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Abstract
This article discusses the concepts of document and documentation in Douglas Huebler’s (1924–1997) work of the late 1960s in order to assess the role of referentiality and subject matter within conceptualism more broadly. It examines the complex form and function of documents in his Location Pieces and establishes documentation as the zone of encounter between an artistic concept, proposal, or system, and the outside world. Focusing on the essential role of photographic images in his pieces affords new analysis of Huebler’s practice. Central to that practice was the tension between the photograph as an allegedly neutral document – an idea deeply rooted in the history of photographic discourse – and its critical as well as aesthetic potential.
Acknowledgments
This article was written during my time as a Volkswagen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles in 2015/16. I would like to express my sincere thanks to both institutions; to Regine Ehleiter, Sarah McGavran, Kavior Moon, Jessica Santone, and Bert Winther-Tamaki for their insightful comments on the manuscript; and finally to Darcy Huebler and the Estate of Douglas Huebler, represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, for their generosity in granting image rights.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Liz Kotz, “Huebler in Transition, 1968” (unpublished draft, 2015). I am grateful to Liz Kotz for sharing that text, which has been very inspirational for my research. For November 1968, see also Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 72–80.
2 Douglas Huebler, November 1968 (New York: Seth Siegelaub, 1968), n.p. In addition to these “sculptures,” four drawings were listed as a separate category.
3 Stephen Melville, “Aspects,” in Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965–1975, ed. Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer, exhibition catalog (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995), 241. See also Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Michael Asher and the Conclusion of Modernist Sculpture,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 10 (1983): 276–95; Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 30–44.
4 Douglas Huebler and Frédéric Paul, “Truro, Massachussetts, October 11–14, 1992,” in Douglas Huebler, “Variable”, etc., ed. Frédéric Paul, exhibition catalog (Limoges: FRAC Limousin, 1992), 130.
5 Seth Siegelaub, ed., January 5–31, 1969, exhibition catalog (New York: Seth Siegelaub, 1969), n.p.
6 In Barry's case, the page reserved for the statement is left blank.
7 Lawrence Alloway, “Artists and Photographs [1970],” in his Topics in American Art since 1945 (New York: Norton, 1975), 202.
8 Nancy Foote, “The Anti-Photographers,” Artforum 15, no. 1 (September 1976): 46.
9 Ibid., 48.
10 Alexander Alberro, “At the Treshold of Art as Information,” in Recording Conceptual Art: Early Interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson, Weiner, ed. Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 2.
11 I would like to point here to the work of Alexander Alberro, Heather Diack, Liz Kotz, Robert Morgan, and Anne Rorimer, which will be referred to throughout this article. See other endnotes for individual citations.
12 Huebler, November 1968, n.p.
13 Huebler, November 1968, n.p. Within the booklet, the piece is constantly referred to as “New York-Boston Exchange Shape,” i.e. with the names of the two cities inversed.
14 Boston – New York Exchange Shape is part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Here, a road map of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island (with New York City at its very margin) was added to locate the two cities. The photographs are slightly different from the ones published in November 1968: http://www.moma.org/collection/works/137399 (accessed June 30, 2016). See Lucy R. Lippard, “Douglas Huebler: Everything about Everything,” Art News 71 (December 1972): 29, on the co-existence of different versions of some pieces. Andrew P. Cappetta has discussed the museological consequences of such issues in his conference paper: “Reconstructing Douglas Huebler” (College Art Association 103rd Annual Conference, Panel: Preserving the Artistic Legacies of the 1960s and 1970s, New York, February 2015).
15 Anne Rorimer, New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001), 136.
16 Alberro, “At the Treshold of Art as Information,” 6. See also Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, “Documentation as Art in Artists’ Books and Other Artists’ Publications: Art versus Documentation? Terms of a Paradox,” in Artists’ Publications. Ein Genre und seine Erschließung, ed. Sigrid Schade and Anne Thurmann-Jajes (Cologne: Salon-Verlag, 2009), 40–42; Tom Holert, “Land Art's Multiple Sites,” in Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974, organized by Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon, exhibition catalog (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art; Munich: Prestel, 2012), 96–117.
17 Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International 12, no. 2 (February 1968): 31–36. Petra Lange-Berndt has rightly pointed out that Lippard's and Chandler's aim in introducing the term in 1968 “was not … to dispense with materials but instead to redefine and update the category.” Petra Lange-Berndt, “Introduction: How to Be Complicit with Materials,” in Materiality, ed. Petra Lange-Berndt, Documents of Contemporary Art Series (London: Whitechapel Gallery; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 19.
18 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); Johanna Drucker, “The Crux of Conceptualism: Conceptual Art, the Idea of Idea, and the Information Paradigm,” in Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice, ed. Michael Corris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 253.
19 See Frances Colpitt, “The Formalist Connection and Originary Myths of Conceptual Art,” in Corris, Conceptual Art, 28–49.
20 Drucker, “The Crux of Conceptualism,” 267, n. 4.
21 Lucy Soutter, “The Visual Idea. Photography in Conceptual Art” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2001), 123.
22 Sophie Cras, “Global Conceptualism? Cartographies of Conceptual Art in Pursuit of Decentering,” in Circulations in the Global History of Art, ed. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann et al. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 172–3; 178.
23 Norvell, “Douglas Huebler, July 25, 1969,” in Alberro and Norvell, Recording Conceptual Art, 139.
24 Ibid., 146.
25 “When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art. … Conceptual art is not necessarily logical. The logic of a piece or series of pieces is a device that is used at times only to be ruined. … Ideas are discovered by intuition.” Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967): 80. For the irrational dimension in LeWitt's art and the importance of intuition as method, see Sabeth Buchmann, Denken Gegen das Denken: Produktion, Technologie, Subjektivität bei Sol LeWitt, Yvonne Rainer und Hélio Oiticica (Berlin: b_books, 2007), 48–54; see also Rosalind Krauss, “LeWitt in Progress,” October 6 (Fall 1978): 46–60.
26 “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. … Irrational judgements lead to new experience.” Sol LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” Art-Language 1, no. 1 (May 1969): 11.
27 Norvell, “Douglas Huebler, July 25, 1969,” 139: “I began to get into the whole notion of language, the convention of language as a way by which we read … or conceptualize our experience.”
28 Norvell, “Douglas Huebler, July 25, 1969,” 146. The second ellipses are from the original quote.
29 Liz Kotz, Words To Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 232; Melville, “Aspects,” 231–6; Robert C. Morgan, “Huebler's Phenomenology,” in Paul, Douglas Huebler, “Variable”, etc., 188–94. For positions that argue how the larger project of (North American) Conceptual art must still be understood in terms of the social and political protests of the time, see Lucy R. Lippard, “Escape Attempts,” in Goldstein and Rorimer, Reconsidering the Object of Art, 16–39; Seth Siegelaub's reply to Benjamin Buchloh in October 57 (Summer 1991): 155–57, as part of Joseph Kosuth and Seth Siegelaub, “Replies to Benjamin Buchloh on Conceptual Art”; Blake Stimson, “The Promise of Conceptual Art,” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), xxxviii–lii.
30 Douglas Huebler, “Sabotage or Trophy? Advance or Retreat?” Artforum 20, no. 9 (May 1982): 76.
31 Rorimer, New Art in the 60s and 70s, 137.
32 Prospect 69: Katalog-Zeitung zur internationalen Vorschau auf die Kunst in der Galerie der Avantgarde, exhibition catalog (Düsseldorf: Städtische Kunsthalle, 1969), 26.
33 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Winning the Game When the Rules Have Been Changed: Art Photography and Postmodernism,” in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (London: Routledge, 2003), 155. See also Foote, “The Anti-Photographers,” for that relation.
34 Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). See also Thomas Crow, “Unwritten Histories of Conceptual Art: Against Visual Culture,” in Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1996), 213; Robert C. Morgan, Conceptual Art: An American Perspective (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1984), 105.
35 Norvell, “Douglas Huebler, July 25, 1969,” 142: “If there's anything that I really can say is part of my work, at least, it's to take the notion that appearance itself carries aesthetic value, or art value, I should say … I’m not talking about real experience – I mean real visual experience, where I might choose to look at one kind of thing over another kind of thing in the world just because my responses are that way. I’m talking about art using appearance – using certain color structures, certain notions of composition and so forth. … But I am certain that art is not limited to being something that's located at the end of your eyeballs, you know.”
36 Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 107; Charles Harrison, Essays on Art & Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 29.
37 Norvell, “Douglas Huebler, July 25, 1969,” 140. This statement refers to Location Piece #5, which will be discussed below.
38 Alan Fern, “Documentation, Art, and the Nineteenth-Century Photograph,” in The Documentary Photograph as a Work of Art: American Photographs, 1860–1876, ed. Joel Snyder and Doug Munson, exhibition catalog (Chicago: Smart Gallery, 1976), 11.
39 Timm Starl, “Dokumentarische Fotografie,” in Begriffslexikon zur zeitgenössischen Kunst, ed. Hubertus Butin (Cologne: Snoeck, 2014), 73; William R. Alschuler, “Leon Vidal,” in Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography, ed. John Hannavy, vol. 2 (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2008), 1448–9.
40 Albert Londe, La photographie moderne (Paris: Masson, 1888), 157: “Par photographie documentaire, nous entendons toutes les applications où la photographie n’est qu’une copiste fidèle, rigoureusement exacte.” This and all following translations are by the author.
41 Londe, La photographie moderne, 1: “elle est devenue l’auxiliaire indispensable de toutes les sciences où la précision documentaire est nécéssaire.”
42 Londe, La photographie moderne, 2: “pour les artistes, une mine des documents.”
43 Molly Nesbit, “Eugène Atget,” in A New History of Photography, ed. Michel Frizot (Cologne: Könemann, 1999), 400. See also Rosalind Krauss, “Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View,” Art Journal 42, no. 4 (Winter 1982): 317–18; Sophie Berrebi, The Shape of Evidence: Contemporary Art and the Document (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2014), 17. See Erin Silver's review in this volume.
44 Nesbit, “Eugène Atget,” 401.
45 Molly Nesbit, Atget's Seven Albums (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 15.
46 All these quotes are taken from the statements cited above.
47 Alloway, “Artists and Photographs.”
48 Douglas Huebler, Location Piece #2 (New York: Multiples, Inc., 1970).
49 Melanie Mariño, “Dumb Documents. Uses of Photography in American Conceptual Art, 1959–1969” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2002), 245 (here with regard to one of the pieces in January 5–31, 1969).
50 Walt Crowley, Rites of Passage: A Memoir of the Sixties in Seattle (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 269; Jeff Stevens, “May 4, 1969: Hit the Highway, Freeway,” Seattle Star, May 4, 2016, http://www.seattlestar.net/2016/05/may-4-1969-hit-the-highway-freeway. In 1971, the plan was finally dropped. The “ramps to nowhere” (or “ghost ramps”) are currently being removed.
51 I am grateful to Darcy Huebler for this information.
52 Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, Esthétique du livre d’artiste 1960–1980: Une introduction à l’art contemporain, rev. ed. (Marseille: Le Mot et le Reste, 2011), 153: “images vides, sans interêt, et qui auraient pu être faites dans n’importe quelle ville.”
53 Robert C. Morgan, Art into Ideas: Essays on Conceptual Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 166; 169: “Huebler … has made an important comment about the limitations of photography in manufacturing an accurate view of reality when left without a textual counterpart to fill the visual threshold between representation and deceit.”
54 “The ‘product’ of art is not its issue: the fabrication of meaning is the issue and may be read back from the observation statements that form the product.” Sonsbeek ’71: Sonsbeek Buiten de Perken, ed. Gert van Beijeren, exhibition catalog (Deventer: De Ijssel, 1971), 141 (original emphasis).
55 See Phyllis Plous, “Speaking to Contemporary Culture: Notes and Excavations,” in Phyllis Plous and Frances Colpitt, Knowledge: Aspects of Conceptual Art, exhibition catalog (Santa Barbara: University Art Museum; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992), 62, for Conceptualism's “emphasis on systems for the production of cultural rather than personal meanings.”
56 Brecht on Film and Radio, ed. and trans. Marc Silberman (London: Methuen, 2000), 164.
57 Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography [1931],” trans. Stanley Mitchell, Screen 13, no. 1 (March 1, 1972): 25. Sections of Benjamin's essay are also devoted to Atget's photographs, which he compared “with those of a scene of action” in the section directly following my quote.
58 Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 15–31. See also Kotz, Words To Be Looked At, 218.
59 Douglas Huebler, in Origin and Destination. Alighiero e Boetti, Douglas Huebler, ed. Marianne van Leeuw and Anne Pontégnie, exhibition catalog (Brussels: Société des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, 1997), 134.
60 Mike Kelley, “Shall We Kill Daddy?” in Van Leeuw and Pontégnie, Origin and Destination, 156. For the biographical information, see Kenneth Reich, “Obituary: Douglas Huebler; Artist Helped Start Conceptualism,” Los Angeles Times, July 15, 1997.
61 Rorimer, New Art in the 60s and 70s, 139.
62 Norvell, “Douglas Huebler, July 25, 1969,” 139–40.
63 Rosalind Krauss, “Stieglitz/Equivalents,” October 11 (Winter 1979): 134–5.
64 Ibid., 133.
65 Heather Diack, “The Benefit of the Doubt. Regarding the Photographic Conditions of Conceptual Art, 1966-73” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2010), 128; Joshua Shannon, “Uninteresting Pictures: Photography and Fact at the End of the 1960s,” in Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1967–1977, ed. Matthew S. Witkovsky, exhibition catalog (Chicago: Art Institute, 2012), 91. Both Diack and Shannon have pointed to the relation between Stieglitz's Equivalents and a different work by Huebler, Location Piece #1, New York – Los Angeles (1969), where photographs of the cloudy sky down from the plane window were taken on a flight between the two cities. For Diack (128), “[i]n recalling Stieglitz's interest in ‘Equivalents,’ … Huebler is demonstrating his acute awareness of photographic history.”
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Christian Berger
CHRISTIAN BERGER is a research fellow and lecturer at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. He received his MA and PhD in Art History from Freie Universität Berlin, was a fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and at the Centre Allemand d’Histoire de l'Art in Paris, and a research fellow and lecturer at Philipps-Universität Marburg. His scholarly interests focus on modern and contemporary art with specializations on Conceptualism of the 1960s and 1970s as well as on nineteenth-century French art. He has published a book on repetition and experiment as artistic strategies in the work of Edgar Degas (Wiederholung und Experiment bei Edgar Degas, Reimer, 2014) and articles in journals such as Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, as well as in conference volumes and exhibition catalogs. His postdoctoral research project addresses questions of materiality and referentiality in Conceptualism.