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 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to October. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 129.96.252.188 on Sun, 28 Feb 2016 21:04:52 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Benjamin Buchloh Replies to 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. This content downloaded from 129.96.252.188 on Sun, 28 Feb 2016 21:04:52 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Buchloh Replies to Kosuth and Siegelaub 159 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. This content downloaded from 129.96.252.188 on Sun, 28 Feb 2016 21:04:52 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 160 OCTOBER 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.