Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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The question of “recognition” is a crucial one here. There has been a constantly devel-
oping series of methods throughout the evolution of the art whereby the artist has attempted
to construct various devices to ensure that his intention to count the object as an art object is
recognized. This has not always been “given” within the object itself. The more recently established
ones have not necessarily, and justifiably so, meant the obsolescence of the older methods.
(. . .)
. . . Once having established writing as a method of specifying points in an inquiry of
this kind, there seems no reason to assume that inquiries pertaining to the art area should
necessarily have to use theoretical objects simply because art in the past has required the presence
of a concrete object before art can be thought of as “taking place”; having gained the use
of such a wide-ranging instrument as “straight” writing, then objects, concrete and theoretical,
are only two types of entity which can count; a whole range of other types of entities become
candidates for art usage. Some of the British artists involved in this area have constructed a
number of hypotheses using entities which might be regarded as alien to art. Most of these
inquiries do not exhibit the framework of the established art-to-object relationshipand (if you
like) they are not categorically asserted as members of the class “art object,” nor for that matter
is there a categorical assertion that they are art (“work”); but such a lack of absolute assertion
does not prohibit them from being tentatively asserted as having some important interpellations
for the art area.
This concept of presenting an essay in an art gallery, the essay being concerned with
itself in relation to it being in an art gallery, helps fix its meaning. When it is used as it is in
this editorial, then the art gallery component has to be specified. The art gallery component
in the first essay is a concrete entity, the art gallery component in the second case (here) is a
theoretical component, the concrete component is the words “in an art gallery.” (. . .)
The British “conceptual artists” are still attempting to go into this notion of the metastratas
of art-language. Duchamp wrote early in the century that he “wanted to put painting
back into the service of the mind.” There are two things to be especially taken into account
here, “painting” and “the mind.” Leaving aside here ontological questions concerning “the
mind,” what the British artists have, rightly or wrongly, analyzed out and constructed might
be summarized in words something like: “There is no question of putting painting, sculpture,
et al., back in the service of the mind (because as painting and sculpture it has only served the
mind within the limits of the language of painting and sculpture and the mind cannot do
anything about the limits of painting and sculpture after a certain physical point, simply because
those are the limits of painting and sculpture). Painting and sculpture have physical