Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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that nomination was a dead duck. It required that the relations between language and the
world be treated as secure and unquestionable. From the point of view of Art & Language the
relevant logical grammar was in urgent need of wholesale re-examination and renewal.
It was the position of Art & Language in the later 1960s that given a) the beholder’s
status as the personification of the Modernist moral and aesthetic disposition, and given b) the
exhaustion of Modernism as a discursive system, the possibility of critical transformation in
the practice of art implied not the exploitation but the ruination of those mechanisms of validation
which were identified with the beholder. To imagine a transformed art was thus to
imagine the experience of art as a possibly different form of experience and to imagine the
public as a constituency of which different dispositions and competences could be expected
or predicated. It followed both that different competences would have to be exercised in the
production of art and that these would have to be exercised upon some different range of
discursive and aesthetic materials. It was a distinguishing feature of the most critically challenging
works of Conceptual Art that they were opaque to the intuitive responses of the Modernist
connoisseur, even in his Post-Minimalist guise. Viewed under their phenomenal and morphological
aspects they remained insignificant, inconstant or absurd. Into the resulting aesthetic void
they instilled the demand for a reading—that is to say, a demand which the modernized beholder
could not satisfy without abandoning the grounds of his own authority.
The search for new material was one which variously preoccupied the larger avant-garde
of the later 1960s. Among those that were found were some from earlier avant-garde episodes
which had been marginalized in the process of establishment of the Modernist historical
canon—forms of enterprise which had been derogated as “impure” on the grounds of their
adjacency to the theatrical, the narrative or the political. Thus the period of development of
Conceptual Art coincided with a recuperation of the critical and informal aspects of such earlier
avant-garde movements as Dadaism, Constructivism and Surrealism. Consequent shifts in
the conceptual relations of mainstream and margins have been observable in recent arthistorical
perspectives on the twentieth century. In some Eurocentric accounts, the moment of
Conceptual Art is seen as marking the end of that long American diversion which Modernism
is taken to have been, as effecting the re-identification of the history of modern art with an
authentic avant-garde tradition, and even as reestablishing the status of such disregarded antecedents
as the Fluxus group and the Nouveaux Réalistes. Recently there have been attempts to
represent Conceptual Art as a form of Situationist “terror.” In the more sophisticated of these
revisionist accounts, attention is drawn to the prominence accorded to European philosophy
and literary theory among the favored intellectual materials of the Conceptual Art movement.