ANGLO-AMERICAN STANDARD REFERENCE WORKS: ACUTE CONCEPTUALISM
NEVER HAVE ANGLO AMERICAN relations been more firmly cemented than with regard to Conceptualism. As with all purportedly new art, that part of it which is radical is awesome; that part of it which is retrograde, irksome.
This impression is sustained by the surveys, “The British Avant-Garde,” at the New York Cultural Center, and the documentation presented at the Museum of Modern Art and called “Projects: Pier 18,” concerning a suite of activities and situations on a New York City pier. The British survey was organized by Charles Harrison, until recently the assistant editor of Studio International, a magazine dogmatically attached to Conceptualism as is Willoughby Sharp’s Avalanche here in New York. It was Sharp who organized the material for the Museum of Modern Art.
The prevailing impression apart from individual cases1 is that most of the British effort is interchangeable with the American and that the strains of these two “vanguards” are not especially virulent. Considering the tardiness of this review—it will appear after both presentations are down and long after either one had been planned or organized—the possible inappropriateness of these views (and they can be applied to numerous similar efforts) is perhaps less the result of their lateness and more due to the fact that the international Conceptualist movement is moribund and groggy. In short, Conceptualism, as a means of sustaining a group of artists’ work in concert, is over. Whatever it was that these surveys were meant to demonstrate en masse—although, that they were without “aims” or “ends” is probably true—is now more strongly stated in the efforts of individuals or groups of individuals acting in exact concert, rather than in the fragmented, self-referential ways they appear to be acting in surveys which document specious group aspirations and tendentious affiliations. Which in the end brings us back to individuals, individual oeuvres, and formalist analyses of these productions—quite despite the egalitarian and anticritical tenor of the Conceptualist movement.
It is not especially entertaining to rework past critical terrain. In connection with Robert Smithson’s important Six Stops on a Section, I noted that “to record an event appears to grow more important than to create an event, or, more exactly, that creation and recording are, at very least, virtually congruent activities.” (Artforum, April 1969.) In tracing the early development of Richard Serra’s influential work I observed that “. . . films, . . .” articles, or journals or manuscripts or photographs or tape recordings, may in turn aspire to the condition of works of art. I think that this substitution of a record for the actual thing is perhaps one of the key features of a retrograde faction of the new sensibility. The acceptance of such views tends to render expendable the product on which they are based, so much so that many new works exist only as literary ideas or as possibilities in the artist’s mind.” (Artforum, October 1969.) And, of “557,087” at the Seattle Art Museum which was held during the summer of 1969 and which clearly established the formats of two subsequent summers of manifestations (now as well as at last summer’s “Information” show at the Museum of Modern Art) and the theoretical exhibition model derived from a random sequence of notes for The Large Glass, Peter Plagens rightly observed that “the relationship of art to objecthood. . . is solved in a literary way, by literature. The concepts in concept art are either so large, general, profound, abstract, permanent or so small, personal, complex, trivial, particular, ephemeral, as to mock any rationale for an art object. Into the vacuum abandoned by the art object comes “concept,” made manifest by literature (specifications, photo documentation, formulae, and, infrequently, ordinary narrative prose).” (Artforum, November 1969.)2
Thus, for some time now, clearly since 1969, one kind of post-Minimalist innovation has emphasized a production ancillary to the fabrication of objects of art. With the rejection of the art work—either as “art” or “object”—the photograph, the tape recording, the television loop, the film strip, the color slide, in short “secondary sources” have supplanted primary “things.” In so doing, an intellectual asseveration which in its desire for qualification and elusion of specific closed notions has been added in the form of a reference-work “literalism”: documents, philosophical postures, the “abstract,” the “précis,” the “proceeding,” designations used as they were once applied in connection with the literary summary.
Clearly, such “reference works” aim away from closed stylistic systems (and in this, perhaps, the movement finds its strongest modernist expression) particularly closed stylistic systems of the kind associated with Minimalism and the Minimalist affiliate, formalist criticism. Acute Conceptualism, through its very need for qualification, adumbrates those kind of things which in fact cannot be fabricated (although they can be “imagined” and in this way they “do exist”) and which, therefore, are closed to critical discussion or formal analysis, that is to methods of apprehension predicated on closed stylistic entities realized in tangible things. Through a simple expedient, acute Conceptualism appears to attempt to create an art from which the art critic and historian is excluded––the artist himself has virtually moved into these disciplines. But, in rejecting the fabrication of things made according to rules, the production of rules themselves have become the primary embodiment of the more recent phase of Conceptualism. Things are now such, as Douglas Huebler once said of a passé species, that “the existence of each sculpture is documented by its documentation.” One speculates on this passion for documentation as an end. I wonder whether it does not serve the function of being a method of patent, a registration of pedigree aimed at showing who had what idea first—as if “first ideas” could ever be shown to have existed. Each subsequent catalog, in an already long exegetical production, recapitulates the exhibitor’s chronology in which the artist’s curriculum vitae and bibliography is kept up to the minute in an “on-going system.” Oddly, these extensive entries do not trace an artist’s development so much as they offer conclusive proofs that such an artist first had had some fragment of ideation. “The photographs or documentation act . . . in the way they are used in the courtroom. They are presented to make it absolutely clear that such a thing has occurred. They are not to be considered for their particular esthetic quality.” (Les Levine, “The information fall out,” Studio International, June 1971, p. 264.) Ultimately, this documentation—much closer to conventional art history’s index card catalog than earlier vanguardists ever would dream of—seems less concerned with works and more with human existences. The ego is demonstrated, reiterated, and ultimately proven. I document, therefore I am. The journal extract, the recorded musing, the critical testimonial, the fundamentalist element, the narcissistic projection are all held in the honor which Minimalist artists once reserved for the square, seriality, and the monochrome.
By these hesitations I do not mean to infer that what we see is not art. This is beyond doubt—once The Green Box and Duchamp’s notes for The Large Glass were admitted as art and once Yves Klein produced the stunning blow of literally patenting as his own the three monochromes, Klein Blue International, Klein Gold International, and Klein Rose International. In acknowledging these gestures much of the purchase of the more recent phase of Conceptualism is rendered superfluous. In the recent light of the past—immediate (post-Minimalist), recent (Minimalist), distant (Dada)—the positions we now encounter appear derivative, continuous, evolutionary, and frankly imitative. In short, acute Conceptualism possesses the characteristic features of academic art. It is wordy, literal, and rhetorical. The way has been paved for Art-Language, a nonpictorial and tractarian English journal, the most academic expression to date of Conceptualism; although, in the context of the movement, the adjective need not be understood as negative. This Anglo-American interchange has done much to demonstrate that Marshall McLuhan’s contention that we were moving away from a world of linear thought—literature—into one of instantaneous imagery was wrong. The question must hang fire as, of course, the published document and the printed page is in itself a kind of image or picture which can be looked at as easily as read. Granted, the collapse of these two modes of comprehension into a single presentation may be an essential feature of the Anglo-American vanguard. But, as Nancy Mitford once said of Northey, a deft ingenue in Don’t Tell Alfred, “Like all of us, she can read what interests her.”
Do we have here the kind of nostalgia that we feel for snapshots of European Surrealists in exile or for the Hanover Dada Group about to step onto a tram? It seems that a sensibility has been transposed from photo albums and history books to an intellectual advertising in which a thousand photographed attitudes can be shuffled like baseball cards, each one of equal face value to the other. Since—practically speaking—the most radical ambition of acute Conceptualism has been to defeat criticism and history, that is, evolutionary stylistic logistics3, I will only name the artists whose work has been documented at these exhibitions and reproduce those pieces which I like, but with no comment on them, reminding the reader of what Ian Baxter once cynically said, “a reproduction in a top art magazine is worth two one-man shows.”
The British Avant-Garde
The New York Cultural Center
Keith Arnatt
David Dye
Sue Arrowsmith
Barry Flanagan
Terry Atkinson
Gilbert & George
David Bainbridge
Harold Hurrell
Michael Baldwin
Richard Long
Victor Burgin
Roelof Louw
Colin Crumplin
Bruce Mclean
Andrew Dipper
Gerald Newman
David Tremlett
Projects: Pier 18
Museum Of Modern Art
Vito Acconci
Gordon Matta
David Askevold
Mario Merz
John Baldessari
Robert Morris
Robert Barry
Dennis Oppenheim
William Beckley
Alleri Ruppersberg
Mel Bochner
Italo Scanga
Daniel Buren
Richard Serra
Jan Dibbets
Michael Snow
Terry Fox
Keith Sonnier
Dan Graham
Wolfgang Stoerchle
Douglas Huebler
Georges Trakas
Lee Jaffe
John Van Saun
Richards Jarden
William Wegman
Laurence Weiner
—Robert Pincus-Witten
—————————
NOTES
1. A few of these cases in “The British Avant-Garde” are “preconceptual” in nature. In this respect Roelof Louw’s boxing arena-like sculpture with its “bars” of refined color and Richard Long’s floor spiral of approximately four-inch lengths of chamfered and smoothed twigs are noteworthy, although the former has an evasiveness one associates with British color and the latter an “ecological-organic” inference which strikes me as fashionable.
2. By contrast, Sol LeWitt—a lone voice but an immensely influential one—explicitly denies this. The final assertion of his 35 “sentences on Conceptual Art,” states (of the previous 34 postulates) that “these sentences comment on art, but are not art,” (Art Language #1, May 1969, p. 11). But the denial points up the fact that “these sentences” were liable to be construed as art, particularly by the readership of the magazine in which they appeared.
3. Theoretically, this is another matter. No art, no matter how alienated, ever aspires to be “against” anything. It is always “for” something—though what it is for, as in this case, may seem enormously derivative.
