Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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understood in New York, even by the “left.” (The “difficulty” of the work was also disliked.
What seemed to be valued most on the New York art left was a clear political “statement”—
specific indictments were best—accomplished with as much visual flourish as could be mustered.)
Apart from attracting hostility from the left, the low-key, démodé, appearance of most
of the “Difference” work was also anathema to enthusiasts of the then fashionable neoexpressionism.
The renaissance of conservative values towards the close of the 1970s had produced
a New Right and a “New Spirit in Painting,” “new object” sculpture, and “neo-geo”
followed. Today, “neo-conceptualism” is in fashion. What is “new” about this latest work, however—when
compared with the conceptualism of the 1960s and ’70s—is precisely what makes
it the same as the stylistic revivals which immediately preceded it. Nothing has changed between
neo-expressionism and neo-conceptualism, except appearances—their position with respect
to the various economic and ideological apparatuses of art is the same. This is to observe
that history has been evacuated from these purloined forms. “Art history” is not just a set of
coffee-table volumes from Rizzoli, but this is precisely what these stylistic revivals would have
us believe. Conceptual art, having spent its critical momentum, had (in Shklovsky’s image)
completed its “journey from poetry to prose”; today’s neo-conceptualism has picked up the
inert mass and carried it further—to a point where historical differences are flattened, a point
of historical indifference, the terminal point of platitude. The original conceptual art is a failed
avant-garde. Historians will not be surprised to find, amongst the ruins of its utopian program,
the desire to resist commodification and assimilation to a history of styles. The “new” conceptualism
is the mirror-image of the old—nothing but commodity, nothing but style. We once
again have occasion to observe, “What history plays the first time around as tragedy, it reappears
as farce.” (. . .)
This statement was published in Flash Art, 143 (November-December 1988), p. 115.