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Conceptual Art 1962-1969 111 and by Donald Judd than I ever was specifically by LeWitt . .. Pollock and Judd are, I feel, the beginning and end of American dominance in art."6 Sol LeWitt's Structures It would seem that LeWitt's proto-Conceptual work of the early 1960s originated in an understanding of the essential dilemma that has haunted artistic production since 1913, when its basic paradigms of opposition were first formulated -a dilemma that could be described as the conflict between structural specificity and random organization. For the need, on the one hand, for both a systematic reduction and an empirical verification of the perceptual data of a visual structure stands opposed to the desire, on the other hand, to assign a new "idea" or meaning to an object randomly (in the manner of Mallarme's "transposition") as though the object were an empty (linguistic) signifier. This was the dilemma that Roland Barthes described in 1956 as the "difficulty of our times" in the concluding paragraphs of Mythologies: It seems that this is a difficulty pertaining to our times: there is as yet only one possible choice, and this choice can bear only on two equally extreme methods: either to posit a reality which is entirely permeable to history, and ideologize; or, conversely, to posit a reality which is ultimately impenetrable, irreducible, and, in this case, poetize. In a word, I do not yet see a synthesis between ideology and poetry (by poetry I understand, in a very general way, the search for the inalienable meaning of things).7 Both critiques of the traditional practices of representation in the American postwar context had at first appeared mutually exclusive and had often fiercely attacked each other. For example, Reinhardt's extreme form of self-critical, perceptual positivism had gone too far for most of the New York School artists and certainly for the apologists of American modernism, mainly Greenberg and Fried, who had constructed a paradoxical dogma of transcendentalism and selfreferential critique. On the other hand, Reinhardt was as vociferous as they- if 6. Joseph Kosuth, "Art after Philosophy" (Part II), in The Making of Meaning, p. 175. The list would seem complete, if it were not for the absence of Mel Bochner's and On Kawara's name, and its explicit negation of the importance of Sol LeWitt. According to Bochner, who had become an instructor at the School of Visual Arts in 1965, Joseph Kosuth worked with him as a student in 1965 and 1966. Dan Graham mentioned that during that time Kosuth was also a frequent visitor to the studios of On Kawara and Sol LeWitt. Kosuth's explicit negation makes one wonder whether it was not precisely Sol LeWitt's series of the so-called "Structures" (such as Red Square, White Letters, for example, produced in 1962 and exhibited in 1965) that was one of the crucial points of departure for the formulation of Kosuth's Proto-Investigations. 7. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 158.
112 OCTOBER not more so - in his contempt for the opposite, which is to say, the Duchampian tradition. This is evident in Ad Reinhardt's condescending remarks about both Duchamp--"I've never approved or liked anything about Marcel Duchamp. You have to chose between Duchamp and Mondrian" -and his legacy as represented through Cage and Rauschenberg--"Then the whole mixture, the number of poets and musicians and writers mixed up with art. Disreputable. Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg. I'm against the mixture of all the arts, against the mixture of art and life you know, everyday life."8 What slid by unnoticed was the fact that both these critiques of representation led to highly comparable formal and structural results (e.g., Rauschenberg's monochromes in 1951-1953 and Reinhardt's monochromes such as Black Quadruptych in 1955). Furthermore, even while made from opposite vantage points, the critical arguments accompanying such works systematically denied the traditional principles and functions of visual representation, constructing aston- ishingly similar litanies of negation. This is as evident, for example, in the text prepared by John Cage for Rauschenberg's White Paintings in 1953 as it is in Ad Reinhardt's 1962 manifesto "Art as Art." First Cage: To whom, No subject, No image, No taste, No object, No beauty, No talent, No technique (no why), No idea, No intention, No art, No feeling, No black, No white no (and). After careful consideration I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing in these paintings that could not be changed, that they can be seen in any light and are not destroyed by the action of shadows. Hallelujah! the blind can see again; the water is fine.9 And then Ad Reinhardt's manifesto for his own "Art as Art" principle: No lines or imaginings, no shapes or composings or representings, no visions or sensations or impulses, no symbols or signs or impastos, no decoratings or colorings or picturings, no pleasures or pains, no accidents or ready-mades, no things, no ideas, no relations, no attributes, no qualities--nothing that is not of the essence.'0 Ad Reinhardt's empiricist American formalism (condensed in his "Art as Art" formula) and Duchamp's critique of visuality (voiced for example in the 8. The first of the two quotations is to be found in Ad Reinhardt's Skowhegan lecture, delivered in 1967, quoted by Lucy Lippard in Ad Reinhardt (New York, 1981), p. 195. The second statement appears in an interview with Mary Fuller, published as "An Ad Reinhardt Monologue," Artforum, vol. 10 (November 1971), pp. 36-41. 9. John Cage (statement in reaction to the controversy engendered by the exhibition of Rauschenberg's all-white paintings at the Stable Gallery, September 15-October 3, 1953). Printed in Emily Genauer's column in the New York Herald Tribune, December 27, 1953, p. 6 (section 4). 10. Ad Reinhardt, "Art as Art," Art International (December 1962). Reprinted in Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, ed. Barbara Rose (New York: Viking, 1975), p. 56.
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Page 5 and 6: 108 OCTOBER movement's self-declare
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Page 11 and 12: Sol LeWitt. Untitled (Red Square, W
Page 13 and 14: 116 OCTOBER made as the mere displa
Page 15 and 16: 118 OCTOBER to the manifest lack of
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Page 19 and 20: 122 OCTOBER Years, or, most signifi
Page 21 and 22: 124 OCTOBER By contrast, Graham's w
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Page 25 and 26: 128 OCTOBER tion types shows art "w
Page 27 and 28: 130 OCTOBER which never sets over t
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Page 33 and 34: 136 OCTOBER Transcending the litera
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Page 37 and 38: 140 OCTOBER incidentally, which had
Page 39 and 40: 142 OCTOBER Buren, Mosset, Parmenti

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