Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

almost nothing to do with aesthetics and which concerned itself with the question of how one
can make something from nothing. There were people working with shadows—no cost;
people working with words—no cost; people working with bits of wood found lying in the
street or hedgerows—no cost; etc., etc. Of course, and perhaps this is something we should
discuss elsewhere, a lot of this stuff became chic and expensive, stylish and academic. But if
you take it as the emergence of a connection between the sensibilities of people who, in most
cases, did not at that time know each other, it is very interesting to see it in terms of the
economy of means.
S.S.: You wouldn’t want to rush too quickly to say that that was democracy, but that
seemed to me at the time to be an important factor. You can say that of all art movements
when they’re young—putting bits of wood together in Paris in 1910 was new, too—but I
think we’re talking about something quite, quite different in the late Sixties.
D.B.: I would see that in a way as being in the very standard tradition of the avant-garde.
This kind of total contradiction between a society which believed that all was possible, that
progress would continue for ever, and a group of artists, not necessarily homogeneous or with
shared interests, working on things which were of no cost, usually with no technique, no technology,
very fugitive, more or less also against possession, even if that did turn into bullshit for
most of them. But if you see the impulse and the opposition it’s interesting, it is in the tradition
of the avant-garde, it’s a reaction against society as a whole ...
S.S.:...asopposed to just a form of art. You could say that a lot of avant-gardisms
have been directed at their immediate predecessors and have developed in relation to, antithesis
or contravention of them. Here was something which didn’t have that quality, it dealt with
something else. I suppose in terms of generations, the people who came immediately before
would be Carl Andre and, as a borderline case, Sol LeWitt: minimal sculptors anyway. Conceptualism
wasn’t developed in opposition to that, and, in fact, there are a lot of people who fall
just on the line between the two. Conceptualism was a much more fundamental calling into
question of things. That’s what is so interesting about it and is probably why we’re having
this conversation.
D.B.: We also know that, historically, attacking the object, attempting to escape from it,
is a twentieth-century phenomenon. It comes in cycles and was not new in the Sixties. However,
as things get older they can get more radical, and even though it may have been working
on familiar principles it was, for a moment, a more radical questioning of the object than
anything which had gone before. From a personal point of view, it led to a lot of suspicion. I
wrote at the time that although the impulse seemed a good and interesting one, we should be
deke dusinberre � seth siegelaub � daniel buren � michel claura working with shadows, working with words 435