Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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effective way for the artist to declare himself independent and liberated from culture than to
announce that he has disassociated himselffrom art history? The history ofmodern art is
replete with artists who announced themselves impervious to historical categories. (. . .)
It is odd that their unrest manifests itself by recourse to language, and the technical
language ofphilosophy or pseudo-science at that. To be sure, there is a short-term logic to be
found in the proposal that since the history of art was a history of forms, to demolish physical
form is to blink away the continuity of the historical event in art.
To abandon the search for a new form at any price means trying to abandon the history
ofartasweknowit....
—Daniel Buren
. . . andsince I am not interestedin problems of forms, color andmaterial, it goes
without saying that my evolution couldnot be aesthetic.
—Bernar Venet
I suppose this is the ultimate rebuke to formalist aesthetics whose definitions of radicalism
always seemed to be incarnated by sleek, decorative artifacts. But the dialogue between
art’s intentions and meanings is not so much transcended as shortchanged by abandonment of
a sensory guise. Aesthetic encounters have merely been transposed from the allusions that can
be stimulated by art objects to a focus on the illusions ofart ideology, neither ofwhich is
exempt—nor could it be—from the historical process.
One ofthe more extreme art-as-idea artists, Lawrence Weiner, denies neither the materiality
ofart, because everything an artist uses is material, nor the inevitable legitimization ofhis
efforts by “culture.” But “as what I do becomes art history the minute the culture accepts it, so
it stops being art” (Avalanche, Spring, 1972). Like the Groucho Marx who wouldn’t join a
country club that would have him as a member, Weiner, less wittily, plays at being disreputable.
Yet such an artist does not claim himselfa pariah in any mood ofironic self-disparagement.
Rather, it is assumed that art can only have art impact before it is recognized culturally as art.
And it is implied that the work ofthe artist must be acceptable to a committed minority group
by virtue ofits, at least temporary, unacceptability to the “cultural” mass.
Culture, then, is often defined self-servingly by artists who would flatter their immediate
sympathizers as a very exclusive club, an “inner culture.” From a once fairly accurate description
ofhow modern art became assimilated, this seduction ofthe sophisticates has become a