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

140 OCTOBERincidentally, which had made up the single most original contribution of YvesKlein's work ten years before). This was that the critical annihilation of culturalconventions itself immediately acquires the conditions of the spectacle, that theinsistence on artistic anonymity and the demolition of authorship produces instantbrand names and identifiable products, and that the campaign to critiqueconventions of visuality with textual interventions, billboard signs, anonymoushandouts, and pamphlets inevitably ends by following the preestablished mechanismsof advertising and marketing campaigns.All of the works mentioned coincide, however, in their rigorous redefinitionof relationships between audience, object, and author. And all are concertedin the attempt to replace a traditional, hierarchical model of privileged experiencebased on authorial skills and acquired competence of reception by a structuralrelationship of absolute equivalents that would dismantle both sides ofthe equation: the hieratic position of the unified artistic object just as much as theprivileged position of the author. In an early essay (published, incidentally, in thesame 1967 issue of Aspen Magazine-dedicated by its editor Brian O'Doherty toStephane Mallarmk-in which the first English translation of Roland Barthes's"The Death of the Author" appeared), Sol LeWitt laid out these concerns for aprogrammatic redistribution of author/artist functions with astonishing clarity,presenting them by means of the rather surprising metaphor of a performance ofdaily bureaucratic tasks:The aim of the artist would be to give viewers information. . . . Hewould follow his predetermined premise to its conclusion avoidingsubjectivity. Chance, taste or unconsciously remembered forms wouldplay no part in the outcome. The serial artist does not attempt toproduce a beautiful or mysterious object but functions merely as a clerkcataloguing the results of his premise (italics added).31Inevitably the question arises how such restrictive definitions of the artist asa cataloguing clerk can be reconciled with the subversive and radical implicationsof Conceptual Art. And this question must simultaneously be posed within thespecific historical context in which the legacy of an historical avant-garde-Constructivism and Productivism-had only recently been reclaimed. How, wemight ask, can these practices be aligned with that historical production thatartists like Henry Flynt, Sol LeWitt, and George Maciunas had rediscovered, inthe early '60s, primarily through the publication of Camilla Gray's The GreatExperiment: Russian Art 1863- 1922.52 This question is of particular importancesince many of the formal strategies of early Conceptual Art appear at first glance31. Sol LeWitt, "Serial Project #1, 1966," Aspen Magazine, nos. 5-6, ed. Brian O'Doherty, 1967,n. p.32. The importance of this publication in 1962 was mentioned to me by several of the artistsinterviewed during the preparation of this essay.