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

Conceptual Art 1962- 1969and by Donald Judd than I ever was specifically by LeWitt. . . . Pollock andJudd are, I feel, the beginning and end of American dominance in art."6Sol LeWitt's StructuresIt would seem that LeWitt's proto-Conceptual work of the early 1960soriginated in an understanding of the essential dilemma that has haunted artisticproduction since 1913, when its basic paradigms of opposition were firstformulated-a dilemma that could be described as the conflict between structuralspecificity and random organization. For the need, on the one hand, forboth a systematic reduction and an empirical verification of the perceptual dataof a visual structure stands opposed to the desire, on the other hand, to assign anew "idea" or meaning to an object randomly (in the manner of Mallarmk's"transposition") as though the object were an empty (linguistic) signifier.This was the dilemma that Roland Barthes described in 1956 as the "difficultyof our times" in the concluding paragraphs of Mythologies:It seems that this is a difficulty pertaining to our times: there is as yetonly one possible choice, and this choice can bear only on two equallyextreme methods: either to posit a reality which is entirely permeableto history, and ideologize; or, conversely, to posit a reality which isultimately impenetrable, irreducible, and, in this case, poetize. In aword, I do not yet see a synthesis between ideology and poetry (bypoetry I understand, in a very general way, the search for the inalienablemeaning of things).'Both critiques of the traditional practices of representation in the Americanpostwar context had at first appeared mutually exclusive and had often fiercelyattacked each other. For example, Reinhardt's extreme form of self-critical,perceptual positivism had gone too far for most of the New York School artistsand certainly for the apologists of American modernism, mainly Greenberg andFried, who had constructed a paradoxical dogma of transcendentalism and selfreferentialcritique. On the other hand, Reinhardt was as vociferous as they-if6. Joseph Kosuth, "Art after Philosophy" (Part 11), in The Making ofhfeaning, p. 175. The listwould seem complete, if it were not for the absence of Mel Bochner's and On Kawara's name, and itsexplicit negation of the importance of Sol LeWitt. According to Bochner, who had become aninstructor at the School of Visual Arts in 1965, Joseph Kosuth worked with him as a student in 1965and 1966. Dan Graham mentioned that during that time Kosuth was also a frequent visitor to thestudios of On Kawara and Sol LeWitt. Kosuth's explicit negation makes one wonder whether it wasnot precisely Sol LeWitt's series of the so-called "Structures" (such as Red Square, White Letters, forexample, produced in 1962 and exhibited in 1965) that was one of the crucial points of departure forthe formulation of Kosuth's Proto-Investigations.7. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 158.