Buchloh, conceptual art.pdf - Course Materials Repository

Robert
Barry. Painting in Four
Parts. 1967.
i~iiiii~iII Uii~iii
* U
as spatial perimeter, as plane, as surface, and, functioning simultaneously, as
support. But, with the very success of this self-referential gesture, marking the
form out as purely pictorial, the square painting paradoxically but inevitably
assumes the character of a relief/object situated in actual space. It thereby invites
a viewing/reading of spatial contingency and architectural imbeddedness, insisting
on the imminent and irreversible transition from painting to sculpture.
This transition was performed in the proto-Conceptual art of the early- to
mid-1960s in a fairly delimited number of specific pictorial operations. It occurred,
first of all, through the emphasis on painting's opacity. The object-status
of the painterly structure could be underscored by unifying and homogenizing
its surface through monochromy, serialized texture, and gridded compositional
structure; or it could be emphasized by literally sealing a painting's spatial
transparency, by simply altering its material support: shifting it from canvas to
unstretched fabric or metal. This type of investigation was developed systematically,
for example, in the proto-Conceptual paintings of Robert Ryman, who
employed all of these options separately or in varying combinations in the earlyto
mid-i1960s; or, after 1965, in the paintings of Robert Barry, Daniel Buren, and
Niele Toroni.
Secondly- and in a direct inversion and countermovement to the firstobject-status
could be achieved by emphasizing, in a literalist manner, painting's
transparency. This entailed establishing a dialectic between pictorial surface,
frame, and architectural support by either a literal opening up of the painterly
support, as in Sol LeWitt's early Structures, or by the insertion of translucent or
transparent surfaces into the conventional frame of viewing, as in Ryman's
fiberglass paintings, Buren's early nylon paintings, or Michael Asher's and Ger-