Philosophy and Conceptual Art This page intentionally left blank Philosophy and Conceptual Art Edited by Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox26dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © the several contributors 2007 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–928555–6 13579108642 CONTENTS List of Illustrations vii Introduction ix Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens Part I: Conceptual Art as a Kind of Art 1 1. On Perceiving Conceptual Art 3 Peter Lamarque 2. The Dematerialization of the Object 18 Derek Matravers 3. Visual Conceptual Art 33 Gregory Currie 4. Speaking Through Silence: Conceptual Art and Conversational Implicature 51 Robert Hopkins Part II: Conceptual Art and Aesthetic Value 69 5. The Aesthetic Value of Ideas 71 Elisabeth Schellekens 6. Kant After LeWitt: Towards an Aesthetics of Conceptual Art 92 Diarmuid Costello vi / Contents Part III: Conceptual Art, Knowledge and Understanding 117 7. Matter and Meaning in the Work of Art: Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs 119 Carolyn Wilde 8. Telling Pictures: The Place of Narrative in Late Modern ‘Visual Art’ 138 David Davies 9. Conceptual Art and Knowledge 157 Peter Goldie 10. Sartre, Wittgenstein, and Learning from Imagination 171 Kathleen Stock Part IV: Appreciating Conceptual Art 195 11. Artistic Character, Creativity, and the Appraisal of Conceptual Art 197 Matthew Kieran 12. Creativity and Conceptual Art 216 Margaret A. Boden 13. Conceptual Art Is Not What It Seems 238 Dominic McIver Lopes 14. Emergency Conditionals 257 Art & Language Index 267 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Jenny Holzer, Truisms, 1978–87. Digital image © 2007, The Museum of Modern Art/Scala, Florence/© ARS, NY and DACS, Landon 2007. 2. Michael Craig-Martin, An Oak Tree, 1973. © Tate 2007. 3. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917. Photo by Alfred Stieglitz from the peri- odical ‘‘The Blind Man’’, Beatrice Wood. Philadelphia Museum of Art © Photo Scala, Florence, © Succession Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2007. 4. Bruce Nauman, One Hundred Live and Die, 1984. Neon tubing with clear × 1 × . × . × glass tubing on metal monolith; 118 132 4 21 inches (299 7 335 9 53.3 cm). Collection Benesse Corporation, Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, Kagawa Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2007. 5. Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2007. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/SCALA, Florence. 6. Art–Language, Index 01 (Art and Language, Index 001) (aka Kassel Index), 1972. By permission of the Lisson Gallery, London. 7. Robert Barry, Inert Gas Series: Argon, 1969. By permission of the artist. (From a measured volume to indefinite expansion on March 4, 1969 on a beach in Santa Monica, California, one litre of argon was returned to the atmosphere. Documentation: Catalogue page, diapositive, two colour photographs framed.) Collection Elisabeth & Gerhard Sohst in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany. Photo Bridgeman Art Library. 8. Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing No. 623, 1989. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2007. 9. Adrian Piper, Catalysis IV, 1970–1. By permission of the artist. viii / List of Illustrations 10. Santiago Sierra, Space Closed by Corrugated Metal, 2002. By permission of the Lisson Gallery, London. 11. Walter De Maria: Vertical Earth Kilometer, 1977. Kassel, Germany. Photo by N.C. Tenwiggenhorn. © Dia Center for the Arts. 12. Keith Arnatt, Trouser-Word Piece, 1972–89. © Tate 2007. Introduction Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens Philosophy and Conceptual Art Art devoid of ideas is seldom good art. Ideas can wear many guises in an artistic context: they can be highly focused and convey one specific concern (such as the idea of the threat of domestic violence), or, alternatively, they can be quite indefinite (such as the idea of the wilderness of nature as evocative of the sub- lime). There are, in fact, many different kinds of ideas that can be conveyed by art,andsotheclaimthatgoodartshouldinvolveideasneednotimplythatonly artwhichsetsouttocommunicatespecificthoughtsisworthyofourattention. However, there is one artistic movement which has claimed that art should invariably aim to engage its audience intellectually, and, moreover, that it need not do so aesthetically or emotionally. Art, on this view, should aim to be ‘of the mind’, not simply because it demands a primarily intellectual approach, but also because such artwork is best understood as an idea. The purpose of art, according to this movement, is analytic, and as such, art is in the business of creating and transmitting ideas. Artists are authors of meaning rather than skilled craftsmen, since it is the idea, and not the art object, that is at the heart of artistic experience. With a plethora of bold claims such as these, the conceptual art movement placed itself firmly within a stream of controversy from its very outset.¹ ¹ Although the first publication to use the expression ‘Conceptual Art’ appears in Sol LeWitt’s ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ (1967), Henry Flynt was already exploring the idea in his ‘Essay: x / Introduction And like other avant-garde movements before it, it not only welcomed but partly instigated the tumultuous debate that was to engulf much of the Western art world from the late 1960s onwards by posing questions such as ‘What kind of thing can qualify as art?’, ‘Must art be beautiful?’, and ‘What is the role of artists?’ Despite their considerable diversity, the multitude of manifestos, mission statements, projects, and discussions that emerged from this movement can all be said to share this one central tenet: in art, the ‘idea is king’.² In conceptual art, that is, the concepts or ideas constitute the artworks’ ‘material’.³ In the process of redefining art-making and art appreciation in terms of a primarily intellectual process, many artists working in the conceptual tradition have drawn, and continue to draw, on philosophical theories and debates. Frequent appeals are made to philosophers from both the Anglo- Saxon and Continental perspectives: Wittgenstein, Carnap, Austin, Kuhn, Barthes, Althusser, Benjamin, Foucault, Lacan, Saussure, and many others.⁴ Many conceptual artists even go further, claiming that conceptual art and philosophy are in much the same business, so that even if they approach their subject matter from different angles, there is considerable overlap in the questions explored by the two disciplines. One conceptual artist and writer, Joseph Kosuth, even heralds conceptual art as the eventual successor to philosophy.⁵ Philosophy thus seems to have served not only as an inspiration, but, at times, even as a source of authority and justification for the work performed by conceptual artists. As a matter of fact, comparatively few analytic philosophers have returned thisinterestandsenseofamity.Evenphilosophersworkingonissuesconnected with artistic and aesthetic experience rarely appeal to conceptual artworks when it comes to illustrating their claims or supporting their views. Whilst critical discussions of the philosophical issues raised by conceptual art certainly Concept Art’, in La Monte Young and Jackson MacLow (eds.), An Anthology of Chance Operations (New York, 1963). ² Paul Wood, Conceptual Art, Movements in Modern Art (London: Tate Publishing, 2002), 33. ³ LucyLippardandJohnChandler,‘TheDematerializationofArt’,ArtInternational,12/2(February 1968), 31–6. ⁴ See, for example, Art & Language’s Index 01 made for the ‘Documenta’ exhibition in 1972; Keith Arnatt’s Trouser-Word Piece (1972) and Joseph Kosuth’s ‘Art After Philosophy’ Studio International, 178 (October 1969), 134–7, all illustrated in this volume; and the work of Mel Bochner and Art & Language, especially Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin. ⁵ See Kosuth, ‘Art After Philosophy’. Introduction / xi havebeengivendueattentionbyartcriticsandarttheorists,suchinvestigations are still to find their way into analytic philosophy