Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

assumptions regarding formal requisites of traditional art practice is not to be denied, but
formalistic innovation in and of itself is of questionable value. Since it is assumed that the
intentional aspects of an artist’s endeavor extend only to the making of a work or a proposition,
and its placement or “documentation” within the prescribed context, the use or function of
that work (aside from its existence as art history) is no longer an aspect of art. The artist is thus
severed, except on a symbolic level, from his culture. He responds to and assumes responsibility
for an art in isolation.
If art “lives” primarily by affecting other art (as is often claimed), then there is no mechanism
by which such an art can reorient or redefine itself except out of a logic internal to the
closure “art.” Thus we are confined to a large extent to the progressive reduction and expansion
of inherent formal relations; such “conceptual innovations” as may occur are subsumed within
the system to which they refer. A tradition keyed to the demands of the competitive market,
responding to the stylistic or formal elements of innovation, sees no use or value in the implications
of change beyond the historical progressivity which it denotes. This is the ultimate consumership:
Ideas become the property of the inventor, and as such are no further use to the
community once claimed.
We move away from the tyranny of the picture frame only to discover that of the gallery,
the market, and so on, and as it begins to become apparent that the privileging of the art object
cannot be dissociated from the privileging of the context and tradition in which the object
appears; we begin to wonder whether the very sense of that history or sociality, which is the
shape and dynamic of our discipline, is not so much the momentum of a free and critical
consciousness as the order of a definitive social and economic reality, the pervasiveness of which
we have scarcely begun to grasp.
Inversely, we might begin to inquire whether the retreat from the objectification, commodification
and institutionalization of traditional art models, which has characterized the
tactics of certain more (theoretically) radical segments of the art community, is not so much a
function of the realization of inherently noxious qualities which those models possess, as the
instinctive recoil against that which they represent: the commodification and institutionalization
of human history and endeavor. While such activities now appear naive and unsuccessful on
the one hand, in mistaking for ethic or style that which is in fact part of a more profound
social and economic reality, they do signify a positive and potentially liberating capacity; that
is, the will to change, to re-examine, and, more importantly, to “call to arms” the tools that
make radical and contextual critique conceivable. Suppose we imagine this capacity as a
sarah charlesworth a declaration ofdependence 315