Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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There has been a noticeable increase in public action in the most advanced works—an
action which in fact amounts to participation in the evolutionary process. It more and more
takes charge, changing its transient or long-term significance. This is another factor which
forces the creative proposition beyond cultural boundaries; it engenders irreversible processes in
which the artist is no longer master of his work.
Public participation involves the desacralization and the desegregation of the work of art
(at the same time it debunks the idea of the artist as a semi-sacred personality). In the hands
of the public, the contention gains a didactic value. It teaches freedom of action. All life’s
phenomena can be transformed: why not those governing social conditions? We can change
those too.
These influences serve not to eliminate the activity of the artist (as those may desire for
whom “art is dead”) but to inject modern creative activity, by an increasingly rapid chainreaction,
right into the heart of the social process.
“Culture for culture’s sake,” like the “ideology of leisure” (after work) aims at hermetically
partitioning the intellectual sphere from the social. What the ruling class wants is an
inoffensive artist, brushes in hand, shut away in his golden cage. Picturesque poverty is an
acceptable alternative. Let him paint and draw—it will at least make for one protester less.
Shut the “creator” upbehind bars of words. In his pretty isolation, he will favor the designs of
the official ideology. Troublemakers can be eliminated by bribery or suppression. See that no
disturbance troubles the somnolent mastication of uni-dimensional man, both producer and
consumer of blinkers, the intoxicated slave of the so-called abundant society. Repression of the
bizarre protagonists of “wild art” will increasingly go hand in hand with social repression.
To summarize the hypothesis: In supporting the systematic and unlimited expansion
and proliferation of works of art along with open participation, artists will
find themselves in due course off the beaten cultural tracks, outside the segregated
circuits designed to confine them. Within the logic of its current development out
of the “art object,” the aesthetic process flows ever straighter to the heart of social
reality, like a river to the sea, creating an indefinite, intermediary zone where inherited
categories no longer apply. And this not by betraying the language of art—as
happened with Socialist Realism and Narrative painting, both of which used iconographic
methods borrowed from the past—but by keeping straight along the main lines of artistic
evolution. As the object is freed of its pedestal, so culture is freed of its confines. To go ...?
This text appeared in Studio International, 177:912 (June 1969), pp. 261–265.