Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

The crisis facing the large official exhibitions came to a head in 1963 with the storm that
raged round the Venice Biennale; a timid protest also disturbed the opening of the Kassel
Documenta 4 exhibition, a grandiose affair laid on with the aid of public funds, but lacking
an objectivity.
Exhibitions inspired with the breath of novelty have been organized by the Albright
Knox Foundation, Buffalo, by the Pasadena Museum and the Berne Kunsthalle; but artists
have found their most effective freedom of action in mixed-art festivals, in action meetings and
one-day groupshows; in Italy, the most successful exhibition has been that of the “Poor Actions”
festival at Amalfi.
Less intensive, but free and uninterrupted work on the artistic community level has been
carried on by the Art Departments of American universities and in some European schools
of art.
In concluding a lecture in a school of figurative art, Herbert Marcuse said: “. . . in that case,
art with all its affirmative force would form part of the liberating power of the negative and
would serve to set free the unconscious and the conscious, both of them mutilated, that lend
strength to repressive institutions. I believe that modern art is discharging this duty with greater
awareness and method than before. The rest is not within the purlieu of the artist. Implementation
and the real change that would set free both men and things are left for the field of political
action; the artist does not take part therein as such. Today, however, this external activity is,
perhaps, closely linked with the position held by art and perhaps with the achievement of the
ends of art itself.” Marcuse has here laid his finger on something that is both different and
positive in the new position adopted by art; his is not a full understanding, however, since he
is still impeded by “vertical” logic; the cathartic function and the world of the negative are real
but nevertheless obvious features of the present avant-garde; the connection between art and
politics is not to be thought of as an infrastructure but as falling on a horizontal plane in the
form of mental and emotional “closeness”; art, in its linguistic and structural aspects, is already
finished—absorbed into the entropy of the system.
The only reason why free artists still express themselves through the medium of signs is
that their consciousness has not yet brought forth a globality that is “functional” by nature;
avant-garde artists at one with the establishment take on more and more the appearance of
isolated, mechanical extensions of the body of the system; for the rest, entire experience
is already a mental reality, “functional” experience is not: psychoanalytical and sociological
piero gilardi politics and the avant-garde 133