Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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problem by 1974; for most of us, this proved to be a major factor contributing to our decision
to launch and sustain The Fox as an alternative to Art-Language journal.
. . . To talk about tactics and strategy is to recognize the significance of location and occasion.
Then our differences tend to be culturally mediated,not ideologically. Don’t make the silly mistake
in thinking everything that is against the Bolsheviki is counter-revolutionary. . . . You do
rely overly on “class conflict” . . . in America? It was no accident that Marx took England for his
model of social classes—just as it’s also not incidental his concepts of conflict and revolution derived
mainly from the experiences of France. But the English class system,the blend of crude
plutocratic reality with sentimental aroma of aristocratic legend? . . .
. . . This isn’t denying class struggle at all,but making the point that in the US you just
don’t have highly stratified classes—hence it’s not a very reliable basis for analysis. Marx’s class
theory clings to a binary class model,though often he’s forced to speak of “intermediate” classes
(your “social sections”). That may be fine in a monolithic social structure,such as perhaps still
exists in England,but here it’s more complex and highly confused. . . .
It’s not a case of trying to resolve surface contradictions (. . . perhaps proliferate them?).
The cultural restrictions on generation from deep structure,of need be,produce contradictions.
This is especially so if one adopts (for whatever reasons) the critically-complicit attitude of Alicein-Wonderland
empiricism. The NY environment,with its unilateral media network,sustains
culturally-doctrinaire points of reference which anyone who lives here does “experience”—and
these form the basis of “common” or “shared” experience. Deontic (etc.) imperatives notwithstanding.
Idealism is futile in New York,it’s why you finally leave New York! . . .
You know as well . . . the only hope of any sort of authentic [sic] practice lies in being able
to keep our dialogue going . . . more conversations . . . the moment we let it go,fade away,we
don’t have any hope and can just as well be thrown onto the garbage heap of Modern Art.
Keeping it going also means getting it to penetrate other people’s conversations,activities,
contexts,lives . . . as long as it co-opts other speakers . . . “you were dead; theirs was the future.
But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind . . .” (Orwell,another petty bourgeois).
And you said that the dialogical-historical vectors of . . . (etc.) can be mediated theoretically.
I suppose you (we) are seeing that as they exist from the paradoxicalness of any “practico-”
realm . . . you end up trading expensive Marxism for expensive theory . . . still the old problem,
still the only option. So we try to bargain . . . less-expensive theory ( The Fox, at $2),and perhaps
bits of vulgar determinism do stick to it. But,given the occasion,that’s important. It’s never
gratuitous . . . far from indulging in utopian panaceas; we are,as it were,trying to practice