Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

some of the crucial foundations for the development of an art practice emphasizing its parallels,
if not identity, with the systems of linguistic signs, i.e., Conceptual Art.
Most importantly, as early as 1961 in his Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, Morris
had ruptured both. On the one hand, it dispenses with the Modernist quest for mediumspecific
purity as much as with its sequel in the positivist conviction of a purely perceptual
experience operating in Stella’s visual tautologies and the early phases of Minimalism. And on
the other, by counteracting the supremacy of the visual with that of an auditory experience of
equal if not higher importance, he renewed the Duchampian quest for a nonretinal art. In Box
with the Sound of Its Own Making, as much as in the subsequent works, the critique of the
hegemony of traditional categories of the visual is enacted not only in the (acoustic or tactile)
disturbance of the purity of perceptual experience, but it is performed as well through a literalist
act of denying the viewer practically all (at least traditionally defined) visual information.
This strategy of a “perceptual withdrawal” leads in each of the works from the early
1960s to a different analysis of the constituent features of the structured object and the modes
of reading it generates. In I-Box, for example, the viewer is confronted with a semiotic pun (on
the words I and eye) just as much as with a structural sleight of hand from the tactile (the
viewer has to manipulate the boxphysically to see the I of the artist) through the linguistic sign
(the letter I defines the shape of the framing/display device: the “door” of the box) to the visual
representation (the nude photographic portrait of the artist) and back. It is of course this very
tripartite division of the aesthetic signifier—its separation into object, linguistic sign, and photographic
reproduction—that we will encounter in infinite variations, didactically simplified
(to operate as stunning tautologies) and stylistically designed (to take the place of paintings)
in Kosuth’s Proto-Investigations after 1966.
In Document (Statement of Aesthetic Withdrawal), Morris takes the literal negation of the
visual even further, in clarifying that after Duchamp the readymade is not just a neutral analytic
proposition (in the manner of an underlying statement such as “this is a work of art”). Beginning
with the readymade, the work of art had become the ultimate subject of a legal definition
and the result of institutional validation. In the absence of any specifically visual qualities and
due to the manifest lack of any (artistic) manual competence as a criterion of distinction, all
the traditional criteria of aesthetic judgment—of taste and of connoisseurship—have been
programmatically voided. The result of this is that the definition of the aesthetic becomes on
the one hand a matter of linguistic convention and on the other the function of both a legal
contract and an institutional discourse (a discourse of power rather than taste).
benjamin h. d. buchloh conceptual art 1962–1969 519