Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

In the early 1970s, in response to an Art-Language attack, I put my own disagreement
with what I saw as their hermetic avant-gardism in a short essay (“In Reply,” Art-Language,
Summer 1972). I argued: “No art activity is to be understood apart from the codes and practices
of the society which contains it; art in use is bracketed ineluctably within ideology.” The
terms “code,” “practice,” “ideology,” signal the presence of a different emerging framework for
visual art in the early 1970s. In Europe, conceptualism coincided with that more fundamental
critique of commodity society for which the 1968 “Events of May” now serve as an emblematic
moment. One subsequent path of European conceptualism was into an involvement with the
transformations of “left” cultural theory in the wake of 1968. In common with several other
British artists and film-makers (for example, Mary Kelly, Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen) my
work became a “working through” of political and theoretical positions informed at first by
Althusserian Marxism and Barthesian semiotics, but which were quickly brought into conjunction
with feminism and psychoanalysis. It was under the impact of feminism in particular that,
in the mid-1970s, there was a move away from the “knowing” discourse of a Marxist classpolitical
analysis towards forms of work which were, as Peter Wollen put it, “interjected into
the place of which questions are asked, rather than that from which questions are asked.” This
work focused particularly on the ideological construction of the individual subject of social
processes. In 1984 some of this work was exhibited in New York as part of the New Museum
exhibition “Difference: On Representation and Sexuality.”
In the early 1980s, one source of the great hostility which met the work in the “Difference”
show—from almost all cultural political positions represented in New York—was its
“conceptualist” appearance. . .”Not photographs and text again,” groaned one (leftist) critic. I
asked him if he ever complained, “Not moving images and sound again,” when viewing films.
For many “political conceptualists” the machine-printed photograph and the typewritten text
had offered, for a period, a “zero degree” of style in which authorial expression could be subsumed
to issues of content. In time, inevitably, this strategy itself became a recognizable style.
To then continue to work in a style which had become dépassé was to emphasize that style was
no longer a concern. What was at issue in the work was not a transient aesthetic form but
a long-established semiotic form—text/image—encountered in most aspects of the everyday
environment. The work of such “works of art” was upon systems of representations which were
not confined within the institutions and practices of “art.” On that opening night at the New
Museum it was my biggest surprise of the evening that the futility of applying traditional
formalist and expressive criteria to such works—taken for granted in London—was not
victor burgin yes, difference again 429