[14a] ‘Making Meaningless’ Art & Language in Practice, Vol. 2, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 1999, pp. 225-249.

The Sedentary and the Stand-up

The maddest (and bitterest) of our interlocutors rail against the appearance of what are called paintings in our work. There are others, calm and urbane, who frequently demand an account of this appearance. We are often bored by the prospect of providing one, preferring a slightly different answer each time. The demand for an account, however constructive and urbane, seems to encase the assumption that only a policed purism – in our case the policed purism of Conceptual Art – is uncontroversial. Our briefest reply might be that the changes of practice and project of which the appearance of painting is one have been occasioned by obvious critical imperatives. Nevertheless, the fact that we might also have to account for the emergence of paintings in terms of  strange and strenuous narratives, populated by delusions and contradictions, suggests that these go to the very heart of the work.

Start anywhere and try.

Wollheimian purifications notwithstanding, pictures and paintings may carry the weight of all sorts of intentions and go to all sorts of practices. One perspective’s subversiveness may be another’s aesthetic decadence; incompetence from a certain viewpoint may be a refusal of the established codes from another, and so on. Painting is often a vague and tendentious category. In the mid-1960s some painters were engaged in an end-game. What seemed possible then was that painting and its critical others were and would remain continuous with a tradition of negation, refusal or dissent. This possibility no longer exists. Recent cultural and moral developments have produced award-winning dissenters, award-winning swearers and cursers – and award-winning criminal lumpens for all we know. In creative consultancy culture anything can be an award-winning something. The Communist Manifesto has been printed as a coffee-table book. That is what it is.

With dissent made over to the representational terminology of management-and-worse, an artistic practice which had tried hard to keep clean at least some of its critical and inquisitive tools might well suffer a sense of crisis and confusion. It would have to ask if this representational terminology had indeed supplanted and suppressed all conditions of critical inquiry. It would be too simplistic to argue that undifferentiated Conceptual Art comprises both critical and manipulative forms of dissent. Differentiated, there are types of Conceptual Art which have more to do with one form of dissent than with the other.  But even in a type of Conceptual Art more attached to the critical than to the manipulative, the latter sits uncomfortably close. Black-ish on very dark grey. Critical Conceptual Art was never simply straight-faced inquiry. It was leavened by a discursive amateurishness and an intellectual delinquency and it was the resonance between these and the straight-faced which (usually) repelled the manipulative. The louder voice, glorious in its neo-vernacular forms, is that of Conceptual Art as executive culture, pumped up and identified with the curator and the manager.  Indeed, we have often argued that many Conceptual artists always thought that theirs was the managerial opportunity. For them, critical tasks are merely the remote source of cultural atmospherics. But they fit close. Beleaguered  and forlorn, but close.

Those recently successful artistic practices which lack so much as a short-term sense of history pile on further grounds for confusion. It is very difficult to go further in search of meaningfulness than the images which promote and advertise these practices. The fact that these images are often supported (or co-formed with) altogether conservative and even antique senses of intentionality and purpose are simultaneously a good reason to discuss them and a deflationary stab at one’s own critical self-image. Desperate to preserve the self-image, one might say that, in being historyless, this stuff faces no substantial reflexive tasks, has no need to test its professional boundaries; it either sticks or it doesn’t. But it would be self-servingly uncritical to suggest that the effectiveness of all this merely reduces to a misunderstanding or misidentification of managerial action in artistic clothes, or to the theatrical props of celebrity-seekers mistaken for potent cultural markers. The history-free images which form the surface of what often passes for an artistic practice, and which seem from a critical perspective to drive the self-images of the age, are not reflected as a simple negation in the critical practice of those who have set themselves the task of working against those self-images. The negation is much more equivocal: figure and ground mediated by representation and reflection. These relations may produce unexpected reversals, even violence as two figures try to occupy the same ground.

Conceptual-ish Art of the 1960s was informed by (among other things) that very late modernity of blankness and negation which was disconnected from the Duchampian tradition. Here was an end-game drive to purification which was also a search for a fetish of the clean. This modernity of fetishistic blankness was above all able to acknowledge its contamination by what was outside it. The neatness and precision of (e.g.) LeWitt’s late-1960s work was always to some degree polluted by the world. And that’s what gives it its sceptical, unprofessional edge. In the effort by historians to account for the emergence of Conceptual Art in adult professional and historical terms (read Thierry de Duve or Benjamin Buchloh) a development more difficult to trace and individuate has often been neglected. The high professionalism of late 1960s modernity produced a critical other in the form of protocol-refusing unprofessional activity, confused perhaps, but prosecuted with a certain transforming historical urgency. If the (historical, material) contingencies of a practice are acknowledged, then the professional’s bubble bursts. This often happens unexpectedly in open enquiry. To say this in 1998 is perhaps to point theatrically at the inevitability of emerging paradox or recurrence: push something hard enough dialectically and for long enough and it will assuredly come back to swallow its own tail. Well, that may be true, but true without differentiation in detail.

In the undifferentiated solidarity of the late 1960s some Conceptual artists entertained fantasies of a gallery-free or even bureaucracy-free art. It was a reflection of an entrenched and sleek marketing system. However naïve these fantasies seem now, they amounted to a significant contribution to many artists’ self-images. A later and corollary development saw the appearance of Marxism-Leninism as the sine qua non of serious Conceptual Art. However maladroit this may now seem, there existed a (moral? practical?) pressure to theorise and to substantiate, a desire to replace merely unhistorical refusal, insolence or mischief-making in the face of market protocols, with a theorised dissent – practical and even ‘organised’. Art-world-y ‘radicalism’ was recognised as palliated management and its forms as constrained within the necessary requirements of ‘professionalism’. The professionalised avant garde had traded management skills for politics. It had to reform itself as a political vanguard – something like a political party. While what was generated was in general quite a lot of embarrassing agit-bullshit, it should not be forgotten that at this time, which abuts and overlaps the period in which the Indexes were produced, Art & Language was at its most ‘participatory’. And some of the first paintings – actually pictures –  are caught somewhere between the Indexing projects and Russian Constructivism.

The possible re-emergence of pictures coincides with a time when art was repressed in favour of  politics. The necessity for substantiation of the amateurism of a certain fraction (ours) of avant-garde-ish Conceptual Art led almost paradoxically to the consideration of pictures (not yet quite paintings). From the point of view of something called ‘class consciousness’ Conceptual Art just looked like an extreme bourgeois mannerism. Pictures could be contemplated because they were the unexpected gift of a practice transformed by politics.

We have to do better than Thorsten Scheer when he claims that ‘Conceptual Art, by separating essence from material presence, had intensified the independence of the work from its physical embodiment to such a degree that even a return to painting became possible.’ (‘Richter and Art & Language: Conceptual Aspects of Postmodernism’) There is something dodgy here. It’s too easy.  Scheer’s assertion might be correct if Conceptual Art ‘has nothing to do with the form of presentation’, i.e., if it is radically separated from its material form.  Logically it must then be possible to include all sorts of things in the category of Conceptual Art - including ‘painting’. And if you can’t include painting one is bound to ask why not; why is the line drawn here? If painting is somehow outside the range of possibilities compassed by Conceptual Art, then one might suggest that Conceptual Art cannot be ‘separate from its form of presentation’ and argue that it reduces to (a particular kind of) neutral graphic material plus taste. In other words, it becomes another specific kind of art, rather than, as the regularly resurfacing cant would have it, generic art, or ‘art in general’. To put this another way, unless it is inclusively generic then it must be attached to certain material genres – things that look like Conceptual Art. If it is a set of theories and strategies for recovering Conceptual Art-type contents or meanings, then it would be able to develop these for things like paintings - which of course would cease to be first-order paintings (or traditional ones). These too would be detached from their material genres or essences.

We suggest in the light of these difficulties that Conceptual Art purism is significantly activated by fear. Fear of the low. Much in Conceptual Art style and practice exemplifies a search for a new social status for the artist. This exemplification can be either adventitious or essential. There were Conceptual artists who sought to colonize the discourse of the critic – either by putting the critic’s words on walls, or by declaring that words in books were art. There were others for whom questions of raised social status were pre-eminent in their arguments for their work. Whether as by-product or essence, artists refused the role of manual labourer and sought to arrogate to themselves the power of the bosses and the managers. (The possible connection between Conceptual Art’s upward rise and the various vicissitudes of shop-floor-management relations remains to be studied.) But if the striving and desiring is ‘heroic’ in a way, it also contains the source of its own corruption. There is an hysteria in some Conceptual Art fanatics’ fear of ‘painting’ as something manual, hand-made and low. What it threatens is an artistic life as entrepreneur and in ‘representation’.

We’ve argued before that to continue with the surface historical ‘logic’ of Conceptual Art was to be forced not to go deeper into the implications of the Duchampian rupture (tricks etc., etc.), but to lose what was radical (or oppositional or critical or emancipating) about that, and to submit to unwanted determinations and to fall into an unwanted form of life. Of course, ‘going deeper’ would itself be enslavement to ultimately footling provocations. It would liberate no one. But this ‘logic’ had transformed the critical materials of Conceptual Art, Duchampian or otherwise, into a bureaucratic décor. Blown up quotes from the local intellectual celebrity and ‘penetrating the space’ had got itself established as an aesthetic whose genericness ensured its congeniality to, and amenability to control by, the people in charge. For us, Conceptual Art was never a mature professional style but a black box (or a black box in a black box); what is sometimes called ‘a genuine historical moment’, changing forever whatever happened ‘next’. What happened in that moment inaugurated a process and a project. And it was given to this project to recognize that there continue to be baffling relations between text, pictures and painting, and that the expulsion of the two latter from the purview of the artist is a cheap closure which fails to recognize the constructedness of the world. It is a closure in open inquiry, and therefore a closure on the idea of art as open inquiry of a special (and no doubt odd) kind - which was the most important idea of the Conceptual Art moment, if not of Conceptual Art itself. This idea is packed or stuffed into the history of Art & Language, and of some Conceptual Art, and flows in part from the unpredictability of collaborative work and of social and class activity and awareness. Do we conclude that we never did Conceptual Art, or that ours was an apostate function?

Art & Language has been a collaborative practice – in one form or another – for over thirty years. This has led some to claim that it is a kind of Conceptual Art sect. Michael Corris has described Art & Language during the period 1972 to 1976 as an ‘art gang’. A gang is an aggressive organization or an informal rabble whereas a sect has constitutive beliefs and often intellectual pretensions. A sect is nasty and aloof whereas a gang is concrete: violence plus street cred. A sect generally deviates from the normal, is involved in some sort of apostasy, major or minor. This is what identifies it and holds it together. A gang has practical goals and consequences, clear or not. It may be that Art & Language has often shifted somewhere between a sect and a gang. Where that somewhere is, is not entirely clear. The negative connotations of both terms seem to go to a fear of unknown allegiances or of unprofessional behaviour and contradiction. Various ‘memoirs’ of former Art & Language participants would seem to reinforce the sect or gang idea. As they see it, they are now the ex-members of a gang/sect and it is no good now they aren’t in it… and in fact their departure was justified. With the hindsight of twenty-five years they know better. Self-patronising sentiments and the paranoid fixations of the stalker are perhaps also the very powerful marks of sect membership. In fact it might be argued more informatively that an embittered and disappointed coterie of former participants is forming a little sect whose feeble image is sometimes projected upon those who continue. 

An example of the strangeness which attended the emergence of pictures (possibly not yet paintings) is provided by Portraits of V. I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock and by the Studio paintings ‘by mouth’. The generation of something (a text) recoverable within the practical ambit of a Conceptual-Art-like practice led to ‘aesthetic’ and even contemplative presences. Titles turn into pictures, which, as a negative consequence of being processed, turn into paintings. A line runs from Portraits of V. I. Lenin through the Studio paintings to the Incidents in a Museum to the Hostage landscape paintings. It probably ends in a loop with the Cunt paintings (the series Index: Now They Are).

Art & Language’s practice has been project-like and essay-like. And this entails that it must be a critical practice. Necessary but not sufficient for this is that it is also a collaborative practice. Work, in the sense of non-wordy action and its consequences, is embedded and then re-embedded in conversation, until the edges of what is work and what isn’t work vanish and then re-appear in different places. Strange displacements and hybrids are generated, not by juxtaposition but by fallings-in. Figures inhabit figures (or non-figures) and this somehow recalls and reflects what is often called ‘indexing’. Some people see this contentedly as ‘self-referentiality’. But what the displacement implies for us is that the visible (and invisible) production has an unstable past and an unstable future – a synchronous and diachronous contamination by narrative and an unpredictable release from it. A step forward is a hopeless deterioration, a step back or two or more a helpless overreach. This temporal slippage is also a ‘spatial’ one. Characteristically, a literal thing will turn figural, objects will become fictions, a face will transform itself into a mask, and so on. Ventriloqual relations proliferate: there’s a difficulty as voices inhabit dummies or bodies not their own. The technical and the productive are liable to obscure a sense of cultural purpose or directedness. A dislocation from telos. For instance, instability in (or loss of) the connection between cultural effects and the means of achieving those effects leads to a virtual weakening of the mechanisms linking work to culture. This remark is no doubt rather old-fashioned, but it is hard to continue or to know that one is continuing without a story – a passing theory – of what one is doing now, with what, etc. The barbarism of the present requires that a knowingness about culture is entirely separated from the mysterious competence of ‘technicians’ – those people who know more than where the hammers are in art galleries and who are often – no, always – the most interesting people to talk to. The banishing of politics and virtue has seen a reinforcement of hierarchies of work and an increased dissemination of lies and nonsense, in the interests of an ever-more-idle and useless but ever-more-intrusive management. 

It could be that some of the ‘cultural’ questions effortlessly posed by Art & Language early work can be so described only because we can’t remember the detail of its being made. What are technical questions and where are their edges, margins, in a world where cultural production is either journalistic fallout without detail, or non-participatory but manipulative expertise? Of course, journalism is a kind of practice, as is Conceptual Art purism. They are posed on the two horns of a dilemma. The journalist/cultural theorist keeps the gates and polices his or her role. The purist pushes at the gate and polices his or her history. Technical difficulties trace all manner of lives lived, and their material circumstances. They are all but invisible from the land-of-Cockayne of Cultural Studies, and from the professionalised production in its thrall (academic art), which makes none but the smartest of moves.

It is tempting here to suggest that painting is to be defended culturally because it is a space (or place) from which expert convictions of cultural relevance or epochality can be aggressively denied - or drowned in decoration.

A more or less identifiable period of Art & Language work – from say 1982 to 1992 finishes with the Cunt paintings. Pink ‘blank’ paintings with mirrored surfaces, paintings with ‘secrets’ – a bit like the painting and post-Minimalism from the mid-sixties which ushered in text, dialogical forms and so forth. The pink-near-blankness required an animation in the spectator (described in Art-Language, New Series No.1 as ‘dialogical aura’). The Cunt paintings seemed to do two things: they apparently materialised a discursive space (or place) in front (strangely) of the painting (for the beholder) and at the same time seemed to remove the facticity and focus of the painting as some sort of compelling whole. Since this time we have not managed to do a single ambitious ‘painting’. Since this time the work has seemed without exception unable to avoid a three-dimensional (literal/figural) confusion. Homeless paintings. We seem now to be left with a problem something like this: we could see ourselves as continuing to paint. However, the focussed ‘facticity’ of the work has had to confront the fact that it was just as important to do things ‘with’ the painting as to do things ‘in’ or ‘on’ or ‘to’ the paintings. These ‘modalities’ (if that’s what they are) make discursive arrangements. These may be decorative or they may be installational. The point is not simply that it’s hard to know which. These may simply not be the practical alternatives in respect of which the works seek to dispose themselves.

The consequences of ‘installation’ on art are dramatic and troublesome, far more than the seemingly stylish initial ruptures of Conceptual Art. These consequences have been with us particularly since the early days of big Minimalism. The causes of the huge increase of installational forms of art are not difficult to work out. Since 1945 the growth of so-called cultural output has been enormous. In New York in 1945 there were a handful of galleries and a score of artists exhibiting. Today there are 200,000 artists in the New York area alone showing at some 800 or so galleries. Around 15 million works are produced in a decade, compared to about 200,000 in the whole of late nineteenth-century Paris. This is in part due to the terrifying proliferation of lecturers, galleries, curators, museum staff, art journals, art-market journals, the internet, etc., etc. (1) Consequently, turnover time is reduced and distribution and marketing are accelerated to the point where what bears down upon the artist are exhibitions, catalogues, travel and so on. The form of the work is determined by its efficiency in terms of packaging and distribution. It needs exhibition credibility and a feasible turnover time. It can be argued that this reaffirms art as a form of social production in exchange and consumption – something ‘public’. On the other hand, the imperialistic expansion of market-driven effects has pensioned off traditional genres far more ruthlessly than Conceptual Art ever did. There is much in history-laden art genres, including ‘disgraced’ ones like landscape and still life, with which to form a place or a representation of a place of historical continuity against and (perhaps) outside the efficiency requirements of the world of cultural output. But nostalgia is the source of the worst opposition. What forestalls it are the undreamed-of disorders and abjections of hybridity.

Consider what we’ve done since around 1993: constructed sheds from seven large paintings, hidden paintings in grey steel containers; made paintings into small sheds and then mounted these on TV wall brackets etc., etc. It’s hard to avoid a rather dusty sense of creative-things-to-do-with-paintings. No focus, no identity, and no ideas as to how to take advantage of an absence of focus and identity; not much to concentrate on anyhow anywhere. Some of these are hybrids perhaps, but not in the ‘post-colonial’ sense. More in the wow-shaped canvas sense – or worse. Time of briefest shadow.

The work did gain some focus and sort of identity in 1996 when the open pages of the book ‘paintings’ were made or rather displaced into a kind of furniture – quasi domestic objects made from the newly decorated (ie., spruced up) defeated relics of Conceptual Art and the ghost presences of Conceptual artists. (We tried very very hard to make these coloured essays into focussed paintings. We perhaps succeeded  in doing so with the Documenta X Vitrine insofar as we defeated certain conventions of beholding. But even that was near three-dimensional. The two-dimensional surfaces reached an horizon, and this provided real material out of the difficulty of focus and its advantageous form – displacement.)

We seem now to be in a familiar position – familiar as to its abstract logic – of confronting a set of technical type displacements which are both the subject matter and the material stuff of the work. The technical stuff is not at all familiar.

This work occupies a narrow space between two walls. One wall is covered with inscriptions or decorated with trophies. These attest to the failures, scandals and successes of Conceptual Art. The other wall is also inscribed or decorated, but these marks or trophies largely attest to the absurdity, scandal and failure of painting, a few to the possibility of its renewed potential. Paul Wood might say ‘that’s a condition of its realism’. Others might say that Art & Language has just burst the professional artist’s bubble of Conceptual Art with painting and burst the bubble of painting with Conceptual Art and that this is the reason for Art & Language’s ‘failure’. That’s the Elmer Fudd view. We’d argue that those are the conditions of the works’ success: it is irritable and restless because it is teleologically incapable of sleeping the professional’s sleep.

Recently, in response to yet another boilingly paranoid pseudo-memoir replete with recollections of radicalism, one of us suggested that ‘it was time to get the decorators in’. But what does ‘getting the decorators in imply’? Is it that the decorative is the subversive other of high modernity, which can cause it to slide towards the domestic (towards furniture?) This would be degeneration into that which Greenberg hated (or was fearful of) and Adolf Loos described as criminal. Heroic modernity made domestic is neither one thing nor the other. It’s a kind of failure: the ventriloquist and her dummy.

Clement Greenberg called Robert Motherwell’s work ‘arch’. He observed that Motherwell was like the interior decorator who staked everything on a happy placement. Everyone knows this is right and that Motherwell’s work is largely a joke. But there is a powerful sense in which the very truth of Greenberg’s observation is what makes that work interesting and instructive. Motherwell’s work embraced the very terror that stalked Abstract Expressionism: apocalyptic wallpaper.

Some time ago at a conference in Vienna we had occasion to trot out the old joke-cum-story of Newman’s shutting the door, Rothko’s pulling down the shade and Reinhardt’s turning out the light. The punch line is that we’ve been going on in the dark ever since. (That’s what one of us said.) The meta-punchline is that we’ve been stuck with the joke ever since (and now stuck with Motherwell pasting up the wallpaper too). (That’s what one of us wanted to say but he was beaten to it.) Can ‘Conceptual Art go stand-up?’

Tony Godfrey says in a forthcoming book on Conceptual Art: ‘Matisse wrote of how he wanted the experience of his paintings to be like sitting in an armchair, but conceptual artists have generally opposed such sitting down.’ (2) Richard Huelsenbeck, in his first Dada manifesto, was definitely against chairs: ‘To be a Dadaist means to be an artist only by accident, to be a Dadaist means to let oneself be thrown by things, to oppose all sedimentation: to sit in a chair for a single moment is to risk one’s life.’ If the decorators come in and we make and exhibit a chair we might think that this  aestheticizes politics. But it could also be that it suggests a politicised aesthetics.

To make chairs or their equivalent and to oppose all sedimentation. Is this a contradictory practice or it is an ornamental political excess? If the above-mentioned positions relative to the chair are seen as fundamentalist (as the enemy or temptation of Postmodernism) can they be brought into collision and simultaneously preserved? The preservation is political excess: permanent iconoclasm as the politics of gracious living.

The Dummy Speaks – Teleologically

There is often a nostalgic presumption contained in questions about the past. The presumption is that there was something radical in Art & Language and that this radicalism was highly teleological and that there is now no such happy future pulling along the present. The presumption is untrue, or rather unfounded. What was characteristic about the ‘early days’ was the fragmentary, inchoate and project-like nature of all Art & Language (and pre Art & Language) activity. The self-inflating and self-deflating nature of the essay-like things produced was for us the exemplification of a sort of morale. It is indeed astonishing that what we are often asked to explain is change – change in ourselves and the work – as if a change was something more in need of explanation than is the one-idea stasis of the purist.

There was never a committed aim or purpose in Art & Language (the kind of thing expressed, for example, in manifestos) even in the most overpopulated circumstance of the late 1960s and early 1970s. There was no well-formed vision of grandeur. There was of course a powerful critical purpose. But a critical purpose is hard to sustain now and was somewhat easier then. Now we’d be disingenuous if we said that a sense of telos is not difficult to have – to keep. Indeed, we’d say that it is something that needs more or less constant critical review.

So what does it mean to have an artistic purpose and how is that distinguished from e.g., a social purpose (formed as a sort of consequence of an artistic one)? Most strongly organised teleological claims or principles are mere vanity. They may be efficacious in determining or conditioning action, but of course they are never sufficient. Consider for example that early Conceptual Art was produced according to the reason that one day there will be a vanishing of the consumer-durable middle-sized dry good as a paradigm of art and that this vanishing will also be a vanishing of the social class/profession which controls the interpretation of such things. Consider that there might have been such a possibility – the disappearance of an ideologically sustained hegemony of art and talk in favour of a talkative critical and expanding world of reflection and representation. The possibility implies a purpose – a very long-term purpose with some undeniable motivating force.

But to speak of a teleology – so as to imply that this possibility actively motivates mediate practice – is to invoke the need of some further enquiry and, no doubt, explanation. There are smaller splinters of telos in our practice which do not have the motivating grandeur of the hegemony-abolishing one. 

We’ve suggested that the dual figure of the armchair and of its other which refuses the sedentary can be made to work as a permanent and unresolvable contradiction upon which an activity insists – a contradiction which makes it unavoidable. A putative history of Art & Language is something that the work continually addresses. But what’s important is that this is always a history, not the history – it is always only a possible history. The ‘history’ of which others wish to make a nostalgic fetish is one of those that are possible. The only necessity this imposes on us, however, is the need to satirise or otherwise displace or alienate it.

The introduction of the decorative and the ornamental (which approaches what John Robert’s calls the ‘stand-up’) involves a gross displacement of nostalgic narrative. It offers history and telos an opportunity to connect itself disastrously to the sedentary. This is the sedentary possible world (not necessarily not an actual one… somewhere) which is marked or signalled by a decorative layering upon the ‘historical’ original. The ‘original’ can only refuse and then weakly submit to the displacement. It wears the colour on its face. Not all acts in favour of the sedentary are visited upon the past.  But there is a sense in which it will always have to be a past – and often a past with a teleology in the imaginations of others.

Any sense of genuinely collective purpose to be associated with Art & Language in the late 1960s and early 1970s is actually difficult to identify. There were those traditionalists who wished desperately to be taken seriously at the top – to impress someone in authority leading to absorbtion into the official culture or some segment thereof. What embattled Art & Language then was the accusation that we were against painting and feeling. Such accusations are not to be answered by public outbursts of spontaneous emotion. It was necessary from time to time to demonstrate that a conceivable condition of our practice lay in painting insofar as we sought to syndicalize the territory of the constitutive critics of late high modernist painting. Frank Stella was a disappearing necessity in the sense that his was an ironisation of high modernism analogous to Jasper Johns’ ironisation of Abstract Expressionism. Stella’s critique was, however, a conceptual (or cultural) cul de sac. In any case, no one in Art & Language could entirely avoid exigencies imposed by painting, since the preponderance of the membership (an ordinal rather than a cardinal thing) was involved in teaching in Fine Art Departments in art schools. A sense of purpose distinct from the upwardly-mobile one was connected to a defence of enquiry over power. Power in the institutions is traced through various unattractive forms of mimesis – the enforcing of house styles or house options which are sanctioned by the concordat of stars and time-serving administrators. One of the most persistent claims made by Art & Language was that a critique of the high culture of painting in the form of an investigation (often necessarily at its conceptual margins) was as feasible a practice in art schools as painting – and further, that the critical power of such investigations might be such as to deny the possibility of (some) painting at all. The sense of enquiry (investigation!) which we sought to encourage was not at all foreclosed by a sense of social status privileging the intellectual over the blue-collar artist. None of us had that sort of insecurity, and more importantly (and with one noticeable moany exception) most of us had some class experience of hourly-paid industrial labour which entailed a certain solidarity with those who worked by hand.

The idea that Art & Language was ‘founded’ with fully-formed constructive intentions is ludicrous if what that means is that there was some sort of memorandum of association setting out explicit aims and purposes – positive or negative. (The ad-nauseam anthologizing of the editorial Introduction to Art-Language Vol. 1 no. 1 no doubt reflects an ordinary cultural anxiety that there should in fact have been such a thing.) What there was was a ragbag of overlapping interests. What is most noticeable was that a sense of a critique of high modernism was confined to one member among those normally listed as ‘founders’. The others were generally ignorant of or indifferent to the issues. Let’s be clear: Art & Language as originally ‘constituted’ amounted to a discursive project and a desire to see that project reflected in a publication, insofar as no antecedently established publication seemed to offer a natural place to put this work. Other ‘interests’ were loosely packed into a commitment to talk, to explain, to stock our minds with puzzles and to let this show in a publication. Any suggestion grander than this is the product of bitterness and fantasy. But this loosely-packed conversation was a conversation. This was the teleological hook. The tradition of silence by the artist and service by the critic had been long established. Not even the likes of Barnett Newman or Don Judd or Robert Morris, who spoke eloquently for themselves, could be said to have engaged in their published work in an open or self-annihilatingly discursive activity. They tended to ratify a certain sort of art – work explicitly distinguished from their writing. Our theorising and talk had by the late 1960s issued an invitation to us (?) to abandon or to close this kind of distinction wherever possible in favour of a commitment to discursive activity and its indices as our work – as art of some kind. What made that commitment possible was the very complexity, absurdity and difficulty of the material which appeared to touch our situation; together with the ontic insecurity and exoticism of the artistic materials generated. The relations between discourse and putatively artistic materials were, as matters of dialectical interest, unavoidably contested and unstable. The status of texts and art work was constantly subject to emergency conditionals, annihilated and returned and annihilated again, often in the course of hours rather than days.

This was not Conceptual Art in the sense that the practice had moved, from purified-Minimalism plus Duchamp plus a commitment to make that reduction stick, into an artistic practice which conceived of itself as totally in continual process.

The Indexes from 1972-74 were an attempt to collect and to reflect – to take some measure of this activity, which, by its nature, was ordinally social rather than exclusively proprietorial and ratificatory. The ‘implosion’ which the indexes represent is also a drawing in as contributor of anyone who took the trouble to exert themselves in working with or on them.  The dead spectator. Among the questions that all this raises is whether or not it might be possible to regard some other form of work (say painting) initially as qualified by this indexing activity and finally as exemplifying it. In other words, with a certain continuity of working ethos and practice, where are the limits which determine what can count as its index?

Now, this brings us more or less naturally to the question of ‘voice’. There is something characteristically although marginally ventriloqual about the written work of Art & Language in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There were exceptions of course. Those who desired recognition – by, well, someone with weight – were shameless (or insecure) in their need to be seen speaking from their mouths. What was strange about this was that there were very few clues antecedently available as to what sort of voice we had made up. And made up it was. Here were artists not acting artist, indeed artists wearing the clothes of researchers or talkers simultaneously attached to some sort of artistic purpose. One might say teleologically artistic. There were possibly two ventriloqual voices. One (which often deluded itself as to its authenticity) was the researcher’s voice projected by the conventionally ambitious artist; an accretion of a researchy style to a competitive transformation of artistic practice. Here, philosophical-type discussion offered itself as a conventionally defensible artistic practice – as something capable of being the next thing in historicist space. The other voice was harder to identify. This was one less sure that it could take on the researchy package whole. It was a voice constantly disowned by what we have called an emergency conditional. Art & Language was engaged in something researchy and philosophical just in case this was an artistic practice (even if it was difficult to say how) and engaged in an artistic practice (etc.) just in case those involved thought they were engaged in something authentically research-like.

The latter voice was better able to express the bewilderment which the basic critique of high modernism engendered – a critique which had recognised the grotesque over-empowerment of the historicist critic and had constructed a project of syndicalisation. We sought to occupy the space of the critic somehow. But where? An ambivalence, even confusion, in this matter was not so much one of the flaws in the project as one of the conditions of its dialectical nature – a source of resonant provocation within the practice. Contained within the imploded (reflexively accultured) index is an explosion of possible voices or possible vocalizations. These are the worked  pathways which viewers (i.e., ‘operators’) of the index produce. Now, with this in mind, we take a sample from a later time – from studio discussions in the 1980s.

Consider the first series of works (paintings) called Hostages. These are colloquially known as ‘palette Hostages’. They are all constructed out of several parts. A number of slits (narrow sections) is transcribed from a view of a museum interior. The site described is a site of artistic production in the series of paintings Index: an Incident in a Museum. These transcriptions are fixed to narrow, flat, rectangular ‘canvasses’ and they are inserted so as to form the shape of an architectural plan (of a museum) in a larger canvas surface which contains small recesses designed to receive them.  Painted in similar ‘plan’ patterns in this large surface (but not inserted in it) are various forms of flat colour: fake painted wood-grain, dots and other surface vulgarities. The entirety of the surface so far painted is masked, and a ‘palette’ is plastered overall. A ‘palette’; it is only a representation of a palette. It may also be some sort of high-genre abstraction. It may be (is) the effect of a considerable concentration and effort. This is an aesthetic effort, within its parentheses more or less compatible with a Wollheimian description of what a painter does or imagines when she’s painting. To discover the virtues similar to or at least compatible with those that Wollheim discovers in Hofmann or De Kooning would not be a mistake, yet in the context of the entire work (the masking-tape removed to reveal the slits), to recover no more (or far less) than that would be a gross and conspicuous error. The seemingly Wollheimian painting is ventriloqual. The Hostage is not merely a representation of such a work – although at a certain level of reduction it is this of course – but a riskier illusion. The ventriloquist a) disguises her voice, which nevertheless remains b) a use of her voice.  She is not an actor who assumes a character. The ventriloquist infests a body not her own with a representation of a voice not her own, but which has its origin in her. The voice-thrower’s voice is spatially displaced, and the spatial displacement is disguised. The palette bit of the palette is the authentic production of Art & Language displaced centre-stage-front into a constructed ‘other’. The ‘risk’ the ventriloquist takes is that her presence on the stage is such that it is only to be displaced. To be recognised as the author of a vocal production is another risk.  Someone might say that a strict analogue here would require that we pretend that some literal other (someone with a different name and identity) had produced the palette. This would not address the simultaneous virtuality (or presence) of dummy (or other) and ventriloquist. The palette is produced under the condition that we may be misunderstood as its willing producers, producers who willingly accede to the culture of such productions but who are simultaneously present as those who do not. The painting is the other – the dummy, who virtually speaks in a voice which is actually ours. The risks of being seen to be represented by the dummy (the painting) are worrying enough. There is a great temptation to be a bad ventriloquist – to move one’s lips. The fact is that the palette can’t be done without a concentration analogous to Hofmann’s, but equally, it can’t be done without our being other than Hofmann-like.

This is the form in which painting was returned to our practice. The Wagnerian decorativeness of mid 1970s Conceptual Art had seen its site of production as well as its ethos in the hands of the administration. In acquiring a studio (a place or site redundant in the practice of management) we sought the restitution of a material world. This is a requirement of realism. This was a material world in which our conversation might take place: a site such that the conversation might critically reflect the conditions bearing upon it, and not hand itself over to a neurotic idealism whose critical content is the constituted product of the furious competition of managerial desire.

Conversations, Pet’s Homes, Decorations and Ornaments

‘Reductionism about the plurality of goals… often sounds simply funny. Thus the joke about the lawyer who is offered sex by a beautiful girl: "Well I guess so", he replies, "but what’s in it for me?"’
Jerry Fodor ‘The Trouble with Psychological Darwinism’, London Review of Books, 22^nd January, 1998.

We’ll begin this section by trying to describe what we’re doing now. That may not tell anyone what it’s like to be working now as a reflection of culture on a grand scale – but to have a grand view of culture is, given the fraudulent virtue of the age, also an imperative not only to talk like Jerry Fodor’s lawyer but to act like him, to elaborate his perlocutionary effect and to build a world on his model. Any ‘aesthetic’, that is a reasonably made art theory, will have to take Fodor’s joke seriously – and will need to acknowledge that many art theories may be serviceable in one way or another. The thing is to stay awake and to recognize the open critical task. How else can we continue in the face of the repulsive instrumentalists in charge of the land of Cockayne?

What we’re doing (and what we’ve often done) is to make things (art of a sort) which are built like mesomeric chemicals. Built of parts not mixed together, not identified with the sum of their constituents, but such that they are identical with all of them conceived separately as resonant. We might call them ‘hybrids’, not in the anthropological sense of bullshitters like Homi Bhaba or Peter Wollen, but in the sense that we’re producing work which is mutated from its original form, and decidedly mutated in relation to what might be called our original intentions (or hopes and fears). In fact, ‘hybrid’ may not be quite the appropriate expression. A chair made of small canvasses on which a picture of an open book is depicted (an open book also legible to the viewer) is not a hybrid as such.  It is a chair as well as a representation of a chair. It is simply that it is constructed of materials which are usually associated with a more or less normal wall display – small paintings – and that it presents a decorative surface. The constructed chair is a dis-construction – a dis-mantling of the ‘original’ form in which these items are intended and found. In this sense it is not at all a hybrid but a use – a use of the small paintings which might be like the use of a door or doors to make a fence or the use of a fridge as a garden shed, a use which almost supplants an earlier or an original identity, but which is itself also liable to be supplanted or made scandalous.

A more or less ordinary circumstance of mis-use is actually also just use or re-use. (Indeed, that’s what it really ought to be thought of.) In any case, what is used (or etc.) undergoes the contrary of being aufgehoben. There is much in contemporary culture which fears the reflexive iconoclasm of  ‘what-I-may-have-meant-brought-low’. But our interest in the world constituted as (a bit of) culture upraises the footlingly literal to become the provocation for one or two metaphors in the circle of dreamwork gone literal. More of this later. We are thinking of a group of paintings done by us between 1983 and 1985 and generically titled ‘Snow paintings’. They suffered from a difficulty, viz: that when they were aesthetically or decoratively complete (i.e., when we could stand to look at them, etc.) they were intellectually incomplete (hadn’t been sufficiently erased to make the cultural-critical point they were supposed to make). We re-used (used/mis-used) these surplus paintings – and they were all surplus paintings – to keep the rain off Tom’s pet rabbit, to cover its house and so forth.  One might say that we had indeed abandoned these works as aesthetic (or as paintings) and that their use for such ends as a rabbit cover (a roof) was possible only after they had been abandoned. It is possible that this abandonment foreclosed any possibility of their being used as paintings. But it did not foreclose their being of some sort of exemplary artistic interest (or for that matter cultural significance) for us somehow. But they really were abandoned. We would have had to invent new and disgracefully opportunistic reasons for their new status as rabbit-roof art and these reasons would not have been the same as our reasons for painting the paintings. Certainly, conceived as cultural consumable, a painting was merely transformed into another type of consumable.  Conceived as a painting (a cultural consumable of a particular kind) it might only have undergone a transformation into a painting (abandoned and used as a rabbit cover), the transformation (abandonment and use) being intrinsic to the painting’s own development.

The putting to a new use of the canvasses whose ‘original’ purpose was to sit conventionally on the wall presumably ‘represents’ the abandonment of the work as that particular type of representation of cultural consumable in favour of a representation of another. For example, a chair made of paintings is a representation of a painting and a representation of a chair. The chair narrates the process of the painting’s being brought low – and put in another world.

So far so more or less obvious. But we have found other uses for these small canvasses. They appear in the form of frame or cupboard for a quasi-decorative object of highly indeterminate identity which is made from even smaller canvasses. These smaller canvasses are all painted a uniform brown. The cupboard or frame is highly decorative and it tends to reduce the object within to something pictorial. But not quite. Indeed, one possibility is that the flat brown rear surface of the cupboard which is blocked by the object contained might be pictorial also: the viewer’s sight of it is frustrated by an object of perpetually asymptotic identity, made from small versions of itself. To be confronted with an object such that one is always just approaching identifying it is to be in an unfortunate position. The viewer is put in the unfortunate position of trying to ascertain what sort of object it might be. It looks familiar, but familiar as what? You can’t quite say. There seems to be some sort of family resemblance between this quasi-pictorial cupboard-plus-its-contents and another object which hangs next to it at the moment in the studio. This is something like a flat brown painting in a frame made out of the same canvasses as the cupboard. It has two chairs in front – the chairs being constructed of similar materials. This painting’s surface effaces itself to the extent that it appears as no more than a decorative attribute of that portion of the wall which the frame frames. The frame makes a shallow box. The painting is the ‘floor’ of that box – or rather, the absent floor of that box. The frame as the abandonment and re-use of paintings/texts frames a painting which it also abandons as decoratively null, or which it shuts in as a spatial anomaly. The chairs in front pay full attention (imply viewers) upwards from the lower leading edge of the frame, and return the glare of the (God-)forsaken painting. The painting in being both framed and abandoned or forsaken by the frame does indeed glare past the viewers absent from the chairs. To return the glare, however, is to risk being abandoned oneself to an exchange in an indecipherable code – an alien language understood only by the (non-human? invisible?) occupants of the chairs. (… Or… according to an even stranger Meinongian excess, the chairs are for disapproving Conceptual artists.)

What has this to do with the larger historical-cultural world? In order to answer this rather desperate question we need to say what the larger cultural world looks like – is like from the perspective of this work. 

Oppositional or dissenting models have declined in the (no doubt amusing) play of harmless contrasts which forms one of the self-images of the age. It does not follow that totalitarianism or fascism has disappeared. The disappearance of a conscious mass politics of social change has found its ideological apologists – or rather its smug affirmation – in the world of Cultural Studies. We work in conditions such that the moral adjuncts of oppositional politics (variations on the anti-instrumentalism of Kant’s categorical imperative to Sartre’s concept of good faith) have been forsaken in favour of the small advantages of the small politics of cultural expertise and ethical professionalism. This is barbarian politics and it’s hidden in the ornamental representations of emancipation which are the ideology of the culturally empowered.

A dialectically serviceable art theory is usually in danger of bathos if it tries too hard to second-guess the outcomes of authentic political struggles. The theory must nevertheless try to imagine the successful outcomes of these struggles. Many such serviceable theories have been buried in the small politics of research and its presumed rewards. The cultural theory (and a fortiori the cultural politics) which presses close upon our practice is one formed of small Gestapo states, in a not-quite-virtual not-reality of Spenglerian police stations, of empowered officials, prisoners and clients. The totalitarian fantasies of fascistic or Stalinist politics have been fragmented and replanted, transformed as small hegemonies – persuasive and oppressive conditions not acknowledged or recognised as such – competing violently with one another for the accolade which follows submission to an historical or cultural imperative. It might be thought that the task for the artist is to seek out – or to trip over – conditions which will liberate the viewer (or his or her interlocutor or whatever) from the list which follows an assertion of the type “This is where we are now”. In fact, though, the artist has been increasingly compelled to submit to the nomological pretentions of the Spenglerian list – to work, that is to say, in a climate in which the direction of the culture is prescribed according to priorities conceived as natural laws. The shift in power and in the locus of talk might not have been so bad had the practical emancipatory task been simply transferred to the theoreticians – who might at least have been able to offer some critique of the intellectual processes of naturalization. But the cultural theoreticians or theorists have taken only the talk of emancipation. And behind this talk lies not a critical practice of enquiry but a totalitarian mania for closure. The culture of cultural informedness abhors the crooked timber of human (and indeed natural) contrivance (the crooked timber which makes the discipline of socialist economics and socialist politics and enquiry necessary). It prefers a trivial but violent politics of competing purisms or cleansings. These purisms or cleansings take various forms, but they are all immune to the dialectical discomfort which would force their adherents to recognize the need to change themselves. For those not completely crushed by their own venal inertia there is the odd possibility of a move into a successively amnesiac submission, but there is little more than that.

The mere language of ‘variety’ and ‘difference’ becomes the self-deluding chant of the prisoners and the police alike.

It is against this pasteboard-and-barbed-wire background that we try to produce a minor narrative of grumbling doubt (scepticism) and conversation. 

One of the consequences of the totalitarian overdevelopment has been a loss of meaninglessness. The ‘Devil in the Sofa Cushions’ of Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White (the semiological preoccupation of a religious maniac) is the cognitive paradigm of the cultural sophisticate, as exemplified by the academic Art Historian with a grip on contemporary art.

The decorative has been reworked as a marginal subset of a Francis Bacon figure-and-ground trick, while the limits of the literal are fatuously overlapped by the figural. By this we mean that the theatrical schlock and excess of Bacon’s background decorativeness, which is fraudulently redeemed by the fake agonies (or headaches) of the figure decorated with paint, is now continued with sillier and sillier (gamier and gamier) provocations and stunts. The journalist writes a stunning and shocking scenario, the art director arranges it and the Advertising Czar speculator buys it. The circle of reflections is indeed productive of a low-grade, low-interest meaning, but it is stuffed with opportunities for the unhistorical literal minded to generate a figural language, a rhetoric. The empty literalness of the material provides a necessary condition for an ornamental excess of language which is itself turned literal in the small political battle for cultural power.

This power is systematically exemplified in the growth of small or large academies whose purpose is to render the figural language (or worse) of those at the top of the charismatically solipsist heap into conventional sort. The decorative and the ornamental cannot offend decency in virtue of what it describes or pictures, but only (when it does) in virtue of its form. If a decorative or ornamental work is to contain some sort of controversial and fearless content, then it must hide it – make it unseen. The “fuck it, I don’t care, it’s just dumb shit” that forms the spots and stripes of Brit Art’s fraudulent insouciance is far from decorative: it sticks its content (“fuck it...” etc.) plus gullible interpretation right in the middle of its two-dimensional face.

The untidy edges of the decorative remain more or less thinly populated. These are the places which might produce an uncomfortable silence in the minds of those who arbitrate the artistic self-image of the age. What we mean is that the decorative promises a collapse from the significant to the meaningless. This is the scandal (the reason to continue) which attends all possibilities of conversation.

We’re saying that the conversational and the decorative are connected. There is in the resistant (semiotically resistant) decorative always a possibility (due to excess of compunction) of collapse into meaninglessness. This is often a meaninglessness which is associated with alien-ness or criminality.  A mark of  the conversational is that it is liable to collapse into a pragmatic or concatenatory excess or emptiness – a practical resistance to theory – and that is resistance to a hegemony of academic observance, protocol and closure. It could be that conversation is the criminality of theory just as decoration might be the forensic degeneration of sense. But this is conversation that keeps its rubbish as rubbish: it doesn’t make its unmade beds of metaphors come back as literal sorts.

Conversational meaninglessness in the form of collapse is familiar to most people. Most of us are familiar with the idea of a conversation capable of being sustained pragmatically beyond the point at which the normal expositional rules of semantics and syntax are being strictly followed. What if we go a bit further and think that a conversation can take place as a kind of dream-work. That is, while the normal referential (etc.) uses are made of words and phrases, a point can be reached such that these are never (or seldom) connected directly to the real effects of talking (or writing). At the limit (some) conversations can amount to a concatenatory exchange of metaphors understood intentionally but somehow embedded indexically – unable to escape without leaving considerable remainder. What is produced is an aesthetic excess (an ornamentation) which may be adjacent to but which is unlike literature in having little or no publicly aestheticised effects. The cognitive effects are contained within the indexical horizon of the conversation and do not readily (or never) transmit  into the land of public exposition. Their language is the language of a pattern of incitements (colours?) to some (almost) possible courses of action (whether linguistic or otherwise).

The possible conversational type under consideration is not conducted merely in jargon – in a language of lexical marginality or novelty – but in words which have a regular and literal use. Of course, most conversation is conducted normally. It’s likely that what we are in fact trying to consider is not so much a conversational type, but a possible conversational margin: a way that a conversation and only a conversation can go. These are margins where the exchange remains fully aware of the normal referential use but falls down (collapses) in an excess of effects (analogous to but not identical with) aesthetic effects. This is not, however, a collapse into poetry – although it might be sometimes. It’s more like a collapse into a modal richness – grammatical and semantic elision and indexicality: going on. This is no more than “normal” for many conversations, and is particularly plausible in the private dreamwork of self-incitement. What is not always clear is that this can also be a socially productive thing. 

(Or is this simply crap … or, was that conversational?)

Consider this possibility: how many words does a complex conversation need? Two or three people somehow work socially or collaboratively. They decide (or...) to practise an extreme principle of economy. There are three main expressions in their language plus the usual connectives and a few verbs and adjectives. It’s not a normal lingo or pidgin as it’s far too impoverished in surface resources of expression. They have the expression “yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah” which deals with assent or dissent, denial or certain forms of assertion, ‘knobex’ and its negative (‘non-knobex’) as its nouns, and an obscene comparative ‘as fuck…’ They have the usual resource of ostention. Such a poor language could be used to have a comparatively complex conversation. What is odd and of interest conversationally about this imagined poverty is that it actually is like a certain conversational development, where an application of Occam’s razor is simultaneously the condition of wild referential and modal excess.

At this margin the conversational is an exchange which can collapse into the literally meaningless and which is yet sustained according to rules which leave ‘spaces’ for the effects of meaningless utterances to function practically, not simply as a consequence of eventual ‘correction’ by conventionalisation (or use) but in being the ornamental shadow which lives in an index. We’re not just thinking here of the occasionally undifferentiated vocabulary (calling everything a ‘knobex’ or using catchphrase obscenity) but also of the strange ‘decorative’ breakdown(s) that occur(s) in the face of unexpected or strange practical outcomes like great failures and moments where work is abandoned or alienated – desperate moments.

Of course, everyone has moments of collapse and absurdity in conversation – moments of meaninglessness. This is commonplace. What is often not noticed about such moments is that in being sustained or continued, it is their very decorativeness – their excess in the face of loss of meaning – which is their power to strike subversively at the substance of official truth or power. Meaningless over-recursion is the outward sign that the originary set of epistemic conditions have been passed or abandoned in favour of the pleasures of dreamwork-in-practical-guise.

Used decoratively, colours and textures and shapes (or what? those differences which incite philosophy, i.e., the examining of differences and the attempt sometimes to resolve them – are absolved (or apparently absolved) of the requirement that they make meaning. There are two questions that might be asked of the outcome of such a use: ‘What are the conditions (what additional conditions are present or adjacent) such that in some possible world (some world other than the actual one?) those colours and textures and shapes might form something meaningful’; and: ‘What are the actual circumstances such that a claim that this work P (painting, art or something like them) makes itself meaningless, can be said to be true?’

The decorative in our sense absconds from the meaningful – at least from the meaningful in the actual world. Indeed, it is decorative only in the sense that it does abscond. There is nothing of course that is incapable of being meaningful in some sense, and of course one person’s or perspective’s decoration is another’s votive object. So there are no absolutely decorative items. Are the poems and inscriptions on the walls of the Alhambra decorative in any sense that we mean? No, except that they hide their meaning, or an aspect of their meaningfulness, in excess. They obscure their own literary power with an excess of decorative tangle which is unread but viewed as a surface. What we want to call decorative has something necessarily to do with a flight from meaning. And this flight may be either from the expressive or figural or allegorical, or from whatever significance may be confirmed (contained within) and recoverable from a painting, or from the literal-cultural meaningfulness which is read into (post-structurally discriminated from) objects as themselves or as signs.

Now, this flight from meaningfulness is accomplished only in the preservation of a tension.  It is accomplished (or essayed) by a work which fails to be (e.g.) either a painting or a literal object. (This is the abject achievement of ‘neither one thing nor the other.’) There may be  a ‘logical’ figure for such items, just as there is for certain textual Conceptual Art works of the 1960’s and 1970’s. In the latter case, there are several emergency conditionals involved. ‘P is a philosophical text just in case it is a work of art (a quasi-text, accidental and non-intentional to some degree and in some relevant sense).’ Or, ‘Q is a text – a piece of writing or something conceived as intentional, non-accidental (in some way and to some degree) – just in case it is an artistic inscription (accidental and non-intentional to some degree in some relevant sense)’, and so on.

We can try such emergency conditionals the other way round. ‘P is a work of art (a quasi-text – on intentional, etc.) just in case it is a text (etc.)’. What do we make of “just in case” here? The emergency conditional almost works. Consider: ‘S is decorative (meaningless) just in case S is a painting (and meaningful)’. It doesn’t quite work. Consider, however, ‘S is somehow to be made decorative (etc.) just insofar as it is a painting (etc.)’. Do we need the additional ‘practical’ modifiers? No. The fact (or fact-like condition) is that we can perform the categorical denial, the inversion, so long as we get help from the work or the world outside – just as we usually do with textual work from the 1960’s.

If I hang up the newspaper as a paper-chain, the text of the newspaper may well remain intact (cf the texts in the collages of Picasso and Braque) but the newspaper has lost its first-order significance as a newspaper. (That’s one of the most obvious diagrams.) But can we correct this diagram to the emergency conditional – or the ‘just in case’  and say, the paper-chain is (or could be) decorative just in case the newspaper is read as a newspaper, or etc. ‘Just in case’ could be put in other ways. One might say that  the recognition that P might be (is) decorative might be (is) connected to relative success in recovering some sort of non-decorative significance from P’s components – i.e., those parts which together compose P as a decorative whole.

The possible achievement of what we suppose has to be called the post-structuralist decorative is that it extracts meaninglessness from materials which might be thought ‘intrinsically’ meaningful, collapsing or imploding them – their internal significances – into an empty connectedness or use which is tantamount to their loss as signifying stuff.

The paper-chain may also of course be made of something else: a ‘painting’ or a Conceptual Art text. How would an emergency-type conditional work in this rabbit-roof-plus-fragmentation case?



Notes


(1) The comparative figures are given in Brandon Taylor, Modernism, Postmodernism, Realism: a critical perspective for art, Winchester, 1987, p 77. David Harvey draws attention to the significance of Taylors’s figures in The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford. 1990, p 290.

–––––

(2) At the time of writing, Godfrey’s book was forthcoming. It has now been published by Phaidon (1998). It is largely a feeble and contemptible product. We don’t need to list its scholarly and moral deficiencies here. We will therefore confine ourselves to remarking that its cover reproduces a fakes Broodthears and that the book declines from there.