Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

not so much to regulate our cultural praxis in relation to the existent norms, as to understand,
elucidate, and evaluate the normative import of those activities in which we are historically,
presently, well as potentially engaged. Thus the philosophy, the theory, the strategy and the
ethics of practice become one with praxis itself. And yet this union of theory and practice in
the ideal is always subject to and modified by conditions in relation to which we must continually
re-evaluate our position. It is a dynamic and self-regulatory critical theory by which we
attempt to understand and evaluate our own (art) practice in relation to social practice in
general, and to evaluate social and historical conditions as they are effective of and become
apparent in our practice of art.
If it is true that “the creation of a thing for the sake of a thing is itself an objective human
relationship to itself and to man,” 6 then it is on the level of this relationship which we must
question our function, for it no longer has much meaning to speak of the thing (art) in itself.
At the dawn of the 19th century, Hegel predicted that art would no longer, as in the past,
be connected with the central concerns of man. Hegel saw the role of art becoming increasingly
marginal as science moved into a stronger and more central position within society. Art, according
to Hegel, would cease to be serious, as it became increasingly pure and disengaged. By
moving into a marginal position, art would not lose its quality as art, but it would nonetheless
cease to have direct relevance to the existence of man.
We have lost touch—not only with ourselves and with each other but with the culture
of which we are a part. It is only by confronting the problem of our alienation, making this the
subject of our work, that our ideals take on new meaning. We move to become one again with
culture in our sense of shared concerns.
NOTES
1. Stanley Diamond, “Anthropology in Question,” Reinventing Anthropology, ed. Dell Hymes
(New York: Random House, 1969).
2. Berel Lang and Forest Williams, Marxism and Art (New York: David McKay Co., 1972).
3. Andre Malraux, Les Voix du Silence.
4. Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951).
5. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).
6. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, ed., Dirk J. Struik, trans., Martin
Mulligan (International Publishers Co.).
This text appeared in The Fox, 1:1 (1975), pp. 1–7.
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