Buchloh, conceptual art.pdf - Course Materials Repository

Conceptual Art 1962-1969 143
moment that it mimed the operating logic of late capitalism and its positivist
instrumentality in an effort to place its auto-critical investigations at the service of
liquidating even the last remnants of traditional aesthetic experience. In that
process it succeeded in purging itself entirely of imaginary and bodily experience,
of physical substance and the space of memory, to the same extent that it
effaced all residues of representation and style, of individuality and skill. That
was the moment when Buren's and Haacke's work from the late 1960s onward
turned the violence of that mimetic relationship back onto the ideological apparatus
itself, using it to analyze and expose the social institutions from which the
laws of positivist instrumentality and the logic of administration emanate in the
first place. These institutions, which determine the conditions of cultural consumption,
are the very ones in which artistic production is transformed into a
tool of ideological control and cultural legitimation.
It was left to Marcel Broodthaers to construct objects in which the radical
achievements of Conceptual Art would be turned into immediate travesty and in
which the seriousness with which Conceptual Artists had adopted the rigorous
mimetic subjection of aesthetic experience to the principles of what Adorno had
called the "totally administered world" were transformed into absolute farce.
And it was one of the effects of Broodthaers's dialectics that the achievement of
Conceptual Art was revealed as being intricately tied to a profound and irreversible
loss: a loss not caused by artistic practice, of course, but one to which that
practice responded in the full optimism of its aspirations, failing to recognize that
the purging of image and skill, of memory and vision, within visual aesthetic
representation was not just another heroic step in the inevitable progress of
Enlightenment to liberate the world from mythical forms of perception and
hierarchical modes of specialized experience, but that it was also yet another,
perhaps the last of the erosions (and perhaps the most effective and devastating
one) to which the traditionally separate sphere of artistic production had been
subjected in its perpetual efforts to emulate the regnant episteme within the
paradigmatic frame proper to art itself.
Or worse yet, that the Enlightenment-triumph of Conceptual Art-its
transformation of audiences and distribution, its abolition of object status and
commodity form--would most of all only be shortlived, almost immediately
giving way to the return of the ghostlike reapparitions of (prematurely?) dis-
placed painterly and sculptural paradigms of the past. So that the specular
regime, which Conceptual Art claimed to have upset, would soon be reinstated
with renewed vigor. Which is of course what happened.