Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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responsibility was surfacing. In the broadest sense, these diverse cultural expressions converged
on a common attitude of anti-institutionalism.
Within this radicalizing climate, the social consciousness which developed tended to
value highly the ideals of spontaneity and individualism, which at times appeared as virtually
an ideology of personal psychology. Jerry Rubin argued, for example, that politics is how you
lead your life, not for whom you vote. The revolution was to happen by each of us transforming
our own consciousnesses—sometimes referred to as “communism of the mind.” These attitudes
found cultural expression on a wide front, from the seeking of alternate lifestyles and
the counter-cultural forms to the still-elegant adjustments within elite intellectual production,
including the officially sanctioned high art styles.
By the mid-1960s the sanctioned styles of avant-gardism were Pop Art, Color Field or
Hard Edge painting (or Post-Painterly Abstraction) and Minimal Art. For the ambitiously
avant-garde younger artist these formed the horizon of options to be “worked through and
beyond,” but they were also the styles which would function to legitimize the next avantgarde
developments.
Looking back over the rapidly and successfully institutionalized avant-garde art of the
later 1960s, a strong sense of crisis remains in the work, appearing on a wide front and seeming
to connect political and social consciousness to aesthetic attitudes. The art did not merely
passively reflect the larger social milieu, but was in fact undergoing its own crisis as a necessary
climax to its own recent history. This artistic crisis, while very much part of the pervasive
condition throughout American society, needs to be examined in terms of its specific character
in order to unravel its participation in the larger crises but also to identify how the issues were
experienced and confronted in terms of artistic production. In other words, both the “autonomy”
of high cultural forms and their “integration” into a corporate capitalist culture have to
be accommodated.
The symptoms of the crisis within avant-garde art surfaced within particular characteristics.
In the following, I have set out to describe them in the terms in which they seemed to be
experienced at the time.
THE DESKILLING OF THE PRACTICE OF ART
Each of the early 1960s styles was marked by a tendency to shift significant decision-making
away from the process of production to the conception, planning, design and form of presentation.
The physical execution often was not carried out by the artist, who instead could adopt