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 Document Version Final published version 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:11 Oct 2021 during the exhibition the gallery will be closed contemporary art and the paradoxes of conceptualism CAMIEL VAN WINKEL 2 3 During the Exhibition the Gallery Will Be Closed: Contemporary Art and the Paradoxes of Conceptualism ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op gezag van de Rector Magnificus prof. dr. D.C. van den Boom ten overstaan van een door het college voor promoties ingestelde commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Aula der Universiteit op vrijdag 17 februari 2012, te 11:00 uur door Camiel Harry van Winkel geboren te ’s-Gravenhage 4 promotor: prof. dr. D.A. Cherry co-promotor: dr. J. Boomgaard Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen 5 Acknowledgments I would like to thank my supervisors, Deborah Cherry and Jeroen Boomgaard at the University of Amsterdam, for the stimulating discussions we had and their willingness to steer me through a few difficult times. I am grateful for their trust that I would somehow finish this thesis. I am equally grateful to Willem De Greef and Jan Cools at Sint-Lukas University College of Art and Design in Brussels for the generous funding I received. Further acknowledgments are due to Janey Tucker, who did a great job correcting my English, and to Michelle Provoost and Sophie Berrebi, whom I am lucky enough to have as my paranymphs. Sophie was also a major stimulus at home; her love made it seem vital to me that I obtain the second PhD title at our breakfast table. The texts compiled in this volume were originally written for the publications listed below. I would like to thank the editors and publishers of these titles for giving me the opportunity to develop my thinking on the topic that was to become the subject of my thesis. Jeroen Boomgaard et al., ed., Als de kunst er om vraagt. De Sonsbeektentoonstellingen 1971, 1986, 1993 (Amsterdam: Stichting Tentoonstellingsinitiatieven, 2001) [chapter 1]. Cat. Conceptual Art in the Netherlands and Belgium 1965-1975, ed. Suzanna Héman et al., (Amsterdam/Rotterdam, Stedelijk Museum and Nai Publishers, 2002) [chapter 2]. Camiel van Winkel, The Regime of Visibility (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005) [chapters 3 and 4]. Cat. Schöner Wonen, ed. Moritz Küng and Patrick Ronse (Brussels/Ghent, Marot/Tijdsbeeld, 2004) [chapter 5]. Cat. Re-View. Perspectieven op de collectie van het Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, forthcoming) [chapter 6]. Jeff Wall. Photographs (Göteborg: Hasselblad Foundation, 2002) [chapter 7]. 6 Contents: Introduction: During the Exhibition the Gallery Will Be Closed, 7 Part I: Unfortunate Implications 1. Collecting Information and – or as – Experience, 73 2. The Obsession with a Pure Idea, 93 Part II: Conceptual Art in a Visual World 3. Information and Visualisation: The Artist as Designer, 109 4. Artists and Critics in the Culture of Design, 161 5. Living with Art, 177 Part III: Conceptual Art and Photography 6. After the Dilettantes: Photography as Conceptual Art Form, 189 7. Jeff Wall: Photography as Proof of Photography, 203 Conclusion: Conceptual Art and the Ironies of History, 213 Bibliography, 227 Samenvatting, 239 Illustrations, 243 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.

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