Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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can never be created or destroyed. But further, if one were to speak of an art-form that used
radiant energy, then one would be committed to the contradiction of speaking of a formless
form, and one can imagine the verbal acrobatics that might take place when the romantic
metaphor was put to work on questions concerning formless-forms (non-material) and material
forms. The philosophy of what is called aesthetics relying finally, as it does, on what it has
called the content of the art work is at the most only fitted with the philosophical tools to deal
with problems of an art that absolutely counts upon the production of matter-state entities.
The shortcomings of such philosophical tools are plain enough to see inside this limit of material
objects. Once this limit is broken these shortcomings hardly seem worth considering, as
the sophistry of the whole framework is dismissed as being not applicable to an art procedure
that records its information in words, and the consequent material qualities of the entity produced
(i.e. typewritten sheet, etc.) do not necessarily have anything to do with the idea. That
is, the idea is “read about” rather than “looked at.” That some art should be directly material
and that other art should produce a material entity only as a necessary by-product of the need
to record the idea is not at all to say that the latter is connected by any process of dematerialization
to the former.
Here in England, I have been and still am a participant in what could loosely be called
a think-tank6 (at the risk of being accused of using metaphorical technological jargon reminiscent
of McLuhan) which had been working with “objectless” quiddities (I use this phrase for
the patent want of a better one) developed inside what I can, at the moment, only call a framework
of mention. 7 Such a framework uses only theoretical entities and as such does not come
up for the count as either material or immaterial art. The ideas are recorded in typewritten
word form as the nature of the ideas can only be satisfactorily developed in such a form (or in
audio form on magnetic tape). One reads the written information just as one reads any written
information. (. . .)
. . . At the moment I can only refer to the technique that Michael Baldwin and myself
have used in attempting to formulate the theoretical entities constructed in the “Air-
Conditioning Show,” the “Air Show” and the “Time Show” as a technique where the content
is separated off from the notion of making an art-object. Maybe something like a technique of
content-isolation (I am wary of such a description; but I must admit, at the cost of being a
little anecdotal, that the term appeals to me by virtue of the fact that Clement Greenberg has
pontificated to the effect that it is no use talking about the content of an art-work, which if I
guess correctly means he can’t talk about these particular works at all.) It is, to put it more
approximately than precisely, the artist working with what, in the visual art-context, is tradi-