Kunstværkets materialitet

There is no consistent or cohesive model of Conceptual Art. How we understand it today stems from different, sometimes competing approaches. Today four artists are generally considered the protagonists of Conceptual Art: Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner, although one could also add Art & Language and Mel Bochner. Initially Joseph Kosuth and Sol LeWitt were the first artists to call themselves ”conceptual artists.” Although nowadays LeWitt is not usually seen as a protagonist of Conceptual Art, he was the first one to pin down its essential feature: the idea is more important than the form of its materialization. In 1967 LeWitt published Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, in which he wrote:

“In conceptual art the idea or the concept is the most important aspect of the work. [...] In other forms of art the concept may be changed in the process of execution. [...] 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 the machine that makes the art.” (34)

In a larger sense Conceptual Art denotes a diverse set of artistic practices during the 1960s and early 70s that in different ways undertook a rigorous questioning of the parameters that constitute the work of art. Of central concern to my argument here is the critique and the dismantling of the traditional definition of the art object, which Lucy Lippard misleadingly called “dematerialization.” A truly dematerialized artwork has never existed and cannot exist, as any artistic utterance has to be mediated by material support. At best one can speak of the altered status of the object’s art character, which shifts toward the idea and away from the forms of its material fixation. Materialization can take place via language (as “critical language” as in the works of Lawrence Weiner) or can be site-specific (for example, in the works of Michael Asher, although he never defined himself as a Conceptual artist) or can take the form of documentation (as in the work of Douglas Huebler). The object recedes behind the processes of information or communication for which it is now merely a trigger. This shift is original, and artistically implies a fundamentally new definition of the formal, aesthetic and material properties of art.

There was always a critical and political aspect that was latently or explicitly inscribed to Conceptual Art. In a broad sense one can speak of a conglomerate of artistic and political anti-establishment attitudes that coalesced in the late 1960s with a politicized cultural criticism. Two aspects are at the center of this critique: the artwork as a privileged aesthetic object and the artwork as commodity. Both are related yet become effective in different ways. The critique of the primacy of the aesthetic in art is grounded in an intentional self-liquidation and asceticism, a reductionism that emphasizes the similarity of art and non-art and resists any form of (aesthetic) privileging or hierarchy. This attempt has its roots in the utopias of modernity, which believed that the participation of the masses in social production and political life would lead to radically different forms of perception and culture. In 1967 Roland Barthes published two treatises that were highly influential for art criticism, Death of the Author and Birth of the Reader, which together formulated a critique of the traditional notion of the author. In relation to the work of Lawrence Weiner one can argue that both the negation of the privileged object and the decentering of the position of the author manifested themselves when Weiner wrote in 1967: “Everything is an object. It’s just the idea of realizing and accepting that one object is not necessarily better than another.” (35) And one of the artist’s most quoted statements is: “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.” (36) By transferring the responsibility for the execution of the work from the artist to the buyer or collector, Weiner decentered the position of the author — at least this was the idea, since such an ambition is contradictory in many ways. Delegating the execution and thereby also the responsibility for the artwork does not mean that the artist literally gave up the position of the author. The author of the work is still Lawrence Weiner, as the delegation is part of his intention and therefore ultimately refers back to him. A similar principle holds true of the alleged annihilation of the privileged object: the transformation of the object into language as an (allegedly) direct, critical and democratic form of expression does not equal an abolition of privileges. The artist cannot abolish the “privileged artistic object,” as it is not the artist who privileges it but rather the gaze upon it and the institutional framing of it. Thus also a work of Lawrence Weiner is a privileged work and not an “object like all others.”

In a quintessentially modernist dialectic, Benjamin Buchloh writes that the artwork is “simultaneously the exemplary object of all commodity production and the exceptional object, which denied and resisted the universality of that reign.” (37) Behind this dialectic stands the conviction that the object and the commodity or product status of art are inseparably linked. Because art is an object, it is sellable, and becomes part of a market, circulating inside this market as a commodity. If one inverts this notion — and this idea was of central importance to Conceptual Art — then one can argue that the more immaterial the art, the stronger its resistance against market forces. This uneasiness — uttered latently or explicitly — about the commodity status of the artwork must be seen in the context of the social and economic changes that occurred in the United States in the 1950s and in Europe in the 1960s. In the heyday of economic success, many believed that continuous growth was assured, but it came with a sense of the ever increasing economization of all areas of life. A concern about this economic invasion came not only from real life experiences but from reading politicized theoretical treatises, like Marx’s critique of the fetish character of the commodity, in which the principle of exchange is the dominant principle that defines the relations of individuals to each other and from Horkheimer/Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), which outlines a theory of the “culture industry” and which has dominated the New Left’s criticism of both art and culture after 1968.

In summary, the critique of the equalization of art, object and commodity was fueled by the aspiration to transcend the objecthood of art and keeping it aside from the economic sphere and thus the domain of capitalism. Underlying this aspiration is the utopia of a communication freed from commodity production, of an activity freed from the primacy of economic exchange value. But the unresolved and unresolvable contradictions implicit in such an attitude become apparent when these political positions were confronted with real circumstances, with people’s own desires. The critique of the product or commodity status of the work was nourished by the idea of an “outside” position that was neither feasible nor desirable in the long run — not only because artists have to generate income, but because art can only continue over time if the works circulate and persist.

Additionally, despite its dissociation from theories of taste and aesthetic positions, Conceptual Art ultimately remained on the level of the aesthetic, which led to fundamental artistic changes, but did not change the commodity or product status of art, largely because it assumed a very narrow definition of product. In an aesthetic sense, Conceptual Art does not aspire to live up to standards of taste but nevertheless immediately establishes new standards, which Buchloh calls an “aesthetics of administration,” referring to the preference of Conceptual Art for the forms of expression of bureaucracy. (38) It failed to recognize that anything can be a product, even a mere piece of paper, as long as there is somebody who recognizes value in it. Favourizing the idea does not challenge the commodity status of the artwork in the least. A work —like that of Lawrence Weiner — that can only be bought as a surrogate, namely as a certificate, may render the procedure of acquisition and collecting a bit more complicated, but structurally and literally this work is just as much a commodity as anything else that is traded in the market. There is a kind of elitism in the belief that these products could not be appreciated in value and be validated by the market. History has indeed shown that many Conceptual artists of the 1960s have been surprised by the interest of collectors in their work. Although Conceptual artists broke with aesthetic conventions — and in that sense maybe weakened their commodity status — the innovation of these works is definitely valued.