Buchloh, conceptual art.pdf - Course Materials Repository

136 OCTOBER
Transcending the literalist or perceptual precision with which Barry and
Ryman had previously connected their painterly objects to the traditional walls of
display, in order to make their physical and perceptual interdependence mani-
fest, Weiner's two squares are now physically integrated with both these support
surfaces and their institutional definition. Further, since the work's inscription
paradoxically implies the physical displacement of the support surface, it engenders
an experience of perceptual withdrawal as well. And just as the work negates
the specularity of the traditional artistic object by literally withdrawing rather
than adding visual data in the construct, so this act of perceptual withdrawal
operates at the same time as a physical (and symbolic) intervention in the institutional
power and property relations underlying the supposed neutrality of
"mere" devices of presentation. The installation and/or acquisition of either of
these works requires that the future owner accept an instance of physical removal/withdrawal/interruption
on both the level of institutional order and on
that of private ownership.
It was only logical that, on the occasion of Seth Siegelaub's first major
exhibition of Conceptual Art, the show entitled January 5-31, 1969, Lawrence
Weiner would have presented a formula that then functioned as the matrix
underlying all his subsequent propositions. Specifically addressing the relations
within which the work of art is constituted as an open, structural, syntagmatic
formula, this matrix statement defines the parameters of a work of art as those of
the conditions of authorship and production, and their interdependence with
those of ownership and use (and not least of all, at its own propositional level, as a
linguistic definition contingent upon and determined by all of these parameters in
their continuously varying and changing constellations:
With relation to the various manners of use:
1. The artist may construct the piece
2. The piece may be fabricated
3. The piece need not to be built
Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to
condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership
What begins to be put in play here, then, is a critique that operates at the
level of the aesthetic "institution." It is a recognition that materials and procedures,
surfaces and textures, locations and placement are not only sculptural or
painterly matter to be dealt with in terms of a phenomenology of visual and
cognitive experience or in terms of a structural analysis of the sign (as most of the
Minimalist and post-Minimalist artists had still believed), but that they are always
already inscribed within the conventions of language and thereby within institu-
tional power and ideological and economic investment. However, if, in Weiner's
and Barry's work of the late 1960s, this recognition still seems merely latent, it
was to become manifest very rapidly in the work of European artists of the same
generation, in particular that of Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, and Hans