Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

great deal ofcompetitive energy. (The same thing, ofcourse, happens in American culture,
under the rubric of“administration.”) The loss ofconfidence in the concrete has been screened
by a downpour ofminutiae. Cause and effect have been disassociated, and human action trivialized,
ifwe accept the message ofart-as-idea. But what I notice above all, is the inability of
the various mediums—process, Conceptual, etc.—to come to terms with what can be said of
experience. It is as ifa whole language has been reduced to punctuation marks, contained on
forms on which the art world inscribes its initials.
There can be no doubt that recent events in art history have led to this hermetic situation.
Minimal sculpture, earthworks, happenings, “distribution” pieces, these are merely the
bases ofthe more extreme outcomes we see today. The artist as critic, serial or systemic modes
ofcomposition, the photographic documentation offering no inherent qualities ofits own, the
whole evanescent, biodegradable art leavings syndrome—all these prophesied what was to
come. Even more obvious, though, is the literal ransacking by the current generation ofevery
doctrine in modern art that has opposed itselfto the ideals ofsensory pleasure and the values
ofpersonal imagination. Cage, Duchamp, Reinhardt, and Malevich represent extreme degrees
ofunrestricted or over-restricted art goals that are seen by Conceptualists to amount to very
much the same thing: the principle that philosophical attitude takes precedence over unique
form. But the new figures are content to describe what had earlier been necessary to show or
demonstrate. They have picked clean what was once fresh in such positions through literal
illustration and perpetual replay. And they treat us now to a tired litany against the possessible
and the material. Not for nothing has the word “re-cycle” become an almost mystical term of
art parlance. And in the film loop is found the apparatus most instrumental in effecting a
mood ofsuch unconscious desperation that it does not know any more ofbeginning, middle,
or end.
In an extremely apparent sense, then, art-as-idea is highly conservative. It exemplifies an
almost rote dependence on an art context and does nothing more than reveal passive attitudes
towards advancing that context. To live off the subversiveness of the parent, to freeload from
it, and to score unearned points for significance in its name: these tactics characterize recent
activity. When this situation occurs in painting, instead ofrecondite propositions and theorems,
its visibility draws immediate fire. Often ethereal in presence, the art of ideas is just as
plainly compromised in its derivations.
As it turns out, however, a major proposition ofthis retread Dadaism is the longing to
be free of art history. The tradition of art, after all, is culture-bound, and where is there a more
max kozloff the trouble with art-as-idea 273