Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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issues anchored in the specificity of their New York lives and the larger artists’ community
here. The Fox is obviously one expression of this work. It has forced us into the real world, or
to put it better, it has shown us that Art & Language spans two real worlds: and that the gulf
between the two communities is, indeed, as wide as the Atlantic.
How can we make the transition from a praxiological life-world in which our work along
with us is commodified (i.e. money and fame) to one in which “payment” takes the form of an
acknowledgment by the community in which one lives implicitly by the act of adaptation.
That means seeing how one’s work affects the world in which one lives, and learning along with
others from its effect, and appreciating that effect not as simply an extension of oneself (power)
but as a part of a larger historical complexity which connects the location of your life with that
of others. Perhaps it is here where one begins to understand the import of the (artistic) ideological
collective of which Art & Language is a prototype and emerging model.
4.
. . . with the events of recent years Marxism has definitely entered a new phase of its
history, in which it can inspire and orient analyses and retain a real heuristic value,
but is certainly no longer true in the sense it was believed to be true.
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The shift from the individual craftsman to the “ideological community” has as its pivotal base
an understanding of a changed sense of responsibility. It is one result of the generalizing aspect
of theoretical work, paramount as it has been to Conceptual Art. Initially, as Harold Rosenberg
suggests, CA was self-consciously historical. Particularly among the early Conceptual artists,
we were united not by a shared involvement in the technical issues of painting, for instance,
but rather by a collective sense of a historical location: a view of art overlooking the flatlands of
painting and sculpture. In thinking of artist’s groups as a human community, one thinks of
how painters are forced to underscore their differences from other painters; the struggles being
how to maintain one’s own identity within the generalization of painting. In CA what was felt,
in the beginning at least, was not a sense of solidarity among technicians—that was wide open
with everyone trying to stay out of everyone else’s way—but rather a sense of solidarity in our
sameness, what we shared: being members of the first generation to be young enough to be
capable of breaking our ties with modernism. The myth of modernism, which includes painting
and sculpture, collapsing at our heels, left only its shock waves: the sense of a more direct
relationship with the cultural bias of western civilization, left for us to try to express in some