Buchloh, conceptual art.pdf - Course Materials Repository

128 OCTOBER
tion types shows art "works" as analytic propositions. Works of art
that try to tell us something about the world are bound to fail .
The absence of reality in art is exactly art's reality.25
Kosuth's programmatic efforts to reinstate a law of discursive self-reflexiveness
in the guise of a critique of Greenberg's and Fried's visual and formal
self-reflexiveness are all the more astonishing since a considerable part of "Art
after Philosophy" is dedicated to the elaborate construction of a genealogy for
Conceptual Art, in and of itself a historical project (e.g., "All art [after Duchamp]
is conceptual [in nature] because art exists only conceptually"). This very construction
of a lineage already contextualizes and historicizes, of course, in "telling
us something about the world"-of art, at least; that is, it unwittingly
operates like a synthetic proposition (even if only within the conventions of a
particular language system) and therefore denies both the purity and the possibility
of an autonomous artistic production that would function, within art's own
language-system, as mere analytic proposition.
Perhaps one might try to argue that, in fact, Kosuth's renewed cult of the
tautology brings the Symbolist project to fruition. It might be said, for example,
that this renewal is the logical extension of Symbolism's exclusive concern with
the conditions and the theorization of art's own modes of conception and reading.
Such an argument, however, would still not allay questions concerning the
altered historical framework within which such a cult must find its determination.
Even within its Symbolist origins, the modernist theology of art was already
gripped by a polarized opposition. For a religious veneration of self-referential
plastic form as the pure negation of rationalist and empiricist thought can simultaneously
be read as nothing other than the inscription and instrumentalization
of precisely that order - even or particularly in its negation - within the realm
of the aesthetic itself (the almost immediate and universal application of Symbolism
for the cosmos of late nineteenth-century commodity production would
attest to this).
This dialectic came to claim its historical rights all the more forcefully in the
contemporary, postwar situation. For given the conditions of a rapidly accelerat-
ing fusion of the culture industry with the last bastions of an autonomous sphere
of high art, self-reflexiveness increasingly (and inevitably) came to shift along the
borderline between logical positivism and the advertisement campaign. And
further, the rights and rationale of a newly established postwar middle class, one
which came fully into its own in the 1960s, could assume their aesthetic identity
in the very model of the tautology and its accompanying aesthetic of administration.
For this aesthetic identity is structured much the way this class's social
identity is, namely, as one of merely administering labor and production (rather
than producing) and of the distribution of commodities. This class, having be-
25. Joseph Kosuth, The Sixth Investigation 1969 Proposition 14.