Buchloh, conceptual art.pdf - Course Materials Repository
Buchloh, conceptual art.pdf - Course Materials Repository
Buchloh, conceptual art.pdf - Course Materials Repository
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Conceptual Art 1962-1969 129<br />
come firmly established as the most common and powerful social class of postwar<br />
society, is the one which, as H. G. Helms wrote in his book on Max Stirner,<br />
"deprives itself voluntarily of the rights to intervene within the political decisionmaking<br />
process in order to arrange itself more efficiently with the existing<br />
political conditions."26<br />
This aesthetic of the newly established power of administration found its<br />
first fully developed literary voice in a phenomenon like the nouveau roman of<br />
Robbe-Grillet. It was no accident that such a profoundly positivist literary project<br />
would then serve, in the American context, as a point of dep<strong>art</strong>ure for Conceptual<br />
Art. But, paradoxically, it was at this very same historical moment that the<br />
social functions of the tautological principle found their most lucid analysis,<br />
through a critical examination launched in France.<br />
In the early writing of Roland B<strong>art</strong>hes one finds, simultaneously with the<br />
nouveau roman, a discussion of the tautological:<br />
Tautologie. Yes, I know, it's an ugly word. But so is the thing. Tautology<br />
is the verbal device which consists in defining like by like ("Drama<br />
is drama"). . . . One takes refuge in tautology as one does in fear, or<br />
anger, or sadness, when one is at a loss for an explanation. . . . In<br />
tautology, there is a double murder: one kills rationality because it<br />
resists one; one kills language because it betrays one. . . . Now any<br />
refusal of language is a death. Tautology creates a dead, a motionless<br />
world.27<br />
Ten years later, at the same moment that Kosuth was discovering it as the<br />
central aesthetic project of his era, the phenomenon of the tautological was once<br />
again opened to examination in France. But now, rather than being discussed as<br />
a linguistic and rhetorical form, it was analyzed as a general social effect: as both<br />
the inescapable reflex of behavior and, once the requirements of the advanced<br />
culture industry (i.e., advertisement and media) have been put in place in the<br />
formation of spectacle culture, a universal condition of experience. What still<br />
remains open for discussion, of course, is the extent to which Conceptual Art of a<br />
certain type shared these conditions, or even enacted and implemented them in<br />
the sphere of the aesthetic-accounting, perhaps, for its subsequent proximity<br />
and success within a world of advertisement strategists-or, alternatively, the<br />
extent to which it merely inscribed itself into the inescapable logic of a totally<br />
administered world, as Adorno's notorious term identified it. Thus Guy Debord<br />
noted in 1967:<br />
The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the<br />
simple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends. It is the sun<br />
26. Hans G. Helms, Die Ideologie der anonymen Gesellschaft (Cologne, 1968), p. 3.<br />
27. Roland B<strong>art</strong>hes, Mythologies, pp. 152- 53.