Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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operations. 2 Their convictions were voiced with the (by now often hilarious) self-righteousness
that is continuous within the tradition of hypertrophic claims made in avant-garde declarations
of the twentieth century. For example, one of the campaign statements by Joseph Kosuth from
the late 1960s asserts: “Art before the modern period is as much art as Neanderthal man is
man. It is for this reason that around the same time I replaced the term ‘work’ for art proposition.
Because a conceptual work of art in the traditional sense, is a contradiction in terms.” 3
(...)
SOL LEWITT’S STRUCTURES
It would seem that LeWitt’s proto-Conceptual work of the early 1960s originated in an understanding
of the essential dilemma that has haunted artistic production since 1913, when its
basic paradigms of opposition were first formulated—a dilemma that could be described as
the conflict between structural specificity and random organization. For the need, on the one
hand, for both a systematic reduction and an empirical verification of the perceptual data of a
visual structure stands opposed to the desire, on the other hand, to assign a new “idea” or
meaning to an object randomly (in the manner of Mallarmé’s “transposition”) as though the
object were an empty (linguistic) signifier. (. . .)
. . . It should be noted, however, that the strange admixture of the nominalist position
of Duchamp (and its consequences) and the positivist position of Reinhardt (and its implications)
was not only accomplished in 1965 with the beginnings of Conceptual Art but was wellprepared
in the work of Frank Stella, who in his BlackPaintings from 1959 claimed both
Rauschenberg’s monochrome paintings and Reinhardt’s paintings as points of departure. Finally,
it was the work of Sol LeWitt—in particular work such as his Structures—that demarcates
that precise transition, integrating as they do both language and visual sign in a
structural model.
The surfaces of these Structures from 1961 to 1962 (some of which used single frames
from Muybridge’s serial photographs) carried inscriptions in bland lettering identifying the
hue and shape of those surfaces (e.g., “red square”) and the inscription itself (e.g., “white
letters”). Since these inscriptions named either the support or the inscription (or, in the
middle section of the painting, both support and inscription in a paradoxical inversion), they
created a continuous conflict in the viewer/reader. This conflict was not just over which of the
two roles should be performed in relation to the painting. To a larger extent it concerned the
reliability of the given information and the sequence of that information: was the inscription