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Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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having-your-heart-in-the-right-place-is-notmaking-history<br />

art & language, UK<br />

Let us not cite history. Our logic and time is new. I see no collective ideals, nothing<br />

outside personal truth to identify with . . .<br />

By choice I identify myself with working men. I belong by craft yet my subject of<br />

aesthetics introduces a breach. I suppose that is because I believe in a workingman’s<br />

society in the future and in that society I hope to find a place. In this society I find<br />

little place to identify myself economically . . .<br />

Ihave strong social feelings but propaganda is not necessarily my fate . . .<br />

The most important thing to know is who you are and what you stand for and to<br />

acknowledge this identity in your time. Concepts in art are your history; there you start.<br />

—David Smith, an artist with his heart in the right place<br />

So the artist has no history outside concepts in art, and sees no “collective ideals,” yet he identifies—by<br />

choice—with working men and “believes in” a “workingman’s society in the future”<br />

in which he’ll have a place! Is identification a matter of choice? A historical identification (i.e.<br />

identifying oneself idealistically with a history which one does not believe he can join in making)<br />

is more determinism parading as ideology; “If-I-could-I-would-ism.” Smith was just being

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