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

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Conceptual Art 1962 - 1969come firmly established as the most common and powerful social class of postwarsociety, is the one which, as H. G. Helms wrote in his book on Max Stirner,"deprives itself voluntarily of the rights to intervene within the political decisionmakingprocess in order to arrange itself more efficiently with the existingpolitical condition^."^^This aesthetic of the newly established power of administration found itsfirst fully developed literary voice in a phenomenon like the nouveau roman ofRobbe-Grillet. It was no accident that such a profoundly positivist literary projectwould then serve, in the American context, as a point of departure for ConceptualArt. But, paradoxically, it was at this very same historical moment that thesocial functions of the tautological principle found their most lucid analysis,through a critical examination launched in France.In the early writing of Roland Barthes one finds, simultaneously with thenouveau roman, a discussion of the tautological:Tautologie. Yes, I know, it's an ugly word. But so is the thing. Tautologyis the verbal device which consists in defining like by like ("Dramais drama"). . . . One takes refuge in tautology as one does in fear, oranger, or sadness, when one is at a loss for an explanation. . . . Intautology, there is a double murder: one kills rationality because itresists one; one kills language because it betrays one. . . . Now anyrefusal of language is a death. Tautology creates a dead, a motionlessworld.27Ten years later, at the same moment that Kosuth was discovering it as thecentral aesthetic project of his era, the phenomenon of the tautological was onceagain opened to examination in France. But now, rather than being discussed asa linguistic and rhetorical form, it was analyzed as a general social effect: as boththe inescapable reflex of behavior and, once the requirements of the advancedculture industry (i.e., advertisement and media) have been put in place in theformation of spectacle culture, a universal condition of experience. What stillremains open for discussion, of course, is the extent to which Conceptual Art of acertain type shared these conditions, or even enacted and implemented them inthe sphere of the aesthetic-accounting, perhaps, for its subsequent proximityand success within a world of advertisement strategists-or, alternatively, theextent to which it merely inscribed itself into the inescapable logic of a totallyadministered world, as Adorno's notorious term identified it. Thus Guy Debordnoted in 1967:The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from thesimple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends. It is the sun26. Hans G. Helms, Dze Zdeologae der anonymen Gesellschaft (Cologne, 1968), p. 3.27. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, pp. 152-53.
OCTOBERwhich never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers theentire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory.28A Tale of Many SquaresThe visual forms that correspond most accurately to the linguistic form ofthe tautology are the square and its stereometric rotation, the cube. Not surprisingly,these two forms proliferated in the painterly and sculptural production ofthe early- to mid-1 960s. This was the moment when a rigorous self-reflexivenesswas bent on examining the traditional boundaries of modernist sculptural objectsto the same extent that a phenomenological reflection of viewing space wasinsistant on reincorporating architectural parameters into the conception ofpainting and sculpture.So thoroughly did the square and the cube permeate the vocabulary ofMinimalist sculpture that in 1967 Lucy Lippard published a questionnaire investigatingthe role of these forms, which she had circulated among many artists. Inhis response to the questionnaire, Donald Judd, in one of his many attempts todetach the morphology of Minimalism from similar investigations of the historicalavant-garde in the earlier part of the twentieth century, displayed the agressivedimension of tautological thought (disguised as pragmatism, as was usual inhis case) by simply denying that any historical meaning could be inherent ingeometric or stereometric forms:I don't think there is anything special about squares, which I don'tuse, or cubes. They certainly don't have any intrinsic meaning orsuperiority. One thing though, cubes are a lot easier to make thanspheres. The main virtue of geometric shapes is that they are notorganic, as all art otherwise is. A form that's neither geometric nororganic would be a great discovery.29As the central form of visual self-reflexiveness, the square abolishes thetraditional spatial parameters of verticality and horizontality, thereby cancelingthe metaphysics of space and its conventions of reading. It is in this way that thesquare (beginning with Malevich's 19 15 Black Square) incessantly points to itself:28. Guy Debord, The Society ofthe Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1970), n. p., section 13. Firstpublished, Paris, 1967.29. Donald Judd, in Lucy Lippard, "Homage to the Square," Art in America (July -August, 1967),pp. 50-57. How pervasive the square actually was in the art of the early- to mid-1960s is all tooobvious: the work from the late '50s, such as paintings by Reinhardt and Ryman and a large numberof sculptures from the early 1960s onwards (Andre, LeWitt, and Judd), deployed the tautologicalform in endless variations. Paradoxically even Kosuth's work from the mid-1960s-while emphasizingits departure from painting's traditional object status and visual/formal design-continues todisplay the definitions of words on large, black, canvas squares. By contrast one only has to think ofJasper Johns's or Barnett Newman's work as immediate predecessors of that generation to recognizehow infrequent, if not altogether absent, the square was at that moment.
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Page 17 and 18: VARIOUS ' I x * Edward Rurcha. Four
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Page 21 and 22: OCTOBERBy contrast, Graham's work a
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Page 29 and 30: Robert Morris. Four Mirrored Cubes.
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Page 35 and 36: Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni.M
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