Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Institutions
Author(s): Benjamin H. D. Buchloh
Reviewed work(s):
Source: October, Vol. 55 (Winter, 1990), pp. 105-143
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778941 .
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BENJAMIN H. D. BUCHLOH
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1. As is usual with stylisticformationsin the historyof art, the origin and the name of the
movementare heavilycontestedby its major participants.Barry,Kosuth,and Weiner, forexample,
vehementlydenied in recent conversationswith the author any historicalconnection to or even
knowledge of the Fluxus movementof the early 1960s. Nevertheless,at least with regard to the
inventionof the term,it seems correctwhen Henry Flyntclaimsthathe is "the originatorof concept
art, the most influentialcontemporaryart trend. In 1961 I authored (and copyrighted)the phrase
'concept art,' the rationale for it and the firstcompositionslabeled 'concept art.' My document was
firstprinted in An Anthology, ed. La Monte Young, New York, 1962." (La Monte Young's An
Anthology was in factpublished in 1963.)
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MelBochner.WorkingDrawingsand OtherVisible
Thingson PaperNot Necessarily
Meantto Be
Viewedas Art.Installation,
SchoolofVisualArts
December,
Gallery, 1966.
5. Mel Bochner, "Less is Less (for Dan Flavin)," Artand Artists(Summer 1966).
....................................,
Sol LeWitt.
WallFloorPiece(ThreeSquares).1966.
and by Donald Judd than I ever was specificallyby LeWitt . .. Pollock and
Judd are, I feel, the beginningand end of American dominance in art."6
Sol LeWitt'sStructures
It would seem that LeWitt's proto-Conceptualwork of the early 1960s
originatedin an understandingof the essentialdilemmathathas hauntedartistic
production since 1913, when its basic paradigms of opposition were first
formulated-a dilemma that could be described as the conflictbetween struc-
tural specificityand random organization. For the need, on the one hand, for
both a systematicreductionand an empiricalverificationof the perceptualdata
of a visual structurestandsopposed to the desire,on the other hand, to assigna
new "idea" or meaning to an object randomly(in the manner of Mallarme's
"transposition")as though the object were an empty(linguistic)signifier.
This was the dilemma that Roland Barthesdescribed in 1956 as the "diffi-
cultyof our times" in the concluding paragraphsof Mythologies:
It seems thatthisis a difficulty pertainingto our times:there is as yet
only one possible choice, and thischoice can bear onlyon two equally
extrememethods:eitherto posit a realitywhichis entirelypermeable
to history,and ideologize; or, conversely,to posit a realitywhich is
ultimately impenetrable,irreducible,and, in this case, poetize. In a
word, I do not yet see a synthesisbetween ideology and poetry(by
poetry understand,in a verygeneral way,the search forthe inalien-
I
able meaning of things).7
Both critiquesof the traditionalpracticesof representationin the American
postwarcontexthad at firstappeared mutuallyexclusive and had oftenfiercely
attacked each other. For example, Reinhardt's extreme form of self-critical,
perceptual positivismhad gone too far for most of the New York School artists
and certainlyforthe apologistsof American modernism,mainlyGreenbergand
Fried, who had constructeda paradoxical dogma of transcendentalism and self-
referentialcritique.On the other hand, Reinhardtwas as vociferousas they- if
6. Joseph Kosuth, "Art after Philosophy" (Part II), in The MakingofMeaning,p. 175. The list
would seem complete,ifit were not forthe absence of Mel Bochner's and On Kawara's name,and its
explicit negation of the importance of Sol LeWitt. According to Bochner, who had become an
instructorat the School of Visual Artsin 1965, Joseph Kosuth workedwithhim as a studentin 1965
and 1966. Dan Graham mentionedthat during that time Kosuth was also a frequentvisitorto the
studios of On Kawara and Sol LeWitt. Kosuth's explicitnegationmakes one wonder whetherit was
not preciselySol LeWitt's series of the so-called "Structures"(such as Red Square, WhiteLetters,for
example, produced in 1962 and exhibitedin 1965) thatwas one of the crucialpointsof departurefor
the formulationof Kosuth's Proto-Investigations.
7. Roland Barthes,Mythologies, trans.AnnetteLavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 158.
famous quip: "All my work in the period before the Nude was visual painting.
Then I came to the idea. "") appear in the historicallyratherunlikelyfusion
...
of Kosuth's attemptto integrate the two positionsin the mid-1960s, leading to
his own formula,which he deployed startingin 1966, "Art as Idea as Idea." It
should be noted, however,thatthe strangeadmixtureof the nominalistposition
of Duchamp (and its consequences) and the positivistpositionof Reinhardt(and
its implications)was not only accomplished in 1965 with the beginnings of
Conceptual Art but was well-preparedin the work of Frank Stella, who in his
Black Paintingsfrom 1959 claimed both Rauschenberg'smonochromepaintings
and Reinhardt'spaintingsas pointsof departure. Finally,it was the work of Sol
LeWitt- in particularworksuch as his Structures - thatdemarcatesthatprecise
transition,integratingas they do both language and visual sign in a structural
model.
The surfacesof these Structuresfrom 1961 to 1962 (some of which used
singleframesfromMuybridge'sserialphotographs)carriedinscriptionsin bland
letteringidentifying the hue and shape of those surfaces(e.g., "RED SQUARE")
and the inscriptionitself(e.g., "WHITE LETTERS"). Since these inscriptions
named either the support or the inscription(or, in the middle section of the
painting,both supportand inscriptionin a paradoxical inversion),theycreated a
continuousconflictin the viewer/reader.This conflictwas notjust over whichof
the two roles should be performedin relationto the painting.To a largerextent
it concerned the reliabilityof the given informationand the sequence of that
information:was the inscriptionto be given primacyover the visual qualities
identifiedby the linguisticentity,or was the perceptualexperience of the visual,
formal,and chromaticelement anteriorto its mere denominationby language?
Clearly this "mapping of the linguisticonto the perceptual" was not argu-
ing favorof "the idea" -or linguisticprimacy- or the definitionof the work
in
of art as an analyticproposition.Quite to the contrary,the permutationalcharac-
ter of the work suggestedthat the viewer/readersystematically performall the
visual and textual options the painting'sparametersallowed for. This included
an acknowledgmentof the painting'scentral,square element:a spatial void that
revealed the underlyingwall surface as the painting's architecturalsupport in
actual space, therebysuspendingthe reading of the paintingbetween architec-
tural structureand linguisticdefinition.
Rather than privilegingone over the other, LeWitt's work (in its dialogue
withJasperJohns'slegacyof paradox) insistedon forcingthe inherentcontradic-
tions of the two spheres (that of the perceptual experience and that of the
linguisticexperience) into the highestpossible relief. Unlike Frank Stella's re-
sponse to Johns,whichforcedmodernistself-referentiality one step furtherinto
the ultimatecul de sac of itspositivistconvictions(his notoriousstatement"what
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you see is whatyou see" would attestto thatjust as muchas the developmentof
his later work),12Sol LeWitt's dialogue (with both Johns and Stella, and ulti-
12. Stella's famous statementwas of course made in the conversationbetween Bruce Glaser,
Donald Judd, and himself,in February 1964, and published in Art News (September 1966), pp.
55-61. To what extent the problem of this dilemma haunted the generationof Minimal artists
becomes evident when almost ten years later, in an interviewwithJack Burnham,Robert Morris
would stillseem to be responding(if perhaps unconsciously)to Stella's notoriousstatement:
Paintingceased to interestme. There were certainthingsabout it that seemed very
problematicto me. ... There was a big conflictbetweenthe factof doing thisthing,
and what it looked like later. It just didn't seem to make much sense to me. Primarily
RobertMorris'sParadoxes
15. Robert Morris, "Some Notes on the Phenomenologyof Making: The Search for the Moti-
vol. 9 (April 1970), p. 63.
vated," Artforum,
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AndyWarhol.FromThirteen Most Wanted Men.
1964.
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17. Victor Burgin, "The Absence of Presence," in The End of Art Theory(Atlantic Highlands,
1986), p. 34.
18. In the preparationof thisessay,I have not been able to finda singlesource or documentthat
would confirmwith definitecredibilityKosuth's claim that these works of the Proto-Investigations
were actuallyproduced and existed physicallyin 1965 or 1966, when he (at that time twentyyears
old) was stilla studentat the School of Visual Artsin New York. Nor was Kosuthable to provideany
documentsto make the claimsverifiable.By contrastthese claimswere explicitlycontestedby all the
artistsI interviewedwho knew Kosuth at that time, none of them rememberingseeing any of the
Proto-Investigationsbefore February 1967, in the exhibitionNon-Anthropomorphic ArtbyFour Young
Artists,organized by Joseph Kosuth at the Lannis Gallery. The artistswith whom I conducted
interviewswere Robert Barry,Mel Bochner,Dan Graham,and Lawrence Weiner. I am not necessar-
ilysuggestingthat the Proto-Investigations could not have been done by Kosuth at the age of twenty
or that the logical steps
(afterall, Frank Stella had painted his Black Paintingsat age twenty-three),
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Dan Graham.HomesforAmerica(ArtsMagazine).
December1966.
JosephKosuth'sTautologies
In oppositionto this,Kosuth was arguing,in 1969, preciselyforthe contin-
uation and expansion of modernism'spositivistlegacy,and doing so withwhat
musthave seemed to him at the timethe mostradical and advanced tools of that
tradition:Wittgenstein'slogical positivismand language philosophy(he emphati-
callyaffirmedthiscontinuitywhen,in the firstpartof "Art afterPhilosophy,"he
states,"Certainlylinguisticphilosophycan be considered the heir to empiricism
. ."). Thus, even while claimingto displace the formalismof Greenberg and
Fried, he in fact updated modernism'sproject of self-reflexiveness. For Kosuth
stabilizedthe notion of a disinterestedand self-sufficient art by subjectingboth
-the Wittgensteinianmodel of the language game as well as the Duchampian
model of the readymade- to the stricturesof a model of meaningthatoperates
in the modernisttraditionof that paradox Michel Foucault has called mod-
ernity's"empirico-transcendental" thought.This is to say that in 1968 artistic
production is stillthe result, Kosuth,of artisticintentionas it constitutesitself
for
above all in self-reflexiveness (even if it is now discursiveratherthan perceptual,
epistemological rather than essentialist).20
19. "For many years it has been well known that more people are aware of an artist'swork
through(1) the printedmedia or (2) conversationthanby directconfrontationwiththeart itself.For
paintingand sculpture,where the visual presence-color, scale, size, location-is importantto the
work, the photograph or verbalizationof that work is a bastardizationof the art. But when art
concernsitselfwiththingsnot germaneto physicalpresence,itsintrinsic(communicative)value is not
altered by its presentationin printedmedia. The use of catalogues and books to communicate(and
disseminate)art is the most neutralmeans to presentthe new art. The catalogue can now act as the
primaryinformationforthe exhibition,as opposed to secondaryinformationaboutart in magazines,
catalogues, etc. and in some cases the 'exhibition' can be the 'catalogue."' (Seth Siegelaub, "On
Exhibitionsand the World at Large" [interviewwith Charles Harrison],StudioInternational,[De-
cember 1969].)
20. This differentiation is developed in Hal Foster's excellent discussionof these paradigmatic
differencesas theyemerge firstin Minimalismin his essay "The Crux of Minimalism,"in Individuals
(Los Angeles: The Museum of ContemporaryArt, 1986), p. 162-183.
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24. Joseph Kosuth, "Art after Philosophy," Studio International,nos. 915-917 (October-
December 1969). Quoted here fromJoseph Kosuth, The MakingofMeaning,p. 155.
Ten years later,at the same momentthat Kosuth was discoveringit as the
centralaestheticproject of his era, the phenomenonof the tautologicalwas once
again opened to examinationin France. But now, ratherthan being discussedas
a linguisticand rhetoricalform,it was analyzed as a general social effect:as both
the inescapable reflexof behavior and, once the requirementsof the advanced
culture industry(i.e., advertisementand media) have been put in place in the
formationof spectacle culture, a universalcondition of experience. What still
remainsopen fordiscussion,of course, is the extentto whichConceptual Artof a
certaintypeshared these conditions,or even enacted and implementedthem in
the sphere of the aesthetic-accounting, perhaps, for its subsequent proximity
and success withina world of advertisementstrategists-or, alternatively,the
extent to which it merelyinscribeditselfinto the inescapable logic of a totally
administeredworld,as Adorno's notorioustermidentifiedit. Thus Guy Debord
noted in 1967:
The basically tautological character of the spectacle flowsfrom the
simple fact that its means are simultaneouslyits ends. It is the sun
which never sets over the empire of modern passivity.It covers the
entiresurfaceof the world and bathes endlesslyin its own glory.28
28. Guy Debord, The SocietyoftheSpectacle(Detroit: Black & Red, 1970), n. p., section 13. First
published,Paris, 1967.
29. Donald Judd,in Lucy Lippard, "Homage to the Square," Artin America(July-August, 1967),
pp. 50-57. How pervasive the square actuallywas in the art of the early-to mid-1960s is all too
obvious: the workfromthe late '50s, such as paintingsby Reinhardtand Rymanand a large number
of sculpturesfromthe early 1960s onwards (Andre, LeWitt, and Judd), deployed the tautological
formin endless variations.Paradoxicallyeven Kosuth's workfromthe mid-1960s- while emphasiz-
ing its departure frompainting'straditionalobject statusand visual/formaldesign-continues to
displaythe definitionsof words on large, black, canvas squares. By contrastone only has to thinkof
JasperJohns'sor BarnettNewman's workas immediatepredecessorsof thatgenerationto recognize
how infrequent,if not altogetherabsent, the square was at that moment.
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30. Michel Claura, at the time the critic activelypromotingawareness of the affiliatedartists
Buren, Mosset,Parmentier,and Toroni, has confirmedin a recentconversationthatthe referenceto
Warhol, in particularto his series The ThirteenMost WantedMen, which had been exhibitedat the
Ileana Sonnabend Gallery in 1967, was quite a conscious decision.
31. Sol LeWitt,"Serial Project#1, 1966," AspenMagazine,nos. 5-6, ed. Brian O'Doherty, 1967,
n. p.
32. The importanceof this publicationin 1962 was mentioned to me by several of the artists
interviewedduring the preparationof thisessay.
33. Lucy Lippard, "Introduction,"in 955.000 (Vancouver: The Vancouver Art Gallery,January
13- February8, 1970), n. p.
......
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MarcelBroodthaers's (Plaque).1971.
moment that it mimed the operating logic of late capitalismand its positivist
instrumentality in an effortto place itsauto-criticalinvestigations
at the serviceof
liquidating even the last remnants of traditional aesthetic experience. In that
process it succeeded in purging itself of
entirely imaginaryand bodily experi-
of
ence, physical substance and the space of memory,to the same extentthat it
effacedall residues of representationand style,of individualityand skill. That
was the momentwhen Buren's and Haacke's work fromthe late 1960s onward
turnedthe violence of that mimeticrelationshipback onto the ideological appa-
ratus itself,using it to analyze and expose the social institutionsfromwhichthe
laws of positivistinstrumentality and the logic of administrationemanate in the
firstplace. These institutions,which determinethe conditionsof culturalcon-
sumption,are the veryones in which artisticproduction is transformedinto a
tool of ideological controland cultural legitimation.
It was leftto Marcel Broodthaersto constructobjects in whichthe radical
achievementsof Conceptual Art would be turnedinto immediatetravestyand in
which the seriousnesswith which Conceptual Artistshad adopted the rigorous
mimeticsubjectionof aestheticexperience to the principlesof whatAdorno had
called the "totallyadministeredworld" were transformedinto absolute farce.
And it was one of the effectsof Broodthaers'sdialecticsthatthe achievementof
Conceptual Art was revealed as being intricatelytied to a profoundand irrevers-
ible loss: a loss not caused by artisticpractice,of course, but one to which that
practiceresponded in the fulloptimismof itsaspirations,failingto recognizethat
the purging of image and skill,of memoryand vision, withinvisual aesthetic
representationwas not just another heroic step in the inevitable progress of
Enlightenmentto liberate the world from mythicalformsof perception and
hierarchicalmodes of specialized experience, but that it was also yet another,
perhaps the last of the erosions (and perhaps the most effectiveand devastating
one) to which the traditionallyseparate sphere of artisticproductionhad been
subjected in its perpetual effortsto emulate the regnant episteme withinthe
paradigmaticframeproper to art itself.
Or worse yet, that the Enlightenment-triumph of Conceptual Art-its
transformation of audiences and distribution,its abolition of object statusand
commodityform--would most of all only be shortlived,almost immediately
giving way to the return of the ghostlikereapparitionsof (prematurely?)dis-
placed painterlyand sculptural paradigms of the past. So that the specular
regime,whichConceptual Art claimed to have upset, would soon be reinstated
withrenewed vigor. Which is of course what happened.