Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

312
might be centered around my involvement with The Fox and my working relationship with other
participants; but I also address and appeal to a larger community which is made up of other individuals
with whom I share a common tradition, a similar historical and cultural locus, who see themselves
and/or have come to be recognized variously as artists, critics, dealers, curators, professors,
students and so on.All are at least potentially in a position to make critical choices which will affect
not only the internal character but also the social dynamic of contemporary and future art activity.
To a large extent, we learn what our purposes are through the systems which we use, just as we learn
what is required for survival through the interaction of those systems and our experience in trying to
do things.For each of us there is a certain element of contradiction involved in the majority of
personal and professional choices that we make, a certain tension between self survival/self interest
and social interest/species survival.Some of us feel this conflict more intensely than others and we
have varying interests and values at stake.It is important, however, that we begin to recognize and
elucidate the criteria and implications of choice rather than continue to apologize, rationalize, and
obfuscate.None of us, neither artist, critic, dealer, curator, nor “patron of the arts,” can be said to be
free of conflict of interest when it comes to the making of the cultural phenomena “art.”
If art is viewed as one aspect of culture or one form of “symbolic action,” then the logic
embodied in this particular system and the meanings which we attribute to our actions must
be considered in relation to, or more precisely as evolving within and contributing to, a larger
context of social meaning. But characteristic of our liberal tradition, both on an intellectual or
ideological level (political liberalism, empiricism, logical positivism) as well as on an intuitive
or common sense level, is a tendency toward an emphasis on the individual fact or item at the
expense of an awareness of the relational or contextual aspects in which such a seemingly discrete
fact or item occurs. This tendency has been manifest in contemporary art both in our
conceptualization of art as an autonomous and self regulatory discipline, an assembly of static
objects of contemplation, as well as in our inclination to interpret the symbolic or gestural
content of our actions in a dissociated and superficial manner.
Viewed from one perspective, the history of Modern art has been a long revolution
against the complacency, sentimentality and tedium of bourgeois culture, a rebellion against
the self-assuming and rhetorical aspects of traditional forms, against the threat of subsumption
or diversion of political or social non-art concerns—a veritable march of progress in the name
of freedom, of individuality, of art. On a symbolic level, this is apparently so; on a theoretical
level as well. But is not the very logic through which we hail the theoretical and symbolic
tokens of “revolutionary spirit” while embracing those very tokens in an attitude of blind acceptance
and self-complacency, a tribute to the failure of that art—and the logic it embodies—