Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of 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 . Accessed: 20/08/2012 06:32
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Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aestheticof Administration to the Critique of Institutions*

BENJAMIN H. D. BUCHLOH

is noteternal.We know called beauty thatour breath This monster had no will never but we above and world's can, all, conceive stop, ofthe beginning creation and its end. - Apollinaire,Les peintres cubistes art is part and parcel ofthedisenchanttoanyrelapseintomagic, Allergic use Weber's ment the to Max term. It is inextricably intertwined world, of withrationalization. Whatmeans and productive methods art has at its disposalare all derived fromthisnexus. -Theodor Adorno

A twenty-year distanceseparatesus fromthe historical momentof Concepis a Art. It distance that both allows and obliges us to contemplate the tual movement'shistoryin a broader perspectivethan that of the convictionsheld during the decade of its emergence and operation (roughlyfrom 1965 to its temporarydisappearance in 1975). For to historicizeConceptual Art requires, first of all, a clarification of the wide range of oftenconflicting positionsand the of exclusive that were mutually types investigation generatedduringthisperiod. But beyond that there are broader problemsof method and of "interest." For at thisjuncture,any historicization has to considerwhattypeof questionsan art-historical on the studyof visual objects- can based approach traditionally or to answer in the context of artisticpractices that legitimately pose hope on insisted addressed of outside the parameters of the production explicitly being of formally ordered, perceptual objects, and certainlyoutside of those of art and criticism. such an historicization mustalso address the And, further, history

An earlier versionof thisessay was published in L'art conceptuel: * une perspective (Paris: Mus&e d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1989).

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Art 1962-1969 Conceptual

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currencyof the historicalobject, i.e., the motivationto rediscoverConceptual Art fromthe vantage point of the late 1980s: the dialecticthatlinksConceptual and traditionaldefinitions of Art, as the most rigorous eliminationof visuality this decade of a rather violent restoration of to traditional artistic representation, formsand procedures of production. It is withCubism,of course, thatelementsof language surfaceprogrammatically within the visual field for the firsttime in the historyof modernist painting,in what can be seen as a legacy of Mallarm&. It is there too that a analysisof language and parallel is establishedbetweenthe emergingstructuralist the formalistexamination of representation.But Conceptual practices went model onto the perceptualmodel, outdisbeyond such mappingof the linguistic tancing as they did the spatializationof language and the temporalizationof Because the proposal inherentin Conceptual Art was to replace visual structure. definition the object of spatialand perceptualexperience by linguistic alone (the the most consequentialassault work as analyticproposition),it thus constituted its commoditystatus,and its formof on the statusof that object: its visuality, the fullrange of the implications distribution. of Duchamp's legacy Confronting for the firsttime, Conceptual practices,furthermore, reflectedupon the conand the role (or the death) of the authorjust as much as theyredefined struction and the role of the spectator.Thus theyperformed the conditionsof receivership of the conventionsof pictorial the postwarperiod's most rigorousinvestigation and sculptural representationand a critique of the traditionalparadigms of visuality. From its very beginning,the historicphase in which Conceptual Art was developed comprisessuch a complex range of mutually opposed approaches that at a must beware of the forceful voices (mostly retrospective survey any attempt those of the artists for the and themselves) demandingrespect purity orthodoxy of the movement.Preciselybecause of thisrange of implications of Conceptual of its history in termsof a Art,it would seem imperativeto resista construction which would limit that to a of stylistic homogenization, history group individuals defined practicesand historicalinterventions and a set of strictly (such as, for the activities initiated Seth in New York in 1968 or the example, by Siegelaub authoritarian for the Art & orthodoxyby quests English Language group). To historicize Concept Art (to use the termas it was coined by Henry Flynt in 1961)1 at thismoment,then,requires more thana mere reconstruction of the
As is usual with stylistic formationsin the historyof art, the origin and the name of the 1. 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 it seems correctwhen Henry Flyntclaimsthathe is "the originatorof concept inventionof the term, art trend. In 1961 I authored (and copyrighted) the phrase art, the most influential contemporary compositionslabeled 'concept art.' My document was 'concept art,' the rationale for it and the first ed. La Monte Young, New York, 1962." (La Monte Young's An firstprinted in An Anthology, was in factpublished in 1963.) Anthology

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movement'sself-declared primaryactors or a scholarlyobedience to theirproof intentions and operations.2 Their convictions were voiced with claimed purity that is continuous within the the (by now often hilarious) self-righteousness claims made in avant-gardedeclarationsof the twentraditionof hypertrophic tiethcentury.For example, one of the campaign statements byJoseph Kosuth fromthe late 1960s asserts: "Art before the modern period is as much art as Neanderthal man is man. It is for this reason that around the same time I Because a conceptual work of art in replaced the term 'work' forart proposition. in terms."' the traditionalsense, is a contradiction of It seems crucial to rememberthat the oppositionswithinthe formation readings of Minimal sculpture Conceptual Art arose partlyfromthe different (and of its pictorialequivalentsin the paintingof Mangold, Ryman,and Stella) and in the consequences the generationof artistsemergingin 1965 drew from those readings-just as the divergencesalso resultedfromthe impactof various movementas one or anotherwas chosen by the new withinthe Minimalist artists of reference.For example, Dan Graham seems to generationas itscentralfigures have been primarily engaged withthe workof Sol LeWitt. In 1965 he organized LeWitt's first one-personexhibition(held in his gallery,called Daniels Gallery); in 1967 he wrote the essay "Two Structures:Sol LeWitt"; and in 1969 he to his self-published volume of writings entitledEnd concluded the introduction Moments as follows:"It should be obvious the importanceSol LeWitt's workhas in 1967, rewritten first in had formywork. In the articlehere included (written the after-the-fact hasn't too much subthat 1969) I hope only appreciation merged his seminal work into mycategories."4
forthe termwas Edward Kienholz, withhis seriesof Concept A second contestant Tableaux in of the term.See forexample Roberta 1963 (in fact,occasionallyhe is stillcreditedwiththe discovery Smith'sessay"Conceptual Art," in Concepts ofModernArt,ed. Nikos Stangos [New York: Harper and Row, 1981], pp. 256-70). 1969 Proposition14" (publishedby Gerd de JosephKosuth claimsin his "Sixth Investigation time "in a seriesof notes Vries,Cologne, 1971, n.p.) thathe used the term"conceptual" forthe first Art dated 1966 and publisheda year laterin a catalogue foran exhibitiontitledNon-Anthropomorphic at the now defunctLannis Galleryin New York." Sol LeWitt's two And then there are of course (most officially accepted by all participants) famoustextsfrom1967 and 1969, the "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," first publishedin Artforum, vol. V, no. 10, pp. 56- 57 and "Sentences on Conceptual Art," first publishedin Art& Language,vol. 1, no. 1 (May 1969), pp. 11-13. of Conceptual Art by blindly For a typicalexample of an attemptto writethe history 2. adopting and repeating the claims and convictionsof one of that history'sfigures,see Gudrun Inboden, Kosuth:TheMakingofMeaning(Stutt"JosephKosuth--Artist and Criticof Modernism,"inJoseph 1981), pp. 11-27. gart: StaatsgalerieStuttgart, 14 (Cologne: Gerd De Vries/Paul 1969 Proposition 3. Joseph Kosuth, The SixthInvestigation Maenz, 1971), n. p. withwhose work Dan Graham, End Moments 4. (New York, 1969), n.p. The other Minimalists involved were Dan Flavin (Graham wrote the catalogue Graham seems to have been particularly Art in Chicago in 1967) and Robert essay for Flavin's exhibitionat the Museum of Contemporary in his essay "Income Piece" in 1973). Morris(whose work he discussed later extensively

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MelBochner. and OtherVisible Drawings Working Meantto Be Thingson PaperNot Necessarily Viewedas Art.Installation, School Arts ofVisual 1966. December, Gallery, Mel Bochner,by contrast, seems to have chosen Dan Flavin as his primary figureof reference.He wroteone of the first essayson Dan Flavin (it is in facta text-collageof accumulated quotations,all of which relate in one way or the other to Flavin's work).5Shortlythereafter, the text-collage as a presentational mode would, indeed, become formative withinBochner's activities, for in the same year he organized what was probablythe first trulyconceptualexhibition (both in termsof materials being exhibitedand in termsof presentational style). and EntitledWorking Other Visible onPaper NotNecessarily Meant Drawings Things as Art(at the School of Visual Arts in 1966), mostof the Minimal to Be Viewed were presentalong witha numberof thenstillratherunknownPost-Miniartists mal and Conceptual artists.Having assembled drawings,sketches,documents, tabulations,and other paraphernaliaof the productionprocess,the exhibition the "originals" in Xeroxes assembledintofourlooselimiteditself to presenting leafbindersthatwere installedon pedestalsin the centerof the exhibition space. While one should not overestimate the importanceof such features(nor should one underestimatethe pragmaticsof such a presentationalstyle),Bochner's intervention both the formatand space of exhibiclearlymoved to transform tions.As such,it indicatesthatthe kindof transformation of exhibition space and of the devices throughwhichart is presentedthat was accomplishedtwo years
5. Mel Bochner, "Less is Less (for Dan Flavin)," Artand Artists (Summer 1966).

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later by Seth Siegelaub's exhibitions and publications(e.g., The Xerox Book)had become a common concern of the of artists. already generation post-Minimal A thirdexample of the close generational would be the fact that sequencing at leastone of JosephKosuthseemsto have chosen Donald Juddas his keyfigure: the early tautologicalneon works fromthe Proto-Investigations is dedicated to Donald Judd; and throughout the second part of "Art afterPhilosophy"(published in November, 1969), Judd's name, work,and writings are invokedwith the same frequency as thoseof Duchamp and Reinhardt.At the end of thisessay, add to that,however,that I was cerKosuth explicitly states: "I would hastily by Ad Reinhardt,Duchamp via Johnsand Morris, tainlymuch more influenced

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WallFloorPiece(ThreeSquares).1966. Sol LeWitt.

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and by Donald Judd than I ever was specifically by LeWitt . .. Pollock and and end of I the American dominance in art."6 feel, are, beginning Judd Sol LeWitt's Structures It would seem that LeWitt's proto-Conceptualwork of the early 1960s of the essentialdilemmathathas hauntedartistic originatedin an understanding when its basic paradigms of opposition were first since 1913, production -a dilemma that could be described as the conflictbetween strucformulated and random organization. For the need, on the one hand, for tural specificity reductionand an empiricalverification of the perceptualdata both a systematic standsopposed to the desire,on the other hand, to assigna of a visual structure 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 "difficultyof our times" in the concluding paragraphsof Mythologies: It seems thatthisis a difficulty pertainingto our times:there is as yet and one this choice can bear onlyon two equally only possible choice, extrememethods:eitherto posit a realitywhichis entirely permeable and ideologize; or, conversely,to posit a realitywhich is to history, ultimately impenetrable,irreducible,and, in this case, poetize. In a I do not yet see a synthesis between ideology and poetry(by word, in a I verygeneral way,the search forthe inalienpoetry understand, able meaning of things).7 in the American Both critiquesof the traditional practicesof representation had context at first and exclusive had oftenfiercely appeared mutually postwar attacked each other. For example, Reinhardt's extreme form of self-critical, had gone too far for most of the New York School artists perceptual positivism forthe apologistsof American modernism, and certainly mainlyGreenbergand a paradoxical dogma of transcendentalism and selfFried, who had constructed the other referential On Reinhardt was as vociferous as hand, critique. 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 instructor at 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, White for Letters, example, produced in 1962 and exhibitedin 1965) thatwas one of the crucialpointsof departurefor the formulation of Kosuth's Proto-Investigations. Roland Barthes,Mythologies, 7. trans.AnnetteLavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 158.

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not more so - in his contemptforthe opposite,whichis to say,the Duchampian tradition.This is evident in Ad Reinhardt'scondescendingremarksabout both Duchamp--"I've never approved or liked anythingabout Marcel Duchamp. You have to chose between Duchamp and Mondrian"-and his legacyas represented throughCage and Rauschenberg--"Then the whole mixture, the number of poets and musiciansand writersmixed up withart. Disreputable. Cage, Cunningham,Johns, Rauschenberg. I'm against the mixture of all the arts, against the mixtureof art and life you know, everydaylife."8 What slid by unnoticedwas the factthatboth these critiquesof representaresults(e.g., Rauschenberg's tion led to highly comparable formaland structural monochromes in 1951-1953 and Reinhardt's monochromes such as Black in 1955). Furthermore,even while made from opposite vantage Quadruptych such workssystematically denied the arguments accompanying points,the critical of visual representation, astontraditional principlesand functions constructing similarlitaniesof negation. This is as evident,for example, in the text ishingly in 1953 as it is in Ad Paintings prepared byJohnCage forRauschenberg'sWhite Reinhardt's 1962 manifesto"Art as Art." FirstCage: To whom,No subject,No image, No taste,No object, No beauty,No talent, No technique (no why), No idea, No intention,No art, No feeling,No black, No white no (and). Aftercareful considerationI have come to the conclusion that there is nothingin these paintings thatcould not be changed, that theycan be seen in any lightand are not destroyedby the action of shadows. Hallelujah! the blind can see again; the water is fine.9 And then Ad Reinhardt'smanifestofor his own "Art as Art" principle: no shapes or composingsor representings, no No lines or imaginings, visionsor sensationsor impulses,no symbolsor signsor impastos,no no pleasures or pains, no accidecoratingsor coloringsor picturings, no things, no ideas, no relations,no attributes, dents or ready-mades, no qualities--nothing that is not of the essence.'0 Ad Reinhardt'sempiricist American formalism (condensed in his "Art as Art" formula)and Duchamp's critique of visuality(voiced for example in the
The first of the two quotationsis to be foundin Ad Reinhardt'sSkowhegan lecture,delivered 8. in 1967, quoted by Lucy Lippard in Ad Reinhardt (New York, 1981), p. 195. The second statement with Mary Fuller, published as "An Ad ReinhardtMonologue," Artforum, appears in an interview vol. 10 (November 1971), pp. 36-41. 9. John Cage (statementin reaction to the controversy engendered by the exhibitionof Rauschenberg's all-whitepaintingsat the Stable Gallery,September 15-October 3, 1953). Printed in Herald Tribune, December 27, 1953, p. 6 (section 4). EmilyGenauer's column in the New York Ad Reinhardt,"Art as Art," ArtInternational 10. (December 1962). Reprintedin Artas Art:The SelectedWritings ed. Barbara Rose (New York: Viking, 1975), p. 56. ofAd Reinhardt,

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famous quip: "All my work in the period before the Nude was visual painting. ratherunlikely Then I came to the idea. fusion "") appear in the historically ... the two positionsin the mid-1960s, leading to of Kosuth's attemptto integrate in 1966, "Art as Idea as Idea." It his own formula,which he deployed starting should be noted, however,thatthe strangeadmixtureof the nominalist position of Duchamp (and its consequences) and the positivist positionof 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 - thatdemarcatesthatprecise LeWitt- in particularworksuch as his Structures do both as transition, language and visual sign in a structural integrating they model. from 1961 to 1962 (some of which used The surfacesof these Structures in bland singleframesfromMuybridge'sserialphotographs)carriedinscriptions the hue and shape of those surfaces(e.g., "RED SQUARE") identifying lettering itself(e.g., "WHITE LETTERS"). Since these inscriptions and the inscription named either the support or the inscription(or, in the middle section of the in a paradoxical inversion), theycreated a painting,both supportand inscription in the viewer/reader.This conflict was notjust over whichof continuousconflict the two roles should be performedin relationto the painting.To a largerextent of the given information it concerned the reliability and the sequence of that was the inscriptionto be given primacyover the visual qualities information: or was the perceptualexperience of the visual, identified entity, by the linguistic chromatic element anterior to its mere denominationby language? and formal, of this the onto the perceptual" was not argu"mapping linguistic Clearly - or the definition in favor of "the idea" -or of the work linguistic primacy ing to the of art as an analytic the characproposition.Quite contrary, permutational ter of the work suggestedthat the viewer/readersystematically performall the visual and textual options the painting'sparametersallowed for. This included of the painting'scentral,square element:a spatial void that an acknowledgment revealed the underlyingwall surface as the painting's architectural support in actual space, therebysuspendingthe reading of the paintingbetween architecand linguistic definition. tural structure Rather than privileging one over the other, LeWitt's work (in its dialogue with the inherentcontradicJasperJohns'slegacyof paradox) insistedon forcing tions of the two spheres (that of the perceptual experience and that of the linguisticexperience) into the highestpossible relief. Unlike Frank Stella's reone step further into sponse to Johns,whichforcedmodernistself-referentiality convictions the ultimatecul de sac of itspositivist "what (his notoriousstatement
11. withFrancis Roberts (1963), ArtNews,(December 1968), p. 46. Marcel Duchamp, interview

Sol LeWitt. Untitled (Red Square,White Letters).

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you see is whatyou see" would attestto thatjust as muchas the developmentof his later work),12 Sol 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 interview withJack 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 betweenthe factof doing thisthing, problematicto me. ... There was a big conflict and what it looked like later. It just didn't seem to make much sense to me. Primarily

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mately,of course, withGreenberg) developed a dialecticalpositionwithregard to the positivist legacy. In contrastto Stella, his work now revealed thatthe modernist compulsion for empiricistself-reflexiveness not only originated in the scientific positivism which is the foundinglogic of capitalism(undergirdingits industrialformsof but that,foran artistic production just as muchas itsscienceand theory), practice that internalizedthis positivism a on by insisting purelyempiricist approach to vision, there would be a final destiny.This destinywould be to aspire to the conditionof tautology. It is not surprising, then,that when LeWitt formulatedhis second text on Conceptual Art-in his "Sentences on Conceptual Art" from the spring of first sentence should programmatically state the radical difference 1969-rthe between the logic of scientific productionand that of aestheticexperience: 1. Conceptual artists are mystics ratherthan rationalists. They leap to conclusionsthat logic cannot reach. 2. Rationaljudgments repeat rationaljudgments. 3. Irrationaljudgments lead to new experience.13 Robert Morris'sParadoxes Theproblem has been one ofideas-those most admiredare for sometime theoneswith thebiggest, most incisive ideas (e.g.,Cage & Duchamp) . I think thattodayart is a formofart history.
-

Robert Morris,letterto Henry Flynt,8/13/1962

Quite evidently,Morris's approach to Duchamp, in the early 1960s, had already been based on reading the readymade in analogy with a Saussurean model of language: a model where meaning is generated by structural relationships.As Morrisrecalls,his own "fascinationwithand respectforDuchamp was related to his linguisticfixation,to the idea that all of his operations were built on a sophisticatedunderstanding of language itself."'4Accordultimately Morris's ingly, early work (from 1961 to 1963) already pointed toward an of Duchamp thattranscendedthe limiteddefinition of the readyunderstanding
because there was an activity I did in time,and there was a certainmethod to it. And thatdidn't seem to have any relationship to the thingat all. There is a certainresolution in the theaterwhere thereis real time,and what youdo is what youdo. (emphasisadded) Robert Morris, unpublished interviewwithJack Burnham, November 21, 1975, Robert Morris Archive.Quoted in Maurice Berger,Labyrinths: Robert and the1960s (New York: Morris, Minimalism, Harper & Row, 1989), p. 25. 13. Sol LeWitt, "Sentences on Conceptual Art," firstpublished in 0-9, New York (1969), and Art-Language, Coventry(May 1969), p. 11. 14. Robert Morrisas quoted in Berger,Labyrinths, p. 22.

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made as the mere displacementof traditionalmodes of artistic productionby a new aestheticof the speech act ("this is a workof art ifI say so"). And in marked fromthe Conceptualists'subsequentexclusivefocuson the unassisted distinction readymades, Morris had, from the late 1950s when he discovered Duchamp, been particularly and the engaged withwork such as ThreeStandard Stoppages the Glass Green Notes (The Box). for Large Morris'sproductionfromthe early 1960s, in particular workslike Card File Bulb I-Box Metered and the Statement Litanies, (1963), (1962), (1963), ofAesthetic also entitledDocument indicated a of Withdrawal, (1963), reading Duchamp that went towards a structural and semioticdefinition clearly beyondJohns's,leading of the readymade. As Morrisdescribed it retrospectively of the functions in his 1970 essay "Some Notes on the Phenomenologyof Making": There is a binaryswingbetweenthe arbitrary and the nonarbitrary or or diachronic "motivated" which is . . . an historical, evolutionary, featureof language's developmentand change. Language is not plasof human behaviorand the structures ticart but bothare forms of one can be compared to the structures of the other.'5 While it is worthnoticingthatby 1970 Morrisalready reaffirmed apodictithe ontological characterof the category"plastic" art versus that of "lancally guage," it was in the early 1960s that his assaultson the traditionalconcepts of and plasticity had already begun to lay some of the crucial foundations visuality for the developmentof an art practiceemphasizingits parallels,if not identity, of linguistic withthe systems signs,i.e., Conceptual Art. as early as 1961 in his Box withtheSound of Its Own Most importantly, Making, Morris had ruptured both. On the one hand, it dispenses with the Modernist quest for medium-specific purityas much as with its sequel in the a conviction of purelyperceptualexperienceoperatingin Stella's visual positivist And on the other,by counteractand the tautologies earlyphases of Minimalism. of visual of an the with that the supremacy auditoryexperienceof equal ifnot ing he the renewed Duchampian quest for a nonretinalart. In higher importance, Box withtheSound ofIts Own Making,as much as in the subsequent works,the critique of the hegemonyof traditionalcategories of the visual is enacted not only in the (acoustic or tactile) disturbanceof the purityof perceptual experiact of denyingthe viewer ence, but it is performedas well througha literalist all (at least traditionally defined)visual information. practically of a "perceptual withdrawal"leads in each of the worksfrom This strategy featuresof the structhe early 1960s to a different analysisof the constituent tured object and the modes of reading it generates. In I-Box, for example, the witha semioticpun (on the wordsI and eye) vieweris confronted just as much as
Robert Morris, "Some Notes on the Phenomenologyof Making: The Search for the Moti15. vol. 9 (April 1970), p. 63. vated," Artforum,

Robert Morris.I-Box. 1962.

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witha structural sleightof hand fromthe tactile(the viewerhas to manipulate the box physically to seetheI of theartist) I throughthe linguistic sign(the letter definesthe shape of the framing/display device: the "door" of the box) to the visualrepresentation of theartist) and back. It is (the nude photographic portrait of course this very tripartite divisionof the aestheticsignifier- its separation into object, linguisticsign, and photographicreproduction-that we will encounter in infinitevariations,didacticallysimplified(to operate as stunning in Kosuth's tautologies)and stylistically designed (to take the place of paintings) after 1966. Proto-Investigations In Document(Statement Morris takes the literal Withdrawal), of Aesthetic of the visual even in that after further, clarifying negation Duchamp the readymade is notjust a neutralanalyticproposition(in the mannerof an underlying statementsuch as "this is a work of art"). Beginningwiththe readymade,the workof art had become the ultimate and theresultof subjectof a legal definition institutional validation.In the absence of any specifically visualqualitiesand due

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lack of any (artistic) manual competenceas a criterion of distincto the manifest tion, all the traditional criteria of aesthetic judgment--of taste and of - have been programmatically voided. The resultof thisis that connoisseurship of the aestheticbecomes on the one hand a matterof linguistic the definition convention and on the other the functionof both a legal contract and an institutional discourse(a discourseof power ratherthan taste). This erosion works,then,notjust againstthe hegemonyof the visual,but of any other aspect of the aestheticexperience as being against the possibility autonomousand self-sufficient. That the introduction of legalisticlanguage and an administrative of the artisticobject could styleof the materialpresentation effect such an erosion had of course been prefigured in Duchamp's practiceas well. In 1944 he had hireda notaryto inscribea statement of authenticity on his 1919 L.H.O.O.Q., affirming that ". . . this is to certify that thisis the original

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of Aesthetic Robert Morris. Untitled (Statement 1963. Withdrawal).

Art 1962-1969 Conceptual

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'ready-made'L.H.O.O.Q. Paris 1919." What was possiblystilla pragmaticmaneuver with Duchamp (although certainlyone in line withthe pleasure he took in of the workof art definition the vanishingbasis forthe legitimate contemplating in visual competence and manual skill alone) would soon become one of the featuresof subsequent developmentsin Conceptual Art. Most obconstituent issued by Piero Manzoni defining personsor viouslyoperatingin the certificates works of art this is to be or lifetime as (1960-61), partial persons temporary zones of immaterial found at the same timein Yves Klein's certificates assigning to the various collectorswho acquired them. pictorialsensibility conventionsand legalisticarrangements not But thisaestheticof linguistic it also cancels the the studio of traditional the denies aesthetic, validity only aestheticof productionand consumptionwhichhad stillgoverned Pop Art and Minimalism. of figurative critique(and ultimateprohibition) repreJustas the modernist sentationhad become the increasingly dogmatic law for pictorialproductionin decade of the twentieth the first century,so Conceptual Art now instatedthe as the inescapableaestheticrule forthe end of of any and all visuality prohibition the twentieth Just as the readymade had negated not only figurative century. and authorship while introducingrepetitionand authenticity, representation, the series(i.e., the law of industrial production)to replace the studioaestheticof the handcrafted original,Conceptual Art came to displace even thatimage of the mass-producedobject and its aestheticizedformsin Pop Art, replacing an aestheticof industrial productionand consumptionwithan aestheticof administravalidation. and tive legal organizationand institutional Edward Ruscha's Books One major example of these tendencies--acknowledged both by Dan Graham as a major inspirationfor his own "Homes for America" and by Kosuth, whose "Art afterPhilosophy" names him as a proto-Conceptualartist-would be the early book work of Edward Ruscha. Among the key strategiesof future Conceptual Art that were initiatedby Ruscha in 1963 were the following:to chose the vernacular (e.g., architecture)as referent;to deploy photography as the representationalmedium; and to develop a new form of systematically distribution produced book as opposed to the tradition(e.g., the commercially d'artiste. livre crafted ally in any formwhateverwould have been Typically,referenceto architecture formalism and AbstractExpresunthinkablein the context of American-type the European postwaraestheticforthatmatter)untilthe early sionism(or within 1960s. The devotion to a privateaestheticof contemplative experience,withits of the social functions absence of any systematic reflection of artistic concomitant production and their potential and actual publics, had, in fact,precluded any and artistic of architectural production,be it explorationof the interdependence

VARIOUS

Edward Ruscha. Four Books. 1962-1966.

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even in the mostsuperficial formsof architectural decor.16 It was not and trivial untilthe emergenceof Pop Art in the early 1960s, in particularin the workof Bernd and Hilla Becher, Claes Oldenburg, and Edward Ruscha, thatthe references to monumental and to (even in itsnegationas theAnti-Monument) sculpture if vernacular architecture reintroduced a reflection on (even onlyby implication) and the absence of domestic)space, thereby public (architectural foregrounding a developed artistic on the problematicof the contemporary reflection publics. In January1963 (the year of Duchamp's first Americanretrospective, held at the Pasadena Art Museum), Ruscha, a relatively unknownLos Angeles artist, Gasoline Stations. The book, modest decided to publisha book entitledTwenty-Six
like ArshileGorkyunder the impactof It would be worthwhile to explore the factthatartists 16. of muralpainting whenhe was the WPA programwould stillhave been concernedwiththeaesthetics and thateven Pollock tinkered commissioned to decorate the NewarkAirportbuilding, withthe idea dimensionfor his paintings, of an architectural into wonderingwhethertheycould be transformed withthe Seagram Corporationto architectural panels. As is well known,Mark Rothko'sinvolvement produce a set of decorativepanels for theircorporate headquartersended in disaster,and Barnett Newman's synagogueprojectwas abandoned as well. All of theseexceptionswould confirm the rule and a reversal of the that the postwar aesthetichad undergone the most rigorous privatization reflection on the inextricablelink between artisticproductionand public social experienceas they had markedthe 1920s.

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in format was as removedfromthe tradition and production, of the artist's book was opposed to everyaspect of the official as itsiconography Americanart of the 1950s and early '60s: the legacy of AbstractExpressionismand Color Field painting.The book was, however, not so alien to the artisticthoughtof the emerginggeneration,if one remembersthatthe year beforean unknownartist fromNew York bythe name of AndyWarholhad exhibiteda serialarrangement of thirty-two stenciledpaintingsdepicting Campbell Soup cans arranged like objectson shelvesin the Ferus Gallery.While both Warhol and Ruscha accepted a notionof public experiencethatwas inescapably containedin the conditions of both artists altered the mode of productionas well as the formof consumption, of theirworksuch thata different distribution addressed. public was potentially Ruscha's vernaculariconographyevolved to the same extentas Warhol's had fromthe Duchamp and Cage legacyof an aestheticof "indifference," and fromthe commitment to an antihierarchical valid organizationof a universally Indeed, random samplingand aleatory facticity, operatingas total affirmation. of possibleobjects (Ruscha's Twenty-Six choice froman infinity GasolineStations, Most WantedMen) would soon become essentialstrategies Warhol's Thirteen of the aestheticof Conceptual Art: one thinksof AlighieroBoetti's The Thousand Rivers,of Robert Barry'sOne Billion Dots, of On Kawara's One Million Longest

122

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in thiscontext,of Doug Huebler's life-long Years,or, mostsignificantly project, entitledVariablePiece: 70. This workclaims to documentphotographically "the existenceof everyonealive in order to produce the mostauthenticand inclusive representationof the human species that may be'assembled in that manner. Editions of this work will be periodicallyissued in a varietyof topical modes: '100,000 people,' '1,000,000 people,' '10,000,000 people,' . . . etc." Or again, thereare the worksby StanleyBrouwn or Hanne Darboven where in each case abstractprincipleof pure quantification an arbitrary, replaces traditional princior of and/or sculptural organization pictorial compositional relational ples order. In the same mannerthatRuscha's books shifted the formalorganizationof the mode of presentation the representation, itself became transformed: instead of lifting frommass-cultural sourcesand (or print-derived) photographic imagery these images into painting (as Warhol and the Pop Artistshad transforming in an appropriate practicedit), Ruscha would now deploy photography directly, laconic typeof photography at that, medium. And it was a particularly printing situateditself as muchoutsideof all conventions of art photogone thatexplicitly raphyas outside of those of the venerable traditionof documentaryphotograThis devotion to a deadpan, phy,least of all thatof "concerned" photography. to amateurish approach photographicformcorrespondsexactlyto anonymous, banal. Thus at all three levels Ruscha's iconographicchoice of the architectural of mode distribution -the given forms form, -iconography, representational of artisticobject no longer seemed acceptable in their traditionally specialized and privilegedpositions. As Victor Burgin put it with hindsight:"One of the of the hierarchy of media thingsConceptual Art attemptedwas the dismantling to which behind is it) assumed according painting (sculpture trailingslightly most to, superior inherently notably,photography.""7 even in 1965- 66, withthe earlieststagesof Conceptual pracAccordingly, tices, we witnessthe emergence of diametrically opposed approaches: Joseph on the one hand (according to their author conKosuth's Proto-Investigations ceived and produced in 1965);18 and a work such as Dan Graham's Homesfor
Victor Burgin, "The Absence of Presence," in The End of Art Theory 17. (Atlantic Highlands, 1986), p. 34. In the preparationof thisessay,I have not been able to finda singlesource or documentthat 18. Kosuth's claim that these works of the Proto-Investigations would confirmwith definitecredibility in 1965 or 1966, when he (at that time twenty were actuallyproduced and existed physically years old) was stilla studentat the School of Visual Artsin New York. Nor was Kosuthable to provideany contestedby all the documentsto make the claimsverifiable. By contrastthese claimswere explicitly who knew Kosuth at that time, none of them remembering artistsI interviewed seeing any of the ArtbyFour Young before February 1967, in the exhibitionNon-Anthropomorphic Proto-Investigations Artists, organized by Joseph Kosuth at the Lannis Gallery. The artistswith whom I conducted were Robert Barry,Mel Bochner,Dan Graham,and Lawrence Weiner. I am not necessarinterviews could not have been done by Kosuth at the age of twenty that the Proto-Investigations ilysuggesting or that the logical steps (afterall, Frank Stella had painted his Black Paintingsat age twenty-three),

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Dan Graham. HomesforAmerica (ArtsMagazine).

December 1966.

on the other.Publishedin Arts America Magazinein December 1966, the latteris a work which- unknownto most and long unrecognized-programmatically and contextuality, addressingcrucial quescontingency emphasized structural of audience and authorship.At the same and distribution, tionsof presentation esotericand self-reflexive aestheticsof pertime the work linked Minimalism's on the architecture of massculture(thereby to a perspective mutation redefining detachment fromany representation of the legacyof Pop Art). The Minimalists' contemporarysocial experience upon which Pop Art had insisted,however to construct models of visual meaningand resultedfromtheirattempt furtively, and phenomenoexperiencethatjuxtaposed formalreductionwitha structural logical model of perception.
and Pop Art leading up to the Proto-Investigations fusingDuchamp and ReinhardtwithMinimalism of Kosuth'shistorical awarenessand strategic could not have been takenbyan artist But intelligence. evidence is I am sayingthatnone of the workdated by Kosuth to 1965 or 1966 can-until further the By contrast, produced-actually be documentedas 1965 or 1966 or dated withany credibility. of On Kawara (whose studioKosuthvisitedfrequently at thattime),such as Something, wordpaintings are reproduced and documented.

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Graham's workargued foran analysisof (visual) meaningthat By contrast, constituted withinthe relationsof language's defined signs as both structurally in the referent of and social and politicalexperience. Further, grounded system Graham's dialectical conception of visual representation polemicallycollapsed betweenthe spaces of productionand those of reproduction(what the difference and secondaryinformation).'9 Seth Siegelaub would,in 1969, call primary Anticof work's actual modes distribution and the within its reception ipating very Homes of production, eliminatedthe difference betweenthe structure forAmerica the difference and its(photographic)reproduction, artistic construct betweenan the difference exhibitionof art objects and the photographof its installation, betweenthe architectural space of the galleryand the space of the catalogue and the art magazine. JosephKosuth'sTautologies In oppositionto this,Kosuth was arguing,in 1969, precisely forthe continuation and expansion of modernism'spositivist and legacy, doing so withwhat musthave seemed to him at the timethe mostradical and advanced tools of that and language philosophy tradition:Wittgenstein's (he emphatilogical positivism thiscontinuity when,in the first partof "Art afterPhilosophy,"he callyaffirmed states,"Certainlylinguistic philosophycan be considered the heir to empiricism of Greenberg and . ."). Thus, even while claimingto displace the formalism For Kosuth Fried, he in fact updated modernism'sproject of self-reflexiveness. and self-sufficient art by subjectingboth stabilizedthe notion of a disinterested model of the language game as well as the Duchampian -the Wittgensteinian of a model of meaningthatoperates model of the readymade- to the strictures in the modernisttraditionof that paradox Michel Foucault has called modthought.This is to say that in 1968 artistic ernity's"empirico-transcendental" for intention as it constitutes itself is still the result, Kosuth,of artistic production if is it now discursive rather than above all in self-reflexiveness (even perceptual, epistemologicalratherthan essentialist).20
19. "For many years it has been well known that more people are aware of an artist'swork thanby directconfrontation withtheart itself. For through(1) the printedmedia or (2) conversation to the paintingand sculpture,where the visual presence-color, scale, size, location-is important work, the photograph or verbalizationof that work is a bastardizationof the art. But when art concernsitself withthings not germaneto physical value is not presence,itsintrinsic (communicative) 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 information forthe exhibition, as opposed to secondaryinformation aboutart in magazines, primary catalogues, etc. and in some cases the 'exhibition' can be the 'catalogue."' (Seth Siegelaub, "On Exhibitionsand the World at Large" [interview with Charles Harrison],StudioInternational, [December 1969].) This differentiation is developed in Hal Foster's excellent discussionof these paradigmatic 20. differences as theyemerge first in Minimalism in his essay "The Crux of Minimalism,"in Individuals Art, 1986), p. 162-183. (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary

Art 1962-1969 Conceptual

125

At the very moment when the complementaryformationsof Pop and the legacyof AmeriMinimalArt had, forthe first time,succeeded in criticizing of this and its formalism prohibition referentiality, project is all the can-type more astounding. The privilegingof the literal over the referentialaxis of aesthetichad entailed- had been (visual) language- as Greenberg's formalist countered in Pop Art by a provocativedevotion to mass-cultural iconography. Then, both Pop and Minimal Art had continuouslyemphasized the universal conditions presence of industrialmeans of reproductionas inescapable framing had for artisticmeans of production,or, to put it differently, they emphasized thatthe aestheticof the studio had been irreversibly replaced by an aestheticof Pop and Minimal Art had exhumed productionand consumption.And finally, the repressed historyof Duchamp (and Dadaism at large), phenomena equally unacceptable to the reigningaestheticthoughtof the late 1950s and early '60s. foryetanotherreason. Kosuth's narrowreading of the readymadeis astonishing claimed that he had encountered the work of Duchamp In 1969, he explicitly throughthe mediation of Johns and Morris rather than throughan primarily and works.21 actual studyof Duchamp's writings As we have seen above, the firsttwo phases of Duchamp's reception by fromthe early 1950s (Johnsand Rauschenberg)to Warhol and Americanartists of Morrisin the early 1960s had graduallyopened up the range of implications It is thereforeall the more puzzling to see that after Duchamp's readymades.22 1968-what one could call the beginning of the third phase of Duchamp

See note 5 above. 21. at that point already tranAs Rosalind Krauss has suggested,at leastJohns's understanding 22. scended the earlier reading of the readymade as merelyan aestheticof declarationand intention: If we consider that Stella's paintingwas involvedearly on, in the work of Johns,then of Duchamp and the readymade-an interpretation diametricJohns'sinterpretation allyopposed to thatof the Conceptualistgroup outlinedabove - has some relevancein thisconnection.For Johnsclearlysaw the readymadeas pointingto the factthatthere need be no connectionbetween the finalart object and the psychologicalmatrixfrom is precluded fromthe whichit issued,since in the case of the readymadethispossibility start. The Fountain was not made (fabricated)by Duchamp, only selected by him. Therefore there is no way in which the urinal can "express" the artist. It is like a sentence which is put into the world unsanctionedby the voice of a speaker standing are evidently behind it. Because makerand artist separate,thereis no wayforthe urinal of the state or statesof mind of the artistas he made it. to serve as an externalization withinthe grammarof the aestheticpersonality, And by not functioning the Fountain can be seen as puttingdistancebetween itself and the notion of personality per se. The betweenJohns'sAmerican Flag and his reading of the Fountainisjust this: relationship the arthood of the Fountainis not legitimized from by itshavingissued stroke-by-stroke the privatepsycheof the artist;indeed it could not. So it is like a man absentmindedly and being dumbfoundedifasked ifhe had meantthattune or ratheranother. humming That is a case in which it is not clear how the grammarof intentionmightapply. vol. 12 (November 1973), pp. 43-52, n. 4. Rosalind Krauss, "Sense and Sensibility," Artforum,

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- the understandingof this model by Conceptual Artistsstill forereception declarationover contextualization. intentional This holds true not only grounds for Kosuth's "Art afterPhilosophy,"but equally forthe BritishArt& Language to the first issue of thejournal in May 1969, they Group, as, in the introduction write:

To place an object in a contextwhere the attentionof any spectator willbe conditionedtoward the expectancyof recognizingart objects. For example placingwhatup to thenhad been an object of alien visual to those expected withinthe framework of an art amcharacteristics bience, or by virtue of the artistdeclaring the object to be an art object whetheror not it was in an art ambience. Using these technew morphologieswere held out niques whatappeared to be entirely to qualifyfor the statusof the membersof the class "art objects." For example Duchamp's "Readymades" and Rauschenberg's "Portraitof Iris Clert."23 A few months later Kosuth based his argument for the development of Conceptual Art on just such a restricted reading of Duchamp. For in its limiting view of the history and the typologyof Duchamp's oeuvre, Kosuth's argument -like that of Art & Language- focuses exclusivelyon the "unassistedreadymades." Thereby early Conceptual theory not only leaves out Duchamp's work but avoids such an eminently crucial workas the ThreeStandard painterly (1913), not to mentionTheLarge Glass (1915-23) or the Etantsdonne Stoppages (1946 - 66) or the 1943 Boiteen valise. But what is worse is thateven the reading of the unassistedreadymadesis itself narrow,reducingthe readymade extremely model in factmerelyto that of an analyticalproposition.Typically,both Art & Language and Kosuth's "Art afterPhilosophy"referto Robert Rauschenberg's notoriousexample of speech-actaesthetics of Iris ClertifI say ("This is a portrait based on the rather limited of the so") understanding readymade as an act of willful artistic declaration. This understanding, of typical the early 1950s, continues in Judd's famous lapidary norm (and patentlynonsensical statement), ." quoted a littlelaterin Kosuth's text: "if someone saysit's art,thenit is art In 1969, Art & Language and Kosuth shared in foregrounding the... "analyticproposition" inherentin each readymade,namelythe statement"this is a workof art," over and above all other aspects impliedby the readymade model (its structurallogic, its featuresas an industrially produced object of use and its seriality, and the dependence of its meaning on context).And consumption, most importantly, according to Kosuth, this means that artisticpropositions be it that of the constitutethemselvesin the negation of all referentiality, historicalcontextof the (artistic)sign or that of its social functionand use:
23. Art& Language, vol. 1, no. 1 (May 1969), p. 5. Introduction,

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Works ofartare analytic That is,ifviewed within their propositions. no information what-so-ever about context-as-art, theyprovide any matter offact. A work ofartisa tautology inthat itisa presentation of theartist's thatis,he is saying thatthatparticular work of intention, artis art,which isa definition ofart.Thus,that itisartistrue a means, is what when he states "ifsomeone that calls (which priori Juddmeans it art,it'sart").24 1969 Or, a littlelaterin the same year,he wrotein TheSixth Investigation 14 (a textthathas mysteriously vanished from thecollection of his Proposition writings): If one considers thattheforms arttakesas beingart'slanguage one can realizethenthata workofartis a kindofproposition presented within thecontext ofartas a comment on art.An analysis ofproposi24. Joseph Kosuth, "Art after Philosophy," Studio International, nos. 915-917 December 1969). Quoted here from Joseph Kosuth, The MakingofMeaning,p. 155. (October-

Kosuth. FiveFives(to DonaldJudd).1965 (). Joseph

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tion typesshows art "works" as analyticpropositions.Works of art . that tryto tell us somethingabout the world are bound to fail The absence of realityin art is exactlyart's reality.25 efforts to reinstate a law of discursive Kosuth's programmatic self-reflexiveness in the guise of a critique of Greenberg's and Fried's visual and formal are all the more astonishing since a considerablepart of "Art self-reflexiveness afterPhilosophy" is dedicated to the elaborate construction of a genealogy for a historical project(e.g., "All art [afterDuchamp] Conceptual Art,in and of itself is conceptual [in nature] because art exists only conceptually"). This veryconof a lineage already contextualizesand historicizes, struction of course, in "telling us somethingabout the world"-of art, at least; that is, it unwittingly proposition(even if only withinthe conventionsof a operates like a synthetic and therefore denies both thepurity and the possibilparticularlanguage system) withinart's own ityof an autonomous artisticproductionthat would function, as mere analyticproposition. language-system, one Perhaps mighttryto argue that,in fact,Kosuth's renewed cult of the It mightbe said, forexample, the project to fruition. Symbolist tautologybrings that thisrenewal is the logical extensionof Symbolism'sexclusive concern with the conditionsand the theorizationof art's own modes of conceptionand reading. Such an argument,however,would stillnot allay questions concerningthe withinwhich such a cult must findits determinaaltered historicalframework itsSymbolist tion. Even within origins,the modernist theologyof art was already For a veneration of self-referential a religious gripped by polarized opposition. and rationalist of form as the empiricist thoughtcan simulpure negation plastic and than the instrumentalization as other be read nothing inscription taneously in its negation- withinthe realm of preciselythatorder- even or particularly immediate and universalapplicationof Symbolalmost of the aestheticitself (the ism for the cosmos of late nineteenth-century commodityproduction would attestto this). in the all the more forcefully This dialecticcame to claim itshistorical rights a acceleratFor the conditions of situation. rapidly given postwar contemporary, withthe lastbastionsof an autonomous sphere ing fusionof the cultureindustry came to shift of highart,self-reflexiveness (and inevitably) along the increasingly borderline between logical positivismand the advertisementcampaign. And and rationaleof a newlyestablishedpostwarmiddle class,one the rights further, into itsown in the 1960s, could assume theiraestheticidentity whichcame fully aestheticof administraand itsaccompanying in the verymodel of the tautology much the is structured For this aesthetic tion. way this class's social identity labor and of one as is, namely, production(rather merelyadministering identity of commodities.This class, having bethan producing) and of the distribution
25. 1969 Proposition 14. Joseph Kosuth, The SixthInvestigation

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establishedas the mostcommonand powerfulsocial class of postwar come firmly one which,as H. G. Helms wrote in his book on Max Stirner, is the society, to intervene within the politicaldecisionof the rights itself voluntarily "deprives in to itself more order with the existing arrange efficiently making process conditions."26 political This aestheticof the newlyestablishedpower of administration found its in a voice like the first nouveau romanof fullydeveloped literary phenomenon It was no accidentthatsuch a profoundly Robbe-Grillet. positivist literary project would then serve, in the Americancontext,as a point of departurefor Conceptual Art. But, paradoxically,it was at thisverysame historicalmomentthat the social functionsof the tautological principle found their most lucid analysis, througha criticalexaminationlaunched in France. In the early writing of Roland Barthes one finds,simultaneously withthe nouveau roman,a discussionof the tautological: Yes, I know,it's an uglyword. But so is the thing.TautoTautologie. in defining likeby like("Drama logyis the verbaldevice whichconsists is drama"). . . . One takes refugein tautologyas one does in fear,or anger, or sadness, when one is at a loss for an explanation. . . . In because it tautology,there is a double murder: one kills rationality resistsone; one kills language because it betraysone. . . . Now any refusalof language is a death. Tautology createsa dead, a motionless world.27 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 as both and rhetoricalform,it was analyzed as a general social effect: a linguistic the inescapable reflexof behavior and, once the requirementsof the advanced and media) have been put in place in the culture industry (i.e., advertisement formationof spectacle culture, a universalcondition of experience. What still of course, is the extentto whichConceptual Artof a remainsopen fordiscussion, certaintypeshared these conditions,or even enacted and implementedthem in the sphere of the aesthetic-accounting, perhaps, for its subsequent proximity the and success withina world of advertisement strategists-or, alternatively, extent to which it merelyinscribeditselfinto the inescapable logic of a totally it. Thus Guy Debord administered world,as Adorno's notorioustermidentified noted in 1967: The basically tautological character of the spectacle flowsfrom the its ends. It is the sun simple fact that its means are simultaneously
26. 27. Hans G. Helms, Die Ideologieder anonymen Gesellschaft (Cologne, 1968), p. 3. Roland Barthes,Mythologies, pp. 152- 53.

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which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entiresurfaceof the world and bathes endlesslyin its own glory.28 A Tale ofMany Squares The visual formsthatcorrespondmost accuratelyto the linguistic formof are the square and itsstereometric the tautology rotation,the cube. Not surprisin the painterly these two formsproliferated and sculpturalproductionof ingly, the early-to mid-1960s. This was the momentwhen a rigorousself-reflexiveness boundariesof modernist was bent on examiningthe traditional sculpturalobjects to the same extent that a phenomenological reflectionof viewing space was insistanton reincorporatingarchitecturalparameters into the conception of paintingand sculpture. So thoroughlydid the square and the cube permeate the vocabulary of Minimalist sculpturethatin 1967 Lucy Lippard publisheda questionnaireinveswhichshe had circulatedamong manyartists.In the tigating role of theseforms, his response to the questionnaire,Donald Judd, in one of his manyattemptsto of Minimalism fromsimilarinvestigations of the historidetach the morphology cal avant-gardein the earlier part of the twentieth century, displayedthe agresas was usual in sive dimensionof tautologicalthought(disguisedas pragmatism, his case) by simplydenying that any historicalmeaning could be inherentin forms: geometricor stereometric I don't thinkthere is anythingspecial about squares, which I don't use, or cubes. They certainlydon't have any intrinsicmeaning or One thing though, cubes are a lot easier to make than superiority. main virtue of geometric shapes is that they are not The spheres. art otherwiseis. A formthat's neithergeometricnor as all organic, be a great discovery.29 would organic the square abolishes the As the central form of visual self-reflexiveness, and horizontality, traditionalspatial parametersof verticality therebycanceling of space and itsconventionsof reading. It is in thisway thatthe the metaphysics pointsto itself: square (beginningwithMalevich's 1915 Black Square) incessantly
28. oftheSpectacle(Detroit: Black & Red, 1970), n. p., section 13. First Guy Debord, The Society published,Paris, 1967. Donald Judd,in Lucy Lippard, "Homage to the Square," Artin America 29. (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 paintings by 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 emphasizdesign-continues to ing its departure frompainting'straditionalobject statusand visual/formal of words on large, black, canvas squares. By contrastone only has to thinkof displaythe definitions JasperJohns'sor BarnettNewman's workas immediatepredecessorsof thatgenerationto recognize if not altogetherabsent, the square was at that moment. how infrequent,

Robert Barry.Paintingin Four Parts. 1967.

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as spatial perimeter,as plane, as surface,and, functioning as simultaneously, support.But, withthe verysuccess of thisself-referential gesture,markingthe formout as purely pictorial,the square paintingparadoxicallybut inevitably situatedin actual space. It thereby assumesthe characterof a relief/object invites of spatialcontingency and architectural a viewing/reading insistimbeddedness, from on the imminent and irreversible transition to ing painting sculpture. in the proto-Conceptual This transition was performed art of the early-to mid-1960s in a fairlydelimitednumber of specificpictorialoperations. It ocof all, throughthe emphasison painting'sopacity. The object-status curred,first of the painterly could be underscoredby unifying structure and homogenizing serializedtexture,and gridded compositional its surfacethroughmonochromy, or could be it structure; emphasized by literallysealing a painting's spatial it fromcanvas to transparency, by simplyalteringits materialsupport:shifting fabricor metal. This typeof investigation unstretched was developed systematically, for example, in the proto-Conceptualpaintingsof Robert Ryman,who or in varying in the earlycombinations employedall of these optionsseparately of RobertBarry,Daniel Buren,and to mid-i1960s; or, after1965, in thepaintings Niele Toroni. and countermovement to the firstSecondly- and in a directinversion in could be achieved a literalist manner, object-status by emphasizing, painting's This entailed establishinga dialectic between pictorial surface, transparency. frame,and architectural supportby eithera literalopening up of the painterly in as Sol LeWitt's or by the insertion of translucent or support, earlyStructures, in surfaces the frame of as into conventional transparent viewing, Ryman's Buren's earlynylonpaintings, or Michael Asher's and Gerfiberglass paintings,

Robert FourMirrored Morris. Cubes.1965. hard Richter'sglass panes in metal frames,both emergingbetween 1965 and in FourParts, 1967. Or, as in the earlyworkof RobertBarry(suchas hisPainting 1967, in the FER-Collection),where the square, monochrome,canvas objects demarcation.Functioning now seemed to assume the role of mere architectural architectural as decenteredpainterly objects,theydelimitthe external space in a manneranalogous to the serial or centralcompositionof earlier Minimalwork that stilldefinedinternalpictorialor sculpturalspace. Or, as in Barry'ssquare canvas (1967), which is to be placed at the exact center of the architectural the reading of it shifting supportwall, a workis conceived as programmatically confroma centered,unified,pictorialobject to an experience of architectural the supplementary and overdetermining and as thereby incorporating tingence, of curatorialplacementand conventionsof installation (traditionally strategies of the work itself. disavowed in paintingand sculpture)into the conception is performedin the "simAnd thirdly--and most often--this transition evident in Naum Gabo's famous diaple" rotationof the square, as originally and a stereometric cube are juxtaposed in gram from1937 where a volumetric and voluthe inherentcontinuity betweenplanar,stereometric, order to clarify metric forms. This rotation generated cubic structuresas diverse as Hans Cube (1963-65), Robert Morris's Four MirroredCubes Haacke's Condensation Bell's or (1965), produced MineralCoatedGlass Cubes,and simultaneously Larry
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Piece(ThreeSquares), 1966. All of these (beyondsharing Sol LeWitt's Wall-Floor the obvious morphologyof the cube) engage in the dialectic of opacity and of that dialectic in mirror-reflection as in (or in the synthesis transparency of the theme).At Cubesor LarryBell's aestheticized variations Morris'sMirrored the same timethattheyengage in the dialecticof frameand surface,and thatof container, theyhave displacedtraditional figure-ground object and architectural relationships. The deployment of any or all of these strategies (or, as in mostcases, their in the of Minimal context and art,i.e., protocombination) post-Minimal varying and sculpture, resultedin a range of hybrid objects.They no conceptualpainting studio categoriesnor could theybe longerqualifiedforeitherof the traditional decoration-the compromisetermstradias reliefor architectural identified tionallyused to bridge the gap between these categories. In this sense, these objects demarcated another spectrumof departurestowards Conceptual Art. artistic Not onlydid theydestabilizethe boundariesof the traditional categories of studioproduction, productionin the byerodingthemwithmodes of industrial in their criticalrevisionof the but they went further manner of Minimalism, discourse of the studio versus the discourse of production/consumption. By inherentin both along withthe conventionsof visuality dismantling ultimately establishedan aestheticof administration. them,theyfirmly

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of these protoconceptualobjects would at first The diversity suggestthat so profoundly thata comparativereading, theiractual aestheticoperationsdiffer operatingmerelyon the grounds of theirapparent analogous formaland mor- the visualtopos of the square- would be illegitimate. phologicalorganization has accordinglyexcluded Haacke's Condensation Art history Cube,for example, with Minimal Art. Yet all of these artistsdefine artistic from any affiliation productionand receptionby the mid-1960s as reachingbeyond the traditional and productionprocedures of visuality thresholds (both in termsof the materials of the studio and those of industrialproduction),and it is on the basis of this parallel thattheirworkcan be understoodto be linkedbeyond a mere structural worksof the mid-1960s redeor morphologicalanalogy. The proto-conceptual of nonspecialized modes of fine aesthetic experience, indeed, as a multiplicity to the these and reading objects generAccording language-experience. objectof objects with ate, aestheticexperience-as an individualand social investment as well as by specularconventions, by the by linguistic meaning-is constituted determinationof the object's status as much as by the reading institutional competence of the spectator. these objects Within this shared conception,what goes on to distinguish from each other is the emphasis each one places on different aspects of that Morris'sMirrored of the traditionalconceptsof visuality. deconstruction Cubes, for example (once again in an almost literalexecution of a proposal found in of the mirror reflection: Box),situatethe spectatorin thesuture Duchamp's Green containerwhere neithat interfacebetween sculpturalobject and architectural or dominancein the triadbetween therelementcan acquire a positionof priority and architectural space. And in so far as the work spectator,sculpturalobject, to inscribea phenomenologicalmodel of experience into a acts simultaneously and to displace it, itsprimary focus model of purelyvisual specularity traditional remainsthe sculpturalobject and its visual apperception. froma Cube-while clearlysuffering By contrast,Haacke's Condensation reductivismand the legacy of now even more rigorouslyenforced scientistic - moves to modernism'sempiricalpositivism away froma specular relationship as a linkbetween insteada bio-physical the object altogether, system establishing the viewer container.If Morrisshifts viewer,sculpturalobject, and architectural intoa phenomenologicalloop of bodily a mode of contemplative from specularity Haacke replaces the once revolutionary movementand perceptual reflection, in an of activating"tactility" the viewing experience by a move to concept of "system."For his work the determinacy bracketthe phenomenologicalwithin now suspends Morris's tactile"viewing" withina science-basedsyntagm (in this and inside the condensation of of the case that evaporation process particular of to the due cube broughtabout by temperature changes frequency spectators in the gallery). And finally, we should consider what is possiblythe last credible transformationof the square, at the heightof Conceptual Art in 1968, in two worksby

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A Square Removalfrom Lawrence Weiner,respectively entitled a Rug in Useand A 36" X 36" Removalto theLathingor SupportWall ofPlasteror Wallboard froma Wall (both publishedor "reproduced" in Statements, in which the 1968), specific paradigmaticchanges Conceptual Art initiateswith regard to the legacy of - while maintainformalism are clearlyevident. Both interventions reductivist their structural and links with formal traditions ing morphological by respecting as theirdefinition classicalgeometry at the level of shape--inscribe themselves in the supportsurfacesof the institution and/or the home whichthattradition had alwaysdisavowed. The carpet (presumably for sculpture)and the wall (for which idealist aesthetics declares as mere "supplements,"are always painting), here not as of their material basis but as the inevitable foregrounded only parts futurelocation of the work. Thus the structure, location,and materialsof the at the verymomentof theirconception, are completely determined intervention, their future destination. While neither surface is by explicitly specifiedin terms of its institutional of dislocationgeneratestwo opposicontext,this ambiguity tional,yetmutually readings.On the one hand, it dissipatesthe complementary of traditional the workof art onlyin a "specialized" or expectation encountering location and "wall" (both "qualified" "carpet" could be eitherthoseof the home or the museum,or, for that matter,could just as well be found in any other location such as an office,for example). On the other, neither one of these surfacescould ever be consideredto be independentfromits institutional locainto each particularsurfaceinevitably tion, since the physicalinscription generates contextualreadingsdependent upon the institutional conventionsand the particularuse of those surfacesin place. A 36" x 36" SquareRemoval Lawrence Weiner. to or Lathing from theWallboard a Wall.1968.

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or perceptual precision with which Barryand Transcending the literalist theirpainterly had connected wallsof objectsto the traditional previously Ryman make their in order to and physical perceptual interdependencemanidisplay, now Weiner's two are these support fest, squares integratedwithboth physically definition. since the work's surfacesand theirinstitutional Further, inscription paradoxicallyimpliesthe physicaldisplacementof the supportsurface,it engenas well. Andjust as the worknegates ders an experienceof perceptualwithdrawal of the traditionalartisticobject by literally rather the specularity withdrawing than adding visual data in the construct,so this act of perceptualwithdrawal in the instituintervention operatesat the same timeas a physical(and symbolic) tional power and property relations underlyingthe supposed neutralityof The installation "mere" devices of presentation. and/or acquisitionof eitherof these works requires that the futureowner accept an instance of physicalreon both the level of institutional order and on moval/withdrawal/interruption that of privateownership. It was only logical that, on the occasion of Seth Siegelaub's firstmajor exhibitionof Conceptual Art, the show entitled January5-31, 1969, Lawrence Weiner would have presented a formula that then functionedas the matrix all his subsequent propositions.Specifically addressingthe relations underlying as an open, structural, withinwhich the work of art is constituted syntagmatic definesthe parametersof a workof art as thoseof thismatrixstatement formula, the conditionsof authorshipand production,and their interdependencewith and use (and not leastof all, at itsown propositionallevel,as a thoseof ownership contingent definition upon and determinedby all of theseparametersin linguistic theircontinuously varyingand changingconstellations: Withrelationto thevariousmanners ofuse: thepiece 1. The artistmayconstruct 2. The piecemaybefabricated 3. The pieceneed notto be built as to with theintent thedecision Each being oftheartist equal and consistent the occasion rests withthereceiver condition upon of receivership What begins to be put in play here, then,is a critiquethat operates at the level of the aesthetic"institution."It is a recognitionthat materialsand procedures, surfacesand textures,locationsand placementare not only sculpturalor painterlymatterto be dealt with in terms of a phenomenologyof visual and analysisof the sign(as mostof the cognitiveexperienceor in termsof a structural had stillbelieved), but thattheyare always artists Minimalist and post-Minimalist already inscribedwithinthe conventionsof language and therebywithininstitutionalpower and ideological and economic investment. However, if,in Weiner's and Barry'swork of the late 1960s, thisrecognitionstillseems merelylatent,it of the same was to become manifest veryrapidlyin the workof European artists generation,in particularthat of Marcel Broodthaers,Daniel Buren, and Hans

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Haacke after1966. In factan institutional critiquebecame thecentralfocusofall of visionthatprovidesthe underlying threeartists' assaultson the falseneutrality rationalefor those institutions. In 1965, Buren-like his Americanpeers--took offfroma criticalinvesHis earlyunderstanding of the workof Flavin,Ryman, tigationof Minimalism. and Stella rapidly enabled him to develop positions from within a strictly analysisthatsoon led to a reversalof painterly/sculptural painterly conceptsof Buren was on the one hand with a critical reviewof visuality altogether. engaged the legacyof advanced modernist and on the (and postwarAmerican)painting otherin an analysis of Duchamp's legacy,whichhe viewedcritically as the utterly unacceptablenegationof painting.This particularversionof reading Duchamp - while not and the readymade as acts of petit-bourgeois anarchistradicality and accurate -allowed Buren to construct a successful necessarilycomplete of both: modernist and as critique painting Duchamp's readymade its radical historicalOther. In his writingsand his interventions from 1967 onwards, his of the order of of the institutional and through critique specular painting

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framework determiningit, Buren singularlysucceeded in displacingboththe of years later this paradigms paintingand that of the readymade(even twenty in of the makes naive continuation the Duchampian object production critique vein of the readymademodel appear utterly irrelevant). From the perspectiveof the present,it seems easier to see that Buren's was assault on Duchamp, especiallyin his crucial 1969 essay Limites Critiques, of and the conventions directed at Duchamp reception operative preprimarily dominantthroughoutthe late 1950s and early '60s, ratherthan at the actual Buren's centralthesiswas thatthe fallacy of Duchamp's model itself. implications of Duchamp's readymade was to obscure the very institutional and discursive to its shiftsin the that allowed the conditions framing readymade generate in of first the the the of and object experience place. Yet, assignment meaning one could just as well argue, as Marcel Broodthaerswould in factsuggestin his in to Todayin Dfisseldorf catalogue of the exhibitionTheEaglefromtheOligocene construction of the workof and syntagmatic 1972, thatthe contextualdefinition of all. art had obviouslybeen initiatedby Duchamp's readymademodel first of of of the elements the discourse In his systematic constituting analysis of all the artistic and to Buren came parameters production investigate painting, was similarto the one performedby reception (an analysisthat, incidentally, Lawrence Weiner in arrivingat his own "matrix" formula). Departing from of paintdismemberment Minimalism's (especially Ryman'sand Flavin's)literalist the pictorialinto yet another model of opacity transformed ing, Buren at first and objecthood. (This was accomplished by physicallyweaving figure and

Art 1962-1969 Conceptual

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ground together in the "found" awning material, by making the "grid" of vertical parallel stripes his eternallyrepeated "tool," and by mechanicallyalmostsuperstitiously or ritualistically, one could say withhindsight -applying a coat of white paint to the outer bands of the grid in order to distinguishthe pictorialobject froma readymade.) At the same time that the canvas had been removed fromitstraditionalstretcher supportto become a physicalcloth-object of Greenberg's notorious "tacked up canvas [which]already exists (reminiscent as a picture"),thisstrategy in Buren's arsenal founditslogical counterpart in the canvas leaning as an object against support wall and placement of the stretched floor. This shifing of supportsurfacesand proceduresof productionled to a wide withinBuren's work: fromunstretched canvas to range of formsof distribution anonymouslymailed sheets of printed striped paper; from pages in books to billboards. In the same way, his displacementof the traditionalsites of artistic intervention and of reading resulted in a multiplicity of locations and formsof that and exterior,thereby display continuously played on the dialecticof interior within the contradictions of sculptureand paintingand foregrounding oscillating all those hidden and manifestframingdevices that structureboth traditions withinthe discourse of the museum and the studio. Furthermore,enacting the principles of the Situationistcritique of the bourgeois divisionof creativity according to the rules of the divisionof labor, and Niele Toroni publiclyperformed Buren, Olivier Mosset,Michel Parmentier, various occasions between 1966 and (on 1968) a demolitionof the traditional between artists and with each given theirrespectiveroles. audience, separation Not only did they claim that each of their artisticidioms be considered as absolutely equivalent and interchangeable,but also that anonymous audience productionof these pictorialsignswould be equivalentto those produced by the artiststhemselves. With its stark reproductionsof mug shots of the four artiststaken in at the 1967 Biennale de photomats,the poster for their fourthmanifestation Paris inadvertently pointsto anothermajor source of contemporary challengesto the notion of artisticauthorshiplinked witha provocationto the "audience" to as practicedin Andy Warhol's "Factory" participate:the aestheticof anonymity and its mechanical(photographic)procedures of production." The criticalinterventions of the four into an established but outmoded culturalapparatus (representedby such venerable and important institutions as the Salon de la Jeune Peintureor the Biennale de Paris) immediately broughtout in the open at least one major paradox of all conceptual practices(a paradox,
30. Michel Claura, at the time the critic activelypromotingawareness of the affiliated artists and Toroni, has confirmed in a recentconversation Buren, Mosset,Parmentier, thatthe referenceto Most WantedMen, which had been exhibitedat the Warhol, in particularto his series The Thirteen Ileana Sonnabend Gallery in 1967, was quite a conscious decision.

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which had made up the single most original contribution of Yves incidentally, Klein's workten yearsbefore). This was thatthe criticalannihilation of cultural conventionsitselfimmediately acquires the conditionsof the spectacle,that the insistenceon artisticanonymity and the demolitionof authorshipproduces instantbrand names and identifiable products,and that the campaign to critique with textual interventions, conventionsof visuality billboard signs,anonymous ends and the preestablished mechahandouts, pamphletsinevitably by following nismsof advertising and marketing campaigns. All of the works mentionedcoincide, however,in theirrigorousredefinitionof relationships betweenaudience, object,and author. And all are concerted in the attemptto replace a traditional, hierarchicalmodel of privilegedexperience based on authorialskillsand acquired competenceof receptionby a structural relationshipof absolute equivalents that would dismantle both sides of the equation: the hieraticpositionof the unified artistic objectjust as muchas the of In the author. an in the earlyessay(published,incidentally, privilegedposition same 1967 issue of AspenMagazine- dedicated by itseditorBrian O'Doherty to of Roland Barthes's Englishtranslation St6phane Mallarm --in whichthe first "The Death of the Author" appeared), Sol LeWitt laid out these concernsfora of author/artist redistribution functions withastonishing programmatic clarity, themby means of the rathersurprising of metaphorof a performance presenting daily bureaucratictasks: The aim of the artistwould be to give viewersinformation.. . . He would follow his predeterminedpremise to its conclusion avoiding rememberedforms would Chance, tasteor unconsciously subjectivity. play no part in the outcome. The serial artistdoes not attemptto or mysterious as a clerk object but functions merely produce a beautiful results his the (italicsadded).31 of premise cataloguing the questionariseshow such restrictive definitions of the artist as Inevitably and radical implications a cataloguingclerkcan be reconciledwiththe subversive be posed withinthe of Conceptual Art. And this question must simultaneously specifichistoricalcontext in which the legacy of an historicalavant-garde-and Productivism-had only recently been reclaimed. How, we Constructivism be with that historical can these aligned production that practices mightask, artistslike Henry Flynt,Sol LeWitt,and George Maciunas had rediscovered,in the early '60s, primarily throughthe publication of Camilla Gray's The Great This question is of particularimportance Art 1863-1922.32 Russian Experiment: of earlyConceptual Artappear at first since manyof the formalstrategies glance
31. Sol LeWitt,"Serial Project#1, 1966," AspenMagazine,nos. 5-6, ed. Brian O'Doherty, 1967, n. p. The importanceof this publicationin 1962 was mentioned to me by several of the artists 32. interviewed during the preparationof thisessay.

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and procedures of the Constructivist/Productivist to be as close to the practices Minimal had as sculpture appeared to be dependent upon its mateavant-garde rials and morphologies. The profoundly naive) natureof the claims utopian (and now unimaginably associated withConceptual Art at the end of the 1960s were articulatedby Lucy Lippard (along with Seth Siegelaub, certainlythe crucial exhibitionorganizer and criticof that movement)in late 1969: Art intended as pure experience doesn't exist untilsomeone experiences it, defyingownership,reproduction,sameness. Intangible art could break down the artificial of "culture" and provide a imposition broader audience for a tangible,object art. When automatismfrees millionsof hours for leisure,art should gain ratherthan diminishin importance,for while art is not just play, it is the counterpointto work. The time may come when art is everyone's daily occupation, will be called art.33 though there is no reason to thinkthisactivity While it seems obvious that artists cannot be held responsible for the and politically naive visionsprojected on theirworkeven by theirmost culturally and enthusiastic it now seems equally obvious thatit was critics, competent, loyal, of the earlier movements (the typethatLippard precisely utopianism avant-garde to resuscitate for the that was absent occasion) desperatelyattempts manifestly from Conceptual Art throughout its history(despite Robert Barry's onetime invocation of Herbert Marcuse, declaring the commercial gallery as "Some places to whichwe can come, and fora while 'be freeto thinkabout whatwe are going to do'"). It seemsobvious,at least fromthe vantageof the early 1990s, that fromits inceptionConceptual Art was distinguished by itsacute sense of discursive and institutional itsself-imposed itslack of totalizing limitations, restrictions, vision, its criticaldevotion to the factual conditionsof artisticproduction and of these conditions. reception withoutaspiring to overcome the mere facticity This became evident as works such as Hans Haacke's series of Visitors' Profiles collec(1969- 70), in itsbureaucraticrigorand deadpan devotionto the statistic tion of factual information,came to refuse any transcendental dimension whatsoever. it now seems thatit was precisely a profounddisenchantment Furthermore, withthose political master-narratives thatempowered most of '20s avant-garde art that,acting in a peculiar fusionwiththe mostadvanced and radical formsof critical artisticreflection,accounts for the peculiar contradictionsoperating within(proto) Conceptual Art of the mid- to late-1960s. It would explain why thisgenerationof the early '60s-in itsgrowingemphasison empiricism and its - would be attracted, all with to vision for scepticism utopian regard example, to
33. Lucy Lippard, "Introduction,"in 955.000 (Vancouver: The Vancouver Art Gallery, January 13- February8, 1970), n. p.

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OCTOBER

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% ~FRoom-,
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Toroni.Installation at Parmentier, Buren,Mosset,

Museum Marcel Broodthaers's (Plaque).1971.

of Wittgenstein and would confoundthe affirmative the logical positivism petitof Alain Robbe-Grillet withthe radical atopismof Samuel bourgeois positivism Beckett,claimingall of themas theirsources. And it would make clear how this generationcould be equallyattracted bythe conservative conceptof Daniel Bell's "end of ideology" and Herbert Marcuse's Freudo-Marxist philosophy of liberation. What ConceptualArtachievedat leasttemporarily, however,was to subject toward the last residues of artistic transcendence aspiration (by means of traditional studio skills and privileged modes of experience) to the rigorous and order of the vernacularof administration. relentless it managed to Furthermore, the artistic of towards an affirmative collaboration production aspiration purge and withthe forcesof industrial last of the totaliz(the production consumption had into which artistic inscribed itself production ing experiences mimetically in the contextof Pop Art and Minimalism for one last time). withcredibility became the Paradoxically,then,it would appear thatConceptual Art truly most significant paradigmaticchange of postwarartistic productionat the very

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moment that it mimed the operating logic of late capitalismand its positivist in an effort to place itsauto-critical at the serviceof investigations instrumentality of aesthetic even the last remnants traditional experience. In that liquidating in of itself succeeded it purging entirely imaginaryand bodily experiprocess and the of substance ence, physical space of memory,to the same extentthat it and style,of individuality and skill. That effacedall residues of representation was the momentwhen Buren's and Haacke's work fromthe late 1960s onward back onto the ideological appaturnedthe violence of that mimeticrelationship and the social institutions it to fromwhichthe ratus itself, analyze expose using and of the administration emanate in the laws of positivist logic instrumentality which conditions These determine the of first culturalconinstitutions, place. in ones which artistic is are the transformed into a production very sumption, tool of ideological controland cultural legitimation. It was leftto Marcel Broodthaersto construct objects in whichthe radical of Conceptual Art would be turnedinto immediatetravesty and in achievements which the seriousnesswith which Conceptual Artistshad adopted the rigorous mimeticsubjectionof aestheticexperience to the principlesof whatAdorno had into absolute farce. called the "totallyadministeredworld" were transformed of Broodthaers'sdialecticsthatthe achievementof And it was one of the effects tied to a profoundand irreversConceptual Art was revealed as being intricately ible loss: a loss not caused by artisticpractice,of course, but one to which that of itsaspirations, to recognizethat failing practiceresponded in the fulloptimism the purging of image and skill,of memoryand vision, withinvisual aesthetic representationwas not just another heroic step in the inevitable progress of to liberate the world from mythicalformsof perception and Enlightenment modes of specialized experience, but that it was also yet another, hierarchical of erosions (and perhaps the most effective the the and devastating last perhaps of artistic to which the one) traditionally separate sphere productionhad been to in efforts emulate the its regnant episteme withinthe perpetual subjected to art itself. frame proper paradigmatic of Conceptual Art-its Or worse yet, that the Enlightenment-triumph of audiences and distribution, its abolition of object statusand transformation commodityform--would most of all only be shortlived,almost immediately disgiving way to the return of the ghostlikereapparitionsof (prematurely?) of and the So that the sculptural paradigms past. placed painterly specular regime,whichConceptual Art claimed to have upset, would soon be reinstated withrenewed vigor. Which is of course what happened.