(Yes, a review of an art exhibition that's actually still on!)
”Conceptual art was a
critical art rather than a contemplative one – not necessarily for
looking at, but for analysing or for reading.”
- From the indicia
”No Rhapsody Here”
Things you will see if you attend this
show...
Art made from non-art or even
perishable materials, such as oranges, sand and ice. Photography, but
clearly intended as documentation rather than as artform. Sometimes
documenting the perishable stuff before it... well, perishes. (See
for example Bruce McLean's 'Six Sculptures'
(1967/9) below.) More widely, a focus on the paraphernalia of
recording - on reports, on filing drawers and card index systems.
Documentation as a thing in itself, often at the expense of what's
being documented.
Hamish Fulton's 'Hitching
Times From London to Andorra, And From Andorra to London'
(1967), rather than give us photos or sketches of his trip, provides
a dryly typed list of the time it took him to get from one place to
another. For 'The Spring Recordings', (1972) David
Tremlett took field recordings of spring sounds from each of the
eighty-one English counties. The eighty-one cassettes are displayed
lined up neatly on a shelf, with a sign to helpfully tell us what
they are. And with no means for us to hear them.
But what you will really
come across is text. Reams and reams of the stuff. Normally in bold
geometric fonts, as if serifs weren't considered sufficiently
rigorous. The group Art and Language, in the show's words, “echoed
the conventions, format and content of academic philosophical
journals”. No. 1 of Vol. 3 of their journal was headlined 'Draft
for an Anti-Textbook' (1974, below).
Some works come ready-built with their
own indicia. While others effectively are their
own indicia, words in a frame or just thrown up on a wall. With both,
of course, the show then recursively slaps their own
indicia on. The show comes to look like the largest and most
comprehensive optician's eye test in recorded history.
Okay... so... what do we make of all of
this?
Reviews of the show, which were almost
universally negative, focused on it's dour tone, it's monochrome
look, on those uninviting chunks of text. Adrian Searle in the Guardian called it “uptight... bleak...
pleasureless... [and leaving] a taste of ashes”. And it's true, it
does have a similar hair-shirt tone to the Godard films of this era.
You know, the ones with the five-minute shots of someone eating an
apple at the camera while someone else recites Marx. Even the dates
it gives in its title are unrounded and unwieldy. It's like it has a
disdain for the digestible, like it's decided it'll best gain
attention by scraping it's nails down a blackboard. As Art and
Language proudly declare, “there is no rhapsody here”.
But beneath the dry deadpan surface
there's traces of an impish humour, as if all this is a mischievous
provocation. The show's quoting Marcel Duchamp's “art of the mind”
as an influence before we've even got in the door, and his philosophically pranksterish brand of Dada does seem a
strong influence.
Keith Arnatt's 'Self
Burial' (1969, above), is made up of a time lapse series of
photos in which the artist, maintaining an identical pose, sinks
deeper and deeper into the ground. It couldn't be closer to Duchamp's
mission statement to “annihilate the ego of the artist”. Ian
Burn's 'Mirror Piece' (1967), quite adequately
described by it's title, is one of those works which comes with it's
own indica. Which also seems to be channelling Duchamp, stating “any
of the materials may be replaced at any time necessary/The technique
of assembly must be devoid of any interest/ the process is to be
simple and ordinary.”
Because this is conceptual art of a
particular kind. It's not art in service to a big idea, with anything
not conveying that idea in the most direct way possible dismissed as
irrelevant. It's concept is art, which is another
way of saying it's concept is itself. And it exists not to clearly
convey that concept but confound the brain. It doesn't seek to make
art in new ways, but corrode the art already made. This is the King
exposing himself in your face and defying you to claim he's wearing
clothes.
It's true some of Duchamp's chief
strategies, such as the use of the random, aren't particularly taken
up. But the main way they differ from him is by taking it further.
He, for the most part, used objects as art. He didn't use art
objects as art, but found objects or assemblages of non-art
materials. But times had moved on. Anthony Caro, for example, would
make his sculptures from any old bits of metal, not necessarily the
'classical' bronze. So the conceptualists mounted an attack on the
art object in itself.
As Joseph Kosuth said in 1969: “Being
an artist now means to question the nature of art. If one is
questioning the nature of painting, one cannot be questioning the
nature of art... Painting is a kind of art. If you
are painting you are already accepting the nature of art.”
Toppling the Plinths
And those dates in the title, however
unwieldy, tell all. By the Sixties Modernism was no longer the wild
child but the steady parent. As seen in
the earlier 'Out There' show at Somerset House, local authorities by that point had a budget
to stick modernist statues up in shopping centres and around housing
estates. People now knew what it was and where to find it. It had
triumphed. Which of course meant it was time to depose it.
As Richard Cork said, looking back on
this era: “It was extraordinary; everything was being questioned,
everything opening up, nothing was sacred at all. And all the work
you had grown up thinking was revolutionary, like Caro, all that was
being superseded.” Caro seems to have been a particular target,
which suits me as I've never taken to his work. But Moore and
Hepworth, in fact pretty much everybody seen in 'Out
There', were doubtless in the sights too.
Take for example Bruce McLean's
'Pose Work For Plinths' (1971, above) in which the
artist improbably substitutes himself for his artwork. In some
pictures he does valiantly seem to be trying to pose, but in others
he's more trying to settle back on them like into the world's worst
sofa. The repeat images become like a kind of cartoon strip which
betrays how impossible this task is, as he tosses and turns in
different failed combinations.
This time the joke's so visible you
almost need to look past it for the point. The differently-sized
plinths stand for art removed from it's environment, possibly for
hierarchy in general. They stand not just for all the plinths in all
the galleries, but all the perspex vitrines, the little bits of red
rope and watchful attendants. Those plinths need to be toppled.
But, inevitably, it may have been not
an artist but art theorist Clement Greenberg (champion of American
Abstract Expressionism) who functioned as their main Aunt Sally. John
Latham borrowed a copy of his 'Art and Culture'
from the St. Martins College library, held a party where guests were
encouraged to chew and spit out it's pages, collected these in a jar
then sought to return it. His contract was instead suspended.
But the attack was not always so
direct. The show says “placing and context for the artwork were
seen as key issues”. And this was true in both the immediate and
the general sense. Once people figured they knew what a Modernist
artwork was, making those elements absent was to deliberately
with-hold them. And conscious with-holding starts to take on an
almost totemic force. What's not there matters as
much as what is.
Art and Language's Terry Atkinson and
Michael Baldwin provide two anti-maps, 'Map of a Thirty-Six
Square Mile Surface Area of Pacific Ocean, West of Oahu'
(1967). It's entirely accurate but, being just of the surface of the
ocean, entirely blank. While the somewhat gloriously titled 'Map
Not To Indicate' (1967, below) is of the United States, but
showing only the states of Iowa and Kentucky. (Chosen, I suspect,
because both have borders which are simple straight lines.) Keith
Arnatt even called a work 'Art As An Act of Omission'
(1971).
“Artists were making blank films,”
said Lucy Lippard in 1969. “They locked galleries and practiced
doing nothing. They were denying conventional art by emphasising
emptiness, cancellation, the vacuum, the void, the dematerialised,
the invisible.” (Most probably about the similar American scene,
but it's too good not to quote.)
Art is Language
The second big influence, at least as
big as Duchamp, doesn't get mentioned by the show at all. Which is
probably because it wasn't itself an art movement. But then
Conceptualism was almost unique in being an art movement based in art
schools and academia. Normally, you went to art school only if you
wanted to join a band. Not here. Art and Language for example were
based at Coventry College of Art.
And they picked up on the then-current
academic interest in Structuralism and – increasingly, as the
Sixties progressed – Post-Structuralism. This was the notion that
language was not just slippery or open to abuse. It contended that
what language really described was itself, it was
a self-referential, self-defining system. Language was not a neutral
labelling device, providing tags by which we might describe the
world, but a mechanism by which we impose meanings upon it.
We're used to the idea of
institutionalisation, of how a powerful organisation can not just win
people's compliance but shape their thinking to its moulds. We're
used to the idea of this being achieved partly through language, by
devising terminology that people inevitably then adopt. Get them to
talk your talk and you're almost there. But this, it was contended,
was inherent - language always worked that way.
And more, it threw open the definition
of language - seeing it as a system of signs. The clothes you wear,
they're a language where you 'say' something about yourself to the
world. Road signs and traffic lights? Language. And visual art?
Language, too. Art, in seeming to spring from the individual genius
artists, is quite possibly ideology in it's neatest form. And visual
art may be the most pernicious form of ideology. Images appear to us
to be naturalised. Literally, and with it metaphorically, they seem
to be not saying anything.
So all this text as art was an attempt
to jog us into seeing art as text – to look in
the same critical way that we read. As the show
says of Art and Language, “language was to be used as art to
question art”. And as soon as you convert image back into words the
outline of a critique starts to appear. Supposing you read something
like “this painting is a portrait of a Seventeenth Century
landowner, at home with his possessions”? There's no real value
terms in the sentence, no 'feudal' or 'exploiter' or even 'wealthy'.
But doesn't it sound like it's already being set up for a social
critique, the lead-in to the John Berger chop?
Props Without Agit
The show seems keen to connect this
movement to the tumult of Sixties political events, devoting a long
wall to a timeline paralleling show openings with anti-Vietnam
demonstrations and the like. Those unwieldy years in the title are
themselves politically driven, spanning from the start of the Wilson
government to the end of the Callaghan.
And, unlike Post-Structuralism, Marx
is mentioned. Art and Language in particular
declared “a class analysis through the study of meaning in
discourse, and the practice of class struggle through didactic
activity”. The even said it in a work not so subtlety titled
'Dialectical Materialism' (1975). There's talk of
“an art that might reconnect with the world, and act within it”.
But is any of this earned? Like
Post-Structuralism, Marx was then fashionable in academia, a name to
cite if you wanted to be in the cognoscenti. You could carve a career
out of studying him. True, we shouldn't get too sweeping here. Many
took up academia as the best means available to combine earning a
living with spreading Marxist ideas. But all too often Marx, the man
whose axiom was “philosophers have only interpreted the world”,
became the subject of academic interpretation. And Marx without the
commitment to social engagement isn't Marx any more.
So, in the precise mirror image of
Post-Structuralism, Marx is mentioned when he probably shouldn't be.
It's like that Godard film with the five-minute shot of someone
eating an apple at the camera. Without the other guy reciting Marx.
There's something strangely rarified,
even hermetic about this world, those neat shelves of tapes, card
index files and aligned text. However rigorously insistent it is that
art as a whole should be critiqued, that art is a social product, it
seems strangely uninterested in that wider society. Look back at
'Map To Not Indicate'. Something it doesn't
indicate is the wave of civil rights, black power and anti-Vietnam
agitation then raging across the USA. In fact, it spotlights two
states where those movements weren't particularly strong.
The Sixties as we think of them, a
conflagration so bright and vibrant, are happening somewhere else.
It's almost entirely unlike the agit-prop art of Pete Kennard, so recently seen at the Imperial War Museum. And certainly it's stark monochrome anti-aesthetic
and it's incessant problematising is the polar opposite of hippie
subculture, with it's dayglo psychedelic posters and it's “do what
you feel” hedonism.
But what's perhaps most surprising is
how unlike it is to the other Dada-derived movement of the era.
Fluxus (originally Neo-Dada) had it's Festivals of Misfits, it's
iconoclastic happenings, it's pranks and stunts and jamming of high
culture. Fluxus was as messy, as convulsive, as Conceptualism was
neat and rigorous. Just compare those neat lines of aligned text to
the scrawl and collage of the 1963 Fluxus manifesto (below), before
you even get on to the content calling to “PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY
FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART”.
The critique commonly (if wrongly) made
of Dada is that anti-art was still art. Whereas the critique of
Conceptualism, that anti-academia is still academia, that an
anti-textbook is still a textbook, is much more on the money. This
was, let's face it, scarcely inflammatory stuff.
Conceptualism's impersonation of
academia was simply too successful, the
infiltrators gone native. By rooting itself in art colleges and
public funding, it was genuinely trying to bite the hand that fed it.
But who else was it encouraging to do the same? You wonder what kind
of audience it considered itself to be aimed at. The attempts to
reach “the people” by the public artists of the 'Outside
In' show may have been flawed, and to a degree even
patronising. But at least there were some.
So have the Tate simply gone for the
wrong target, and it's Fluxus we need to be spirit guided by right
now? Certainly the summation of the manifesto is stirring stuff -
“FUSE the cadres of social, cultural and political revolutionaries
into united front & action.” But it's not just that it was
active in the political and cultural spheres simultaneously. It's
that it seized culture by it's lapels and shook, audaciously stoking
up people's imaginations. Dissent was made to seem not just necessary
but enticing and attractive – we were too cool for rule. That is
something we seem to have lost hold of in more recent years.
But it might be truer to say that the
two movements were the broken halves of what needed to be one thing.
Inheritors to a radical tradition, Fluxus was never as hippy-dippy or
bliss-out hedonistic as other Sixties scenes. But it was more
concerned with iconoclasm than incisiveness, more about motion than
substance. It was often accused of uncritically replicating that
radical tradition, of diligently reassembling the past and so making
yesterday's mistakes today. While Conceptualism was merely critical.
One frenzied, one lucid.
And perhaps those halves mirrored the two
wings of original Dada, the cerebral questioning of Duchamp on one
hand and the savage tracts of Grosz and Heartfield on the other.
Time For Strife
The show states “by the mid-1970s
there was a widespread recognition and institutional support for
conceptual art”. Which of course meant orthodoxies had to be
overthrown all over again. And in fact the final room, 'Action
Practice', is so different from all that’s come before
that it’s like walking into a different exhibition. As the name
suggests politics finally enters the frame, and as it does the
monochrome anti-aesthetic departs.
Why should that be? This segues into
another point. While earlier it seemed far from convincing this
wasn't the British wing of an international movement, making the
parameters of the show somewhat arbitrary, here the context does seem
more uniquely British.
In Britain 1968 had not been the
seismic year that it had in other countries. In France, they talk to
this day of soixante-huitards. While the Wikipedia article ‘Protests of 1968’ doesn’t even
contain a section on Britain. It's widely accepted that here the
social changes most associated with 'the Sixties' almost entirely
happened in the Seventies.
And the politics employed have moved
from the theoretical to the concrete. Two of the main works are
concerned with feminism and the troubles in Northern Ireland.
Feminism had not been shy of savvy media events, such as the 1970 Miss World protests. But it's backbone had been grassroots consciousness-raising groups, and it had devised the now-well-known slogan 'the
personal is political'. If much Sixties activism had been no more
than the radical chic and attention-grabbing antics it's detractors
claimed, feminism was one of the exceptions.
And those roots gave it a staying
power. Moreover, while it was as keen to expose and question unstated
norms as Conceptualism, it was not some dry and disengaged formal
enquiry – it was directly concerned with lived experience. (It was
only at this point I noticed how few women artists there'd been up
till now. So much for my political credibility!) Northern Ireland, in
some ways similarly, was a slow-burning issue – something which
refused to go away.
In fact, when you start to look at
Margaret Harrison's 'Homeworkers' (1977, above)
and Conrad Atkinson's 'Northern Ireland 1968 – May Day
1975' (1975/6) you can still see traces of Conceptualism's
dry formalism. Neither work is at all concerned with self-expression,
but with social enquiry – art as reportage. Harrison's subject is
the then-widespread practice to get women to perform piece work from
home, so she stitches in examples of the things those homeworkers
would assemble – buttons, stamps and jewellery.
While Atkinson juxtaposes quotes from
Loyalists, Republicans and British soldiers. One squaddie is reported
as wishing the Catholics were “wogs”, the easier to shoot them
with impunity. It's posted up without comment, it's for us to decide
how we feel about it. This is still some way from the heated
agit-prop of Pete Kennard. Yet in art the aesthetics matter. And
Harrison's work in particular looks mid-way between a collage and a
banner, messy and immediate, art as weapon in the culture wars.
Downhill To Here
Okay... so... that's what to make of it
was. But a more pertinent question might be, what
does it look like from here? Whatever the faults, I think the short
answer to that is “we look back up at it from downhill”.
Complaints made about this show often
suggest that this is where we got sold the magic beans. Conceptualism
was a bum deal where, seduced by fine-sounding film-flam, we swapped
aesthetics for empty gestures. At which point it normally gets
associated with Brit Art. For example the Stuckists, Brit Art's
perennial antagonists, use the slogan “death to conceptual art”
(variant above). But if people associate the two that's because they
dislike both, so figure they must be linked.
Art and Language always exhibited under
the group name. (Even if I've followed the show's convention and
credited individual artists here.) Can you imagine Brit Art doing
that? It marked the inevitable degeneration from artist as individual
genius to artist as celebrity. Art became the means to propagate
yourself as a brand, just as music had before it. Tracy Emin's bed
gets displayed in a gallery like Kurt Cobain's smashed guitar,
something come down from the world of fame which we can gaze on. It
was because of this that Brit Art could become the public face of
contemporary art.
But the face is not the body. Go to a
regular, not a well-known, contemporary gallery and chances are it
won't be Brit Art you'll see. And it's this art,
the crappy polaroids attached to some polysyllabic screed, which is a
debased parody of conceptualism. (See here for a particularly egregious example, but there's plenty of them.) It's like the
difference between piss and shit. Shit smells worse, but piss is more
prevalent.
It's chiefly characterised by what Alix Rule and David Levine tagged as International Art English. And you can see the degeneration from Seventies conceptualism to IAE
right on the gallery walls here. Try...
“By deciding one area to be
the 'area of attention', then the area that is designed as 'not the
area of attention' will demand a sufficient amount of attention for
it to be acknowledged as 'not the area of attention'.”
...against...
“...anathema to an
understanding of a modernist compositional syntax that valued quality
of presence over process.”
The first is from Art and Language
describing their work 'Air Conditioning Show'
(1966/7). The second is, irony of ironies, from the show's own
indicia describing Art and Language. The first is sharp and witty and
above all does actually mean something. (It describes, for example,
the white surround on Malevich's 'Black Square' perfectly accurately.) The second... well I
don't think it means anything. But more to the point I don't
care. It's just so damned uninvolving. It
sounds like its saying something clever. So let's
just assume it is, rather than bother reading it again.
What's significant here is that this is
so unlike the pseudo-poetic luvvie speak so often associated with art
writing. It's prose is sterile and bloodless, the jargon of academia
without the content, the glossolalia of intellectualism. Ben Davis called IAE “the joke that forgot it was funny”.
Just like anti-art became art and anti-music became music, this
deadpan parody of discourse became discourse. Yet by remembering when
it was funny, by looking back up that slippery slope we rolled down,
perhaps we can get out of that lake of piss art is now in.
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