifting it fromcanvas to unstretchedfabric or metal. This typeof investigationwas developed systemati- cally, for example, in the proto-Conceptualpaintings of , who employedall of these optionsseparately or in varyingcombinations in the early- to mid-i1960s;or, after1965, in the paintingsof RobertBarry, ,and Niele Toroni. Secondly- and in a directinversion and countermovementto the first- object-statuscould be achieved by emphasizing,in a literalistmanner, painting's transparency.This entailed establishinga dialectic between pictorial surface, frame,and architecturalsupport by eithera literalopening up of the painterly support,as in Sol LeWitt's earlyStructures, or by the insertionof translucentor transparentsurfaces into the conventional frame of viewing,as in Ryman's fiberglasspaintings, Buren's early nylonpaintings, or Michael Asher's and Ger-

This content downloaded from 146.96.128.36 on Fri, 26 Apr 2013 16:19:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions RobertMorris. Four MirroredCubes. 1965.

hard Richter'sglass panes in metal frames,both emergingbetween 1965 and 1967. Or, as in the earlywork of RobertBarry (such as hisPainting in Four Parts, 1967, in the FER-Collection),where the square, monochrome,canvas objects now seemed to assume the role of mere architecturaldemarcation. Functioning as decenteredpainterly objects, they delimit the externalarchitectural space in a manneranalogous to the serial or centralcomposition of earlier Minimalwork that stilldefined internal pictorial or sculpturalspace. Or, as in Barry'ssquare canvas (1967), which is to be placed at the exact center of the architectural supportwall, a work is conceived as programmaticallyshifting the reading of it froma centered,unified, pictorial object to an experience of architecturalcon- tingence,and as therebyincorporating the supplementaryand overdetermining strategiesof curatorialplacement and conventionsof installation(traditionally disavowed in paintingand sculpture)into the conceptionof the work itself. And thirdly--and most often--this transitionis performedin the "sim- ple" rotationof the square, as originallyevident in 's famous dia- gram from 1937 where a volumetricand a stereometriccube are juxtaposed in order to clarifythe inherentcontinuity between planar, stereometric,and volu- metric forms. This rotation generated cubic structuresas diverse as 's CondensationCube (1963-65), Robert Morris's Four MirroredCubes (1965), or LarryBell's simultaneouslyproduced Mineral CoatedGlass Cubes,and

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This content downloaded from 146.96.128.36 on Fri, 26 Apr 2013 16:19:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Hans Haacke.Condensation Cube. 1963-65.

Sol LeWitt's Wall-FloorPiece (Three Squares), 1966. All of these (beyond sharing the obvious morphologyof the cube) engage in the dialectic of opacity and transparency(or in the synthesisof that dialectic in mirror-reflectionas in Morris'sMirrored Cubes or LarryBell's aestheticizedvariations of the theme).At the same timethat they engage in the dialecticof frameand surface,and thatof object and architecturalcontainer, they have displaced traditionalfigure-ground relationships. The deploymentof any or all of these strategies(or, as in mostcases, their varyingcombination) in the contextof Minimaland post-Minimalart, i.e., proto- conceptualpainting and sculpture,resulted in a range of hybridobjects. They no longer qualifiedfor eitherof the traditionalstudio categoriesnor could theybe identifiedas relief or architecturaldecoration-the compromiseterms tradi- tionallyused to bridge the gap between these categories. In this sense, these objects demarcated another spectrumof departures towards Conceptual Art. Not onlydid theydestabilize the boundariesof the traditionalartistic categories of studioproduction, by erodingthem with modes of industrialproduction in the manner of Minimalism,but they went furtherin their criticalrevision of the discourse of the studio versus the discourse of production/consumption.By ultimatelydismantling both along withthe conventionsof visualityinherent in them,they firmly established an aestheticof administration. IIIIOWN

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The diversityof these protoconceptualobjects would at firstsuggest that theiractual aestheticoperations differ so profoundlythat a comparativereading, operatingmerely on the grounds of theirapparent analogous formaland mor- phological organization- the visual topos of the square - would be illegitimate. Art historyhas accordinglyexcluded Haacke's CondensationCube, for example, from any affiliationwith Minimal Art. Yet all of these artistsdefine artistic productionand receptionby the mid-1960s as reaching beyond the traditional thresholdsof visuality(both in termsof the materialsand productionprocedures of the studio and those of industrialproduction), and it is on the basis of this parallel thattheir work can be understoodto be linkedbeyond a mere structural or morphologicalanalogy. The proto-conceptualworks of the mid-1960s rede- fine aesthetic experience, indeed, as a multiplicityof nonspecializedmodes of object-and language-experience.According to the reading these objects gener- ate, aestheticexperience -as an individualand social investmentof objects with meaning-is constitutedby linguisticas well as by specularconventions, by the institutionaldetermination of the object's status as much as by the reading competence of the spectator. Within this shared conception, what goes on to distinguishthese objects from each other is the emphasis each one places on differentaspects of that deconstructionof the traditionalconcepts of visuality.Morris's Mirrored Cubes, for example (once again in an almost literal execution of a proposal found in Duchamp's GreenBox), situatethe spectatorin the sutureof the mirrorreflection: that interfacebetween sculpturalobject and architecturalcontainer where nei- therelement can acquire a positionof priorityor dominance in the triadbetween spectator,sculptural object, and architecturalspace. And in so far as the work acts simultaneouslyto inscribea phenomenologicalmodel of experience into a traditionalmodel of purelyvisual specularityand to displace it, its primaryfocus remainsthe sculpturalobject and its visual apperception. By contrast,Haacke's CondensationCube-while clearly sufferingfrom a now even more rigorouslyenforced scientisticreductivism and the legacy of modernism'sempirical positivism - moves away froma specular relationshipto the object altogether,establishing instead a bio-physicalsystem as a linkbetween viewer,sculptural object, and architecturalcontainer. If Morrisshifts the viewer froma mode of contemplativespecularity into a phenomenologicalloop of bodily movementand perceptual reflection,Haacke replaces the once revolutionary concept of an activating "tactility"in the viewing experience by a move to bracketthe phenomenologicalwithin the determinacyof "system."For his work now suspends Morris's tactile "viewing" withina science-basedsyntagm (in this particularcase that of the process of condensation and evaporation inside the cube broughtabout by temperaturechanges due to the frequencyof spectators in the gallery). And finally,we should consider what is possiblythe last credible transfor- mation of the square, at the heightof Conceptual Art in 1968, in two worksby

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Lawrence Weiner,respectively entitled A Square Removalfroma Rug in Useand A 36" X 36" Removalto theLathing or SupportWall ofPlaster or Wallboardfrom a Wall (both publishedor "reproduced" in Statements,1968), in whichthe specific paradigmaticchanges Conceptual Art initiateswith regard to the legacy of reductivistformalism are clearlyevident. Both interventions- while maintain- ing theirstructural and morphologicallinks with formal traditions by respecting classical geometryas theirdefinition at the level of shape--inscribe themselves in the supportsurfaces of the institutionand/or the home whichthat tradition had alwaysdisavowed. The carpet (presumablyfor sculpture)and the wall (for painting),which idealist aestheticsalways declares as mere "supplements,"are foregroundedhere not onlyas partsof theirmaterial basis but as the inevitable futurelocation of the work. Thus the structure,location, and materialsof the intervention,at the verymoment of theirconception, are completelydetermined by theirfuture destination. While neithersurface is explicitlyspecified in terms of its institutionalcontext, this ambiguityof dislocationgenerates two opposi- tional,yet mutuallycomplementary readings. On the one hand, it dissipatesthe traditionalexpectation of encounteringthe workof art onlyin a "specialized" or "qualified" location(both "wall" and "carpet" could be eitherthose of the home or the museum, or, for that matter,could just as well be found in any other location such as an office,for example). On the other, neither one of these surfacescould ever be considered to be independentfrom its institutionalloca- tion, since the physicalinscription into each particularsurface inevitably gener- ates contextualreadings dependent upon the institutionalconventions and the particularuse of those surfacesin place.

LawrenceWeiner. A 36" x 36" Square Removalto theWallboard or Lathingfrom a Wall. 1968.

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Transcending the literalistor perceptual precision with which Barry and Rymanhad previouslyconnected their painterly objects to the traditionalwalls of display,in order to make their physicaland perceptual interdependencemani- fest,Weiner's two squares are now physicallyintegrated with both these support surfacesand their institutionaldefinition. Further, since the work's inscription paradoxicallyimplies the physicaldisplacement of the supportsurface, it engen- ders an experience of perceptualwithdrawal as well. And just as the worknegates the specularityof the traditionalartistic object by literallywithdrawing rather than adding visual data in the construct,so this act of perceptualwithdrawal operates at the same timeas a physical(and symbolic)intervention in the institu- tional power and property relations underlying the supposed neutralityof "mere" devices of presentation.The installationand/or acquisitionof eitherof these works requires that the future owner accept an instance of physicalre- moval/withdrawal/interruptionon both the level of institutionalorder and on that of private ownership. It was only logical that, on the occasion of Seth Siegelaub's firstmajor exhibitionof Conceptual Art, the show entitledJanuary 5-31, 1969, Lawrence Weiner would have presented a formula that then functionedas the matrix underlyingall his subsequent propositions.Specifically addressing the relations withinwhich the work of art is constitutedas an open, structural,syntagmatic formula,this matrix statement defines the parametersof a workof art as those of the conditions of authorshipand production,and their interdependencewith those of ownershipand use (and not least of all, at itsown propositionallevel, as a linguisticdefinition contingent upon and determinedby all of these parametersin theircontinuously varying and changing constellations: Withrelation to thevarious mannersof use: 1. The artistmay construct the piece 2. The piece maybe fabricated 3. The piece need not to be built Each beingequal and consistentwith the intent of the artist the decision as to conditionrests with the receiver upon theoccasion of receivership What begins to be put in play here, then, is a critique that operates at the level of the aesthetic "institution."It is a recognitionthat materialsand proce- dures, surfacesand textures,locations and placementare not only sculpturalor painterlymatter to be dealt with in terms of a phenomenologyof visual and cognitiveexperience or in termsof a structuralanalysis of the sign(as mostof the Minimalistand post-Minimalistartists had stillbelieved), but thatthey are always already inscribedwithin the conventionsof language and therebywithin institu- tional power and ideological and economic investment.However, if,in Weiner's and Barry'swork of the late 1960s, thisrecognition still seems merelylatent, it was to become manifestvery rapidly in the work of European artistsof the same generation,in particularthat of , Daniel Buren, and Hans

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Haacke after1966. In factan institutionalcritique became the centralfocus of all threeartists' assaults on the falseneutrality of visionthat provides the underlying rationalefor those institutions. In 1965, Buren-like his Americanpeers--took offfrom a criticalinves- tigationof Minimalism.His early understandingof the work of Flavin, Ryman, and Stella rapidly enabled him to develop positions from within a strictly painterlyanalysis that soon led to a reversalof painterly/sculpturalconcepts of visualityaltogether. Buren was engaged on the one hand witha criticalreview of the legacy of advanced modernist(and postwarAmerican) painting and on the otherin an analysisof Duchamp's legacy,which he viewedcritically as the utterly unacceptablenegation of painting.This particularversion of reading Duchamp and the readymade as acts of petit-bourgeoisanarchist radicality - while not necessarilycomplete and accurate-allowed Buren to constructa successful critique of both: modernistpainting and Duchamp's readymade as its radical historical Other. In his writingsand his interventionsfrom 1967 onwards, throughhis critique of the specular order of paintingand of the institutional

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frameworkdetermining it, Buren singularlysucceeded in displacing boththe paradigmsof paintingand that of the readymade (even twentyyears later this critiquemakes the naive continuationof object productionin the Duchampian vein of the readymade model appear utterlyirrelevant). From the perspectiveof the present,it seems easier to see that Buren's assault on Duchamp, especiallyin his crucial 1969 essay LimitesCritiques, was primarilydirected at the conventionsof Duchamp receptionoperative and pre- dominantthroughout the late 1950s and early '60s, rather than at the actual implicationsof Duchamp's model itself.Buren's centralthesis was thatthe fallacy of Duchamp's readymade was to obscure the very institutionaland discursive framingconditions that allowed the readymade to generate its shiftsin the assignmentof meaningand the experience of the object in the firstplace. Yet, one could just as well argue, as Marcel Broodthaerswould in factsuggest in his catalogue of the exhibitionThe Eaglefrom the Oligocene to Todayin Dfisseldorfin 1972, thatthe contextualdefinition and syntagmaticconstruction of the workof art had obviouslybeen initiatedby Duchamp's readymade model firstof all. In his systematicanalysis of the constitutingelements of the discourse of painting,Buren came to investigateall the parametersof artisticproduction and reception (an analysis that, incidentally,was similarto the one performedby Lawrence Weiner in arrivingat his own "matrix" formula). Departing from Minimalism's(especially Ryman's and Flavin's)literalist dismemberment of paint- ing, Buren at firsttransformed the pictorialinto yet another model of opacity and objecthood. (This was accomplished by physicallyweaving figure and

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ground together in the "found" awning material, by making the "grid" of vertical parallel stripes his eternallyrepeated "tool," and by mechanically- almostsuperstitiously or ritualistically,one could say withhindsight -applying a coat of white paint to the outer bands of the grid in order to distinguishthe pictorialobject froma readymade.) At the same time that the canvas had been removed fromits traditionalstretcher support to become a physicalcloth-object (reminiscentof Greenberg's notorious "tacked up canvas [which]already exists as a picture"), thisstrategy in Buren's arsenal found its logical counterpartin the placement of the stretchedcanvas leaning as an object against support wall and floor. This shifingof supportsurfaces and proceduresof productionled to a wide range of formsof distributionwithin Buren's work: fromunstretched canvas to anonymouslymailed sheets of printed striped paper; from pages in books to billboards. In the same way, his displacementof the traditionalsites of artistic interventionand of reading resulted in a multiplicityof locations and formsof displaythat continuously played on the dialecticof interiorand exterior,thereby oscillatingwithin the contradictionsof sculptureand paintingand foregrounding all those hidden and manifestframing devices that structureboth traditions withinthe discourse of the museum and the studio. Furthermore,enacting the principles of the Situationistcritique of the bourgeois division of creativityaccording to the rules of the division of labor, Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier,and Niele Toroni publiclyperformed (on various occasions between 1966 and 1968) a demolition of the traditional separation between artistsand audience, with each given theirrespective roles. Not only did they claim that each of their artistic idioms be considered as absolutely equivalent and interchangeable,but also that anonymous audience productionof these pictorialsigns would be equivalent to those produced by the artiststhemselves. With its stark reproductionsof mug shots of the four artists taken in photomats,the poster for their fourthmanifestation at the 1967 de Paris inadvertentlypoints to anothermajor source of contemporarychallenges to the notion of artisticauthorship linked witha provocationto the "audience" to participate:the aestheticof anonymityas practiced in 's "Factory" and its mechanical (photographic)procedures of production." The critical interventionsof the four into an established but outmoded culturalapparatus (representedby such venerable and importantinstitutions as the Salon de la Jeune Peintureor the Biennale de Paris) immediatelybrought out in the open at least one major paradox of all conceptual practices (a paradox,

30. Michel Claura, at the time the activelypromoting awareness of the affiliatedartists Buren, Mosset,Parmentier, and Toroni, has confirmedin a recentconversation that the referenceto Warhol, in particularto his series The ThirteenMost WantedMen, which had been exhibitedat the Ileana Sonnabend Gallery in 1967, was quite a conscious decision.

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incidentally,which had made up the single most original contributionof Yves Klein's work ten years before). This was that the criticalannihilation of cultural conventionsitself immediately acquires the conditionsof the spectacle,that the insistenceon artisticanonymity and the demolitionof authorshipproduces in- stantbrand names and identifiableproducts, and that the campaign to critique conventionsof visualitywith textual interventions,billboard signs,anonymous handouts,and pamphletsinevitably ends by followingthe preestablishedmecha- nismsof advertisingand marketingcampaigns. All of the works mentionedcoincide, however,in theirrigorous redefini- tion of relationshipsbetween audience, object, and author. And all are concerted in the attemptto replace a traditional,hierarchical model of privilegedexperi- ence based on authorial skillsand acquired competence of receptionby a struc- tural relationshipof absolute equivalents that would dismantle both sides of the equation: the hieraticposition of the unifiedartistic object just as much as the privilegedposition of the author. In an earlyessay (published, incidentally, in the same 1967 issue of AspenMagazine - dedicated by itseditor Brian O'Doherty to St6phane Mallarm --in which the firstEnglish translationof Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author" appeared), Sol LeWitt laid out these concernsfor a programmaticredistribution of author/artistfunctions with astonishing clarity, presentingthem by means of the rathersurprising metaphor of a performanceof daily bureaucratictasks: The aim of the artistwould be to give viewersinformation. . . . He would follow his predeterminedpremise to its conclusion avoiding subjectivity.Chance, tasteor unconsciouslyremembered forms would play no part in the outcome. The serial artistdoes not attempt to produce a beautifulor mysteriousobject but functionsmerely as a clerk cataloguingthe results of his premise(italics added).31

Inevitablythe question arises how such restrictivedefinitions of the artistas a cataloguingclerk can be reconciledwith the subversiveand radical implications of Conceptual Art. And this question must simultaneouslybe posed withinthe specifichistorical context in which the legacy of an historicalavant-garde-- Constructivismand Productivism-had only recentlybeen reclaimed. How, we might ask, can these practices be aligned with that historicalproduction that artistslike Henry Flynt,Sol LeWitt,and had rediscovered,in the early '60s, primarilythrough the publication of Camilla Gray's The Great Experiment:Russian Art 1863-1922.32 This question is of particularimportance since manyof the formalstrategies of earlyConceptual Art appear at firstglance

31. Sol LeWitt, "Serial Project #1, 1966," AspenMagazine, nos. 5-6, ed. Brian O'Doherty, 1967, n. p. 32. The importanceof this publication in 1962 was mentioned to me by several of the artists interviewedduring the preparationof thisessay.

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to be as close to the practicesand proceduresof the Constructivist/Productivist avant-gardeas Minimal sculpturehad appeared to be dependent upon its mate- rials and morphologies. The profoundlyutopian (and now unimaginablynaive) nature of the claims associated withConceptual Art at the end of the 1960s were articulatedby Lucy Lippard (along with Seth Siegelaub, certainlythe crucial exhibition organizer and criticof that movement)in late 1969: Art intended as pure experience doesn't exist until someone experi- ences it, defyingownership, reproduction, sameness. Intangible art could break down the artificialimposition of "culture" and provide a broader audience for a tangible,object art. When automatismfrees millionsof hours for leisure, art should gain ratherthan diminishin importance,for while art is not just play, it is the counterpointto work. The time may come when art is everyone's daily occupation, though there is no reason to thinkthis activitywill be called art.33 While it seems obvious that artists cannot be held responsible for the culturallyand politicallynaive visionsprojected on theirwork even by theirmost competent,loyal, and enthusiasticcritics, it now seems equally obvious thatit was preciselythe utopianismof earlieravant-garde movements (the typethat Lippard desperatelyattempts to resuscitatefor the occasion) that was manifestlyabsent from Conceptual Art throughout its history(despite Robert Barry's onetime invocation of Herbert Marcuse, declaring the commercial gallery as "Some places to whichwe can come, and fora while 'be freeto thinkabout whatwe are going to do'"). It seems obvious,at least fromthe vantageof the early 1990s, that fromits inceptionConceptual Art was distinguishedby its acute sense of discur- sive and institutionallimitations, its self-imposed restrictions, its lack of totalizing vision, its criticaldevotion to the factual conditionsof artisticproduction and reception withoutaspiring to overcome the mere facticityof these conditions. This became evident as works such as Hans Haacke's series of Visitors'Profiles (1969- 70), in its bureaucraticrigor and deadpan devotion to the statisticcollec- tion of factual information,came to refuse any transcendental dimension whatsoever. Furthermore,it now seems thatit was preciselya profounddisenchantment with those political master-narrativesthat empowered most of '20s avant-garde art that,acting in a peculiar fusionwith the mostadvanced and radical formsof critical artistic reflection,accounts for the peculiar contradictionsoperating within(proto) Conceptual Art of the mid- to late-1960s. It would explain why thisgeneration of the early '60s-in its growingemphasis on empiricismand its scepticismwith regard to all utopian vision- would be attracted,for example, to

33. Lucy Lippard, "Introduction," in 955.000 (: The Vancouver ,January 13- February8, 1970), n. p.

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Buren,Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni. Installation at MarcelBroodthaers's Museum (Plaque). 1971.

the logical positivismof Wittgensteinand would confoundthe affirmativepetit- bourgeois positivismof Alain Robbe-Grilletwith the radical atopism of Samuel Beckett,claiming all of themas theirsources. And it would make clear how this generationcould be equallyattracted by the conservativeconcept of Daniel Bell's "end of ideology" and Herbert Marcuse's Freudo-Marxist philosophy of liberation. What Conceptual Artachieved at leasttemporarily, however, was to subject the last residues of artisticaspiration toward transcendence(by means of tradi- tional studio skills and privileged modes of experience) to the rigorous and relentlessorder of the vernacularof administration.Furthermore, it managed to purge artisticproduction of the aspirationtowards an affirmativecollaboration withthe forcesof industrialproduction and consumption(the last of the totaliz- ing experiences into which artisticproduction had mimeticallyinscribed itself withcredibility in the contextof Pop Art and Minimalismfor one last time). Paradoxically,then, it would appear that Conceptual Art trulybecame the most significantparadigmatic change of postwarartistic production at the very

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moment that it mimed the operating logic of late capitalismand its positivist instrumentalityin an effortto place itsauto-critical investigations at the serviceof liquidating even the last remnantsof traditionalaesthetic experience. In that process it succeeded in purging itselfentirely of imaginaryand bodily experi- ence, of physicalsubstance and the space of memory,to the same extent that it effacedall residues of representationand ,of individualityand skill. That was the momentwhen Buren's and Haacke's work fromthe late 1960s onward turned the violence of that mimeticrelationship back onto the ideological appa- ratus itself,using it to analyze and expose the social institutionsfrom which the laws of positivistinstrumentality and the logic of administrationemanate in the firstplace. These institutions,which determinethe conditionsof cultural con- sumption,are the very ones in which artisticproduction is transformedinto a tool of ideological control and cultural legitimation. It was leftto Marcel Broodthaers to constructobjects in which the radical achievementsof Conceptual Art would be turnedinto immediatetravesty and in which the seriousnesswith which Conceptual Artistshad adopted the rigorous mimeticsubjection of aestheticexperience to the principlesof what Adorno had called the "totallyadministered world" were transformedinto absolute farce. And it was one of the effectsof Broodthaers'sdialectics that the achievementof Conceptual Art was revealed as being intricatelytied to a profoundand irrevers- ible loss: a loss not caused by artisticpractice, of course, but one to which that practiceresponded in the fulloptimism of itsaspirations, failing to recognizethat the purging of image and skill, of memoryand vision, withinvisual aesthetic representationwas not just another heroic step in the inevitable progress of Enlightenmentto liberate the world from mythicalforms of perception and hierarchicalmodes of specialized experience, but that it was also yet another, perhaps the last of the erosions (and perhaps the most effectiveand devastating one) to which the traditionallyseparate sphere of artisticproduction had been subjected in its perpetual effortsto emulate the regnant episteme withinthe paradigmaticframe proper to art itself. Or worse yet, that the Enlightenment-triumphof Conceptual Art-its transformationof audiences and distribution,its abolition of object statusand commodityform--would most of all only be shortlived,almost immediately giving way to the return of the ghostlikereapparitions of (prematurely?)dis- placed painterlyand sculptural paradigms of the past. So that the specular regime,which Conceptual Art claimed to have upset, would soon be reinstated withrenewed vigor. Which is of course what happened.

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