Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

3. A photograph of a bridge is a picture of a particular bridge whereas the word “bridge” does
not necessarily indicate any existing bridge. I nevertheless hold that, encountered within an art
context, the word has “nowhere to go” but to concrete particulars.
4. “. . . whatever does not belong to the structure but to the material (i.e., anything that can be
pointed out in concrete ostensive definition) is, in the final analysis, subjective.” Rudolf Carnap,
op. cit.
5. Rudolf Carnap, ibid.
6. Rudolf Carnap, ibid.
7. “It is crucially important to learn to see abstraction not as the visual characteristic of a range
of objects (the idea is semantically ludicrous), but as a faculty of thought.” Charles Harrison,
“A Very Abstract Context,” Studio International (November 1970).
8. Rudolf Carnap, op. cit.
9. While we may feel we know what is meant here by “private language,” it is worth emphasizing
that if a “private language” is understood only by the person who speaks it, the use of the word
“language” is inappropriate. Even interpreted liberally, assuming the term is being used metaphorically
to describe some sort of personal system of encoding, we may still want to know how
far it is possible to decode, to translate this language into terms we can all understand.
10. Rudolf Carnap, op. cit.
11. Ervin Laszlo, System, Structure, andExperience (NewYork: Gordon and Breach, 1969).
12. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Oxford University Press, 1969).
13. Abraham Moles, Information Theory andEsthetic Perception (University of Illinois Press,
1966).
14. Claude Lévi-Strauss, quoted by Michael Lane in his introduction to Structuralism: A Reader
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1970).
This text appeared in Studio International, 181:933 (May 1971), pp. 237–239.
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