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

OCTOBERTranscending the literalist or perceptual precision with which Barry andRyman had previously connected their painterly objects to the traditional walls ofdisplay, in order to make their physical and perceptual interdependence manifest,Weiner's two squares are now physically integrated with both these supportsurfaces and their institutional definition. Further, since the work's inscriptionparadoxically implies the physical displacement of the support surface, it engendersan experience of perceptual withdrawal as well. And just as the work negatesthe specularity of the traditional artistic object by literally withdrawing ratherthan adding visual data in the construct, so this act of perceptual withdrawaloperates at the same time as a physical (and symbolic) intervention in the institutionalpower and property relations underlying the supposed neutrality of"mere" devices of presentation. The installation and/or acquisition of either ofthese works requires that the future owner accept an instance of physical removal/withdrawal/interruptionon both the level of institutional order and onthat of private ownership.It was only logical that, on the occasion of Seth Siegelaub's first majorexhibition of Conceptual Art, the show entitled January 5-31, 1969, LawrenceWeiner would have presented a formula that then functioned as the matrixunderlying all his subsequent propositions. Specifically addressing the relationswithin which the work of art is constituted as an open, structural, syntagmaticformula, this matrix statement defines the parameters of a work of art as those ofthe conditions of authorship and production, and their interdependence withthose of ownership and use (and not least of all, at its own propositional level, as alinguistic de$nition contingent upon and determined by all of these parameters intheir continuously varying and changing constellations:With relation to the various manners of use:1. The artist may construct the piece2. The piece may be fabricated3. The piece need not to be builtEach being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as tocondition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivershipWhat begins to be put in play here, then, is a critique that operates at thelevel of the aesthetic "institution." It is a recognition that materials and procedures,surfaces and textures, locations and placement are not only sculptural orpainterly matter to be dealt with in terms of a phenomenology of visual andcognitive experience or in terms of a structural analysis of the sign (as most of theMinimalist and post-Minimalist artists had still believed), but that they are alwaysalready inscribed within the conventions of language and thereby within institutionalpower and ideological and economic investment. However, if, in Weiner'sand Barry's work of the late 1960s, this recognition still seems merely latent, itwas to become manifest very rapidly in the work of European artists of the samegeneration, in particular that of Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, and Hans