Buchloh, conceptual art.pdf - Course Materials Repository

BENJAMIN
H. D. BUCHLOH
Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From
the Aesthetic of Administration
to the Critique of Institutions*
This monster called beauty is not eternal. We know that our breath had no
beginning and will never stop, but we can, above all, conceive of the world's
creation and its end.
- Apollinaire, Les peintres cubistes
Allergic to any relapse into magic, art is part and parcel of the disenchantment
of the world, to use Max Weber's term. It is inextricably intertwined
with rationalization. What means and productive methods art has at its
disposal are all derived from this nexus.
-Theodor Adorno
A twenty-year distance separates us from the historical moment of Conceptual
Art. It is a distance that both allows and obliges us to contemplate the
movement's history in a broader perspective than that of the convictions held
during the decade of its emergence and operation (roughly from 1965 to its
temporary disappearance in 1975). For to historicize Conceptual Art requires,
first of all, a clarification of the wide range of often conflicting positions and the
mutually exclusive types of investigation that were generated during this period.
But beyond that there are broader problems of method and of "interest."
For at this juncture, any historicization has to consider what type of questions an
art-historical approach - traditionally based on the study of visual objects - can
legitimately pose or hope to answer in the context of artistic practices that
explicitly insisted on being addressed outside of the parameters of the production
of formally ordered, perceptual objects, and certainly outside of those of art
history and criticism. And, further, such an historicization must also address the
* An earlier version of this essay was published in L'art conceptuel: une perspective (Paris: Mus&e
d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1989).