Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

experience. In that process it succeeded in purging itself entirely of imaginary and bodily experience,
of physical substance and the space of memory, to the same extent that it effaced all
residues of representation and style, of individuality and skill. That was the moment when
Buren’s and Haacke’s work from the late 1960s onward turned the violence of that mimetic
relationship back onto the ideological apparatus itself, using it to analyze and expose the social
institutions from which the laws of positivist instrumentality and the logic of administration
emanate in the first place. These institutions, which determine the conditions of cultural consumption,
are the very ones in which artistic production is transformed into a tool of ideological
control and cultural legitimation.
It was left to Marcel Broodthaers to construct objects in which the radical achievements
of Conceptual Art would be turned into immediate travesty and in which the seriousness with
which Conceptual Artists had adopted the rigorous mimetic subjection of aesthetic experience
to the principles of what Adorno had called the “totally administered world” were transformed
into absolute farce. And it was one of the effects of Broodthaers’ dialectics that the achievement
of Conceptual Art was revealed as being intricately tied to a profound and irreversible loss: a
loss not caused by artistic practice, of course, but one to which that practice responded in the
full optimism of its aspirations, failing to recognize that the purging of image and skill, of
memory and vision, within visual aesthetic representation was not just another heroic step in
the inevitable progress of Enlightenment to liberate the world from mythical forms of perception
and hierarchical modes of specialized experience, but that it was also yet another, perhaps
the last of the erosions (and perhaps the most effective and devastating one) to which the
traditionally separate sphere of artistic production had been subjected in its perpetual efforts
to emulate the regnant episteme within the paradigmatic frame proper to art itself.
Or worse yet, that the Enlightenment triumph of Conceptual Art—its transformation
of audiences and distribution, its abolition of object status and commodity form—would most
of all only be short-lived, almost immediately giving way to the return of the ghostlike reapparitions
of (prematurely?) displaced painterly and sculptural paradigms of the past. So that the
specular regime, which Conceptual Art claimed to have upset, would soon be reinstated with
renewed vigor. Which is of course what happened.
NOTES
1. As is usual with stylistic formations in the history of art, the origin and the name of the movement
are heavily contested by its major participants. Barry, Kosuth, and Weiner, for example,
vehemently denied in recent conversations with the author any historical connection to or even
benjamin h. d. buchloh conceptual art 1962–1969 533