English text

 

 

[8a] ‘We Aimed to be Amateurs’, Art-Language, New Series No. 2, June 1997, pp. 40-49.

2. We Aimed to be Amateurs

The fact that this event has been divided into old folks and young suggests that Conceptual Art has been identified and processed if only in a working sense. We wish to resist this suggestion by pointing out some of the difficulties entailed. Actually, what we want to resist is the thought that Conceptual Art is or was a readily recognised and ordered artistic style which remains inviolate in the hands of some purists and which has been variously abandoned or aetiolated by others like ourselves. And I want to suggest that one of the implications of this is that the renovated form of Conceptual Art is no more than a nostalgic husk; a look; a text and various neo-neo-Dada bits and pieces.

What is quite interesting about some old Conceptual Art is its paradoxical relationship with the well-policed and the professional. I’d argue that there exists some set of inverse relations between what might be called the prevailing (historical) self-images of Conceptual Art and conceptual artists, and what might be called its vividness, or aesthetic effectiveness. Some conceptual artists, for example, radically appropriated some of the strange appurtenances of an-other professionalism, like lawyers’, managers’ and therapists’ suits. These were often inexpert borrowings, indeed so callow as to reduce the resulting appearance to no more than an adolescent posture – an ironical spectacle, perhaps. Some continued (and continue) this in their more conspicuous adult life. It is and was a quick way to the collector's and curator’s heart: his world becomes coextensive with the internal dialogue of the artist. Of course, there was a lot of art which was called ‘conceptual’ which was simply compulsive and obsessive and which more or less automatically eschewed such an executive-impersonating professionalism. (But the ‘cold’ professional and the compulsive obsessive are not always unadjacent in the culture of Conceptual Art.) What I’m trying to say is that notwithstanding its ‘professionalised’ later self-image (and perhaps because of its early efforts which were often rather sad and aspiring) old Conceptual Art is vivid in virtue of its cognitive and cultural character as displaced and exiled, unable-to-be-professional-really.

This is not unconnected to the fact that, in general, it was practised – and certainly animated – by relatively young people. This is by no means a claim for Conceptual Art as youth culture. It is an observation that ‘early’ Conceptual Art, in its culturally radical, relatively untransformed form, is more or less essentially the work of people who saw themselves as in process. That is to say, people with a high degree of mobility, low security (and a relatively low perceived need for security), high discursivity, amenability to dialogical situatedness, possessed of a relatively meagre economic base; fairly active in their efforts to extricate themselves from unwanted structurally-ordered determinations, and so on. These are, perhaps, additional conditions which might separate Professor Rorty’s ‘strong poets’ from Professor MacIntyre’s ‘managers and therapists’... or ways of indicating the grounds of such a separation. It would be pleasant, for example, if we could extract the strong poet from the patronage of the university: strong (adolescent) poets... as inept and aspiring adolescent managers and therapists perhaps.

In highly volatile cultural circumstances, the cost of failure and similar risk is often perceived to be bearable, while there is relatively little pressure to produce objects of a negotiable middle-sized dry sort. And for many conceptual artists there was certainly little real pressure to act with any mechancial consistency concerning the formal appearance of any of their ‘products’ which eventually found themselves in the public domain. This is not the apotheosis of youth culture. It is merely that being young tends to coincide with these conditions being present. What is clear is that Conceptual Art was vivid insofar as it approached the condition of what might be thought of as an exotic variant of amateur art activity. This does not mean ‘amateur’ in the sense of subservient to the grand style passé, nor does it mean ‘primitive’ in the sense of untutored or somehow ‘naive’. This latter sense is, however, important in some way or at some point - as may be clear later.

And continuing on the via negativa, I do not use ‘amateur’ in the sense of the gentleman amateur’s lofty and privately-funded disinterest. And while I have no sense of Jamesian clarity as to how this amateur might finally be specified, I do mean to suggest someone who signs up for the game without any guarantees as to where it will end – what the result will be – and, for that matter, without being sure where and when it began. This is not so much a world of collaborative and self-abnegating security (or hiding), so much as one of openness and inquisitiveness and contingency concerning one's self-description – an openness which runs the risk of being composed out-of-cultural-character. It is such that the materials upon which ingenuity is turned are acquired without shame or sense of posterity, image or face.

I must of course acknowledge that there are many reifications and identifications of Conceptual Art. But it is somehow demeaning to have to rehearse them. There are, for example, the (quasi-)purifications as practised by Benjamin Buchloh, who singles out poor old Marcel Broodthaers as Conceptual Art’s redeeming and negatively absolute spirit. What Buchloh is unaware of, perhaps, is the extent to which this Schwitters-like character was indeed Schwitters-like - unaware of how much of his ‘wor’ was in fact the work of his friend the galeriste and artist Fernand Spillemaeckers, unaware of how much of Broodthaers’ work is posthumous, etc., etc. This might at some juncture have the power to worry us (or him), but the land of industrial back-dating and its cognates has been surveyed many times. Some vested curatorial interests will have to die before such tiresome empirical particles might count for something. Perhaps this travesty is not exactly what Buchloh had in mind in extolling the somewhat farcical character of Broodthaers’ work. The ironist recovers Conceptual Art for the taste of the radical critic. What is remarkable about this admittedly human unhistoricistic stuff of Broodthaers’ is that it is incapable of radical self-development a priori. Among its strengths is the power to satisfy almost any critical predication so long as it is informed by some well established – one might say traditional – prejudice concerning the opacity of artistic behaviour. And of course recognition of this in a second-order discourse is a radical critical development.

If you do measure the moment of Conceptual Art in terms of what can be extracted historically (or for that matter aesthetically) from the middle-sized dry goods produced, then you are bound to tell the interpretive story within that ontological and historiographically centred frame. The dry goods and their penumbra will have to do some historical talking. But what are these dry goods? These are things now accorded a presumed practical maturity which at the point (or moment) of production they singularly – and one might say happily – lacked.

Conceptual Art might for the moment be regarded as more or less non-pictorial, more or less physically or formally reduced post-Minimal art, which was exhibited (called ‘New Art’ or something) between about 1968 and 1974, and which enjoyed avant-garde pre-eminence at that time.

But many kinds of work are captured by this gloss. There are, for example, various incarnations of what might be called Minimal-ish or ultra-Minimal-ish mad art. This obsessive-compulsive iterative stuff (iterative on the page or panel, or iterative in a matrix of time and place) is, in its discursive poverty, its fraudulent aesthetic (and essentially Modernist) silence, always ‘mature’. It is work without internal or discursive complexity, work whose ‘development’ is transacted in predicates which exclude or sidestep a sense of ‘ordinary’ connected human political development. To describe this work as ‘callow’ would be more or less a waste of time as it is simply callow (non-complex and relatively undifferentiated, relatively autonomous) culture. There was also another species of ‘mad’ art. It is possessed of a little more internal complextity than the former sort. This is a variety exemplified (again) by Broodthaers – in his role as the presumed heir to that other great proto-conceptualist René Magritte. What Broodthaers did was to orchestrate a quasi-literal world – a world of socio-personal props. Very Belgian, a bit jokey, and reliant on the power of the literal object to fire meaning and desire. Deleuzian machines, perhaps. There is no ‘no’ among the possible predicates which these flimsy machines might provoke or bear. This is one of the variants in the curatorial (indeed the highly managerial) spectacle of mad art: the corollary of the fraudulent ascetic compulsive-obsessive. It is art which is, again, always ‘mature’. The suggestion that this or that example of work is somehow immature or inchoate is more or less uninformative.

I have remarked that I do not wish to try to purify Conceptual Art or to seek its powerful exemplifiers. All such efforts at aesthetics and apologetics are doomed to failure if the conative morale of the the period (that is to say, what might have been edifying about it) is correctly identified. What I am trying to say is that if there is anything that might be called Conceptual Art – if the term ‘Conceptual Art’ is to be associated with any significant differentae – then it is not in virtue of anyone’s identifying any middle-sized dry goods as exemplifiers of replete and structurally autonomous genre.

Of course, there are those who would agree with all this somehow, but who would nevertheless regard Conceptual Art as something in need of permanent (but now retrospective) purification. This purification is usually associated with a distinction between language-art and late Minimalism: Conceptual Art equals art in which text has erupted to form the surface in some highly significant way. The advocates of this purification are usually keepers of a flame. I think that they would agree that there is some sort of morale which identifies Conceptual Art. What they would also say is that this morale is distinct in respect of the artistic materials to which it attends... that there is something like a special ontological status for works of Conceptual Art... that what artists (should) make is meaning (whatever that means).

I would argue that it is this flimsy, fuzzy and allusive meaning metaphysics (meaning shorn of its inscriptions or iconic correlates) which is the mark of the purist’s purism, but that it is also what makes this purism virtually unextensible or unworkable. What is perhaps more important – if somewhat paradoxical – is that it is something like this very metaphysical and theoretical inchoateness which is useful for a desirable characterisation of Conceptual Art, and which is poweful among the conditions of its vividness. And this purism is born of a confusion which is deeply corrupting. We have suggested previously that ‘those who nail their cultural reasons irrevocably to the mast are impelled as a matter of urgency to seek the conditions of acceptance of their self-descriptions as innovators. It is under the rule of those conditions that whatever is made must then be distributed. Certain substantive critical issues being treated as effectively settled, or dead, what follows as a necessity is not that the practice be remade in the image of its innovatory moment, but rather that its habits be perpetuated as protocol. The critique of a dying culture for which the innovatory moment may originally have been the occasion is thus turned into the edifice upon which the practice is itself perpetuated.

‘The moment in question must necessarily be identified as epochal, in the sense that future practice is an act of submission before it. All those who join in must accede to the Spenglerian pact. This will be the case for those who would be pure (or be purists); for those who – having managed more or less to make something stick – refuse to or are unwilling to remake themselves critically; for those for whom the remainders of their artistic lives approach the condition of a formality; indeed, for those for whom it is a measure of the power of their artistic innovation that the rest of their lives should be a formality.

‘Wherever the pact is observed, controversies in matters of cultural value are rendered in black and white. On the one hand the purist is able to maintain a sense of consistency, and of virtue in that consistency. Out of that sense of consistency one kind of history is made. On the other hand the case is made for the critic who would regard twelve-tone music or Conceptual Art (or whatever, and whatever these may actually be) as a dead end or worse. This polarisation serves the interests of both parties and is good for business. But what is being dignified as potentially fruitful or interesting conflict or incommensurability or polarity is in fact a form of reciprocating and thus stabilizing mechanism. Its outcome is a curatorially tidy complementarity. Under these conditions debate is rendered fraudulent and is emptied of critical power, serving merely to dignify the public relations posturings of journalistic controversialists. Cultural conflict or opposition is reduced to an adolescent squabbling over the limits of small or imaginary territories.

‘One of the assumptions of the adolescent or normative purist is that there is in his oeuvre a continuity of justified property value. The forgotten juvenilia extracted from the back room is never what it is. Or rather it has never been forgotten. It has always been accorded the status of the canonical. This is hardly surprising since the canon has been a fixed and intransitive thing – as it can be when one's reasons for acting remain forever unreconstructed as the reasons why one acted. There is no junk which gets its unforseen moment in the limelight in virtue of some retrospective or historical work, some seeing of an aspect in the diachronic overlap in which discourse takes place. There is only the model of property continuity. The language of this continuity is replete with anecdote. It is characterised by a misuse of the definite article. A conversation between x and y is dignified and made fraudulently public as “the x-y conversations”; a series of works on steamrollered lamb’s liver becomes “the steamrollered-lambs-liver works”. There are no bad moments which may or may not turn out to be recoverable; instead there are transitional works.

‘The greater the morphological continuity in distributed one-idea culture, the greater the likelihood that there will be a sense of justified continuity of property value...’

Much of the work of the avant garde of the period just falls into the antecedently available categories too easily. Occam’s razor is easily applied nothwithstanding the unavoidably endemic nominalism of art-historical categories. The question I still want to ask is a quasi-transcendental one. What do we want (or need) the category ‘Conceptual Art’ for, and with what distinctions can it be usefully (or interestingly) identified?

What it is useful for is raising one’s hopes in respect of the identification of some anomalous and unstable activity; activity best looked at, as Carlos Guerra suggests, dialogically – and only marginally historically. This is activity saturated with contradiction and loss... activity which slides all too smoothly between subversiveness and incompetence. Indeed, the slippage is arranged on a line such that one is, as it were, a Zenoian finitude with subversiveness at one end and incompetence at the other, where it is never decidable whether the category on the left occupies the virtual entirety of the line as a continuum which merely terminates in the other, or vice versa... or whether they meet somewhere in the middle.

So, I’m adverting to something like a morale and a way of acting... a set of reasons and a set of actions.

Perhaps we can throw light on this from a perspective slightly later than the heroic years of Conceptual Art. Consider the following.

We aim to be amateurs, to act in the unsecular forbidden margins. We shall make a painting in 1995 and call it ‘Hostage; A Roadsign near the Overthorpe Turn’. The work will be executed in oil on canvas. It will measure 60cm. x 40cm. The white roadsign will occupy about half the picture. It tells us we are 7 miles fromm Brackley, 2 from Overthorpe and 2 from Warkworth. These names will be scarcely visible in a tangle of lines. The professional may cast a colonising eye but the tangle will go to a corporeal convulsion beyond her power. The painting will be homely and priggish. We may hide behind our speech at this appalling moment.

What is strange about this text written in 1989 is in part what might be called its instrumental or performative significance. This is perhaps its first-order significance as some kind of text – or as some kind of Conceptual Art.

There is a strain or tension between the cultural character of the promissory note and what it seems to promise. The sophisticated postmodern text-on-a-wall promises an amateur painting... is still locked in the possibly possible world of the text... this tension, which seems to offer some sort of condition for the eventual redemption of the promise, can also be said to foreclose utterly on the likelihood of that outcome. The cultural form of the promissory note renders the promise implausible or even impossible.

One might say that if the text contains or is a promise, it is a promise which we couldn’t (or shouldn’t) keep... and this even if one or both of us intended to do so at the time. In ‘finding’ forbidden margins to write about, we were (at best) entering them in make believe. We were writing ourselves paintings that couldn’t be meant, in ‘texts’ that internally undermined their own performative purport. In seeming to promise a painting which could not be painted and meant were we in fact ensuring that the text (conceived solely as text) could not be meant?

There was never any realistic possibility that we would execute a painting as promised or predicted. We might say that the landscapes were illusory Meinongian objects, and that’s non-tautologically illusory pie in the sky. (As a minor digression, it may be instructive to note that this project could still be reanimated. But this would be achieved not by executing the paintings, but by retrieving the texts and altering the dates.) I should add a few positive details. These disappointments were originally silkscreened in white onto grey canvas. Eventually they were silkscreened in black and white on paper and glued onto glass. This glass covered paintings. Some of these, Hostage XIX, for example, are paintings with a ‘past’. The glass covers and is instrumental in bringing disorder to an image of a museum with the pseudo-promise of a landscape in the future.

Perhaps some interest resides also in the fact that it is of landscape painting that we predicate amateurism. I have suggested that it is a feasible suggestion that a certain amateurishness characterises the Conceptual Art of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is of course not the amateurishness which is associated with weekend landscape painting, but an amateurism of a fragment or faction of the avant garde. I would argue that it is an amateurism in the sense of something like personal displacement: being out of one’s metier, systematically and (quasi) intentionally. (Of course, displacedness – this dialogically rich refugee-hybridity or its consequent hybrid generation – is arguably an activity which was forced, or at least powerfully argued, upon the relatively young critical avant garde by that impenetrable professionalism which created a discursive vacuum at least upon artists of the 1960s. Perhaps.) I suppose that what might be called the talkative materials of Conceptual Art were explicitly not the sensible aggregates of traditional visual art, but the reflexive mechanisms with which the art as cultural material might construct (or concoct) its self-images(s).

Most of this is well rehearsed. I shall not dilate greatly upon it. What I will say is that such a self-displacement cannot be defended and characterised as historical territory, nor can it be defended in terms of specifically epoch-exemplifying works. It should not need saying that the garagiste desire to inflate and ratify certain works as somehow classical Conceptual Art is to deny that Conceptual Art marks any worthwhwile differentae whatsoever. I say this not in the belief that there are no works which are somehow ‘typical’ of the period, but in the conviction that the ‘period’, the moment, of Conceptual Art exhibited a morale such that such standings-in-relief might best be regarded as monstrous reifications... or absurd errors or slippages in the unfolding of a narrative. (I mean something like this: in ‘Lucy Grey’, Wordsworth says ‘she seemed immune to mortal fears’, when in fact she had not so seemed until after she had died.)

I guess – or hope – that I’m staggering towards something a bit more positive or contructive than the remark that Conceptual Art was a mess, not something ‘identifiable’ like Cubism... I am not suggesting that the late 1960s or early 1970s are immune to retrodiction, but rather that what is interesting about (some) Conceptual Art (and what makes Conceptual Art interesting) is that it is radically incomplete.

This means that all or most claims that Conceptual Art can be isolated as some sort of discrete historical well-formed epoch are false unless severely limited and apparently almost paradoxical; that any attempt to invest the use of certain textual-type materials associated with certain artists who became (a bit) prominent in the late 1960s and early 1970s with some sort of present cultural pre-eminence - resisted only by reactionaries – is doomed to bathos and failure.

So what is to be extracted from this? Perhaps something like the following. Conceptual Art does not correspond tout court to some sort of linguistic turn in artistic practice. It does represent an appropriation of certain dialogic and discursive mechanisms by artists who sought thereby critically to empower themselves and others, and to that limited extent it represents a linguistic turn. But Conceptual Art did not reduce (or attempt to reduce) the pictorial to the linguistic (or textual). The point is, rather, that the gaps and connections, the lemmas and absurdities between the pictorial and the textual are spaces in which much cultural aggravation was and is possible. The eruption of the text into the cultural and historical space of the picture or the painting is an exemplary moment. A dialogic – and consequently more or less linguistic – sense of work and action provides a considerable critical purchase upon the prevailing stereotypes of artistic personality and practice, and even upon what is to count as artistic practice in a social context. And these considerations bear quite powerfully upon what it is to claim historicity for any Conceptual Art. Again, what is interesting about some Conceptual Art is its resistance to (its own) historicity.

And what is odd about what I am saying is that it both seeks to identify Conceptual Art as some activity engaged in by young people from a position of internal exile at a particular time (and at a particular time in their lives), and attempts to refuse the propositon that the morals of this moment died with the passing of 1974 or whenever. Perhaps this is not as odd as it seems.

...And now, I suppose I am talking largely about Art & Language’s work, and in particular that now somewhat vexatious group of works known as Indexes. I will not dwell on the anecdotal nostalgia with which certain small-business inspired ex-colleagues have sought both to inflate and to derogate these projects, except to say that it is far from edifying to witness these former friends, who departed Art & Language out of a perfectly understandable combination of economic necessity and what might be called incipient ideological difference, now reduced to the production of an apologetics in the interests of a pathological monomaniac whose only project is at best the settling of imaginary scores.

To be sure, these Indexes did not contain very much pictorial or iconic material. They consisted mainly of text or text-like material. This was text, or rather conceptual material, which was always in internal exile, paradoxically situated both within (just within) and beyond the borders of disciplines as traditionally defined and institutionally policed (as were the artists themselves, with one notable exception). And it was from this internal exile that far from stable artistic meta-languages were generated; unstable because there was and is no prioritization of concepts that live in the borders which define them internally. There are writers and critics who have seen this dialogical implosion as representing a strange bureaucratization of Art & Language’s and inter alia of Conceptual Art's practice. To these, I would say that far from representing grounds for the denunciation of a demonic authoritarianism, these indexing projects are and were Conceptual Art’s best chance (a) of an internal complexity which might be capable of resisting the management culture these writer allege to fear, and (b) of an anti-hegemonic and non-purist critical path for a morale which was falling apart in a dying culture: the best chance of maintaining internal exile, and of insuring Conceptual Art (or some relatively young artists) against co-option and worse. The margins of the index projects were such as to model inter alia some rather fugitive (though compelling) forms of solidarity: forms of talkative and aggressive non-proprietorial tolerance. Others have tried to suggest that a lively (or something) anarchy was evident in the productive ethos of Conceptual Art, insofar as it is represented by the work of Art & Language, and that this was brought to an end by the organization mentality of the Index. This is a tawdry distortion. The Index ruined the atmosphere for the small-business tendency. It should be added that small business can acquire any political odour according to expedient. Indeed, a recent criticism of the Index is a monument to a career almost medieval in its capacity to grub for a niche, a place at some table or any. The Index had the tendency to proliferate tables and places in suprising uncentred locations; in an exile unlikely to satisfy the mechanical aspirations of small business – and intolerable to small business gone historical.

The Index provided unforeseen resonances, conversations and cultural misfortune or embarrassment: exile and hybridity; distance from the putative cultural centre. Therein lies the class character of these projects. On the one hand, the garagiste tendency faced loss by appropriation (or expropriation) followed by implosion, on the other hand, very little work at the time aspired to (or stood much chance of achieveing) the necessary qualifications for co-option. The projective mechanism was relentlessly to pull things away from the accultured centre. (And remember, almost everyone involved had started life very far from that centre.) This pulling away occurred even when (though this was quite rare) the autonomous character of a given item was more or less commensurable with the mechanisms of co-option, actual or potential. The artists were tied, as it were, to a machine which exiled and bastardised them in virtue of its power as a function-spitting container. The workers had no need to learn to overcome their real (one might say structurally induced) discomfort with the fine things which allegedly preceded them, nor did they need to devise the latters’ structurally successful replacement.

And it is exile, this generative context of hybridity and malingering, which is conceivably the only vivid and continuing legacy of Conceptual Art: its post-imperial confusion. It is perhaps understandable that those who seek to persist with an historical account, more often an historicistic account, cast about with various attempts and purifications and convergences, are the accultured representatives of the cultural interests of the remaining globally imperialistic paranoid power, witting or not. The manipulative strivings of Conceptual Art’s last purist seem to owe as much to the nitty gritty of American foreign policy in the 1950s as to some unavoidable mental disorder. The ‘theme’, if you like, of internal exile which is played out, no doubt upon the surface of cultural margins, is no more than worthless provocation unless it is the prospect of the annihilation of the artist herself. ‘We Aim to be Amateurs’ is a surface enfolded in the unabated compilation of the Index. This is exile which entails the derogation and loss of hard-won competence, not the promise of Napoleonic return and final triumph. A history of pie in the sky is a history of expectation and loss, of allusions and displacements. The history of Conceptual Art had better be a story of some artists and how they tried to account for themselves. This will be a story of neither pies nor skies.