Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

as any kind of art; it can’t claim a special identity, an existence for its own sake as a medium. If
it does it will end up like lithography and etching.”In other words, for painting to be “real,”
its problems must be problems of art. But neither painting nor sculpture is synonymous with
art, though they may be used as art. To confuse the appearance of painting with art is to mistake
the identity of a class of things with art itself (which of course has no appearance). Accepting
such a basis for one’s art entails advocating an a priori concept of what art can be and how it
should appear.
The critical role sustaining the function of Formalist art depends on the Formalist presenting
the “experience”and the critics presenting the “ideas.”Such artists appear to have
abandoned responsibility for their ideas in order to allow the critic to analyze (or interpret) the
experience provided by the art. In addition, a whole hierarchy of roles is being maintained
through this attitude; for example, galleries, museum officials, critics etc., who do not want
art to change its traditional identity, depend for their vocation on the institutionalization of
experience-as-art, aesthetics-as-art, and even investments-as-art. As such, art functions through
polite and cultured “experiences”and this function is governed by an a priori concept of what
art should be. It is precisely such a regulated function that Conceptual Art’s “strict and radical
extreme”seeks to usurp.
During the twentieth century, all innovations in art have been conceptual; to mistake as
such the changing of say hard-edge to soft-edge is to have a peculiarly telescoped view of one’s
“language”and to confuse art’s function with a kind of rearrangement of furniture. Since Cubism
and Malevich’s Black Square, through Reinhardt’s Invisible Paintings, there has been an
obsessive desire to abstract; that is, artists have wanted to remove their art from “the green
world of flesh and bones”and purge it of anything that was recognizable (be it flying angels or
abstract imagery). Anything in art that was not strictly art was progressively eliminated. Conceptual
Art can be seen within this tradition; not only does it remove morphological significance
as art, but it isolates “the art”from the form of presentation altogether.
The influence of Minimalism2 on the thinking of certain of the Conceptual artists has
been to bring about an awareness that the art-object is not self-supporting. One of Andre’s
Floors is art in the Dwan Gallery, but not necessarily if placed on a sidewalk; i.e. this object,
lacking an identifiable morphology, now depends upon its context to be seen as art. 3 One such
context is the “linguistic support”that the art-society provides for its art-works; and through
such supports we identify an art-work as an art-work. In other words, “what is singled out
depends entirely upon how one does one’s singling out.”Conceptual Art shifts the focus from
what is said through the language to an investigation of the language itself; 4 it expands the art
ian burn conceptual art as art 189