Systems, Contexts, Relations: An Alternative Genealogy of Conceptual Art A thesis submitted to Middlesex University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Luke Skrebowski Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy/History of Art and Design Middlesex University September 2009 Acknowledgments I would like to thank the following people: Professor Peter Osborne; Professor Jon Bird; the staff and students of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University; Hans Haacke; Mel Bochner; Chris and Jane Skrebowski; Suzi Winstanley. The research and writing of this thesis were supported by an AHRC Doctoral Award and a Gabriel Parker Travel Bursary from Middlesex University. i Abstract Recent scholarship has revisited conceptual art in light of its ongoing influence on contemporary art, arguing against earlier accounts of the practice which gave a restricted account of its scope and stressed its historical foreclosure. Yet conceptual art remains both historically and theoretically underspecified, its multiple and often conflicting genealogies have not all been convincingly traced. This thesis argues for the importance of a systems genealogy of conceptual art—culminating in a distinctive mode of systematic conceptual art—as a primary determinant of the conceptual genealogy of contemporary art. It claims that from the perspective of post-postmodern, relational and context art, the contemporary significance of conceptual art can best be understood in light of its “systematic” mode. The distinctiveness of contemporary art, and the problems associated with its uncertain critical character, have to be understood in relation to the unresolved problems raised by conceptual art and the implications that these have held for art’s post-conceptual trajectory. Consequently, the thesis reconsiders the nascence, emergence, consolidation and putative historical supersession of conceptual art from the perspective of the present. The significance of the historical problem of postformalism is re- emphasised and the nascence of conceptual art located in relation to it. A neglected historical category of systems art is recovered and its significance for the emergence of conceptual art demonstrated. The consolidation of conceptual art is reconsidered by distinguishing its multiple modes. Here, a “systematic” mode of conceptual art is argued to be of greater current critical importance than the more established “analytic” mode. Finally, the supersession of conceptual art is revisited from the perspective of the present in order to demonstrate that contemporary context and relational practices recover problems first articulated by systematic conceptual art. It is from systematic conceptual art that relational and context art inherit their focus on the social relations and the social context of art. By recovering the systems genealogy and systematic mode of conceptual art we provide a richer conceptual genealogy of contemporary art. ii Contents Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………….………….. i Introduction……………………………………………………………….…………..…….. iv 1. Contemporary Art’s Conceptual Genealogy Art’s Ongoing Uncertainty……………………………………………………………………….. 002 Characterising Contemporary Art………………………………………………………………….. 009 Modernism and Conceptual Art…………………………………………………………………… 017 Histories and Theories………………………………………………………………………….... 025 Unresolved Problems of Conceptual Art……………………………………………………………. 035 A Systems Genealogy of Conceptual Art……………………………………………………………. 051 2. The Postformal Condition Last Paintings………………………………………………………………..…………………. 058 Counter Greenberg…………………………………………………………..…………………… 069 Postformalisms……………………………………………………………..…………………… 079 Beyond Specific Objects………………………………………………………………..…………. 091 From Series to Systems………………………………………………………………..………….. 103 Exit Strategies………………………………………………………………..…………………. 119 3. Systems Art and the System Problem complexes………………………..…………………………………..…………………. 123 Art and Technological Rationality…………………………………………………………………. 132 Systems Aesthetics…………………………………………………………..…………………… 145 Theorising Systems Art………………………………………………………..…………………. 162 Limit Cases………………………………………………………………..…………………… 177 4. Conceptual Art’s Heterodox Modes Indexing…………….……………………………………………………..…………………… 181 Multiple Modes…………….……………………………………………..…………………..… 188 Analytic Conceptual Art and the Quest for Orthodoxy……………………………………………… 195 Systematic Conceptual Art and Politics………………………………………………………… 211 Synthetic Conceptual Art and Subjectivity……………………………………………………… 223 All Systems Go………………………………………………………………………………… 233 5. Institution as Contexts and Relations A Test Case………………………..………………………………………………...………… 240 Challenging the Institution of Institutional Critique………………….……………………………… 247 Kontext Künstlers vs Artistes Relationnels………….……………………………………………… 264 Periodisation: After Postmodern Art…………..…………………………………………………… 280 Towards a Genealogy of Contemporary Art……..………………………………………………… 292 Endnotes……………………………………………………………….…………..………... 297 Bibliography……………………………………………………………….…………..…….. 322 Appendix iii Introduction iv We should always be in a position to envisage a new context entirely. We have to keep our options open, to pose questions to which the answers are not predictable, to which answers might come in a different language, suggesting a different grammar – a different system, a changed consciousness. — Harald Szeeman, “When Attitudes Become Form” (1969) v Q: “Who is the best conceptual artist?” A: “The one with the most children.” Lawrence Weiner’s joke elicits an awkward, almost reluctant, laugh. Our response is not ultimately attributable to the impropriety of its punch line, although this is evidently a contributing factor (the sexual pun undermines the intellectual gravitas that is conventionally held to characterise the “best” conceptual art). Such bathos is, however, only enough to raise a smile. The awkward, almost reluctant laugh is drawn forth by the punch line’s cognitive follow-through: the joke turns back on itself, undermining the assumption encoded in its question (an assumption with which the structure of the joke renders us unwillingly complicit). Here then we are made to laugh at ourselves, to acknowledge our own implication within those structures of art historical legitimation that seek to produce an answer to a question that goes against the spirit of conceptual art. As Victor Burgin has had cause to observe “Recollected in tranquillity conceptual art is now being woven into the seamless tapestry of ‘art history.’ This assimilation, however, is being achieved only at the cost of amnesia in respect of all that was most radical in conceptual art.”1 We laugh reluctantly then, because the joke is on us. Weiner’s joke challenges the habitual mechanisms and procedures of art history as they have been applied to an artistic practice that sought to undermine many of its foundational tenets, namely the coherence of artistic “movements,” the “genius” of particular artists and their concomitant “influence” on other, lesser or subsequent, ones. Since art history after conceptual art has taken many of these lessons to heart there is something of the straw man about such an encapsulation of the discipline. Nevertheless, it is incontestable that mainstream art history has, as Burgin charges, dealt with the challenge of conceptual art by turning it into something like a period style. This strategy overlooks the fundamental challenge to the ontology of art, and vi thus to the discursive procedures of art history, that was posed by conceptual art. The challenge is thus to find ways of writing about and exhibiting conceptual art that are more faithful to conceptual art’s challenge, procedures that hold to its radicality. My own work on this thesis began from within this problematic and was stimulated by it. On 19th September 2005, at the Graduate Symposium of the Tate Modern’s “Open Systems” conference, I presented a paper based on an early version of my Master’s thesis entitled “All Systems Go: Recovering Jack Burnham’s Systems Aesthetics”. The conference was organised in conjunction with the Tate Modern’s “Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970” (2005) exhibition, curated by Donna DeSalvo. “Open Systems” was one of a series of large, retrospective survey exhibitions on conceptual art that had been produced by major Western art institutions over the previous decade. Other such exhibitions had included: “Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965– 1975” (1995) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, curated by Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer; “Circa ‘68” (1999) at Museu de Serralves, Porto, curated by Vicente Todolí and João Fernandes, (1999); and “Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s–1980s” (1999) at Queens Museum of Art, New York, curated by Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss. The scope and scale of these exhibitions, and their associated catalogues and conferences, contributed to a major reassessment of conceptual art that is still ongoing today. Inevitably then all of these exhibitions intervened in the historicisation of conceptual art. As such they were obliged to negotiate the double-edged risk of either simply representing received knowledge about the practice (offering nothing new to the established discourse) or of engaging in revisionist historiography (producing an unproductive intervention in the established discourse). Given that conceptual artists are notorious for having offered rigorous theoretical expositions of their own practices, vii engaging in deep and sustained