Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to ...

OCTOBERBy contrast, Graham's work argued for an analysis of (visual) meaning thatdefined signs as both structurally constituted within the relations of language'ssystem and grounded in the referent of social and political experience. Further,Graham's dialectical conception of visual representation polemically collapsedthe difference between the spaces of production and those of reproduction (whatSeth Siegelaub would, in 1969, call primary and secondary information).lg Anticipatingthe work's actual modes of distribution and reception within its verystructure of production, Homes for America eliminated the difference between theartistic construct and its (photographic) reproduction, the difference between anexhibition of art objects and the photograph of its installation, the differencebetween the architectural space of the gallery and the space of the catalogue andthe art magazine.Joseph Kosuth's TautologiesIn opposition to this, Kosuth was arguing, in 1969, precisely for the continuationand expansion of modernism's positivist legacy, and doing so with whatmust have seemed to him at the time the most radical and advanced tools of thattradition: Wittgenstein's logical positivism and language philosophy (he emphaticallyaffirmed this continuity when, in the first part of "Art after Philosophy," hestates, "Certainly linguistic philosophy can be considered the heir to empiricism. . ."). Thus, even while claiming to displace the formalism of Greenberg andFried, he in fact updated modernism's project of self-reflexiveness. For Kosuthstabilized the notion of a disinterested and self-sufficient art by subjecting both-the Wittgensteinian model of the language game as well as the Duchampianmodel of the readymade -to the strictures of a model of meaning that operatesin the modernist tradition of that paradox Michel Foucault has called modernity's"empirico-transcendental" thought. This is to say that in 1968 artisticproduction is still the result, for Kosuth, of artistic intention as it constitutes itselfabove all in self-reflexiveness (even if it is now discursive rather than perceptual,epistemological rather than essentialist).*O19. "For many years it has been well known that more people are aware of an artist's workthrough (1) the printed media or (2) conversation than by direct confrontation with the art itself. Forpainting and sculpture, where the visual presence-color, scale, size, location-is important to thework, the photograph or verbalization of that work is a bastardization of the art. But when artconcerns itself with things not germane to physical presence, its intrinsic (communicative) value is notaltered by its presentation in printed media. The use of catalogues and books to communicate (anddisseminate) art is the most neutral means to present the new art. The catalogue can now act as theprimary information for the exhibition, as opposed to secondary information about art in magazines,catalogues, etc. and in some cases the 'exhibition' can be the 'catalogue."' (Seth Siegelaub, "OnExhibitions and the World at Large" [interview with Charles Harrison], Studio International, [December19691.)20. This differentiation is developed in Hal Foster's excellent discussion of these paradigmaticdifferences as they emerge first in Minimalism in his essay "The Crux of Minimalism," in Individuals(Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986), p. 162- 183.