Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

for people of my generation, even if it has not been totally conscious, I think a lot of our way
of thinking, our attitudes, reactions, etc., have been framed by those successive colonial wars.
D.D.: Would you go so far as to make a direct relationship between that cultural/political
environment and an art practice such as Conceptual Art?
D.B.: I am sure it is important although I would not draw a direct line. Personally, I was
both very engaged and skeptical about the drawing of that kind of engagement into the production
of art. I was strongly critical of those contemporaries of mine in France who brought
into art a formal concern with these sorts of problems. For the most part their work consisted
of large figurative paintings which described an attitude to the events we have been mentioning.
My dissatisfaction with the idea of taking an artwork as a flag for a certain kind of
political engagement was that in political terms such a gesture was meaningless. However, there
is a strong relation with what I was able to do at the time, if we take into account the kind of
consciousness we are talking about. I guess that the bridge was, and this is something which I
shared with other people in other places, the question that if one was concerned with the
political situation, what would it mean to take the art world itself as a political problem? Is
that micro-system a total revelation or reverberation of the general system? If it is not, where
does the weight of the political system make itself felt within the art world? I think producers
from different cultures and different countries, and I’m thinking particularly of America,
shared this total rejection of a practice which put political concern into “art shapes.” Up until
then that had been the only way to deal with issues of this kind. Focusing on something which
seemed to have little or nothing to do with this concern allowed us to question where politics
was actually feeding into the production of art, its reception, its structure and its context. I
guess that, vaguely, under the stupid name of Conceptual Art, a certain Sixties sensibility did
criss-cross between Europe and America. Obviously there were different cultural emphases, but
the connections were there.
S.S.: You have to use the term politics in two ways. Daniel is alluding to this although I
don’t think we’ve made it quite clear yet. There is “political” in the superficial sense in which
one speaks of the traditional left/right oppositions of social forces, and “political” in the deeper
sense which refers to a conscious questioning of what is going on around you, not just in the
sense of left/right or imperialist/anti-imperialist, but in terms of the kind of relationships that
exist between people, between people and things, between people and institutions. This latter
sense calls up in art, as in any other context, a whole range of issues. That moment in the late
Sixties, particularly in the United States in any case, was very full of these kinds of questions.
deke dusinberre � seth siegelaub � daniel buren � michel claura working with shadows, working with words 433