Both the status of art as an object and the validity of the gallery exhibition as a unit have been questioned. The first sign of the problem may have been in the ’50s when Pollock, Newman, and Rothko made their large paintings. After initial consternation, however, the paintings were assimilated into small spaces, like a gallery or apartment, because the artists wanted intimate, participatory contact. Happenings, though sometimes producing residual objects, like Oldenburg’s, were outside gallery limits; even more so were Events, which could be imperceptible, except to participants, dispersed, and protracted or momentary. Earthworks, which substitute terrain for the object, were originally supported by galleries notably Virginia Dwan’s, and what was shown in the gallery was usually the documentary evidence of work in New Jersey or Nevada. The new expansion of scale was wittily stated by Morris when he observed of his Los Angles Project, 2 (air conditioning and heating equipment buried in a square mile of earth) that there would be “ a little more weather in the area.” Smithson’s dialect of the site and non-site set up a network of signs between the absent signified and the present signifiers, a procedure which assigns the gallery a partial role, as a container of rock samples, maps, and photographs. Andre’s “post-studio art,” has the potential, not followed by Andre himself, of going straight from inventory to site, which would make it post-gallery art, needing no middle stage of display. Conceptual art, when it consists of photographs, schedules, lists, maps, and instructions is better viewed in books and catalogues than when mounted and framed on the wall where it subsides into tacky graphics. Finally performance art, such as Vito Acconci’s, deals with states of low visibility, interaction, exhaustion, vulnerability which dissolve the usual day-long solidity of spectacle at an art gallery.
In conclusion we must ask what is likely to follow from the crisis of confidence that artists (some artists) feel in the distribution system. There is a basic continuity from (1) the public consumption of prints that started on a big scale in the 17th century and (2) the public display of heterogeneous uncommissioned art in annual exhibitions that started in the 18th century to the ’60s. The continuous assumptions are that art is translatable and that public access to new art is desirable. For any development in the ’70s to introduce a real difference, these ideas or one of them, would need modification. It is highly unlikely that any change will originate with the galleries which have never been remarkable either for “degree of flexibility” or “span of foresight” to quote the two criteria of M. P. Schutzenberger’s for evaluating behavior. (29) To judge by the recent record museums do not seem a likely source of new forms of distribution, subject as they are to their own institutional traditions and to the ceiling imposed by wages and overheads. Any change would need to originate with the artists, though the difficulty of making viable changes is suggested by the underlying assumption of public access which I take it nobody wants to abridge. However the cumulative effect of post-studio, site-based, and conceptual art forms is a clear sign of stress, requiring changed forms of presentation. The problem is that search-bias, the tendency to look for a new solution to the old solution, (36) is pronounced in the art world, because we all tend to conceive the world in the fixed image of our vocation.
(1) This passage derives from the author’s “Art and the Communication Network,” Canadian Art, June, 1966, pp.35-37
(2) Calvin Tompkins, “Moving with the Flow,” The New Yorker, November 6, 1971, pp. 58-113
(3) Apollinaire of Art, ed. LeRoy C. Breuing, trans. Susan Suleiman, New York, 1972, p. 51.
(4) Tomas Maldonado, Design, Nature and Revolution, trans. Susan Suleiman, New York, 1972, p. 51
(5) Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch, New York, 1971, p. 56.
(6) D. S. Pugh, D. J. Hickson, C. R. Hinings, Writers on Organizations, Harmondsworth, 1971. Paraphrasing Richard M. Cyert and James G. March, p. 81.
(7) Ibid., p. 83.
(8) H. J. Leavitt, “Some Effects of Certain Communication Patternson Group Performance,” in Organization Theory, ed. D. S. Pugh, Harmondsworth, 197, p. 72.
(9) Raymond B. Cottoll, “The Nature and Measurement of Anxiety,” Scientific American, 208, 3, 1963, p. 96.
(10) D. Katz, R. L. Kahn, “Common Characteristics of Open Systems,” in Systems Thinking, ed. F. E. Emery, Harmondsworth, 1969, p. 88.
(11) F. E. Emery, E. L. Trist, “The Casual Texture of Organizational Events,” in Emery, Systems Thinking, pp. 247-248.
(12) For an account of one such competition, between The Museum of Modern Art and The Guggenhiem Museum, see the author’s “Art,” The Nation, December 30, 1968, pp.733-734.