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Marcel Duchamp and the Perceptual Dimension of Conceptual Art

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Marcel Duchamp and the Perceptual Dimension of Conceptual Art chapter 3 Marcel Duchamp and the Perceptual Dimension of Conceptual Art Conceptual Art is often considered to be without a perceptual dimension, even though it is classified with the visual arts.1 Nonetheless, the critique of formalism advanced by Conceptual Art cannot be totally divorced from perception in favour of ‘pure’ concepts, without eliminating the contextual character of this art. To deny the contextuality of these concepts, however, would be to dismiss the very position without which idea as art is inconceivable when it is also without a perceptual ingress. As will become clear, this paradox has resulted more from the inadequacy of the standard critical response to Conceptual Art, than from the inadequacies of Conceptual Art itself. Just as Merleau-Ponty has noted that in perception there is no vision without thought, so in Conceptual Art there is no concept without precepts. In addressing the perceptual dimension of Conceptual Art, I will necessar- ily consider another issue, namely, the relationship of art to aesthetics. Using the word ‘aesthetics’ to mean the experience of sensual form, rather than any science of the beautiful, I will discuss the anxious, but never truncated, rela- tionship of art to aesthetics in Idea Art. Duchamp’s readymades, as well as the ‘dematerialised’ and supposedly ‘objectless’ art of the Conceptual move- ment have not really sequestered cognition from perception, information from experience, or ideas from objects. To a considerable degree, the opposite has occurred. Although Idea Art has highlighted how we conceive art, it has con- tributed much to a self-consciousness about how we perceive art. Thus, Con- ceptual Art has led to a rigorous critique of art and aesthetics. Without erad- icating either the aesthetic dimension of art or the contextual grounding of aesthetics, Idea Art has stringently re-examined both. This essay will disclose the perceptual self-consciousness of artists like Mar- cel Duchamp and Hans Haacke, who have dealt most subtly with the percep- tion of art when not ‘making’ objects to be perceived. Conversely, we will see 1 I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities, which provided me with a Summer Seminar Grant to work on this article. Also, I am indebted to Professor Sam Hunter, with whom I discussed some of these ideas when I was a Visiting Fellow at Princeton in the summer of 1980. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/9789004235861_005 70 chapter 3 how certain Conceptual Artists and their apologists have – by erroneously pro- claiming Idea Art free from formal considerations – merely helped entrench untenable preconceptions for perceiving art forms. A refutation of this view will be connected to a rebuttal of the argument that modern art has caused the aesthetic to be cut off from art,2 since neither of these positions recognises that this relationship has been radically re-assessed, but not completely suppressed. There are three major phases of Idea Art: 1) proto-Conceptual Art, such as the readymades of Duchamp; 2) Conceptual Art, for example, the ‘pure’ ideas of Joseph Kosuth or Terry Atkinson; and 3) Metaconceptual Art, the works by Hans Haacke and Daniel Buren which have given a radical, self- reflexive turn to Idea Art by focusing on the preconceptual factors presently influencing any experience of Conceptual Art. In recognition of how recent Metaconceptual Art has demonstrated that the most profound Idea Art is incisively self-critical about its own contextual grounding, this essay will entail a phenomenological approach, rather than an empirical description. Hence, I will use an epoché concerning the ‘universal’ or ontological nature of art, as well as for the possibility of any ‘essential’ or a-contextual approach to art. A more conclusive look at Idea Art will result from a consideration of the issues which fostered it and the factors which await it in any contemporary constitution of its meanings. As this study will show, Idea Art has expanded self-consciousness about the ‘impure’ contextuality of art precisely because it has not reduced art to the ‘purity’ of ideas. As Richard Wollheim has noted, concepts are used in the creation of any artwork.3 To conceive and create art, rather than something else, presupposes a con- cept of what art is or presumably should be. Even when the spontaneous and the unintentional are used in art, their acceptance as art involves a concep- tual ordering which elevates some ideas over others. Anything can be con- sidered art, but only if it is intentionally conceivable as art by someone who experiences it as such. Even though the conceptual dimension of art has been emphatically underscored in the twentieth century, it was hardly unemphas- ised in earlier periods. Nicolas Poussin, a contemporary of Descartes, defined painting as ‘nothing but an idea of incorporeal things’, since he contended that the concept of an artwork was ‘a pure product of the mind’.4 Nevertheless, this rationalistic grounding of classicising art was directly related to a concern with 2 Binkley 1977, p. 265. 3 Wollheim 1974, p. 114. 4 Poussin 1958, pp. 144–5. For a discussion of Descartes’ relationship to Poussin and the Grand Manner, see Lee 1967..
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