Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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emblems of social and spiritual crisis (rather than breaking through into symbolizing liberation)
was the problem faced by all the great modern movements of the “heroic” period of
revolutionary upheaval (1905–25). As the somber history of Abstract Expressionism shows,
this tragic emblematicism was enshrined as the highest and most sublime value in the “triumph
of American painting.” The liberating shock of the assault of Pop and Minimal art on the
enclosures of earlier work was aggravated and turned in a more critical direction by the subsequent
spectacle of the great Rauschenbergs, Judds and Flavins taking their places in museums
alongside the Picabias, Lissitzkys and Rothkos. This re-awakening of critical historical thought
in the art of the 1960s corrodes the legitimacy of the very works which initiated the process most
directly. Conceptual art’s central intent is of course to interrogate the basis of that legitimacy.
The question thus posed was: “What is the process in which the cultural crisis is not resolved
socially, but transmuted into sublime fixation upon immobilized symbols and fetishes?”
Once again—and here the conceptualists resumed aspects of the Surrealist-Constructivist
terms of critique—the styles of modern art are attacked because of the institutions
for which they are seen to form a kind of essential facade. Conceptual art interrogates modern
art as a complexof institutions which produce styles, types of object, and discourse, rather
than questioning art in the academies’ terms, of works of art first and foremost.
This interrogation is inconceivable outside the critical context in which conceptualism
developed. The political upheavals of the 1960s provided a fissure through which ideas, traditions
and methods of critical thought could make a dramatic return to the cultural field, as
they had been suppressed and discredited by anathema and terror during the period which
witnessed the collapse of liberationist ideals that animated European modernism and saw the
rise of totalitarian regimes in the 1930s.
In general, conceptual art draws its themes, strategies and content from the politicized
cultural critique identified broadly with the New Left. The assault on the institutions of art
takes up, on the one hand, the revival of Frankfurt School ideas of the encirclement and falsification
of avant-garde culture and its traditional critical con sciousness by the Culture Industry,
and on the other hand, upon Situationist strategies of guerilla activism, which found their
most complete expression in the student revolts of 1968. Thus, in a sense, the historical character
and limitations of conceptualism stem from its intellectual and political location mid-way
between the Dialectic of Enlightenment and the Society of the Spectacle. That is, it is between
the acerbic defeatism of the Adorno-Horkheimer position, which sees art as a transcendent
concretion and emblem of existing unfreedom, and the desperate anarchism of Debord’s
indignant cultural terrorism. The actual works of art which organize themselves most deliber-