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The Production of Social Space as Artwork 229
the role of the traditional spectator within the structures of hegemonic institutions
of power such as museums and Western gallery systems were not substantially
articulated in the operations of conceptual art. Already in 1952,
a decade before conceptual art purportedly began the redeWnition of the role
of the spectator, Frantz Fanon had called this homogeneous spectator into
question in his classic psychoanalytic study, Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon’s
study of subjectivity drew from the master/slave relationship of the self and
other in colonial discourse, in which he foregrounds the importance of language
whereby “to speak is to absolutely exist for the other.” 10 Therefore, the
fact of conceptual art’s interpellation of language into the Weld of artistic
vision cannot simply be adopted, in toto, as the radical critique of language,
for its own action of critique is called into question with regard to the selfsufWciency
of its own language games. Let me elaborate.
Though the terms, idioms, and forms of conceptual art are fully integrated
within the site of institutionalized production of artistic discourse, as one of
the legacies of high modernism and a bridge between modernism (including
the hybridization performed on it by postmodernism) and contemporary
art, the residual issues surrounding the authenticity of its statements is yet
to be fully resolved. One astonishing fact of early conceptual art was its retrogressive
awareness of and interest in politics of representation. Though a lot
of large claims have been made for conceptual art in terms of its radicality,
its critique of visuality seems mostly structured by a formalist rereading of
modernist art. On the other hand it entirely bypassed the more problematic
consequences for the non-Western conception of art posed by the grand narratives
of art history. And where politics seems to intrude into its strategies,
it was immediately contained within its polemics against the institution of
art as the arbiter of meaning and authority. Working with certain worn-out
clichés of Marxism, the most advanced elements of the movement were interested
in the critique of capitalism, but never really interested in the formation
and relations of power and citizenship that question the role of the spectator
(for example, in the segregated context such as South Africa). Many of its
chief proponents were interested in critiques of the consumer economy but
never truly interested in the question of a radical opposition to political injustice.
Throughout the 1960s conceptual artists operated with a surprising
disinterest, and one could even say suspicion, of the political, opting instead
for the more opaque notion of criticality, something with which many of its
orthodox historians today have yet to come to terms.
The degree to which many elements of conceptual art claimed a
position of reXexivity by involving themselves in arguing with outmoded
ideas of the bourgeois order is still difWcult to reconcile with their purported