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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112 OCTOBER<br />
not more so - in his contempt for the opposite, which is to say, the Duchampian<br />
tradition. This is evident in Ad Reinhardt's condescending remarks about both<br />
Duchamp--"I've never approved or liked anything about Marcel Duchamp.<br />
You have to chose between Duchamp and Mondrian" -and his legacy as represented<br />
through Cage and Rauschenberg--"Then the whole mixture, the number<br />
of poets and musicians and writers mixed up with <strong>art</strong>. Disreputable. Cage,<br />
Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg. I'm against the mixture of all the <strong>art</strong>s,<br />
against the mixture of <strong>art</strong> and life you know, everyday life."8<br />
What slid by unnoticed was the fact that both these critiques of representation<br />
led to highly comparable formal and structural results (e.g., Rauschenberg's<br />
monochromes in 1951-1953 and Reinhardt's monochromes such as Black<br />
Quadruptych in 1955). Furthermore, even while made from opposite vantage<br />
points, the critical arguments accompanying such works systematically denied the<br />
traditional principles and functions of visual representation, constructing aston-<br />
ishingly similar litanies of negation. This is as evident, for example, in the text<br />
prepared by John Cage for Rauschenberg's White Paintings in 1953 as it is in Ad<br />
Reinhardt's 1962 manifesto "Art as Art." First Cage:<br />
To whom, No subject, No image, No taste, No object, No beauty, No<br />
talent, No technique (no why), No idea, No intention, No <strong>art</strong>, No<br />
feeling, No black, No white no (and). After careful consideration I<br />
have come to the conclusion that there is nothing in these paintings<br />
that could not be changed, that they can be seen in any light and are<br />
not destroyed by the action of shadows. Hallelujah! the blind can see<br />
again; the water is fine.9<br />
And then Ad Reinhardt's manifesto for his own "Art as Art" principle:<br />
No lines or imaginings, no shapes or composings or representings, no<br />
visions or sensations or impulses, no symbols or signs or impastos, no<br />
decoratings or colorings or picturings, no pleasures or pains, no accidents<br />
or ready-mades, no things, no ideas, no relations, no attributes,<br />
no qualities--nothing that is not of the essence.'0<br />
Ad Reinhardt's empiricist American formalism (condensed in his "Art as<br />
Art" formula) and Duchamp's critique of visuality (voiced for example in the<br />
8. The first of the two quotations is to be found in Ad Reinhardt's Skowhegan lecture, delivered<br />
in 1967, quoted by Lucy Lippard in Ad Reinhardt (New York, 1981), p. 195. The second statement<br />
appears in an interview with Mary Fuller, published as "An Ad Reinhardt Monologue," Artforum,<br />
vol. 10 (November 1971), pp. 36-41.<br />
9. John Cage (statement in reaction to the controversy engendered by the exhibition of Rauschenberg's<br />
all-white paintings at the Stable Gallery, September 15-October 3, 1953). Printed in<br />
Emily Genauer's column in the New York Herald Tribune, December 27, 1953, p. 6 (section 4).<br />
10. Ad Reinhardt, "Art as Art," Art International (December 1962). Reprinted in Art as Art: The<br />
Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, ed. Barbara Rose (New York: Viking, 1975), p. 56.