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Dissertatie Cvanwinkel UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) During the exhibition the gallery will be closed: contemporary art and the paradoxes of conceptualism van Winkel, C.H. Publication date 2012 Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): van Winkel, C. H. (2012). During the exhibition the gallery will be closed: contemporary art and the paradoxes of conceptualism. Valiz uitgeverij. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:03 Oct 2021 7 Introduction: During the Exhibition the Gallery Will Be Closed • 1. RESEARCH PARAMETERS This thesis aims to be an original contribution to the critical evaluation of conceptual art (1965-75). It addresses the following questions: What is conceptual art, what were its aims and procedures and what has it achieved? Is there a privileged relationship between contemporary art and conceptual art? Has the notion of “concept” fundamentally changed the theoretical position of artists and their interaction with audiences, critics, curators and historians? What are the implications of conceptual art for the practices of art historical and critical writing today? Have art historians, especially those who write about post-1960s art, taken these implications into account? And if not, why not? What dilemmas characterise the critical legacy of conceptual art? The specificity of my approach lies, firstly, in using a combination of historical, critical and theoretical tools and, secondly, in adopting a starting point in the artistic practice of today. I will suggest that, in order to understand the nature of conceptual art, one has to analyse its continued effect, its outgrowths and aftermath. This seems to be the only way to reach a deeper understanding of the issues that are seminal for contemporary artistic and art historical discourses. Therefore my reading of conceptual art is grounded in a critical and theoretical analysis of contemporary art. I look at contemporary art as a combined system of production and reception, in which discursive and artistic practices are intimately entwined. My aim is firstly to identify the structural changes that have occurred in this system since the 1960s and then to trace them back to the artistic movement commonly known as conceptual art. Shifts in the cultural position of the visual artist over the last fifteen to twenty years, such as the tendency towards a design-based model of 8 production (see chapters 3 and 4 below), call for a renewed interpretation of the artistic movement that, I hope to show, prefigured these shifts. This explains why this thesis could only be written now and not, say, in 1975 or 1990. More than forty years after its inception, I look at conceptual art from a deliberately anachronistic point of view, taking into account after-effects that may never have been planned or foreseen by the artists in question or their advocates. I evaluate the original ideas and intentions in close connection to their offshoots and derivatives, whilst trying to avoid the danger of teleological reduction.1 A common notion in the art historical literature on conceptual art is that its basic thrust is anti-visual (see section 5 of this introduction). My own understanding of conceptual art, as developed in this thesis, is that it is not based on a refusal of visuality, but on something that makes the distinction between visual and non-visual parameters virtually irrelevant: the primacy of information. I intend to show that the appearance of conceptual art was the result of artists starting to take account, in various radical ways, of two conditions, one social, the other institutional: first, the rise of post- industrial or “informational” society, as it was theorised at the time by critics such as Jack Burnham and sociologists such as Daniel Bell;2 second, the central position of institutions and mediators, which had become indispensable for the experience of artworks by an audience. The simultaneous impact of these new conditions is no coincidence: they can be seen as two distinct but related forms of the primacy of information. Artists such as Carl Andre, Lawrence Weiner, John Baldessari, Douglas Huebler, Michael Asher, and Joseph Kosuth not only acknowledged and accepted 1 This idea of an anachronistic art history is indebted to Hal Foster’s notion of a “traumatic” avant-garde that “is never historically effective or fully significant in its initial moments”. Foster, “Who’s Afraid of the Neo-Avant-Garde?”, The Return of the Real. The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press, 1996), 29. 2 Jack Burnham, “System Esthetics”, Artforum 7:1 (September 1968), 30-35; and “Real Time Systems”, Artforum 8:1 (September 1969), 49-55. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. A Venture in Social Forecasting [1973], repr. (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Bell’s first publications on the post-industrial society date from the early 1960s. 9 these conditions, but deliberately allowed them to determine the fundamental parameters of their artistic output. Closely connected to the rise of post-industrial society is the mathematical theory of information. This information theory was a branch of science developed in a military context during and shortly after World War II. Its aim was to produce theoretical models for improving the efficiency of information transfer and communication channels. The theory found a broad range of technological and social applications in the post-war decades and also left considerable traces in the sphere of cultural production, especially around 1970. The transfer of information became a self-imposed task for a wide range of cultural producers.3 Thus, conceptual artists adopted a position literally as brokers of information.4 In their practice as artists they would subject the manual work to a protocol (a set of explicit prescriptions and rules) and in many cases completely separate the conception of a work from its execution, denying responsibility for the latter. By reducing a work to the “information value” of a concept, protocol or script, these artists seemed to accept the premises of information theorists about the possibility – or need – to reduce the act of communication to an efficient exchange of “bits”.5 Taking 1970 as the historical starting point of “contemporary art” (see section 4 below), I define and analyse contemporary art as “post- 3 Relevant sources on information theory are Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication [1949] (Urbana/Chicago/London: University of Illinois Press, 1972); and Jeremy Campbell, Grammatical Man. Information, Entropy, Language, and Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). For a critical and historical perspective, see Kathleen Woodward, ed., The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture (London/Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980); and Omar Aftab et al., “Information Theory and the Digital Age”, http://web.mit.edu (2001). 4 Cf. Robert Hobbs, “Affluence, Taste, and the Brokering of Knowledge. Notes on the Social Context of Early Conceptual Art”, in: Michael Corris, ed., Conceptual Art. Theory, Myth, and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 200-222. An interesting case of “reframing”, Hobbs’ use of the word “knowledge” may be understood as an attempt to take away some of the embarrassment concerning the information paradigm of the late 1960s and to make conceptual art seem compatible with the current focus in the contemporary art world on artistic research and knowledge transfer. 5 Michael Corris has suggested that the use of information theory by conceptual artists was done “in the spirit of a productive misreading”. “Recoding Information, Knowledge, and Technology”, in: Corris, ed., Conceptual Art. Theory, Myth, and Practice, 197. 10 conceptual” in the double sense of coming after and permeated by conceptual art.6 This definition allows me to disregard the redundant notion of “neo-conceptual art,” a term coined in the art world for certain work produced in the 1990s. All art produced since 1970 has had to come to terms with the legacy of conceptual art. The social and institutional conditions taken into account by conceptual artists (and relating to the primacy of information) still exist and have profound consequences for the position of artists today. Contemporary art is increasingly subsumed within the realm of communication, in both academic and institutional contexts.7 Since conceptual artists were the first to consider their practice in terms of information transfer,8 a critical reconstruction of the conceptual roots of contemporary art may help to shed light on the conditions that determine artistic production today. In order to achieve this, I will go beyond the classical art historical framework and, following a suggestion by Benjamin Buchloh,9 look at the broader social and cultural changes that took place in Europe and North America in the 1960s and ’70s – most importantly, the transition from an industrial to a service-oriented economy. A critical evaluation of the legacy of conceptual art is complicated by the following paradox. On the one hand, the fact that conceptual formats such as photo-documentation and text works are now a widespread phenomenon 6 As suggested in Peter Osborne, “Art beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Criticism, Art History and Contemporary Art”, Art History 27:4 (September 2004), 666.
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