Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

yes, difference again: what history plays the
first time around as tragedy, it repeats as farce
victor burgin
In the late 1960s, “Conceptual Art”—a heterogeneous phenomenon—emerged both as a new
chapter in the old story of bad relations between modernism and the “historical avant-garde”
(Dada, surrealism, 1920s Soviet art, and so on) and, contradictorily, the termina stage of that
same modernist progress towards complete self-reference. On the one hand (in common with
the historical avant-garde) most conceptualist works represented a rejection of the commodity
form of art, of the confinement of art within the museum (its separation from everyday life),
and of an identity defined by a style. On the other hand the most celebrated conceptualist (and
stylist) of the period, Joseph Kosuth, concluded his manifesto “Art After Philosophy” (Studio
International, October 1969) with: “Art’s only claim is for art. Art is the definition of art.”
Kosuth subsequently joined the editorial board of Art-Language—in appearance a British journal
of analytic philosophy, devoted to the dissection of statements about art. Art-Language
differed from other philosophical journals, however, in that the articles it contained were written
not by professional philosophers but by artists—who in using the journal to conduct internal
doctrinal disputes in public, and to launch denunciations and excommunications, behaved,
again, much in the manner of the avant-gardes of the 1920s and ’30s.