Benjamin Buchloh Replies to Joseph Kosuth and Seth Siegelaub Author(s): Benjamin Buchloh Source: October, Vol. 57 (Summer, 1991), pp. 158-161 Published by: MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778877 Accessed: 28-02-2016 21:04 UTC

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Joseph Kosuth and Seth Siegelaub

I am a bit disappointed that Joseph Kosuth refused to take me up on the

critical and scholarly exchange that seemed possible after our original interview/

discussion conducted during the research in preparation of my essay. It was in

a spirit of critical debate that I had written this essay concerning historical and

theoretical questions within the complex field of activities that is now inevitably

and irreversibly compounded under the stylistic epithet "Conceptual Art."

I had deliberately refrained from provocative polemics in both tone and

information in order to continue that critical exchange. The careful reader can

easily recognize that my essay does not in fact contain any accusations or

polemics directed specifically at Joseph Kosuth or his work (unless one would

consider it an insult to voice a very hesitant doubt that is buried in a footnote

and introduced with the explicit proviso that ". . for the time being and until

further evidence may be produced ...").

Instead of responding to the proposal to look at the history of conceptual

art from a position of critical distance, Kosuth has reacted with a massive assault

consisting of blackmail (of the curators who originally published my essay in

the exhibition catalog, whom he threatened with withdrawing his work from

the exhibition unless they would cede the most important space in the exhibition

to his work and glue his printed reply, supplied on the day of the opening, into

the already printed catalog) and ad hominem insults to which I have no reason

to respond.

What I would like to respond to, however, is the evidence of a common

art-world attitude in Kosuth's reaction that is symptomatic in its fusion of

paranoia and the compulsion to control. Artistic practice from this perspective

is not a dialogic enterprise where critical questions can be asked, challenges and

provocative hypotheses can be posed, and answers and counterchallenges can

be returned. By contrast, it is an enterprise of the culture industry and its

products, whose international dissemination has to be protected (like corporate

products in general) from any challenge by critics-the leftover nuisance from

the old days when artistic practice still aspired to operate in the public sphere.

It seems that in the mind of artists like Kosuth, artistic practice is a matter

of image control and product protection, of territorial strategies, networked or,

if necessary, extorted in the various institutional and commercial venues that

facilitate the work's continued circulation and guarantee its mythical status.

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Historical insight and critical communication have to be silenced and blocked

in order to buttress a support system dependent on the blind faith of curators,

collectors, dealers, and disciples.

The violence of Kosuth's response cannot possibly have been triggered by

the one inference and two factual mistakes that he has found in my fifty-five-

page manuscript. The first factual mistake is my suggestion that Kosuth called

his exhibition space on occasion the Lannis Museum, which is in fact an error;

he called it the Lannis Gallery, as I do call it; and he called it also the Museum

of Normal Art.

The second mistake-noticed by Kosuth after more than a year had passed

and pointed out in his addendum to the original rebuttal, here published upon

his request-is a patent misconstruction. The interested reader will easily notice

that in my footnote 28 (footnote 29 in the October version of the essay), I do

not at all refer to Kosuth's Proto-Investigations as "paintings," but as "definitions

of words on large black canvas squares." Obviously I do know that the Proto-

Investigations were not painted, but that they were photostats. But I have to

admit that I was under the erroneous assumption that these paper photostats

were mounted like valuable posters on canvas to protect them from damage

during installation when the truth is that they are mounted on cardboard.

The main accusation leveled by Kosuth against the curators at the time

was that he had only two days before the opening to read my essay and respond

to it. Now, more than a year later, it is astonishing that all Kosuth can come up

with is a second partial error in one of my footnotes. I had been looking forward

particularly to hearing some retrospective thoughts from Kosuth about his

infatuation with tautological thought in the mid-to-late sixties-which seems a

crucial subject for the study of that moment-or to further clarifications of the

interaction between the minimalists and the emerging conceptualists. But quer-

ies about relationships between artists and their shared information can only

be misconstrued by Kosuth as an attempt to sabotage the idea of the protean

originality of the artist prodigy. Kosuth therefore seems to have decided that

he must shore up his territory and status against even the slightest gesture of

critical doubt with a totally disproportionate rebuttal, a strike of deterrence, so

to speak, that would settle questions once and for all and would make future

critics think twice about even wanting to ask a question or two. But moreover

-and paradoxically-it seems that his outrage and insults were motivated

perhaps even more by the fact that he could not resist the temptation to display

once again his status as a master by deploying the institutional power of the

museum to stage a public retaliation similar to the famous Guggenheim affair

when he co-initiated the censoring of Daniel Buren's work from the Guggen-

heim International Exhibition in 1971.

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Seth Siegelaub's polemical response to my essay seemed less surprising to

me than that of Joseph Kosuth: after all, ambitious art dealers in the twentieth

century have often claimed that they make art history more than that they make

money. Their exclusive identification with one particular moment of artistic

production is both the condition of their success and the cause of their failure

to recognize any other activity within that moment, let alone the development

of the work of a subsequent generation (one could think of Kahnweiler's vitu-

perative attacks on the emergence of nonrepresentational art, for example, and

his simultaneous devotion to minor post-cubist artists like Manolo).

It seems that my article has awoken Mr. Siegelaub from his historical sleep,

as he seems startled by the prospect that somebody might dare to question both

the immaculate conception of the movement whose New York debut he man-

aged and the subsequent canonization of its players as the true conceptual artists

of 1968. Now Siegelaub wakes up in the role of the Marxist poseur, counseling

me on how to write a truly dialectical history, rather than the conventional

formalist one he ascribes to me.

I have to admit I have much more respect for Siegelaub the art dealer,

exhibition organizer, and the publisher of International General than for Sie-

gelaub the Marxist counsel. First of all, I have always considered it an honor to

be accused of being a formalist by vulgar Marxists and to be accused of being

a vulgar Marxist by conservative voices in the art and art history world. But

after a twenty-year debate on the relative autonomy of the aesthetic from the

ideological and the political sphere and the concomitant difficulties for writing

a social art history, even the most radical and orthodox Marxist art historians

would not advocate the methodological simplicity of Siegelaub's argument. Ac-

cusing me of having failed to recognize that conceptual art was born first and

foremost from the political oppositions of these artists to the war in Vietnam

and their sympathy with the student rebellions of 1968 seems only one of the

inevitable results of the mechanistic determinism Siegelaub considers to be

dialectical.

This argument appears all the more dubious in the light of my discussion

of Kosuth's work, with its continuous emphasis on the analytic nature of art

and its inability to make synthetic propositions. More absurd yet, it is Kosuth

that Siegelaub feels particularly compelled to defend (of all participants in the

Siegelaub group certainly the least convincing candidate for the political causes

of Conceptual Art, then and now). I can only suspect that this engagement results

more from the loyalty to the numerous objects by this artist in Siegelaub's

collection than loyalty to the Marxist cause.

His second accusation is that I failed entirely to understand the move-

ment's essentially international character. I thought I had sketched out, both in

my essay and in the consultation for the concept of the exhibition, to what

extent I consider Conceptual Art to be both European and American in its

origins and its consequences. (Does the final part of the essay not deal explicitly

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with the European critical responses to the myths of Conceptual Art in the work

of Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, and Hans Haacke, for example?)

At the same time that Siegelaub accuses me of having written a narrow

local history of the activities between Twenty-third Street and Canal Street in

Manhattan, he tries to disqualify me from writing about the subject-as does

Kosuth-by arguing that I was after all-unlike himself and Lucy Lippard-

not an eyewitness at that place at the time. For it seems that, according to

Siegelaub's astonishing materialist ideas about history, only eyewitness accounts

are reliable, and the rest is personal fiction. This conception of history culmi-

nates in Siegelaub's long list of proper names that, according to him, make up

the real history of Conceptual Art.

Finally, Siegelaub argues that in opposition to his all-embracing collective

vision of conceptual art, mine is closed and esoteric, suffering most of all from

a "Duchamp fixation." I guess I would have to admit that I suffer from a

Duchamp fixation (as a physicist might suffer from an Einstein fixation) to the

extent that I do in fact consider Duchamp's contribution to the theory and

practice of aesthetic experience tremendous-a legacy whose full range is only

beginning now to become apparent. But my attempt to unravel that complicated

legacy does not posit Duchamp as the personal beginning and end. Quite the

opposite, it is an attempt to develop a detailed reading of the works of the

artists and their operations inside the parameters of the Duchampian legacy

and to understand the real changes that they have contributed within that

discursive and institutional territory called contemporary art. That this first

sketch would contain ambiguities seems inevitable, since ambivalence is a fun-

damental condition of the aesthetic object, but in no way can they be miscon-

strued as my personal ambivalence toward the individual artists. It seems that

dealers and collectors inevitably will be the last ones to maintain the notion of

art history as one of continuous achievements and unsurpassable heroic deeds.

-Benjamin Buchloh, May 1991

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