Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

(create) the conditions . . . we haven’t arrived at our own content—subverting form-as-content
is political,that’s all. But we won’t end up as more objects of history . . . yet. . . .
DOCUMENT II, 1975
The following item by Annette Kuhn appeared in the Village Voice—a well-known New York
liberal weekly now owned by Rupert Murdoch—in early 1975.
“Us old warlords of conceptual art have gotten together,” says Joseph Kosuth. The 30 and under
group—Sarah Charlesworth,Michael Corris,Preston Heller,Kosuth,Andrew Menard and Mel
Ramsden,all loosely second generation conceptualists—is about to give birth to The Fox, a quarterly
magazine of reviews and articles on the politics of art. The first issue,coming out April 15,
has a run of 4000 and costs $2. Kosuth,who shows at the Castelli Gallery,is banging the war
drums when he says the magazine is “going to be the formalization of the schism between theoretical
conceptualists and the stylists.”
DOCUMENT III, 1975
“I’ve been here in Maryland for over a week,” writes Mel Ramsden in the summer of 1975. “It’s
given me time to think. The following are some thoughts—more or less straight off the top of my
head,concerning the ‘political’ thrust of the recent work. I’m talking about NYAL. One of the
things I finally sorted-out down here,after a fair amount of soul-searching,was that—speaking
for myself—I have to break contact with ALUK—but that’s incidental.”
Some of my worries appear to me—insofar as we step-up the moral if not moralizing side
of the work—to be typical of the worries of the post-war American left. We haven’t looked hard
enough at the paradoxes of the US left though we’ve picked up a lot of the lingo. For instance,the
impossibility of striking a real balance between the articulation of ideals and the recognition of
social realities led Sweezy,Baran,Mills,Marcuse,the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society]
to moods of despair. Right now I share that despair,because I am part of that left. I share the
ideals of the left. Even-though-my-field-is-art I wish to politicise-that-category and-relate-it-tothe-whole.
Notice I said paradoxes above. A paradox is not a dilemma,nor is it a contradiction. With
these latter two we can still choose. You choose one and lose or suffer the alternative. The result
may not be exactly happy but the choice is still logically possible. A paradox is different,it totally
michael corris inside a new york art gang 473