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Art & Language and the Institutional Form 89
Buchloh writes: “[I]t would appear that Conceptual Art truly became the
most signiWcant change of postwar artistic production at the moment that it
mimed the operating logic of late capitalism and its positivist instrumentality.”
26 In his view, conceptual artists’ adoption of tautological modes (evident
principally in the view that artworks were analytic propositions but extendable
to Art & Language’s reXexive structure) aligned the practice with the
identity and operation of a depoliticized technocratic postwar middle class.
What his account does not seem to allow for, and would follow from the
arguments above, is that appropriation of hegemonic bureaucratic or administrative
methods was not simply a move against aesthetic transcendence. It
remained, I have contended, an ethical move and a strategy that, while at
times mimetic of the culture it opposed, was certainly also carried out in the
name of and with a view toward forming a resistant self-determination.
That Buchloh was writing at the end of a decade of neoexpressionist
returns to transcendence and authenticity may have colored his view
of the bureaucratic nature of conceptualism. Yet with the perspective of an
additional Wfteen years one may attempt to reframe with greater precision
the practice of Art & Language and the administrative or institutional moment
in conceptualism that it exempliWes with such clarity. How are we to understand
this moment in which institutional life comes to the forefront of a
collective practice to the extent that it serves as at least one group’s raison
d’être? There are two answers to this. First, as far as a simple genealogy of
the present is concerned, one may look to how Art & Language’s institutionalization
of collective work—collectivity taking on an institutional character
in an effort to secure autonomy from administered culture—did in fact
mark a massive change in art production, after which it became impossible
for even mainstream artists to unreXectively adopt the givens of studio practice,
but they would henceforth have to locate their activities within selfinstituted
or at least self-theorized practices. 27 The period that came in the
wake of Art & Language’s administrative gamesmanship ushered in not only
the “self-instituting” of most artists operating as individuals—together with
the de facto institutionalization of institutional critique—but also an array
of not-for-proWt galleries and other public organizations (like Artists Space,
Franklin Furnace, Printed Matter) that in many ways make up the landscape
of today’s art subculture. More important than this genealogy, however, is
that from the standpoint of a radical historiography this case study of Art &
Language points to how it is in the impulse to self-determination and the
methodology of resistant organizational form that an important legacy of
conceptual art may be located.
It may seem that excessive weight is being put on one group in the
above, and of course it would be mistaken to assume that Art & Language’s