It is only a kind of criticism addicted to the pendular logic of a history of alternations that turns away from the objections of the naive observer. Insisting upon the importance of the fact that numbers or pencil marks on the wall involve a rejection of the concrete object, that criticism finds itself embracing the notion of “dematerialization” as the operative tool of distinction. And then it is face with the problem that the cutting edge, rather than appearing too fine, seems too blunt. Because “dematerialization” is a category incapable of distinguishing the work of, say, Sol LeWitt, Bochner, Rockburne, and Richard Tuttle from other types of objectless art—Bob Barry’s for example, or Joseph Kosuth’s, or Douglas Huebler’s. It therefore encourages one to overlook the way in which the meaning of the work in the first group is deeply opposed to the kind of content—to the models of how meaning itself is formulated—proposed by the work in the second. For the type of Conceptualism evinced by the art of the second group grows from the seeds of a deeply planted traditionalism with respect to meaning.

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In connection with the exhibition “Prospect ’69,” Robert Barry was interviewed. “What is your piece for Prospect ’69?” he was asked. “The piece,” he replied, “consists of the ideas that people will have from reading this interview . . . . The piece in its entirety is unknowable because it exists in the minds of so many people. Each person can really know that part which is in his own mind.”

Barry’s answer stands as a verbal equivalent for the Inert Gas Series which he did in the same year. The photographs of sites over which released amounts of invisible gas are presumably expanding demand the same kind of residence within the minds of each of their separate viewers. For the work must be completed by the addition of a mental image of the (invisible) gas to the concrete image of the landscape. Since each of these mental images is private, “each person can really know that part which is in his own mind.”

This notion of privacy, and of meaning tied to the private confines of a mental space, permeates Huebler’s thinking as well. Deepening Barry’s view of the separateness of experience, Huebler proceeds to deny to time and space their status as the grounds of a transpersonal reality. “I think,” Huebler declares, “it’s perfectly fair to say that time is what each of us says it is at any given moment.” Or take, for another example, On Kawara’s “I got up” postcards and “I am alive” telegrams, about which Lucy Lippard writes,

The fascination exerted by Kawara’s obsessive and precise notations of his place in the world (time and location) imply a kind of self-reassurance that the artist, does, in fact exist. At the same time, they are totally without pathos, their objectivity establishing the self-imposed isolation which marks his way of life as well as his art.

“Objectivity” is a strange predicate to attach to the utter subjectivism of the notion that we can only know someone is alive (or awake) because he tells us so. Joining Conceptual hands with Barry and Huebler, Kawara places art within the confines of what Logical-Positivism has called the protocol language—the language of sense-impression, mental images, and private sensations. It is a language implying that no outside verification is possible of the meanings of words we use to point to our private experience—that meaning itself is hostage to that separate video of impressions registered across the screen of each individual’s monitor. In the terms of the protocol language, my ‘green’ and my ‘headache’ point to what I see and feel, just as your ‘green’ and your ‘headache’ point to something you possess. The separateness of our ‘greens’ arises from the separateness of our retinas, and thus neither of us has any way of verifying the separate date to which our words point. In the grip of this argument we may feel that we therefore have no way of verifying the meaning of those words—and that ‘time’ or ‘green’ do indeed mean “what each of us says it is at any given moment.”

Because it is over the notion of privacy or private languages that the division between these artists and Minimal/post-Minimal art arises, it is important to explore the various forms private language takes (and has taken); just as it is important to understand the implications of those forms. One of the forms involves the notion of intention.

If sense-impressions are thought of as necessarily private, intention must be thought of that way also. Thus, it is no surprise that artists who immerse themselves in questions of the protocol language are particularly concerned with intention. One thinks of Kosuth in the connection, of his saying that,