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

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Conceptual Art 1962- 1969to be as close to the practices and procedures of the Constructivist/Productivistavant-garde as Minimal sculpture had appeared to be dependent upon its materialsand morphologies.The profoundly utopian (and now unimaginably naive) nature of the claimsassociated with Conceptual Art at the end of the 1960s were articulated by LucyLippard (along with Seth Siegelaub, certainly the crucial exhibition organizerand critic of that movement) in late 1969:Art intended as pure experience doesn't exist until someone experiencesit, defying ownership, reproduction, sameness. Intangible artcould break down the artificial imposition of "culture" and provide abroader audience for a tangible, object art. When automatism freesmillions of hours for leisure, art should gain rather than diminish inimportance, for while art is not just play, it is the counterpoint towork. The time may come when art is everyone's daily occupation,though there is no reason to think this activity will be called art.33While it seems obvious that artists cannot be held responsible for theculturally and politically naive visions projected on their work even by their mostcompetent, loyal, and enthusiastic critics, it now seems equally obvious that it wasprecisely the utopianism of earlier avant-garde movements (the type that Lipparddesperately attempts to resuscitate for the occasion) that was manifestly absentfrom Conceptual Art throughout its history (despite Robert Barry's onetimeinvocation of Herbert Marcuse, declaring the commercial gallery as "Someplaces to which we can come, and for a while 'be free to think about what we aregoing to do"'). It seems obvious, at least from the vantage of the early 1990s, thatfrom its inception Conceptual Art was distinguished by its acute sense of discursiveand institutional limitations, its self-imposed restrictions, its lack of totalizingvision, its critical devotion to the factual conditions of artistic production andreception without aspiring to overcome the mere facticity of these conditions.This became evident as works such as Hans Haacke's series of Visitors' Profiles(1969- 70), in its bureaucratic rigor and deadpan devotion to the statistic collectionof factual information, came to refuse any transcendental dimensionwhatsoever.Furthermore, it now seems that it was precisely a profound disenchantmentwith those political master-narratives that empowered most of '20s avant-gardeart that, acting in a peculiar fusion with the most advanced and radical forms ofcritical artistic reflection, accounts for the peculiar contradictions operatingwithin (proto) Conceptual Art of the mid- to late-1960s. It would explain whythis generation of the early '60s-in its growing emphasis on empiricism and itsscepticism with regard to all utopian vision-would be attracted, for example, to33. Lucy Lippard, "Introduction," in 955.000 (Vancouver: The Vancouver Art Gallery, January13-February 8, 1970), n. p.
142 OCTOBERBuren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni. Installation atMarcel Broodthaers's Museum (Plaque). 1971.the logical positivism of Wittgenstein and would confound the affirmative petitbourgeoispositivism of Alain Robbe-Grillet with the radical atopism of SamuelBeckett, claiming all of them as their sources. And it would make clear how thisgeneration could be equally attracted by the conservative concept of Daniel Bell's"end of ideology" and Herbert Marcuse's Freudo-Marxist philosophy ofliberation.What Conceptual Art achieved at least temporarily, however, was to subjectthe last residues of artistic aspiration toward transcendence (by means of traditionalstudio skills and privileged modes of experience) to the rigorous andrelentless order of the vernacular of administration. Furthermore, it managed topurge artistic production of the aspiration towards an affirmative collaborationwith the forces of industrial production and consumption (the last of the totalizingexperiences into which artistic production had mimetically inscribed itselfwith credibility in the context of Pop Art and Minimalism for one last time).Paradoxically, then, it would appear that Conceptual Art truly became themost significant paradigmatic change of postwar artistic production at the very
Page 1 and 2: Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the
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Page 11 and 12: Sol LeWitt. Untitled (Red Square, W
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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
Page 37: 140 OCTOBERincidentally, which had

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

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