Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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ideas beyond the limits of visual-object-making and in doing so repudiates all formal aesthetic
considerations.
To put forward a generalized argument then, one could say that, following Minimalism,
the artist’s choice was either to “conceptualize”and discard the whole object framework or to
“retinalize”and “return to Abstract Expressionism”etc. (the latter direction is well behaved and
within the traditional visual status of art, hence it is well supported critically; in fact, such artconfectionery
has reached pollution-level in New York where it is extravagantly promoted by
the new galleries, the Whitney Annual et al.).
Today, many of the traditional functions of art, such as to provide cultural entertainment
and decoration, have been supplanted by the modern world. If this world can provide us with
aesthetic spectacles like the Empire State Building and TV relays from Mars, then is there any
need for an art form restricted to similar macroscopic maneuvers? Once art is abstracted from
its form of presentation and becomes strictly the artist’s idea of art, it can, like science and
philosophy, become serious and completely concerned with its own problems.
Once one understands that art is not in objects but in the completeness of the artist’s
concept of art, then the other functions can be eradicated and art can become more wholly
art. (. . .)
NOTES
1. This selection has been based on what has been conceptually relevant during the past few
years. The “famous” Formalist artists (Noland, Stella, Olitski, Caro, etc.) have contributed little,
in fact no conceptually new Formalist painting has emerged during the past decade, probably
since Stella’s paintings of 1959.
2. Minimal art has gathered little critical response and this is probably why it seems not to have
been understood in Australia. Minimal artists are concerned enough with the conceptual content
of their art to write about it themselves; they do not need critics to write it for them.
3. Greenberg’s oft quoted dictum that “art is strictly a matter of experience” is the antipathy
of Conceptual Art and apparently an attempt to see art-objects as empirical entities, outside of
the artist’s cognitive domain and in the domain (one assumes) of good food, mountains and
thunderstorms!
4. The use of words is in itself of no importance. What is important is the art information carried
by the words. The presentation of art writing “as art” does not mean that the form of the words
is aesthetically significant.
This text was published in Art and Australia, 8:2 (September 1970), pp. 167–170.