Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

systematically as the representational medium; and to develop a new form of distribution (e.g.,
the commercially produced book as opposed to the traditionally crafted livre d’artiste. (...)
Accordingly, even in 1965–66, with the earliest stages of Conceptual practices, we witness
the emergence of diametrically opposed approaches: Joseph Kosuth’s Proto-Investigations
on the one hand (according to their author conceived and produced in 1965); 8 and a work
such as Dan Graham’s Homes for America on the other. Published in Arts Magazine in December
1966, the latter is a work which—unknown to most and long unrecognized—programmatically
emphasized structural contingency and contextuality, addressing crucial questions of
presentation and distribution, of audience and authorship. At the same time the work linked
Minimalism’s esoteric and self-reflexive aesthetics of permutation to a perspective on the architecture
of mass culture (thereby redefining the legacy of Pop Art). The Minimalists’ detachment
from any representation of contemporary social experience upon which Pop Art had
insisted, however furtively, resulted from their attempt to construct models of visual meaning
and experience that juxtaposed formal reduction with a structural and phenomenological
model of perception.
By contrast, Graham’s work argued for an analysis of (visual) meaning that defined signs
as both structurally constituted within the relations of language’s system and grounded in the
referent of social and political experience. Further, Graham’s dialectical conception of visual
representation polemically collapsed the difference between the spaces of production and those
of reproduction (what Seth Siegelaub would, in 1969, call primary and secondary information).
9 Anticipating the work’s actual modes of distribution and reception within its very structure
of production, Homes for America eliminated the difference between the artistic construct
and its (photographic) reproduction, the difference between an exhibition of art objects and
the photograph of its installation, the difference between the architectural space of the gallery
and the space of the catalogue and the art magazine.
JOSEPH KOSUTH’S TAUTOLOGIES
In opposition to this, Kosuth was arguing, in 1969, precisely for the continuation and expansion
of modernism’s positivist legacy, and doing so with what must have seemed to him at the
time the most radical and advanced tools of that tradition: Wittgenstein’s logical positivism
and language philosophy (he emphatically affirmed this continuity when, in the first part of
“Art after Philosophy,” he states, “Certainly linguistic philosophy can be considered the heir to
empiricism . . .”). Thus, even while claiming to displace the formalism of Greenberg and Fried,
benjamin h. d. buchloh conceptual art 1962–1969 521