Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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(One dividend of such an approach could be the erasure from our minds of all vestiges of the
listless “object quality” of paintings, or the leaden “specific materials” of sculpture.) We could then
simply concentrate on where we are looking. Consideration of “where” implies more than an ontology
of position. It suggests that differentiations by style need not be made and then transformed into
values. All art exists as it exists within its own described set of conditions. The only aesthetic question
is recognition . . . re-cognition . . . thinking it again.
A desire to eliminate “furniture”from art is not nihilistic. What does initially appear
“sterile”is an attitude that establishes nothing, produces little, and by its very nature cancels
out results. Also there is the gratuitousness of being unwilling to transform the world or accumulate
in it...
At the risk of appearing self-contradictory, I do not believe art is understood through intellectual
operations, but rather that we intercept the outline of a certain manner of treating (being in)
the world.
Thinking via the constant intervention of procedures, one over another, filters out the
arbitrariness of conventional thought patterns. Any sort of in-formation or re-formation can
be diverted by externally maintained constants. The fascination with seriality and modular
form (which continues, disguised, in the work of many artists) made it possible, at one point,
to clarify and distinguish the processes involved in the realization of the work of art. Ordered
proceduralism often led to an inversely proportional visual complexity. Suppression of internal
relational concerns opened the way for the involvement with ideas beyond the concentricity
of objects. It became apparent that the entire foundation of art experienced from a “point-ofview”was
irrelevant to art of attenuated size or total surround, i.e., works without experienced
centers. A case in point is the work made in and for a single place. Wall-works, for example,
simply bypass double supports. Marks on the wall, here forward and in view, there only
peripherally visible, held where they are by the wall’s mass . . . spread along the surface. They
cannot be “held,”only seen. As such they are neither copy nor paradigm. Art of this nature
is not secondly present. Its uniqueness (single-placedness) is its co-existent unity with its
own appearance.
Formalist art is predicated on a congruency between form and content. Any artist who considers
this dichotomy either irreconcilable (or desirable) is no longer interested in formal relationships.
For this artist the activity of making is not equivalent to the informing of content (a more appropriate
word would be “intent”). Certain intents are capable of various equally viable realizations.
Imagination is a word that has been generally banned from the vocabulary of recent art.
Associations with any notion of special power reserved for artists or of a “poetical world”of