Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

508
mechanism through which a corporatization of aesthetic production and thought is being carried
out. This is understood as a social and political crisis in art in which crucial elements of
the critical traditions of modernism are being liquidated.
The strategies of Graham, Buren or Kosuth are, each in their own way, informed
(through the issues raised by the institutionalization of Minimalism and Pop) by the combination
of concepts drawn from the Frankfurt School tradition with related, historicist, critiques
of urbanism. This combination took the form of linked studies in the development of state
and scientific institutions (as mechanisms of social power and control) and research into the
methods of siting these institutions within the modern city (or, more accurately, of the rebuilding
of the modern city in terms of the strategic siting of these institutions). In Graham’s case,
these areas of thought are most directly identified with the writings of Barthes in the 1960s
and of Foucault and Tafuri through the 1970s. The influence of the Frankfurt School, but
most particularly of Walter Benjamin, is evident in the connections these authors make between
their specific objects of study and the psychosocial effects of these objects, wherein
mechanisms of power and domination are internalized by the atomized urban masses and involuntarily
reproduced as profound estrangement.
These issues are expressed artistically in the rapid turning of conceptual artists toward
techniques and procedures identified with the communications monopolies and state “information”
agencies—the “new media” of 60s art. Through the appropriation of these media
antagonistic to those of traditional art, conceptualism attempts to break out of the institutional
enclave of “Art” and intervene actively in the complexof social forces constituted by urban
communication and representation systems. This intervention is constantly stimulated
through critique of other art.
Minimal art is recognized as more than simply a new formalism (because of the echo of
Constructivism it retains), but it is criticized for being no real negation of formalism. Minimalism
is seen as a transitional form dominated by a Romantic and mystified concept of negativity,
though one which is preferred to the chronic affirmativeness of Pop. There is frustration
and disappointment over the fact that the Minimalist “heroes” never make a decisive break
from the positivism dominant within American formalism. Minimalism therefore appears to
be no more than a “negativistic” version of formalism. Even by the end of the 1960s it had
become clear that the Constructivist elements in Minimalism were only a feeble residue of
socially-aggressive aspects of the original movement, filtered through Bauhaus streamlining
and American “systems” ideas. Minimalism, far from striving (in the Constructivist spirit) to
break open its constricting architectural shell and assert itself as antithetical to constriction,