Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

the early work of Art & Language and which has been stressed in the continuing work associated
with that name. What is meant here by reading is not the willful digression of the selfenchanted,
but rather the critical elaboration of the object of thought, where the object of
thought is recognized as the other, both as regards the self-image of the observer and as regards
any given historical narrative or tableau.
The need for strong interpretative reading is now all the more urgent in face of two
prevailing recent tendencies: the first—characteristic of the new ruling class of the eighties and
early nineties—is to identify rational judgement and preference with the “findings” of the
market; the second—characteristic of a new left clerisy—is to fetishize causal inquiry (Verklären)
as the means to uncover authentically subversive meanings. However mutually distinct
they may believe their ends to be, the respective adherents of these two tendencies have the
same ideal object in view: the unimpeachable work of art which confirms their picture of
history and authenticates their image of themselves.
It is an important function of interpretative reading that it serves to distinguish the
cognitively critical from the factitiously avant-garde. As regards the art of the past twenty-five
years, this is a matter of specific moment to the business of discrimination between various
candidates for attention. The suppression of the beholder was not simply a matter of making
things which were radically unartistic or radically political—and in that sense unamenable to
being beheld. Nor did it simply mean envisaging a different constituency. It meant establishing
the grounds for a different form of transaction. As envisaged by Art & Language, the distinguishing
critical feature of Conceptual Art lay in the requirement of collaboration or silence it
made of its imagined public, and in the transformed image which it thus offered spectators of
themselves as historical beings: the image of people placed on their mettle before the material
presented to view: of people challenged to act upon that material, and to take thought upon,
the conditions of thought—or to keep quiet.
This essay was published in the catalogue for the exhibition Art conceptuel formes conceptuelles
(Paris: Galerie 1900–2000 and Galerie de Poche, 1990), pp. 538–545.
charles harrison conceptual art and critical judgement 545