Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

336
Typical of most recent art “movements,” conceptual art has had a relatively brief life.
Had we known that its death would have come from acceptance, perhaps many of us would
have appreciated (for as long as it continued) that the hostility and extreme defensiveness that
marked its art public greeting was paradoxically its life-support system: the reaction from the
vanguard establishment was itself a tacit understanding of its potential threat. The subsequent
deterioration of the movement into a popular SCA pointed, at least on the surface, to an
ultimate victory by the establishment. The form the victory takes is that of annexation. On a
personal level for the practitioners what occurs is that the sense of authentic existence obtainable
through a kind of struggle is replaced by an impersonal participatory role in cultural
power brokerage and subsequent defense of that generalized cultural status quo of which,
henceforth, your movement is part. The political implications of such a generalization is the
identification of what you “mean” or intend with those institutions of society upon which your
work is dependent.
The scientistic structure upon which I based my older work was intended to provide an
arena in which work on art could be art yet leave behind the aura of profound personal moments
reified and vying for recognition as “masterpieces.” The activity was art, not the residue.
But what can this society do with activity? Activity must mean labor. And labor must give you
a service or a product. Only as a product could what I spent my time doing be meaningful in
this society. But what it meant to me, and to anyone really interested in art had nothing at all
to do with its existence as a product. The more recent work needed galleries and museums to
provide the necessary context—and this is where the problems, artistic and political, begin.
On one hand, one can rightly ask: where else is the audience for this activity? Certainly the
museums, galleries, and art magazines provide the stage for the interested public to make contact
with the “activity.” Then, on the other hand, one realizes that the museums, galleries, and
art magazines transform, edit, alter and obscure the very basis of one’s art. 3 Just like the other
institutions in America, these institutions in our world are bent on maintaining the cultural
status quo.
In the late sixties and early seventies in New York there was somewhat of a “junta” atmosphere
in the art world. The Greenberg gang was attempting with great success to initiate an
Official History gestalt, and there wasn’t much generosity toward us “novelty” artists that didn’t
happen to fit into the prescribed historical continuum. Fortunately, there were very few
younger artists that did fit into his historical continuum, which is what collapsed the movement—in
spite of the tremendous appeal of Greenberg’s brand of formalism to academics and
other upper middle class professionals. Exponents of the “party line” had saturated all aspects
of the art establishment. There was Lawrence Rubin selling it in his gallery, and William Rubin