Voices Off: Reflections on Conceptual Art

Author(s): Art & Language

Source: Critical Inquiry , Vol. 33, No. 1 (Autumn 2006), pp. 113-135
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Voices Off: Reflections on Conceptual Art
Art & Language

We write as the representatives of an artistic practice that has been

counted a major contributor to the conceptual art movement of the late
1960s and early 1970s and that has persisted in continuous though varied
operation to the present day. Our purpose in writing is to argue for an in-
dependent view of the stuff and character of that movement and of its legacy.
This requires that we critically consider what has come to be accepted as
the authoritative account of the art of our generation and of the crisis of
modernism from which it is supposed to have emerged.

1
In the world of academic art history and art criticism, considerable in-
dustry has been devoted in recent years to establishing the terms of the
postmodern settlement. In all competing accounts, the conceptual art
movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s plays a crucial part, though there
are considerable differences in the ways in which that movement is defined
and the roles it is accorded in the succession from modernism. In its widest

The name Art & Language was first adopted in 1968 to refer to a collaborative practice that had
developed over the previous two years between Michael Baldwin and Terry Atkinson, in
association with David Bainbridge and Harold Hurrell. Over the next several years it stood for a
collaborative practice with a growing and changing membership associated with the journal Art-
Language, first published in May 1969, and subsequently with a second journal, The Fox, which
was published in New York in 1975–76. Joseph Kosuth was invited to act as American editor of
Art-Language in 1969. In the following year Michael Ramsden and Ian Burn merged their separate
collaboration with Art & Language. Charles Harrison became editor of Art-Language in 1971. By
the mid-1970s some twenty people were associated with the name, divided between England and
New York. From 1976 on, however, the genealogical thread of Art & Language’s artistic work was
taken solely into the hands of Baldwin and Ramsden, with whom Harrison continues to
collaborate on projects such as the present essay.

Critical Inquiry 33 (Autumn 2006)

䉷 2006 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/06/3301-0002$10.00. All rights reserved.

113

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114 Art & Language / Reflections on Conceptual Art
popular usage the term conceptual art serves well beyond the historical con-
fines of the movement in question to designate a continuing current of art
that is generic, in the sense of owing little or nothing to the material tra-
ditions of painting or sculpture. In its slightly more restricted art-world
sense and, indeed, in the world of artists, conceptual art has been waved as
a banner proclaiming various rappels à l’ordre and purifications and as a
headline for various career moves. In academic narratives, however, con-
ceptual art tends to be defined by reference to the crisis of modernism in
the 1960s and in terms of specific relations of difference with high modernist
abstract art. Driven by an overdeveloped sense of the necessity of the suc-
cession, the account of this crisis and of the relations in question has been
widely conventionalized. It has also acquired a marked teleological aspect.
Among the assumptions characteristic of this account is the notion that
the dematerialization of art is of some descriptive and explanatory rele-
vance;1 that minimalism was not a kind of modernism; that, relative to con-
ceptual art, a greater virtue resides in an art of institutional critique; and
that the post-Duchampian object represents a rich resource of semiological
possibilities. When these assumptions are taken in sequence, the conclusion
to which they conduce is that the significance of conceptual art’s critique
of modernism is to a large extent exhausted by its reinauguration of some
relatively overt political content and by its reinvestment in the Duchampian

1. Lucy Lippard and John Chandler open their 1968 essay on the dematerialization of art with
an account of current trends in minimal and postminimal art: “As more and more work is
designed in the studio but executed elsewhere by professional craftsmen, as the object becomes
merely the end product, a number of artists are losing interest in the physical evolution of the
work of art. The studio is again becoming a study. Such a trend appears to be provoking a
profound dematerialization of art, especially of art as object, and if it continues to prevail, it may
result in the object’s becoming wholly obsolete” (Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, “The
Dematerialization of Art,” Art International 12 [Feb. 1968]: 31).
Hal Foster writes of the urgency of the question: “Is there a limit to the materiality of the art
work, a zero degree of its visuality?” (Hal Foster, “Postminimalism and Process,” Art since 1900:
Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, ed. Foster et al. [London, 2004], p. 534). The concept
of dematerialization was of some marginal theoretical and speculative interest. As a kind of
literalization of Greenbergian modernist reduction finally ending in thought forms and telepathy,
it was, however, vacuous. As a countercultural idea about art that was of political and economic
implication by virtue of its lack of commodity status, it was simply laughable.

A r t & L a n g u a g e ’s recent exhibitions have been held at the Lisson Gallery

(London), the Center for Art and Media Technology (Karlsruhe), and the Grita
Insam Gallery (Vienna), and recent publications include the monograph Homes
from Homes II (2006). Charles Harrison, professor of history and theory of art at
the Open University, is coeditor of Art in Theory and author of Essays on Art &
Language (2001), Conceptual Art and Painting: Further Essays on Art & Language
(2001), and Painting the Difference: Sex and Spectator in Modern Art (2005).

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 Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2006 115
generic. This critique is understood as addressed to modernist notions of
autonomy—its sundering of art from history and truth and of avant-garde
practice from social practice—and to the sexist, elitist, and imperialistic in-
terests served by the untenable claims to disinterest that are made in mod-
ernist theory and criticism.
There was substance to the charge that the modernist institutions had
become socially and politically hegemonic and dissuasive. It does not follow,
however, that the modernist project was bereft of virtue, that all modernist
aesthetic judgements were wrong or malign, or that all modernist art was
complicit in sexism, elitism, and imperialism. While there were many mod-
ernist artists who were by no means immune to such negative charges, many
of them sustained political commitments more radical than those vaunted
routinely by the liberals of the soi-disant postmodern academy. That these
artists did not embody the possibility of social change in their work—at
least not without difficulty and without somewhat allusive argument—does
not make them guilty of all the sins of the epoch. It is nevertheless widely
assumed of the modernist project as a whole that it was an institution nec-
essarily overthrown in the course of the succession.
A dominant academic account of conceptual art is now associated
with the American journal October, an account given considerable weight
by its representation in the recent art-historical study Art since 1900, by Hal
Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. A
seemingly unmessy orthodoxy narrates a succession, from the crisis of mod-
ernism through minimalism, that entails a split into two modes of conceptual
art: an institutional critique that is approved and a kind of apostate mod-
ernism that is not. In its aspect as institutional critique, conceptual art could
have no relation but a stark negativity toward that which it succeeded and
in particular toward modernism’s institutional and political imbrication;
on the other hand what remains of conceptual art is characterized as lacking
that critical negativity, as effectively complicit in the sins of modernism, and
as devoid of virtue. Buchloh, for instance, describes Art & Language’s “self-
criticality” as “late-modernist” and remarks that “Clement Greenberg’s
American-type formalism had kept English artists (up to and including
members of the Art & Language group) in its spell for an astonishingly long
time.”2 In Buchloh’s terms this is to put Art & Language beyond the pale.
We accept the bifurcation up to a point. While we agree that there is a
form of conceptual art that procures its meaning and identity largely from
the fact that it enjoys quasi-canonical status as institutional critique, we
argue that there is another form that is capable of producing institutional

2. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Photoconceptualism,” Art since 1900, p. 590.

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116 Art & Language / Reflections on Conceptual Art
critique inter alia but whose relation with modernism and with minimalism
is more complex, less mechanical, less literal, and less sentimental. This
latter form is not culturally exhausted by the claim that it produces insti-
tutional critique. It is necessary to express our acceptance in this oddly con-
ditional form because, as we shall see, the expression “institutionalcritique”
goes to very few useful differentiae.
We shall deal with the account of the succession in terms that question
its teleological critique of modernism. Our approach will be to try to char-
acterize conceptual art’s development from the detail of our own experience
as artists (and so on) and through discussion of the typical valuations of the
prevailing academic account, particularly those that concern the art of in-
stitutional critique. It is by looking, at the outset, through the lens of this
account that we hope to see better into the other spheres in which concep-
tual art resonates.

2
The voice that carries any challenge to the truth of the assertion that
institutional critique was the most substantial practice to emanate from the
minimalist and conceptual critique of modernism is now a voice off. In-
deed, it is a voice off that is likely to be talked over by the actors at the center
stage of institutional critique. The center stage performance, however, de-
pends on some strange arguments and ruses. Appearing slightly downstage
from the main academic performers is a group of representative artists:
Marcel Duchamp, Dan Graham, Marcel Broodthaers, Hans Haacke, Daniel
Buren, and Michael Asher.
In Foster’s account, the particular significance of the Duchampianready-
made is that it “allowed him to leap past old aesthetic questions of craft,
medium, and taste (‘is it good or bad painting or sculpture?’) to new ques-
tions that were potentially ontological (‘what is art?’), epistemological(‘how
do we know it?’), and institutional (‘who determines it?’).”3 Subsequently,
according to Krauss, Duchamp’s Étant donnés, installed in Philadelphia,“by
lodging itself at the heart of the museum . . . was able to pour its logic along
the very fault lines of the aesthetic system, making its framing conditions
appear in startling clarity only to make them ‘strange’. . . . The ‘institutional
critique’ that will now focus on the museum as its site will range from Mar-
cel Broodthaers’s work in Belgium to Daniel Buren’s in Paris to Michael
Asher’s and Hans Haacke’s in the United States.”4 Foucault’s historical cri-
tique of knowledge presides as a philosophical guiding spirit: “Foucault’s

3. Foster, “Tatlin’s Constructions and Duchamp’s Readymades,” Art since 1900, p. 128.
4. Rosalind Krauss, “Duchamp’s Étant donnés,” Art since 1900, p. 499.

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 Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2006 117
strategic acknowledgment of the unacknowledged frame of the university,
his unmasking of its political imbrication, was soon adopted by artists who
wished to unmask the interests at work in the institutional frames of the
art world. Called ‘institutional critique,’ this revelatory strategy informed
the work of Daniel Buren, Marcel Broodthaers, Hans Haacke, and many
others.”5
Of Broodthaers, Buchloh writes, “His intention was to expose as empty
Conceptualism’s claim to having established a truly democratic, egalitarian
art form that had transcended the object, its forms of distribution, and its
institutional frame, instead denouncing all such claims as typical avant-
garde myth and self-mystification, and opposing them by making persistent
reference back to the continuing (if not increased) validity of all those meth-
ods Conceptualism claimed to have left behind.”6 What we have here is an
apparent antithesis between the “realistic” art of institutional critique and
an idealistic, self-mythologizing conceptual art. In Buchloh’s account there
is—as one might expect—a kind of conceptual art that is virtuous insofar
as it is inflected by institutional critique. For example, Graham’s Homes
for America (1967) is celebrated as “one of the key moments of Conceptual
art . . . [when] modernism’s (and Conceptualism’s) supposedly radical
quest for empirical and critical self-reflexivity is turned in on itself and onto
the frames of presentation and distribution. . . . The artist’s model of self-
reflexivity dialectically shifts from tautology to discursive and institutional
critique.”7
Similarly, “Haacke’s work shifts attention from the critical analysis of the
work’s immanent structures of meaning to the external frames of institu-
tions. Thus Haacke repositions Conceptual art in a new critical relation to
the socioeconomic conditions determining access and availability of aes-
thetic experience, a practice later identified as ‘institutional critique’”
(“SHA,” p. 29). The correct lineage is established through Duchamp and
Fluxus. According to Buchloh, the latter “initiated many key aspects of Con-
ceptual art, such as the insistence on viewer participation, the turn towards
the linguistic performative, and the beginnings of institutional critique.”8
This is the conceptual art that bathes in the light. The conceptual art

5. Krauss, “Foucault,” Art since 1900, p. 548. There is some inconsistency in the various
accounts of the initiation of institutional critique that are given in Art since 1900. While Krauss
represents Foucault’s influential “revelatory strategy” as prompted by the events of 1968, Buchloh
associates a shift from conceptual art to institutional critique with Dan Graham’s Homes for
America in 1966.
6. Buchloh, “Broodthaers,” Art since 1900, p. 552; hereafter abbreviated “B.”
7. Buchloh, “The Social History of Art: Models and Concepts,” Art since 1900, p. 28; hereafter
abbreviated “SHA.”
8. Buchloh, “Fluxus,”Art since 1900, p. 456.

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118 Art & Language / Reflections on Conceptual Art
consigned to the dark by the October writers inherited modernism’s ten-
dency to self-reflexivity and “tautology,” and yet, as “exposed” by Brood-
thaers, “assumed that it had itself been able to transcend the frames within
which modernism is institutionalized” (“B,” p. 551).

3
We make two contentions in respect to this recital. Our primary argu-
ment is that the characterization of conceptual art that is in the dark is in
some important instances false. That is to say, the conceptual art in question
is not in fact monolithic, and the criticisms do not apply across the board,
irrespective of whether or not institutional critique is a supportable genre.
Our second contention is that the arguments in favor of institutional cri-
tique that we cited are badly made, inconsistent, and dependent upon the
would-be redemptive and in fact largely sentimental insertion of social con-
tent into certain kinds of (post)minimal art. Supplementary to these con-
tentions, we argue that the price the Octobrists pay for the bifurcation they
make is that it blinds them to the real conditions that vitiate the work that
they see as virtuous and leaves them with an anachronistic nostalgia for a
battle long over in a conflict that nevertheless continues. As a consequence
they are also made unaware of the potential for institutional critique that
resides less self-importantly in the practice of the conceptual art they reject.
It may be noted from the above representative quotations that the claims
made by the October authors on behalf of institutional critique have a con-
sistent rhetorical form: the generation of putative antitheses. Artists they
favor have usually gone beyond, transcended, or outdone others from
whom favor is withheld. This latter group has committed sins, or heresies,
or registered other failures that are usually modernistic but are rarely oth-
erwise described in any substantial particulars. They are transcendentalsins,
attributed so that the favored may be seen as virtuous.
In the case of Graham, for instance, the virtue of his work resides in its
shifting of conceptual art’s agenda from “tautology” to institutional cri-
tique. (The association of conceptual art with tautology picks out a slogan
of Joseph Kosuth, though he is not named. In fact it often seems as though
October’s sense of conceptual art-in-the-dark is almost exclusively predi-
cated on Kosuth’s “Art after Philosophy,”9 though the consequences of this

9. “Works of art are analytic propositions. That is, if viewed within their context—as art—they
provide no information whatsoever about any matter of fact. A work of art is a tautology in that it
is a presentation of the artist’s intention, that is, he is saying that that particular work of art is art,
which means, is a definition of art. Thus, that it is art is true a priori” (Joseph Kosuth, “Art after
Philosophy,” Studio International 178 [Oct. 1969]: 136). The apparent aim of Kosuth’s essay was to
argue for a fully autonomous post-Duchampian art condition and to serve as a manifesto for the

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 Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2006 119
predication are felt by others, ourselves included. While we do not pretend
that we were never associated with Kosuth, it would be a serious misrep-
resentation to suggest that we and he ever spoke with one voice.) In the case
of Broodthaers, it is through his exposure of the “false egalitarianism” of
conceptual art and his inhabiting “those structures that would have to be
called supplements—the page of the catalogue, the site of the poster, the
framing device of the institution—that [he] denies the continuing validity
of an aesthetic of centrality, of substantiality and by so doing also denies the
commodity status of the work of art, for the supplement can never itself
acquire value” (“B,” p. 553). These are the means by which he performed
“the kind of challenge to institutional frames that poststructuralists such as
Foucault were then theorizing.”10
We address these two examples as typical of the form and substance of
the October authors’ arguments. It may be noted that Graham’s Homes
for America was not an entirely unprecedented work. It is not at all unlike
Robert Smithson’s essay “Quasi-infinities and the Waning of Space” (1966)
or Mel Bochner’s and Smithson’s “Domain of the Great Bear” (1966), at
least in terms of it being a series of variously captioned photographs. The
subtitle of Graham’s architectural-cum-social critique is “The Early Twen-
tieth-Century Possessable House to the Quasi-Discrete Cell of ‘66.” Smith-
son describes it with a curious simile: “Like some of the other artists,
Graham can ‘read’ the language of buildings. . . . The ‘block houses’ of the
post-war suburbs communicate their ‘dead land areas’ or ‘sites’ in the man-
ner of a linguistic permutation.”11 In fact, compared with Smithson’s “col-
lage essays,” Graham’s Homes for America was, in its first incarnation, a
relatively straightforward photo-essay and factual critique of California-
style tract housing, published in a magazine and distributed accordingly.12
avant-garde idea of art as idea. Though parts 2 and 3 were published in subsequent issues of Studio
International, the theoretical aspect of the essay is restricted to its first part, which has been much
reprinted and also much criticized for its philosophical presumptions and arguments.
10. Krauss, “Poststructuralism and Deconstruction,” Art since 1900, p. 42.
11. Quoted in Claude Gintz, L’Art conceptuel: Une perspective, trans. Judith Aminoff (Paris,
1989), p. 155. The original slides that were meant to serve as the illustrations for Graham’s
publication were shown in Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt’s loft in New York, probably in 1967.
12. Given the problematic etiology and ontology of Homes for America, it is not easy to be sure
precisely what it is that Buchloh’s claims for its radicality should be tested against. The work began
its public life under the title Project Transparencies as a sequence of some twenty photographic
slides for the exhibition “Projected Art” at Finch College Museum of Art, New York, in December
1966. Graham referred to these in its instantiation as a photo-text article, “Homes for America:
Early Twentieth-Century Possessable House to the Quasi-Discrete Cell of ‘66,” Arts Magazine 41
(Dec. 1966-Jan. 1967): 21–22. In fact his own photos were cut from the published form of the
article, leaving as black-and-white illustration only an image taken from a real-estate brochure
and a photograph of a wooden house by Walker Evans. A revised double-page layout by Graham,
illustrated with his own photographs, was printed in various versions from 1970 onwards and was
thereafter widely used as exhibition material. (A monochrome print of one of these photographs

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120 Art & Language / Reflections on Conceptual Art
This is what Buchloh means, perhaps, by his claim that it “integrates the
dimension of distribution into the conception of the work itself ?” (“SHA,”
p. 28). The work was always intended to be in a magazine and not on an
art gallery wall. However, Buchloh’s claim that “self-reflexivity is turned in
on itself ” is barely intelligible. He is not too concerned here with the essay-
and-picture content of Graham’s work but with the circumstances of its
distribution. And it is within these that the dialectical shift is to be found.
Homes for America is a strange work to load with the making of the shift,
if a shift it is. Graham had been or was a poet. Throughout the 1960s, poetry
magazines and other artsy and literary journals had published all manner
of poem-and-graphics combinations, prints, and embellished pages that
readers were invited to consider as first-order works of art. Insofar as these
were not reproductions but works, the dimension of distribution was in-
tegrated into the “conception of the work itself.” Furthermore, insofar as
they were producing texts, most conceptual artists were obliged to consider
the “frame” of their distribution in the very ordinary sense that their words
and graphic stuff might naturally belong in a publication. There were indeed
many who saw the supposedly antielitist possibilities in this, pretenders to
a subversive refusal to be co-opted by the gallery. So far, so sort of good:
Graham qua conceptual artist made early use of magazines to exhibit and
distribute some of his work. It is nevertheless hard to understand how this
turns “modernism’s (and Conceptualism’s) supposedly radical quest for
empirical and critical self-reflexivity” in on itself.
We might say that Graham’s subject matter was somehow current in the
liberal culture of New York. For Buchloh, however, the power of institu-
tional critique is not invested in the (rather mild) architectural critique but
rather in the reflexive doubling of conceptual art’s dialectical model that is
associated with the work’s presence in a magazine. Are we to assume that
this turning-in on itself is more than a mere doubling of the supposedly
radical quest? Or are we to understand this dialectical shift as a sort of dou-
ble negative? The self-reflective artwork—art that is about art—is now art
that is about art-that-is-about-art. And it is so by virtue of its being dis-
tributed in a form that implicitly criticizes or disimbricates the gallery and
support structures of modernism.
It is hard to see how the double aboutness that seems to be ascribed to
the work distinguishes it from the kinds of minor modernist artwork that

is reproduced in Art since 1900 and is referred to there by Buchloh as “Graham’s publication of one
of his earliest works in the layout and presentational format of an article in the pages of a rather
prominent American art magazine” [“SHA,” p. 28].) The artwork for Graham’s “original” layout
as he subsequently envisaged it with photographs in full color is now in the Daled Collection,
Brussels.

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 Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2006 121
are bound into magazines or, for that matter, from those that are issued as
multiples. Smithson had previously produced magazine collage essays with-
out necessarily dignifying them as art. (It should also be pointed out that
the photographs from Homes for America have over the years undergone
various technical improvements, resulting in a newfound critical appreci-
ation. They are now fine photography and subject to an altogether different
dialectical regime.) What we have seen is a false antithesis. Conceptual art
is transformed in having its “quest” for “self-reflexivity turned in on itself.”
In fact, a doubling of aboutness characterizes most conceptual art. The false
antithesis goes, of course, to a false dialectic. The capacity for institutional
critique is ascribed to Homes for America and denied to other forms of con-
ceptual art. It seems that institutional critique is not here a property that
distinguishes one work from another but an axiological term that signals
approval. The mechanism by which the approval is gained appears to be a
practical one, such as might one day be subject to Foucauldian study.
In order to come to Buchloh’s conclusion we are obliged to begin with
a set of premises that are posited a priori. The chief among them is that
Graham’s is a radical institution-critical practice; the second is that mod-
ernism’s and conceptual art’s quest for self-reflexivity was often a misguided
concern with the ordering of form or with something worse called tautol-
ogy. If we accept the first premise, we are also accepting a dimension of
distribution over which Buchloh and Graham themselves preside. That
Graham’s career profile has for one reason or another been identified as
radical is good enough for the dialectic to follow. If we accept the second
premise we are traducing modernism to some extent and definitely tra-
ducing almost all conceptual art. If we reject the premises then the claim is
empty.
Regarding Broodthaers’s supposedly Foucauldian institutional critique,
the orthodox account is not without difficulty. Foucault shows the singu-
larity and contingency and thus the evitability of aspects of modern social
being that are often presented as universal, necessary, or inescapable. His
notion that philosophy can be (or should be) critical history involves anal-
ysis of the conditions of the possibility of particular thought systems. He is
not, however, concerned with their epistemic status, nor does he accept a
priori conditions of knowledge. He argues, rather, that certain statements
function as knowledge at certain times and within certain conditions. His
historical studies are supposed to assist the criticism of systems of thought
and the practices that are informed by them. But in order to render this
assistance, he seeks to reveal certain historical conjunctures that supply the
a priori conditions, as it were, for certain systems of thought to be treated
as knowledge.

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122 Art & Language / Reflections on Conceptual Art
What Broodthaers supplies—in the form of a late surrealist assemblage—
is a “what if ?” as an alternative to the institutional norm. But only through
some attenuated analogy in the mind of a particularly suggestible curator
could this be thought to embody an aspect of Foucauldian interrogative.
And that is on a very good day. Krauss supplements the fraudulent drama
of Broodthaers’s Foucauldianism with a remark that has him surpass the
critical power of Duchamp: “If Duchamp had wanted to expose the mu-
seum as conventional, Broodthaers is now displaying it as simulacral.”13 It
is indeed the case that Duchamp “exposes” the museum as “conventional”
in the sense that the significance of his work is told against a background
of aesthetic normativity; that is to say, a real or imagined normativity is
required by Duchamp’s gesture and a fortiori required for it to be successful.
In Broodthaers’s case, however, Krauss’s conditional is shown to be vacuous.
While we see in Broodthaers’s work a wacky simulacrum of a museum ex-
hibit, the gestural content relative to the museum is irreducibly Duchampian.
The relation of “surpassing” and the antithesis that that implies are the mere
illusions of a pushy rhetoric.
Buchloh endorses Broodthaers’s “intention” to expose the emptiness of
conceptualism’s emancipatory claims. In the course of a few years in the
1960s many claims of this nature had indeed been made, most of them by
journalists and conceptual art entrepreneurs whose distributional fantasies
had gone to their heads without any help from Walter Benjamin. These
claims were largely refuted in practice or in words by the artists—by any
artists worth bothering with, at least. While the cheaply made booklet and
other allographical forms burgeoned, so far as Art & Language was con-
cerned these were either ways to change the normative relations between
artist and artist and artist and critic or were forms that might be phenom-
enologically investigated. Insofar as Broodthaers actually did denounce
any avant-garde myths, he was denouncing a fabrication on the part of
conceptual art hangers-on or, more likely, a necessary fiction of his own
devising.
The vagueness and imprecision of Buchloh’s encomium creates prob-
lems for his account of Broodthaers’s challenge to the institution and to
conceptual art. He places great weight, for example, on the artist’s “denial”
both of an aesthetic of centrality and substantiality and of the commodity
status of the work of art. Was this denial something Buchloh extracted from
Broodthaers’s professional self-description—from his perhaps profession-
ally melancholic personality—or is it somehow compelled by his work? In
pursuit of an answer to this question we might cast an eye on a sample of

13. Krauss, “Magritte Joins the Surrealists,” Art since 1900, p. 215.

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 Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2006 123
that work and on the circumstances of its installation. Some Art & Language
work was included in Documenta 10 in 1997. An extensive component of
Broodthaers’s much celebrated Museum of Eagles—the Section Publicité of
1972—was installed at the same Kunstmesse, where it had originally been
seen twenty-five years earlier. Space is restricted at this kind of event, and
the sight of one work may tend to overlap the anxious territory of another.
Broodthaers’s work was originally installed close to some work by the Ar-
chigram group from their Instant City project of 1969. The directors may
have thought that there would be an interesting resonance. In the event
Archigram’s work tended to show the Broodthaers to a certain disadvan-
tage. The artist’s widow and daughter were soon in tearful action. A sort of
standoff ensued until a solution was brokered by the Marian Goodman
Gallery—which was offering the work for sale at approximately one million
dollars. It seems that this work had achieved a high degree of centrality,
substantiality, and commodity status. Indeed, Broodthaers’s picturesque,
consumable, and often posthumous work had already achieved blue-chip
status by the time of Documenta 7 in 1982.
In addressing the arguments made on behalf of an art of institutional
critique we have been less immediately concerned with the work of the art-
ists involved than with the terms of their canonization, depending as these
do on a politically naı̈ve understanding of the succession to modernism and
on the characterization of conceptual art through a number of false antith-
eses. We now return to the moment of conceptual art’s emergence during
the late 1960s and early 1970s and to consideration of the high modernist
and minimalist art that immediately preceded it.

4
The in flagrante case for the exhaustion of modernism concerns the loss
of critical potential in the modernist painted surface. The problem with the
surfaces in question was that they imposed no descriptive task upon the
viewer that was not already rehearsed in a litany. That a litany was indeed
what was involved seemed to be confirmed by the physical circumstances—
the galleries—under which the representative works were normally
encountered, designed as these appeared to be both to emphasize and to
protect those surfaces in all their rarefaction and vulnerability. In 1963
Greenberg wrote of the paintings of Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and
Jules Olitski that their color and formal properties “are there, first and fore-
most, for the sake of feeling, and as vehicles of feeling.”14 To the skeptical

14. Clement Greenberg, “Introduction to an Exhibition of Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and
Jules Olitski,” The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, 4 vols. (Chicago, 1993), 4:153.

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124 Art & Language / Reflections on Conceptual Art
viewer, however, what the paintings appeared to express was no more and
no less than the prescriptive power of the critical claim. It was as though
the precepts that had schooled the construction of the surface functioned
also to school the experience of the viewer.
Greenberg concluded, “If these paintings fail as vehicles and expressions
of feeling, they fail entirely.”15 It was a theoretical condition of probity in
modernist criticism that there could be no merit in aesthetic success where
no risk of failure was run. But the failure at issue was always conceived of
as risked by the individual artist and work, never as a possibility within the
system as a whole. It is now conventional wisdom, however, that by the early
1960s the entire Greenbergian dialectic had run into Frank Stella and the
blank canvas.16 The dialectic was fast running out of negative energy and
the discourse was confined to a set of protocols and minor disagreements
within a narrow field that was policed by the cognoscenti. Increasingly, the
dialectical drama within the discourse of high modernism had to be staged
and became in this sense increasingly inauthentic. Those who consumed
the best stuff did so in a way that did not preclude them from celebrating
the worst of work that also obeyed the rules. The litany remained capable
of explaining why good was good, but it did not admit of explanation as to
why its terms of approbation could be applied to bad painting with the same
success. Not only had it become a prisoner of corporatist agencies, the Welt-
anschauung of these agencies had infected the operation of modernism’s
internal dialectic.
While there is an exceptional fraction of high modernist work that pre-
eminently rewards attention—that is to say, is possessed both of a consid-
erable aesthetic power to which its virtuality is necessary and of a largely
lucid and relevant critical discourse—the social life of both the art and the
discourse had become decadent. We might then say that, even when the
litany of virtue seemed to be worth going through because the painting or
sculpture amounted to something more than a dry rehearsal, the kitsch of
the attendant social milieu acted as a repellent. In Greenberg’s terms, how-
ever, to suggest that there was a social price to be paid for assenting to aes-
thetic success was to commit a vulgar foul. The possibility of critical
discourse was thus confined; either one repeated the formula or one was
driven outside into a second-order discourse.
As the occasion of a kind of methodological failure, the moment of ex-
haustion of high modernism has been widely observed and theorized. It has

15. Ibid., 4:153.

16. See, for instance, the account given by Thierry de Duve, “The Monochrome and the Blank
Canvas,” Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), pp. 199–279.

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 Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2006 125
been less often considered as a kind of social degeneration; minimalism pro-
vided an important resource in this respect. While its typical objects did not
pay off experientially in the way that a painting by Louis or Noland did, at
one and the same moment they constituted an asymptote of modernist for-
mality and yet remained at a sufficient distance from modernist orthodoxy
to invite conversation about just what kind of objects they were. They showed
the case they were making, as it were. In particular, what minimalism made
explicit were the circumstantial considerations that modernism had ignored
or attempted to hide, those factors that constituted the physical, institutional,
and social framing of the art object and its accompanying litany. Minimalism
thus saw itself as a constructive opposition, its own deliberations being crit-
ically addressed to high modernism on terms that were soundly rebuffed by
Greenberg and Michael Fried but that high modernism itself had cause to
entertain. Minimalism also made clear its connections to such “unprivileged”
aspects of the culture as vernacular architecture and beltway industry, man-
ifesting a certain pride in particular kinds of technical know-how and a criti-
cal class consciousness vis-à-vis antic European sensibility for the precious,
the handmade, and the relational.
It should be acknowledged that to speak of minimalism in general is
more or less to misrepresent it. There are relevant distinctions to be made
between the respective works of Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt,
Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, and Smithson that depend on significant technical
and material details. What we can say is that in talking about minimalism
we do not mean exclusively to invoke a sense of primary structures but
rather to refer to a congeries of practices united by a sense of need to raise
questions that modernism had dismissed as irrelevant or illicit. Smithson
was distinctive among those who asked why so small a part of human con-
trivance was to be quantified and interpreted as art. “It’s not the gallery that
matters but the art,” says the modernist. “What if the art is a bit of the gallery
removed?” asks the minimalist. The very situatedness of minimal art—its
rendering explicit of its dependence on physical context—compellingly in-
augurated some form of institutional critique. It didn’t actually require
Homes for America to turn the trick.
It would be false, however, to suggest that the technical aesthetics of min-
imalism were exhausted by its role in creating the conditions of institutional
critique. Such soi-disant radicalism would have been of little concern to
Flavin, for example. The generic character of the industrial lighting prod-
ucts from which he fashioned his work makes their technical description or
specification in some sense equivalent to an allographic work—a score or
stage direction relative to which the actual lights were a form of exempli-
fication, as might be the case with a specific performance or a particular

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126 Art & Language / Reflections on Conceptual Art
action by an actor. The production of the work entails no technical com-
plexity beyond its putative description or specification. In 1967, LeWitt
wrote that “when an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all
of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a
perfunctory affair.”17 The types of minimal object that such statements in-
voke are the partial archetypes of certain forms of conceptual art, among
them Lawrence Weiner’s Statements (1968), some of Robert Barry’s work,
and Art & Language’s Air Show (1967), at least so far as concerns the latter’s
unreflective first moves.18
In this respect, a certain minimalist route to conceptual art seems secure,
obvious even. What emerges as relatively insecure—and perhaps less
obvious—is the pathway to conceptual art from high modernism. There
were many—ourselves included—who were at the time genuinely bemused
by the refusal of the modernist critics to assimilate any of the discourse of
minimalism. That the essays of Morris and the general chat of minimalism
were dogmatically dumped outside the bastion erected by Greenberg and
Fried suggested that some other way had to be found to colonize the walls.
The thought that gave rise to this last realization had a relatively complex
and ambiguous structure. The position of the modernists seemed to be si-
multaneously well founded and absurd. Notwithstanding the dogmatism
of their defense of painting—and consequent defense of a certain bounded
virtuality that occupied the vertical surface of the wall—it did seem more
or less successful, at least as a defense of the nonliteral. For instance, it was
clear that Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” was a quite robust defense of the
gallery wall against the literal objects, including a special class of such literal
objects that were a bit like or a lot like paintings.19 On the other hand, min-
imalism did seem to propose a genuinely critical and constructive challenge
to modernist orthodoxy. For example, “How do you make ‘a Noland’ that
is not spatial—in Judd’s sense—but literally flat?” is a question that might
be thought of as logically motivated by modernism’s own reductivism and
that therefore serves to render that reductivism practically explicit. How-
ever, while the dialectical power of minimalism’s critique thus seemed
undeniable, that critique nevertheless depended on an ignorance or mis-
apprehension of those substantial arguments according to which literal flat-
ness runs into difficulty as a tendency continuous with early modernist
painting.

17. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5 (Summer 1967): 79.
18. The textual materials that comprised Air Show were written by Terry Atkinson and Michael
Baldwin in 1966–67 and were incorporated in a letterpress booklet; see Atkinson and Baldwin,
Frameworks (Coventry, 1968).
19. See Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5 (Summer 1967): 12–23.

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 Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2006 127
It did seem possible, therefore, that a countervailing critique might be
essayed, one that recognized the mechanical plausibility of modernism’s
historical reductivism—to which minimalism and dematerialization were
still largely in thrall—but that nevertheless still sought to preserve some sort
of wall-bound virtuality (if only in terms of equivalence). The observation
that prompted this critique was that the fault in modernist theory lay in the
incommensurability of its commitment to virtuality with a reductivism that
inexorably invited literalism. Its pursuit was justified in part by a concern
that the intellectual and imaginative space that virtuality had kept open
would be closed down by a logically collapsing argument for literalism be-
fore that space had been thoroughly explored.

5
It is a relevant consideration that, although minimalism may indeed have
seemed to represent a return to something like a robust reality in the face
of a modernist surface shrouded in cheap mystery, the technical operations
of certain minimalist artists tended to generate potential textual substitutes
for the supposedly literal objects. From these there developed more or less
immediately a pair of conceptual art genres. The first of these was the text-
as-readymade. This was a kind of postminimalist literal object that, taken
directly from the pages of books and dictionaries, was possessed of the prop-
erties of a displaced literal object and, reproduced or blown up as a pho-
tostat, was instilled with a certain pictoriality and thus with a certain
distance from minimalism. Such works sustain a kind of ambiguity. They
are composed of textual materials, are of a more or less semantic and syn-
tactical form, as it were, while at the same time recontextualized in the art
gallery or museum. Text works of this order vary from the Duchampian
exercises of Bernar Venet to the more complex quasi paintings that are Ko-
suth’s Definitions. The point here is that the artist’s voice is not present in
the text in question, which tended to be selected simply for the task of gen-
erating an atmosphere of intellectually high birth and purpose.
The typical exemplar of the second postminimal genre was a text whose
logical form remained closer to that of the minimalist working out of physi-
cal particulars and that was thus, to some extent, authored. The artwork of
this second type seemed to offer a critique of the literal object in a different
sense, invoking what John Hyman has called “the insipid thought” that a
picture is a bit like a description.20 The page, as well as the wall-mounted
text, is structured to produce effects (meanings) that are categorically

20. John Hyman, “Language and Pictorial Art,” in A Companion to Aesthetics, ed. David
Cooper (Oxford, 1992), p. 264.

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128 Art & Language / Reflections on Conceptual Art
distinct from the mere means of its physical realization. It can only be a
literal object when construed as a surface that has been inscribed or as mere
text. And the very fact of a text’s relatively weak or mobile sense of medium
specificity (whether page, wall, or other) drove away for a moment the fear
that minimalism was going to reduce the art object to a decorative subar-
chitectural genre of literal objects.
There are, of course, degrees to which an attempt to construe the internal
structuredness of the language of a text will thoroughly detach it from a
world of literal objects. There are texts—ones that might or might not be
singled out as works of art in themselves—that are the equivalent of speech
acts or ostensive behavior and that seem to single out and more or less ap-
propriate ordinary objects or parts of the world as works of art (or some-
thing like them.) One example might be Barry’s Something Very Near in
Place and Time but Not yet Known to Me (1969), where it is not the printed
text but the “something” in question that is the intended “art object.”21 We
need to distinguish texts of this second type from those works of art whose
physical form consists in the literal presence of such objects, as well as from
those texts of the first (readymade) type that are a marginal subset of the
class of literal objects.
The problem with the postminimal readymades of the first type was that
they tended to inherit the unnecessarily crude and sterile ontology that was
minimalism’s answer to wall-bound virtuality, the proposition that the lit-
eral is a secure category. For all their apparent radicality in the face of high
modernism, such enterprises joined a long roster of exotic appropriations
to which late-late surrealists, avant-garde poets, members of Fluxus, and
Robert Rauschenberg had been adding since at least the early 1950s, albeit
in a spirit of insouciance with regard to the authority of Greenbergian the-
ory that the postminimalists could never match.22
In contrast, what is distinctive about those works of the second type that
have the character of quasi speech acts is that they oscillate as installed texts
between, on the one hand, the occupation of the gallery wall (as quasi

21. This was Barry’s contribution to the exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form” at the
Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 28 Aug.–27 Sept. 1969. The “installation” of the work was
effected by means of a printed notice on the wall. At that time Barry was represented by the avant-
garde dealer Seth Siegelaub, whose views on the presentation of contemporary art were expressed
in an interview with Harrison: “Whether the artist chooses to present the work as a book or
magazine or through an interview or with sticker labels or on billboards, it is not to be mistaken
for the ‘art’ (‘subject matter?’). . . . If it is made clear that the presentation of the work is not to be
confused with the work itself, then there can be no misreadings of it” (Seth Siegelaub, “On
Exhibitions and the World at Large,” Studio International 178 [Dec. 1969]: 202-3).
22. Rauschenberg’s contribution to an exhibition of portraits at the Galerie Iris Clert in Paris in
1951 was the telegraphed text: “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.”

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 Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2006 129
paintings) and, on the other, the objects these texts designate or lay claim
to; this claim is made in the relatively simple form of a phrase or declarative
sentence or injunction (explicit or implied) that effectively says, “The art
object under consideration is this hitherto non-art object.”
It may have seemed at the time that it would be possible simply to con-
tinue nominating in this way ad infinitum. A nonliteral subspecies of the
generic art object would thus be formed. In being nonliteral it would supply
a negative (minimalist?) value and in a figurative sense a dematerialization
because of the absence of the object referred to or nominated. In doing
this it would occupy a constructive niche in modernism’s negative dialectic
(a niche that the work of Lawrence Weiner, for example, might be thought
to have securely occupied). However, whether as wallpaper or as publica-
tion, such acts of nomination require a very particular act of charity on the
part of their readers or viewers, unlike work that represents the larger genus
of post-Duchampian objects. The artist makes, in general, the assumption
that his gnomic appropriation is somehow transparent to his interlocutors
and that the actual opacity of it can be waved away by the radicality of his
gesture. Certain intellectually and socially restrictive consequences follow:
the artist is likely to be limited to a range of publicly ostensible middle-sized
dry goods; successive gestures are likely to increase in banality; and what
follows is a tendency to abandon the critical virtues of the oscillating textual
form in favor of ever more Wagnerian graphic displays. This outcome drops
the artist firmly into the hands of institutional management, which oblit-
erates the work’s already faded dialectical history as it reduces that work to
a decoratively subarchitectural genre: installed in neon, on illuminated
hoardings, or as painted lettering across the facades of public buildings. In
furnishing material for spectacle, the nondiscursive appropriating gesture
thus completes a vicious circle. As thus conceived and practiced, conceptual
art risked a rapidly increasing banality in gestural content and a consequent
vulgarization of technical means.
As far as Art & Language was concerned, the excitement of the post-
minimal artwork-as-text was exhausted by 1968. On the one hand, in those
works in which the text itself came ready-made there seemed not to be
enough work to keep the producer intellectually awake. In the case of those
texts that were presented as quasi speech acts, on the other hand, there could
be little real progress made in the conversation that ensued from the nom-
inating or appropriating gesture. Rather, what gave the artwork in linguistic
form some projective potential was the realization that as soon as the ap-
propriative text was written (or rather typed), some debate necessarily
ensued as to the appropriate or natural condition in which it might be en-
countered: the page or the wall. If the work colonized the wall it seemed

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130 Art & Language / Reflections on Conceptual Art
possible that the text could provide some sort of equivalence to or be a
substitute for modernistic virtuality and flatness, while still satisfying the
critique of modernism’s unsustainable claim to technical (and historical)
continuity by reduction. What was of interest was not the tension between
the wall-mounted textual artwork and the notional object it picked out. The
potential for development was contained in the very oscillation. In other
words, the wall-mounted text seemed to preserve a baby of virtuality that
minimalist literalism had been about to throw out with the bathwater.

6
It transpired, then, that the dangers of increasing banality and vulgari-
zation might be avoided by recourse to a textual form that began life as an
artistically insecure object. This was a text that might indeed begin with
some kind of appropriative gesture towards a quasi readymade. But the ges-
ture in question was quickly subject to interrogation: What are we or you
talking about here and how are we or you doing it? As a consequence, the
gesture lost its appropriative character and itself took on the aspect of an
inquiry. There were other risks to be encountered, however; among them
was the risk that the putative art object at which the text seemed to want to
point would be lost in discursive opacity and erasure (or failure). But these
were risks that it seemed the artwork had to take if it were to recover an
agency that had been removed by the culture of the post-Duchampian ob-
ject, an agency that refused to hang around passively while the art world
and its instrumental operations decided what to say in ratification.
The vicious circle that returns to spectacle was avoided through the rec-
ognition of the potential opacity of the appropriative language and the
social life it implies, in seeing that the nominated object is not given trans-
parently in the artists’ speech or writings and that the latter are plugged into
a realm of differences that are made by the speech and writing of others.
The postminimalist object that had been figuratively dematerialized in the
virtuality of text was thus brought back to the dialectical reality of social life
and was in this sense subject to a rematerialization. In the process “my
work” tended either to be negated by or subsumed into “the work.”
It would be wrong to assume that the appropriative gesture (or decla-
ration) was immediately and explicitly subject to such social and con-
versational correction and complication. One started off with a fairly
conventional sense of the artist’s individuality and agency. The text was
initially conceived as a means to produce something like a way of seeing at
the artist’s behest; it was not the work but the medium of presentation.
There was the ostension and the thing being ostended: in Art & Language’s

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 Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2006 131
case, for instance, a description of a column of air and the column of air
itself;23 in Weiner’s a statement such as “A river spanned ”24 and a river some-
how spanned in actuality or in imagination. But it is true that the time of
such things was necessarily brief. The more extended and discursive the text,
the more inescapably it generated uncertainty concerning the transparency
of the ostensive gesture (or declaration) itself and thus, inter alia, concerning
the independence of the object in question, and the more distance it created
from those stereotypes of artistic agency—endemic to modernistpracticeand
ideology—in which the artist’s gesture is necessarily decisive, whether that
gesture results in a readymade or in an eight-foot-high abstract painting. In-
sofar as it made a public show of this uncertainty, what might be correctly
characterized as a merely reflexive—and in this sense putatively modernis-
tic—dialectic in fact served to expose what was normally hidden. To that
extent it embodied a decisive element of social critique.
While Buchloh is almost right to suggest that Art & Language (and Ko-
suth) understood the readymade in a manner that “foregrounded inten-
tional declaration over contextualisation,”25 he is thoroughly wrong, first,
to assume that what he calls declaration forms a contrasting pair with
contextualization and, second, to imply that declaration necessarily in-
volves transparency. Transparent or not, a perlocutionary act, or declara-
tion, implies a social context. If the transparency of the act is put in doubt,
then inquiry into the nature of that social context is unavoidably entailed.
The social context entails readers who may also be writers. In Art & Lan-
guage’s case, the lengthy text acts acquired readers. To read these works was
to put them to practical use. They were not literary texts but porous, open,
and discursive things constituting a new genre, a form that invited the
reader-as-writer’s intervention.
Text and hors-texte were thus rendered unstable forms in a genre that
was constantly menaced with disappearance or absurdity. The distribu-
tional mode of these texts was largely toward an erotesis that demanded a
reply. Insofar as it presumed a kind of conversational exchange, the genre
was critical of the distributional mode that sought to place an artistic fait
accompli before a large public at low cost: art through the mail, art on bill-
boards, and so on. In saying this, however, it should be noted that these were
texts (works), printed and circulated in various ways (through our own

23. This conjecture comprised the Air Show section of Frameworks.

24. This was Weiner’s contribution to “When Attitudes Become Form.” It was indicated by a
label on the wall, but no river was actually spanned.
25. Buchloh, “From the Aesthetics of Administration to Institutional Critique (Some Aspects
of Conceptual Art 1962–1969),” in L’Art conceptuel, p. 47.

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132 Art & Language / Reflections on Conceptual Art
journal, Art-Language, for instance), that were frequently unable to make
up their minds regarding the constructive agency of their interlocutors.
They were also forms that emerged amidst a host of other more or less dis-
cursive try ons, try outs, and emergency conditionals.26
Some examples of these transitional forms are found in the Art & Lan-
guage books Hot-Cold (1967) and 22 Sentences: The French Army (1967).
These are books whose logic is partly formed by the order in which pages
are turned. Hot-Cold raises a set of questions concerning relationalconcepts
of quality and quantity exemplified by the terms hot, cold, warm, and cool.
22 Sentences: The French Army examines the possible differentiae and iden-
tity conditions of a complex aggregate like the French army. (It would be,
incidentally, a French-speaking army that would contain an avant-garde.)
What is noticeable about these two books is that a dwindling vestige of the
declaration-to-unassisted-readymade remains. But, as we have said, the os-
tended readymade stands in danger of incremental banality as declaration
succeeds declaration. Hot-Cold and 22 Sentences: The French Army do in-
deed seem to ostend or to appropriate certain objects at their margins, but
these are objects whose ontologies are complex and fugitive. While Weiner’s
One Standard Dye Marker Thrown into the Sea may well be conceivable as
a concrete though not at all unassisted readymade, the thermodynamic
properties—or the qualities—of things (hot, cold, and so on) are virtually
impossible to gather into the fold of the readymade.27 The French army is
similarly an outlandish candidate for membership in that quasi-Duchampian
category. Neither object was capable of being appropriated as middle-sized
dry good or as a lump of physical geography. No empirically ostensible ob-
ject remained. Instead, there were processes and conditions in which certain
objects might be brought under description.
Of course, declaration and many other overtly ostensive forms had by
this time all but disappeared, being replaced by interrogatives, or by ordi-
nary declarative sentences that announced an intention to examine or to
consider a certain possibility. What had begun at the edges of the readymade
had by now passed through various transformations. The first of these
occurred as the declaration or ostending text began to supplant a literal
object that was now only to be imagined or entertained as a conjecture. One
such conjecture was raised in the editorial introduction to the first issue of

26. “This sense of permanent transition and instability brought us to what we called an
emergency conditional. The work was theory (or something) just in case it was art, and it was art
just in case it was theory. Could we say then, that in its strangeness it resonated with both?” (Art &
Language, “Emergency Conditionals,” paper given at Kings College, University of London, June
2004, at a conference entitled “Philosophy and Conceptual Art”).
27. See Lawrence Weiner, Statements (New York, 1968).

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 Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2006 133
Art-Language: “Suppose the following hypothesis is advanced: that this ed-
itorial, in itself an attempt to evince some outlines as to what ‘conceptual
art’ is, is held out as a ‘conceptual art’ work.”28 At moments such as this,
the text began to enter the margins of institutional theory itself, the cultural
discourse of some sort of art world. To begin with it remained as a mere
deposit or gesture.
The second transformation occurred as the text acquired a recursive or
discursive property. This property was acquired by virtue of certain often
undifferentiated and simultaneous tendencies: instrumentalism (different
operations define different concepts), essentialism (how you do your sin-
gling out determines what you single out), or a certain diffidence regarding
the possibility of an hors-texte (there is no object that escapes the discursive
text; the text will have to suffice). In other words, as more and more complex
or hard-to-describe objects fell within the “intended” quantificatory range
of artistic discourse, so these objects were captured within the forms of that
discourse itself.
As the discursivity of the text increased, so the remaining sense of it as
readymade-by-description-or-ostension weakened still further. Similarly,
as the text ceased to function as a form that usurped the place of painting
on the gallery wall, in the manner of one of Kosuth’s definitions, so the
legacy of the containing frame also diminished. As both effects weakened,
so did the power of those formal constraints on the length of the text that
characterized the supposedly definitive postminimal genres of conceptual
art as they were established in New York between 1967 and 1969. It was our
experience at this point that the lack of formal constraint on the extent of
the text allowed the mechanisms internal to its discursive production to take
over. What drove the discourse in practice was no longer the need to pro-
duce the brief illusions of transparency but those recursive and dialogical
processes by which the discourse itself was pursued and continued. This
was a crucial moment in the establishment of what might be described as
a new genre. Though we do not propose a label for this genre, its existence
is suggested by a question not normally provoked by any literary genre:
could one extend a text beyond the length of a characteristically postmin-
imalist label or a poster and, if so, then how far?
A work from 1969 called Sunnybank will serve to illustrate the point. The
gist is as follows: Consider the possibility of a work of art that is itself only
a possibility, a wall that might be built between one backyard and another.
There are no plans for such a wall, it is not necessarily envisaged. What then
is the nature of such an object? Its nature is to subsist in our manner of

28. Art & Language, “Introduction,” Art-Language 1 (May 1969): 1.

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134 Art & Language / Reflections on Conceptual Art
speaking. Thus driven largely from within, there is no a priori natural limit
to the extent of the text, which is now subject to social modes of augmen-
tation, growth, and change. The work of art, such as it is—or, rather, insofar
as the question of its status as art arises—now approaches an ontological
condition closer to performance than to any pretextual literal object. This is
not to say, of course, that it is literally performance. It is rather to say that the
work of art would be impossible to characterize without a sense of the social
conditions that are not merely its external determinants but its internally
constructive principles as well.
This is what we made out of the definitive genres of conceptual art. It
would be true to say, then, that for the purist this is also when we ceased to
produce conceptual art and that we had already begun a conversational
genre. To the historically orthodox, we have to say that the purist is correct.
For us, if conceptual art was to have a future, then it was not as conceptual
art and just as importantly not as the form of institutional critique that has
been named as conceptual art’s virtuous and exceptional exemplar.

7
The narrative that has just been given supplies no positive account of
distributive “democracy,” of dematerialization, or of any of the other over-
wrought fantasies of the conceptual art entrepreneur. It offers an account
that is not so much ignored by Buchloh, Krauss, and others as it is beyond
their empirical, historical, and analytical means. It is an account of the
production of an unstable object that eventually inaugurates a sense of a
new genre, but a genre that embraces a degree of hybridity and that can
finally neither lay claim to material and medium specificity nor decisively
rule it out.
If the concept of institutional critique is not to remain pickled in sen-
timent it will need to be retheorized in terms of works that have sufficient
intellectual agility and internality to put up a critical resistance to the in-
stitution as it mutates and develops. It is in this resistance that we may find
some vestige of the autonomy that was lost in the transfiguration of high
modernism into expensively framed money, lost again in the trajectory
from minimalist literalism to institutional critique, and lost once more in
the postmodern development of conceptual art into architectural adjunct.
The apparent tokenization of the work of art is an institutional effect, not
a prohibition against staying awake; nor, for that matter, is it a coercive
cultural condition, however powerful it may be.
Consider then, the idea of the work of art as an essay that gives form and
voice—often a ventriloquist’s voice—to a project. Consider further that this
form is a fragment lopped off from a conversation—a performance of sorts

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 Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2006 135
that is always under the pain of erasure, conceived as both form and social
reality. Finally, consider the possibility that “This is the work”/“I don’t think
so” is the work.
This is a genre that is readily spattered with material forms. An inter-
rogative and the discussion to which it gives rise may naturally invoke an
essay or a heuristic in the form of a picture. Insofar as the outcome is ex-
hibited it may be in the guise of a painting. But this is a painting that is in
fact a form cut off from a usually larger whole—in the manner perhaps of
a swatch or sample. And the picture may be of more than a thousand words
or of none.29 It will, if we are lucky or judicious, possess an internality or
autonomy that it owes to its discursive origin, even as it loses that autonomy
to the institution that frames it. It will be, as we have suggested, a perfor-
mance of sorts. It will indeed be “a strange quirk in the fate of Conceptual
art,” but then the form of conceptual art whence it came was itself strange.30
We might say even that the mode in which such things as paintings answer
to the discourse is one that approaches performance, as much perhaps as
the mode of answering that is made by the not quite rock ’n’ roll lyric. (We
have produced three LPs with The Red Crayola as well as a libretto for an
opera.) In painting, we act the part, up to the limit of imposture. There are
many possible positions to be occupied—one suspects a Xenoian infinity—
between the painter and the actors of the Jackson Pollock Bar, working to
a script by Art & Language, who have pretended to be Art & Language en-
gaged in painting—and who, in doing so, have produced a painting of their
own. These are positions as capable of embodying a near absence of cultural
guile as an iterative and recursive knowingness. Once the genre is bound to
its social use as discourse, there is little or no artistic identity to be lost—
only the displaced tokens and impostures from which contemporary art
fashions the episodes that keep capital interested.
Two putative artists and a putative art historian sat in a studio writing
this.

29. “A picture is not worth a thousand words, or any other number. Words are the wrong
currency to exchange for a picture” (Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” in On
Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks [Chicago, 1979], p. 45). But what if the picture is a thousand words?
30. See Krauss, “Art & Language Turns to Painting: A Strange Quirk in the Fate of Conceptual
Art,” Art Press hors série no. 16 (1995). Our response was published in abbreviated form as
“Rosalind Krauss: Un petard mouillé,” Art Press hors série no. 17 (1996), and in full as “Northanger
Abbey,” Art-Language, n. s. no. 2 (June 1997).

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