The concept of art when art is not a concept

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Notes

1. Deleuze and Guattari's use of “dematerialization” refers to Lucy Lippard's early connection of the term to Conceptual art practices in Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” in Art International (Feb. 1968), and later in Lippard's better known Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972.

2. Steinberg argues that Duchamp is perhaps “the most vital source” (85) for the “flatbed” plane, and that in its primary example – the work of Robert Rauschenberg – this surface “stood for the mind itself” (88) and not least the banality of its processes and products (90). All these themes are relevant to Deleuze and Guattari's rejection of conceptual art.

3. These two receptions of Duchamp's readymade in Conceptual art, as well as Deleuze and Guattari's objection to them, had already been laid out in Benjamin Buchloh's seminal essay “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions” in October 55 (winter 1990). Given that an earlier version of Buchloh's essay had appeared in the catalogue to an important exhibition of Conceptual art at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville in Paris in 1989, it is not surprising that Deleuze and Guattari appear so familiar with these issues in What is Philosophy? This could also be the reason for the fact that this attack on Duchampian strategies marks a departure from Deleuze and Guattari's previously published remarks. Deleuze had evoked Duchamp's assisted readymade L.H.O.O.Q. in the preface to Difference and Repetition (xxi) as a forerunner of his own form of ventriloquised philosophy, and more significantly Guattari had favourably discussed the Bottlerack in Cartographies Schizoanalytiques (translated as “Ritournellos and Existential Affects” in The Guattari Reader) and quoted Duchamp in Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (100–01) in support of his ethico-aesthetic paradigm. For a discussion of the problems with Guattari's use of Duchamp see Éric Alliez, “Rewriting Postmodernity (Notes),” and chapter 5 in my Art as Abstract Machine. For a general overview of the problems and positions in the intensely debated field of Conceptual art's Duchamp reception, see the Roundtable discussion “Conceptual Art and the Reception of Duchamp” in October 70 (fall 1994).

4. “For the artist,” Kosuth writes, “as an analyst, is not directly concerned with the physical properties of things. He is concerned only with the way (1) in which art is capable of conceptual growth and (2) how his propositions are capable of logically following that growth” (20). This is a very clear echo of Ayer: “For the philosopher, as an analyst, is not directly concerned with the physical properties of things. He is concerned only with the way in which we speak about them” (Ayer 57).

5. Deleuze and Guattari argue that in scientific discourse “enunciation remains external to the proposition because the latter's object is a state of affairs as referent, and the references that constitute truth values as its conditions (even if, for their part, these conditions are internal to the object)” (What is Philosophy? 23). This is, in effect, the way the concept operates in LeWitt's work.

6. Guattari is attacking the “postmodernists,” a designation traceable to the late 1960s, whose

• views are directly in keeping with the modernist tradition of structuralism, whose influence on the human sciences appears to have been a carry-over from the worst aspects of Anglo-American systematization. The secret link that binds these various doctrines, I believe, stems from a subterranean relationship – marked by reductionist conceptions, and conveyed immediately after the war by information theory and new cybernetic research. (Guattari, “The Postmodern Impasse” 111)

7. “Information” was such a widely used term amongst conceptual artists that the major survey show of Conceptual art held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1970 took that name.

8. Once more Deleuze and Guattari are quite precise: “a thing, its photograph on the same scale and in the same place, its dictionary definition” (What is Philosophy? 198).

9. Examples would be: art indiscernible from the ordinary perceptions and affections of the viewer – John Baldessari's The Back of All the Trucks Passed While Driving from L.A. to Santa Barbara, California, Sunday 20 January, 1963; art where the concept is reduced to a proposition stating an opinion – Cildo Meireles’ Insertions into Ideological Circuits (1970); and art as a doxa confirming the generic subject of urban American social life – On Kawera's I’m Still Alive postcard project begun in the late 1960s.

10. Interview with Seth Siegelaub, 17 Apr. 1969 (Alberro and Norvell 40). It is interesting to note that at the other extreme, but for similar reasons, Deleuze and Guattari also reject the phenomenological project for painting, which would attempt to assimilate sensation to an “original opinion” or “Urdoxa.” This would be to find in affects and percepts “a priori materials” that transcend the affections and perceptions of the lived (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 178). This would summarise the necessity of art to the phenomenological account, as the operative element that expressed a transcendental subject determining experience in general by constructing sensations as lived experience. This argument is fully developed by Deleuze in Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation, and finally means his rejection of a phenomenological flesh as a metaphor for incarnation that retains a transcendental commitment. Flesh as the “developer” (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 183) of transcendental ideas remains “too pious” (178) and will be replaced by Artaud's flesh of the Body without Organs (Deleuze, Francis Bacon 34–35).

11. This is once more perfectly articulated by the laconic Siegelaub: “I mean art is obviously beginning to reach out into provinces we thought were just, you know, life's” (Alberro and Norvell 41).

12. The exhibitions and articles in which art's relation to Systems theory and new technology were explored are too many to list here. Worth mentioning is the exhibition curated by Jack Burnham, one of the most intelligent proponents of system-based art, “Software: Information Technology: Its Meaning for the Arts,” held at the Jewish Museum, New York, in 1970. Burnham wrote in the catalogue that the exhibition “demonstrates the control and communication technologies in the hands of the artists.” Interestingly, this statement is echoed in Guattari's affirmation of a strategic “reappropriation of communications and data processing technologies” to produce, among other things, “a re-singularization of mechanically mediated means of expression” (Guattari, “The Postmodern Impasse” 113). The question remains, however, whether Conceptual art's “reappropriation” succeeded.

13. Conceptual artists found much in common with Marshall McLuhan, the prophet of the information age, when he wrote in 1967: “At the high speeds of electric communication, purely visual means of apprehending the world are no longer possible; they are just too slow to be relevant or effective.” Beyond the visual, at least for the conceptual artists, lay the word, and through it art as information was plugged into the new “global village” (McLuhan 63).

14. Despite Conceptual art's clear rejection of Greenberg's materialism and his emphasis on vision, its relation to Greenberg's definition of Modernism as a Kantian self-criticism is a more complex one. It is commonly argued that Kosuth's “Art as Idea as Idea” marks the final conclusion of the Modernist desire for aesthetic “purity.” Similarly, Kosuth's insistence on the artistic gesture, or concept, as the authorial basis of aesthetic expression suggests a certain continuity with Greenberg's theories. Deleuze and Guattari's relation to Greenberg and Fried's work is also ambiguous. On the one hand there is sometimes a tacit acceptance of their terms (for example the final footnote of the Smooth and the Striated chapter in A Thousand Plateaus, which is to Fried), and a disavowal of differences (Deleuze's claim that his disagreement with Greenberg is merely “an ambiguity over words” (Deleuze, Francis Bacon 107)). On the other there is a clearly irreconcilable difference over the Modernist dematerialisation of sensation in vision, and the transcendental aesthetic Greenberg takes from Kant. For a more detailed discussion of this problem see Zepke, chapters 4 and 5.

15. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri suggest a political project in which “being against becomes the essential key to every active political position in the world” (Empire 211). As Paolo Virno writes: “The political action of the Exodus consists, therefore, in an engaged withdrawal,” a withdrawal that will found a new republic against the State (Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution” 197).

16. Weiner attempts to express class solidarity with this piece, claiming that the reason it is sprayed onto the floor is because that is how a car-painter does it. From this point of view, spraying on the wall is an “unnatural act.” See the interview with Weiner in Alberro and Norvell (106).

17. This could be a hilariously extreme attitude. Lawrence Weiner, for example, claimed that not going outside to execute one of his pieces because it was snowing would be a kind of “expressionism.” See the interview with Weiner in Alberro and Norvell (106).

18. For a useful account of the corporate embrace of Conceptual art see Alberro (Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity, chapter 1: “Art, Advertising, Sign Value”).

19. This is a reading of Conceptual art that is widespread in the literature, and emerged as early as Lucy Lippard's “Postface” to Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 from 1973. While Buchloh writes that Conceptual art “mimed the operating logic of late capitalism and its positivist instrumentality,” he argues that it did so with the aim of “liquidating even the last remnants of traditional aesthetic experience” (Buchloh 142–43). Alexander Alberro states more categorically that the idea that “the political economy of conceptual art sought to eliminate the commodity status of the art object, while highly provocative, is mythical” (Alberro 4).

20. Boris Groys has argued that Conceptual art's “embodiment of pure negativity” was the completion and extreme radicalisation of the historical avant-garde, and that this radicalisation was what paradoxically pushed it into the arms of a late capitalist and “post-revolutionary” logic. Groys invokes Hegel's definition of post-revolutionary society as a description of Conceptual art: the defining of rational goals, procedures and strategies to its members, and a demand for explanations, justifications and precise plans (Groys, “The Mimesis of Thinking” 54).

21. As Guattari argues: “Artistic assemblages will have to organise themselves so as not to be delivered, bound hand and foot, to a financial market” (Chaosmosis 124).

22. Indeed Boris Groys has suggested, and here I agree, that “art documentation as an art form [i.e., as it arose in relation to conceptual practices] could only develop under the conditions of today's biopolitical age, in which life itself has become the object of technical and artistic intervention” (“Art in the Age of Biopolitics” 108).

23. Virno writes that “in order for ‘mass intellectuality’ to enter the political scene and destroy what deserves to be destroyed, it cannot limit itself to a series of refusals, but beginning with itself it must exemplify positively through construction and experimentation what men and women can do outside the capitalist relationship” (“Do You Remember Counterrevolution?” 225).

24. Johanna Burton suggests that “recourse to ‘systems’ enabled rather than denied access to the rhizomatic, perpetually variable and vehemently nonlinear” (67).

25. The most interesting of these readings comes from Howard Slater, who argues that Conceptual art enables “a rejection of the a priori identity of art that, as it crosses the social field becomes more and more distant from the art institution until it materialises cultural relationships and social relations that can be enacted upon as a social object.” This would be the condition for gaining control of the administrative apparatus, or, as Slater has it, of the “means of expression” (Slater n.p.). Similarly Brian Holmes has argued that the counter-globalisation movement's innovative use of the Internet was “a kind of autonomous, do-it-yourself conceptualism” that worked “in perfect accord with Lawrence Weiner's famous dictums, the work could be carried out by the initial authors of the ideas, realized by others, or not done at all – something like a taste of planetary exchange, where the ‘art’ is ‘totally free’” (Holmes 176).

26. In Empire Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri seem unable to produce any positive description of the world beyond Empire. Their insistence on “being against” as the fundamental political strategy compels them to argue that any positive constructions in fact defeat their purpose, for even when they

• manage to touch on the productive, ontological dimension of the problematic and the resistances that arise there […] we will still not be in the position […] to point to any already existing and concrete elaboration of a political alternative to Empire. And no such effective blueprint will ever arise from a theoretical articulation such as ours. It will arise only in practice. (399–400)

27. This would be a readymade in the spirit of Deleuze's Duchampian suggestion of producing a “philosophically clean-shaven Marx” (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition xxi).

28. As Duchamp said: “I believe that art is the only kind of activity in which man, as man, shows himself to be a true individual capable of going beyond the animal phase” (137).