Conceptual Art of the Press Release, Or Art History Without
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Conceptual Art of the Press Release, or Art History without Art Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00276/1753987/octo_a_00276.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 DAVID JOSELIT On a recent tour of galleries in Chelsea, I mentioned to my two compan - ions—a curator and an artist—that in general I prefer to forego reading the Xeroxed press releases offered to visitors at the front desk until I’ve had a good look at the show. This policy represents a test of sorts—both for myself and for the art on view. Can I apprehend patterns of allusion and palimpsests of codes without the cheat sheet? And conversely, does the art, stripped of its discursive apparatus, hold up? On that day, however, it wasn’t long before I was consulting press releas - es—first, to learn what a certain mystifying material was in a painting at Hauser & Wirth, and then, frankly, just to cut to the chase, to move more efficiently through the ten or so exhibitions we wanted to see that afternoon. My lapse is trivial but nonetheless central to something disturbing both in art practice and in histories and criticism of contemporary art. If the equation of art with information beginning in the late 1960s constituted a profound ontological challenge to the work of art, now Blouinartinfo.com giddily identifies the “25 Most Collectible Conceptual Artists.” 1 As in neoliberal economic theory, where maximal information is said to make markets more efficient, our Conceptual art of the press release (in which artworks are “translated” into text as propositions about their meaning) makes even difficult art easy to consume. It’s my suspicion that this condition is intensified by the now-standard training of artists in MFA programs, where learning consists of verbally justifying one’s artworks before a cohort of peers and artist-instructors. The once radical proposal of Conceptual art—that objects exist in a transactional relation with text (and prosaic photographic docu - ments)—has become business as usual. It’s easy enough to criticize the art world, but we academics are responsible for an analogous shift. Let’s call it a philological turn (to be generous), or, in a less generous formulation, art history without art. As I see it, this practice, in which art-historical analysis based on thinking with and through objects—what Yve-Alain Bois eloquently called painting as model (but which can be extended to any kind 1. Art+Auction , Taylor Dafoe, Liza Muhlfeld, Meghana Reddy, Sara Roffino, Angela M.H. Schuster, Danielle Whalen, Deborah Wilk, “25 Most Collectible Conceptual Artists,” September 26, 2016, http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/1510504/25-most-collectible-conceptual-artists, last accessed 10/22/16. OCTOBER 158, Fall 2016, pp. 167 –168. © 2016 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 16 8 OCTOBER of artwork as model )—is displaced by textiles of citations, the weaving of primary and secondary sources where artworks serve as little more than illustrations of rhetorical designs. In my view, this tendency is a perversion of two of the most important revisionist challenges to art history launched in the 1970s and ’80s: the social history of art and the semiotic turn. In the former, artworks are “histori - cized” through a recitation of their many discursive effects; in the latter, they are Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/OCTO_a_00276/1753987/octo_a_00276.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 “theorized” by demonstrating their inherent nature as texts. In both cases, resis - tant matter risks disappearing into a cloud of words. I have nothing against words—or history, or theory—but I do think there is too much faith (whether implicit or explicit) in the transparency of information in both the art world and academic art history, and too little careful attention (and theoriza - tion!) of the opacities of painted, molded, enacted, and digitally recorded stuff. This stuff (i.e., art) is what the Conceptual art of the press release and art history without art seem to fear. Instead, they adopt a neoliberal ideal of perfect translation from the status of obdurate objecthood to the much more mobile medium of text, which, like currency, is easily circulated and consumed. This translation abets all kinds of quick transactions—from my own speed viewing in Chelsea to art-world Instagram feeds to remote sales of artworks conducted globally. If you’re Edward Snowden, transparency is a good thing, but I’m not sure it’s such a good principle for art objects. In fact, we might be entering a moment when the very purpose of art is to slow things down; to afford friction; to refuse easy translation into information . Perhaps, we are at the end of the era initiated by Conceptual art, since the astonishingly prescient principle of that tendency is now the standard operating procedure of global capital. If this is true, art’s challenge (and that facing critics as well) is not to forego engaging with information, but rather to resist the allure of its transparency in favor of tracking its plasticity —in other words, the shapes of social governance and aesthetic speculation that its myriad overlapping channels assume. .