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

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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.
OCTOBER not more so-in his contempt for the opposite, which is to say, the Duchampiantradition. This is evident in Ad Reinhardt's condescending remarks about bothDuchamp- "I've never approved or liked anything about Marcel Duchamp.You have to chose between Duchamp and Mondrian" -and his legacy as representedthrough Cage and Rauschenberg- "Then the whole mixture, the numberof poets and musicians and writers mixed up with art. Disreputable. Cage,Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg. I'm against the mixture of all the arts,against the mixture of art and life you know, everyday life."8What slid by unnoticed was the fact that both these critiques of representationled to highly comparable formal and structural results (e.g., Rauschenberg'smonochromes in 1951- 1953 and Reinhardt's monochromes such as BlackQuadruptych in 1955). Furthermore, even while made from opposite vantagepoints, the critical arguments accompanying such works systematically denied thetraditional principles and functions of visual representation, constructing astonishinglysimilar litanies of negation. This is as evident, for example, in the textprepared by John Cage for Rauschenberg's White Paintings in 1953 as it is in AdReinhardt's 1962 manifesto "Art as Art." First Cage:To whom, No subject, No image, No taste, No object, No beauty, Notalent, No technique (no why), No idea, No intention, No art, Nofeeling, No black, No white no (and). After careful consideration Ihave come to the conclusion that there is nothing in these paintingsthat could not be changed, that they can be seen in any light and arenot destroyed by the action of shadows. Hallelujah! the blind can seeagain; the water is fine.gAnd then Ad Reinhardt's manifesto for his own "Art as Art" principle:No lines or imaginings, no shapes or composings or representings, novisions or sensations or impulses, no symbols or signs or impastos, nodecoratings or colorings or picturings, no pleasures or pains, no accidentsor ready-mades, no things, no ideas, no relations, no attributes,no qualities-nothing that is not of the essence.1°Ad Reinhardt's empiricist American formalism (condensed in his "Art asArt" formula) and Duchamp's critique of visuality (voiced for example in the8. The first of the two quotations is to be found in Ad Reinhardt's Skowhegan lecture, deliveredin 1967, quoted by Lucy Lippard in Ad Reinhardt (New York, 1981), p. 195. The second statementappears in an interview with Mary Fuller, published as "An Ad Reinhardt Monologue," Artforum,vol. 10 (November 1971), pp. 36-41.9. John Cage (statement in reaction to the controversy engendered by the exhibition of Rauschenberg'sall-white paintings at the Stable Gallery, September 15-October 3, 1953). Printed inEmily Genauer's column in the New York Herald Tribune, December 27, 1953, p. 6 (section 4).10. Ad Reinhardt, "Art as Art," Art International (December 1962). Reprinted in Art as Art: TheSelected Il'ritings of Ad Reinhardt, ed. Barbara Rose (New York: Viking, 1975), p. 56.
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