In One and Five Ideas eminent critic, historian, and former member of the Art & Language collective Terry Smith explores the artistic, philosophical, political, and geographical dimensions of Conceptual Art and conceptualism. These four essays and a conversation with Mary Kelly—published between 1974 and 2012—contain Smith's most essential work on Conceptual Art and his argument that conceptualism was key to the historical transition from modern to contemporary art. Nothing less than a distinctive theory of Conceptual and contemporary art, One and Five Ideas showcases the critical voice of one of the major art theorists of our time.
In One and Five Ideas eminent critic, historian, and former member of the Art & Language collective Terry Smith explores the artistic, philosophical, political, and geographical dimensions of Conceptual Art and conceptualism. These four essays and a conversation with Mary Kelly—published between 1974 and 2012—contain Smith's most essential work on Conceptual Art and his argument that conceptualism was key to the historical transition from modern to contemporary art. Nothing less than a distinctive theory of Conceptual and contemporary art, One and Five Ideas showcases the critical voice of one of the major art theorists of our time.
One and Five Ideas: On Conceptual Art and Conceptualism
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Overview
In One and Five Ideas eminent critic, historian, and former member of the Art & Language collective Terry Smith explores the artistic, philosophical, political, and geographical dimensions of Conceptual Art and conceptualism. These four essays and a conversation with Mary Kelly—published between 1974 and 2012—contain Smith's most essential work on Conceptual Art and his argument that conceptualism was key to the historical transition from modern to contemporary art. Nothing less than a distinctive theory of Conceptual and contemporary art, One and Five Ideas showcases the critical voice of one of the major art theorists of our time.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822374329 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/06/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 168 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Terry Smith is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh and Professor in the Division of Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School. He is the author of several books, including Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America and What Is Contemporary Art?
Robert Bailey is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Oklahoma and the author of Art & Language International: Conceptual Art between Art Worlds, also published by Duke University Press.
Read an Excerpt
One and Five Ideas
On Conceptual Art and Conceptualism
By Terry Smith, Robert Bailey
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2017 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7432-9
CHAPTER 1
Art and Art and Language
For more than a year various writers in this magazine, and others, have referred to the Art & Language group of artists. Their remarks add up to a sorry list of misunderstandings, distortions, and hasty judgments, interspersed with occasional expressions of tentative and somewhat puzzled sympathy, that typify the reception of Art & Language work in this country. Part of the reason follows from the nature of Art & Language work itself: its modes of address and most of what it has to say are not only new and unfamiliar, but new and unfamiliar in ways which are themselves foreign to the art audience here.
Thus, it becomes important to give an accounting of the Art & Language point of view — or, more accurately, of my understanding of it. I should say immediately that I acquired my conception during the past year, as I moved from observing Art&Language (A&L) as an art critic to active participation in the A&L inquiry.
Approaching A&L from within the framework of beliefs and expectations current in the art world, one might feel that here are a group of artists making destructive, extraordinary, often contradictory, and, perhaps, deceitful claims for their work. How can their typewritten essays be considered visual art? Why is their writing style so obscure? Are they trying to do philosophy of language or are they parodying philosophers? How does their work fit in with other Conceptual Art? Are they simply artists taking on the roles of art critics and art theorists? Do they really believe that they can "clean up" the theoretical confusions rife in art discourse so that we all might be able to make "theoretically more sound" art at some future time?
These questions can be easily countered in the rhetorical, polemical style typical of art-world debate. And some of A&L's replies to criticism have been of this order. But it interests me more to propose a description of the A&L point of view alternative to those these questions presuppose. To begin doing so, I need to outline reasons why A&L seems so pertinent.
My openness to A&L started from the broad view I took of the current state of art. It seemed to me that the condition of art was — as it remains — disastrous. And not because of the announcement of the "death of painting" on every corner; or because a systematic style had failed to succeed Minimalism; nor finally because of some kind of "failure of sensibility" that had mysteriously afflicted all the practicing artists of the world. Rather, insofar as these and other fears had any sense at all, they were symptoms of a deeper shift from certain fundamental conceptions of what it is to make art, to be an artist, and to understand art. It seemed imperative to determine what these conceptions were, how they related to one another, how they functioned in other contexts, and how they so thoroughly informed the making of art. Furthermore it seemed obvious that trying to create yet more art objects ("thinking in paint"), or conjuring up still more ingenious art-critical theories, was to do no more than to desperately strive to "save the theory." Yet much Conceptual or "Art-as-Idea" art of the past few years willfully compounds this problem-set by using it as material for art. Most recent criticism has shown itself inadequate precisely because it refuses to surrender the self-imposed limitation that it dance attendance on what the artists do. (A critic can always wait, saying: "There are hundreds of thousands of artists out there, all dedicated to producing the best art they can — how can I say that some of them, at some future time, won't come up with the goods?" Artists can only partially take this option; finally, an artist has to act through an art-making situation, or give up entirely.)
As the necessary tools were not to be found in current art and art-critical practices, it seemed natural to turn to that aspect of philosophy which addressed itself to the expression of concepts in language. It was equally natural to turn to the philosophy of science because this is a field of inquiry consumed in controversy — what it is to do science and what it is to do the philosophy of science. These controversies might, perhaps, throw some light on those debilitating the art world. It became clear to me that the making of art entailed the holding of a set of theories about art (to which T. S. Kuhn's notion of paradigm seems only an approximate analogy), theory-sets constituted by notions of what the world is like.
A formalist artist and critic, insofar as his beliefs are consistent, holds intuitionist ideas of the immanent properties of things, "empirical" attitudes to the experientiality of his products, and a theory of autonomy guiding the self-definitional nature of his artworks as well as their place in an immanently developing history and future of art in general. Other artists have assumptions which cluster around a romantic subjectivism, adding another version of autonomy which aims to secure the uniqueness of themselves and their products, along with a "special" status for their insights within the society at large. Still other artists emphasize theories that artworks are essentially physical objects with a necessarily material character, and believe that sacred among the rituals of producing artworks is the activity of making ("manipulating stuff," "displaying processes"). Obviously, these notions are held with varying degrees of self-consciousness, are rarely systematized beyond random "right intuitions," and appear in many interwoven and differently emphasized guises. But, nonetheless, in my view they amount to the overall theoretical framework within which all art activity is conducted; they individually constitute "deep" concepts of art for those who hold them, generating the different points of view which we see operating during controversies; and, most importantly, they are in the artworks, governing their form and content.
It hardly matters to any artist that the theories constituting these theory-sets are being shown in philosophy to be seriously flawed. "Good art from bad theory" is a slogan which can be decked out with many illustrious names. My point is that the negative side of this half-truth has recently come into play: as the structural power of these theory-sets becomes more overt, their inherent inadequacies become unavoidable, with the result that they foreclose on activity derived from them.
The key cause of art's misfortune is that, through the past decade, each one of these theory-sets, having initially clustered together to form open concepts of art for those who employed them, have become progressively more closed, fixed, and over-determined through continual usage and ever more refined self-definition. They no longer have the generative power of "essentially contested concepts": all-too-clear criteria for their "proper" use have been developed.
The paucity of invention and the puerility of talk in the current art world is a direct result of this situation. Basic beliefs, fundamental features of one's concept of art, stand revealed as anomalies within a whole too easily grasped, or ungraspable. Superficial changes, in "style" for example, become trivial when the foundations are shaking.
A glance through some of the better-known A&L essays will reveal that a critique of this sort (although not as wide-ranging and total) was being developed during the later 1960s, and continues. The A&L critique includes a notion perhaps more disturbing than any which I have offered so far: that the anomalous features of the various concepts of art are incorrigible in principle. The suggestion here is that none of the concepts capture anything natural to the practice of art because nothing is natural to that practice — rather, they are merely conventions adopted by artists as if they were natural. None of them are essential, they are all expendable, all relative to time and place. It is this, rather than any distaste for "objects" per se, which limits any application to the visual arts of Victor Burgin's suggestion to architects:
Perhaps it is time for a moratorium on things — a temporary withdrawal from real objects during which the object analogue formed in consciousness may be examined as the origin of a new generating system.
The situation won't be righted by stepping back in order to get one's "theoretical support structure" into good shape, and then returning to the fray ready to make fundamentally the same kind of art, albeit in some sense "improved." Nor will it be righted by dropping the anomalies, or even by heightening them as the rule of practice. It may well be that, in the long run, it will not be righted at all. Or, if you want to employ analogies from Kuhn's paradigms in science, while it might be possible to show that art has recently shifted from one paradigm (or set of paradigms), it cannot be shown that a new paradigm has developed for artists to shift to.
In these circumstances, A&L hardly appears from the wings on a white charger waving the banner of its own activity as an alternative form of art — nor, indeed, as an alternative to art. What, then, does A&L see itself to be doing? A simple formula answer to this question is not available; nor should we expect it to be. Like any human activity, A&L's is complex and many-sided; it has also been subject to change — constantly on surface levels, occasionally in radical depth. As I see it, the first radical change arose out of the instincts and practices of mid-'60s Conceptual Art to become a distinctively A&L set of intentions: to construct a complex methodology for nonspecialist critical discourse which would function in the "interstices" between some of the concepts and procedures raised thus far within specialisms such as art, philosophy, sociology, etc. The approaches used were, for example, relativism, "theory-trying," recursivity, and falsification. This first shift began in late 1968, early 1969, and is symbolized by the founding of the journal Art-Language. The current point of view differs as a result of responding to the difficulties, accumulating during the last three years, involved in realizing such a program. The concern now is focused more on exploring the logical, linguistic, and psychological sets which appear to be problematic in considering the possibility of a program such as the initial one — including, of course, consideration of its potential impossibility. It is, as a 1971 memo puts it, "a body of discourse that literally just searches; out of that 'search' for what is necessary there is a form of skepticism in modality arrived at (or not) in this way."
Perhaps the above concedes too much to the impulse of any "team performer" to display a united external front. Like any other group activity, dissent rather than consensus is internally typical — all notions, including (perhaps especially) those about the A&L point of view, are essentially contested concepts within A&L discussions. The proper use of concepts involves endless dispute about their proper use. This should start to indicate that the inquiry as a whole is not systematic, that it does not study objects in the world external to it and capable of providing "objective" adequacy criteria. It accepts no empirical tests for its sentences, no analytic axioms. Its criteria and modalities are discovered in process, generated by the "search," and are all, in principle, regarded as ad hoc. A&L's frequent use of material from established disciplines is heuristic — no obligations are necessarily felt to the material's previous context of use.
A key characteristic of A&L work is its conversational thrust. The current focal concern is with the implications of various proposals for mapping the semantics and the ideologies of the intersubjective exchange which constitute these conversations. Charles Harrison's essay "Mapping and Filing," and Atkinson/Baldwin's "The Index" give clear accounts of some such proposals (The New Art, Hayward Gallery, London, August–September 1972). Of more intensive concern is the idiolectic dictionary currently being compiled by various English members of A&L, and the "Annotations," an exchange of written and verbal commentary, currently being pursued by A&L members in New York.
I cannot summarize this work, but I can give a partial impression of the character of some of the conversations by citing excerpts from notes sent to me in relation to writing this essay:
[Early] A&L seemed concerned to discuss, in conversation, the problem of the fundamentality of language (or language-dependent items), in relation to prepositional attitudes instantiated in contexts of criticism. ... [There was a] programmatic concern with the reductions suggested particularly in "ordinary language" linguistic philosophy and in the philosophy of science. ... [This did not mean] theory-trying, [nor did it] entail a reference-class, e.g. "field of study." ... One wasn't trying to provide an epistemology as aesthetics, or vice-versa. ... There was the strain of not seeing the discourse at the opposite end of the cultural continuum from, e.g., the discourse of the scientific community.
Our position at one stage may have been that of a category analysis of languages. A metaphysical revision of the language at a Sellars sort of level. This, one suspects, was the surface of something more basic, from an ideological point of view. The requirements of a theory of art seemed in some basic way related to those of a theory of language (or a theory of the possibility of language). We believed that, except in some ideologically remote ways, a theory of this kind was a purely descriptive device. A hermeneutic aspect to the work, engaged with the idea of theoria, and thus to some extent prescriptive/prospective....
The present state of the art might be said to be concerned with dealing with the problem of our context, the kinds of entailments that might exist in our social system, the network of our interpersonal relations — manifest in interactions, certain representative types of interactions regarded as central to the understanding of ideological, political and moral matters. ... [However] one can't assume that the discourse functions in only one way, even though one might want to point to some primary functions, or note that specializations occur. ... One breaks with traditional philosophy's assumption that discourse functions in a restricted number of ways and always serves the same purpose, i.e., to do something like convey thoughts.
One is not dealing with out-and-out epistemology. Rather, the development of a semantics adequate to dealing with problems — that one's situation is problematical is a basic tenet. Our activity might have to function in terms of a massive indexicality, aphilosophically. This would require epistemic organisation, revision etc. Considering sets of interrelated items may lead to progress towards finding out what instrumentalities our teleological priorities commit us to.
Much of the activity has been involved in self-description; indeed, a form of "self-description-trying." A basis might be: if we describe whatever it is we are doing, how does that description alter what we are doing? There are of course no neutral descriptions, any description is relative to one point of view. Slogans: (i) "Analytic" 1969–70, (ii) "Theory-trying" 1971–72, (iii) "Talking to each other" 1972–73. (There was a sense in each of these of finding out what that particular description committed us to.) But our work doesn't state an ideology, it shows one (or several).
[We] are concerned with pragmatics. That is, with problems, not idealist "good ideas" (like the past six years of Konzept Kunst), nor with realist "things in the world" (stuff like art objects). The latter enter into the A&L problematic but only in a secondary way. ... Giving primacy to problems links with our ideology, not our ontology. Thus (citing Hintikka correcting Quine in Reference and Modality, p. 153) we have to distinguish between what we are committed to in the sense that we believe it to exist in the world or in some other possible world, and what we are committed to as part of our ways of dealing with the world conceptually, as part of our conceptual system. The former constitute our ontology, the latter our "ideology."
The current interest in A&L that turns on problems of intersubjectivity within the conversations is of little interest to at least two members: Joseph Kosuth and David Bainbridge. They would also, perhaps, find my formulation of the A&L point of view not merely inadequately descriptive of the thrust of their work, but also incapable of including their work. However, their anomalousness to the current range of A&L self-descriptions hardly rules them out of A&L altogether (although Bainbridge, as a matter of fact, recently chose to leave the group), for part of the dynamic of the group depends on the diversity of outlook of its members.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from One and Five Ideas by Terry Smith, Robert Bailey. Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: A Theory of Conceptualism / Robert Bailey 1
1. Art and Art and Language 37
2. The Tasks of Translation: Art & Language in Australia and New Zealand, 1975-76 57
3. A Conversation about Conceptual Art, Subjectivity, and the Post-Partum Document 85
4. Peripheries in Motion: Conceptualism and Conceptual Art in Australia and New Zealand 99
5. One and Three Ideas: Conceptualism Before, During, and After Conceptual Art 127
Index 145
What People are Saying About This
"Terry Smith writes about the history of Conceptual Art as its participant and observer—and his book produces a stereoscopic image of the movement that is fascinating and persuasive. According to Smith, Conceptual Art has transformed itself into the global conceptualism that is still contemporary. This book should be read by everybody who has become tired of the simplistic opposition between global and local and looks for the ways to overcome it."
"Scholars, critics, artists, and students concerned with the legacy of conceptual art in the present—particularly those focused on its development as a kind of global lingua franca for contemporary art—will welcome the publication of this tremendous book."