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

OCTOBERtion types shows art "works" as analytic propositions. Works of artthat try to tell us something about the world are bound to fail. . . .The absence of reality in art is exactly art's reality.25Kosuth's programmatic efforts to reinstate a law of discursive self-reflexivenessin the guise of a critique of Greenberg's and Fried's visual and formalself-reflexiveness are all the more astonishing since a considerable part of "Artafter Philosophy" is dedicated to the elaborate construction of a genealogy forConceptual Art, in and of itself a historical project (e.g., "All art [after Duchamp]is conceptual [in nature] because art exists only conceptually"). This very constructionof a lineage already contextualizes and historicizes, of course, in "tellingus something about the worldm-of art, at least; that is, it unwittinglyoperates like a synthetic proposition (even if only within the conventions of aparticular language system) and therefore denies both the purity and the possibilityof an autonomous artistic production that would function, within art's ownlanguage-system, as mere analytic proposition.Perhaps one might try to argue that, in fact, Kosuth's renewed cult of thetautology brings the Symbolist project to fruition. It might be said, for example,that this renewal is the logical extension of Symbolism's exclusive concern withthe conditions and the theorization of art's own modes of conception and reading.Such an argument, however, would still not allay questions concerning thealtered historical framework within which such a cult must find its determination.Even within its Symbolist origins, the modernist theology of art was alreadygripped by a polarized opposition. For a religious veneration of self-referentialplastic form as the pure negation of rationalist and empiricist thought can simultaneouslybe read as nothing other than the inscription and instrumentalizationof precisely that order -even or particularly in its negation -within the realmof the aesthetic itself (the almost immediate and universal application of Symbolismfor the cosmos of late nineteenth-century commodity production wouldattest to this).This dialectic came to claim its historical rights all the more forcefully in thecontemporary, postwar situation. For given the conditions of a rapidly acceleratingfusion of the culture industry with the last bastions of an autonomous sphereof high art, self-reflexiveness increasingly (and inevitably) came to shift along theborderline between logical positivism and the advertisement campaign. Andfurther, the rights and rationale of a newly established postwar middle class, onewhich came fully into its own in the 1960s, could assume their aesthetic identityin the very model of the tautology and its accompanying aesthetic of administration.For this aesthetic identity is structured much the way this class's socialidentity is, namely, as one of merely administering labor and production (ratherthan producing) and of the distribution of commodities. This class, having be-25. Joseph Kosuth, The Sixth Investigation 1969 Proposition 14.