Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

to be given primacy over the visual qualities identified by the linguistic entity, or was the perceptual
experience of the visual, formal, and chromatic element anterior to its mere denomination
by language?
Clearly this “mapping of the linguistic onto the perceptual” was not arguing in favor of
“the idea”—or linguistic primacy—or the definition of the work of art as an analytic proposition.
Quite to the contrary, the permutational character of the work suggested that the viewer/
reader systematically perform all the visual and textual options the painting’s parameters allowed
for. This included an acknowledgment of the painting’s central, square element: a spatial
void that revealed the underlying wall surface as the painting’s architectural support in actual
space, thereby suspending the reading of the painting between architectural structure and linguistic
definition.
Rather than privileging one over the other, LeWitt’s work (in its dialogue with Jasper
Johns’s legacy of paradox) insisted on forcing the inherent contradictions of the two spheres
(that of the perceptual experience and that of the linguistic experience) into the highest possible
relief. Unlike Frank Stella’s response to Johns, which forced modernist self-referentiality one
step further into the ultimate cul de sac of its positivist convictions (his notorious statement
“what you see is what you see” would attest to that just as much as the development of his
later work), 4 Sol LeWitt’s dialogue (with both Johns and Stella, and ultimately, of course, with
Greenberg) developed a dialectical position with regard to the positivist legacy.
In contrast to Stella, his work now revealed that the modernist compulsion for empiricist
self-reflexiveness not only originated in the scientific positivism which is the founding logic of
capitalism (undergirding its industrial forms of production just as much as its science and
theory), but that, for an artistic practice that internalized this positivism by insisting on a
purely empiricist approach to vision, there would be a final destiny. This destiny would be to
aspire to the condition of tautology.
It is not surprising, then, that when LeWitt formulated his second text on Conceptual
Art—in his “Sentences on Conceptual Art” from the spring of 1969—the first sentence should
programmatically state the radical difference between the logic of scientific production and
that of aesthetic experience:
1 — Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot
reach.
2 — Rational judgments repeat rational judgments.
3 — Irrational judgments lead to new experience. 5
benjamin h. d. buchloh conceptual art 1962–1969 517