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

Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni.Manijestation Number Four, September1967, F$h Biennale de Paris, Mushd'art moderne de la Ville de Paris...,,..,"roro., yym -.l.,,,.l, 'I.,- I.11.) ' ' 'I"-a.. . . ...I..- .....-- - *....framework determining it, Buren singularly succeeded in displacing both theparadigms of painting and that of the readymade (even twenty years later thiscritique makes the naive continuation of object production in the Duchampianvein of the readymade model appear utterly irrelevant).From the perspective of the present, it seems easier to see that Buren'sassault on Duchamp, especially in his crucial 1969 essay Limites Critiques, wasprimarily directed at the conventions of Duchamp reception operative and predominantthroughout the late 1950s and early '60s, rather than at the actualimplications of Duchamp's model itself. Buren's central thesis was that the fallacyof Duchamp's readymade was to obscure the very institutional and discursiveframing conditions that allowed the readymade to generate its shifts in theassignment of meaning and the experience of the object in the first place. Yet,one could just as well argue, as Marcel Broodthaers would in fact suggest in hiscatalogue of the exhibition The Eagle from the Oligocene to Today in Diisseldorf in1972, that the contextual definition and syntagmatic construction of the work ofart had obviously been initiated by Duchamp's readymade model first of all.In his systeinatic analysis of the constituting elements of the discourse ofpainting, Buren came to investigate all the parameters of artistic production andreception (an analysis that, incidentally, was similar to the one performed byLawrence Weiner in arriving at his own "matrix" formula). Departing fromMinimalism's (especially Ryman's and Flavin's) literalist dismemberment of painting,Buren at first transformed the pictorial into yet another model of opacityand objecthood. (This was accomplished by physically weaving figure and