The Contractual Aesthetics of Sharecropping in Black Conceptualism

ABSTRACT

The impersonal legal language of contracts, termed the “aesthetic of administration” by Benjamin Buchloh, has had a strong impact on postwar conceptualist art. In the U.S., however, a two-tiered legal system explicitly existed from before the founding of the republic up through the end of Jim Crow, and, implicit in so-called “colorblind” legal discourse, continue to exist. Without claiming an exclusive status for Black conceptualist art, Black artists often employ a critical approach to the universalism assumed by the analytical ethos of conceptualism. Making use of text and performance, the works of artists Adrian Piper, Charles Gaines, William Pope.L, Glenn Ligon, and Cameron Rowland offer an archive of nuanced operationalised language. The hybrid practices of artists like Rick Lowe and Martine Syms spill over into curation, signalling an emphasis on administration as an avenue for accruing cultural capital. Black conceptual artists and Black curators can be framed within a history linked not to identity per se, but to a skepticism that expands and enriches the conceptualist tradition, while suggesting a need to transform systems by which cultural recognition is allocated.

KEYWORDS:

• Conceptual art
• Adrian Piper
• Charles Gaines
• Cameron Rowland
• Glenn Ligon
• William Pope.L
• Black contemporary art
• law and art

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Marcel Duchamp's “readymades” marked a landmark moment in modern art, when the artist asserted the ability to transform the status of everyday objects simply by the act of placing them in the context of an art exhibition. On the theme of appropriation and expropriation, it is worthy of note that Duchamp's most iconic readymade, a urinal entitled Fountain (1917), has been attributed by many historians to a woman artist, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.