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idea of an isolated American painting, so popular in this country during the thirties,
absurd to me, just as the idea of creating a purely American mathematics or physics
seem absurd . .. And in another sense, the problem doesn't exist at all; or if it did, would
itself.' An American is an American and his painting would naturally be qualified by that
whether he wills it or not. But the basic problems of contemporary painting are
of anyone country."
Jackson Pollock
totally uninterested in European art and I think it's over with."
Donald Judd
(arte) facts of recent history rush backwards in time, perpetually receding from
apperception and apprehension; their actuality (their qualities as 'acts'
in a context of historical reality) and their effectiveness (the effects on
those works depended as well as those they created in their particular
of production) are diminishing their impact, dissolving up to the point of
It is at precisely this point that the historian steps in. After having neither
Jticipated in the acts nor caused any effects,' after having taken neither risk nor
lity, he contributes to history by elevating works of art to the status of
objects and saves them from oblivion by transforming their historical
into formal quality. In his perspective the works become magnified
Bereft of all contextual implications, they now tend to appear as
ronomous subjects (and objects) speaking (and being spoken about) in their
discourse, following their own rules of grammar and having a history of their
, an independent metalanguage and metahistory, so to speak. This language,
clearly the language of a secondary mythical reality, has to be read with the
tool of ideological criticism1. Yet as works of art can never be restored to
original level of primary functional language, the historical method of
criticism is capable only of revealing their original impact in an indirect
r. As their transformation into cultural myth is analyzed, their original
reality becomes apparent.
On the other hand, a formalist approach to art of the recent past would allow us
about a urinal manufactured around 1917 in terms of the wholeness of its Gestalt,
; specificity of its material, its sculptural presence. It allows us to see the relative
, of ponock's paintings, their definitive abolition of the cubist grid as their highest
As a result we learn about a new notion of identity between form and shape in
to Stella's work or about the objective quality of Judd's painterly sculpture which
and defines itself and which commands its own space. The formalist approach
us-perhaps even out of respect for the original historical and existential
under which a work has been produced-to deal with a work in an objective
, considering only the facts seemingly at hand in form.
Formalization of historical and critical description seems to have found fE.->edback
in the production of American art of the sixties. The terms which had been used to
describe the phenomena became the terms used to produce the phenomena. This
hermeneutic circle-which has its equivalents in other disciplines (e.g. the debate on
positivism in sociology between Karl Popper and TW. Adomo)-seems to have found
its post-minimal high point in the visual arts in an aphorism as defined by Joseph
Kosuth in 1969.
"Works of art that try to tell us something about the world are bound to
fail .... The absence of reality in art is exactly art's reality."2
This position which is, philosophically speaking, simply the introduction of a basic
concept of logical positivism into aesthetical discussion and, art historically speaking,
just another attempt in a long tradition of trying to conjure up the historical and physical
materiality of the artwork by acting out narcissistic fantasies about the self-procreating
artist, offers aesthetical relief by promising an escape from history. "From symbolism
3
to
Yves Klein's concept of immateriality until togay-it-basJound its most updated version in
the well-designed tautological corpora of ePh
The polar opposite of this position of formalism was articulated the very
same year along the lines of a concept of dialectic historicity in Daniel Buren's text
Limites Critiques, which ended as follows:
"Art whatever it may be is exclusively political. What is called for is the
analysis of formal and cultural limits (and not one or the other) within which
art exists and struggles.
These limits are many and of different intensities. Although the prevailing
ideology and the associated artists try in every way to camouflage them, and
although it is too early-the conditions are not met-to blow them up, the
time has come to unveil them."4
If there is anything like a prominent specific difference between recent American
and European art, one might presume to find it by comparing their differe
attitudes toward the ided of history_and the historiciiY of art Therefore the following
essay-by no means pretending to show the only aspect of differentiation-focuses
on how these notions and attitudes have changed in the work of Europeans and
Americans since 1945. It discusses their interrelations and exchanges, the
transformations that these notions have undergone on both sides, and finally asks:
what are the problems that arise when artists understand their work as being
beyond history and when the historian's critical fictions tend to become art?
Post war Lacunae
"Art publications from France, and Cahiers d'Art above all, were another
matter; these kept you posted on the latest developments in Paris, which
the only place that really mattered. For a while Parisian painting exerted
perhaps a more decisive influence on New York art through black and white
reproductions than through first hand examples, which may have been a
blessing in disguise, for it permitted some Americans to develop a more
83
<he idea of an isolated American painting, so popular in this country during the thirties,
1ems absurd to me, just as the idea of creating a purely flmerican mathematics or physics
ould seem absurd ... And in another sense, the problem doesn't exist at all; or if it did, would
Jive itself.- An flmerican is an American and his painting would naturally be qualified by that
ct, whether he wills it or not. But the basic problems of contemporary painting are
ldependent of anyone country."
Jackson Pollock
I'm totally uninterested in European art and I think it's over with."
Donald Judd
(arte) facts of recent history rush backwards in time, perpetually receding from
apperception and apprehension; their actuality (their qualities as 'acts'
Irformed in a context of historical reality) and their effectiveness (the effects on
Formalization of historical and critical description seems to ha'1'found feedback
in the production of American art of the sixties. The terms which ~ been used to
describe the phenomena became the terms used to produce t phenomena. This
hermeneutic circle-which has its equivalents in other disci . es (e.g. the debate on
positivism in sociology between Karl Popper and T.W. A oj-seems to have found
its post-minimal high point in the visual arts in an aph9 m as defined by Joseph
Kosuth in 1969.
"Works of art that try to tell us something
fail. ... The absence of reality in art is actly art's reality.''2
This position which is, philosophi y speaking, simply the introduction of a basic
concept of logical positivism into ae tical discussion and, art historically speaking,
just another attempt in a long t r a ~ of trying to conjure up the historical and physical
materiality of the artwork by ac' g out narcissistic fantasies about the self-procreating
artist, offers aesthetical relie y promising an escape from history. "From symbolism
3
to
Yves Klein's concept of j materiality until today it has found its most updated version in
the well-designed tau\elOgical corpora of Joseph Kosuth.
./
those works depended as well as those they created in their particular The p r opposite of this position of formalism was articulated the very
of production) are diminishing their impact, dissolving up to the point of same ye along the lines of a concept of dialectic historicity in Daniel Buren's text
I
. ishing. It is at precisely this point that the historian steps in. After having neither Limite ritiques, which ended as follows:
rticipated in the acts nor caused any effects, after having taken neither risk nor / "Art whatever it may be is exclusively political. What is called for is the
sponsibility, he contributes to history by elevating works of art to the status of /' analysis of formal and cultural limits (and not one or the other) within which
objects and saves them from oblivion by transforming their historical // art exists and struggles.
into formal quality. In his perspective the works become magnified / These limits are many and of different intensities. Although the prevailing
s. Bereft of all contextual implications, they now tend to appear as <c/ ideology and the associated artists try in every way to camouflage them, and
subjects (and objects) speaking (and being spoken about))rftheir although it is too early-the conditions are not met-to blow them up, the
discourse, following their own rules of grammar and having a ~ r r y of their time has come to unveil them."4
an independent metalanguage and metahistory, so to spei3,k.'This language, If there is anything like a prominent specific difference between recent American
clearly the language of a secondary mythical reality, h,9$1o be read with the and European art, one might presume to find it by comparing their different
tool of ideological criticism
1
Yet as works of artaan never be restored to attitudes toward the ided of history and the historicity of art. Therefore the following
original level of primary functional language, the t;WStorical method of essay-by no means pretending to show the only aspect of differentiation-focuses
criticism is capable only of revealing ttJ.eff original impact in an indirect on how these notions and attitudes have changed in the work of Europeans and
As their transformation into cultural myUf is analyzed, their original Americans since 1945. It discusses their interrelations and exchanges, the
reality becomes apparent. transformations that these notions have undergone on both sides, and finally asks:
On the other hand, a formalist aPPJ,0ach to art of the recent past would allow us what are the problems that arise when artists understand their work as being
about a urinal manufactured ar /d 1917 in terms of the wholeness of its Gestalt, beyond history and when the historian'S critical fictions tend to become art?
ispecificity of its material, its sc ural presence. It allows us to see the relative
, of Pollock's paintings, Ir definitive abolition of the cubist grid as their highest
As a result we learn out a new notion of identity between form and shape in
to Stella's work a about the objective quality of Judd's painterly sculpture which
and defines < elf and which commands its own space. The formalist approach
us- ps even out of respect for the original historical and existential
under which a work has been produced-to deal with a work in an objective
considering only the facts seemingly at hand in form.
Post war Lacunae
"Art publications from France, and Cahiers d'Art above all, were another
matter; these kept you posted on the latest developments in Paris, which waq
the only place that really mattered. For a while Parisian painting exerted
perhaps a more decisive influence on New York art through black and white
reproductions than through first hand examples, which may have been a
blessing in disguise, for it permitted some Americans to develop a more
83

independent sense of color, if
ignorance. "5
Clement Greenberg
thanks to misunderstanding and
Immediate post-war history, namely that of the Paris and New York schools
of painting, seems to have been formed as much by omissions and by ignorance of
historical knowledge as by the especially rich wells of artistic information which
existed at the time and which have since been handed down to us. Mondrian's
presence, for example, seems to have made no impression on the new generation
of artists either in Paris, where he had been virtually ignored over the period of
almost twenty years which he spent there, or in New York, where he was only really
discovered after abstract expressionism. Another example of how 'history' is made
by omission is the almost complete lack of artistic reception of the Russian
Constructivists, although Kandinsky became of incredible importance both in Paris
and New York post-war painting. The same can be observed in looking at the
history of artistic reception of Dada and Surrealism, which were assimilated only in
their more traditional painterly forms as they appeared in the works of Mira and
Masson, Max Ernst and Tanguy, whereas the artists, whose work in the light of our
present evaluation of their epistemological radicalness and long range
consequences, seem to have been completely ignored by the first generation of
post-war artists. Why did Rothko and Newman, Still and Pollock, Gorky and de
Kooning not choose Duchamp and Picabia, Man Ray and Tzara, Arp and
Schwitters as sources of information at that time?6 It must have been due to the awe
for the tradition of Parisian painting as it is expressed in Greenberg's The School of
Paris: 1946':
"Paris remains the fountainhead of modern art, and every move made there is
decisive for advanced art elsewhere-which is advanced precisely because it
can respond to and extend the vibrations of that nerve center and nerve-end of
modernity which is Paris."7
From our perspective this seems the more astonishing, as artists in Paris, to some
extent, by then had become aware of the growing academicism of late surrealist
painting. Jean Dubuffet, for example, tried to posit his Art Brut figurations against
the surrealists' mythical attitude of the individual creator's proliferous subconscious
by referring again-as the surrealists had done originally themselves-to the
collective potentials and forms of creativity by substituting raw and repugnant
materials like foils and sponges or sand for the precious and pompous surfaces of
late surrealist painting. Or, as he put it in his own words in 1947:
"What I'm interested in is not the cakes but the bread. If one would be inclined
in general to prefer bread to cake, one would end up being very injust to pastry
chefs, and not only to pastry chefs, but also to the institutions, like museums
and art dealers and critics, which are also a Parisian specialty, nourishing quite
a lot of people ... I would like my paintings to be on the verge of disappearing
as paintings. It's at the moment of vanishing that the swan starts singing ... "8

Of course one knows that it is irrelevant to review historical facts and
question their facticity by referring to the arbitrary circumstances and coin,..;,
by which they happened to become facts. And it is almost ludicrous to
whether artefacts might have become different artefacts altogether under a
different set of historical circumstances had more or different information
absorbed at any specific point in history. Nevertheless it is a valid step to
acknowledge the extent to which 'reception history' (and its very peculiar
conditions) has become 'production history', and by proceeding according
kind of approach to reveal the degree to which seemingly autonomous
entities inform themselves historically. From today's European perspective
questions about the historic aspect of some recent American art begin to
Despite its unquestionable authenticity and innovative impact, in retrospect
not affirm a cyclic pattern of history whereby each generation from fhe
expressionists to the minimalists will appear as having assimilated, worked
enlarged a different set of historical presuppositions of 20th century art?
example, one could ask for the new epistemological radicality or the new
Warhol Campbell Soup painting in comparison to Duchamp's urinal. Or
Flavin's Diagonal of Personal Ecstasy (the diagonal of May 25, 1963, to
Brancusi), which has certainly to be considered a key work in international
American art of the sixties? From our point of view today is it not a very well
assimilation of different sculptural concepts, comparable to the still undec
complexity of Schwitters' architectural vision, his Cathedral of
Erotic Misery?9
Post Surrealist Dilemma
"The surrealists reacted against the historical conditions 'in the service
revolution' by trying to accelerate and to increase the process of
autodestruction of bourgeois consciousness by means of the su
By Using the more or less misunderstood and limited methods of
psychoanalysis, those artists totally withdrew from society back into
themselves, i.e. the subconsctous became the last unit of the d
they hoped that from there they could protest more convincingly by
their 'ego' against the dissociated conditons. That this particular form
was infantile did not prevent them from experiencing it as a real
the contrary, it was precisely this infantilism which allowed them to
protest to include everything and nothing, believing it to be unlimited.
Max Raphael, Reading the new art, 1938
10
When looking at the history of post-surrealist art in Europe,
painting of the School of Paris, it becomes even more of a necessity to
history as the result of ignorance peculiar to local traditions or as a
. resistance to certain presuppositions. Even though Clement Greenberg's
observation from 1946 is truthful to objective history, it neither coincides
actual Parisian reality at the time nor with what developed out of it in the
following:
"After 1920 the positivism of the School of Paris, which depended in part on
the assumption that infinite prospects of technical advance lay ahead of both
society and arts, lost faith in itself. It began to be suspected that the physical in
art was as historically limited as capitalism itself had turned out to be.
Mondrian looked like the handwriting on the waiL" 11
I
reenberg, whose astounding clairvoyance seems to anticipate the more recent
. materialization of the art object in conceptual and post-minimal art and which
might be calJed the most original and authentic contribution of American
to the present,12 came obviously closer in his observations to the actual reality
nding him ten years later (and one wonders whether he had to relinquish for
the uncompromising radicality of his original insight into historical truth) in
"It could be said that, by 1940, Eighth Street had caught up with Paris as Paris
had not yet caught up with herself, and that a handful of then obscure New
York painters possessed the ripest painting culture of the day."13
It is only against the background of a situation 'which had not caught up with
(a deliberate or imposed historical ignorance and innocence), that one can
:mprehend certain European developments and estimations, over-estimations
a certain type of artist as a specific socially and historically defined character
thus the behavior of the key figures of post-war European art: Mathieu and
in Paris, Fontana and Manzoni in Italy and finally Beuys in West-Germany.
Raphael's remark on the surrealists' infantilism became even more true with
artists, which finds its clearest manifestation in the fact that-with the
of Fontana-the work of these first-generation-artists is bound to the
personality of its authors, with all its necessary differentiations of the
identities of course. This idea of the artist as mediumistic-transcendental
is in distinct opposition to the more familiar and traditional image of the
sCientist-philosopher-craftsman, who delivers the objective results of his
society. It seems to have been the historical function of these European
artists to act out the collective needs for a newly born identity and the
urge for a new concept of 'ego' and 'personality'. For this purpose they had
attitudes which oscillate on a broad scale of irrational archaic behavior:
and high priest via victim and fool down to clown and entertainer.
14
All
reflect-in very different ways of course-the society's need and interest in
of a new and unique personality and, as in the case of Mathieu and Klein,
s submissive reaction 'to 1 it, or, as in the case of Manzoni and Beuys, a
gesture toward the potential reality of a collective subject.
and Pollock
Pollock a Frenchman, there would be, I feel, no need by now to call
to my objectivity in ,praising him: he would already be called maitre
there would already be speculation in his pictures."15
Greenberg, 1952
Certainly Mathieu's lasting merit will be to have organized the first showings
of Wols' and Pollock's paintings in Paris. And it is characteristic that in his rush to
install his own paintings among these masters, he was not able to discern the
elementary differences between the two. If the first was the completion of ecriture
automatique and its radical subjectivity in painting, the latter was an entirely new
beginning of the objectification of the process of painting itself. This is most clearly
revealed in a comparison between the structural organization of mass in canvases
by Pollock and those of Wols or even more so of Mathieu. One of the basic
differences between European and American art of that period-with its lasting
effects on the contemporary situation-becomes visible in the entirely different
attitudes toward the act of painting and art itself. Pollock's dominant concern is for
the matter of painting, for materia prima and the visual-plastic reality of his work as
an objective factum. And more so, their highly dialectical interchange endow
Pollock's paintings with their innate objective radicality: the decentralized field of
self-referential plastic equivalents. Mathieu's painting however, like a caricature out
of misapprehension, ends up in a demonstrative frozen gesture, which shoyvs all
the trails of its almost compUlsive egocentric motivation. The result of Mathieu's
'act' is painterly facture in centralized focal composition, although it prEltends to be
the immediate concretion of pure velocity and time. Its painterly reality however is
nothing more than a dead hierarchic figure on a most traditional ground.
Mathieu's work represents an extreme and final phase of academicism
based on the surrealist concept of the 'liberating forces' of the subject's
subconscious which was used as a tool for dissolving objective historical
reification. It had been proven by Pollock's painting that not even the slightest
residue of 'private' imagery should interfere with those forces, and that there was no
longer any need for an 'artistic' or 'subjectivist' imagination (in the literal sense of
the word of furnishing somebody's mind with images) which need be
superimposed on the viewers perception. This level of abstraction constituted a
considerable move away from surrealist painting practices, and was a negation of
art conventions in favor of the potentially real process of individualization. Mathieu's
anecdotal private spectacles and his epiphenomenal gesticulation, on the contrary,
attempted not only to reactivate the more traditional forms of painting but even
more so the equally restorative ideas on the artist's role in society. Or, on a totally
different level of analysis, one could hypothetically argue that it was Mathieu's
ludicrous dilemma as artist to try in vain (and vainly) to reinstate the gesture of the
painter as the equivalent of the free-wheeling private entrepreneur, whereas Pollock
had already been dialectically reflecting objective conditions under an advanced
state of monopolist economic organization-with its potential for increased .
individual freedom and its reality of increased oppression.
Klein and Kaprow
Born in 1928 and 1927 these two artists might well be chosen as another
pair of opposites to illustrate the history of European and American specifities. In
fact they are both members of the first generation that had learned substantially
@
from its antecedents. Kaprow, who had done his master's thesis on Mondrian and
had extensively studied the work of Pollock, considered his own work as a
necessary extension of the tradition outlined by these painters:
"Not satisfied with the suggestion through paint of our senses we shall utilize
the specific substances of sight. sound, movement, people, odors, touch.
Objects of every sort are the materials of the new art: paint, chairs, food,
electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand
other things which will be discovered by the present generation of artists. Not
only will these bold creators show us, as if for the first tim!3, the world which we
have always t:lad about us, but ignored, but they will disclose entirely unheard
of happenings. . "16
By joining a most authentic and radical reading of the original surrealist
implications in Pollock's parnting with the heritage of theatrical activities as they had
been performed in revolutionary Russian theatre and Dada activities alike, Kaprow
arrived at a basis for his own work, which was then a convincing continuation and
transformation of surrealist and Dada anti-art attitudes towards a new dialectical
interchange between art and reality; as it had been put before by the great
philosopher of that transformational process, John Cage:
"I think daily life is excellent and that art introduces us to it and its excellence
the more it begins to be like it."
This attitude which was held by a whole generation of American artists, from
Cage and Cunningham to Kaprow and the Fluxus activists and by the early
Rauschenberg and Yvonne Rainer, could be summed up as the positive guest for a
life an<Lar.LgnJlls.tQJj{:;qj!YQonscious materialist around as
the surrealists had originally intended: art in
favor of potentially collective which
were me changed conditions oTpresent day American life. It is most unfortunate
thai this extremely original and vital strain of recent American art, because it did not
produce marketable or museologicaliy classifiable items and relics should be
underrated and misrepresented in many ways in comparison to the
object-producing visual arts of the early sixties. The European position of Yves
Klein is quite different and reveals a hilarious state of mind which could be easily
named deluded narcissism resulting from the conventional conflict of artist versus
bourgeois:
"Materialism-this quantitative spirit has been recognized as the enemy of
liberty ... I love in myself everything' that does not belong to me, that is my
LIFE, and ! detest everything that belongs to me: my education, my
psychological and optical inheritance, which is received and traditional, my
vues, my defects, my qualities, my manias: in one word, everything that leads
me irredeemably towards physical, sentimental and emotional death."17
obviously had learned his art historical lesson as well, but unlike
Kaprow he tried to conceal his antecedents-apart from one or two allusions to
Malevich-with all that hypertrophic affirmation of his absolutely ingenious
originality which-appearing consistently as it does as a rhetoric pattern all
his activities-seems to be the symptomatic behavior of somebody whose
credibility is dependent on his secrets:
"The glaring obviousness of my paternity of monochromy in the twentieth
century is such that even if myself were to fight hard against that fact I
probably never manage to rid myself of it."18
Apart from his knowledge of Malevich, Klein seems to have been
aware of Mondrian's legacy. His first show at Colette Allendy's gallery in 1956
differently colored Unicolor paintings looked as though it had been executed
the influence of Mondrian's monochrome color rectangles, which had been
scattered all over the wall of his New York studio shown in a photograph which
been published in Michel Seuphor's monograph on Mondrian the very same
One has to admit that in commenting on the show, Klein shows an incredibly
precise perception of a major formal problem, which would later become the
crucial point in the argument of American artists like Stella and Judd against
European tradition, namely the problem of relationalism:
"I was trying to show color, but I realised at the private view that the public
were prisoners of a preconceived point of view and that, confronted with all
these surfaces of different colors they responded far more to the
. / inter-relationship of the different propositions, they reconstituted the
V of a decorative poJychromy."19
But the hermetic mystery of Klein's genius had been subjected to even more
if not to say vernacular, influences. Jean Dubuffet's work like the Texturotogie
1954 and the monochrome sponge sculptures of the same year was of prime
importance for the development of Yves Ie Monochrome's plastic apparitions;
seems he switched from muddy monochrome colors to bright synthetic hues which
either could be seen as q major change or discarded as a minor academic
problem in the final phase of post surrealist painting. What is more, examples of
monochrome paintings had been shown in Paris by Ellsworth Kelly (who had lived
and worked in Paris from 1948-1954 and at his first one man show at the Galerie
Arnaud in 1951 had presented shaped monochrome canvases). Moreover one
should remember the monochrome canvases of Lucio Fontana which might have
been easily known to Klein as he was a frequent traveller to Italy in the early fifties.
Finally Rauschenberg's monochrome paintings, even though they had not been
shown in Europe, have to be taken into account when making the issue of
monochromy and flatness, wholeness and objectlike painting as much of a
spectacular argument as Klein did, and as his followers and exegetics continue
to do.
And after all, the whole attitude of Yves Klein, his declaratory propaganda for
immateriality, are as post-Duchampian as anything. Klein's famous car-ride
painting, which was the result of climatic effects on a blank canvas mounted on the
roof of his car for the journey Paris-Nice reveals as clear a knowledge of
Joseph Beuys during his activity 'Wie man dem
loten Hasen die Bi/der erk/art' (How to explain the
pictures to a dead hare) at Galerie Schmela,
. Dusseldorf 1965 Photograph by Ute Klophaus
88
Piero Manzoni showing one copy of his
multiple edition of Merda d'artista, 1961.
Rene Magritte and Marcel Broodthaers in 1967
Photograph by Maria Gilissen-Broodthaers
Daniel Buren, Photo-Souvenir d'xposition d'une Exposition at documenta V (1972)
Kassel. Photograph showing Jasper Johns' painting 'Flag' (1958, collection leo Castelli, NYC)
and Daniel Buren's work on the wall underneath, white on white striped paper.
@
I

i
I
I
I

Duchamp's Unhappy Ready Made (1919) as of his Elevage de Poussiere (1920)
, Klein's Portraits-Reliefs from 1962 relate as well to Duchamp's plaster and latex
cast pieces from the late fifties like With my Tongue in my Cheek (1959). The
certificates for the exchange of pure gold for parts of the Immaterial Pictorial
Sensitivity Zone show Klein's knowledge of Duchamp's Monte Carlo Bonds (1924),
however, without achieving or maintaining the original dialectical wit in regard to
reality which all of Duchamp's work radiates. Thus Klein, quite in opposition to
Kaprow and the Fluxus activities, represents the incorporation of a petit bourgeois
reactionary position which always had been lingering in the air around late Parisian
surrealism. It found its most symptomatic figure in Dali whose techniques of
,self-scandalizing mythology Klein seems to have studied thoroughly. Their central
aim was to maintain under any historical circumstance an idea of the artist as a
narcissistic elitist, as 'a sort of superman' as Marcel Duchamp once had put it,
which would fit the restoration of pre-war social hierarchy and its more recently
established members.
Klein and Judd
In retrospect it is therefore ail the more astonishing that Klein's work which
attempted to maintain issues that had already been proven obsolete by a large
number of young American artists and by their European predecessors, should
have found such an unusual degree of appreciation in the United States. Klein was
the first-and only?-European artist of that time who 'made it' for example on the
cover of Artforum (January 1967), if that is of any significance, and the same year
he had a major retrospective at the Jewish Museum in New York-a proof of
appreciative interest that no other European artist of that time had achieved. It
comes as even more of a surprise to read that Klein seems to have been the
figure recognized by the younger generation of American artists of the early sixties,
as revealed in Bruce Glaser's Interview with Stella and JUdd. Even more explicitly in
his written criticism Judd frequently refers to Yves Klein as the only relevant
European painter who had dealt with formal issues of prime importance to his own
concerns: flatness, abolition of relalionalism, wholeness and the painting as object.
Judd, who was born as was Klein in 1928, in his essay on Barnett Newman from
1970 goes as far as including Klein among 'the world's best artists' and continues:
"At the moment, despite the difficulties of comparisons and the excellence of
the work of Rothko, Noland and Stella it's not rash to say that Newman is the
best painter in the country. Also the work of these four artists and that by
Reinhardt and Lichtenstein, is considerably better than the European painting
evident in the magazines and that is shown in New York, except for Yves
Klein's blue paintings."2o
Thus, in obvIous and conscious disregard of any of the implications involved in
Klein's works, their historical and art-historical conditioning, their materiality (e.g.
the monogolds) or their process of production (e.g. the Anthropometries), and
the broader context and significance these works gain by virtue of the
propagandistic declarations of their author, Judd as late a als an attitude
of formalist criteria and judgment in art. See our European vantage point
~
"'"
today it is hardly comprehensible, and therefore might hint at another aspect of a
specific difference between recent American and European formal thinking. How J
can one appreciate Klein's blue paintings without considering along with' them the
totally corny monogold relief paintings? What can the attraction of the sponge -
paintings be once they are discerned as decorative relics of a derivative
post -surrealist painting-into-object attitude? How can one appreciate the ~
anthropometries without considering their act of production? How can one admire
somebody's 'art' disregarding his 'mind'-supposing they might not be an integral
whole-when the artist in question on the occasion of the 'Inauguration of the
Pneumatic Epoque' indulged himself with quasi-fascistic announcements like the
following:
"Our government pure and scandalous will eliminate the puppets, the
FranQoise Sagans, the Genets, the George Duhamels, the Einsteins, the
Roosevelts, the Pandit Nehrus, the rats and garbage cans. "21
Or the formalist approach, seen another way: how inaccurate and imprecise is a
formalist description and appreciation of a visual work, if it is not even capable of
making out the implications inherent (and obvious) in the appearance of the work?
Fortunately we know from a lucid analysis of Yves Klein's work, published
relatively early by the American critic Dare Ashton, that the formalist attitude itself is
only one possible historical position to be taken in regard to Klein, and not a
specifically American one at all, but rather one which seems to be defended by a
generation of artists who, after having learned their art-history lessons better than
their history lessons, seemed to be concerned mainly with the pr<;>blem of inserting
their production into the mainstream of 'formal' tradition. As Ashton put it in her
essay on Mathieu, Klein and others:
"He was a reactionary in the sense that many of the young intelligentsia were
reactionaries in the post-war decade: theirs was a reaction against the great
wartime currents of commitment, summarized by existentialism ... when many
older French intellectuals were frantic with horror, the fevered prose
accompanying the 'revolution' in the visual arts was coyly transmundane,
limiting itself to exalted discussions of new cosmologies, new psychism, new
infinite beyonds, and new brotherhoods in some distant future in the infinite
beyonds where 'other' art would conquer ... Under cover of cascades of
hyperbolic prose promotion, a host of younger artists stepped out into the
world of show business, bringing 'reality' to their hungry bourgeois patrons ...
the fossils of one of these lives, dessicated and boring, are on view at the
Jewish Museum. No one better exemplifies the shift in values, the switch from
art as a private affair to art as a public event, than the late Yves Klein. The
souvenirs of his life of spectacle are poor dead things. Bereft of the
confectioner, the life of his art has vanished."22
Formalism and historicity could be more clearly defined and distinguished by now.
Both concepts have to be regarded as the opposite ends of an axis on which art
activities seem to be permanently shifting according to their own and to historical
conditions. Of course neither of them could be called specific per se to European
or American art of the recent decades, but it seems that at precisely the point
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where the major European artists of the present, like Buren and Broodthaers,
Richter and Toroni, the Bechers and Stanley Brouwn developed an entirely
changed notion of the artist's relation to __ around 1965-a strong
current of formalist identification with art seems to have been representative for the
American situation. Judd's apodictic statement in his essay 'Imperialism,
Nationalism, and Regionalism' (1975) seems significant for that position:
"Art, dance, music and literature have to be considered as autonomous
activities and not as decoration upon political and social purposes."23
If, according to Judd, aesthetic activities have to be considered autonomous
activities, this doesn't necessarily mean that they in fact are, and if they are actually
not autonomous, neither must this imply that they can only be considered
'decoration upon political and social purpose.' It either shows disdain or naivete
t
towards the real conditions of history and the dialectical potential of art, when their
interdependence cannot be imagined othiOr than by considering art merely as a
mimetical appendix of reality (or decoration as the formalist puts it).
.r It is precisely this loss of history which might be called a
becific feature of European art since (196." The awareness and recognition grew
that art, being concerned with modes of perception as being modes of experience,
could no longer limit itself to the reflection of phenomenology of perception alone,
but at the same time would have to extend its analysis to cover the general
pistorical (not only art-historical), social and political phenomena conditioning those
, y/ modes of perception as well as the modes of producing art. Awareness grew as
>,v well that by analyzing its own epistemological pre-suppositions art could not restrict
'r-;.'" its inquiry to its own discourse (and the history of that discourse) by pretending to
be a self-containing autonomous activity. but would have to reflect aialectically its
eosition ,:",ithin both as a dependant and determined form
and as a conscious mode of ideological productivity transforming this reality.
Thus the artist consciously tried to reflect-if not abolish--a role which had
been imposed on him by social conventions and by his traditional inca aClt to
question IS 0 con ro e orms of behavior which had become forms of
" eroductions, one being the restncted concern for visual and formal sensibility: By
(\ adding this inquiry to his aesthetical venture, or more precisely, by substituting
r:J>. tfie latter for the former: "tie-armed" at an escape from the post-surrealist dilemma
" d attempted to furnish the aesthetical work with a new objective function in
order to save its author and his product from the malediction f existin as
an aesthetical objec a e to ot erwlse I trable and unalterable conditjg[1s
pf historicaLr:.eahly, rom etng;as Max Raphael had definedit as early as 1938, a
/'Tcaterer of "chic:"
Ou-tIC/J... "Chic is another feeling of contrast. It develops out of two altogether
'r I'tlhlh') different sources: either the masquerade of outer elegance under which the
individual pretends to continue his fight against society, or an abstract
idealization and embellishment which develops exactly to the degree to
which the real human being becomes a caricature. In the first case dandyism
is. a conscious irony deriving from the tragiC and comical separation of the
singular individual from society and the feeling of superiority of the
----
'paradoxical unique' over the bon sens of the philistines; in the second
'embellishment' is the desire of the disproportioned and dehumanized
aesthetical illusion, for false harmony and pretended proportionality, for
fata morgana of all contradictions being resolved. In both cases Chic
become an integral element of high art."24
Neo Dada dimensions
'It useful to emphasize that none of the artists whose work
changed the European notion of contemporary art---'-at least in the terms of
essay-has been substantially influenced by the work of Yves Klein, which
not of course exclude the possibility that other European artists in this show
have acknowledged Klein's impact. The work of the! Bechers and Broodthaen
Brouwn and Buren, Darboven, Richter and Toroni dpes show on the other
various degrees and forms, transformations of ideas and practices that had
founded by European artists of the fifties and early sixties, who have had both
then and now much less of a place in European or }\merican art criticism and
general appreciation. This is true of Klein's countertigure. the Italian Piero
Manzoni, as well as for the lesser known group of French pftcollagists 01!trAhe
Hains and Villegle (and their Ttalian colleague Rotelfa). These artists' basic
attitudes and concepts seem to have been objective aesthetical and historical
issues, which were consequently unfolded and developed, transformed and
extended up to the level of present day discourse. .
Villegle's anonymous lacerations
" ... it is within the real. by the real and with the real that the 'affiche
laceree' gains its consistency and imposes its presence. But it's just
because he doesn't resign reality that the anonymous lacerator, who feels
the restraint of reification pending on him, acts by protesting in. particular
against the psychic violation of the masses by the public propaganda. By
this he introduces the domain of potentiality of childhood right into the
of adults."25
Jacques de la Villegle, Les Boulevards de la Creation
'Lacere Anonyme,' the anonymous lacerations of billboards-the term used
by Villegle to describe the result of an artistic contract between the artist as a
chOOSing collector and those anonymous artistic actions-could be called the
most underestimated and mjsuQQerstood 911 activity in post-war European art: it
?night represent in fact the first legitimate and highly onglnal
contribution to the development of a new artistic language after Dada and
Surrealism in Paris.26 Being aware of given (art) historical conditions, ranging from
the concept of the Ready Made to Schwitters' collage and assemblage aesthetics
to the radicality of Pollock's all-over pictorial field which accomplished the idea of
gestural automatism, they deliberately transferred their realm of painterly actions
from the studio and the canvas into the street as early as 1949. It might be most
rewarding to see and read their works in terms of the critical terminology of New
Gerhard Richter and Blinky Palermo. Joint exhibition at
Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Cologne 1971: 'Waif painting and two sculptures'
Duchamp's
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York School painting and its consequent discussion in inimal theory whose q
main concerns are, among others, the final abolition of the cu IS grid structure,
the elimination of shallow illusionistic space, the flatness of the painted surface, .
the quality of the painting as autonomous, self-referential object, the non-relational
organization of formal elements and finally the anonymous procedures and
materials of production. These concerns can be found in the works of Villegle and
Hains, Dufrene and Rotella. Without bringing up the ludicrous question of 'who did
what first' one should point to the differences in these artists' self-comprehension
and attitudes toward given historical reality in their pursuit of similar painterly and
formal concerns. Their work has been discarded all too easily as simply having
extended Duchamp's Ready Made into a different materiality, the formal and
plastic language of Schwitters into larger dimensions, and the aesthetics of
Matisse's 'Papiers Decoupes' into a more modernist look. In fact, the work of
Villegle and his friends deliberately and consciously transformed those
presuppositions by inducing qualitative historical differentiations and introducing
'entirely new attitudes, which radicalized the inherent dimensions of their
predecessors' work and developed the implications of this work into the present.
:As Villegle himself has pointed out:
"To plunder, to collect, to sign the lacerated affiches and to live with them
and to expose them in galleries, salons and museums, this is not a
questioning of the artwork in the sense of Duchamp's Ready Made but more
a questioning of the professional and traditional artist."
And elsewhere:
"After all, I cannot consider the laceration of the Anonymous or my selection
of it as a transcription or objectivation of a singular lived experience of a
gifted and predestined individual, the artist ... The gestural savagery of a
multitude is individualized to become the most remarkable manifestation of
'art made by all and not by one' of this period."
It represents a considerable progression both from Duchamp's
..JonymousI
Y
manufactured objects, transformed into art by declaration, and from
;lchwilters' found objects, aestheticized by arrangement. The anonymous gesture
and the very activity of the 'inconscient collect if' to which Villegle frequently
enter by choice the realm of artistic reflection. It represents an equally
Ionsiderable step away from the surrealists' traditional ideas (and idealization) of
i collective unconscious. This had found its final form in Dubuffet's Art Brut
and production and ever since the 'discovery' of the works and
of exotic primitives and local schizophrenics had been an idiosyncratic
(historical-geographical as well as socio-psychological) and a reversed
n of seemingly lost states of a fictitious, innocent productivity that the
of bourgeois society were raving about as they searched for new
With 'Lacere Anonyme' the artist, quite in the tradition of the 'flaneur
holique,' ranging from Baudelaire to Duchamp, restricts his own
passive-receptive activity to the act of 'choix,' the choice which is even less of a
productive gesture than Duchamp's 'declarative act.' In conscious negation of his
traditional role, he cedes his place to the collective gesture of productivity, which
in Villegle's historical situation had been that of stuporous aggression against the
imposed alienation and 'psychic viofation by the public propganda.' As a collector
who binds himself to the anonymous producer, the artist takes over the role of the
historian; inasmuch as he acknowledges the potential of collective gestures and
their growing consciousness, his own art gains historical significance and
authenticity. How this contract between artist-collector and anonymous producer
has evolved in the work of Stanley Brouwn and Marcel Broodthaers and in the
systematical documentation of 'Anonymous Sculptures' by Bernhard and Hilla
Becher will be discussed.
It is against this background that 'formalist' concerns gain their
transparence and convincing necessity: inasmuch as the abolition of illusionistic
space is a material equivalent of the abolition of projective subjectivism; inasmuch
as the presence of the painterly self-referential object demands that of a
conscious subject; inasmuch as its holistic form is the actual sign of separate
ideptity and the elimination of relationalist composition is the result of the artist's
conscious negation of his traditional role; insofar as all these formal principles can
be seen and read in the works of the 'Lacere Anonyme.' Villegle phrased it in this
way: " ... Lacere Anonyme opens up with four cuts of the razor blade a window
into the flatness of the affiche-objet. A beam of daylight thus cuts through the
obscurity of the ways in which the financial and political powers arrive at the ends
they impose on mankind. The unknown poetry reveals and destroys the
schematizations of propaganda and publicity."
Manzoni's analytical concepts
"Manzoni is dead, physically dead. He was young. Is there a connection
between his untimely death and the attitude that he took on in the context of
art? It is most certain that insisting on his kind of humour was not a very
comfortable position to have taken. And if this should be the reason, then
our inquiry into artistic events, into all kinds of events, will have to be
profound and thorough. In any case Manzoni will be in the history books of
the terrible twentieth century."27
Marcel Broodthaers
When Broodthaers wrote this after Manzoni's death in 1963 he considered
himself-and was in fact-still a poet and critic whose own visual production
started shortly thereafter. Thus those lines could be read in two ways, first as a
very profound comprehension of Manzoni's ideas and work, especially to the
extent they point to the central aspect of investigative and analytical nature, and
second as a promise of continuation and extension of Manzoni's legacy, which
Broodthaers actually realized in his own artistic production. Whereas Klein can be
rightfully considered a terminal figure-as was Mathieu-who left almost no
traces in contemporary art, except perhaps in works like those of the Poiriers, the
opposite can be said to be true
While nowadays 'We looking at "the poor corpses of
blue paintings"-as Ashton put it-which, by their formalist and aestheticist
pretence exclusively refer to immaterial metaphysical sensitivity and spirituality
(and these notions may be easily replaced by more modernist notions of purely
aestheticist concepts like the tautological nature of art), they actually represent,
given historical reality, a concrete glorification of restorative domination and
worldly octroi. It is in looking at Manzoni's work that we still experience the
presence of his gestures to open up sights of materialistic recognition and to
mediate, by means of his art, a concrete experience for the individual autonomous
subject. Or as discerned by. the Italian critic Sarenco:
" ... the work of Klein is conservative, the work of Manzoni is revolutionary
... In Klein there is nietaphysics, childish obsessions. In Manzoni there is
violent irony, desire to change things, a materialist conception of the world.
Klein is a man of despair, a romantic, a decadent; his work closes a cycle
of avant-garde. Manzoni is a man of the concrete, a provoker, his work
opens the way of the contemporary avant-garde."28
Manzoni can be considered a source for most aspects central to
contemporary European art. If one could hypothetically say that Duchamp at least
occasionally acted as if playing games or as dreaming-that is as far as the
long-range theoretical and epistemological consequences of his art are
concerned-Manzoni adapted those Duchampian attitudes to the post-war period
by changing them into preconscious hypotheses. The following generation of
present-day artists inverted Manzoni's preconscious hypotheses into a wide
spectrum of fully conscious theses. Each progression at each time consisted of
the singularization of elementary notions of visual and spatial (i.e. mental and
physical) modes of experience (of art): the successive quantitative extension
which was induced by the singularization of the constituting elements of the
artworks caused a qualitative change toward a radical public openness of the
works, and their progressive dissolution of aesthetic semblance in favor of its
actual materiality brought with it dialectically an increasing degree of
conceptualization.
Lines from Duchamp, Manzoni and Brouwn
One could say for example that Duchamp's Trois Stoppages/Eta/on (3
Standard Stoppages), 1913, represented an almost unimaginable step of
singularization of a particular aesthetical aspect (and as such of course an
abstraction) in the context of contemporary art at that time. This work was
certainly at the root of Manzoni's Line works (from 1959 on) of different
dimensions (up to 7200 m, and one of infinity which was a massive wooden black
body). One could as well argue that Manzoni's work in turn was certainly most
relevant, if not an immediate influence on Stanley Brouwn's early
spatial-c;onceptual works (for example his piece No. 34 from 1962: a walk from a
to b: b to a: a to b etc., 100 times
29
) in which Brouwn intentionally introduced the
94
notion of the space-time continuum into a sculptural-visual work, or as
own formula says: distance = length, length = distance. The visual-malt
appearance of Duchamp's piece is most intricate and subtle, both of
complexity and complicated richness of aspect. Its materials range
rulers to golden lettering, from glass panes to meter sticks, from canvas
leather labels, all of it finally encased in a croquet box. Equivalent to
is the perceptual-conceptual complexity of Duchamp's work, ranging as
does-just to name a few aspects-from apperception of relationships
and form, the question of conceptual identity and perceptual dissimilaritl
spiritual conception of a work, its processual action and execution to
result and body of that work as a physical reminiscence of that past
time. Manzoni's line works (for example, Line 1000 Meters Long 1961,
paper in chrome plated metal drum, 20% x 15%", The Museum of
New York) in comparison are simplistically reduced. Their material
by no means less elaborate than Duchamp's, is equally simplified and
the most elementary qualities of a material: a plastic body constituting
containing a work of art. As far as the work's perceptual and conce
are concerned, its main characteristic in comparison to the
the singularization and isolation of the one constituent and dominant
artistic work: namely spatial extension as a visual sign and a literal
Inasmuch, however, as this feature is isolated in Manzoni's work it is
simultaneously magnified and thus gains an altogether innovative range
qualitative aspects. The most prominent is its almost monumental
and public openness. In comparison Duchamp's work has all the
almost subjectivist intimacy and individualist privacy. Btlt to the extent
the idea and the phenomenon of spatial extension are magnified and
to the level of public monumentality, they are at the same time radically
their visual appearance) and dialectically concealed: this phenomenor
spatial dimension, other than conceptually, is no more accessible. Visual
appearance, its objective materiality, has been restricted to the object
literally contains and conceals the idea and the phenomenon itself. By
ingenious il!version Manzoni very clearly arrives at and defines a basic
all conceptual art to follOW, which especially in the work of Bruce
played a crucial role since 1965: the withdrawal of perception. In Man
both the idea of the pure spatial dimension and its material concretion
and given. But the artwork as material object negates itself totally in
invisible conceptual dimension. As object, it appears only insofar as it
negate the work's appearance as a containing concealment. The shiny
surface of the chrome container literally throws back the perceptual
of the viewer onto himself.
Manzoni's distinction as the originator of conceptual art
\
years before Henry Flynt articulated his ideas-has therefore to be
as the most innovative continuation and development of these dimensions
since Duchamp. Thus he helped finally to overcome the Neo-Dada
of art in the late fifties as embodied by the Nouveaux Realistes like
France (and also, at least in certain aspects, by Johns and Rauschenberg in the
States) by introducing a new attitude of materialist conceptualization and of
conceptualized material in art. What the American critic Robert Pincus-Witten in
his appreciation of Manzoni's impact discerned as the central concern of his art
when he said that" ... isolating constituent features of art, Manzoni paraded what
he thought the essential futility of art as sensibility . . ,"30 could have been equally
applied to Duchamp as it was his central concern, Manzoni's innovation leads
much further however and has caused far reaching consequences in
contemporary art. Manzoni recognized the essential futility of art which is a
subjectivist activity that isolates itself from objective processes and from basic
forms of perception and recognition.
Therefore it can be said that Manzoni's systematic, analytical approach to
art provided a basis for a whole spectrum of entirely new and different attitudes
and concepts in art activities of the sixties up until now, ranging from Broodthaers'
practical museological investigations to Buren's elaborate and highly articulated
Imuseological analysis and theory, from Brouwn's introduction of the space-time
nuum and his conceptual approach to spatial experience to Hanne
I
Darboven's drawing systems which are exclusively concerned with the
; Quantification of time and its representation as elementary self-experience (which
turn owe a lot to Stanley Brouwn's work). Or, in a totally different manner, the
I
', 'strictly painterly activities of Gerhard Richter and Niele Toreni both in very
" .different ways extend and continue the systematical inquiry into the act and
of painting, an investigation which had started in this particular way with
: Manzoni's systematically ordered, all-white achrome material paintings and range
his thumb prints on paper and eggs.
Brouwn
"A This way Brouwn' is a portrait of a tiny bit of earth, Fixed by the memory
of the city: the pedestrian." .
Stanley Brouwn
tpyhen in 1960 Brouwn's first offLci.al.J::Jut;>lic_W9rk
Amsterdam were to a major step in
pntemporary Eu'ropean art had been taken. work not only acknowledged the
relevance of Duchamp's Ready Mare concept but at the same time it
ilferentiated its meaning and enlarged its functions in various dimensions. The
. of quantitative multiplication and serial equivalence had already been
by the Nouveaux Realistes-especially by Arman whom Brouwn had
in Nice-but in the final analysis they had left both the concept and the
formally and historically in a rather reified state, whereas Brouwn's idea of
obviously leads away from the collectible (and collected) 1001 id objcet-s
and functioning reality context. What is more, Brouwn's shoe shop
humorous way his future concerns for participatory
for the spatial practice of the pedestrian is one of the most common

actual works as they walked over large sheets of white paper laid down in the
streets (Works No. 1-8). It seems useful to remember at this point parallel
activities like Rauschenberg's Tire Print, 1959, and Klein's "Anthropometries" from
1960 as weI! as Manzoni's "Finger Prints", and one can imagine the qualitative
differences and the variety of implications which a structural comparison between
the seemingly similar works and activities might reveal. But then in the very same
year Brouwn inverts this practice altogether, he turns from passively collecting
past traces, which unconscious pedestrians left on his papers, to actively
instigating a dialogue with a consciously participating and producing subject:
"The duration of the creation of a 'this way Brouwn' is precisely limited, in
contrast to what was previously generally done in art. There is no adjusting,
no measuring, no rounding-off or embellishment of the result. The time
Brouwn really needs to walk from A to B is compressed in the
explanation-time of the passer-by in the street ... At the moment of
explanation the situation is still in the future. He (the passer-by) makes a
in time and space."31 .
It is worthwhile comparing the subject-object (relatively the subject-subject)
relationship and the changes it has undergone from Villegle's Lacere Anonyme to
Brouwn's randomly chosen street' pedestrian as active participant. Whereas in
Villegle's work the quality of 'objective anonymity' was still a necessary and
crucial step in rendering more objectively the artist's activity, in retrospect his
activity and role as artist were actually still considerably defined by artistic
conventions: the act of choosing and its aesthetical criteria, the act of mounting
and framing the chosen fragment of anonymous activities, the act of signing, etc.
With Brouwn's work both sides have been juxtaposed in certain ways and the
artist's_activi1 artici ation in the form of a I?roduct
tJ.!LlLmits.himse 0 e.8. 5Sfu'W..Y.
in the street for his explanation of the way as a projective spatial production. The
result of this cooperation constitutes the work, which, even with the authentication
of his stamp, This way Brouwn', indicates the objective nature of a process of
production entirely dependent on the cooperation of different individuals. The
potential participation of the collective subject actually becomes real inasmuch as
the artist eliminates himself and his authorship. More correctly, inasmuch as the
collective subject as a historical necessity becomes potentially real, the artist
accelerates this process of development by negating his role and withdrawing his
obsolete functions in dialectical gestures of anonymity. While the decollagist as
artist was still the collector of the subject's unconscious gestures of furious stupor
against imposed alienation, Brouwn's role is to anticipate in his dialogical art the
forthcoming and forward-looking, self-conscious subject which is projecting its
own self-determined future, or as Brouwn put it:
"It is not the past but the future which has the greatest influence on our
ideas and actions."
Stanley Brouwn's work No. 34 (see above), once again in comparison to
c:: I inA works, seems to have abolished any t()WMr1 m::ltAri.,,1
appearance .. No,:,)hfl work simply exists as
be possibly undertaken. The spatial mrnensionas an experience of temporal
setj08f1Cevisibly realizes itself only in those printed words necessary to the
defining description. This vanishing of plastic does
not make the work fall into an idealistic trap of art which has become symptomatic
for so many conceptual artworks that have developed since. Quite to the contrary.
The potential execution of the piece can be accomplished by anybody who
wishes to do so and is a very material practice of sculptural activity. Thus the
highest degree of formal abstraction-and at the same time the most common
and generally developed sense of formalization of signs, language-has become
the equivalent to the highest degree of elementary material concretion: the
potential practice of everybody's experience of spatial-temporal change in the
basic activity of taking steps. The recipient to whom Brouwn addresses his art is a
historically conscious subject who no longer supports the more or less complex
models of heteronomous experience imposed on him. The artist who has almost
disappeared in his role as author simply has restricted himself to the most
objective neutral proposition, a written definition which can cause his work to take
shape and function within given material reality itself.
As we have seen with the example of the transformation of concepts from
Manzoni, similar mutational processes could be shown to reveal the considerable
importance Brouwn's work has had for contemporary European art, if only, as is
often the case, in a very subtle and hardly perceptible manner. It is intriguing to
note how Manzoni's and Brouwn's materialist radicality and consequent degree of
formal abstraction have found followers, imitators and surrogates for the 'sake of
art.' By adding dimensions of transcontinental exoticism and romanticist attitudes
toward 'nature' and mythical formal archetypes like spirals and the like (all most
delicately photographed), the works of Richard Long have assimilated original
[
deaS of Stanley Brouv;n by inverting them into traditional art-modernisms. (See for
example Brouwn's works No. 35 and No. 36 from 1962, A walk through a grassfield
exactly on the same line a-b; every day during a full year, and compare Long's
'j works of the late sixties which execute and vary Brouwn's concepts and deliver the
L results as sculpture.) It is most significant again that Donald Judd, in his
'Imperialism, Nationalism and Regionalism,' 1975, by ignoring the original works of
Manzoni and Brouwn and consequently not realizing their implications, expresses
his high appreciation for Richard Long's work by simply judging on formalist
grounds of traditionalist modernism and thus ends up in the very mess he points to:
"It becomes a real mess when no one knows the difference between a good
artist and a bad one, as they didn't, say, in 1959 between Rauschenberg
and Michael Goldberg or Grace Hartigan. Or say now botween Richard Long
and Daniel Buren or Jan Dibbets."32
Another example would be a work like Walter de Maria's Mile Long Drawing
(Mohave Desert, 1968) which once again clearly refers to Manzoni's and Brouwn's
concepts, in the same way his more recent and even more spectacular Vertical
Earth Kilometer (Kassel, 1977) does. De Maria's works add to Manzoni and Brouwn
restoring to the notion of art precisely those qualities which they had deliberately
96
done away with: pompous, spectacular attractiveness, oppressive, reifying,
subconscious games and mystical symbolism (both of which are identical in the
end anyway), ideological pretensions like exotically distant places, and, most of
all-as is usual with academic work-gigantic dimensions.
There are, on the other hand, examples of authentic assimilations and
transformations of Manzoni's and Brouwn's concepts. The American-Japanese
artist, On Kawara, and the American-German artist, Hans Haacke, have developed
their work in totally different ways and directions, partly out of the basic aesthetical
concepts that had been formulated by Manzoni and Brouwn in the late fifties
and early sixties. They have thus added considerably to our appreciation of reality
and art by their activities. And it should finally be noted that the younger group of
relevant post-minimalist American artists, like Michael Asher, Dan Graham and
Lawrence Weiner have been fully aware of Brouwn's work and its functional
immediacy for a long time and hold it in highest esteem, even though it may not .
have left an immediate visual trace in their own works.
Marcel Broodthaers
"I have instruments which were destined for my usage to
understand the aspect of fashion in art, to follow it and finally to find a
definition of that fashion. I am neither painter nor violinist. What really interests
me is Ingres. I am not interested in Cezanne and his apples."33
Marcel Broodthaers '
It was during his sojourn in Brussels in 1962 that Manzoni declared in his
Carte d'authenticite No. 71 (23.2. 1962) that Marcei Broodthaers in his entirely and
for all future (red certificate) was to be considered.a work of art. It seems thai for
Broodthaers, who was still a poet at the time and a photographer and critic, the
confrontation with Manzoni may have functioned a9 one of the final initiating
experiences-others were the visit to a show of the work of George Segal and
Broodthaers' critical, ambiguous feelings about American pop-art-in launching his
decision to change roles from poet to visual artist.. His very first works, which he
showed in 1964 in Brussels under the title Moi aussi je me suis demande si je ne
pouvais pas vendre quelque chose et reussir dans /a vie (/ too have asked myself
whether / could sell and succeed in life), show the very strong impression
which Manzoni must have left on him. For example, his very first work, the complete
edition of his recent and final volume of poems, Pense Bete, he casl in plaster and
thus 'objectified.' This influence is valid for both the perceptual and the conceptual
aspect of Broodthaers' work, even though the latter developed very quickly and
completely independently into his most original domain. Both artists share a similar
spiritual attitude, namely that of an incredibly intricate and sagacious humor which
seems to stem from the radical and annihilating insights of a deeply rooted
skepticism and an almost childlike trust of the positive human future to come. With
Broodthaers this attitude apparently takes the role of the acid melancholic with a
seemingly insurmountable disillusion and critical negation as its rationalistic
constructive counterpart. Perceptually, it is mainly in the sense of its original identity
I
I '
1
of material and color that his work shows its indebtedness to Manzoni, Consider the
'achrome' non-color qualities of materials in Broodthaers' plaster assemblages and
!his egg-mussel-and-coal accumulations, Where the latter had used white 'achrome'
fmaterials, Broodthaers finally turned them into black by using mussel-shells and
t telephones, coal and suitcases, which were much closer to his everyday
: surroundings. He was so poor at the time that no other materials were at
!hand and also they corresponded to his ironic sense for the qualities of the
i 'northern tradition.'
f Of other contemporary influences which have been repeatedly detected in
'I' Broodthaers' early work, the most important is his relation to Arman in particular.
When Arman had his first show in Brussels in the early sixties, Broodthaers
dedicated the accumulation of syllables 'dad ada' in the guest book of the gallery,
! thus clearly indicating his doubts about a Neo Dada activity which simply carried
Ion art concepts dating from a totally different historical context and applied them to
I thE! present without major reflection or change. Later when asked whether he could
identify the origins of his work in Nouveau Realisme, he answered:
"My first objects and images, 1964-1965, could not cause such confusion. The
literalness shown in the appropriation of the real was intolerable to me because
it meant an acceptance pure and simple of the ideas of progress in art ... and
elsewhere."
, Most obvious however are the references which Broodthaers' work makes to
its Dada and Surrealist ancestors, and this to such an extent that they have been
entirely misunderstood. A strictly post-or neo-surrealist reading as Nicolas Calas'
recent essay (Artforum, May 1976) does not aid in understanding. Broodthaers' first
film, which he did as a poet and which in fact has to be considered as an early
,masterpiece in the long sequence of films that he later made as an artist, arose out
'of the spontaneity of enthusiasm that he had experienced when seeing his first
exhibition of the work of Kurt Schwitters in Brussels in 1957. It was entitled La Clef
de I'Horloge (Poeme cinematographique en I'honneur de Kurt Schwitters). Aside
'from a number of obvious and concrete references to works by Duchamp and Man
Ray, a particularly strong semblance to Magritte's work misled many of
Broodthaers' critics. He has of course t6 be considered as one of the few authentic
pupils of Magritte, whom he had met briefly after the war. It was Magritte who
introduced the young poet to the knowledge of Maliarme and Poe. For a number of
years thereafter he maintained .a regular, friendly contact with him, first as a poet
and later as a visual artist, but did not enjoy at ali-as it seems-the master's
unreserved approval. As Broodthaers put it: "This is what Magritte has often
reproached me for. He thought of me as more sociologist than artist." His own
'appreciation of Magritte, on the other hand, was not fuli either, as he stated,
"Magritte with his Ceci n'est pas une Pipe is less easy. But even so, he was stili too
Magritte. This means that he was not enough 'Ceci n'est pas une Pipe.' From
this pipe I started on my own adventure." And having once been asked whether he
would situate himself in a surrealist perspective, after having recited a quotation
from Breton's Surrealist Manifesto on the abolition of all contradictions, Broodthaers
answered, "I do hope that I have nothing in common'with this state of mind." The
historical presuppositions from Dada and Surrealism that still seemed to have some
validity and to be of interest for reintegration into contemporary art discourse, were
Duchamp's Ready Made concept from 1913 on the one hand, and the theoretical
implications of Magritte's 'linguistic' paintings from the late twenties and the thirties
(such as Cec; n'est pas une Pipe, 1928, also known as The Treason of Images) on
the other, which in fact had been an aesthetical-painterly application (not to say
exploitation) of Ferdinand de Saussure's original recognition of the structure of
language signs in 1915. Whereas one of the essential queries of Duchamp's
concept had been to learn about the transformation from primary object reality into
secondary sign reality (and vice versa), Magritte's inquiry quite to the contrary
focused on the secondary nature of the (painted) sign and on the decomposition of
the material signifiant and the immaterial signifie and their seemingly arbitrary
relationship. Reduced to a formula: the sign potential of objective reality and the
potential objectivity of signs, both basic epistemological questions into the nature of
art and its historical conditioning, became the starting point of Broodthaers' work.
But since he had also been a student in Lucien Goldmann's seminars, (who was
turn the pupil of Lukacs, an eminent historian of literature and criticism of ideology
in Brussels and Paris), and had read extensively in French structuralist theory and
semiology in particular (of course he read Roland Barthes' Le Oegre Zero de
I'Ecriture (1953), Mythologies (1957) and his Systeme de la Mode (1967) which
enlarged de Saussure's linguistic model of the sign and transformed Helmslev's
variation of this model as a metasign into a tool of critical reading of secondary
ideological sign systems), Broodthaers had to acknowledge that neither production
nor reflection of visual-aesthetical sign-systems could limit itself any longer to a
pretension of self-contained and self-determined art historical thought or, as far as
the producer was concerned, to a riarrow-minded art-and-craft ethos, centered on
the formal problems of its modernist tradition. With the publication of his TMoremes
in 1966 Broodthaers clearly announced the direction his future investigations would
take by saying in his Theoreme No.3:
"Every object is the victim of its nature, even in a transparent painting the color
stili hides the canvas and the moulding hides the frame."34
Broodthaers pointed to the fact that art, inasmuch as it had become
historically overdetermined by elements alien to its own original concerns (for
example, having become the object of commercial speculation to an extent
unknown before or entirely dependent on its museological benediction and thus an
object of cultural administration and thereby serving the representation of ruling
could __ its, role a." nd fun, ct,ion, Ob, J,',eC,.t,ive]
hlstoflcarrecogmtlon only to rlie'W';mm,Jllilil[couldoecome gapable of radically
acknowledging the degree of its own aliena,ted_ state"and its cultural function of
fartnering alienatio[1, only by making its own state of reification its own-subject
matter. In keeping with these intentions Marcel Broodthaers founded in 1968 in
Brussels the Musee d'Art Modeme (Section IXe siec/e) Oepartement des Aigies,
which, upon invitation by its director, the artist, was inaugurated by a guest-director
97
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of a 'real' museum, Dr. Johannes Cladders, in the presence of a number of guests
and friends, among them Daniel Buren, Judging very rigorously one could argue
, that this was his first really major and far reaching work, Broodthaers' art
r therefore started at the point where art normally ends-in the place of its official
\
accultUration, the museum. Consisting of a number of empty wooden cases which
normally serve as transportation containers for highly valuable paintings, and a
i series of art-picture-postcards on the walls, Museum of Madero Art inverted the
traditional hierarchy of cultural organization by substituting the lowest elements of
the given functional basis for the unique hieratic artwork and thus publicly
questioned the origins of this hieratic image's aura, as pointed out in a later text on
the museum, when Broodthaers asked, "Is a picture post-card of a painting by
Ingres worth a couple million?" and when he commented on his museum project
once as "L'ldee de ce Musee est nee de Mai '68" ("The idea of this museum was
born in May '68"). The inferior object had not only been put into the place of the
\-. artwork itself, but even more the artist introduced himself in the role of cultural
I administrator by claiming to be the director of the museum. Broodthaers'
museological enterprise, a most ambiguous and brilliantly ironic 'cultural' revolution,
passed through different states in the following years and proceeded to open up
various sections: XVlle Siecle in Antwerp, XIXe Siecle bis and Section du Cinema in
DOsseldorf, and finally found its termination in 1972 with the by now famous
exhibition, The Eagle from Oligocene up until today-Musee d'Art Moderoe,
Section des Figures 35, which brought together more than 260 items from over 80
public museums and private collections in a structuralist reading of cultural signs
and emblems of power all representing the eagle and ranging from relics of natural
history to religious and mythological representations to artworks and contemporary
advertising trivialities and commodities' brands and trade signs. In retrospect one
recognizes it as an ingeniously prognostic announcement of the end of liberalism in
West Germany. Each object was accompanied by a black plastic label bearing the
catalogue number and stating in three languages, 'This is not a work of art.'
Methodologically speaking Broodthaers had in fact combined for his own
investigation the opposing concepts of Duchamp and Magritte-in the first
instance the transformation of (art)2!gns ELC!efinition of the artist
(derived from the artist's original intention to transform art into a new reality), and in
the second theJ.cansfprmatiQ[l of the sign (the representations of paLoling)jnto its
painterly painted signified, or as Broodthaers put it
more humorously:
\'to'''' '''This is not a work of art' is a formula which I obtained from the contraction of
a concept of Duchamp and an antithetical concept of Magritte. This helped me
to decorate Duchamp's 'Urinoir' with the sign of the eagle smoking the pipe.
believe to have emphasized the prinCiple of authority which makes out of the
eagle the colonel of art"
Most important for his method is the introduction of a third concept which
ling'::!ltic _a via Magrttt.e..Jl!!'
into the present. Roland Barthes' concept of the 'mvth' as cOl"nnrbnl

system is superimposed on primary language for the needs of alien ideological
interests. By fictitiously assuming the role of the museum historian and at the same
time radically negating the art-status of the museum's content, Broodthaers reveals
the museum as the place where art first and foremost obtains the status of
secondary language, the place where it is defined as art or where its self-definition
finds its approval. Thus his work opens up a perspective into both aspects
simultaneously, into the historicity of the activity of art itself and into the definitions
given to it post facto by its institutions, a perspective of art as being in itself as
antagonistic as primary and secondary language necessarily have to be. On the
other hand, Broodthaers' museology reveals the reality of the phenomena of 'art'
and returns these phenomena to their original historical status. They appear as an
almost unclassifiable variety of highly differentiated objects, each bound to its
unique and most individual peculiar historical situation, not to be isolated from the
very particular condition under which it arose and developed itself, on which it .
depended materially and historically. By polemically inverting the most famous
formula of conceptual idealism in art, Kosuth's 'Art as :Idea as Idea,' Broodthaers
put it this way: "Reste I'art comme production comme, production. (It still remains
valid, art as production as production)." It could therefore be argued that
Broodthaers' museum projects posited that, if the artist has finally become the
critical historian of his own craft, then reality, as conscious history, should
become art.
36
Broodthaers' visual language follows a strategy which might easily
be misapprehended and which is probably assumed by its author to induce such
misunderstanding. 'Nouveaux trucs, nouvelles combines (new tricks, new cheats),'
a device out of the ancient French comic-strip 'The Nibkel Feet,' which he included
as a vignette in his major catalogues in Brussels and Paris, is finally also valid for
his own art in its almost nostalgic qualities of typographical and stylistic refinement.
His films and books in particular, and the altogether dated aura of 19th century
bourgeois culture that many of his works seem to bring to mind, might easily
seduce the viewer into dismissing these works as being obviously obsolete and not
at aI/ concerned with the presuppositions of contemporary art of the modernist
tradition, but derivative of 19th century literary concerns instead. Or, quite to the
contrary the viewer might be totally enchanted by the secret attractions of the past
and charmed by the works' retrogressive appearance which could greatly appeal
to the viewer's own retrograde inclinations, As in the fables of La Fontaine, one of
Broodthaers' most beloved authors to whom he dedicated his first film as a visual
artist, where the animals as archaic antecedents of human beings speak their
language so that the humans can more easily recognize themselves in their dated
behavior in the present, Broodthaers speaks in old-fashioned art terms to a viewer
expecting the modernist idiom. He has defined his 'romanticist' attitude toward the
'souvenir,' the historian's position to be taken within the present art activity itself.
When asked at which point the artist would reach the essential state of an
'indifferent art' (as opposed to an engaged art like poetry which cannot become a
commodity), he said:
"At that moment precisely when one becomes less of an artist, when the
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exhibitions have always and still depend on souvenirs of the epoque in which, I
presume, the creative situation was one of heroic and solitary form. In other
words one of Read and See. Whereas today it is: May I present to You."
Of course the work of Marcel Broodthaers situates itself historically in the
1 context of so called conceptual art. Along with Robert Barry, Dan Graham and
; Lawrence Weiner, whose work he highly appreciated, he very probably will have to
he considered'one of the few truly visual artists who used language in a materialist
1 and dialectical manner (as opposed to a theoretical art-philosophical or poetical
! manner), thereby transferring our notions of art to a new level of abstraction, which
* historically from Duchamp and Malevich on always meant art's inherent tendency to
1 dissolve itself in favor of true collective subjectivity, the very 'Read and See' as a
'i general condition of being. Broodthaers' fantasy of a more heroic and solitary
situation of the artist projected backwards into an unfathomable past, demands of
'course dialectically the future necessity of a receiver of art who has become a
conscious historical subject himself.
When it turned out, however, that in the arts, even the written sentence, and
. more so the spoken word, CQuid be easily turned into a newly reified commodity,
l' he immediately changed positions. His terribly dull 'alphabet paintings' from the
early seventies and his magnificent major final work L'E/oge du Sujet (The Eulogy of
the Subject)37 radically negate the premature heroic gesture of conceptual art
twhich in his eyes pretended too soon to have finally overcome the burden of the
material and the historical world. Furthermore, as nobody had really learned to read
,:or-to see, art would have to start all over again. He thereby anticipated a collapse of
art into the derivative forms of decoration and academism that we have to face
now.
Bro,odthaers' critical skepticism addresses in particular the kind of positivist
enthusiasm which naively celebrates each aesthetical innovation as an
,Innovation of reality instead of a comprehension of it. His critical reading of the
I' historical and ideological implications of art is just another more or less valid and
effective attempt to decipher and transform reality. By being transformed it lost its
,intended primary functional object, language, which only could be capable of real
change, and entered the state of secondary mythical language. A basic theory of
art under our conditions was defined by Adorno as follows;
'. "Even within radical art there is still so much falsehood, because by its
anticipating construction of potentiality, in fact it neglects to construct il."38
Daniel Buren
"The difference between art and the world, between art and being, is that the
world and being are perceived by real facts (physical, emotional, intellectual)
and art visualizes this reality. If the artist's vision of the world were concemed
this could be a veritable consciousness of reality. But it concerns a product,
-art-, that is the thing seen by the consumer; thus a fixed and arbitrary reality
is proposed, a reality deformed by the individual who, wanting to express his
own vision of the world, no longer expresses the real but makes an illusion
of reality. "39
Daniel Buren
Museology is an enterprise of systematic investigation into the historical
conditions determining production and perception of art, its modes of fabrication
and distribution and its principles of installation and presentation. This enterprise
became the central concern of the art producer himself and the work's dominant . ,X\I\
focus, and it has therefore become apparent as one of the prominent features in
Broodthaers' work, latently from 1966 and manifestly as a key issue after 1968. (f.k
Broodthaers' attitude had been that of the artist disguised as historian and the
historian disguised as artist. The obsolete appearance of his work and its 19th
century 'look' incessantly pointed in a literal and pragmatic manner to the state of
present day art apperception as historically determined in its entirety by the
'Museum', this powerful institution of cultural administration which achieved its
height in the 19th century (where it has remained) with the secularization of religion
by the bourgeois culture. With the works of Daniel Buren we are confronted with an
entirely different approach to the same problem-at the same time theoretically
more explicit and practically more functional. Daniel Buren has approached this
problem latently since 1965 and in an outspoken manner since 1969.
Broodthaers and Buren maintained a friendly relationship in the sixties, and
this certainly has to be considered as a source of communication and exchange
with regard to the central ideas of their work. Their main connection,
probably was a similar interest in reading French structuralism and semiology. In
regard to their political orientation, one could say that in Buren's case his approach
to aesthetical activity as one form of practice was indebted to the thinking of
Althusser in contrast to Broodthaers' more analytical-contemplative attitude toward
history, which had been indebted to Lucien Goldmann. Their concem for
semiological theory, Roland Barthes' in particular, seems to be comparable. In fact,
both of their practical approaches to the problem of the museum can hardly be
imagined without the theoretical foundations of Barthes' model of the 'myth' and his
notion of the 'degre zero' of the sign as a state of objective language which one
would have to arrive at were the activity of that language to achieve the dimension
of practical and functional immediacy and transformational efficiency in its
relationship to a given historical reality context. As Broodthaers once said, "I serve
myself of the object as a wo'rd at the degre zero", 40 so Buren answered the
question as to whether his work was actually proposing the 'zero degree
of painting':
99
"I'll push it further. I believe we are the only ones to be able to claim the
right of being 'looked at,' in the sense that we are the only ones to present a
which has no didactic intention, which does not provide 'dreams', which
is not a 'stimulant'. Each individual can dream himself and without doubt much
better than by the trickery of an artist, however great he may be. The artist
appeals to laziness, his function is emollient. He is 'beautiful' for others,
'talente(j' for others, 'ingenious' for others, which is a scornful or superior way
of considering 'others.' The artist brings beauty, dreams, suffering to their
domiciles, while 'the others,' whom I myself consider a priori as talented as
artists, must find their own beauty, their own dream. In a word, become adults.
Perhaps the only thing that one can do after having seen a canvas like ours is
total revolution."41
This declaration, given in February 1968, not only testifies to the
in aesthetical thought in that fervent period in Paris but also should be read as an
indication of Buren's general understanding of his art activities which he has
considered ever since to be a form of 'practice', a material practice of ideological
criticism within the realm of the superstructure of art itself. Thus he was
simultaneously negating both a traditional positivist attitude toward art as being an
entirely separate and fully autonomous entity within human productivity as well as a
non-dialectical manner of mechanistic thinking of certain vulgar marxist ideologies
which tend to ignore the material reality and the power of ideology itself and
therefore equally to ignore the artist's potential capacity to act (not only in art)
efficiently within that field and to initiate possible transformational changes which,
eventually, might have reflexive consequences within historical reality itself. In
opposition to Broodthaers, who had repeatedly declared that art for him was only
conceivable as an activity of critical negation, the practice of art for Buren enters a
new state of constructive potential efficiency, very much in the tradition of
Stendhal's famous dictum that painting was nothing but constructed morality ('La
peinture n'est que de la morale construite', in L'Histoire de la Peinture en Italie).
Broodthaers' work and attitude insert themselves-even by their very negation of
that tradition-into an art historical tradition, that might have had its actual origins in
the 19th century starting with Baudelaire as the passive, melancholic flaneur, who
reflects the growing process of general reification within the formal analysis of his
own artwork, never doubting, as Broodthaers put it, that art could not exist
"otherwise than by being negation." This attitude reached its first climax within the
visual arts with Duchamp's invention of the Ready Made. The consequent reduction
of art and productivity to a mere act of declaration found, as we painted out before,
its more contemporary adaptation and historical modification in the procedures of
artists like Villegle and the Decollagists, who defined their activity as artists as
the anonymous collectors and historians of the collective gestures of revolt
against this evergrowing state of reification.
Daniel Buren has mentioned that if there was any post-war European
(Parisian) influence on his own work at ali, it might in fact have been the attitude of
the decollagists in general and that of Villegle in particular. Buren's pre-valid early
works around 1962 consisted of 'papiers dec hires'. In :contradiction to
paper objects' of the 'affiche laceree', Buren's 'decollages' were
differently colored papers covered with a final layer of white paper
torn off in an accidental manner to present the final pictorial result. This
indicates the impact Villegle's work must have had earlier but even
reveals the radical inversion of the artist's position that was to follow in
development in his first original and authentic works after 1965. For
valid to consider in thiS perspective Buren's description of a series of
he executed in 1968 on more than two hundred public billboards in
almost simultaneously by postal delivery and a museum instaiJation:
"All these works, executed within a very brieftime period in the
used the interior and the exterior, static and mobile supports,
(outside of the institution of the museum) and the author's name
museum's system."42
The activities of the French decoliagists have been almost literally
into a totally new comprehension of aesthetical procedure by this work.
no longer the collector of the past relics of anonymous acts of the
unconscious, but has become the conscious actor, positing himself
anonymity as the proof of a potential collective conscious practice.
Buren, the European artist's role identification changed again considerably
the original attitude of post-surrealist infantilism of the artist as a
unconscious actor on a stage limited by the bourgeois expectation for art
spectacle of narcissism, the artist turned to the street and became the
anonymous gestures. Consequently, as we have seen with the work of
Brouwn, the artist began a systematic analysis of his own position and
revealed the objectively given potential for conscious, autonomous
Following this we discovered in the work of Broodthaers the artist becomin
conscious historian of his own craft, who, by his perpetual critical neg
his own activity, dialectically pointed at the growing necessity and 'possibilit
actual, instead of symbolic, transformations within a given reality context.
work of Daniel Buren the European artist achieved a new state of identity.
equally assuming the role of the critical historian of his own activity, Buren
further in developing out of this role an anticipatory practice that inserts
more in the historical development that had been founded by artists of
constructivism and neoplasticism, who also had acted primarily on the
their work would induce and accomplish actual transformations within reality
Frequently Buren has referred to the instrumental aspect of his work, as
functional tool of practical investigation, for which reason the
theory and painterly practice in his work is absolutely indispensable.
compare" ... apparition of the work as an instrument of questioning and not as
moving and superficial found object"43 to Broodthaers' remark, quoted in
33, when he was describing his works as "instruments to understand the aspect
fashion in art.")

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In Buren's work the historical realities of visual culture (i.e. its social and
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political determinations) have become a visual-cultural reality in history. This 'V
self-referential identity, as opposed to a formalist's notion of self-reference, is a
dialectical one. Inasmuch as it understands itself to be a painterly practice,
however, it owes a great deal to a painterly tradition that found its highest forms of
development within the sQ-called formalist development. The work of Buren, who
repeatedly pointed out that the apprehension of his work as painting would be
: necessary and integral to its understanding (which means that it should not be
considered primarily as a conceptual investigation illustrating his theories or as a
. dematerialized work), has very much reflected the problems of painting -
as the purest forms of material practice. He was concerned with
tCezanne and his apples (see"Standpoints,' Five Texts, p. 33) and dealt thoroughly
1with the history of the evolution of painting since Cezanne, which he once
Idescribed as follows in a schematic abbreviation:
1 "Thus contemporary art history would oscillate constantly between two poles
'i symbolized by Cezanne and Duchamp. The first represents the positive, open
pole and the second the negative regressive pole. ( ... ) History of art thus finds
itself on the one hand, really fissured by the impetus given by Cezanne, a
fissure enlarged here and there (ct. Mondrian, Pollock, Matisse, Newman,
Stella)."44
American critic Roberta Smith was therefore quite right in saying that " ...
aspects of Buren's work as well as its formal nature-the broad regular
(that is the lack of composition and imagery, and the scale)-involve a
cal extension of various ideas in the work of Judd, Flavin, Andre and most
Stella. "45
She fails to point out, however, where these extensions lead and what their
'I' Implications and consequences are. And furthermore, she makes the mistake of
:, hinkinQ that to acknowledge the impact of Stella's work, who in turn was equally
to Andre, Flavin and Judd, at the same time means acknowledging an
I
, nfluence of the whole generation of American minimal artists on Buren. There is
,ardly an influence of Judd's work visible or imaginable, and certainly none
, hatsoever of Flavin. The 'objectification' of the painterly support, the decision of
walls directly, the decomposition of the painting from the stretcher and its
elimination, which in the case of Buren did not necessarily end up with the
ng becoming a sculptural object, has been a convincingly innate problem in
n's work.46 As for the,impact of Stella's work, which Buren had seen for the first
in New York in 1962 (he paid his first visit to the States in 1957), Buren has
outspokenly admitted the relevance of the early work of Stella for his own
lsthetic.al thought and the contemporary problems of painting in general. But to
ecognize the impression which Stella left on Buren's painterly investigation, means
ioestioning the issues and following the questions raised by Buren a little further
critics discerning this influence seem to have been willing or capable to do. It
thEtrefore a typical dilemma of strictly visually oriented formalist criticism-as
Crimp has pointed out_47 to see stripes in Buren's work and to think of
. (See for example Barbara Rose's statement: "Buren's nondescript and
deliberately ephemeral, non-qualifiable pieces vaguely resembling travesties of
Stella's stripe paintings ... ")48 In this line of formalist reading one might then as well
go one step further to reach the caricature of that method by arguing that the
color-square diagrams which illustrate Buren's central theoretical eHsay 'Critical
Limits' were miniature reproductions of Stella's 'Color Maze' paintings and thus
would again reveal Buren's dependency on Stella. On the contrary these diagrams
are the very point at which to start understanding the specific difference that Buren
introduced into the analysis of painting. Had it been Stella's central problem to
eliminate every element of reference to extra-painterly phenomena from painting, to
present the painting as a strictly self-referential identity, to abolish every moment of
spatial illusion, figurative allusion, compositional order, painterly facture,
differentiations of scale etc., and had he therefore in fact achieved the most
advanced investigation into painting and its practice, one could argue that,
precisely by the rigidity of this analysis, Stella had liberated painting from all
unreflected conditions which heretofore unconsciously determined painting. Thus
at the same time he achieved, also on a theoretical level, the purest notion of the
contemporary practice of painting itself. (And at the time it seemed hard to imagine
anybody going further than Stella within the area of painting, and probably very few
did singularize its elements any further, apart from Ryman and-in certain
aspects-the monochrome wall paintings by the German painter, Palermo, and the
'Empreintes'-paintings by the French painter, Toroni).
One could go as far as to argue that it was precisely the phenomenological
clarity and the rigid autonomy of Stella's work that would have to be considered one
of the historically necessary conditions enabling an artist like Buren to lead his own
investigation in an entirely new direction, discovering a whole range of undetected
extra-painterly determinations inherent in the traditional forms of art production and
reception which merited an analysis equally precise as the formal questions
received before. This painterly 'peripety', the paradigmatical change induced by
Stella on the level of painting, which has been recognized by a large number of
non-painting conceptual artists in America and Europe, in Buren's case led into a
new dimension of inquiry that demanded from the critical viewer a different kind of
opening up of traditional fields of vision. It asked for the recognition of historical
factors (i.e. political, social, ideological) as equal to visual-formal material factors in
defining the painterly practice. After all one could argue that the strictly formalist
concerns of the so-called 'minimal artists' certainly in the beginning had been
'historical' problems, in the way Barthes had defined formal signification, when
saying: "1 have always understood 'signification' as a process which produces the
sense and not as the sense itself." For example, Andre's or Judd's intention to
eliminate anthropomorphism from sculpture, by the time it was discussed
pretended to be a strictly 'formalist' concern, a question simply resulting from the
reflection of the tradition of the language of sculpture itself. But all of these
changing terms originally were the results of changing modes of
self-comprehension of the aesthetical subject, its general attitude towards history,
its process of identification within reality and its general understanding of changed
forms of recognition. All these aspects, however, at least in the discussion as it
101
seems to have been practiced after the fact among American artists and critics,
were severely restricted to the reflection upon the more precise problems of the
visual language and its traditions.
The nearly abysmal experience of discomfort many American (and
European) artists, curators and critics seem to have had in the confrontation with
Buren's work-and some still continue to do-is therefore more probably due to the
specific radicality of the paradigmatical change that he had introduced into the art
discourse. What is even worse, Buren did this precisely at a moment when art
seemed to have reached a climax of heretofore unknown and unimaginable
autonomy and sell-containment (Flavin called Judd for example 'the first
all-American sculptor'), as well as a state of self-reflexive and self-referential
consciousness and a peak of historical learnedness and lucidity. (As far as the
history of its own discourse was concerned, hadn't the minimal generation for the
first time in post-war American art history fully absorbed and combined every given
important painterly or sculptural issue, from Cubism to Mondrian and Malevich,
from Brancusi to Tatlin, from Duchamp to Schoenberg?) And it was at precisely this
moment that Buren opened up a perspective into a whole range of determinations
pi art as a highly dependent phenomenon and the artist an uncQnscious
(.e.r,actitioner of these determinations, "the bear in the zoo", as Buren once called his
role. With Buren's work, it seemed, the artist all of a sudden wa 0 .
taken
seriously in the JJ.iture. The sheer making of art and the delivery of the product no
longer appeared sufficient for the mutual standards of recognition that the
inter-relationships between producer and receiver of art had potentially reached.
And furthermore, in order to maintain its credibility in epistemological terms art
would have to initiate processes of interchange between the given formal and
visual data of a work and the invisible but materially efficient aspects of
determination of the artistic procedure of releasing these data. Given this
background, the resistance that the work of Daniel Buren has the level of
public institutions by now is more easily understood. When in famous
exhibition When Attitudes Become Form at the Kunsthalle Bern was opened, Buren
had his stripeapaper works installed outside. He had not been invited to
participate in this show of recent avantgarde art. His work was destroyed and he
himself severely prosecuted. Again in 1974 a work of his was destroyed by the
museum officials of the Cologne show of avantgarde art called Projekt. He had
been invited to participate but was obviously not allowed to do the work he thought
relevant for that show, which was a series of striped wall papers serving as an
exhibition support for Hans Haacke's equally censored contribution to that show.
But the basic contradictions of contemporary art production and reception are most
clearly revealed in the consequences resulting from a piece by Daniel Buren
installed at the 1971 Guggenheim International Exhibition, which shall serve as an
example to describe the various aspects of the questions raised by the work of
Buren in general.
When five out of twenty-one artists invited to that show raised serious
objections to the installation of Buren's piece, a 20 x 10 meter cloth hanging from
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the center ceiling of the museum, it was removed by the museum officials (who
were informed of his project after they had invited him to participate in the show).
This confrontation of Buren's painting with the works of the 'masters' of the minimal
period, like Flavin and Judd, who by then were already reaching their zenith of
artistic development, could be considered one of the more illuminating events in
the history of confrontations between the two opposing principles of aesthetic
that we have. tried to describe throughout this essay as formalist and'
historicist. As such it was certainly more of a historical confrontation than one of
specifically American and European art.
Even if one might have to admit that Flavin's and Judd's insistence on the
removal of Buren's quite gigantic work was justified by the fact that their own work
would have been partially veiled from visual accessibility at certain points of
perspective on the circumscribing ramps of the museum, it is hard not to believe
that they refused to participate in a show including this kind of work, which would
have unavoidably revealed certain qualities of their own work as obsolete by then.
Quite to the contrary of their work, Buren's piece offered a rather broad scale of
formal, dialectic aspects. Ranging from the quaSi-architectural monumentality of the
extended front and/or back side of the cloth piece and its almost wall-like size,
the painting-without actually having become a sculptural three-dimensional object
f->perpetually shifted between being toe flat surface Of a paint!LJg and an
elementlAt the same time, through the dircular walking movements of
the viewer the piece, in a gradual diminuendo, would have reduced itself as a
visual phenomenon almost to the point of eliminating itself entirely by becoming a
thin, 20 meter vertical line in the space of the museum's architecture. As such it did
not interfere at all with the perception of the other pieces in the show. 'Quite rightly
one could argue that at least Flavin's work offered a similar-if not higher-degree
of different visual experiences, ranging from the sculptural elements of the
fluorescent light tubes installed in the architectural context to the almost _
immaterial quality of their emanating light. It was the simplicity of .Buren's work,
which had rid itself of all kinds of technological gadgets in order to deal efficiently
and successfully with those formal concerns, which was at the center of the
minimalist's works. On a more metaphoric, secondary level of reading, however, the
difference between the two types of work, was far more obvious. The problem of
their relationship to the surrounding museum, as well'as to an institutional structure
and its architectural presence, in the particular case of Frank Lloyd Wright's
Guggenheim Museum was on an unusually elaborate level of ambiguity. It could be
argued that Wright's museum seriously questions and 'exposes' the historical
character of the easel painting for whose exhibition and installation it was
paradoxically constructed. Whereas most other works-more or less naively-had
given themselves over to the dominance of Wright's architecture, the works by
Flavin and Judd had gone one step further in their confidence by adapting
themselves explicitly to the architectural structure, as though they would have
wanted to confirm and underline-on a visual and formal level-Buren'S theoretical .
axiom on the overpowering presence of the museum as an institution. Buren, quite
to the contrary, due to his theoretical approach was not only fully
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aware of the institutional aspects and implications of the architecture, but quite
consciously posited his work manifestly, in an antagonist relation to the encircling,.,
museum. TheliLigEi vertlcall{striped painting in
gaUeries, functioned almost like a spine opposing the vertigo of the centrifugal
forces of the architecture. The protective lap of the museum in which the other work
had confidently installed itself in a mixture of historical naivete and economical
calculation,.was suddenly pierced by Buren's work and its motivating theoretical
foundation, because it was obvious that such 'formal' rigidity and the sheer beauty
of the appearance of the giant cloth piece could have been hardly conceived
without the underlying theoretical analysis. Without the dialectical rigidity of Buren's
thought on the historical functions of the museum a similar formal and sensual
beauty of appearance would have been simply unimaginable. The same could be
said of a work that by now appears to us of a similar simplicity and beauty because
of its underlying theoretical-conceptual implications and which more than fifty years
ago had been eliminated from a jury-free show by a group of artists at the 1917
Independents exhibition hanging committee: Marcel Duchamp's Fountain.
Whenever a new artistic definition seriously questions the fundamentals of
the preceding pe(iod in a relevant manner, the former generation's reaction to that
threat and provocation may be one of defensive repression. Buren's work in the
: Guggenheim clearly questioned the essentials of the minimalists' positivist
pragmatism and confronted them with a new dimension of dialectical historical
thought which was to become an integral element of the production of art itsel!. In
, those general terms, however, this should by no means be understood as a
specifically European quality; it was more of an indication of basically changing
concepts in the visual arts around 1965 in both America and Europe. However,
particular choice (the historical analysis of the museum) and his specific
method and elaborate theory, at best, perhaps could be called European,
American artists of that period had likewise developed new ideas of a functional-
as opposed to formal- motivation of the aesthetic procedure, though in entirely
different directions. Bruce Nauman, for example, had inverted the formalist
aestheticism of Flavin's fluorescent light works and reinstalled them simply and
functionally in his corridor-pieces, opening an immediate and authentic material
experience of the work's given elements: architectural space, light. color and the
viewer's attitude toward them. It is precisely this kind of 'micro'-analysis of a work's
given elements and their relationship to the reality context within which they exist
(an analysis which implements those scientific tools and standards of knowledge
which are objectively available in the field where a visual-plastic production occurs
and which can be as widely varying as phenomenological psychology in the work
of Bruce Nauman or semiological museology in the works of Daniel Buren, or a
combination of different forms and tools of analytical approaches as happens in
cases) which have become the primary criteria and inevitable presupposition
the visual and formal, the plastic and the spatial, aspects of a work and which
thus become the results, not the aims, of the aesthetical investigation and its
Perhaps one could argue that with the work of Buren (and to a different
degree before him with Stanley Brouwn) we have seen the development of an art
entirely revising our traditional ideas of functionalist concepts in art and
transforming them according to their present day necessities, while maintaining the
highly developed aesthetical standards that had been elevated by Constructivism
and de Stijl in that field before. It is probably for that reason also that Buren's
polemical attacks on Duchamp (which were more of an attack against the cult-like
reception of his work and the resulting petit-bourgeois radicality) gain their
convincing relevance. With and since Buren, art in Europe not only had to formally
be but also had to functionally do, which means, it had to be obviously effective
within the historical and cultural context within which it defined itself and by which it
was determined. This definition of historicity is therefore exactly in opposition to
historicalness, which one could define as the degree of (art) historical learnedness
and knowledge that has entered and modelled a work of art. Aestheticist
historicalness and historicist aesthetics could thus be the terms to describe the
antagonism that separates some typically American art of the sixties and seventies
from some typically European art of the same period. The difference between the
two attitudes, reduced to a formula, could be considered to be one of a different
approach to aesthetical signification: whereas the first equals signification with
product, the second would probably define it as process. And when Judd, by
consciously ignoring all the non-visual aspects of Buren's work, which of course are
nevertheless sensibly present within the work itself as we have seen above, said on
the occasion of his verdict against Buren's participation in the Guggenheim
exhibition (or was it on a later occasion?) that he was just "a Parisian paper
hanger", one could could have easily answered on the same level of vulgar
derision, that Judd was just a New York box broker.
In 1972 on the occasion of Buren's installation of a work at Documenta V,
accompanied by a text 'Exhibition of an Exhibition' (B 51), Buren had mounted his
white on white striped wall papers two weeks before the actual hanging of the
show. It happened accidentally that a 'Flag' painting by Jasper Johns was installed
on one of the walls (see illustration). Two opposing attitudes in the history of
American and European contemporary art in addition to their highly intricate
intertwinement became apparent. The work of Johns, whom Buren usually calls the
Braque of American painting, refers to a crucial step in the aesthetics and
formalization of Duchampian strategies and their transformation into the realm of
painting, which culminated in the self-referential epistemological consciousness of
painting itself as represented by Stella. Buren, quite ostensibly indebted to Stella
(and therefore-ironically enough-in an indirect way as well to Johns), is involved
with negating and consciously abolishing this growing process of the
aestheticization of (art) historical reality and, in opposition to it, is desperately trying
to re-establish in his own work an original function of aesthetical reality within
history. It is for this reason also that Buren had to attack Duchamp so severely (to
whom -he owes so much after all by the fact of his critical inversion). He had to
maintain his original attitude toward art production considered as a functional
process of recognizing reality and modes of perceiving it in order to keep art from
becoming the aesthetic substitution of realitv itself.
103
Niele Toroni
"For me it is not the question to make my work a mythical one, a work which
might be the ideal work by repeating its presentation; it is not the question to
repeat mechanically for the sake of repetition. It is about a method of critical
work being actually and necessa)Y: the Visible work here and nowposes
certain questions (it raises questiOn'S and it is questioning it<,,,,If\ "49
Niele Toroni
Along with Daniel Buren only Niele Toroni from the original MI-' roup
continued to maintain and develop his artistic work. The other t ,Parmentier and
Mosset, had abandoned this group, which wasJounded io:1 6, after two years-
the first by actively participating in radical politics, the second by joining the world
of fashion and interior design. Both ways seem to be typical Parisian attempts to
escape the problems and dilemma of art and its contradictions. In 1966 the group
claimed to be based "on the principle of each artist making one painting over and
over again for whatever situation comes up." Whereas Buren, as we saw, is more of
the 'radical artist' who developed a broad range of systematic investigations into
the contemporary determinations of. art, ranging from theoretical texts and
pamphlets to a highly differentiated system of functional-visual elements to put this
investigation Into practice, Toroni is more of a traditional painter. He has restricted
himself for the last ten years to minute differentiations of his original activity of
leaving imprints of color by means of a standard No. 50 brush at an equal distance
of 30 cm on varying supports (stretched and unstretched canvas, American cloth,
paper, walls, and more recently, on the floor and outdoor locations). Under certain
historical circumstances traditionalism, not only in the realm of painting, can
become the only way to maintain and pursue the essentials of a truly progressive
development. We saw Buren's high estimation of the tradition of painting in
opposition to the innovative all-or-nothing radical ness of Duchamp's voluntarism.
Toroni could be called a traditionalist in the very best sense. Certainly he has
to be regarded as one of the very few European artists who limit themselves
exclusively to the problems of painting-along with Palermo and Richter in
West-Germany. Their works might merit the interest of eyes that have seen painterly
questions becoming an issue exclusive of American art. Here again we do not have
the primary problem of comparative value judgments in asking in what way Toroni
might have gone further in his reductivist investigation of painting than Stella. In
fact, in at least two ways, to be pointed out later, he went further without having to
give up the traditional painterly elements of the flat support and paint to achieve
this. Stella at the time had insisted on this presupposition and had objected to
certain minimalist transformations of painting into sculpture. Another question can
be raised. Did Toroni achieve the degree of differentiation of the painterly means
and the sensual refinement of an artist like Ryman? He certainly did not, because
as a painter he is a dialectician as much as he is a traditionalist, meaning that he
l negates his painterly Qractice as seriously as be RIJrsues it and is thus a
rmodern painter. He is not a modernist in the way Gertrude Stein once discerned
this quality in Derain's work when she said that it looked as modernist as it smacked

of the museum. What is most interesting here is Toroni's relationship to the historical
background already sketched before. Broodthaers' arid Buren's philosophical and
semiological interests, their thoughts about art's relationship to politics, their
identification with the role of the artist in relation to society were quite similar, This
degree of similarity of attitude is revealed by the fact fMt in 1967 in Paris and in
Lugano Buren and Toroni painted each other's paintings and exhibited them in
public under the title 'Buren, Toroni or anybody', inviting visitors and reviewers to
make their paintings Or to claim them. One should understand Toroni's work in the
way it grew out of this historical context and how the results of his development
could possibly be compared to the work of certain American artists of the period
since 1965, in terms of its formal similarities and also for its dissimilar attitudes.
Toroni, who is descent, as a painter has been more attracted
to the Italian modernist tradition than to that of Paris. It is not surprising to lind
his central formal invention, the 'Empreinte' seems to have had immediate Italian
predecessors. In the early and middle fifties Lucio Fontana had signed a number of
his paintings with a thumb print instead of a signature. This undoubtedly was the
root of Manzoni's inspiration to do paintings on paper with regular rows of serially
ordered finger prints, which are obviously more of a prefiguration than Manzoni's
enlarged fingerprints on cardboard or his thumb prints on eggs. For Fontana the I
would probably have to be read as a sign of negation (as was his entire
production) of the false subjectivist attitudes of the highly gestural painting of post-
and neo-surrealist automatism, which had deluged European post-war painting
under the names of 'art autre', 'informel', 'tachisme'. The gesture of Manzoni is evan
more explicitly a demonstrative act of replacing the painterly work in its entirety with
the imprint of the thumb, which was an incredibly witty move toward tQe
objectivation of painting. He literally took the fingerprints of that 'great culprit', which
Andre Breton earlier had called the subjectivist artistic hand when he said: "The
problem is the glorification of the hand, and nothing else. My hand is the great
culprit, how can I accept to be any longer the slave of my hand? It is impossible
that drawinq and paintinq are still at the point where writing has b'een before
Gutenberg."so The extreme radicality of negating any subjective gestural
autonomy necessarily ends up in the opposite dilemna of objectivist determinism.
Most ironically Manzoni's fingerprints represent the highest degree of invariable
individual nature because the lines of the skin are more subjective than any
automatic unconscious gesture. At the same time they represent the most
'objective' and the most determined aspect of subjectivity, its physical nature. As
usual, at the extreme axis of this problem, far beyond any dialectic attitude, we see
Yves Klein in 1961 practice the imprints of his 'Anthropometries', in which the
gesture of utmost autocratic despotism finally produces the equivalent of total
reification of the subject, the (female) human brushes'.sl Toroni, quite to the
contrary and having nothing in common with Yves Klein whatsoever, is also a
traditionalist in his technical means, Neither would he touch the paint with the tip of
his finger nor would he possibly think of using anything (or even anybody) else as a
tool. He uses a standard No. 50 brush. This is perhaps what makes the difference
between an idealist artist of the recent past and a materialist artist of the present. To
I

't"
-
show the historical distances again a definitive quotation from Yves Klein:
"My monochrome pictures are not my definite works, but the preparation for
my works. They are the left-overs from the creative processes, the ashes. My
pictures after all, are only the title-deeds to my property which I have to
produce when I am asked to prove that I am a proprietor."52
can be compqred to a statement of Toroni about his 'Empreintes':
"The imprint is neither the image, nor the idea, nor the illusion of an imprint, but
in fact the real imprint of a brush No. 50."53
One could hardly imagine a more revealing statement from an artist than this one of
Klein in which he claims that his creativity is his private property. For this reason it
is necessary to pretend to immateriality and metaphysics and to refer to the works
as the 'title-deeds'. With Toroni we see the historically conscious artist as a
practitioner of an intelligible and real procedure, the creator of a non-signifying,
self-referential painterly entity. To the degree that the results of this practice are
objective they are at the same time potentially collective, as Toroni put it himself in
the same pamphlet:
"This work is the factum by Toroni, but this wqrk might as well be the factum by
everybody who would systematically apply a brush No. 50 (intervals 30
cm) on a white support (plastic, paper, wall, canvas ... )."
Repetitious seriality of similar, equal visual elements by 1965, when Toroni
first showed his work, was by no means a formal innovation. Apart from Manzoni's
work there had been Arman's multiplied Ready-Made accumulations of the late
fifties and Warhol's silkscreened image accumulations of the early sixties which
objectified the painterly process, an approach which was quite normal by then.
Seing a traditionalist painter Toroni could certa"inly not accept the post-Duchampian
reification nor its transformation into painting itself, as he was neither a collector of
found reality nor a historian of art concepts; he insisted instead on the original
practice of painting. The invention of Toroni's 'Empreinte' thus the
gesture and oqjectlve..slo.UJn
European art aroun 65. As it is simultaneously a manual trace of the subject's
presence an conscious activity, showing all the characteristics of a lively organic
practice, it is equally the most reduced and objectified, anonymous, almost
mechanic, procedure of applying paint onto a canvas. Toroni's dialectical synthesis
of subjective gesture and objective sign could be described as being at the same
moment singular uniqueness and endless variety of the same, organic individuality
and mechanical object, personal presence and collective anonymity.
When Frank Stella once said, "I wanted to get the paint out of the can and
onto the canvas ... 1 tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can,"54 he
continued a tradition of handling the very substance of painting itself in an
object-like manner. This had started with Pollock's gesture of pouring from the can
and continued to Rauschenberg's Ready-Made approach to paint itself-a color
sequence based on the cheapest offers at the hardware store.
It could be said that Toroni's handling of the materia prima of painting inserts
" itself into this tradition. And at this precise point we believe that Toroni went one
step further in his reductivism than Stella did. Toroni singularized and separated the
act of applying the color onto the surface and the act of distributing the paint on the
surface, which had been a problem for Stella as the above dictum showed. By
separating these two aspects of the painterly process, by showing that paint as
material is not necessarily identical with paint as spatial extension (form), Toroni
achieves one of his most original contributions to contemporary painting. Form as
spatial extension is given in Toroni's work as an abstract definition -the interval of
30 cm-and, as such, form is not bound to color at all; as color, in turn, painted on
a surface, reciprocally is not bound to spatial extension, it exists as repetitive
objectified imprint. Both aspects exist in the same work, but independently from
each other. It is precisely by the ingenious distinction of these constituent elements
of painting-the singularization as a strategy of abstraction which reminds us again
of comparable attitudes by Manzoni and Brouwn-that Toroni arrives at a solution
of formal problems, similar to those that have been among the prime concerns of
American painting since Stella. His solution is not different in the sense that he
abolished the problem of composition by substituting perceptual principles of order
through conceptual principles of order, which is preCisely what Judd did when he
used mathematical or arithmetical series to structure material quantities. What
distinguishes Toroni's work is its simplicity. A serial repetition of a spatial distance of
30 cm (probably derived from the gestural experience of a standard body/arm
movement without expression or strain) as a formal basic definition (the terms of
spatial extension) is as clearly limited as it is fully infinite in variety. It remains
equally valid on the page of a book (Toroni did a book of 'Empreintes')55 as it is
consistent on a scroll of a dozen meters. It is even less of an ordering restraint than
any randomly chosen mathematical serial principle. The highly differentiated
separation between the perceptual material concretion of the figure and the
conceptual definition of the spatial ground (the processual unit of the two
constituting Toroni's 'form'), is the source of the very subtle but substantial
variations in the development of Toroni's work. Furthermore, the degree of reduction
has eliminated every gestural quality of the painterly factura as it has avoided its
opposite, the flatly painted color areas within or without geometrical shapes which
ideally should have been the color coating of the house painter. Toroni had not,
however, to apply mechanical techniques like silkscreening images or more
technologically refined processes like baking enamel on steel or copper to achieve
his synthesis of subjective and objective practices of painting. Donald Judd once
said that the ideal form would be neither organic nor geometric, it might be said
that Toroni has found the ideal form, at least for the process of 'getting the paint out
of the can onto the canvas'. With all its reductivist rigor Toroni's work is never
stereotyped. While the figure in the work remains constant, the surrounding spatial
quantities are organized differently within each work. People who have objected to
Toroni's seemingly stereotyped simplicity also maintain false expectations for
richness and powerful variety in art, an argument which once accused Mondrian of
being boring. It is these people who wish, as Adorno once said, that the art for the
few should continue to be powerful and pompous whereas the life for the many
should go on to be poor and pitiable. Toroni's art seems in fact to claim the
105
contrary, which is probably the main reason for the strong experience of artless
serenity that emanates from his 'Empreintes'.
Bernhard .and Hilla Becher
"What we decide to photograph is affected by certain necessities. Many of
these structures are disappearing. All the time they are being dismantled or
rusting or crumbling away. Qur main problem is
B. & H. Becher
The contemporary artist can become a real historian. With Toroni we saw
the traditionalist painter reducing his practice to the painting of minimal gestures
that oscillate between the beginning of the subject's conscious activity and the
seemingly never ending presence of anonymous reification. The painter whose
formal gesture complements his historicist attitude toward the objective qualities
of painting itself could therefore be seen as the dialectical complement to the
painter who has given up painting altogether in favor of his role as the actual
historian of collective anonymous architecture. He has finally reduced his visual
and formal interests to the adequate photographic reproduction of the documents
and to their presentation within the discourse of contemporary art. Bernhard
Becher, who was trained as a painter and who started by painting the architecture
of his native environment, the Siegerland, one of the oldest industrial districts of
Germany, has joined his interests to the photographical activities of his wife
who has a professional education as a photographer. Both started in 1957 on the
documentation of industrial architecture, which they originally called 'Anonymous
Sculptures', the title of one of their finest books on that subject. In their joint activity
they have combined the two opposing principles of painting and photograpb.y in an
exemplary way of historiC compromise. Those principles since the 19th century
have related to and depended on each other in a multitude of ways, from outright
antagonism to outright imitation of each other and finally to serving one another.
Painting and photography, in the context of this essay, could represent the two
opposing forces of formalism and historicity. By their technical definitions
constitute an opposition between the constructive and .anticipating invention and
the receptive-passive attitude of documentation. The photographic work of the
Bechers not only inserts itself into a tradition of objectivist architectural
photography, like that of German photographers, such as Albert Renger-Palzsch,
who in the twenties and thirties had chosen industrial architecture or serial objects
as their subject matter, but also it is quite deliberately and programmatically
introduced by its authors into the context of contemporary art. Not only does a title
like 'Anonymous Sculptures' hint at a category of the traditional high arts, but it is
equally the consistency of the work's systematical approach, the sequentially
ordered serial photography which links it to a formal artistic practice. It can hardly
be a surprise that we owe one of the most emphatic appreciations of the work of
the Bechers to Carl Andre who developed seriality and sequential order to the
highest form of logic in sculpture. Bernhard Becher's own statement regarding the
relationship of their work to the context of contemporary art is pertinent:
/'-, \
.. -.......
-tN' : , . vi 1 de t
f\)./: '4 ,.,f>V'"
, ({) {} (' b"Y
"'C Ii 1 '\
"The question if this is a work of art or not is not very interesting for us.
Probably it is situated in between the established categories. Anyway the
audience which is interested in art would be the most open-minded and
willing to think about it."
With all the slight ambiguity of this statement it contains a declarative
element, which introduces the documentation of 'Anonymous Sculpture' into the art
context. This declarative gesture necessarily relates the work of the Bechers to that
tradition which has come up again and again in very different ways in European art
of the sixties, and of course it is improbable that the work of the Bechers would not
rely in some way on the Duchampian axiom. Only by acknowledging this
relationship can one discern the qualitative differences and the work's autonomous
and innovative contribution to the present state of aesthetical reflection. It is valid to
figure out the Bechers' connection with those mediators of Duci'lampian basics, like
Arman's object accumulations and equally Villegh3's notion of 'anonymity'. But there
is nothing left of that spirit of willing or involuntary affirmation of reification that had
determined certain surrealists' and Nouveaux Realists' relation to the object as
f
fetish. This found its final extension in the 'Camp' attitude of American artists like Ed -
Ruscha. whose photographic book works of the sixties seem to be structurally - ,!
(like his Twenty Six Gasoline Stations, 1962 or his Every Building on
the Sunset Strip, 1966) to the collection of the Bechers. And at this point it would be
useful to remember Stanley Brouwn's first public work, the exhibition of All the Shoe
Shops of Amsterdam in order to imagine the wide range of specific differences a
structural comparison of these Ready-Made transformations from 1960 could
reveal. But there is nothing left either of that private affectipn for the 'objects of
affection' (as Man Ray once called a series of photographed objects) nor the
sensual polyvalence of Duchamp's intimate objects. It seems like a programmatic
distinction from that tradition altogether, as Becher once saip: "It is not the selection
that is important but what the structures teach us about thsmselves." And yet there
is one quality which ties the photographed architecture to the Ready Made and
gives them their specific historical determination. They are chosen mainly from that
period of the 19th and early 20th century which marks the .transformation from
manufacture to industrialization. This is equally true for Duchamp's objects as
Daniel Buren pointed out when he said that most of the Ready Mades were 'Style
Usine'.
But the work of the Bechers is not concerned with objects of that 'Factory
Style' but rather with the factories themselves. Their work is not concerned with the
products but witt} the resourc r cesses of product;on, with the means of
12rodu.ljpn. This IS cer alnly one of the most stringent i ferences which separate
the work of the Bechers from any post-surrealist tradition. Their photographic
documents research the historical and material origins of present day reality and
thus they inquire into the processes and functions of production. As they
these phenomena within the context of contemporary art they of
the processes and functionl'...2!..Clrt pro,9uctjoo As Carl Andre put it: "The
photographs of the Bechers record the transient existence of purely functional
structures, and reveal the degree to which form is determined by the invariant
requirements of function."57
Tbe transformation of object and product into architectural structure and
productive function in the works of the Bechers is formally realized by the
rllEltamorphosis from actual object accumulation to serially
Inasmuch as they have magninedandeniarged their historical perspective they
have revealed a dimension of public anonymous monumentality, whereas their own
presence in the work recedes behind the objectivist attitude of the photographer.
This 'objectivist' approach is nbt only related to the collective subject of the past,
but it is also directed-and this is only the logical complement of the true historian's
P
osition-at the actual viewer of the work as artwork. As Becher noted:
- '
'We wanted to provide a viewpoint or rather a grammar for people to
understand and compare different structures, This is often impossible in their
natural setting. , .. We are interested in how people see, we do not want them
to look with our eyes but for themselves."
The eiimination of the a ' b'ective resence, the producer who does not
want to inter ere with the viewer's perception, by mfluencing him through his
subjectivist selection or by his own forms of perception is correlated as a formal
element with the objective qualities inherent in the architectural typologies of the
Bechers. And yet, the anonymity of the producer has been a connotation of the
Made ever since Duchamp signed his Fountain R. Mutt. This certainly did
not have to do with concealing his identity, but to do with fulfilling the negation of
the subjective productive act. This idea of anonymity has undergone changes, as
we have seen in the work of Villegle and his 'Lacere Anonyme', and it was
reactivated in Stanley Brouwn's This way Brouwn drawings with the active
dialogical participation of the anonymous producer. Within the work of the Bechers
the notion of anonymity has been carried to a logical extreme. To the degree that
the artist as historian reveals the collective basis of cultural productivity, he
necessarily has to take the final step of critical negation of his own traditional role
as creator and inventor. As the work of real historians, the typologies of functional
architecture reveal society's past potential for collective subjectivity, and as the
work of contemporary artists the photographs of the Bechers point to the necessity
of critical negation within contemporary aesthetical production, quite in the sense
that Adorno has defined it in his final phrases of the 'Aesthetical Theory':
"It is now not the time to imagine the art of the future within a transformed
society. Most probably it would be neither like that of the past nor like that of
the present; but it would be more desirable that art would disappear
altogether once that reatity might have changed to a better state, instead of
art forgetting the suffering which is its expression and which endowed its form
with substance ... What else would art have become but the mere writing of
history if it would have gotten rid of the memory of accumulated suffering."sa
\
,\.(..i-
S ;rJ'r!
Gerhard Richter';" \, '2,
"One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to engage oneself
wholeheartedly with painting. Once obsessed by this one goes finally as far as
believing that one could change humanity by painting. But once you have
given up this passion, there is nothing left to do. Then it is
recommendable to take hands off. Because basically painting is complete
idiocy."59
Gerhard Richter
of this essay it could be said that ever since his first
main atten:pt of Richter's wO.rk been to join .
?PPoslng that we have tned to sketch as dialectical aesthetlcal pnnclples,
and which have become more obvious in their opposition when talking about the
work of Niele Toroni and the Bechers. On the one hand we see the artist as a
(
traditionalist painter who consequently reduces his own activity to the most
elementary. analy.sis and only as such succeeds in maintaining credibility for his
formal invention, and on the other hand we see the artist who
has eliminated every element of subjective presence in his work to
become the actual historian of collective forms of productiQll. This schism seems to
be at the center of Richter's painterly production. This problem has been described
as the 'difficulty of the epoque' by Roland Barthes at the end of his 'Mythologies',
which he defined. as a problem of choice between two equally excessive methods,
poetry and ideology. This first means "to posit a finally impenetrable reality which
cannot be reduced any further," and the second means "to posit a reality which is
entirely transparent for history". Such a highly reflective state-at least in the visual
arts-in West Germany is quite an unusual phenomenon with hardly any tradition
behind it, and it is perhaps for this reason that Richter among the contemporary
artists of the post-Beuys era is certainly the most contradictory and complex figure.
Richter started almost a second career as a painter after having left the German
Democratic Republic in 1962 and his productivity is protean. His work has
developed between seemingly realistic painting (which has caused some critics to
place him erroneously within the context of hyper-or sharp-focus realism which he
then would have done avant la fettre) and between an equally masterly (as for the
technical maneuvering of painterly problems) and self-reflective practice of painting
(which has introduced him in turn-equally erroneOUSly-into the context of
so-called 'systemic'-or 'analytical' painting), It seems useful to point out the
historical context from which Richter's work arose in order to allow a more
differentiated way of understanding the specific features of his work and in order to
have an idea of the position that the work of Richter has taken in European art of the
present.
Unlike many of the other artists whom he first met when he came to
Dusseldorf in 1962, Richter never feU under the spell of the dominant presence of
Klein, but neither did he follow the line of Joseph Beuys and the Fluxus movement,
which certainly had some influence on his new identification with the artist's role in
a Western society. His first public exhibition in 1963 showed his preoccupation with
107
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. '.', ~ ,
, ~ r y ,
the idea of the Ready Made and its possible reactivation for the present day
situation, During his 'Demonstration for Capitalist Realism' he performed with
Konrad Fischer-Lueg in a public department store one evening. They sat on white
sculpture bases and presented themselves as living sculptures in an environment
of the oddest commodities, Because of the declaration of these artists the store and
its content were supposed in totality to be considered a work of art. This piece
described tile attempt to find a new relationship between art and reality, the
attempt 'to act in the gap between art and life' as Rauschenberg had put it It not
only reveals that this seems to have been a rather wide-spread desire among
artists of that period, but this early work tells us again more precisely about the
importance of Piero Manzoni as a mediator of Duchampian ideas in the early
sixties, In this particular case it is Manzoni's concept of the 'Sculpture Vivante' and
his 'Magic Base' which-by changing everything placed on it into an artwork-was
an automatic Ready Made institution, so to speak, finally fulfilling Duchamp's
prophecy that the whole galaxy of objects would one day turn into Ready Mades,
But the spirit of Manzoni is equally present in a totally different way in Richter's
work. All his paintings of the first period from 1962 to 1966 have been painted in a
rather narrow scale of slightly differentiated hues of gray, and as such they are
quasi-monochrome, As Richter called gray the sum of all colors and therefore the
non-color, they could be called 'achrome' paintings and therefore situate
themselves in a relation to Manzoni's 'Achrome', which Richter justified because
"Gray is more than any other color qualified not to represent anything at all." This
negation in Richter's work is just as much an attitude of formal reductivism of the
painterly activity itself as it is historically (again in the anti-cultural and anti-art
line descending from Duchamp) a stance to be taken deliberately while
comprehending all its implications, In addition it can be read in Richter's argument
to explain the choice of 'found photography' as the subject matter of his painting:
"I wanted to do something which had nothing in common with art whatsoever,
at least not as I knew it, nothing to do with painting, composition, color, formal
invention, creativity, .. Therefore I felt so surprised and attracted by the kind
of photography that we all see and use daily in large quantities, All of a
sudden I could see this in a different way as an image which gave me a
different perception, a mode without all those traditional criteria that I had
related to art beforehand. The photograph did not have any style, no concept,
no judgment, it rescued me from personal emotion, it had nothing at all, it was
pure image. Therefore I wanted to use it not as a medium for painting, but the
painting as a medium for the photograph. "60
One should compare this statement to Duchamp's qualifications of the
Ready Made, such as those given in his conversation with Pierre Cabanne. What is
more important for this context is the fact that in 1962, at the climax of Nouveau
Realisme in Europe, which was essentially concerned with the object (as Beuys
was and still is), Richter had changed positions by transferring his perspective from
the object to the objectified image, th_e ehotogrgQh,' whicti cOOld be talletnl1e
equivalent of reification on the level of perceptual instead of, as before,
psycho-physical experience. A transference had occurred before in the
paintings and collage-drawings of Robert Rauschenberg and was discerned
all its impact (without however questioning the motivations and consequenGi
early as 1964 by Max Kozloff: . .
"The fact that Rauschenberg by now uses all kinds of journalist
which he transfers by silkscreening into his paintings as
concrete objects, changes in a subtle manner the meaning and
photography on' our lives."61
One should suppose that history works the other way round, at first p
changed its meaning and impact on our lives and then artists like Rau
and Richter took advantage of these changed conditions of perceptual
The usage of 'found photography' in analogy (and in substitution) to the'
object', historically going back to Schwitters and the Dadaists, as practiced:
Rauschenberg was undebatably another influence on Richter in
particular, the main characteristic of Rauschenberg's dye-transfer technique;
described by Bernice Rose, is found in an entirely different way, but with
comparable effects, in Richter's painterly work:
". , , the scribbled line created by the transfer-tool, the line which
the representation but is totally independent of it ... asserting always
drawn quality as opposed to the printed quality of that image,"62
When Richter systematically erases with the extremely reduced, yet
gesture of his painting activity any contour from the reproduction of the
photographiC image, he induces an incessant ambivalence between the
signifier and the signified photography, Furthermore, an important icof)ograph
difference between Rauschenberg's selection of journalist photography and
Richter's choice of essentially amateurish private hotographs exists, Above
IC ter uses one photog Ime or each painting ere are very few'
exceptions to this principle) whereas Rauschenberg employs the photographiG
material within the elaborate complexity and multileveled context of his
painting-assemblages and drawing-collage techniques, For an adequate
appreciation of Richter's iconic choice it is again useful to remember the
attitudes toward collective forms of expression and production that we have
considered by now in the work of European artists, and the specific difference
appear more easily. Rauschenberg's approach toward the found photographic
image maintains a meaningful, i.e. literary, position (this is espec'ially obvious in
'34 for Dante's Inferno'), whereas in the paintings of Richter, 'found photograph)
absolutely 'meaningless'. It stands for itself as a category of historically
visual concretion, as a collective mode of experience and self-expression, and
such it certainly cannot have any literary or illustrative meaning whatsoever and
choice and selection does not follow along post-surrealist lines of association.
'Found Photography' has entered the work of Richter as a historically defined
category of signs just as in Arman's object accumulations the objects had been
'categorical' objects (as opposed to 'meaningful' objects), or the 'found decollages
of Villegle had been chosen primarily for the categorical reality of the gesture
s
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In
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1,
'I
I
fill
lis
is
;}d
lS
its
,st
,If,
not for the potential associative 'meaning' of its constituent elements or its formal
and sensual qualities, and as Stanley Brouwn's This Way Brouwn drawings had
been primarily instigated for the process and the participatory function of the
anonymous producer and his spatial projection and not for their possible and
eventual plastic attractiveness, and, finally, as the 'Anonymous Sculptures' of the
Bechers had been selected first of all for their objective historical interest and not at
all for transformation into a contemporary cultural sign system. Equally in Richter's
work the necessity for painting is derived from the attempt to maintain a dialectical
relationship with a given segment of historical reality. The collective standard of
visual perception, the desperate need to identify oneself as historical subject by
means of photography is juxtaposed with the individual need to critically oppose
these conditions by the individual formal gesture. Inasmuch as Richter is criticalill
reflecting the influence of historical reality on painting at the same time he is
analyzing painting as a historical reality. This ambiguous wandering between
painting as a 'discours plein' which is oriented toward reality, and its opposite
approach of a 'discours vide', which is only concerned with the practice of painting
has ever since marked Richter's production. Series of paintings based on
photographs have alternated with series of painterly autonomous works, and the
same conflict is acted out within each painting itself. When exhibiting in conjunction
with the painter Palermo in: 1970 (see illustration) Richter went even further by
1 assuming the role of sculptor of artists' self-portraits and thus achieved the peak of
,1' dialectical irony. It is this feeling for objective historicity, even within one's own
" artistic activity, the capacity to question one's relevance while one is practicing,
I which is the most serious effort to maintain a functional validity in the context of
i' culture. This means that Richter's formal attitude is a result of his attitude toward the
,j historicity of his own painterly practice, and as such is a highly fragile equilibrium
between subjective gesture and objective factum.
. This fragility seems to be a common feature to most relevant European art.:,..
Often, in comparison to much of the best American art of the sixties and seventies,
it looks modest, self negating, almost withering from its histori,9l'lI existence, b.!:!.l
without giving up its historical consciousness. The virtue of visual presence, which
William Rubin once aptly called 'the object's capacity to command its own space'
and the notion of power are alien to this type of work. Perhaps this is due to the fact
"" that all of these artists are more concerned with history than with an ideal of cultural
standards that have to be achieved by means of aesthetical products. Perhaps it is
t
'" also due to the fact that their ideas about the culture to come are not primaril')
c concerned with the innovation of the traditional. discourse of the arts, as the great
,1,
',"., American art critic, Clement Greenberg, foresaw in a prophetical statement in 1939
" which has gained a new disquieting actuality (from a European point of view):
; '''Capitalism in decline finds that whatever of quality it is still capable of
producing becomes invariably a threat to its own existence. Advances
. in culture, no less than advances in science and industry, corrode the very
society under whose aegis they are made possible. Here, as in every other
'question today, it becomes necessary to quote Marx word for word. Today we
no longer look toward socialism for a new culture-as inevitably as one will
appear, once we do have socialism. Today we look to socialism simply for the
preservation of whatever living culture we have right now."ss .
Translated from the German of B.H.D. Buchloh by Barbara C. Flynn
and edited at The Art Institute of Chicago
B. H. O. Buchloh is Editor and Publisher of Interfunktionen, Cologne, Germany.
FOOTNOTES
1, The term 'ideology' is understood here in the most general way possible, while still
remaining relevant. as defined by Karl Mannheim in his Ide%gie und Utopie, Frankfurt,
1952: "The term 'ideology' actually means to say that certain challenged opinions,'
statements, objectivations (ideas in the broadest sense of the word) can not be '
comprehended alone for themselves, but have to be understood in terms of existential
conditions of the subject by being interpreted as functions of these conditions of being.
What is more, this means that we somehow reason that the concrete constitution of a
subject's existential being is responsible in a constituting manner for the subject's
opinions, statements and recognitions."
2. Joseph Kosuth, The Sixth Investigation, Proposition 14, ed. by Gerd de Vries, Cologne,
1969, n.p.
3. Jean Paul Sartre as early as 1947 compared certain aesthetic phenomena of that period
to the ideological implications of symbolism as an aestheticist attitude: "But art has never
been on the side of the purists ( ... ) One knows very well that pure art and empty art are
one and the same thing, and that aestheticist purism was simply a brilliant defensive
maneuver of the past century's bourgeoisie who preferred being denounced as philistines
to being discovered as exploiters." (from: "Qu'est-ce que la Litterature ? (I)," Les Temps
Modernes, February 1947, p.782).
This quotation is particularly revealing in regard to the development of the visual arts in
France (and Europe) where only a few years later the ideas of purity and immaterial
emptiness in art became the key concepts of Yves Ie Monochrome. No wonder then that
he became the champion of the newly reinstated bourgeoisie and post-war parvenus of
post-fascist West-Germany.
4. Daniel Buren, Umites Critiques, ed. Yvon Lambert, Paris 1970; English translation as
"Critical Limits" in Buren, Five Texts, New York, John Weber Gallery and London, Jack
Wendler Gallery, 1974.
5. Clement Greenberg, "The Late Thirties in New York," (1957), in Art and Culture, Boston,
1961, p. 231.
6. All this is the more astounding since on the level of art-historical and critical reading at this
time, a profound knowledge and appreciation had existed in New York, exceeding by far
that of Europe in the late thirties. One has only to think of the famous exhibition and
109
catalogue by Alfred Barr, Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art, which offered all information
relevant to recent international art in 1936. Another example would be the work of an artist
like Kandinsky, who already in the twenties was clearly and convincingly criticized on
formal-aesthetical grounds (not to mention the moral-political ones) and derided by EI
Lissitzky as a restorative mind and opportunist and later blamed as well by Arnold
Schoenberg (to quote a non-visual artist and somebody therefore certainly above
suspicion of competitiveness) for dangerous and dubious attitudes. Kandinsky became of
prime importance and very influential on painterly production in New York as well as in
Europe, whereas the uncomparable qualities of the visual and plastic architectural
concepts of El Lissitzky and the paintings of the Suprematist Malevich passed by almost
unnoticed. The question arises again: what kind of information is received by which group
of art recipients at which particular moment? For what reasons does one choose the one
set of information by omitting and/or oppressing the other?
7. Greenberg, "The School of Paris: 1946," Art and Culture, p. 120.
8. Jean Dubuffet, "Causette," invitation-pamphlet for his exhibition, Portraits, at Rene
Drouin's aallerv in 1947.
9. Dan Flavin's dedications to European artists are a particularly significant and intriguing
example of American-European mutual exchange and its history. Apart from the fact that
projective identification has always shown suspiciously through any kind of hommage
(replacing by embracing) in this case the hommage reveals the particular degree of
eclecticism. So does the "Diagonal", which is epistemologically and materially the
clearest example of an unassisted Ready Made in the classical Duchampian sense. In
formal terms it helps itself to one of the basic inventions of constructivism, the rigid
diagonal line crossing the picture plane. In its title it paraphrases the famous title of
Schwitters' most important sculptural-architectural environment and the dedication goes to
Constantin Brancusi, the inventor of serial equivalent elements in sculpture. Or another
example of Flavin's learned dedications: "To V. Tatlin. In lieu of his last glider, which never
left the ground." One could wonder why the dedication refers to a work of the later and
desperate Tatlin, a work that arose of revolutionary decline and adequately Signifies the
desire to escape the growing political restraint. Why doesn't Flavin's dedication refer to
Tatlin's "Monument for the III. International", an architectural concept which in contrast to
the glider might have after all been technologically realized, which could have 'gotten off
the ground'? Or why not simply dedicate to the even earlier works, Tatlin's corner-reliefs, a
type of work to which Flavin's is most indebted anyway? Later on, when Flavin gave up his
original rigidity in formalist concerns (each work to be specifically defined and bound to its
architectural environment) he dedicated to administrators and owners, thus realistically
replacing what once might have been a slight but authentic reflection of functionalist
thinking by an adaption to the terms the work then followed: exhibition-value and
exchange-value instead of oriQinal (aesthetical) use value.
10. Max Raph,'Iel, "BescMftigung mit neuer Kunst," (1938), in Arbeiter, Kunst und KOnst/er,
Frankfurt, 1975, p. 21.
11. Greenberg, "The School of Paris: 1946," lac. cit., p. 120.
12. We do in fact consider all post-minimalist and conceptual work to be an exception to this
tradition of historical assimilation. The works of Nauman and Serra, of Barry and Weiner, of
LeWitt, Graham and Asher (to name Qut the most prominent examples) are certainly
further removed from any European art historicism than any of the preceding generation.
Perhaps Leo Castelli has been paraphrasing Greenberg's reference to Mondrian quite
rightfully when commenting on a show of Lawrence Weiner's in his gallery: "This is the
writing on the wall."
13. Greenberg, "The Late Thirties in New York," loc. cit., p. 233.
14. It is bewildering and sometimes amusing to read again and again in art criticism the most
ridiculous statements on such irrational attitudes and atavisms, as though the visual arts
were a protection zone from reason and understanding of human behavior and activities.
This is especially true of French and German Klein exegesis (e.g. Restany and Wember)
or even more so for recent West-German Beuys exegesis. But even American criticism
seems to fall into this trap as soon as it comes to Beuys. See for example Bernice Rose's
matter-of-course reference to Beuys as a shaman in her introductory essay to the
catalogue, Drawing Now (New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1976, p. 16): "Beu9s, while
allied to the tradition of automatic drawing, stands alone in his choice of sources and
techniques. Instead of resorting to the inchoate individual unconscious he assumes the
role of one to whom the unconscious drive of numerous civilizations has assigned the
function of primary executor of fantasies, he assumes the role of shaman." It would be .
interesting to find out from the inventors of such notions, how they relate those artists' roles
and functions to the reality and society within which they supposedly practice their
obsolete crafts: surrounded by standards of advanced science, the artist (functioning, as
archaic as he is, very well in a highly differentiated and Gomplicated system, the artworld)
as a shaman for whose sake, healing whom? Most symptomatic, however, seems the fact
that Beuys' existence as a shaman (and our objection against interpreting him as a
shaman raises no question about his abilities as artist) has become an integral element to
maintain his almost everlasting dominating position in West-German post-war art. Whereas
Klein and Manzoni disappeared and left the stage to the following generations; Beuys,
who began to make art as they did, in the early fifties, is still not only the dominating figure
in' West-German art life, but still continues to produce seemingly most authentic artworks
of the present-day situation in West Germany. The questipn arises however to whether this
dominance does not depend on the everlasting oppression of individual reason In
Germany, whether his obsolete presence as the artistic father figure does not finally
reflect the seemingly never-ending obsolescence of collt?ctive infantilism and the resulting
need for archaic mystification.
15. Greenberg, "Partisan Review 'Art Chronicle': 1952," loc .. cit., p. 153. I
16. Allan Kaprow, "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock," Art News, October 1958, p. 27.
17. Yves Klein, quoted in Germano Celant's essay on Piero Manzonl, in Piero Manzonl, Tate
Gallery, London, 1974, n.p. ;
18. Yves Klein's statement from 1957 is reproduced in Yves:Klein: Selected Writings, Tate
Gallery, London, 1974, p. 34. .
19. Ibid., p. 30.
20. Donald Judd, "Barnett Newman," Studio International, February 1970; reprinted in Judd,
Complete Writings 1959-1975, New York, 1975, p. 200.
21. Quotation taken from Dore Ashton, "Art as Spectacle," Arts Magazine, March 1967, p. 44.
22. Ibid.
23. Judd, Complete Writings, p. 222.
24. Raphael, lac. cit., p. 133. .
25. Jacques de la Villegle, "Les boulevards de la creation," n.d., in Villegle, Lacere Anonyme,
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1977, p. 57.
26. Their works, the 'affiches lacerees' and 'Decollages' which were shown in William Seitz'
famous exhibition The Art of Assemblage in New York in 1961, later at the New Realists
show at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1962 and in a special group show L'Affiche Laceree at
the Gres Gallery in Chicago in 1964 which included works by all the authentic decollage
artists, Dufrene, Hains, Rotella, Villegle, has hardly been dealt with in American and
European criticism. As is usually the case with art historical reception (especially that of
the recent past), it seems that the radicality of their assault on the traditional (painterly)
values seems to have equally frightened the collector and the museum-historian: how can
one invest money and time if, by definition, the work's production seems to be unlimited
due to its notion of objectivity and anonymity tending out for the (symbolic) annihilation of
the individual producer as a socially determined form of production? I have not found an
example to illuminate how the 'aftichistes' have been received in the criticism of other
artists. Judd does not mention their work at all and it seems that he once' again dismissed
and ignored the few really innovative and important contributors to European art of the
fifties. Even for artistic eyes the implications of this art seem to have been too advanced,
or too similar to their own concerns, to be discovered. For once, Pierre Restany does not
seem to be altogether wrong in saying: "Rauschenberg remains a contributor to
aesthetics, and finally positions himself on this side of Schwitters. He is still
traditional language, a lyrical or expressionist synthesis of cubism, which
clearly in his concerns for composition and painterly presence. The same
for Jasper Johns ... In fact, these Neo-Dadaists have not realised the
nsequences of the Ready Made concept, quite to the contrary of the Nouveaux
ley have not transcended the Dada facts, but instead integrated the found
oaesthetical compositions, into formal structures which were relevant long ago in
and cubist vocabulary." (Restany, Le Nouveau Realisme, Galerie Mathias
970, n.p.). Because of spatial limitations more than for reasons of predilection
the following mainly with Villegle's work and writings. Of course the work of
'affichistes' merits interest and reading.
"Gare au Defi!", Journal du Palais des Beaux-Arts, No. 1029,
Manzoni opere et giorni (1972), Milan, 1973, n.p, More recently Germano
pointed out the opposition between Klein and Manzoni most distinctly and
Among the many aspects of the differences that he analyzes, the following
to be particularly pertinent and relevant: "There is therefore a clear contrast
concept of the spiritual and messianic art that is Klein's and the dialectic and
art of Manzoni. Seen from a psychoanalytic angle there emerges in the former
the theories of Norman Brown) a protagonist of sublimation, and therefore of
latter is a champion of the 'resurrection' of the flesh, and therefore of life.
Manzoni, Tate Gallery, London 1974, n.p.).
Catalogue of Works from 1960-1975, published by Stedelijk van
Eindhoven, 1976, n.p.
ncus-Witlen, "Ryman-Marden7Manzoni," Artforum, June 1972, p. 50.
g quotations of Stanley Brouwn from "The Artist as a Pedestrian:
," by Antje von Graevenitz, in Dutch Art and Architecture Today, No.1,
,p.2.
cit., p. 223.
following quotations, unless otherwise indicated, from "Dix Mille Francs de
("Ten Thousand Francs Reward"), an interview with Marcel Broodthaers by
, published in Marcel Patais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, 1974,
Moules, Oeufs, Frites, Pots, Charbon, Perroquets, Wide White Space Gallery,
'Museum' (The Eagle from Oligocene up until today), Kunsthalle Dusseldorf,
however, a dialectician of Broodthaers' vigor to take such a risk. When it had
obvious a few years that history had not become 'art' at ali and that hopes
a development of growing historical consciousness were vanishing, some artists
- to the manufacture of reified desperation by becoming fictitious factual
dialectical) historians, the 'archaeologists of memory' and the 'fictitious
, for example. Broodthaers, being quite aware of the dangers inherent in
attitude, entirely biased toward the past and voluntarily depriving itself of its
of critical negation and anticipating perspectives, introduced his last book, En
Lorelei ("How I read the Lorelei"), Paris 1975, as follows: "In many countries of
i nostalgia has taken the place of reality, which by itself has been nostalgic anyway.
romanticism has deteriorated into a process of destruction. Again this pale
his reappears, now signalizing authoritarianism. What once used to be the
the bourgeoisie by now only appears in its leftovers, commodities of confection.
of romanticism commands all means of oppression, those which are frightening
and those which are ridiculous, like, well, the arts."
hand, Broodthaers has been equally aware of the questions inherent in an
which pretends to be exclusively concerned with its own visual and formal
deliberately ignoring its historipal determinations, an attitude to which he
frequently referred to as 'the conquest of space' (see, for example, his book title: The
Conquest of Space. Atlas for the Usage of Artists and Military Men, Brussels 1975). Or as
he argued in the interview with Lebeer: "The ongoing research for a definition of space
only helps to hide the essential structure of art, which is a process of rei/ication. Each
individual perceiving a function of space appropriates it mentally or economically, aven
more so if it should be a convincing one. ( ... ) Space can only lead to paradise."
37. Eloge de SUjet, Kunstmuseum Basel, 1974 and reproduced in color in Marcel
Broodthaers, National Galeria, Berlin, 1975.
38. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetische Theorie, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. VII, Frankfurt, 1970,
p.129.
39. Buren, "Is Teaching Art Necessary?" Galerie des Arts, September 1968; English
translation in Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966
to 1972, New York, 1973, p. 52.
40. Broodthaers, "Dix Mille Francs de Recompense," interview with Irmetina Lebeer,loc. cit.
41, Buren, in a discussion with Andre Parinaud in Galerie des Arts, February 1968; English
translation in Lippard, Six Years, p.41.
42. Buren, Discordance/Coherence, ed. by R. H. Fuchs, Stedelijk van Abbemuseum.
Eindhoven, 1976, p. 4.
43. Ibid., p. 12.
44. Buren, "Standpoints," in Five Texts, p. 40.
45. Roberta Smith, "On Daniel-Buren," Artforum, September 1973, p. 66.
46. Buren presented his first work in a public garage in 1965, which was a large piece of cloth
suspended from the ceiling.
47. Douglas Crimp, "Daniel Buren's New York Work," in Buren, Discordance/Coherence,
p.75.
48. Ibid., p. 77.
49. Niele Toroni, Quelques Evidences a'repeter, Milan, 1973.
50. Quoted in Jacques de la Villegle, "Des Realites Collectives," in Dufrene, Hains, Rotella,
Vil/egle, Vostell, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 1971. n.p ..
51. See one of Klein's performances of "Anthropometries," illustration no. 1.
52, Yves Klein: Selected Writings, Tate Gallery, London, 1974, p.35.
53, Toroni, Exhibition Pamphlet, Brussels, 1970.
54. Bruce Glaser, "Questions to Stella and Judd," Art News, September 1966; reprinted in
Minimal Art: a critical anthology, ed. by G. Battcock, New York, 1968, p. 148.
55, Toran/, Cinq Empreintes de Pinceau No. 50, Paris, 1973.
56. This, and all following quotations from Bernd & Hilla Becher, The Arts Council of Great
Britain, London, 1974.
57. Carl Andre, "A Note on Bernhard and Hilla Becher," Artforum, December 1972, p.59,
58. Adorno, Aesthetische Theorie, p. 387.
59. Gerhard Richter, in a conversation with Irmeline Lebeer, in Gerhard Richter, XXXVI
Biennale, Venice 1972.
60. Ibid.
61. Max Kozlott, "Critical and Historical Problems of Photography," (1964) in Renderings:
Critical Essays on a Century of Modern Art, London, 1970, p. 289.
62. Bernice Rose, Drawing Now, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1976, p. 30.
63. Greenberg, "Avant Garde and Kitsch," in Art and Culture, p. 21.
europe in the seventies: aspects of recent art
i
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
October 8-November 27, 1977
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC
March 16-May 7,1978
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California
June 23-August 6, 1978
The Fort Worth Art Museum, Fort. Worth, Texas
September 24-0ctober 29, 1978
The Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio
December 1, 1978-January 31, 1979
Gill I ERY mFt
JlPT
"1 ... \
DlC 2;; 1977