From Conceptual art to contemporary practice: theory as art

From Conceptual art to contemporary practice: theory as art.
Stephen Zepke

Contemporary art begins in the 1960s because the 60s marks the end of
'visual art' and the beginning of art's indiscernibility from its
theoretical assumptions. After the 60s – and in fact this is the sense in
which all contemporary art is by definition 'post-conceptual' – art was no
longer something you experienced, it was something you thought about. At
this point many things changed. Art rejected any material limits to its
defining categories - painting, sculpture, photography, etc. - and now
mixes media under a unifying concept or theory. In this regard Conceptual
art was the most important of a series of movements that rejected the
Modernism of Clement Greenberg. As well as Conceptual art the 60s also
brought us Minimalism's phenomenological concern with perceptual conditions
that lead to the beginnings of 'expanded practice' and installation art,
the emergence of performance practices, while the early 70s saw the
development of what is today called 'new media', and the political
engagements of feminist art and 'institutional critique'. This is the nexus
from which our current understanding of art as a 'theoretical' practice
comes from. What I'd like to do today is to outline some of the features of
Conceptual art from the late 60s that have influenced many of the
theoretical assumptions and methods of 'contemporary practice'. But I have
to admit I also have an ulterior motive in doing this, which is to try to
understand what I regard as being the paradoxical popularity within
contemporary art of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

Sol Le Witt said that Conceptual art engaged the mind rather than the eye
or the emotions, (Le Witt 15) and this is also at least partly true of
contemporary art. I say partly true because today some engagement of the
mind is required for an art work to be called contemporary. This is what I
like to call the ubiquity of inverted commas in contemporary practice,
where even a work that appears to conform to a traditional genre such as
portraiture

Page 2 – Elizabeth Peyton, Libertines

(the work of Elizabeth Peyton for example) employ 'representation', meaning
they contain a conceptual reflection on their status as representation,
indicated here by the painting being executed from photographs, which gives
them a slick artlessness that is, I would say, exemplary contemporary. To
be regarded as contemporary, art must have and display a self-awareness of
the theoretical discourses that provide its minimal conditions of
possibility. In this sense contemporary art was invented in the 60s, from
which time any art that was or is contemporary has to either reflect upon
its own philosophical status as art, or has to exhibit a conceptual
understanding of itself as art or, as we shall see, as non-art. This
defines a 'theoretical art practice', 'theory' being the name that art
gives to the philosophical content within its mode of practice.

The fact that art regards philosophy as part of its process or as one of
its materials was no doubt largely due to Marcel Duchamp.

Page 3 – Fountain, Steglitz photo

In broad terms Duchamp's readymades shifted the definition of 'art' away
from its materials and other morphological factors to a mental decision to
apply the concept of 'art' to an object, or not. In the collection of notes
called The Green Box, Duchamp argues that the readymade object is a
'snapshot' or 'sign of accordance' between it and the laws governing its
choice. (1973 27-8) For Duchamp, this choice is entirely independent of the
material object, which merely exists as, he says, 'information' (1973 32)
indicating that a conceptual decision or 'nomination' as he called it, has
taken place – 'this is art'. This decision expresses the epistemological
conditions (and most famously their institutional structure, as in the
celebrated case of the Fountain) that determine this nomination to be
'true'. This transformation of the material and readymade object into
information had enormous significance for conceptual art, as we'll see, and
remains crucial today where art is called upon to operate politically
within our 'information economy'.

Duchamp's readymade also carried with it some other important implications.
Most famously it made anyone an artist, and anything art, by revealing
art's conditions to be epistemological and institutional rather than based
upon an artistic skill, or on aesthetic taste. As a result, Duchamp's
readymade rests upon the 'visual indifference' of its genetic and ideal
act, an act open to all inasmuch as all it required was, as Duchamp put it
with typical wit, a 'complete anaesthesia,' the complete subtraction of the
affect – and therefore aesthetics - from art. (1973, 141) This will be the
aspect of Duchamp's readymade that Conceptual artists will push as far into
life as they can by dematerialising the object in a 'linguistic turn', and
is, at least according to Jean Baudrillard, the source of contemporary
art's failure, of what he calls art's 'nullity' and insignificance. With
the readymade, he announces, 'all the banality of the world passes into
aesthetics, and inversely, all aesthetics becomes banal,' a communication
that 'truly brings aesthetics in the traditional sense to an end.' (2005
52) In many ways I would see D&G agreeing with Baudrillard on this point,
which makes their ubiquity in the world of contemporary art theory all the
stranger. Anyway, contemporary art will have to answer these charges;
otherwise its much-vaunted 'political' engagement will turn out to be
nothing more than a capitulation to the voracious growth of the culture
industries, and the commercial aestheticisation of life.

I want to outline how D&G pose this criticism to contemporary practice, and
to wonder why contemporary practice seems to have chosen to ignore it. But
first I want to propose a very sketchy genealogy of art as theory, which
attempts to trace some of its salient features back to important aspects of
Conceptual art. Two of the most important were already clear to Victor
Burgin in 1969 when he began his essay 'Situational Aesthetics' with the
following distinction:

Page 4 - text

"Some recent art, evolving through attention both to the conditions
under which objects are perceived and to the processes by which
aesthetic status is attributed to certain of these, has tended to take
its essential form in message rather than in materials. In its logical
extremity this tendency has resulted in a placing of art entirely within
the linguistic infrastructure, which previously served merely to support
art. In its less hermetic manifestations art as message, as "software,"
consists of sets of conditions, more or less closely defined, according
to which particular concepts may be demonstrated. This is to say,
aesthetic systems are designed, capable of generating objects, rather
than individual objects themselves." (883)

The first type, often called 'hard' conceptualism, is exemplified by the
Art and Language group and Joseph Kosuth, whose work is almost entirely
linguistic. The Art and Language group was concerned with "questioning the
condition that seems to rigidly govern the form of visual art – that visual
art remains visual." Against this condition, they write in 1969, "the
following hypothesis is advanced: that this editorial, in itself an attempt
to evince some outlines as to what "conceptual art" is, is held out as a
"conceptual art" work." (99) A&L therefore take Duchamp literally by
proposing an art work that is information about itself, and so reach the
very contemporary conclusion that conceptual art is the same as art theory.
They write:

Page 5 - text

"The content of the artist's idea is expressed through the semantic
qualities of the written language. As such, many people would judge
that this tendency is better described by the category-name "art-
theory" or "art-criticism;" there can be little doubt that works of
"conceptual art" can be seen to include both the periphery of art
criticism and of art theory, and this tendency may well be amplified." (99)


For A&L this ambiguity between art and theory raised the question of what
constitutes a work of art, and how we might recognize it as such if it
actually looks like art-theory. Although today this question is hardly
relevant, for A&L their editorial is art because that is, they say, "the
intention of the conceptual artist." (99) Although this appeal to intention
strikes us as rather old-fashioned today, A&L nevertheless draw a very
contemporary conclusion from it, proposing a

Page 6 - text

"category "art theory" […] which the category "art" might expand to
include. Inside the framework of "conceptual art" the making of art and
the making of a certain kind of art theory are often the same
procedure." (100)

By shifting the definition of art away from the visual and towards the
artist's act of conception, actual objects and theoretical objects simply
become the concrete and theoretical poles of an expanded field of art.
Here, painting and 'theory' take on their present-day meanings as modern
and contemporary artistic products, produced by a manual and intellectual
worker respectively. Once again the art-schools ring to Duchamp's
derogatory words: "Stupid as a painter".

Kosuth shared A&L's 'linguistic turn', and uped their ante by claiming that
Conceptual art didn't just include theory but replaced the philosophy of
art. In this Kosuth took inspiration from two main sources, one being
Duchamp and the other being analytic philosophy. On the one hand, he
argued, Duchamp's readymades succeed in breaking with a morphology of art
based on the visual properties of its materials, and shifted the debate
over the essence of art from a question of form to the question of
function. Art after Duchamp, Kosuth claimed, was primarily concerned with
defining the concept of art, a tendency that Kosuth will literalize and
bring to fruition in the statement, "a work of art is a kind of proposition
presented within the context of art as a comment on art." (165) Kosuth
claimed that an art proposition is what Ayer called (following Kant) an
analytic proposition, a proposition whose validity depends solely on the
definitions of the symbols it contains.

Page 7 – Kosuth – 5 words in green neon, 1965.

In this sense, Kosuth pushes the non-visual and ideal quality of art to an
extreme, claiming: "Works of art are analytic propositions. […] they
provide no information what-so-ever about any matter of fact." (165)
Kosuth's paraphrasing of A. J. Ayer applied analytic philosophy's rejection
of both the empirical and the metaphysical from the function of philosophy
to the realm of art. Kosuth argued, and here we can hear the resonances
with contemporary practices, that the artist was an "analyst" whose
propositions followed art's conceptual development.[i] In place of both
visual art's empirical basis in sensation, and its tendency to draw on
metaphysics to explain the broader significance of its expressions, Kosuth
insisted that Conceptual art's function was to give the logical conditions
by which a statement that an object in the world was art could be judged
true or false. Rather than Deleuze's 'logic of sensation' then, we have its
opposite, a 'conceptual logic of and as art'.[ii]

Although Kosuth's logical concept of Conceptual art is often criticised for
going too far, the 'information aesthetic' he employed has remained
ubiquitous ever since. Kosuth

Page 8 – Kosuth reading

was also influential in the way the figure of the artist changed in the 60s
from the hard-drinking expressionist painter to the thoughtful philosopher
type, and was himself a kind of role-model for the becoming-philosopher of
the contemporary artist. This is one reason why D&G will explicitely attack
him in What Is Philosophy? If there's one thing that pisses them off, its
artists who fancy themselves as philosophers.

There is another aspect of Kosuth's practice which is also important for
us, and that is the insertions of his work into the mass-media formats of
newspapers and magazines. Although Dan Graham at least had been doing work
of this kind since the mid 60s, Kosuth's work such as

Page 9 - Second Investigation 1. Existence (1968)

poses the crucial issues even more acutely. On the one side there is the
projection of Duchamp's readymade into the most banal realms of language,
with the reproduction of the eight categories organizing Roget's Thesaurus,
and on the other the question as to whether this rejection of the autonomy
of art was capable of resisting the emerging conditions of "semio-
capitalism". This is the question we have already seen posed by
Baudrillard, and in my opinion the same question is currently faced by much
new-media art, and especially what is today called activist-art. In a very
acid statement from 1973 Seth Siegelaub, the gallerist responsible for many
of Conceptual art's innovations in distribution methods that cleverly
utilized the newly emerging global networks, answers in the negative:

Page 10 - text

"In a certain sense, conceptual art could be defined as:
Painting the novel
------------------ = --------------
Conceptual art journalism" (286)

Back to Page 9 – Second Investigations

Two aspects of this work are important for us. First, the work's insertion
into mass-media distribution networks makes it available to all, a fact
Kosuth celebrated by boasting 'that people can wrap dishes with my work.'
(Alberro, 49) Second, and perhaps more to the point, the work reproduces a
technique for organising language and information, giving a literal sense
to what Benjamin Buchloh has famously called Conceptual art's 'aesthetics
of administration'. This kind of insertion of art into mass-media networks
announces a by-passing of the control of art institutions in order to place
art directly in 'life', but in announcing its liberation from the art
institution it also achieves its assimilation to the fundamental linguistic
and aesthetic conditions of the mass-media networks, so falling under their
administrative control of 'life'. This remains the problematic alternative
to much contemporary art that follows Conceptual art's lead and tries to
escape 'art' by embracing the linguistic banalities of everyday 'life'.
Like most such avant-garde attempts, the escape from 'art' justifies its
status as 'political' rather than anything it might be able to achieve once
it has embraced the universals of communication. Kosuth's analytical
version of the readymade produces a concept defining information as art,
but this concept meekly follows, and in fact restates the rules and
regulations by which all information is communicated. Art has become
democratically available to all, but only by becoming as banal as
everything else. D&G's lament could easily be about Conceptual art, 'it is
painful to learn,' they write, 'that Concept indicates a society of
information services and engineering.' (1994, 11) In this sense the
democratisation achieved by the 'conceptual readymade' was a kind of
dumbing down, inasmuch as the 'opinion' of the spectator that decided
whether or not the work was art merely enacted the a priori self-evidence
of the dominant structures of information exchange. I want to come back to
this, because it seems to me that this is a central question for the theory
of contemporary art, and one that contemporary art is increasingly
answering, but first I want to briefly outline the second 'type' of
Conceptual art that has been equally, if not more influential on
contemporary practices.

This stream of Conceptual art is best exemplified by the work and writings
of Sol Le Witt and is clearly explained by his own words in 'Paragraphs on
conceptual art':

Page 11 - text

"In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect
of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means
that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the
execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes
the art." (Paragraphs 12)

Le Witt makes it clear that "This kind of art is not theoretical or
illustrative of theories" but he nevertheless says that: "It is the
objective of the artist who is concerned with conceptual art to make his
work mentally interesting to the spectator, and therefore usually he would
want it to become emotionally dry." (Paragraphs 12) By retaining the
object, but positioning the concept as a diagrammatic element producing the
work, Le Witt gives the formula for a great deal of contemporary practice.
This diagrammatic theory could also be said to be that of Structuralism,
and many American artists were reading Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Lacan, etc.
in the 60s. Speaking very broadly we could say that Structuralism also
posits a conceptual structure or diagram through which reality is
produced.[iii] Obviously this relation would need to be more closely
examined, because whereas in Structuralism the diagram is formed of
relations, for Le Witt at least it was more often composed of mathematical
formulas or written instructions.

Page 12 – Sol Le Witt, Serial project #1, 1966

Here the material object is an actualisation of a conceptual structure, and
only attains its real meaning as such. This approach has clearly been
enormously influential, not least in the way it emphasises the artist's
theoretical detachment from his or her objects, which are simply signs for
thoughts, or mechanisms by which the concepts can be actualised. A typical
example are what could be called 'process' works, where some initial
conditions are set by the artist, and then a process emerges that is
allowed to run on its own, or more frequently in relation to the
participation of the viewer. In this way, as Le Witt says in 1969: "The
artist's will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to
completion." (Sentences 106) And as the artist becomes increasingly neutral
from a subjective point of view in Conceptual art, so does its materials.
Again, Sol Le Witt's work from the 60s is typical in this regard, and this
trend towards neutralised materials remains strong today. Once more, Victor
Burgin put his finger on it quite precisely in 1969 when he wrote: "As art
is being seen increasingly in terms of behaviour so materials are being
seen in terms simply of quantity rather than of quality." (Burgin …)[iv]

Burgin also calls this conceptual element of Conceptual art 'software',
another perceptive comment that was famously explored in the exhibition

Page 13 - Information

held in 1970 at MOMA, and curated by Kynaston McShine. This show introduced
art's use of the new computer technologies to a wider audience, and also
put forward a program similar to Kosuth's and to a significant sector of
contemporary art. The introduction to the show emphasises the growing
influence of globalization and mass-media on art production, and the
advantage Conceptual 'information art' had in using these networks of
distribution and movement. This not only challenged our ideas about the
nature of art, the catalogue tells us, but also asked "that we reassess
what we have always taken for granted as our accepted and culturally
conditioned aesthetic response to art." (Anth 214)[v] At the time this call
for a new form of aesthetic response that was free from its cultural and
institutional conditions proposed art as a form of political intervention

Page 14 - (Haacke),

and in fact not much has really changed today. Today we have returned with
a vengeance to the idea of art as software, only with the added dimension
of the politics of interface that has been explored under the names of
'biopolitics', 'Empire' or 'society of control'.

This brings us to the final aspect of Conceptual Art's influence on
contemporary theory-based practices that I want to look at, their political
engagement with the market. Lawrence Weiner was one of many artists who saw
Conceptual art's dematerialisation of the art work as disengaging art from
its capitalist conditions. People "don't have to buy it to have it", he
claimed, "- they can have it just by knowing it." (882) With the original
art work being a 'concept', any actualisation of it was as good as another,
whether done by the artist or not. Weiner's famous formula was:

Page 15 - text

"1. The artist may construct the work
2. The work may be fabricated
3. The work need not 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." Lawrence Weiner, 'Statements' 1969, (Art in Theory, 882-
3)

Wiener offers a strategy slightly different to Kosuth here. Rather than
using readymade linguistic 'objects' inserted into mass-media networks,
Wiener creates art works that are concepts, but leaves the decision of
whether to actualise this concept up to anyone at all. He even designated
some of his 'concepts' as 'freehold' meaning they were publicly owned and
that anyone could actualise a 'genuine' Lawrence Weiner, as long as you
were, for example, prepared to cut a foot square hole out of your rug, or
spray paint on the floor.

Page 16 – Two Minutes of Spray paint directly upon the floor from a
standard aerosol spray can, 1968

By renouncing his ownership rights Weiner anticipated some of the current
arguments on the activist side of contemporary art involved in issues such
as open source software or intellectual commons. Indeed Brian Holmes, one
of the most interesting art theorists in this regard, has spoken of the
anti-globalisation movement's use of the Internet as a "do-it-yourself
conceptualism […]. In perfect accord with Lawrence Weiner's famous dictums,
the [political] work could be carried out by the initial authors of the
ideas, realized by others, or not done at all – something like a taste of
planetary exchange, where the "art" is "totally free"." (BH 50) Holmes is
typical for this activist end of contemporary art theory, inasmuch as he
sees Conceptual art as the end of the bourgeois institutional containment
of art, and the beginning of its escape into the 'real' world. He explains:

Page 17
"Conceptual art can be defined, not simply as the refusal of the
commodified object and the specialized art system, but as an active
signage pointing to the outside world, conceived as an expanded field
for experimental practices of intimacy, expression and collaboration –
indeed for the transformation of social reality." (BH 47)

Holmes emphasises the fact that much Conceptual art saw its production of
the immaterial object through the use of immaterial labour as being
precisely what liberated art production from the capitalist market,
enabling it to produce 'real' political actions. In this sense, as Holmes
puts it, it was "a practice that doesn't produce works, but only
virtualities which can then be actualised, at each time and at each place,
as unique performances." (BH 59) This aspect of Conceptual art makes it, he
says, the "most revolutionary of all art forms." (BH 71) Conceptual art
returns today, according to Holmes, via the Internet. It is as if
Conceptual art merely lacked the right technological conditions, and
attaining them today allows Conceptual art to return as politics. This is
what Holmes provocatively calls "the revenge of the concept", which he
eloquently traces in a genealogy of contemporary practice that leads from
the concept to the political act.

This to me is one of the most interesting, as well as the most prevalent
aspects of the contemporary theorisation of art. That is that art's
theorisation is nothing less than its politicisation, and this is in turn
is accomplished through art's final dissolution into life. Indeed, Holmes
will argue that "when people talk about politics in an artistic frame,
they're lying." (BH 81)[vi] This is because artists interested in engaging
with political issues so often find their work reduced to fashionable
signifiers of 'resistance', and bought and sold as such. This is always the
problem for political artists, that in exchange for money and international
distribution they must allow themselves to be instrumentalised. This
results in another contradiction, that art today is one of the few places
of real experimentation with new technologies and symbolic exchange, but
that this experimentation is always already co-opted, or sold-out. As a
result, Holmes argues, "experiment can only take on a transformative power
in the open, evolving context of a social movement, outside the cliques and
clienteles of the artistic game." (BH 92) In this, Holmes expresses his
"highest admiration [for…] the artists who call their own bluffs – and
dissolve, at the crisis points, into the vortex of a social movement." (BH
93) In the end, Holmes argues, and this is I think a logical extension of a
significant aspect of Conceptual art, it is only by attacking their own
autonomy that an artist can be political. (BH 100) This would be the
fantasy of the contemporary artist whose work becomes escapes the autonomy
of art to become a mechanism of the multitudes self-invention. Art as
social work.

Although I have some problems with Holmes' neo-Situationist rejection of
all institutionalised art forms and practices as complicit with the
spectacularisation of culture, he is excellent at drawing out the pitfalls
that haunt the contemporary desire for a politically engaged form of art.
If we wanted to be flippant we could summarize this by saying that
resistance has become the new painting. Holmes' answer to this is both
brutal and simple, "we [should, he says] abandon the historical practice of
experimental art." (BH 106) This is necessary because, Holmes claims,
"contemporary art itself has now been normed, organized, channelled into
the safe-havens of museums." (BH 127) But while such an Exodus may very
well escape from the markets of the culture industry, the question remains
as to how effective this strategy is as a form of politics. The danger of
art's dissolution into life lies as the flip-side of its political
instrumentalisation, as Kosuth's Second Investigation has already revealed.
That is, by presenting itself as non-art art only succeeds in mimicking not
only the aesthetic, but as well the underlying modes of production the
artist wanted to critique. One of Holmes' examples illustrates the point
well. Holmes' tells the story of

Page 18 - Jakob Boeskov

A Danish artist who presented his spoof 'The ID Sniper' at a security fair
in China, and was told by a French diplomat that it would never work
because it would cause to much physical trauma. Holmes' regards this as a
successful example of an art work that escaped its own autonomy to actively
engage the real political forces shaping our world, but equally we could
say the work was so indiscernible from life that it was simply dismissed as
just another idea that didn't work.[vii] Although this work does perhaps
extend to absurdity a certain path of conceptual art, it also shows the
dangers of the theoretical criteria for 'art' becoming entirely political.
This attempt to, as Holmes puts it, "relocate art within a much broader
political economy" (BH 70) tries to reconfigure art into an aesthetic
relation mediating the collective process and the individual decision.
This, as Holmes quite rightly says, is the "the art of politics." (BH 71)
The question for us is whether this is, or should be, the future of
contemporary art.

Let's come back to D&G, finally, who have without doubt become one of the
most widely quoted theoretical sources for contemporary art. But what I
find strange about this is that D&G write a lot about art, they write about
sensation, about visions, about the history of painting and the
differential forces of colour, but none of this seems to be relevant when
we talk about contemporary art. But actually there is more to it than this.
D&G flatly refuse that an art work can be a concept, but this is only part
of an extensive attack they make on Conceptual art. Conceptual art, they
claim in What Is Philosophy?, attempts a "dematerialization through
generalization, by installing a sufficiently neutralized plane of
composition". (WP 198) In other words, because it accepts anything as art,
according to Duchamp's readymade principle, Conceptual art removes the
element of composition from the creative process, and composition, they
tell us a few pages earlier, is the "sole definition of art." (WP 191)
Composition is a process by which art "creates the finite that restores the
infinite." (WP 197) The finite is obviously the art object, and it is
irreducibly material. But this material object produces a sensation that
embodies an event, something that goes beyond the banal clichés of everyday
life and their human, all too human perception. This 'vision', and although
D&G do say that art is a type of thought, they qualify this by saying it is
the eye that thinks, an 'eye-brain' as Eric Alliez calls it, (WP 195) this
vision is of a "universe-cosmos", (WP 180) and the sensation that art
composes is an event providing passage from the finite to the infinite, a
passage from the banal and limited self-evidence of the everyday to the
ecstatic and inhuman becomings of what they call "infinitely varied
infinites." (WP 181) This then is the very opposite of what Conceptual art
seeks to achieve and what contemporary art tends to take for granted, that
anything can be art within the regime of what Duchamp called 'visual
indifference', or as D&G put it, "everything takes on a value of sensation
reproducible to infinity: things, images or clichés, propositions –

[Page 19] a thing, its photograph on the same scale and in the same place,
its dictionary definition." (WP 198)

It's surely no accident we're back to Kosuth here, although in fact D&G
also mention examples by Mel Bochner, Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark
and the silkscreens of Robert Rauschenburg. In all these cases composition
occurs on a neutral plane where information freely circulates, an
anaesthetized plane of immanence where art is simply a matter of opinion. A
little like U-tube perhaps. Under these absolutely democratic conditions
art becomes life, but life is just the infinity of "ordinary perceptions
and affections" that constitute, D&G write, "the social body or great
American metropolis." (WP 198)

What D&G advocate instead is a visual art, an art of visions whereby a
material object is able to express a sensation and open it onto an infinity
of impossible worlds. They put it very simply: "sensory becoming," they
say, "is otherness caught in a matter of expression." (WP 177) This is an
otherness that requires art's autonomy, that actually defines it. But
unlike more classic modernist accounts, this autonomy does not offer a pure
and disinterested outside to the control society, rather, as Deleuze
argues: "There is no other aesthetic problem than that of the insertion of
art into everyday life."[viii] Deleuze's suggestion of 'inserting' art into
life (which is quite different from art becoming life) attributes a
political value to art, but this is the infinite value of an incalculable
event, a whisper in the "ear of the future" as they rather poetically put
it. It is a qualitative and material transformation, and not a quantitative
or linguistic calculation equalizing all qualities in the democratic
equality of opinions. To begin, art must "insert itself into a social
network", Guattari says, but only in order to "celebrate the Universe of
art as such", in order to construct sublime sensations that "rupture with
forms and significations circulating trivially in the social field."[ix]
This rupture is an "event-incident"[x] that confers, Guattari continues,
"sense and alterity"[xi] to part of the world, it turns a part, and this is
a material part, of the world away from its self-evidence to become what he
calls a "mutant production"[xii] of sensation that "involves a dimension of
autonomy of an aesthetic order"[xiii] and "leads to a recreation and
reinvention of the subject itself."[xiv] This is a political process that
actually has a remarkably similar aim to that Holmes champions, and to much
contemporary art, even if it does not share their conceptual or theoretical
means. For finally the art work, whether baroque, modernist or contemporary
is, as Guattari has it, "an aspiration for individual and collective
reappropriation of the production of subjectivity."[xv] Rather than art
becoming life, life has become art.

References:

-Alexander Alberro, (2003) Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity.
Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press.

- Editors of Art and Language, (1999) 'Introduction', in Conceptual Art: A
Critical Anthology. Edited by A. Alberro and B. Stimson. Cambridge (Mass.):
MIT Press.

- Jean Baudrillard (2005), The Conspiracy of Art. Edited by S. Lotringer,
translated by A. Hodges. New York: Semiotext(e).

- Victor Burgin, 'Situational Aesthetics', in Art in Theory 1900-1990, An
Anthology of Changing Ideas. Edited by C. Harrison and P. Wood. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992.

Duchamp, M. (1973), The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. M. Sanouillet and
E. Peterson. New York: Da Capo Press.

- Brain Holmes, (2008) Unleashing the Collective Phantoms

-Joseph Kosuth, (1969) 'Art After Philosophy', in Conceptual Art: A
Critical Anthology. Edited by A. Alberro and B. Stimson. Massachusetts and
London: MIT Press, (1999).

-Sol Le Witt, (1967) 'Paragraphs on Conceptual Art' in Conceptual Art: A
Critical Anthology. Edited by A. Alberro and B. Stimson. Massachusetts and
London: MIT Press, (1999).

Sol Le Witt, (1969) 'Sentences on Conceptual Art' in Conceptual Art: A
Critical Anthology. Edited by A. Alberro and B. Stimson. Massachusetts and
London: MIT Press, (1999).

Seth Siegelaub and Michael Claura, (1973), 'L'art Conceptuel', in
Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. Edited by A. Alberro and B. Stimson.
Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, (1999).

Lawrence Weiner, (….) 'Statements', in Art in Theory 1900-1990, An
Anthology of Changing Ideas. Edited by C. Harrison and P. Wood. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992.

-----------------------
[i] "the artist as an analyst is not directly concerned with the
physical properties of things. He is concerned only with the way (1) in
which art is capable of conceptual growth and (2) how his propositions are
capable of logically following that growth." (166)
[ii] Deleuze's discussion of a 'possibility of fact' and a 'pictorial
fact' in his book on Bacon evokes, as Deleuze admits, (2003 101, 196) the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In fact, Deleuze's
'logic of sensation' is in many ways a sustained, although largely ironic,
attack on Wittgenstein's own use of these terms in establishing the logical
possibility of a fact in thought. (Wittgenstein 1.1, 2.141, 2.201-2.203, 3,
3.02) Directly opposed to Wittgenstein, and to the Wittgensteinian
assumptions of much Conceptual art, the passage from the possibility of
fact to the hapticity of sensation and its emergence in a haptic vision,
bypasses the realm of logical essence. Deleuze's 'analagous' use of
Wittgenstein's vocabulary therefore produces the opposite result: "For the
diagram was only a possibility of fact, whereas the painting exists by
making present a very particular fact, which we will call the pictorial
fact." (2003 160) The diagram is accidental rather than logical, and so
provides the sufficient reason for an ontological rather than logical
truth. The diagram is therefore the (infinite) ground of a sensation
(although no larger than what it grounds), while the 'pictorial' in
Wittgenstein is the logical condition of possibility of representation qua
signification (Wittgenstein 3.14). Deleuze's 'logic of sensation' therefore
escapes the representational concept as condition of possibility, in order
to explore the non-representative sensation whose infinite and
transcendental conditions it both expresses (as rhythmical chaosmosis) and
constructs (as materialist individuation). The 'logic of sensation'
succeeds in moving us from the specification of a logical truth to the
individuation of a living 'fact' or sensation.
[iii] Brian Holmes makes the fascinating suggestion: "It would be
interesting to reconsider the production of the postwar installationists,
to see to what extent the feedback loops of governmentality become an issue
in their devices." (BH 126) He briefly discusses works by Dan Graham,
Bruce Nauman and Nam June Paik. He then suggests: "Perhaps one would then
have to extend the inquiry to the full range of artistic resistance to
normalization" (BH 126) A genealogy of symbolic and practical antagonism.
[iv] For Le Witt material was merely expedient to illustrate the idea,
and always contained the danger of drawing attention to itself and becoming
an "expressive device" that acted as a "deterrent to our understanding of
the idea." (15) Kosuth went even further, arguing the materiality of his
work constituted only 'secondary information' necessary to illustrate the
concept, but entirely distinct from the 'art' of the immaterial 'primary
information' of the concept.
[v] Although in some respects this program appears now to be rather
naïve: "Inevitably for art, film and videotape are growing in importance.
It is quite obvious that at this point they mass media. Their influence has
meant that the general audience is beginning to be unwilling to give the
delicate responses needed for looking at a painting. Artists are beginning
to use this to their advantage. They hope to introduce a large public to
more refined aesthetic experiences." (Anth 214)
[vi] "In the contemporary art game, the picture of excluded people's
politics is worth a lot to the included – including transnational
corporations." (BH 83) Art still accepts a disjunction between the funding
of their ghetto and the larger economic decisions and strategies of their
benefactors, which is the difference between it and 'real' political
protest. "The most interesting question within the artistic field then
becomes: How to play the exhibition game in such a way that something real
can actually be won?" (BH 92) Finally, this is a political game and not an
aesthetic one, and indeed Holmes sees in new activist art strategies the
shift already taking place from art to politics: "What is ultimately at
stake," he claims, "is the very definition of autonomy, which can no longer
be established in the sphere of representation alone." (BH 93) "the
greatest symbolic innovations are taking place in self-organization
processes unfolding outside the artistic frame." (BH 93)
[vii] Another good example of this problem also comes from Holmes, when he
writes: "If interventionist projects have a much greater intensity today
than the purely symbolic constructions of older artistic models, it's for a
simple reason: the attraction of the reality show." (BH 127) Holmes
supports interventionist art because it seeks to directly confront those
processes controlling our subjectivities and socialities, and he sees its
abandonment of the art institution as being a necessary element in this
resistance. But the model he gives for its "greater intensity" is reality
TV, precisely one of the more successful mechanisms for integrating
'normal' people into the logic of capitalist spectacle. Holmes is
unapologetic about this, and indeed his embrace of populism is a consistent
part of his championing of activist aesthetics. But the problem
nevertheless remains whether an activist art that attempts to utilise the
format of the reality tv show has really achieved an exodus.
[viii] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 293. Translated
by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
[ix] Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, p. 130-1.
[x] Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, p. 52.
[xi] Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, p.
131.
[xii] Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, p.
131.
[xiii] Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm,
p. 13.
[xiv] Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, p. 131.
[xv] Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, p. 133.