Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

imaginative transformation ofinitially unpromising material. In the early part ofour century,
this kind ofquestion and answer process was phrased in terms ofa test—a test ofart’s then
known limits. Sixty years later, the idea that art had aesthetic limits (I do not say moral or
political limits) has worn out. The social brake against anything being called aesthetic, as long
as it remained aesthetic for the art world, has faded away. You can step the brake down to the
floor and nothing happens. Under the circumstances, the problem ofavant-garde continuity
was thought to be solved by the refusal to transform the art subject.
There were, ofcourse, degrees ofsuch refusal, but oflate they have become wholesale
and homogeneous, regardless ofthe endless variables involved in an ostentatiously random
focus on a motif. The untampered or unmanipulated gobbet of “real life,” viewed as art, has
canceled many obligations rewarding to artists who earlier made highly complex objects. But
some might feel it has enhanced the illusion that artists were capable of participating directly
in everyday experience and possibly ofeffecting the course ofpublic events. Participatory occasions,
inter-media mixes, ecological awareness, computer mimicry, environmental analyses,
perceptual intensifications: these are some ofthe themes used by contemporary artists to solicit
approval for their para-activism, their meta-engagement in the world.
I am obliged to conclude, though, that these urgent-sounding concerns decrease in credibility
the more they are contoured by aestheticism. Further, the field ofpresence cannot be
made to match ever more closely the arena ofinvolvement without becoming uneasy by the
comparison. (The converse, I might add, is not true: a murderer’s deeds are not reduced in
effect because he may happen to think ofthem in aesthetic terms.) Good art can change our
consciousness through its symbolic order, but an artist cannot, in good conscience, wish away
that symbolism on one level and use it for insulation and immunity on another. His flirtation
with literal potency only achieves its ends involuntarily when in conflict with hard-core literalists
who either do not see that art was intended, or who couldn’t care less for its crazy privileges
at the moment their symbolic structures are threatened. When Hans Haacke’s photo documentation
ofNew York landlords was censored by the Guggenheim Museum, it was an accident
ofthis sort, induced by sensitive material. When, in an act ofdeliberate provocation, the Judson
Flag Show artists were busted, they were testing a law, not the limits ofart—so their
gesture entered the political rather than the aesthetic annals ofour culture.
But these exceptions do highlight the burdensome ironies faced by the immediate art
audience itself. Art-as-idea’s ritualization of the unusual imposes upon that audience increased
depths of specious response. The unexpected is so expected that a self-defeating element is introduced
into our dialogue with art. (. . .) Our over-conditioning, I think, has become debilitating.
max kozloff the trouble with art-as-idea 271