Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

“reductive” art—simply corroborates my opinion that the necessity for this transcendence of
subjectivity has been recognized, and that attempts are being made to facilitate the process.
To me, people who complain about the “anti-humanism” of conceptual art are missing
the point. Any kind of objectivity—whether it is in the formulation of a concretized system,
a rational decision-making method, conceptual clarity—can serve only to facilitate the final
emergence, in as pure a form as possible, of the artistic idea, which is almost always basically
intuitive in nature. It is only when one subordinates the original intuition to the subjective
distillations and limitations of one’s own personality that one need be finally confronted with
a kind of mirror image of one’s egoistical conflicts as an end product.
I think that the best thing an artist can do for his creative development is allow his
intuitions as full an actualization as possible—unhampered by ultimately unavoidable limitations
of personality and material. (. . .) I have found that the best way for me to deal with my
own subjective limitations is in the process of conceptual formulation. (. . .)
Only the intuitive is truly unlimited. I see all art as basically an intuitive process, regardless
of how obliquely it has been dealt with in the past. Within this context, I think “conceptual
art” is the most adequate way of liberating the creative process so that the artist may approach
and realize his work—or himself—on the purest possible level.
This text is dated 1967. It was first published in Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight. Volume
II: Selected Writings in Art Criticism 1967–1992 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 3–4.
adrian piper a defense of the “conceptual” process in art 37