Buchloh, conceptual art.pdf - Course Materials Repository

116 OCTOBER
made as the mere displacement of traditional modes of artistic production by a
new aesthetic of the speech act ("this is a work of art if I say so"). And in marked
distinction from the Conceptualists' subsequent exclusive focus on the unassisted
readymades, Morris had, from the late 1950s when he discovered Duchamp,
been particularly engaged with work such as Three Standard Stoppages and the
Notes for the Large Glass (The Green Box).
Morris's production from the early 1960s, in particular works like Card File
(1962), Metered Bulb (1963), I-Box (1963), Litanies, and the Statement of Aesthetic
Withdrawal, also entitled Document (1963), indicated a reading of Duchamp that
clearly went beyond Johns's, leading towards a structural and semiotic definition
of the functions of the readymade. As Morris described it retrospectively in his
1970 essay "Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making":
There is a binary swing between the arbitrary and the nonarbitrary or
"motivated" which is . . . an historical, evolutionary, or diachronic
feature of language's development and change. Language is not plastic
art but both are forms of human behavior and the structures of one
can be compared to the structures of the other.'5
While it is worth noticing that by 1970 Morris already reaffirmed apodictically
the ontological character of the category "plastic" art versus that of "language,"
it was in the early 1960s that his assaults on the traditional concepts of
visuality and plasticity had already begun to lay some of the crucial foundations
for the development of an art practice emphasizing its parallels, if not identity,
with the systems of linguistic signs, i.e., Conceptual Art.
Most importantly, as early as 1961 in his Box with the Sound of Its Own
Making, Morris had ruptured both. On the one hand, it dispenses with the
Modernist quest for medium-specific purity as much as with its sequel in the
positivist conviction of a purely perceptual experience operating in Stella's visual
tautologies and the early phases of Minimalism. And on the other, by counteract-
ing the supremacy of the visual with that of an auditory experience of equal if not
higher importance, he renewed the Duchampian quest for a nonretinal art. In
Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, as much as in the subsequent works, the
critique of the hegemony of traditional categories of the visual is enacted not
only in the (acoustic or tactile) disturbance of the purity of perceptual experience,
but it is performed as well through a literalist act of denying the viewer
practically all (at least traditionally defined) visual information.
This strategy of a "perceptual withdrawal" leads in each of the works from
the early 1960s to a different analysis of the constituent features of the structured
object and the modes of reading it generates. In I-Box, for example, the
viewer is confronted with a semiotic pun (on the words I and eye) just as much as
15. Robert Morris, "Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for the Motivated,"
Artforum, vol. 9 (April 1970), p. 63.