Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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They were l’air du temps you might say. A lot of people, even those doing traditional things
like Pop Art, were talking about such relationships. The Vietnam War brought into question
a whole range of things—the traditional role of the United States, or maybe of France for
Daniel and Michel, the role of imperialist power, the wider under standing of world relationships.
This also nourished the traditional “art attitude” which, at least as it has been presented
in the twentieth century, is one of contestation, too. But that would be the false route: that the
artist would naturally be against a power structure is the most superficial kind of trap, and is
one that particularly concerns Daniel. As I say, the deeper aspects of this questioning of relationships
were of concern to many artists, not just Conceptualists, although Conceptualism
was perhaps able to attack these problems more frontally than painting could ever do, since it
took too much for granted in its very nature.
Michel Claura: How and when would you make the connection between the political
surroundings and the fact that at that time people created, so to speak, a new, dematerialized
form of art? You described the context, you described the fact that artists were concerned with
that context and politically involved against what was going on, but to what extent is that
reflected by this move towards a non-object based form of art work?
S.S.: It is not a one-to-one relationship, but there are certain underlying links. For example,
the sort of question that could conceivably have been posed at that time was: What
could be the connection between a subject like democracy and a kind of art? With reference
to this, there is certainly something which is very dear to me about materiality. The process of
making a work of art which, although not necessarily less material, certainly, in a crude sense,
costs less, opens up the possibility of who can make it. It also has to do with how it can be
seen, how it can be shown, and a lot of other things which go with that.
D.B.: It was difficult not to be affected by the political situation however hard you tried
to avoid it. I think one of the things which links a lot of the people who came to prominence
in the mid to late Sixties, quite apart from any formal distinction that could be made, is an
economic restriction which is seen in the use of poor materials, of no materials at all, in exhibition
outside the gallery, and so on. Remember also that in economic terms those were boom
years. It wasn’t that artists were simply against the idea of money, they were working in an
atmosphere in which one found the widely held belief that the West was set for a future of
permanent economic growth. 1968 was the first point at which people realized that this was
not true and that we were running towards catastrophe. Unfortunately that has been true of
most of the time between then and today. The interesting thing in terms of the art world is
that there was a group of people at that time, all of whom were working in a way which had