Conceptual Performance: Radical Art, Time and Action 1138907650, 9781138907652

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CONCEPTUAL PERFORMANCE

Conceptual Performance explores how the radical visual art that challenged material aesthetics in the 1960s and 1970s tested and extended the limits, character, and concept of performance. Conceptual Performance sets out the history, theoretical basis, and character of this genre of work through a wide range of case studies. The volume considers how and why principal modes and agendas in Conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s necessitated new engagements with performance, as well as expanded notions of theatricality. In doing so, this book reviews and challenges prevailing histories of Conceptual art through critical frameworks of performativity and performance. It also considers how Conceptual art adopted and redefined terms and tropes of theatre and performance: including score, document, embodiment, documentation, relic, remains, and the narrative recuperation of ephemeral work. While showing how performance has been integral to Conceptual art’s critiques of prevailing assumptions about art’s form, purpose, and meaning, this volume also considers the reach and influence of Conceptual performance into recent thinking and practice. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of theatre, performance, contemporary art, and art history. Nick Kaye is Professor of Performance Studies, University of Exeter, United Kingdom. His books include Site-Specific Art (2000), Multi-Media (2007), Performing Presence (with Gabriella Giannachi, 2011), Dennis Oppenheim: Body to Performance (with Amy van Winkle Oppenheim, 2016), and he is co-editor of Artists in the Archive (2018).

CONCEPTUAL PERFORMANCE Enacting Conceptual Art

Nick Kaye

Cover image: Paul Kos, The Sound of Ice Melting, 1970. Installation at the Museum of Conceptual Art, San Francisco. Courtesy of the artist. © Paul Kos. First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Nick Kaye The right of Nick Kaye to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 9781138907645 (hbk) ISBN: 9781138907652 (pbk) ISBN: 9781315694962 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781315694962 Typeset in Times New Roman by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

CONTENTS

Figures Acknowledgements

vii x

1 Introduction

1

Conceptual art and the idea of performance  1 From language to performance  4 Performance tactics: Dennis Oppenheim  16 Problematics 27 References 29 2 Languages

33

Language and language-use  34 Performing tautology: From “the last painting” to Joseph Kosuth’s Proto-Investigations (1965–7) and The First Investigation (1966–8)  40 The language of performance: Tom Marioni  50 References 66 3 Documents Information flow and “primary information”  74 Staging the network: Douglas Huebler, Robert Barry, Seth Siegelaub’s January 5–31, 1969 and One Month (March 1–31, 1969) 83

70

vi Contents

Praxis: Art & Language, Index 01 and Index 02 (1972)  93 Performance document: Asco’s “No Movies”  103 References 111 4 Things

116

Rethinking objects  117 Words are material: Robert Smithson, Mel Bochner  128 The language of things: Paul Kos, Terry Fox, Joseph Beuys 137 References 158 5 Infiltrations

163

Readymade as rumour  164 Context as Readymade: Cildo Meireles, T.R. Uthco and Doug Hall, Linda M. Montano, Eleanor Antin, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Tony Labat  168 Contesting the public sphere: Adrian Piper, Vito Acconci, Mierle Laderman Ukeles  182 Infiltrations of the sign: Adrian Piper’s Catalysis series (1970–1) and The Mythic Being (1973–5)  195 References 205 6 Theatricalities

210

Grounding the work  212 Time in place: David Ireland’s House 218 Open spaces: Bonnie Ora Sherk  226 The Artist Contemplating the Forces of Nature: Bas Jan Ader  237 References 248 7 Conclusion

252

Index

259

FIGURES

Art & Language, Abstract Art (No. 8), 1967 Dennis Oppenheim, Reading Position for Second Degree Burn, 1970 1.3 Dennis Oppenheim, Guarded Land Mass, 1970 1.4 Dennis Oppenheim, Guarded Land Mass, 1970 1.5 Dennis Oppenheim, Lead Sink for Sebastian, 1970 2.1 Joseph Kosuth, Self-Described and Self-Defined, 1965 2.2 Joseph Kosuth, Titled (Art as Idea as Idea) The Word “Definition”, 1966–8 2.3 Works by Ad Reinhardt shown at the exhibition “Americans 1963,” MoMA, NY, May 22nd through August 18th, 1963 2.4 Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting No. 5, 1962 2.5 Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965 2.6 Tom Marioni, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art, 1970 2.7 Tom Marioni, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art, 1970-ongoing. Installation view 2.8 Tom Marioni, text of a letter from Tom Marioni to Allan Fish, dated August 20th, 1969 2.9 Tom Marioni as Allan Fish, 1969 2.10 Tom Marioni; Larry Fox, Untitled photograph from “The Trip” (The San Francisco Performance), 1972 2.11 Tom Marioni; Larry Fox, Untitled photograph from “The Trip” (The San Francisco Performance), 1972 2.12 Tom Marioni, “The Trip” (The San Francisco Performance), 1972

1.1 1.2

5 17 22 22 25 34 35 41 43 46 50 53 59 60 62 62 63

viii Figures

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12 4.13 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6

72 Installation view of the exhibition, January 5-31, 1969 Sol LeWitt (1928–2007), Drawing Series in Xerox Book (New York: Siegelaub/Wender, 1968) 75 Dennis Oppenheim, Removal Transplant - New York Stock Exchange, 1969 80 Dennis Oppenheim, Removal Transplant - New York Stock Exchange, 1969 80 Douglas Huebler (1924–1997), Boston, New York Exchange Shape, 1968 85 Douglas Huebler (1924–1997), Boston, New York Exchange Shape, 1968 – detail 86 Douglas Huebler (1924–1997), Boston, New York Exchange Shape, 1968 87 Art & Language, Index 01, 1972 94 Cover of Art-Language Volume 1, Number 1, May 1969 95 Art & Language, Index 02, 1972 98 Sol LeWitt, A Wall Divided Vertically into Fifteen Equal Parts, Each with a Different Line Direction and Colour, and All Combinations, 1970 120 Mel Bochner, Language is not transparent, 1969 123 Giuseppe Penone, Tree of 12 Metres, 1980-2 126 Robert Smithson (1938–1973), A heap of Language, 1966 128 Robert Smithson (1938–1973), Non-Site (Palisades-Edgewater, N.J.), 1968 131 Mel Bochner, Measurement: Room, 1969 (installation view of the exhibition ‘Painting and Sculpture Changes 2009’, MoMA, NY, January 1st through December 31st, 2009) 135 Paul Kos, Reflection,1998138 Terry Fox, Wall Push, 1970 142 Dennis Oppenheim, Arm & Wire, 1969 143 Terry Fox, What Do Blind Men Dream? 1969 144 Terry Fox, Hospital, 1971 146 Terry Fox, Levitation, 1970 148 Joseph Beuys (1921–1986): Eurasia Siberian Symphony, 1963 (1966) 152 Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917, replica 1964 165 Cildos Meireles, Insertion into Ideological Circuits 2: Banknote Project, 1970 169 T.R. Uthco, President Ford and The Avant Guard, 1975 174 T.R. Uthco, President Ford and The Avant Guard, 1975 175 Linda M. Montano and Annie Sprinkle, Linda Montano as Bob Dylan, 1989/2014 177 Vito Acconci, RE, 1967 184

Figures  ix

Vito Acconci, Step Piece, 1970 Vito Acconci, Centers, 1971, still from video Art & Language, Untitled Painting, 1965 David Ireland, Repair of the Sidewalk, 500 Capp Street, San Francisco, 1976 6.3 Tony Labat video recording as Ireland sands the floor in the front parlour, 500 Capp Street, 1977 6.4 Front parlour room, 500 Capp Street, with David Ireland’s South China Chairs, 1978–9 6.5 David Ireland, Broom Collection with Boom, 1978–88 6.6 Bonnie Ora Sherk, Sitting Still I, 1970 6.7 Crossroads Community (the farm), 1974–87 6.8 Bas Jan Ader (1942–1975), I’m Too Sad to Tell You, 1970 6.9 Bas Jan Ader, (1942–1975), Art & Project Bulletin 89  7.1 Tino Sehgal and participants of These Associations outside Tate Modern, 2012 5.7 5.8 6.1 6.2

189 191 214 216 219 222 226 228 234 239 245 255

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has been developed with the support and engagement of many individuals for whose time and interest I am very grateful. These include the artists Eleanor Antin, Janet Delaney, Doug Hall, Paul Kos, Tony Labat, Tom Marioni, Jim Melchert, and Bonnie Ora Sherk, who generously made time for interviews and conversations of considerable importance to the research for this volume. I am especially grateful to Tom Marioni for opportunities to practice as well as theorise Beer with Friends. I would like to thank Jeff Gunderson, and staff of the San Francisco Art Institute Anne Bremer Memorial Library, now of the SFAI Legacy Foundation and Archive, for assiduous and extensive help with source materials throughout the period of my research. I would also like to thank the staff of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive for support in viewing key archival materials and providing access to the Archive of MOCA (Museum of Conceptual Art). I have also received important support from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Library and Archives, Stanford Libraries, including the Bancroft Library Special Collections and the Bowes Art & Architecture Library, and the California College of the Arts Libraries and Capp Street Project Archive. I am pleased to acknowledge funding from the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust Small Research Grant Scheme in support of this archival research. I have also received extensive support from the University of Exeter for the research and development of this project. I am pleased to acknowledge that minor elements of my discussion of Tom Marioni’s work in Chapter 2 have been developed from my article published by PAJ: A. Journal of Performance and Art in May 2013, “One Time Over Another: Tom Marioni’s Conceptual Art.” I am very grateful to Paul Kos for his kind permission to reproduce an image of the first installation of The Sound of Ice Melting, at Tom Marioni’s Museum of Conceptual Art in April 1970, on the cover of this book; and an image from

Acknowledgements  xi

his video performance, Reflection (1998) in Chapter 4. I am grateful to Amy van Winkle Oppenheim for her generous support with illustrations for this project, on behalf of Estate of Dennis Oppenheim; her invitation to a previous collaboration, Dennis Oppenheim: Body to Performance (2016), which provided me with unrivalled opportunities to study Dennis Oppenheim’s work; and for directing me through that volume to Oppenheim’s remark that “In the future time will be accepted as an extender, just as turpentine is now,” as cited in Chapter 1. I am also grateful to many individuals and artists for their generous assistance in obtaining illustrations and permissions: Art & Language and Lisson Gallery, London; Tom Marioni, Anglim/Trimble Gallery, San Francisco; and staff of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Mel Bochner and Ryan Cross/Krakow Witkin Gallery, Boston; Marita Loosen Fox/Estate of Terry Fox; Doug Hall and on behalf of T.R. Uthco; Linda M. Montano and Tobey Carey; Maria Acconci and Acconci Studio, New York; Lian Ladia, Curator of Exhibitions and Programmes, and Justin Nagle, of the 500 Capp Street Foundation, San Francisco; Abby Kellner-Rode and the family of Bonnie Ora Sherk. I am also grateful to staff of Tate Images, London; Scala Archive, Milan; and DACS, London, for their help and advice. Specific permissions credits and acknowledgements are provided in the caption for each image reproduced. Finally, these acknowledgements are also in memory of Bonnie Ora Sherk and the curator and writer Constance Lewallen whose interest, time, and conversations I will always appreciate.

1 INTRODUCTION

This book explores how Conceptual art changed and radicalised ideas and practices of performance. In doing so, Conceptual Performance also reviews and challenges prevailing histories of Conceptual art through critical frameworks of performativity, performance, and theatricality, addressing the staging and enactment of conceptual works in their emphasis on contingencies of place, time-based processes, interaction, and transaction. Conceptual Performance considers how and why principal modes and agendas in Conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s necessitated engagements with ideas and practices of performance, as well as expanded notions of theatricality, and how this genre’s challenge to the stabilities and distinctions in which artworks had been conventionally defined gave rise to new “conceptual” engagements with action, time, and the body. While elaborating modes of performative and performance-based strategies integral to Conceptual art’s critiques of prevailing assumptions about art’s form, purpose, and meaning, this volume also considers the reach of these practices beyond their historical moment and into more recent thinking and practices of performance. Conceptual art and the idea of performance

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, expanded notions of performance and theatricality became an integral part of work by a wide range of self-identified “first generation” conceptual artists. For these artists, performance further expanded their rejection of the consistency and stabilities of conventional genre and form, as part of diverse practices engaging with the problematics in which Conceptual art was first defined. Through the rapid development of new language-based work in visual art in the late 1960s, Conceptual art also frequently invoked the idea of performance in transformations of artwork and the art object. Performative strategies DOI: 10.4324/9781315694962-1

2 Introduction

in Conceptual art included the “infiltration” of real-world processes and relations and the deferring of attention to the “theatricality” of everyday place and situation, each of which often recalled, implied, invited, or required enactment. Frequently, conceptual practices worked at the intersection of performance frameworks and practices and other processes, including social, political, and ecological systems. Where Conceptual art persistently interrogated the aesthetic and ideological basis of the category “work of art,” it produced contentious and influential seams of performance and “theatrical” practice. These practices subordinated the visual to the performative effects of language; substituted objects with information or propositions regarding, anticipating, or inviting actions; and deployed documents that directed attention to events that lay elsewhere or had already occurred. Through these and other tactics, performance practices defined through Conceptual art put pressure on terms and tropes in which the anticipation, execution, and memorialisation of theatre and performance are conventionally stabilised, including score, document, embodiment, documentation, relic, remains, and narrative recuperation. The art historical origins of “Conceptual performance” also lie in the interlocking of conceptual and performance art in the late 1960s, and in contemporaneous distinctions between these practices reflected in wider contentions between North American east and west coast art and criticism. These are differences that had also been elaborated through international developments in Conceptual art: in Latin America in particular, and more broadly through the comparative lens of a Global Conceptualism (Camnitzer et al. 1999a). While embedded in a wider range of practices, Conceptual performance is a term first used to capture ideas, curatorial practices, and works by California artists: Terry Fox, Tom Marioni, Linda Mary Montano, Bonnie Ora Sherk, and by extension early work by Lynn Hershman Leeson and Eleanor Antin. These artists are frequently identified as “first generation” conceptual artists, yet their work can appear at variance to the predominantly Anglo-American and east coast, language-centric modes of Conceptual art, around which a canonical history has frequently been drawn. Conceptual performance is a term used by Dennis Oppenheim to describe his early actions and video following his move from the Bay Area to New York in 1967; and of Bruce Nauman’s work, whose relocation to Pasadena in 1969 followed his experiments with performance and film in his San Francisco shop front studio. As early as 1972, the New York-based critic Robert Pincus-Witten published “Vito Acconci and the Conceptual Performance” in Artforum (1972) associating the term also with Nauman and a broader framing of “Postminimalism” (1981). Nauman’s later “conceptual performance” Body Pressure (1974) comprised instructions to a reader in the gallery to “press as much of the front surface of your body (palms in or out, left or right cheek) against the wall as possible” and provided a further nine paragraphs refining the experience; instructions Marina Abramović performed against sheet-glass in a six-hour spectacle as part of her Seven Easy Pieces (2005). Subsequent work engaged overtly with performance as an elaboration of Conceptual art. Asco, the Chicana/o artists’ collective formed in east Los Angeles

Introduction  3

by Gronk, Willie F. Herrón III, Patssi Valdez, and Harry Gamboa Jr., conceived of their No Movies series (1973–80) as “conceptual performances created specifically for the camera” (Norte 2011: 404). Stephanie Sparling Williams accounts for Lorraine O’Grady’s Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (1980–3) and her performance of direct address in disruptive challenges to the marginalisation of Black women artists, as “conceptual performances of radical (out-of-turn) presence” (2021: 64) (83). Williams’ characterisation is also partly in response to O’Grady’s insistence that “I AM NOT A PERFORMANCE ARTIST […] I am writing in space” (61, original emphasis), an allusion that draws her work back towards the linguistic basis of Conceptual art, as does the institutional critique that her persona enacts. Contemporaneously, journals such as High Performance, founded in Los Angeles by Linda Frye Burnham in 1978, facilitated a new and direct voice for artists engaged with ideas of performance through documentation. In her recollection of “High Performance, Performance Art, and Me,” Frye Burnham recalled her editorial practice which facilitated artists’ pages without overarching critical frameworks, allowing the magazine to become an authenticating voice for work not attested to elsewhere, even producing “performance” in its pages. Frye Burnham recounts publishing documentations and reviews of performance that “could take place literally any place, indoors or out, or it could be entirely conceptual and never exist at all” (1986: 29). More recently, performance has been recognised as a practice and idea embedded into methodologies and encounters characterising early Conceptual art. Stuart Comer, reflecting in 2015 on his approach as curator of media and performance at MoMA, New York, identified Sol LeWitt’s earliest iterations of Conceptual art in his instructions for Wall Drawings from 1968 with the elaboration of performance and its documentation. Here, LeWitt specifies a “concept,” in the form of instructions to be permuted in site-specific iterations, such that “the idea becomes a machine that makes the work” (LeWitt 1999: 12). The execution of such a Wall Drawing, Comer suggests: is as much a performance as is a Dada cabaret. That moment in conceptual art was a watershed moment for performance, especially in New York. It shows how an image can be an archival thought, it can be an action, it can occupy different registers of time. Westerman 2018: 18 In a critical commentary on Conceptual art and performance, too, the term Conceptual performance has persisted, if sporadically. Robert Morgan’s writing of “Conceptual Performance and Language Notations” (1994) focuses on the primacy and ambiguities of documentation to argue that “Conceptual performance relies to a large extent on the presentation of documents as a substitute concern for the non-theatricality of the performance” (80). Contemporary criticism in California also visited the term, but differently again: for example, in W.C. Graham’s reading of Leslie Leibowitz’s SPROUTIME SAN FRANCISCO at the San Francisco

4 Introduction

Site Gallery of 1981 as an “ongoing conceptual performance, and business” that adopted the time of organic growth, while conflating her work with “real life situations” (1981: 22). Tom Marioni’s Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA) which from 1970 in San Francisco showed time-based, ephemeral, and “theatreoriented” art (Marioni 1970) has been associated with “conceptual performance” (Tedford 2011); as has Terry Fox’s crossing of conceptual and site-specific sound practices, also associated with MOCA in the early 1970s. More recent publications have directed attention towards the “problem of critically framing conceptual performance,” treating conceptual and performance art as distinct seams of practice and focusing on actions presenting the body as insensate or as an object (Johnson 2022: 306). In these various respects, Conceptual performance has emerged and persisted as a term capturing the play and effect of the “idea” of performance within conceptual work; as a designation of practices elaborating or further developing Conceptual art’s integration of language and concomitant play with performativity and performance; and as a thinking of Conceptual art as performed acts and processes. From language to performance

The art historical narrative of Anglo-American Conceptual art tends to cohere around a definition of language-centric practices in visual art in the later 1960s: practices that explicitly and critically rejected the perceived hegemony of the New York School of abstract art and its associated formalist critical narratives while also self-consciously overtaking the phenomenological emphasis of Minimalism. These rejections concerned not only the abstraction so influentially supported by the critic Clement Greenberg’s account of the trajectory of North American Modernist art but also the ideals of autonomy and medium specificity these narratives rested upon. In inaugurations of Conceptual art, these departures were crystallised in 1967 in Joseph Kosuth and Christine Kozlov’s Opening Exhibition of Normal Art in New York, which included Kosuth’s realisation of Proto-Investigations conceived in 1965 and modelling Conceptual art as “analytic propositions,” reproducing seemingly structurally self-supporting meanings found within language. It is a linguistic emphasis reflected in Sol LeWitt’s publication in Artforum later in 1967 of “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” which set out the first systematic definition of the term. Conceptual art, LeWitt proposed, is art in which “the idea of concept is the most important aspect of the work,” such that “all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand, and the execution is a perfunctory affair” (1999: 12): a formulation enacted in his texts for Wall Drawings from 1968. It is an approach inflected further in Michael Baldwin and Terry Atkinson’s proposal for Air-Conditioning Show/Air Show/Frameworks, comprising the designation of a current of air as a work of art; on which Baldwin published in Arts Magazine in November 1967, and which informed the work of Art & Language from 1968. It is a proposition, Robert Bailey suggests in his study of Art & Language International,

Introduction  5

that demonstrated how language had the capacity to precede the phenomena of “art,” as through this proposition: Baldwin revealed the extent to which a “viewer” of this phenomenon would need the linguistic dimension of a text (such as the very essay in which he proposed the work) explaining what the work of art is in order to perceive it as art in the first instance – and even then, its crucial component would remain invisible. 2016: 15 In 1969, Bailey notes, the New York-based artist Ian Burn authored 12 declarative sentences on language and art, appearing to set out what was “at stake” in the Air-Conditioning Show. Burn noted that “Perception is no longer a direct and unified act; through language it has become fragmented and dispersed” (Bailey 2016: 19). It is in the context of such thinking that Baldwin’s collaborations with Mel Ramsden made use of text to disrupt visual forms and processes, prior to their formal association with Art & Language. In their collaborations from 1965, Baldwin and Ramsden introduced language to the surface of mirrors and article abstracts from The Review of Metaphysics of September 1966 into spaces announced for “Abstract Art,” so demanding reading in the conventional space for viewing.

& Language, Abstract Art (No. 8), 1967. Silkscreen on canvas. 38 cm × 61 cm. Private collection. © Art & Language

FIGURE 1.1  Art

6 Introduction

This linguistic turn was flagged in New York by numerous exhibitions in this period, including Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read, a re-titling by the artist Robert Smithson of the press release for Language I in 1967 at the Dwan Gallery, New York (Smithson 1996), and followed by Language II (1968), Language III (1969), and Language IV (1970). These New York-based exhibitions inflected the widely recognised history of Conceptual art’s definition in a coalescence of specific language-uses in art emergent from 1965 to 1967 (for example, Buchloch 1990; Wall 1999; Harrison 2001; Osborne 2002). It is a tendency that gained momentum also in the founding of the Art & Language collective in Coventry, England, in 1968, around the collaborative practices of Baldwin and Atkinson, as well as David Bainbridge and Harold Hurrell (Art & Language 2006: 113) who were art history faculty of the then Lanchester Polytechnic. Following the publication of the first issue of their journal Art-Language in 1969 which was briefly subtitled “The Journal of conceptual art,” Joseph Kosuth was invited to act as the journal’s “American editor.” Kosuth later edited the first issues of the corresponding New York-based journal, The Fox, from 1975 to 1976. In this period, Art & Language rapidly expanded in the United Kingdom and New York to include Michael Ramsden and Ian Burn in 1970, Charles Harrison as editor of Art-Language in 1971, to eventually bring together as many as 20 artists under a largely collective authorship. It is a focus on the capacities and effects of language also crystallised in the influential curatorial work of Seth Siegelaub in New York in 1968 and 1969, and the subsequent development of his practice until his departure from the art world in 1972. In November 1968, Siegelaub organised the publication of what came to be known as The Xerox Book, (Seigelaub 1968), sometimes also titled Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Lawrence Weiner. Made up of 25-page (Xeroxed) sequences without an “original,” its image sequencing and self-referential address to the page forced a self-conscious reading of The Xerox Book as exhibition, and exhibition site. In early 1969, this development took further shape through Siegelaub’s series of defining exhibitions for conceptual practice, beginning with January 5–31, 1969 in New York, in participation with Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, and Lawrence Weiner. Utilising print media over gallery exhibition or installation, Siegelaub distributed material conventionally secondary to an exhibition as the exhibition; material was also given primacy by these artists’ conflation of their artwork with information that could be disseminated simultaneously in a variety of media. Such tactics militated against identifying Conceptual art with a specific medium, displacing attention instead towards ways in which media are formed discursively, and how information may simultaneously be conveyed in multiple formats. Siegelaub’s foregrounding of “primary information” also implicitly opposed the Modernist revelation of the recursive structure of a given medium, save for the possibility of recursive structures in language itself; an implication that shadows Joseph Kosuth’s early work. These concentrations on language are also consistent with the earliest definition of

Introduction  7

“Concept Art” by artist Henry Flynt, in his essay of that title written in 1961 from the vantage point of Flynt’s discomfort with the emergent Fluxus group, orchestrated principally by George Maciunas in New York. Flynt’s formulation appeared in the first publication around which Fluxus came to be defined, An Anthology of Chance Operations (Young and Mac Low 1963), and draws on the language-based, explicitly performative event-scores, mail art, and numerous informal publications that came to comprise the diverse work promoted by Maciunas. Here, Flynt suggests that: Concept Art is first of all an art of which the material is concepts, as the material of e.g., music is sound. Since concepts are closely bound up with language, concept art is a kind of art of which the material is language. Flynt 1963, original emphasis Flynt’s statement positions language centrally within “Concept Art,” yet captures one of the recurrent tensions within conceptual work, between concept and medium or material. In his subsequent “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” LeWitt also acknowledged the implicit fissure between concept and materiality in the new work, which, he argued, conceptual artists sought to “ameliorate” in the attempt “to engage the mind” rather than the emotions. In this address, LeWitt notes: The physicality of a three-dimensional object then becomes a contradiction […] Anything that calls attention to and interests the viewer in this physicality is a deterrent to our understanding of the idea and is used as an expressive device. The conceptual artist would want to ameliorate this emphasis on materiality as much as possible or to use it in a paradoxical way. (To convert it into an idea). 1999: 15 It is a dilemma reflected also in discourses over the “dematerialisation” of the art object, first identified explicitly in Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler’s article “The Dematerialization of Art” published in Art International in 1968, and then exhaustively catalogued in Lippard’s book, Six Years: the dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972 in 1973 (1997). Indeed, “dematerialisation” provides for one of a series of contradictions or problematics in which Conceptual art has frequently been defined, and that persist in its framing. As Mel Bochner points out in multiple self-reflexive works from 1969 entitled Language is not transparent, language on a page inevitably asserts its own materiality as mark and style, even as it seemingly “dematerialises” object-forms. The artist and critic Jeff Wall, in his review of the history of Conceptual art, also finds the link to Flynt, arguing that these linguistic practices at once critiqued and

8 Introduction

implicitly extended a “reductivism” exemplified by attempts through Happenings and Fluxus to embed art in the everyday and theorised in the writings of artists such as Allan Kaprow (1966) in aspirations towards “the blurring of art and life” (2003). Such attempts, Wall argued: emphasized the work of art’s resemblance to non-art and is the direct precondition for the “dematerialization” of the work of art into critical language. The transformation from emblematics to a directly critical and discursive form of expression is conceptualism’s central achievement 1999: 507 In his major survey of Conceptual art, the philosopher and art historian Peter Osborne notes the resonance of performance to these defining strategies and concerns. Performance, he suggests, by dint of its ephemerality alone might seem to offer a “paradoxical dematerialisation” as any specific performance work is “constituted through […] disappearing into time, and thus sustaining itself over time, and into history only at the level of an idea” (2002: 20, original emphasis). It is an argument in accord with Peggy Phelan’s profoundly influential and earlier proposition within performance studies that performance’s ontology lies in its ephemerality: that performance, as that which “cannot be reproduced in the ideology of the visible […] becomes itself through disappearance” (1993: 146). In this ephemerality, Osborne argues, performance offered Conceptual art formats of “score” and “documentation” as means of referring attention away from material form; tactics resonant to Lucy R. Lippard’s identification of Conceptual art with the trajectory of dematerialisation in her book, Six Years. Performance in Conceptual art often engaged directly with “disappearance”: sometimes comprising unseen actions whose realisation remained moot, or performances evidenced only in announcements, in “fictional” documentation, or as rumour. Harold Rosenberg, writing of “De-aesthetisation” in 1970, identified a “repudiation of the aesthetic” in Conceptual art with an elimination of the object in favour of ephemeral exchanges: “its replacement by an idea for a work or by the rumour that one has been consummated” (1999: 223). It is a characterisation also reflected in subsequent accounts of Conceptual art. Alexander Alberro, who has extensively documented conceptual practices, suggested in prefacing Recording Conceptual Art (2001), a collection of early interviews with conceptual artists by Patricia Norvell, that “ultimately only the document or record what Norvell calls the ‘oral history’ – remains” (13). It is a tactic surveyed as an intersection of Conceptual art and performance in Philipp Kaiser’s exhibition and publication, Disappearing – California c.1970 (2019), exemplified, for Kaiser, in work by Bas Jan Ader, Chris Burden, and Jack Goldstein. Yet, while Osborne’s focus on score and documentation may emphasise potential and aftermath, they remain in Phelan’s scheme irretrievably other to performance in their visuality, materiality, and permanence.

Introduction  9

In the linguistic turn to Conceptual art, a play of performativity and the capacity to occupy positions performatively also gained prominence early in this history. In the first issue of Art-Language of May 1969, the journal of the Art & Language collective, Terry Atkinson’s opening essay asserted “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” (Atkinson 1969: 10). So compelling were such conflations by 1969 that in his final entry in his “Sentences on conceptual art” reprinted in the same journal issue, Sol LeWitt felt the need to state that “These sentences comment on art, but are not art” (5, original emphasis). In fact, both statements converge in the assumption that the performative effect of language trumps form, as they present analogous linguistic acts of self-definition which define contrasting relationships, and so identities, with their respective readers. This intertwining of linguistic and performative turns in art is also evident in “conceptualism” considered more widely. Indeed, the art historical reading of Conceptual art, defined in part around its emergence as a self-conscious term and mode (Osborne 1999: 49), is usually made distinct from a broader conceptual turn in art prompted first by Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp’s influence was revived through his permanent relocation to New York in 1942, his association with John Cage from the 1950s, and the Sidney Janis and Arturo Schwartz galleries’ release of new, multiple editions of Duchamp’s lost Readymades in 1959 and 1964, respectively. “Conceptualism” at once embraces the linguistic turn of Conceptual art but follows an inclusivity reflected in Sol LeWitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” of 1967. Consistent with this, Adrian Piper, whose early work was influenced by LeWitt, proposed in an essay of 1997 that “we set aside that restriction and think of Conceptual art in this more open-ended way, as being art that subordinates its medium, whatever its medium, to intellectually interesting ideas” (2004: 345). Taken in its broadest form, the furthest reaching of these inclusive perspectives is Global Conceptualism (Camnitzer et al. 1999a) a project surveying diverse origins of conceptualist work from 1950 to the 1980s, in Japan, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa, China, as a development within “Soviet” art, and elsewhere. Here, too, the overarching framework in which conceptualism is considered sets out implicit shifts to performative and performance-based processes. Introducing the volume and exhibition it reflects, Louis Camnitzer, with Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss, identifies heterogeneous and geographically dispersed conceptual turns after Duchamp with an underlying “shift from object to subject,” pointing out that “a prioritisation of language over visuality; a critique of the institution of art; and, in many cases, a consequent dematerialisation of the artwork were set in motion long before the anointing of a Conceptual Art” (Camnitzer et al. 1999b: VII–VIII). Here these tendencies are elaborated as an opening and expansion of the use and purpose of art in response to rapid social change and turmoil, in which “the deemphasis – or dematerialisation – of the object allowed artistic focus to move from the object to the conduct of art” (VIII) and so towards a focus on processes enacted,

10 Introduction

analysed, and documented, that also rest on the enunciation and performative effect of language. It is a conceptual turn that contrasts with a narrower definition of Conceptual art as “a formalist practice developed in the wake of minimalism” (VIII) as a broader range of “conceptual” work turned towards art’s implication in reproducing or intervening into social relationships. Performance maintains its relevance in these expanded fields, providing means of further articulating interconnections and mutual influences between geographically diverse centres. As it is constructed here, however, Global Conceptualism also rests on a narrow view of Conceptual art as a depoliticised practice that extends the formalism that in differing ways it challenged. Read as self-conscious disruptions of the then predominant formalist narratives, Conceptual art gains a more permeable relationship with this conceptualism, a permeability reflected also in the various drives towards performance practices and frameworks in Conceptual art and the political, ideological, and ecological imperatives enacted by artists in frequently politicised challenges to formalist constraints. Furthermore, and despite retrospective readings implying an early well-defined momentum and a clear set of parameters for Conceptual art, Peter Osborne notes in his extensive survey of Conceptual art and conceptualism that the first exhibitions using this term were not until 1970 (2002: 17). Here, Osborne cites Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects, in New York in August 1970, an exhibition “ghost” curated by Joseph Kosuth and Ian Burn (Bailey 2016: 23); and subsequently Conceptual Art, Arte Povera, Land Art in Turin, organised by Germano Celant, anticipated by Celant’s influential book, Art Povera: Conceptual, Actual or Impossible Art? (1969). Other contemporaneous large-scale survey exhibitions reflected not only these curatorial definitions but also the growing ubiquity of “conceptualism.” In March 1969, the international reach of this tendency had been demonstrated through Op Losse Schroeven, meaning Situations and Cryptostructures, curated by Will Beeren at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, which included work not only by Huebler, Morris, Nauman, Oppenheim, Smithson, and Weiner but also by Giovanni Anselmo, Joseph Beuys, Ger van Elk, Richard Long, and many others (Beeren 1969). In the same two months in Bern, Harald Szeemann had organised Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, which was even more wide ranging, prompting Alison M. Green, discussing “The Contest over Conceptual Art’s History,” to remark that “What the record shows, of course, is that the Attitudes show may have included conceptual art, but was in no way an exhibition about conceptual art” (2004: 127, original emphasis). In New York, in July 1970, Kynaston McShine’s large-scale survey Information, at MoMA, followed Siegelaub’s prompt and published an extensive catalogue in which the 96 contributing artists were invited, McShine notes, “to create his [sic] own contribution to this book, a situation which meant that the material presented would be either directly related to the actual work in the show, or independent of it” (1970: 138). The following November, the art critic Jack Burnham curated Software at the Jewish Museum, which set the conceptual turn in art towards

Introduction  11

“information” in the context of real-time data processing, information technologies, and new media (Burnham 1970). Including exhibits not only by Kosuth, John Baldessari, Hans Haacke but also by American Motors, Art and Technology Inc., The Architecture Machine Group from M.I.T., and other industry and experimental interactive technology research groups and companies, Burnham further blurred the distinctions between realms and practices of art and the new technological systems, and so between “art information” and the emergence of real-time information systems. Where language provided a clear point around which to critically define and historicise Conceptual art, so, in retrospect, it also became a principal locus of its contradictions and tensions, of the “faulted” character of conceptual strategies. It is an “instability” won in the rejection of the securities formalist assumptions offered, and a concomitant embrace of contradiction, relation, and processual change. The issues these instabilities presented have been reflected in historiographies of Conceptual art and the diversity of its practices. Writing in 1981, Ian Burn, the Australian artist and member of Art & Language from its inception until 1977, argued that “Conceptual art failed” through internal contradiction and its untenable position in attempting simultaneously to turn outwards to address the social relations in which art functioned while maintaining a “structural adherence to the avant-garde tradition of modern art.” Developing through these fault lines, Burn concludes, “The real value of Conceptual Art lay in its transitional (and thus genuinely historical) character, not in the style itself” (65, original emphasis). For other artists, though, these fault lines provided a potent driver of change around the form, limits, and politics of art in the emergence of work that did not necessarily need to resolve the contradictions it produced or revealed. Thus, Adrian Piper’s formulation of a “Meta-Art,” which in her Catalysis (1970–1) and Mythic Being (1973–5) series included self-reflexive infiltrations of the everyday through performance, can be read in part through Conceptual art’s troubling and rejection of the then predominating Modernist narratives, promulgated by Clement Greenberg and subsequently Michael Fried. Reviewing “The Logic of Modernism” in 1993, Piper argued that: The peculiarly American variety of modernism known as Greenbergian formalism is an aberration. Characterised by its repudiation of content in general and explicitly political subject matter in particular, Greenbergian formalism gained currency as an opportunistic ideological evasion of the threat of cold war McCarthyite censorship and Red baiting in the 1950s. 1999: 546 Piper’s Conceptual art, including her performance, rejected Greenberg’s repudiation of content and valorisation of the medium-specific autonomy of the work of art. Instead, Piper formulated a “Meta-Art” that worked across contexts, addressing and intervening into social constructs and relation by garnering differing meanings

12 Introduction

and identities that remain in negotiation. In this context, one might observe that Conceptual art’s identity and value lies in the problematics in which it is constituted, rather than their resolution; and, specifically, in its exposure of the uncertainties it uncovers and amplifies. In these regards, Conceptual art tends towards an undoing of secure aesthetic form and its seemingly inherent significance and exclusions, whether as “de-aesthetisation” (Rosenberg), dematerialisation (Lippard), ideological critique (Art & Language), institutional critique (Andrea Fraser), or numerous other tactics. Indeed, practices of Conceptual art tend towards contradiction in so far as they advance critiques of “the work of art” through the production and reception of “art” and so self-reflexively contest the very contexts in which they operate. While Lippard’s Six Years, like McShine’s Information and Szeemann’s Live in Your Head, embraced a broad definition of conceptual work, the art historical narratives reflected by Benjamin Buchloch, as well as other influential critical histories by Jeff Wall (1999) and Charles Harrison (2001) of Art & Language, rapidly closed around a concentration on specific aspects of linguistic effect and discursive intervention. Buchloch, publishing in 1990 for the journal October which from its inception in 1976 had initiated a theoretical and politically engaged art history and criticism defined in the wake of the changes he described, dates Conceptual art “roughly from 1965 to its temporary disappearance in 1975” (1990: 105). Setting out what rapidly became an orthodoxy, Buchloch tied Conceptual art not only to language-centric practices but also to the specific interrogation of language on which Joseph Kosuth’s work had first been founded. He states: the proposal inherent in conceptual art was to replace the object of spatial and perceptual experience by linguistic definition alone (the work as analytic proposition), it thus constituted the most consequential assault on the status of the object: its visuality, its commodity status, and its form of distribution […] they performed the post war period’s most rigorous investigation of the conventions of the pictorial and sculptural representation and a critique of the traditional paradigms of visuality. 107 Buchloch’s summary captures the clarity and complexity that flows from an identification of Conceptual art as a linguistic-critical turn, in which the linguistic basis of artworks is demonstrated, conceptualised, and interrogated; sometimes positioning texts as the work, at other times in anticipation or in place of the work. It is a characterisation compelling not only in describing the trajectory of Anglo-American Conceptual art but also in capturing a distinct condensation of concerns and practices that can be differentiated from its precursors. Thus, Buchloch identifies Ed Ruscha’s bookworks, such as Twentysix Gasoline

Introduction  13

Stations (1962), Robert Morris’ Card File (1962), and Sol LeWitt’s “structures” of the early 1960s as “proto-Conceptual work” (1990: 111) and specifies the inauguration of a specifically linguistic Conceptual art and its limits in work by Kosuth and its elaboration by Lawrence Weiner, and others. Based on this definition, one might also identify early works of Conceptual art that were influential in advance of the broader currency of the term or idea, including Robert Smithson’s A heap of Language (1966) and Dan Graham’s Homes for America (1966–7), both of which provide a point of definition against which subsequent performance strategies can be read. It is a direction over language and the document also signalled in Mel Bochner’s installation of four identical ring-binders, copies of Working Documents and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed As Art (1966) at the School of Visual Arts, New York. Comprising the first recorded use of Xeroxed material in an art installation, and in advance of Siegelaub’s The Xerox Book, Bochner’s work opens specific questions taken forward in Conceptual art more broadly: the pun between “document” as noun and verb implicit in the use of Xerox; the primacy of the copy over the original; the privileging of reading above looking in a gallery context that institutionalises the visual. Following Buchloch’s emphasis, Charles Harrison, the British art historian and, from 1971, editor of Art-Language, proposed narrowing the period of Conceptual art further, from Kosuth’s showing of the Proto-Investigations in 1967 to Art & Language’s Index 01 of 1972. In his first volume of Essays on Art & Language, Harrison proposed the installation of Index 01 at the 1972 Documenta in Kassel, as the “summary work of Conceptual art” (2001: 75). Harrison argues that “it was only during that five-year period that a critically significant Conceptual Art movement could be said to be in existence as such” (29), in an implicit dismissal of conceptualism and explicit rejection of other claims to Conceptual art. In doing so, Harrison also conflates the history of Conceptual art with Art & Language’s developing ideological critique, which departed from Kosuth’s early linguistic model despite Kosuth’s association with Art & Language from as early as 1969. Thus, regarding the west coast North American work that explicitly embraced performance, Harrison limited his reference to “A distinctly ‘Californian’ variety of Conceptual art [that] distilled the ethos of a wistfully agnostic hippiedom” (47): a statement that provides a useful measure of cultural, aesthetic, and political differences across the continuum of conceptual practices at that time. Yet, while focusing on language as a means of disruption and critique of the assumptions and exclusions of visual art, Art & Language’s work also exemplified an engagement with the performative and performance; a feature not lost on Harrison but which stands outside the political imperatives of his account. For Harrison, as for Art & Language more broadly, it is the function and efficacy of Conceptual art as an ideological critique of an otherwise prevailing Modernism that provides its sense. Without this imperative, Conceptual art

14 Introduction

becomes symptomatic of the very “Conditions of Problems” (2001: 82) that Art & Language’s practices sought to unveil and correct. These divergent views were acknowledged by North American west coast artists, such as Tom Marioni, who were nevertheless clear about the identity of their own work as Conceptual art, contemporaneously with Art & Language’s reach extending into New York. In 2013, Marioni recalled that just as California Minimalism had been derided as “finish fetish” by east coast critics because of its use of colours and plastics, so: Joseph Kosuth said that John Baldessari’s art wasn’t Conceptual art, it was a cartoon of Conceptual art. And New York, they dismiss California as being – not serious […] Mel Bochner said that Larry Bell was just Sol LeWitt with colour […] there was no colour in Conceptual art because it was always about language and systems and theory. If it was about colour, it was painting. 2013: 45–6 Yet in further identifying Conceptual art’s linguistic challenge to the art object with “the work of art as analytic proposition,” Buchloch nevertheless opened the history of Conceptual art out to performativity and performance. In their very concentration on language, these strategies open to perceived and practised tensions and contradictions, observed by Art & Language themselves, in this case Michael Baldwin, Charles Harrison, and Mel Ramsden. In a later collective paper addressing the constraints and consequences of periodisation, published in 1997, they argued that: Conceptual Art does not correspond tout court to some sort of linguistic turn in artistic practice. It does represent an appropriation of certain dialogic and discursive mechanisms by artists who sought thereby to critically empower themselves and others, and to that limited extent it represents a linguistic turn. But Conceptual Art did not reduce (or attempt to reduce) the pictorial to the linguistic (or textual). The point is, rather, that the gaps and connections, the lemmas and absurdities between the pictorial and the textual, are spaces in which much cultural aggravation was and is possible. Art & Language 1999: 445 Such “aggravation” is evident, also, in contemporaneous, contrasting approaches to language as a description and document of events. Other, early exhibitions on the North American west coast explored the gaps opened by an emphasis on the document, description, or other interpretations of the “absence” of a work implicitly occurring over time. In April 1969, the San Francisco Art Institute opened an exhibition of “Conceptual Art” (Anon 1969) 18′6″ × 6′9″ × 11’2 1/2 ″ × 47′113/16″ × 29″8 1/2″ × 31′9 3/16″ in a rotation of “proposals” by 15 artists.

Introduction  15

Opening with work by Barry, Huebler, and Weiner; then in rotation with Stephen Kaltenbach, Dennis Oppenheim, and others, including Kosuth, Barry Le Va, James Lee Byars, and Iain Baxter, who required “the photographic documentation of the entire volume of the empty gallery” (SFAI 1969). Subtitled “Touring Exhibition of Documentary Materials etc.” and comprising, Fred Martin, then President of SFAI, suggested of “only the residue of their deeds in that room, and our thoughts and judgments of our experience of that residue” (Martin 1969), the exhibition borrowed its title describing the dimensions of the SFAI Diego Gallery from Oppenheim’s contribution, in which: The exact dimensions of the S.F.A.I. gallery was etched in an abandoned oil field and photographically documented and mapped. The second part photographically documents Oppenheim’s chance discovery of wooden forms in the snow which represents a scaled-down replica of the same gallery. SFAI 1969 For Oppenheim, such displacements, linked also to his land and earth art, promised another form of dematerialisation whereby “you can’t see the work, you can’t have the work, you can’t buy the work” (Oppenheim and Kaye 1996: 66). In his subsequent “conceptual/performance,” Oppenheim transposed these tactics towards acts and performances that produced and were seen only or primarily in the documents or remains they generated. Contemporaneously, Tom Marioni’s inauguration of the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA) in the then run down area South of Market Street (SoMA) of San Francisco in April 1970, which preceded the opening of Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects in New York in August, had been announced as “a museum for actions and situational art” (Foley and Lewallen 1981: 33). MOCA’s opening exhibition, Sound Sculpture As, comprised time-based, ephemeral actions executed over a single evening. Artists directly associated with MOCA such as Terry Fox, Paul Kos, David Ireland, and Bonnie Ora Sherk also engaged in performancebased work that in multiple ways reflected Marioni’s framing of Conceptual art as “idea-oriented situations not directed at the production of static objects” (2000: 10). At the time of Oppenheim’s engagement with “conceptual/performance,” Vito Acconci, Adrian Piper, Linda Mary Montano, Bas Jan Ader, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles also cast the idea and framework of “performance” over otherwise unseen, unacknowledged activities, or events otherwise in disappearance. In San Francisco, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s The Roberta Breitmore Series (1974–8) involved Hershman Leeson’s acting out of her alter-ego in the city, then evidencing her “breathing simulacrumed persona” (Hershman Leeson 1994) in photographs, objects, recordings of “real” interactions, and other traces. Performance, in these instances, was integral to the practices of a self-conscious Conceptual art at the time of its broader historical coalescence. Many of these performances explored language as a medium and frame for events, into which they incorporated personal

16 Introduction

and social exchanges and processes; they frequently engaged with permutations and the consequences of language-use, in being written, spoken, and acted upon. Conceptual art, in its linguistic turn, also drove these potentialities, integrating language’s performative effects, the ephemerality of events, and performance itself, into its effects and consequences. Although rooted in analogous concerns, west coast engagements with Conceptual art and performance demonstrate how contemporaneous “self-conscious Conceptual art” also diverged from the specific language-forms Buchloch and Harrison identify, even where its origins lay in a focus on language or language-use. Such performance also tended to diverge from the imperative Ian Burn associated with Conceptual art’s internal contradiction, in which a critique of Modernism’s formalist aspects lies in tension with a “structural adherence” to the ideals and continuity of an implicitly Modernist art or avant-garde (1981: 65). Indeed, this performance invariably elaborates Conceptual art’s attack on the vestiges of stability and value associated with Modernist formalism through ephemeral and diverse tactics that pursue and amplify temporariness and contingency. This also affects a consideration of Conceptual performance as “genre,” as style and morphology are disrupted, and continuities are to be found instead in a clustering of problematics and questions. It is for this reason that this book places importance on the particularities of diverse practices and the issues and effects of performative strategies and performances rather than lodging its identity with consistent forms and conventions. It follows, also, that this work might be best introduced by specifying Conceptual performance as a practice, rather than in a general demarcation of its limits, morphological or otherwise. Performance tactics: Dennis Oppenheim

At the opening of Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler’s early essay on “The Dematerialisation of Art,” they observe that at the time of writing in 1967: The visual arts at the moment seem to hover at a crossroads that may well turn out to be two roads to one place […]: art as idea and art as action. In the first case, matter is denied, as sensation has been converted into concept; in the second case, matter has been transformed into energy and time-motion. 1971: 256 However contested Chamberlain and Lippard’s premise of “dematerialisation,” the underlying development their essay describes is a rejection of the stabilities of form and the emergence of practices that are ephemeral, mobile, and processual: ones that privilege idea, energy, and action. In this regard, the “two roads” described here could be taken to meet in modes of performance locked into and extending Conceptual art’s distinctive practices and concerns.

Introduction  17

Oppenheim, Reading Position for Second Degree Burn, 1970. Stage #1 and Stage #2. Skin, book, solar energy. Exposure time: 5 hours. Jones Beach, New York. Colour photography, text. © Dennis Oppenheim Estate

FIGURE 1.2 Dennis

18 Introduction

Dennis Oppenheim’s Reading Position for Second Degree Burn (1970) describes an action executed in the absence of a witnessing audience. Partially protected by a worn edition of William Black’s Tactics (1903) placed across his upper torso, Oppenheim’s images and text detail the two stages of his five-hour exposure to the sun on Jones Beach, Long Island, in 1970. The materials of the work, “Book, skin, solar energy. Exposure time,” reflect the enmeshing of his performance-based works in “real-time structures or disciplines” (Wood 1981: 133) following Oppenheim’s proposition that “the artist makes his art by infiltrating the real world” (Wall 1991). Here, Oppenheim commits himself to a second-degree burn and so a new pigmentation inhering in his skin in reference not only to painting and the living body as sculptural material – but also implicitly to the burning of Agent Orange and the then ongoing war in Vietnam. Through such integrations of action in what he described in 1975 as his “conceptual/performance activities” (Kaye and van Winkle Oppenheim 2016: 9), Oppenheim recalled working to “slowly build a case for art, for sculpture being able to survive and live within this dematerialised zone of psychological topology” (Oppenheim and Kaye 1996: 66). Tactically, Reading Position for Second Degree Burn counters “fixed form” with an indexical image of performance that poses questions over when and where the artwork occurs and how this action displaces static material forms; sculpture’s “cooled down entropic residue” (Wood 1981: 137). Reading Position for Second Degree Burn provides one iteration of Conceptual performance, yet one that exemplifies how performance may extend Conceptual art’s critique of aesthetic “form” and a rejection of Modernist claims to the artwork’s autonomy. In his early performance, Oppenheim had focused on his body as an instrument and material of a sculptural process, creating “feedback” loops that attended to process over outcome while producing a sense of excess that reaches beyond its formal terms. In an interview with Willoughby Sharp, published in Studio International in 1971, Oppenheim stressed that his attention had shifted from the “aesthetic” outcome, to processes that implicated the artist as agent of the work: Most of the new projects reinforce my interest in precluding the objectification of energy through exterior material. Understanding the body as both subject and object permits one to think in terms of an entirely different surface. It creates a shift in direction from the creation of solid matter to the pursuit of internal or surface change. With this economy of output one can oscillate from the position of instigator to victim. Sharp 1971: 188 Through performance, Oppenheim also advanced his focus on “the real world,” noting as early as 1969 that “I’m concerned with the real organisation itself, not staging arbitrarily or for theatrical effect within it” (Alberro and Norvel

Introduction  19

2001: 27). This conceptual emphasis of the hundred or so body-based performance works Oppenheim executed between 1969 and 1973 and disseminated through video, photographs, installations, and descriptions is evident also in the small number of events that were structured towards an audience whose presence was synchronous to Oppenheim’s. These included Extended Armour (1971) at the Reese Palley Gallery, New York; Vibration 1 (1971) and Do-It (1971) at the A Space, Toronto in May of the same year and other events for which a live audience was present but seemed incidental. For Knute Stiles, reviewing in Artforum what he describes as “three concept shootings” by Oppenheim on 6th November 1970 at the Reese Palley Gallery, San Francisco, including Lead Sink for Sebastian, Oppenheim’s prioritising of video and photography through performance seemed very apparent. Stiles notes that “An audience was invited to view the event, but everyone got in each other’s way […] Many in the audience seemed more interested in watching the picture on the monitor than the performance.” Stiles concludes on Oppenheim’s remark that, regarding live performance, “he had no intention of developing techniques which people would pay attention to while neglecting the concepts” (Stiles 1971: 84). Oppenheim’s remarks reflect his focus on the effects and consequences of performance over live performance as a “medium”. Consistent with this, and as its title implies, Reading Position for Second Degree Burn participates in Conceptual art’s concern with textual strategies, and Kosuth’s “understanding of the linguistic nature of all art propositions” (1991: 40). Thus, while Oppenheim’s performance is at significant remove from Art & Language’s early interrogation of relationships between visual and linguistic practices and perspectives, their routes to the conceptual in art converge in the provocation of tensions between viewing and reading. In their inauguration of text as their primary form of Conceptual art in the 1967 Abstract Art series, the same year that Joseph Kosuth first exhibited One and Three Chairs (1965–7), Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden, latterly of Art & Language, crystallised a defining shift to Conceptual art. Regarding the Abstract Art series, which had reproduced philosophical abstracts from The Review of Metaphysics of September 1966 as found texts, Baldwin and Ramsden noted that when given primacy and yet held within a visual practice: The text, in being read, modifies the normal regard of the viewer: he or she becomes a reader. The surface upon which the text is written is “hidden”, so to speak, insofar as the text is read […] However, like the surface of a mirror, it can be brought into view. Text and surface are thus in permanent disgrace; systematically invisible. Art & Language 2008: 17, original emphasis In Reading Position for Second Degree Burn, performance remains “systematically invisible,” in an analogous vacillation between text, image, and

20 Introduction

referent. Oppenheim’s text, “Book, skin, solar energy. Exposure time,” specifies materials locked into an action no longer present. It is a text also frequently positioned between the photographs, to further bisect “Stage 1” and “Stage 2,” stressing its mediation of the performance and further entrenching the viewer as a reader of documentation, deflecting attention elsewhere. Yet the “performance” deferred to here was always out of reach of the viewer. It is an action no more present or available in 1970, than in being read “now”; an inaccessibility that moves documentation back towards visual artwork. Indeed, the primary aim of such actions, Oppenheim recalled, was the production of “charges to activate the periphery of the things. There was a tendency to see even discrete performances and works as being charges that opened up doors that were not going to be found on the paper that you were presenting the work to” (Oppenheim and Kaye 1996: 80). The idea of Oppenheim’s performance, then, serves to change and qualify a reception of material forms and images, altering the conceptual basis of his work, which remains entangled with the real-time action of which it speaks: a tactic that might be readily identified with the conceptual in performance. Through performance, too, Oppenheim at once identifies himself as the physical location of his work, while elaborating the idea of the “artwork” through its occupation of multiple fields; tactics that signal another engagement characteristic of Conceptual art. Reading Position for Second Degree Burn is lodged in several sites simultaneously: in the gallery, and in the specific location of its earlier execution; in photography and in performance; and as a “tactic” engaging with discourses over contemporary art and its methods. In this respect, Oppenheim also reads Conceptual art more broadly as an overt engagement with the historical and critical discourses on which it depends. He thus emphasised that Reading Position for Second Degree Burn “elaborates painting; is about pigment,” noting: Conceptual art does not pretend to have invented a totally new context for art, nor does it pretend not to have links with the art which directly preceded. The work’s primary value lies in art historical consciousness, particularly methodology: the method of applying paint; the method of achieving form; the method of securing content. Wall 1984 Oppenheim’s view accords with other artists and contemporary critics: with Joseph Kosuth, writing in his essay “1975” that, “as Harold Rosenberg suggests, Conceptual Art was self-consciously historical,” and that its early practice was animated by “a collective sense of historical location: a view of art overlooking the flatlands of painting and sculpture” (1999: 344, original emphasis). It is an “art historical consciousness” consistent with a sense that, whatever “medium” is in play, Conceptual art is a practice that intervenes into

Introduction  21

the historiographic and critical narratives of which it is a part. Victor Burgin, the British conceptual artist working principally through photography, argued in an essay of 1984 that in this self-reflexivity Conceptual art set the ground for postmodernism’s subsequent address to the history and politics of representations, arguing that: conceptual art opened onto that other art history, a history which opens onto history. Art practice was no longer to be defined as an artisanal activity, a process of crafting fine objects in a given medium, it was rather to be seen as a set of operations performed in a field of signifying practices, perhaps centred on a medium but certainly not bounded by it 2002: 283 Oppenheim’s playing through of the signifying practices of theatre and performance can be seen to operate in a similar “overlooking”: an appropriation and adjoining of different media in a Conceptual art that evades resolution into the “settled” forms to which it refers. Thus, in Reading Position for Second Degree Burn, “performance” displaces and embodies sculpture but does so by adjoining photography and painting as systemic references, rather than resolving the “conceptual/performance” at hand into a “theatre” performance, or an action to be seen. In this way, Oppenheim’s engagement with performance further disrupts and postpones any straightforward closure of the work and its reading. Similarly, “documentation,” as the conventional aftermath of live performance, is implied through Oppenheim’s practices but his conceptual/performance evades the oppositions in which documentation becomes the stabilising binary of a performance work; a performance whose “authenticity” was once available to an audience, only to be lost to ephemerality. Many other of Oppenheim’s works also make explicit reference to theatricality and performance yet do so in an articulation of eclectic and discursive contexts and without offering resolution into a performance which, in being seen, might become the “work.” Thus, for Energy Displacement Approaching Theatricality (1970), artists of the Art Department of the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater agreed to enter a 50-metre free-style swim race, and “instructed to perform at full output,” were rewarded “with tickets to Ambassador theatre […] Seating arrangement determined by placement in race” (Kaye and van Winkle Oppenheim 2016: 152). Oppenheim’s focus here is on the “energy displacement” and transfer between the “full output” of the artists as sports performers, and its determination of their subsequent position as spectators, energy expended; a displacement dramatised in the allusions to the theatricality of sports, and the relative passivity of theatre spectating. Energy Displacement is a performance that remains embedded in systems of the everyday: a theatre of “real time systems” that evades resolution into the theatrical forms to which it refers, yet on whose conceptual frameworks it nevertheless depends.

22 Introduction

FIGURES 1.3 AND 1.4

Dennis Oppenheim, Guarded Land Mass, 1970. South Central Wisconsin. 3 armed guards march in 8 hour shifts, 24 hours per day, for 7 days around a barren land mass. Energy in the form of concentration injects this landscape with vestiges of museum preciosity. © Dennis Oppenheim Estate

Introduction  23

In other performances, Oppenheim staged events or actions that directly articulated Conceptual art’s critique of the “precious object” and the museum, through performative forms of the institutional critique that Buchloch later identified with Conceptual art’s trajectory and destination (1990). This work frequently amplified conditions of “theatricality”: the “literal” or quotidian contexts the Modernist artwork would transcend in its claim to autonomy, as Michael Fried argued after Greenberg (Fried 1998). For Protection (1971), Oppenheim stationed 12 trained security dogs around the perimeter of an area on the grounds of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, each loosely chained to a steel post evenly spaced to create a guarded perimeter, for a six-hour period. The result, Oppenheim notes, is a reproduction of the Museum’s authority, as “energy in the form of concentration injects this land mass with vestiges of museum preciosity … inaccessibility” (Kaye and van Winkle Oppenheim: 174). In earlier work, Oppenheim had deployed more overtly “theatrical” means. Guarded Land Area (1970) comprised a museum guard charged with marching for two hours in an area outside the New Orleans Museum of Art, so repeatedly marking out a perimeter corresponding to one of the exhibition areas within the building. Guarded Land Mass (1970) extended this tactic, employing three armed guards who take turn to march, in eight-hour shifts, 24 hours a day, for a week “around a barren land mass” in South Central Wisconsin, such that a “form of concentration injects this landscape with vestiges of museum preciosity” (144). In performance embedded into and acting out the museum function, displaced “costumed” guards thus “perform” for a public on behalf of the Museum – asserting the presence of Oppenheim’s work through the legal authority of the institution to demarcate and protect the place and boundaries of the artwork, to the extent of deploying the signs of lethal force in the defence of empty space. Further work played directly with appearance, transformation, and emergent “persona,” including Toward Becoming a Devil (1970), a two-minute film in which Oppenheim manipulates his hair towards disguise and transformation; and Toward Becoming A Scarecrow (1971), a sequence of 160 35-mm slide dissolves in which Oppenheim moves through 1,000 feet of thick foliage such that “the body slowly builds a skin” and has “collected remnants of its past” (Kaye and van Winkle Oppenheim: 222). Here sculptural processes of forming, accumulation, and transformation of materials invite readings of performed personae or the possibility of Oppenheim’s personal transformation through his treatment of his body as sculptural material and process, and performance as catalyst. Oppenheim’s works also engaged with “delegated performance,” in which the use of a surrogate invoked theatrical representations and frameworks, as an untrained performer acts on the artist’s behalf: a method taken further at Oppenheim’s withdrawal from performance in 1973, and use of marionette surrogates in installations such as Theme for a Major Hit (1974) and Attempt to Raise Hell (1974). Lead Sink for Sebastian (1970), to which Knute Stiles refers in his account of attending Oppenheim’s “concept shootings,” approaches a surrogate performer’s body as equivalent to a

24 Introduction

malleable sculptural material. Here, Oppenheim employs “Sebastian’s” disability as an opportunity to demonstrate the effects of material change as a sculptural process of “subtractive manipulation” is applied to the performer’s physical stance, through his lead piping prosthetic. Over a 30-minute action to camera, Sebastian’s lead support is gradually diminished by the flame from the butane torch strapped to his right ankle and foot. The result on the amputee is excessive: the heightened risk of the flame’s increasing proximity becomes evident over time, as does his developing physical precarity and the seeming change of his disposition. Oppenheim’s surrogate performer is at once objectified as sculptural material and dramatised as a physical and psychological subject that cannot rest or be contained in “cooled down” sculptural process or form.

Artist’s statement The performer is an amputee. A hollow lead pipe is substituted for his wooden peg. A portable butane torch is strapped to his left leg and lit. As the torch melts the lead, his body sinks. Here, the manipulation of a material is given an added dimension. Since the lead pipe also acts as a surrogate limb, the manipulation (melting) affects the body position at the same time the lead itself changes. Since the lead occupies a space normally taken by a leg, it establishes a subtractive manipulation of material at an extremely close proximity to the body. © Dennis Oppenheim Estate

Lead Sink for Sebastian (1970) was the first of a series of actions using a delegate or proxy performer; a strategy that Oppenheim elaborated in performances, including actions with or by his young children as an extension of self, in time and “genetics.” These works, Oppenheim later suggested, demonstrated performances’ infiltration of his daily life, the way “art had invaded these contexts. Body Art invaded one’s home. It took in your family” (Oppenheim and Kaye 1996: 57). In 1975, as part of the text to Identity Stretch (1970–5), he recalled that: At that time, I was interested in performance activities which incorporated my own body, as both the subject and object of an investigation […] This was an art requiring only process, no tools were necessary, no secondary stage (canvas) was necessary; artist became both instigator and victim of the aesthetic act. It was a simple extrapolation to begin using my children as agents, vehicles, to extend this concern with energy as substance to a further conceptual position. Kaye and van Winkle Oppenheim 2016: 114

Introduction  25

Oppenheim, Lead Sink for Sebastian, 1970. Performer, lead pipe, butane torch. B&w contact sheet. Reese Palley Gallery, San Francisco. November 6, 1970, 6:30 pm

FIGURE 1.5 Dennis

In these processes, Oppenheim positioned himself as the source of an action extended in time through familial overlap, in intergenerational performances in which the surrogate performers provide the “conceptual” charge of access to past and future states. The first of these actions, Identity Transfer. Fingers

26 Introduction

(1970), involving Oppenheim’s father and daughter, is recorded by Oppenheim as a process in which: My daughter Kristin transfers the papillary ridges of her thumb onto my thumb. I then transfer this print to my father’s thumb and he terminates the process by transferring it onto the ground. It is a linear regression going back through the members of a family until an impasse is reached. 110 Identity Stretch brought this implicit extension in time to bear on Oppenheim’s work on land, which was often characterised by the displacement of information from one site to another. In this case, the right thumb print of Oppenheim’s son, Erik, and Oppenheim’s own right thumb print are photographed in extension and then transposed onto the land using hot spray tar; drawn, using a gridded map and spray truck, to a new dimension of 300 by 1,000 feet. Here, a mapping of the body over a place is also a mapping and extension of identity, and genetic continuity, further extending Oppenheim’s focus on energy transfer to an extension of his sense of self. In the documentation of the action, Oppenheim reflects on this address to time and limits, suggesting that: By incorporating the second print of my offspring emanating from this structure, the thought turns to age acceleration, the transformation of energy from one chronology to another. My identity is transferred in real space to that of my son’s suggesting an aesthetic act untroubled by the impasse created by death. 114 In the works that followed in 1971, Oppenheim engaged in a series of performances executed to still camera and video that explored permutations of these temporal extensions. For Extended Expressions (1971), Oppenheim adopted a series of facial expressions his son, Erik, sought to imitate, implying, he suggests, that “transfer of stimuli to my son allows me to enter a similar biological system as my own,” as a result of which “My expression, if passed to my son … enters my past” (208). In A Feed-back Situation (1971), Oppenheim drew on Erik’s back with a marker pen, as, both facing a wall, Erik attempted to simultaneously translate and return the movement to Oppenheim, as a result of which, “What I get in return is my movement fed through his sensory system” (210). It is a gesture amplified in the linked performances, 2-Stage Transfer Drawing (Advancing to a Future State), 2-Stage Transfer Drawing (Returning to a Past State) (1971) and 3-Stage Transfer Drawing (1972). In the first of these systematic variations, Erik stands behind his father: he runs a marker over Oppenheim’s back, prompting Oppenheim’s attempt to reproduce the movement, with a marker, on the wall that he faces. “Because Erik is my offspring,” Oppenheim remarks, “my back (as surface) can be seen as a mature version of his own … in a sense, he contacts a future state” (218). Returning to a Past State sees the reverse, as Erik draws on

Introduction  27

Oppenheim’s back, who reproduces the unseen movement to the wall before him, while 3-Stage Transfer Drawing (1972) passes information from Oppenheim, through his daughter, to his son. In many ways, Oppenheim’s work sets out an agenda for a Conceptual performance, as he engages with theatre as context and metaphor – as ways of thinking and reframing actions that transform the material basis and outcome of his sculpture towards the conceptual. At the same time, Oppenheim’s performance can quite readily be understood as, or after, theatrical practices: in his engagement with documentation, delegated performance, disguise, role, even “character.” Yet the presence of these terms does not resolve Oppenheim’s work into theatre form or a live performance practice but instead disturb the terms he extends into his conceptual practice. Reflecting on his early entry into performance in 1969, Oppenheim remarked on his impulse, “To infiltrate the system as an artist, to cause disruption. In turn, the disruption would create the form of the work” (Wall 1984). Oppenheim’s “conceptual/performance” enacts disruptions of “cooled down” sculptural form in favour of concept and process, or disturbances of “preciosity … inaccessibility” in his performances of institutional critique. Regarding theatrical practice, Oppenheim tests and expands its terms and processes. Not the least of these lies in Oppenheim’s address to time, perhaps the most self-evident currency of any performance. In his intergenerational actions, Oppenheim approaches time as a measure – and so concept – as distinct from a time synchronous with the experience of its duration – and so in this way, performance again gives way to the conceptual scheme it animates. In 1971, Oppenheim imagined, by way of provocation, but also reflecting on the idea of performance and dissonance between measure and duration, that “In the future time will be accepted as an extender, just as turpentine is now” (Tarshis 1971: 85; Kaye and van Winkle Oppenheim 2016: 3). Problematics

It is the “tactical” character of performance in Conceptual art that also informs the organisation of this book. Rather than set out a taxonomy of Conceptual performance modes or forms, Conceptual Performance is structured in an address to the problematics of Conceptual art that give rise to performance: to issues and questions raised through and defining conceptual practices, yet which are not necessarily resolved into a settled “form” or practice, and to which performance is a response or elaboration. In doing so, this volume also takes its cue from Joseph Kosuth’s characterisation of his own early work, which, in its most substantial documentation, was published in conjunction with Art & Language under the subtitle, Art Investigations and “Problematics” (Kosuth et al. 1973). This approach to Conceptual art recognises the production of performance through differing questions driving its development and definition, rather than consigning conceptual work back to stable art forms in which significance inheres. For

28 Introduction

this reason, too, Conceptual Performance moves across a series of sometimes overlapping beginnings, and implicit meetings and exchanges between different trajectories, in the manner observed by Lippard and Chandler. Each of the following chapters in this book, then, makes an address, in turn, to Languages, Documents, Things, Infiltrations, and Theatricalities, before concluding a discussion of performance itself as a problematic in Conceptual art. In these contexts, this book explores the performative character of Conceptual art as a “linguistic proposition,” the idea of performance in Conceptual art, and considers various moves in the histories of Conceptual art into performativity and to performance itself. Excepted from Conceptual art’s “problematics” is “institutional critique,” which, as Oppenheim’s work suggests and existing criticism establishes (for example, Alberro et al. 2011), is an integral part of Conceptual art’s self-reflexive and critical tendency to reject, unravel, and complicate the “work of art,” its objects, and underpinning narratives, and so is addressed here as a thread emergent throughout these themes. This address begins, then, in a discussion of the conflicts and contradictions brought into view by language and language-use as Conceptual art: specifically, in the latent performativity of Joseph Kosuth’s definition of Conceptual art as “tautology,” and its implications; then in the “linguistic propositions” underlying Tom Marioni’s social art and performance. The following chapter, “Documents,” addresses the circulation of information and duplicates as part of language-based systems in the late 1960s that challenged art’s “precious object,” distinguishing between “documents” and “documentation” and its implications for events and performance installed within these mechanisms or produced by them. This chapter focuses on the usurpation of the art object by documents that offer “primary information,” in the publication and staging of work organised by Seth Siegelaub from January 1969, presenting work by Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, and Lawrence Weiner. “Documents” also engages with Art & Language’s ideological critiques of Modernist work and its cultural narratives, through a disruption of its conventional art objects; and Asco’s “No Movies” that deployed the document in the explicit production of conceptual performances. Chapter 4 is concerned with a new treatment of “things” that arose in the problematics of “dematerialisation,” a concomitant focus on the materiality of language, and claims of equivalences between objects and words; paradoxes and tensions elaborated in work by Mel Bochner, and Robert Smithson, and explored in relation to recent theories of “entanglement” elaborated by Ian Hodder (2014, 2016). In this context, the chapter goes on to examine performance and installations by Paul Kos, Terry Fox, and Joseph Beuys, which explore imbrications of actions, things, and language. Two further chapters focus on performance practices evolved through Conceptual art: “infiltrations” and “theatricalities.” The first of these concerns appropriations through performance that play out implications of Duchamp’s Readymade, including infiltrations of everyday social practice and media formats by Cildo Meireles,

Introduction  29

Linda M. Montano, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Tony Labat, and others; contestations of private and public spheres by Vito Acconci, Adrian Piper, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles; and Piper’s subsequent and ambivalent infiltrations of signs of identity. Finally, an expanded “theatricality” in conceptual work, read in extensions of Michael Fried’s attack on the “theatrical” corruption of Modernist ideals, is considered through addresses to built, ecological, and environmental place by David Ireland, Bonnie Ora Sherk, and Bas Jan Ader. Conceptual Performance concludes in considering performance itself as a problematic in Conceptual art, and more specifically how the tensions and seeming contradictions elaborated through the enactment of Conceptual art extend into more recent and contemporary aspects of theatre and performance.

References Alberro, A. and Norvell, P. (eds) (2001) Recording Conceptual Art, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Alberro, A., Borowski, W., Ptaszkowska, H. and Tchorek, M. (eds) (2011) Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings, London: MIT Press. Anon (1969) “At The Galleries,” San Francisco Chronicle, 10th April. Art & Language (1999) “We Aimed to Be Amateurs,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, London: MIT Press, pp 442–8. —— (2006) “Voices Off: Reflections on Conceptual Art,” Critical Inquiry, 33:1 (Autumn), pp 113–35. —— (2008) Works 1965–1978, 2007–2008 by Art & Language – Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden, Wielingen: Mulier Muller Gallery. Atkinson, T. (1969) “Introduction,” Art-Language, 1:1 (May), pp 1–10. Bailey, R. (2016) Art & Language International: Conceptual Art between Art Worlds, Durham NC: Duke University Press. Beeren, W. (1969) Op Losse Schroeven, Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum voor Aktuele Kunst. Buchloch, B.D. (1990) “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October, 55 (Winter), pp 105–43. Burgin, V. (2002 [1984]) “The Absence of Presence: Conceptualism and Postmodernisms,” in Peter Osborne (ed) Conceptual Art, London: Phaidon, pp 283–7. Burn, I. (1981) “The Sixties: Crisis and Aftermath (Or the Memoirs of an Ex-Conceptual Artist),” Art & Text, 1:1 (Fall), pp 49–65. Burnham, J. (ed) (1970) Software: Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art, New York, NY: The Jewish Museum. Camnitzer, L., Farver, J. and Weiss, R. (eds) (1999a) Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s-1980s, New York, NY: Queens Museum of Art. —— (1999b) “Foreward,” in Louis Camnitzer, Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss (eds) Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s-1980s, New York, NY: Queens Museum of Art, pp VII–XI. Celant, G. (ed) (1969) Art Povera: Conceptual, Actual or Impossible Art? London: Studio Vista.

30 Introduction

Flynt, H. (1963) “Concept Art,” in La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low (eds) An Anthology of Chance Operations, New York, NY: La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low, n.p. Foley, S. and Lewallen, C. (1981) Space Time Sound: Conceptual Art in the San Francisco Bay Area: The 70s, San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and University of Washington Press. Fried, M. (1998 [1967]) “Art and Objecthood,” in Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, pp 142–78. Frye Burnham, L. (1986) “High Performance, Performance Art, and Me,” TDR The Drama Review, 30:1 (Spring), pp 15–51. Graham, W.C. (1981) “Site,” Art Com, 15 (4:3), pp 22–4. Green, A.M. (2004) “When Attitudes Become Form and the Contest Over Conceptual Art’s History,” in Michael Corris (ed) Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 123–42. Harrison, C. (2001 [1991]) Essays on Art & Language, London: MIT Press. Hershman Leeson, L. (1994) Talk at MOMA. Available online. https://www.lynnhershman.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Talk-at-MOMA-NY.pdf. Accessed 24th May 2022. —— (2015) Civic Radar, Karlsruhe: ZKM and Hatje Cantz Verlag. Hodder, I. (2014) “The Entanglement of Humans and Things: A Long-Term View,” New Literary History, 45, pp 19–36. —— (2016) Studies in Human-Thing Entanglement. Open access. Available online. http:// www.ian-hodder.com/books/studies-human-thing-entanglement#:~:text=This%20 book%2C%20published%20only%20online,application%20of%20formal%20network%20analysis. Accessed 20th July 2022. Johnson, D. (2022) “‘Kind of Goya-Esque or Something’: Charles Ray’s Early Works,” Art History, 45:2 (April), pp 280–307. Kaiser, P.O. (2019) Disappearing – California c. 1970: Bas Jan Ader, Chris Burden, Jack Goldstein, New York, NY: The Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth and Delmonico Books Prestel. Kaprow, A. (1966) Assemblages, Environments, and Happenings, New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams. —— (2003) Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, edited by Jeff Kelley, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kaye, N. and van Winkle Oppenheim, A. (2016) Dennis Oppenheim: Body to Performance, Milan: Skira-Rizzoli. Kosuth, J. (1991 [1969]) “Introductory Note to Art-Language by the American Editor,” in Joseph Kosuth, Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966-1990, edited by Gabriele Guercio, London: MIT Press, pp 37–40. —— (1999 [1976]) “1975,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, London: MIT Press, pp 334–49. Kosuth, J., Smith, T., Ramsden, M., Baldwin, M., Atkinson, T., Pilkington, P. and Rushton, D. (eds) (1973) Joseph Kosuth: Art Investigations and “Problematics” Since 1965, Lucerne: Kunstmuseum, Lucerne. LeWitt, S. (1999 [1967]) “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, London: MIT Press, pp 12–16. Lippard, L.R. (1997 [1973]) Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972, second edition, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Introduction  31

Lippard, L.R. and Chandler, J. (1971 [1968]) “The Dematerialization of Art,” in Lucy R. Lippard Changes: Essays in Art Criticism, New York, NY: E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc., pp 256–62. Marioni, T. (1970) Opening Announcement, MOCA, March 18, San Francisco, CA: Tom Marioni. —— (2000) Writings on Art 1969–1999, San Francisco, CA: Crown Point Press. —— (2013) “Tom Marioni: MOCA (Museum of Conceptual Art) 1970–1984,” SFAQ, 13 (May-July), pp 44–57. Martin, F. (1969) “The Proposals,” Front [Newsletter of the San Francisco Art Institute] April, San Francisco, CA: SFAI, n.p. McShine, K. (ed) (1970) Information, New York, NY: The Museum of Modern Art. Morgan, R.C. (1994) “Conceptual Performance and Language Notations,” in Robert C. Morgan, Conceptual Art: An American Perspective, Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co. Inc., pp 79–100. Norte, M. (2011 [1983]) “Harry Gamboa Jr.: No Movie Maker,” in C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzales (eds) ASCO: Elite of the Obscure, Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz Verlag, pp 402–5. Oppenheim, D. and Kaye, N. (1996) “Dennis Oppenheim,” in Nick Kaye, Art into Theatre: Performance Interviews and Documents, London: Routledge, pp 57–72. Osborne, P. (1999) “Conceptual Art and/as Philosophy,” in Michael Newman and John Bird (eds) Rewriting Conceptual Art, London: Reaktion Books, pp 47–65. —— (2002) “Survey,” in Peter Osborne (ed) Conceptual Art, London: Phaidon Press, pp 12–51. Phelan, P. (1993) Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London: Routledge. Pincus-Witten, R. (1972) “Vito Acconci and the Conceptual Performance,” Artforum, April, pp 47–9. —— (1981) Postminimalism, New York, NY: Out of London Press. Piper, A. (1999 [1993]) “The Logic of Modernism,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, London: MIT Press, pp 546–9. —— (2004 [1997]) “Ian Burn’s Conceptualism,” in Michael Corris (ed) Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 342–58. Rosenberg, H. (1999 [1970]) “De-Aestheticization,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, London: MIT Press, pp 220–3. SFAI (San Francisco Art Institute) (1969) Supplement to 18’6” × 6’9” × 11.2” × 47’11 3/16” × 29”8 ½” × 31’9 1/14,” (Touring Exhibition of Documentary Materials etc.), San Francisco, CA: SFAI, n.p. Sharp, W. (1971) “Dennis Oppenheim Interviewed by Willoughby Sharp,” Studio International, 182:938 (November), pp 183–93. Siegelaub, S. (1968) Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Lawrence Weiner [The Xerox Book], New York, NY: Seth Siegelaub. Smithson, R. (1996 [1967]) “Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read,” in Jack Flam (ed) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, p 61. Stiles, K. (1971) “San Francisco,” Artforum, January, pp 83–5. Sparling Williams, S. (2021) Speaking Out of Turn: Lorraine O’Grady and the Art of Language, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tarshis, J. (1971) “Bodyworks,” Artforum, February, p 85.

32 Introduction

Tedford, M.H. (2011) “The Museum of Conceptual Art: A Prolegomena to Hip,” Art Practical, 2:15 (12th April). Available online. https://wayback.archive-it. org/15633/20210126223440/https://www.artpractical.com/feature/the_museum_of_ conceptual_art_a_prolegomena_to_hip/. Accessed 18th September 2022. Wall, D. (1991) Transcript of unpublished Interview with Dennis Oppenheim. Courtesy: Dennis Oppenheim Estate, New York. Wall, J. (1999 [1985]) “Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, London: MIT Press, pp 504–13 Westerman, J. (2018) “Museum of Modern Art, New York,” in Gabriella Giannachi and Jonah Westerman (eds) Histories of Performance Documentation: Museum, Artistic, and Scholarly Practices, London: Routledge, pp 15–20. Wood, S. (1981) “An Interview with Dennis Oppenheim,” Arts, June, pp 133–7. Young, L. and Mac Low, J. (eds) (1963) An Anthology of Chance Operations, New York, NY: La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low.

2 LANGUAGES

Although language forms, uses, and effects in conceptual practices have many permutations, the inauguration of a “self-conscious” Conceptual art (Osborne 1999: 49) from 1967 takes clear shape in a focus on the internal dynamics of language as a medium, in new relationships between critical narrative and artwork, and in language’s performative effects. In each of these aspects, the dynamic between claims to language’s structural making of meaning and its definition in social acts and transactions became a defining tension in this conceptual work. In his influential essay, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969,” Benjamin Buchloch had identified Conceptual art with “the work as analytic proposition” (1990: 107), so firmly aligning its emergence with Joseph Kosuth’s first language-based works, including his anatomies of the sign, use of tautology, and concern with the self-definition of the work of art; work conceived in 1965 and first shown publicly in 1967. More specifically, here Buchloch references Kosuth’s attempt to conflate tactics in his early Conceptual art with A.J. Ayer’s understanding of truth-claims in language, set out most substantially in Ayer’s book Language, Truth and Logic, first published in 1936. It is in the context of Ayer’s logical positivism that Kosuth proposed his work as “tautologies” of word and material, as well as intention and effect, such as the neon Self-Described and Self-Defined (1965). In contrast, in 1969, the northern California artist Tom Marioni surfaced Conceptual art in performances of the social. Marioni’s theatricalised Conceptual art stresses the contingency of art’s meaning and aesthetic identity, as the materiality of the art object gives way to social exchange and relation that come to visibility “as art” in impermanent circumstances, and in overtly heterogeneous views and experiences. In their differences, however, these artists’ early works both demonstrate how, whether inscribed or enacted, language as Conceptual art foregrounds performative effects and presses towards

DOI: 10.4324/9781315694962-2

34 Languages

Kosuth, Self-Described and Self-Defined, 1965. Installation at Lisbon’s Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Portugal. Alexandre Rotenburg/Alamy Stock Photo. © Joseph Kosuth. ARS, NY and DACS, London 2023

FIGURE 2.1 Joseph

performance practices. This chapter, then, considers how Conceptual art’s focus on language drove towards performative strategies and performance. Language and language-use

A significant backdrop to Conceptual art’s surfacing of language in the spaces of visual art in the 1960s was the legacy of debates in the late 1950s over opposing linguistic models defined in the work and principal publications of British philosophers A.J. Ayer and J.L. Austin. These models are reflected directly in tensions and differences between contrasting bodies of work in Conceptual art and performance: differences exemplified in tensions produced by Kosuth’s investment in tautology and self-definition, and in Marioni’s conflation of Conceptual performance and the social. As Buchloch notes, Kosuth’s earliest conceptual works were conscious inflections of Ayer’s account of how “analytic propositions” in language obtain self-determined truths. Kosuth grouped this first phase of his work as ProtoInvestigations (1965), inaugurated with One and Three Chairs (1965) and including tautological signs and installations such as Five Words in Orange Neon (1965) and Neon Electrical Light English Glass Letters Blue Eight (1965). Subsequently, The First Investigation (1966–8) comprised large-scale black photostats mounted on card reproducing dictionary definitions of selected words, including Titled (Art as

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Idea as Idea) [Water] (1966), Titled (Art as Idea as Idea) The Word “Definition” (1966–8), and similar treatments of hydrogen, oxygen, concept, idea, unit, and many others. In contrast, Marioni’s identification of time-based acts and processes as Conceptual art, and his inauguration of the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA) in San Francisco in 1970 as his “social art,” rested on overtly performative definitions of art, and an externalising of Conceptual art’s enactment and recognition. Championing logical positivism, A.J. Ayer (2001), had argued influentially that structural sources of self-defined meaning lay within language itself; a model countered by Austin’s proposals in How to Do Things with Words, a lecture series of 1955 first published in 1962 (Austin 2018), which de-emphasised “truth-value” in language in favour of speech as a performative and social act. It is a debate that played through and within Conceptual art practices prior to the influence of post-structuralist and continental philosophy that, in his signal

FIGURE 2.2 Joseph Kosuth, Titled (Art as Idea as Idea) The Word “Definition”, 1966–8.

New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Mounted photographic enlargement of the dictionary definition of “definition”, 57 × 57″ (144.8 cm × 144.8 cm). Gift of Seth Siegelaub and the Stichting Egress Foundation, Amsterdam. Acc. n.: 391.2010. © 2022. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. © Joseph Kosuth. ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022

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essay “Art After Philosophy” of October 1969, Kosuth was at that time ready to dismiss (1991b: 14). While the use of discursive and quotidian language in artworks in the late 1960s provides a focal point from which to define and historicise Conceptual art, these language-uses were also widely identified with a critique of a then predominant “Greenbergian formalism” (Piper 1999b: 546). Here, artists including Adrian Piper, as well as Michael Baldwin, Mel Ramsden, and Charles Harrison of Art & Language (Art & Language 2004: 2; Harrison 2001: 27; Smith 2017: 138) rejected Greenberg’s identification of painting with an interiorised and self-supporting definition and untranslatable import. Consistent with this, although taking recourse to the idea of self-defining meaning within language, Kosuth’s influential emphasis on the centrality of language for Conceptual art also stood in direct opposition to “the enigma (abstract art)” (Kosuth 1991g: 180) he associated with Modernist narratives championed by Greenberg (1961a, 1961b, 1982) and subsequently theorised by Michael Fried (1980, 1998). Clement Greenberg’s narratives had proposed not only art’s autonomy but also a teleology in the development of medium-specific, unique, and abstract forms, in a self-consciously progressive Modernist art. It is an agenda Greenberg had identified as early as 1939, writing in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” that: The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid in its own terms […] something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars, or originals. Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself. 1961a: 10 In this overtly formalist agenda, Greenberg elaborated “advanced” North American abstract painting as working to reveal the recursive structures that defined painting in its specific historical moment (1961b: 209). The trajectory of such work, and the art historical process it represented, Greenberg argued in “After Abstract Expressionism” (1962), worked inwards enacting a “self-criticism” whereby “under the testing of Modernism more and more of the conventions of the art of painting have shown themselves to be dispensable, unessential” (1962: 30). Greenberg thus proposed that work by painters such as Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Jules Olitski in the late 1950s and early 1960s had overtaken the gestural emphasis of Pollock, Franz Kline, Ben Nicholson, and others, to establish through the cool abstractions of colour field painting “that the irreducible essence of pictorial art consists of but two constitutive norms: flatness and the delimitation of flatness” (30). In its most obvious aspects, Kosuth’s Proto-Investigations and First Investigations pursue a model of language “as” the work of art that reproduces this

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trajectory at the level of concepts rather than material form, giving rise to modes of work Daniel Buren later characterised as “concept-objects” (1973: 11). It is a practice that rests directly on Ayer’s tenets regarding linguistic truths. Here, Ayer privileged the truth-value of “analytic propositions” whose veracity is produced in the consistency and logic of language itself and distinguished them from propositions that make claims about the world and so are contingent on empirical verification. The truth-claims of “analytic propositions” are constant because they rely on linguistic consistency alone, taking the form of tautologies, a frequently cited example of which is, “all bachelors are unmarried.” In contrast, “synthetic propositions,” such as “the sky is blue,” over time inevitably become false. Under this distinction, Ayer proposed that analytic propositions obtain a truth-value equivalent to those in mathematics, physics, and logic leading to the claim that certain kinds of incontestable meanings are integral to language. Reflecting this, in “Art After Philosophy,” Kosuth quotes Ayer, stressing “There are absolutely no certain empirical propositions. It is only tautologies that are certain” (1991b: 22). It follows, Kosuth argues, that: Works of art are analytic propositions. That is, if viewed within their context – as art – they provide no information what-so-ever about any matter of fact. A work of art is a tautology in that it is a presentation of the artist’s intention, that is, he is saying that a particular work of art is art, which means, is a definition of art. Thus, that it is art is true a priori. 20, original emphasis In conflating Conceptual art with the structural making of meaning within language, Kosuth pursues an inward focus analogous to Ayer’s. Consistent with Ayer, Kosuth argues that “The ‘purest’ definition of Conceptual art would be that it is inquiry into the foundations of the concept ‘art,’ as it has come to mean” (25–6). This emphasis on “purity” is reflected in other critical definitions of Conceptual art as genre. Such distinctions are echoed in Peter Osborne’s bifurcation of Conceptual art and conceptualism according to these works’ respective proximities to philosophy as a mode of investigation, even to the extent that a “strong” Conceptual art might collapse the distinction between art and philosophy and so enter a mode of practice that occupies both fields. Writing of “Conceptual Art and/as Philosophy” (1999), Osborne suggests that: I shall refer to those who advocate an expansive, empirically diverse and historically inclusive use of the term ‘Conceptual art’ (such as Sol LeWitt) as inclusive or weak Conceptualists. I shall call those championing more restricted, analytically focused and explicitly philosophical definitions (such as Kosuth and the British group Art & Language) as exclusive or strong Conceptualists. 48–9, original emphasis

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As a corollary of this, in so far as Kosuth’s Proto-Investigations conform to Ayer’s tautologies, the rhetoric of Conceptual art in privileging idea over “physical form” (LeWitt 1999: 13) also echoes Modernist progressive “self-criticism”. Where each example of Conceptual art is an “analytic proposition” concerning “art itself,” then in its “purest” form, these practices will employ self-regarding structures, or tautologies, to demonstrate that in language art can be “self-described and self-defined”. In assigning such a purity of purpose to Conceptual art, this linearity also tends to reproduce other effects of “Greenbergian formalism.” In Kosuth’s early writing, then, Conceptual art evidently came to embrace a diminishingly small number of artists in his rejection of a defining style or unique morphology, yet with paradoxical consequences. Osborne thus notes Kosuth’s inclusion, in “Art After Philosophy,” of artists including Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, and Lawrence Weiner as “stylistic” conceptualists whose work was overdependent on “residual morphological characteristics” (Osborne 1999: 61) so departing from Conceptual art’s implicit dematerialisation; Kosuth notes these artists association with Conceptual art “as almost accidental” (1991b: 27). Here, and consistent with Henry Flynt’s conclusion that “concept art is a kind of art of which the material is language” (1963), Kosuth’s approach treats language as a medium in which the “analytic proposition” specifies itself as the “recursive structure” of meaning in art (and language). Yet in conflating Conceptual art with language, Kosuth also introduces a referentiality that “Modernist” abstraction (after Greenberg) finds intolerable, as it breaches the autonomy of the work. Indeed, Ayer’s claim to self-defining structures within language ascribes a singularity and self-presence to meaning that thinking contemporary to Kosuth’s Proto-Investigations had already challenged. In response to this projection towards the specificity of each medium, Kosuth suggested in 1979 that his conflation of artwork and text had installed a new “realism” and demystification in the space of the work that “connects the viewer/reader on the level of culture through the language of the text,” which would be “pragmatic/instrumental” in its role and meaning (1991g: 180). In this reading, Kosuth’s adherence to Ayer’s positivism supported the proposition that art could be self-defining, with the effect that the early Investigations looked simultaneously inwards, towards “self-contained” meaning, and outwards, towards a “demystification” and connection to a reader. It is a duality consistent with the consensus that rapidly formed around Ayer’s propositions, which in his later writing he also qualified. Thus, in his survey and history of Performativity (2007), James Loxley points to the weakness of Ayer’s structural model of truth-claims, given language’s constitution in explicit reference outwards and production of meaning in differences and imbrications between signs and intertextually. For other conceptual artists such as Adrian Piper, working shortly after Kosuth, it is the inevitably referential nature of language that shapes their work. Writing in 1988, Piper noted the “direct consequence” for her “of having chosen to work with materials, that is, language and conceptual symbols, that

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can refer to content beyond themselves” (1999a: 425). Similarly, while Kosuth’s comments on “purity” in Conceptual art and propositions regarding tautology imply a transcendence or “dematerialization” of “form,” the Proto-Investigations nevertheless emphasise “physical form” or morphology. Neon works such as Five Words In Yellow Neon (1965) and A Four Colour Sentence (1965) stage tautologies of language and form by describing their own material conditions, so specifying rather than escaping their morphology. In this way, one can argue, Kosuth’s practice aligns with Sol LeWitt’s proposal in his “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” that “The conceptual artist would want to ameliorate this emphasis on materiality as much as possible or to use it in a paradoxical way. (To convert it into an idea)” (1999: 15). Yet this “amelioration” of material form through tautology also speaks of the impossibility of language’s self-containment, either in its materialisation or for that matter its connotations. Writing of “The Crux of Conceptualism” (2004) Johanna Drucker addresses the containment claimed by Ayer’s “analytic proposition” when amplified by the specific material forms of Kosuth’s early statements. With respect to implied tautologies of language and materials, Drucker argues that: in Self-Described it is not at all clear that the definition or description referred to in the title, and embodied in the neon lettering, are at all evident, or that they suggest conditions fulfilled by the physical form of the work […] the abstract and propositional nature of Self-Described is filled with contradictory possibilities. 257 These “contradictory possibilities” reflect contestations over the functioning of language that form part of the philosophical context of Kosuth’s work and Conceptual art more widely; contestations over language and the event of language-use, including reading. In these respects, Kosuth’s Proto-Investigations open questions not only regarding relationships with the Modernist practices he critiques but also over the work of art as analytic proposition. In so far as Kosuth’s early work rests on Ayer’s model of tautological meaning, then it does so at a time at which Austin’s concepts of the performative character of language-use came to predominate over Ayer’s paradigm. As a result, Kosuth’s profoundly influential Conceptual art first shown in 1967 rests in part on an already outmoded understanding of the self-supporting nature of certain orders of meaning in language; a shift that prompted Kosuth’s own investigation into the philosophy of language at the time of the First Investigations (1966–8) (Coelewij and Martinetti 2016: 80). It is this tension in the compelling nature of Kosuth’s proposition for Conceptual art that leads Osborne to conclude of Kosuth’s “Art After Philosophy,” that it “is one of the more technically confused philosophical statements about art. Yet it is exemplary – indeed, constitutive – in its illusion” (1999: 58); a comment that echoes Art & Language’s proposition that critical discourse produces the artwork.

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This debate over linguistic strategies and its reflection in the Proto-Investigations also reinforces the notion of Conceptual art as the contradictory, “transitional” mode of work of which Ian Burn writes: a Conceptual art that unsettles “form” in transitions from Modernism to the “contemporary” (Burn 1981: 65). It is in the process of this unravelling, too, that performative strategies, and subsequently performance itself, come to be integral to Conceptual art in conflations of artwork and language. It is an integration that also prompts a move from language as the object of Conceptual art, towards a Conceptual performance of relation and the social. Performing tautology: From “the last painting” to Joseph Kosuth’s Proto-Investigations (1965–7) and The First Investigation (1966–8)

First shown as a formed body of work at the Museum of Normal Art, an alternative gallery space founded by Kosuth in conjunction with the artist Christine Kozlov and Michael Rinaldi on East 12th Street in Manhattan’s East Village, Kosuth’s presentation of his Proto-Investigations connected Conceptual art with a wider turn towards language by his contemporaries. Thus, the Opening Exhibition of Normal Art in 1967 included work by Kosuth, Kozlov, and artists whose practices had taken a conceptual turn, including Carl Andre, Mel Bochner, Hanne Darboven, Walter De Maria, On Kawara, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Ryman. Here, too, Kosuth acknowledged his debt to concepts in painting through Ryman, and more specifically to the work of Ad Reinhardt. Indeed, in February 1967, the gallery had first opened as the Lannis Gallery, a student project which Kosuth and Kozlov had dedicated to Reinhardt (Melvin 2022: 199, 210). For the subsequent Opening Exhibition of Normal Art, “in a significant tribute to the recently deceased Reinhardt,” Gabriele Guercio notes in introducing Kosuth’s collected writings, “Kosuth began to subtitle his own work ‘Art as Idea as Idea,’ while a label quoting Reinhardt’s well-known dictum ‘Art as Art’ was affixed to the entrance of the gallery wall” (1991: xxiii). It is an influence Kosuth acknowledged in “Art After Philosophy,” while also noting the importance of Duchamp, filtered through Jasper Johns’ and Robert Morris’ work, as well as work by Donald Judd (Kosuth 1991b: 22, 29). In her second edition of Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972, Lucy R. Lippard reflected on the broader significance of Reinhardt’s Black Paintings “as a very important ending point” (1997: 6) and so as an implicitly terminal reflection on Greenberg’s formalism and a paradoxical influence on many aspects of the subsequent “fragmentation” of art into an array of conceptual practices. The relationship between Kosuth’s Conceptual art and prevailing Modernist practice, too, echoed the ambivalent position and effect of Reinhardt’s late Abstract and Black Paintings. Kosuth also emphasised his dialogue with Reinhardt’s programmatic interrogation of abstract painting after Modernism in “Art After Philosophy,” identifying his first conceptual work as Leaning Glass

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FIGURE 2.3 Works

by Ad Reinhardt shown at the exhibition “Americans 1963,” MoMA, NY, May 22nd through August 18th, 1963. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Acc.n.: IN722.7. © 2022. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

(1965) which comprised “any five-foot square sheet of glass to be leaned against any wall” (1991b: 30). Leaning Glass reproduces the dimensions of the Black Paintings to which Reinhardt devoted himself exclusively from 1953 until his death in 1967. In turn, Kosuth’s subtitle, “Art as Idea as Idea,” was applied to the black photostats of the First Investigation that initially reproduced dictionary definitions on wall-mounted black card, typically ranging from 97 cm to 120 cm square, in gallery installations that evoked Reinhardt’s repetitions. Indeed, Kosuth reports that the reception of the First Investigations moved towards this identification, noting that, “In the beginning the photostats were obviously photostats, but as time went on, they became confused for paintings, so the ‘endless series’ stopped” (30–1). In place of his initial installations, Kosuth then disseminated photostatic images through newspapers, magazines, and other mass media, to emphasise “information” over aesthetics, and multiple formats over unique form. Through his Black Paintings, which were exhibited individually and in largescale installations emphasising sequence and reiteration, Reinhardt’s late work acted out a paradoxical relationship with the post-war abstraction of the New York School. Reinhardt’s rhetoric and practice ostensibly reinforced Greenberg’s

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narrative, despite Reinhardt’s later rejection of this affinity (1991d: 21–2). In his statements, Reinhardt thus appeared to rehearse Modernist ideals and method, noting that “the process and problem of painting […] has only to do with the essence” (13) while his pursuit of “a negative progression” (17) in painting sought the elimination of extraneous reference and inessential internal variation. Proclaiming an “Art-as-Art Dogma,” wherein “Art-as-art is a concentration on art’s essential nature” (1991c: 62), Reinhardt accounted for his work through its progressive elimination of the hand, of representation, and of other terms or forms seemingly extrinsic to painting, in a rhetoric reinforced by its own reiterative style. In “Twelve Rules for a New Academy” of 1957, Reinhardt declared that his work was defined by: 1. No texture […] 2. No brushwork […] 3. No sketching or drawing […] 4. No forms […] 5. No design […] 6. No colors […] 7. No light […] 8. No space […] 9. No time […] 10. No size or scale […] 11. No movement […] 12. No object, no subject, no matter. 1991a: 205–6 By 1953, Reinhardt had come to a form he proposed as “the last painting anyone can make” (Kosuth 1991d: 67), acknowledging his affinity to late Modernist rhetoric yet also his work’s implicit challenge to the “progressive” development of art’s purposes and values. A year after their initiation, Reinhardt proposed the Black Painting as “a clearly defined object, independent and separate from all other objects and circumstances […] whose meaning is not detachable or translatable” (1991b: 83). Yet Reinhardt’s “negative progression” was also one that attempted to dispense with the “colour field” itself, to project art towards an “essence” of which Greenberg was overtly sceptical (De Duve 2004: 124); a scepticism that, for Kosuth, showed Greenberg as “the critic of taste” (1991b: 17). In these ways, Reinhardt’s “last painting” introduced a conceptual aspect that troubled Greenberg’s formalism. Integral to this is Reinhardt’s repetition, through which the idea of the painting comes to supersede any single iteration; a position reflecting Reinhardt’s maxim that “the idea should exist in the mind before the brush is taken up” (1991a: 204). In doing so, the repetition of “the last painting” produces a self-referentiality that acts as a cypher and a system for elaborating the idea and condition of painting. Here Reinhardt’s rhetoric, and so “linguistic proposition,” becomes an integral part of this work’s identity. Thus, “the last painting anyone can make” is a sustained reiteration of: A square (neutral, shapeless) canvas, five feet wide, five feet high, as high as a man, as wide as a man’s outstretched arms (not large, not small, sizeless), trisected (no composition), one horizontal form negating one vertical form (formless, no top, no bottom, directionless), three (more or less) dark (lightless)

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Reinhardt, Abstract Painting No. 5, 1962. Presented by Mrs Rita Reinhardt through the American Federation of Arts 1972. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Photo: Tate.

FIGURE 2.4 Ad

no-contrasting (colorless) colors, brushwork brushed out to remove brushwork, a matte, flat, free-hand painted surface (glassless, textureless, non-linear, no hard-edge, no soft-edge) which does not reflect its surroundings – a pure, abstract, non-objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested painting – an object that is self-conscious (no unconsciousness) ideal, transcendent, aware of nothing but art (absolutely not anti-art). 1991b: 82–3, original emphasis This conceptual dimension is further elaborated in Reinhardt’s “negative progression” to the monochrome. Black, here, Reinhardt suggested, is not the assertion of colour, but “non-colour” in a further “negative progression,” for “colour is always trapped in some kind of physical activity or assertiveness of its own” (1991e: 87). In this regard, Reinhardt divides the act of painting from the presence of colour, staging “the absence of colour” and so “the art of painting versus the art of colour” (1991e: 86). The surfaces of the Black Paintings are in fact trisected such that horizontal and vertical forms emphasise

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visual stasis while, despite its initial uniformly black appearance, the surface changes with attention over extended time to reveal just perceptible shades of red, green, and blue within the monotone. In fact, Lucy R. Lippard notes in her major study of his work, “Reinhardt himself never painted a solid black or black-on-black canvas” (1981: 109), nor were his paintings monotonal or in an “uninflected” black (114). Here, the assertion of black as a colour is subverted over time, so stressing the problem of looking over the definitive presence of the visual work. In this attempt at “making a painting that can’t be seen” (1991d: 23), in his private notes Reinhardt proposed his late paintings’ “Dematerialisation, non-being” (1991f: 98); their production of a “Negative presence” (97, original emphasis). Kosuth’s step into Conceptual art also engaged with these critical narratives of abstraction, autonomy, and visuality. Leaning Glass thus makes implicit reference in its dimensions to Reinhardt’s black canvases, “five feet wide, five feet high, as high as a man, as wide as a man’s outstretched arms (not large, not small, sizeless).” It also amplifies the implicit “theatricality” of Reinhardt’s Black Paintings, reflecting Michael Fried’s formulation in 1967 of the Minimalist object’s challenge to Modernist autonomy, in its concern “with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work” (1998: 153). It is a condition reproduced in the Black Paintings’ demand on the time of the viewer; in their exhibition in sequences that provoke an awareness of their object-like presence and articulation of the gallery space; in their production of a “Negative presence.” Analogously, looking at and through Leaning Glass means encountering quotidian place: the walls, the floor, its support, in ways that are in implicit dialogue with the performative dimension of Reinhardt’s work and in its echo of contemporaneous Minimal art. It is this phenomenological emphasis that Kosuth’s subsequent inscription of language over the surface of his work is set in tension with. Thus, Clear Square Glass Leaning (1965) consists of four such sheets inscribed in sequence with, and so self-described by, its title. This tautology – and reflexivity – diverts attention from the phenomenon of their installation and towards linguistic proposition and so the concept of the work. For Liz Kotz, writing of Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (2010), works such as “Five Words in Blue Neon (1965) and other tautological projects” echo a self-justification analogous to that of the Modernist work, as, she argues, Kosuth’s “language ‘systems’ aspire to a degree of precision, certainty, and continual self-presence only possible when any external referent has been abandoned” (227). Following his association with Art & Language, Kosuth had offered his own critical reading of this work’s ambivalent and inherently political relationship with late Modernist strategies. Writing of critical practice within the context of Modernism in 1977, he suggests that the “traditional languages of art” and its “specialized and fetishised” institutionalised production of meaning can be subverted through its occupation by conceptual (discursive) practices, precisely

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because these practices investigate “the foundations of the concept ‘art’”. Here, he emphasises that: Conceptual art, as a critical practice, finds itself directly embedded in that realm of organised meaning, but historical understanding means that that work begins to understand itself, it becomes critical of those very processes of organized meaning in the act of self-understanding. 1991f: 161, original emphasis In its self-reflexive occupation of the visual spaces of Modernism, Kosuth’s language as Conceptual art potentially unpacks, reveals, explains, or refers, in ways that disrupt the mystifications of Modernist abstraction: its claim to ineffable meaning; to be “untranslatable”. As Kosuth’s account emphasises, installing language in this space positions Conceptual art as a critical and disruptive practice, reflected in his conclusion that “a conceptual work of art in the traditional sense, is a contradiction in terms” (Buchloch 1990: 108, original emphasis). In this context, Kosuth’s proposition in his introductory note to Art & Language’s second issue of Art-Language in 1969, that the fundamental conditions of art’s production and reception are linguistic, also invests his tautologies with contradictions that serve this disruption. Thus, Kosuth’s call for “the understanding of the linguistic nature of all art propositions, be they past or present and regardless of the elements used in their construction” (1991c: 40) at once justifies his displacement of the object by language as a revelation of art’s condition yet erodes distinctions between art and its discourses that Modernist ideas of autonomy rely upon. This notion of Conceptual art as a critical practice occupying the cultural spaces of Modernism was elaborated explicitly by Art & Language, whose journal and conceptual work, Art-Language, Kosuth contributed to before editing its New York variation, The Fox, as part of the art collective in 1975–6. Charles Harrison, in taking stock of Art & Language’s history of work and ideas, notes that in its own critical assault on Modernism, Art & Language proposed that the production of artwork lay principally in the critical and ideological discourses associated with it, so reading “Modernist art” as “implicated in a political and economic system which represented and disbursed it” (Harrison 2001: 13). In the atmosphere of revived political scepticism, dissent, and debate prompted by opposition to the United States’ conduct of the Vietnam War, Harrison argued that, in the late 1960s: It became possible to understand what had become the mainstream discourse of Modernism as a voice which had made the work it treated. To engage in a critique of Modernism as a culture of art was thus to propose a form of work emancipated from the constituting power of Modernism as a discourse.

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It was under these conditions and in the light of this understanding that a practice such as Art & Language was to represent could feasibly emerge as an artistic practice. 13, original emphasis It follows that the attack upon, critique, and unpacking of Modernist artwork staged by Conceptual art enacted a broader critique of its enabling discourses and structures, whether such work declared a political imperative or not. Harrison’s reading thus broadly supports Kosuth’s notion of Conceptual art as a critical practice rather than a “form” and one that is at once in and outside of the spaces and discourses of Modernism. The performative nature of this critical movement in and out of the tenets of “Modernism” is evident in the earliest and most celebrated of Kosuth’s ProtoInvestigations, identified by Kotz, for example, as one of the foundational works of

FIGURE 2.5 Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965. New York, Museum of Mod-

ern Art (MoMA). Wooden folding chair, photographic copy of a chair, and photographic enlargement of a dictionary definition of a chair; chair, 32 3/8 × 14 7/8 × 20 7/8” (82 cm × 37.8 cm × 53 cm); photo panel, 36 × 24 1/8″ (91.5 cm × 61.1 cm); text panel, 24 × 24 1/8” (61 cm × 61.3 cm). Larry Aldrich Foundation Fund. 393.1970.A-C © 2022. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. © Joseph Kosuth. ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022

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North American Conceptual art (2010: 182). In some of his most well-known works, Kosuth set out investigations of definition and mobility in language, which present themselves firstly as anatomies of signifier, signified, and referent (187). In one of its most familiar forms, this includes not only One and Three Chairs (1965), Kosuth’s first work to incorporate a dictionary definition and shown at the Opening Exhibition of Normal Art, but also One and Three Hammers (1965), One and Three Lamps (1965) and in overt reference to Marcel Duchamp, One and Three Shovels (1965). One and Three Chairs is a demonstration that linguistic propositions install difference into the object of art, and that tautologies, despite the analytic proposition’s claim to self-definition, operate in multiple and dissonant relationships between terms. In this regard, a tautology stands in close relation to a pun: a slip or difference that plays on being one and the same. Kosuth’s One and Three series articulates this firstly by introducing three elements in indexical relationships that define and redefine each other, as signifier (the photograph of the chair), signified (the unit of meaning, “chair”), and referent (the “real” chair), just as each functions simultaneously as the sign of a chair. In its concrete form, One and Three Chairs is thereby doubly performative. Kotz, drawing on Anne Rorimer’s analysis of this work as an extension of the Readymade (Rorimer 2001), argues that One and Three Chairs functions photographically, as a sign pointing to itself, as well as quasi-linguistically, offering something like the statement “this is a chair, presented as art”. Despite Kosuth’s tight calibration, the three terms are precisely not exact equivalents; what makes the tripartite structure compelling is the simultaneous redundancy and divergence among the “messages”. 2010: 184, original emphasis Not only does this arrangement expose the differences at play in the attempt to secure meaning through tautology, but, in its material presence and anatomy of the sign, it also amplifies its own performative turns. Regarding Kosuth’s use of materials, Johanna Drucker observes a reverse effect to the conceptualisation of the artwork, as “The form makes the idea into something specific, a work an image, a material locus that sustains a contradiction: the work is and is not the idea” (2004: 255–6, original emphasis). The dynamic between the one and three chairs opens this operation of incompatible terms one on the other, further. Each nominal element of One and Three Chairs is, as Kosuth’s title suggests, a sign of a chair; a sign whose simultaneous presentation as signifier, signified, and/or referent within the tripartite play of One and Three Chairs is a function of its counterparts and so interchangeable. Kosuth has also created variations of One and Three Chairs in differing iterations of its “linguistic proposition” that further breach its selfcontainment, as different chairs inflect meanings differently. Thus, Kosuth employs at different times a folding chair, an office chair, and a chair of Scandinavian design amongst other permutations; each denoting and connoting particularities of age, function, comfort, environment (home, office, context, new, badly treated, in or out

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of fashion). Different chairs perform differently: their terms do not reproduce or repeat but act on one another to reveal the multipleness of each seemingly individual term. In this context, too, One and Three Chairs also articulates its own “theatricality,” playing as it does on quotidian (phenomenal), represented (photographic), and described (discursive) spaces: aspects that are not reducible one into the other. In these various dynamics, Kosuth’s arrangements show how the meanings of One and Three Chairs are performative, as its terms are seen to be subject to one another and so to be produced, or performed, in mobile relationships. The unruliness of One and Three Chairs also reflected Kosuth’s aside that “there is always something hopelessly real about materials” (Kotz 2010: 186); a recognition, perhaps, not only of how material specificities resist conceptualisation but also how those specificities multiply linguistic contingency and difference. In these respects, Kosuth’s linguistic-material tautologies do not extend or exemplify the self-presence – or self-determination – valorised by Modernist critical narratives but enact that which Rosalind Krauss later characterised as “the self-differential condition of medium” (2000: 53). Writing of the “postmedium condition,” Krauss directed attention towards how (Modernist) media obtain their identity by suppressing a dependency on exterior conditions, while pointing out that: Derrida built demonstration after demonstration to show that the idea of an interior set apart from, or uncontaminated by, an exterior was a chimera, a metaphysical fiction. Whether it be the interior of the work of art as opposed to its context, or the interiority of a lived moment of experience as opposed to its repetition in memory or via written signs, what deconstruction engaged in dismantling was the idea of the proper, both in the sense of the self-identical – as in “vision is what’s proper to the visual arts” – and in the sense of the clean and the pure – as in “abstraction purifies painting of all those things, like narrative or sculptural space, that are not proper to it.” […] The self-identical was revealed as, and thus dissolved into, the self-different. 32, original emphasis It is to this self-difference that the introduction of language into the determination of the artwork leads. It is in a reflection of this, too, that Greenberg proposes at the risk of self-contradiction that the language of criticism can have nothing to do with the practice of art, suggesting in “Modernist Painting” of 1965 that the “self-criticism” culminating in abstraction is “immanent to practice and never a topic of theory” (1985: 9). In contrast, Kosuth’s emphasis reflects his conclusion in “Art After Philosophy” in 1969, “That there is no ‘truth’ as to what art is seems quite unrealized” (1991b: 19) as he installs language as the work such that the artwork is imbricated with the external contingencies and relations in which its reading operates. In a later reflection of 1992, Kosuth suggests it is the irresolution

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of language’s functioning and the questions raised by the presence of the word – and so the sign – as the work, that justifies the Investigations, over tautological self-definition. Thus, he suggests, of The First Investigation comprising dictionary definitions: meaning doesn’t function in a linear direction. It’s more multi-directional. Using a text as art raised questions; using a photograph as art raised questions; the artefact of a dictionary definition raised questions. […] It became clearer to me that the material of the work was these series of contexts or levels. It seems to me that when the work works, that’s how it works. Kosuth and Siegal 2020: 80 This perspective is also evident in Kosuth’s earlier appraisal of the functioning of his work as, and in, discourse. In his statement regarding One and Three Chairs for the catalogue of McShine’s Information survey at MoMA New York in 1970, Kosuth considered the externalising effect of a focus on language. Emphasising the discursive sites which art as a “proposition” implicitly embraces and is a function of, Kosuth’s comments are consistent with Derrida’s demonstrations of the “metaphysical fiction” of linguistic self-presence, emphasised by Krauss. He states: Every unit of an (art) proposition is only that which is functioning with a larger framework (the proposition) and every proposition is only a unit which is functioning within a larger framework (the investigation) and every investigation is only a unit which is functioning within a larger framework (my art) and my art is only a unit which is functioning within a larger framework (the concept “art”) […] and which ultimately exists only as information 1970, original emphasis The disruption of Modernist values effected by the Proto-Investigations and The First Investigation lies in the division, referentiality, and multipleness in which language functions, even as Kosuth’s tautologies seem to approach and address claims to self-containment. It is in this tension, between the artwork’s “containment” in tautology and yet its functioning in language that refers outward, which works performatively and intertextually, that produces the vibrancy of Kosuth’s early work. Here, too, the Proto-Investigations borrow from Kosuth’s contemporary observation that “Painting is both a noun and a verb” (1991a: 3). The word “painting” is a “gerund,” a noun that functions as a verb. In the Proto-Investigations, “the word” is made analogous to Modernist abstract painting – occupying its space, subverting its non-objectivity with “abstract” ideas – and, regarding the gerund, asserting the instability of a “thing” done, rather than suppressing its duality. Indeed, Kosuth’s tautologies are also performative in this sense: a figure that “enacts that to which it refers” (Pearson and Shanks 2001: 69) as its tautological self-containment is

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undone in the very contingencies of reading in which this claim is made; by the linguistic object’s very dependency on the “beholder” in the social space and relation opened by language. This duality in Kosuth’s Investigations, in which the word infiltrates and installs externality, reference, and contingency, into claims of “selfdefinition,” is one of the principal roots of Conceptual art’s performative aspect and its theatricality, which so frequently returns in its address to how the work works. In these senses and effects, Kosuth’s inauguration of a Conceptual art as language also sets in train its steps towards performance. The language of performance: Tom Marioni

In contrast to Kosuth’s investment in tensions between a “self-determined” object and the presence of language, Tom Marioni’s early work embeds the question of “where the art is” in social and performative exchanges of the everyday. Here, Marioni integrates “experience” into Conceptual art’s proposition and subjects the meanings and identity of events to what is said, proposed, or reported. Marioni’s

Marioni, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art, 1970. Announcement (Tom Marioni AKA Allan Fish), 1970. Printed card with framed documentation. 4 1/2 × 6 in. Courtesy of Tom Marioni and Anglim/Trimble Gallery, San Francisco

FIGURE 2.6 Tom

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engagements with time and the social, and concern with the definition and “visibility” of the work of art, also diminish the status of the object in favour of the language of the everyday, positioning Conceptual art as subject to its use, and the object as a cypher or relic of social acts and transactions. Marioni’s most well-known “social art,” The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art, at the Oakland Museum in October 1970, followed his inauguration of the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA) in the South of Market district of San Francisco the previous March. The Oakland Museum event initiated a process of public and private installation-performance variations of Beer with Friends that extend to this time of writing, some 52 years after its inception. In its first iteration, however, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art was met by its viewing public only in its remains, after Marioni invited “21 of my friends to come and drink beer at the Museum”. Marioni recalled that in the event, which took place the day before the exhibition opening: 16 people were there. All of the people were sculptors except for Werner Jepson, the music composer. We got drunk in the Museum together and the debris that was left over was exhibited as documentation of that activity – empty beer cans and cigarette butts, just morning after kind of debris. It was to exaggerate the concept of the act being the art and the documentation being just a record of the real activity. Vergine 2000: 143 Marioni’s play on performance, which “was done on a day when the Museum was normally closed” because “I didn’t want my friends to be performers” (Marioni and Kaye 2012), puns on social acts and social art, or, he has noted, “sometimes I call it my social work” (Marioni 2010). Beginning in these public traces of a private event, Marioni reiterated The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art at first privately, then as events in a public context and later as gallerybased installations. Following the opening of MOCA, where he held sporadic, private occasions of Beer with Friends, Marioni’s receipt of a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1973–4 supported his inauguration of a weekly event, Free Beer. Originally for MOCA associates, friends, and invited guests, Marioni started having free beer every Wednesday at MOCA and showed artist videotapes, noting “I showed two hours of a twelve-hour lecture by Joseph Beuys” (2013: 46). With the grant expended, he continued with Café Society (1976–84), comprising invitations to a weekly “Salo(o)n” and migrating the event to Breen’s Bar, then known as a journalist’s haunt, immediately below the MOCA premises on the first floor of 75 3rd Street. At this time, Marioni notes, “I sent out cards announcing Café Society “twotofour” every Wednesday in the Saloon of MOCA.” Where for Café Society Marioni’s invitation framed his guests’ participation in “his” social art, so to unknowing patrons of Breen’s Bar this performance remained unseen, while

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still others may have been aware of their incidental exclusion; each relationship reinforcing Marioni’s view that “This is a social artwork for me, another kind of invisible work” (Marioni 2003: 115). Following the demolition of 75 3rd Street and Breen’s Bar in 1984 as part of the redevelopment of the South of Market (SoMA) district, Marioni continued Café Society at Academy of MOCA held in various locations until 1990; then at Archives of MOCA in his studio on nearby Hawthorne Street until 1992, when it became Café Wednesday; and subsequently the Society of Independent Artists (after Marcel Duchamp), meeting for Beer with Friends. In 2003, Marioni recounts in his memoir Beer, Art and Philosophy, the house rules of Beer with Friends posted on the wall of his Studio for Archives of MOCA, and that remained in 2022, stated: People bring their own drinks except for first timers who don’t know any better. Two-drink minimum; this means at least two. No beer cans except Tecate. No drinking from beer bottles except in character. No one behind the bar except the bartender. Guests do not invite guests without checking with the management. No theatre people except famous movie stars. No art students except those who can pass as professionals. No art collectors except in disguise. Hours 5-8, except on special occasions. Leave the bathroom light on. Marioni 2003: 120–2 Marioni’s rules crystallise a tenor for performance, capturing and shaping interactions by which Beer with Friends gains identity in a social manner, in a conscious effort to create an air of sophistication (119). These are rules also in whose reiteration new and repeated participants find their experience, and in which the event’s identity as “social art” is foregrounded. Marioni suggests that “in the early days the performance work I made was about music” (Marioni and Cohn 2017) reflected in Beer with Friends through ambient mood or tenor, and, after John Cage, in the evocation of “performance” as a horizon towards which everyday processes are re-read or experienced in a duality or liminality. Musical performance thus provided a language and conceptual structure in which social acts are reconceived.

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Marioni, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art, 1970–ongoing. Installation view. Courtesy of Tom Marioni and Anglim/Trimble Gallery, San Francisco

FIGURE 2.7 Tom

In his extended oral history interview for the Smithsonian Museum, Marioni notes that: “how I describe it is like it’s a music piece […] I’m the composer […] The bartender is the conductor […] And the drinkers are the players […] Like a symphony” (Marioni and Riedel 2017). From 1979, following a formalising in galleries of Café Society as an event for the public, in Now we’ll Have a Party in Vienna (1978) and The Museum of Conceptual Art at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1979), Marioni began staging participatory gallery installations with free beer; events running parallel to his studio evenings each under variations of the work’s original title. While these installations, he later claimed, “might look like a bar, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is an interactive, audience participation, site-specific tableau sculpture; a situation and a social artwork” (Marioni 2010). In the process of facilitating this “situation” at over 50 venues across North America and Europe since 1979, he recalled that in its public form: it evolved into a more aesthetic experience, a refined situation, like a Japanese tea ceremony, So, it has basic elements when I do it in other places. It has yellow light, has a refrigerator, has a bar, has a table and chairs, it has shelves for the empty beer bottles, and it has a video of beer filling up. Marioni 2013: 54

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Latterly, Marioni heightened the installation’s theatrical references by inaugurating each event with several minutes of stand-up comedy as the first beers are opened and drinking begins, followed by the execution of an Out of Body Free Hand Circle drawing: a graphite circle on a prepared wall, whose diameter is a full measure of Marioni’s reach as he stands adjacent. Marioni’s performance strategies are consistent with Kosuth’s proposition that Conceptual art is in each iteration a definition of art (Kosuth 1991b: 20). Thus, Marioni’s aligning of his work to the contingencies of everyday social events and processes plays with the threshold of his artwork’s visibility and so coming into being, and the capacity of performance to be simultaneously seen and unseen by different constituencies, or to come into or be lost to view. This multipleness is a function of the differing relationships and uses participants and observers construct in response to Marioni’s “proposition”: that, for example, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art. Similarly, Marioni claims the exhibition of work by others as the social site of his own art activity, remarking that “when I organize shows of artists, I don’t think of it as my art. But MOCA’s social activities and the idea of this Museum are my art” (Marioni and Kaye 2012). Here, as in other of his tactics, Marioni’s Conceptual art hinges on language – and on linguistic propositions – to raise the question of the artwork and the conceptual restaging of social events, prompting performative definitions by its participants and observers as they are left with the quandary of their own “completion” of Marioni’s work, if only before its next repetition. Furthermore, where Kosuth’s tautologies are in forms whose material specificity is in excess of their linguistic play, so Marioni’s social art exceeds the terms of “a performance,” as they remain simultaneously locked into the social complexities of the everyday. In these contexts, and in emphasising Conceptual art as performance, Marioni’s propositions become contingent rather than categorical, and overtly performative in embracing different identities simultaneously or at different times. The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art also throws emphasis on the conceptual by implicitly reframing what would be by conventional measures aesthetically trivial events, thereby emphasising, in the manner of Duchamp’s Readymades, the question of their own identity. As if to compound this, Marioni has also called his own propositions into question in an echo of Duchamp’s association with the Société des Indépendants jury’s “suppression” of his first attempt to publicly show Fountain in 1917 (Cabanne 1987: 54–5) – an upturned urinal proposed as sculpture. At the time of Café Society, the second iteration of his weekly invitation to share beers, Marioni emphasised that “It’s never been advertised as art […] I’ve advertised it as an activity of the museum”. MOCA, similarly, was conceived by Marioni as an “underground museum,” remarking that “the only way I can stay underground is to do things disguised as non-art” (White 1978: 5). The orchestration of MOCA and the tenor of precursor programmes organised by Marioni at

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the Richmond Arts Center and the San Francisco Art Institute, often amplified this sense of contingency and appropriation of the quotidian. In March 1970, Marioni opened MOCA with A participation piece by Willoughby Sharp Opening of the Museum of Conceptual Art at 86 3rd Street Suite 401, 8pm, 18th March 1970; the invitation card for which notes, “weare old clothe” (sic) (Marioni 1970b). In the event, the “participation piece” comprised a communal painting of Suite 401, or the Museum, some six weeks in advance of MOCA’s first, one-day exhibition, Sound Sculpture As, on April 30th. A similarly “social” work marked MOCA’s relocation across the street three years later, to 75 3rd Street above Breen’s Bar, prompting a news report that “Tom Marioni opens the Museum of Conceptual art (MOCA), San Francisco as an excuse for a party” (Marioni 1973). On the evening of January 3rd, as reported live by KPFA radio: In this dingy loft, previously used by a printing company, about 500 artists and viewers gathered between 7pm and 11pm expecting to witness a startling new show by the museum’s curator Tom Marioni. Instead, they were left staring at each other and less than adequate quantity of bottled Fisher beer. Marioni 1973 In the absence of the anticipated work, which implicitly comprised the “party,” the broadcaster approaches Marioni, who responds: “I haven’t got anything to say”. When pressed, he directs attention to the margin and his intention “to create an atmosphere, a social scene”; as he states elsewhere, “my main activity is social” (White 1978: 3). Marioni’s step into performance from 1969 had followed his engagement with colour and sculptural form influenced by the emerging California Minimalist aesthetic of John McCracken, who had taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, at various times between 1957 and 1965; as well as artists such as Larry Bell, Craig Kauffman, and others in southern California in the mid-1960s. Frequently read as assertively object-based, and dubbed in 1966 by critic John Coplans as “Finish Fetish,” west coast Minimalism was associated with an “LA Look” that differed radically in appearance and materials from its east coast counterpart. California Minimalism employed advanced industrial resins and plastics, as well as innovative fabrication methods, to embody intense and reflective colours that “blurred the boundaries between painting and sculpture, 2D and 3D, handcrafted and industrially produced objects” (Rivenc et al. 2011). Utilising the smooth surfaces, brightness, and softer forms of new plastics, these materials often reflected or mediated light towards a diffusion of the limits and experience of the work into its immediate environment, as precursors to the LA “Light and Space” environmental artwork in southern California exemplified by Robert Irwin, James Turrell, and Doug Wheeler. Between 1966

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and 1968, Marioni exhibited “LA art in San Francisco” that was not readily accepted (Marioni and Cohn 2017). In his first solo exhibition, at Richmond Arts Center in advance of becoming its curator, he showed lacquered wood sculptures, as well as a free-standing bi-coloured wall in plexiglass. Subsequently, Marioni shared responses to Minimalism’s “theatricality” with artists concerned with performance such as Vito Acconci, Dennis Oppenheim, Chris Burden, as well as explicitly performative conceptual work by Douglas Huebler and Bas Jan Ader. Offering a definition of Conceptual art shortly before the opening of MOCA that was consistent with Minimalism’s phenomenological emphasis, Marioni stressed that “I’m particularly interested in theatre-oriented kinds of art […] sculpture has become close to theatre, now. Going from the pedestal to the ground and then becoming an environment – and then becoming an environment that included people” (Marioni 1970a). In these contexts, where the Light and Space artists opened the object-form into large-scale installations inviting experiences of frequently changing falls of light inclusive of their “situation” as a whole, Marioni made an analogous opening of sculpture towards time and the social. In these developments, Marioni’s emphasis on social acts and exchanges directly affected his treatment and status of objects, where they persisted as part of the work. Thus, in its first iteration, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art is met in its object-remains, yet these are cyphers or relics of activity: including accumulated, empty Anchor Steam beer bottles. Instead of the art object as endpoint, Marioni plays towards the “aura” of the object or image, meaning, after Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks in Theatre/ Archaeology, that “aura refers to the life of things,” to the “sense of associations and evocations that cluster round an object, correspondences and interrelations, engendered by an object” (2001: 95–6). The remains of The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art act as mnemonic prompts rather than the work itself, offering beer bottles seemingly “altered” by their use to evidence the story or history of a work no longer present. In this way, too, the focus of Marioni’s early works is towards a trajectory; on energy expended in the arc towards traces and relics left behind such that “There is something that results. The end isn’t the art, but it has a history, and that history gives it power” (White 1978: 7). Marioni’s own language captures this with reference to first or “second-class” relics, drawn from his catholic upbringing, and being shown “a second-class relic of the true cross of Jesus,” meaning that “a second-class relic is not the piece of wood from the actual cross. A piece of wood that touched the actual cross. So, that made it one time removed” (Marioni and Riedel 2017). Thus, the bottles from the Oakland event offer “first-class” relics; the photograph of the bottle, a second-order relic, in a language that constructs a more active and persistent relationship between event and remains than conventional “documentation.”

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These processes and terms in which objects and events at once approach and evade being resolved into a conceptual artwork that is “fully present” again reflect the influence of Cage’s adoption of duration, sound, and time in relation to the everyday, and his credo, adopted from Ananda Coomaraswamy, that “the function of Art is to imitate Nature in her manner of operation” (Cage 1976: 31). Here, Marioni also draws on Joseph Beuys’ concept of “social sculpture,” and so implicitly “social work,” aimed towards reconfiguring political and social processes as art, which Beuys extended to a characterisation of word formation as “sound sculpture” (Tisdall 1979: 7). In contradistinction to Cage’s view that the synthesis of art and life served to celebrate life, or Beuys’ articulation of discursive, political, and latterly ecological processes as art, however, Marioni’s concern falls on articulating frameworks through which an artwork is made visible, stating unequivocally that “Art and life should not be confused” (Marioni 2003). It is a statement that returns to the problematics of Conceptual art: here, that in each iteration of a work the idea of art as a construct is seen to be asserted, defined, or performed, in a breaching of the “autonomy” of the artwork that threatens a collapse into the contexts in which it is produced. In this focus, too, Marioni’s early practice also reached towards other aspects of theatricality and performance prior to MOCA’s opening, tying a conceptual vocabulary to the performativity of the artwork. The critic and historian of west coast Conceptual art, Constance Lewallen, records that: In the late sixties Tom Marioni, using the pseudonym Allan Fish, created an artwork consisting of himself and three friends eating a six-course dinner at the opening of the Walnut Creek Art Center exhibition 6x6x6. The dirty dishes and empty wine bottles were left on exhibit to underscore his assertion that it was the activity which constituted the art and that the material residue was only a document. Lewallen 1980 Executed in early 1970, 6x6x6 marked the opening of an exhibition of the same name; an event Marioni recalled as prior to The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art in October (Marioni 2021). Marioni’s public dinner and the exhibition of remains also recall the French artist Daniel Spoerri’s Eat Art, originating with his Prose Poems (1959–60) and “snare traps” from 1960, in which the evidence of consuming a meal, including used plates and utensils, as well as food remains, were fixed in their arbitrary positions on the table-top and mounted picture-like on the wall. Developed from the “snaring” of his taking of breakfast while resident at a cheap Parisian hotel in 1959, Spoerri’s “traps” developed a more social emphasis during his participation in the nouveau réalisme group, extending to shared rather than solitary

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meals in his “tableau-piège,” initiated with The Resting Place of the Delbeck Family (1960). It is a process Spoerri culminated with his book, An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (1966), originally published in French in 1962, in which 80 items and marks “trapped” on a single table, ranging from “Grains of Salt” to “Jar of Celery Salt,” are annotated with descriptions and biographical-like anecdotes, over some 214 pages. Established in Paris in 1960 by the critic Pierre Réstany and artist Yves Klein through a manifesto publication whose signatories included Spoerri, Arman, Jean Tinguely, Raymond Hains, and others, nouveau réalisme extended implications from Duchamp and the Readymade to rearticulate everyday materials. Marioni himself directs attention to the importance of Klein’s work to his emphasis on “invisible art,” after Klein’s exhibition of The Void, a whitewashed empty room, at Iris Clert Gallery in 1958, which in 1960 he also referred to as “a theatre of the void” (Klein 2004: 52). Kosuth, too, identified Klein with early Conceptual art (1991b: 19). In 1958, Klein wrote of his material works and monochromes as “leftovers,” that speak back to his own possession of his art and status as artist, asserting that “They are the leftovers from the creative processes, the ashes. My pictures, after all, are only the titledeeds to my property which I have to produce when I am asked to prove that I am a proprietor” (Klein 2004: 30). In April 1969, at the Richmond Arts Center, Marioni organised Invisible Painting and Sculpture in a further elaboration of these themes. In its exhibition catalogue, Marioni notes, “works […] have either arrived at partially invisible objects or the absence of the object completely,” and speculates “if its logical conclusion will be a totally conceptual art where one discusses and planned but never realised” (Marioni 1969). Transposed towards a work which is executed but absent or available only through its relics, such proposals anticipate a Conceptual art reflecting Marioni’s key interest, of which he notes “I am fascinated by art that can only be seen if you know it is art” (Marioni 2003). Here, too, Marioni drew on Klein’s play with theatricality, fiction, and role. Specifically, Klein’s simulated Leap into the Void (1960) by photographer-collaborators Shunk-Kender: a single photograph documenting Klein’s “performance” of leaping in a swallow dive out of a first-story window, towards a cobbled street below. In fact, Shunk-Kender had created a composite image from photographs taken at different times, while Klein had leapt into a safety net erased from the final image. Originally taken as the record of an authentic act, Philip Auslander subsequently argued that under the “performativity of performance documentation,” in which “the act of documenting an event as a performance is what constitutes it as such” (2006: 5, original emphasis) this distinction is rendered irrelevant as Klein “performs” in the space of photograph. Drawing also on Duchamp’s portrayals of his female alter-ego Rrose Sélavy photographed by Man Ray in the early 1920s, Marioni employed analogous fictions and plays with the performative effect Auslander later identified. 6×6×6, as Lewallen notes, was in fact a work by Marioni’s alter-ego, Allan Fish. The origins of Marioni’s alter-ego are at one level pragmatic. After being appointed

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FIGURE 2.8 Tom

Marioni, text of a letter from Tom Marioni to Allan Fish, dated August 20th, 1969. Courtesy of Tom Marioni and University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

as curator at Richmond Arts Center, Marioni had continued to produce his own work under pseudonyms to keep his curatorial activities distinct from his art practice. At this time, he notes, “It was too politically complicated to try to exhibit my work and be a curator at the same time […] So I had to exhibit under another name. I created a fictitious character, Allan Fish” (Vergine 2000: 143–4). Prior to Allan Fish, Marioni had employed a solicitor, Jim McCready, to act as a surrogate artist on his behalf (Marioni and Riedel 2017). Marioni’s collected papers of MOCA at

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FIGURE 2.9 Tom

Marioni as Allan Fish, 1969. Courtesy of Tom Marioni and Anglim/ Trimble Gallery, San Francisco

the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive document his correspondences with Fish, including invitation letters to participate in exhibitions addressed to Allan Fish at 199, Minna Street, opposite the building that would house MOCA from 1973. Marioni recalls his inauguration of Fish’s work in his curation of Birds in Flight (1969). In response to his invitation letter: The artist, Allan Fish, sent instructions to me (the curator) so I could execute his work. These were the instructions: “Enclosed is a packet of multicolored instruction paper. To install the sculpture, sit in a chair about ten feet from a wall. Take one sheet at a time and crumple each one, as if you were in a hurry and throwing it into a wastepaper basket. Throw each piece at the wall, trying to keep them generally in a confined area. The result should be multicoloured birds at the moment of flight after being frightened by the stamping of feet.” 2003: 88–9

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Marioni continued to exhibit and execute work by Fish for three years, including Piss Piece (1970) in MOCA’s opening exhibition Sound Sculpture As, in which Marioni urinated into a bucket from varying heights on a ladder to produce differing tones. In its first form, The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art also fell into the orbit of Fish’s work; hence Marioni’s “disguise,” in reference to Groucho Marx, captured in photographs on the day of its (public-less) performance. Fish contributed to Marioni’s subsequent MOCA show MOCA/FM: Sound Art from the Museum of Conceptual Art, a series of one-minute “sound sculpture” events by 26 “composers, poets and sculptors” broadcast on 1st March 1971 by San Francisco’s KPFA-FM (Marioni 1971a, 1971b). In the same year, Fish’s work was shown at the de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara, in Fish, Fox, Kos, with conceptual artists Terry Fox and Paul Kos. Contemporaneously, Marioni’s “performance” of Fish remained unseen for most and was sufficiently compelling that his various exhibitions in 1969 and 1970 led to reviews of Fish’s work in Harper’s Bazaar, Artforum, and the New York-based Avalanche. In November 1970, the critic Herb Caen was provoked into posing the question “Is there or isn’t there a Sculptor Allan Fish?” in the San Francisco Chronicle (Caen 1970). To publicly reveal his alter-ego, Marioni staged An Evening with Allan Fish, “a collaboration between ALLAN FISH and TOM MARIONI,” in April 1971, in which Marioni performed live, in disguise as Fish, while the undisguised Marioni performed simultaneously in video. The 34-minute performance included the live Marioni shedding his disguise as the mediated Marioni simultaneously represented himself as Fish. Subsequently, on 10th August 1971, to end his association with the Richmond Arts Center, Marioni publicly appeared in his doubled role again, performing Allan Fish Drinks a Case of Beer, this time to exorcise his alter-ego. He recalled that: when it was no longer necessary to be concerned about those things, then I announced, by way of a transformation piece, that I was Allan Fish […] I did a piece called Allan Fish Drinks a Case of Beer, which has to do with creating a situation, an environment, while becoming increasingly more intoxicated over about an eight-hour period. The Reese Palley Gallery bought a case of Becks beer for me. Marioni in Vergine 2000: 143–4 Marioni’s declaration of this doubled identity introduces a further structure that lends his activity, in retrospect, a shifting and dual character. After 1971, Marioni’s prior curation at Richmond and early work at MOCA became enmeshed in his enactments of Fish; a performance now visible in the retelling of events that had in certain respects remained hidden at the time. In these ways, “Allan Fish” provided another structure through which Marioni’s social and professional activity and exchanges acquired the mantel of “performance,” and so of an “invisible” and “social art.” Elaborating this, Marioni’s performance of Fish was later reprised, but as an explicit part of his “social art,” and prompting further performative shifts of identity. For Allan Fish/Tom Marioni, My First Car (1972), Marioni spent his

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Marioni; Larry Fox, Untitled photograph from “The Trip” (The San Francisco Performance), 1972; black-and-white photograph; 5 1/8 × 8 in.; University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Gift of the Naify Family © Archive of MOCA (Museum of Conceptual Art)

FIGURE 2.10 Tom

Marioni; Larry Fox, Untitled photograph from “The Trip” (The San Francisco Performance), 1972; black-and-white photograph; 5 1/8 × 8 in.; University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Gift of the Naify Family. © Archive of MOCA (Museum of Conceptual Art). L-R: Tom Marioni, Bonnie Ora Sherk

FIGURE 2.11 Tom

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Marioni, “The Trip” (The San Francisco Performance), 1972; black-and-white photograph; 4 1/2 × 6 3/4 in.; University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Gift of the Naify Family. © Archive of MOCA (Museum of Conceptual Art).

FIGURE 2.12 Tom

full curatorial budget on a red, used Fiat 750, exhibiting the car as a work by Fish in the exhibition and offering champagne and bites to eat to those joining him in the vehicle at the exhibition opening. On discovering this, the Museum President closed the exhibition, in response to which Marioni drove Fish’s My First Car out of the gallery, as, de facto, Marioni’s first car. My First Car recalls Klein’s Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (1959–62): proposed as a work in exchange for a quantum of gold leaf, to be provided to Klein at a specified time and place by the Seine when the (ritual) transaction would occur. At its execution, Klein threw the gold leaf into the Seine, so identifying the work as the transaction, now executed in the immediate past; in its place, Klein offers an authenticating record of their contract and its performance. Here, the “work” is the performative event fulfilling the contract, consigned to the past tense in a “speech-act”, and substituted by its authenticating contractual record. Playing further with such shifts, Marioni reprised Allan Fish Drinks a Case of Beer in 1984. Subsequently, Marioni changed the title of the piece to The Creation of a Situation and Environment while Becoming Increasingly More Intoxicated, so implicitly consigning the role of Fish back to his earlier period in a further performative play with the narratives in which his

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work is defined. Here, Marioni’s work becomes further layered, not only because of its overt construction performatively, but in an explicitly post-hoc construction of performance. This process of temporal and narrative shift is also evident in Marioni’s subsequent performance. The San Francisco Performance (1972) which comprised a trip from San Francisco to Newport Harbour Art Museum, travelling by car with artists Howard Fried, Terry Fox, Mel Henderson, Bonnie Sherk, and a “Berkeley group” Sam’s Café. The journey, orchestrated by Marioni, was filmed and photographed, creating a documentation subsequently exhibited at Newport as The Trip (1972). Exemplifying another aspect of Auslander’s later claims for the “performativity of performance documentation,” in which “it is by virtue of presenting the photographs of their actions that the artists frame the depicted actions as performances and assume responsibility to the audience” (2006: 6), The Trip constructs The San Francisco Performance as “performance,” or, in this case, specifically as Conceptual art in performance. Like the retrospective reconfiguring of Allan Fish as a performed role, here Marioni’s collaborators find their journey reframed as Conceptual performance, and Marioni’s social art. In other work, Marioni extended the performative effect of fictional roles and claims: for Announcement, on the date of MOCA’s reopening at its second premises, Marioni published the statement that “The Board of Trustees of The San Francisco Museum of Art are pleased to announce the appointment of Thomas Marioni as Director, January 3, 1973.” Marioni recalls the effect of his fiction: I mailed the card out to the art community and to Museum News, a trade magazine, which published the news under “New Appointments” […] I heard later that the trustees were calling each other, saying, “How come you hired someone without telling me?” The art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, Alfred Frankenstein, wrote that there ought to be a limit to the pranks that a Conceptual artist can pull. Twenty-six years later a collector bought one of the cards from me and gave it to the museum for its collection. 2003: 136–7 These shifts were further exemplified in Marioni’s 1976 collaboration with the San Francisco-based conceptual artist David Ireland. The Restoration of a Portion of the Back Wall, Ceiling and Floor of the Main Gallery of the Museum of Conceptual Art (1976) was a concept by Marioni executed by Ireland for a fee of $100, opening for view in February 1976 and then permanently, insofar as it could be seen at all. Ireland’s restoration of the MOCA space responded to Marioni’s requirement that “each work of art done at MOCA [should] add to the history of the building without erasing its history” (Lewallen 2015: 28). However, as part of the MOCA Second Generation exhibition in March 1975, preparation for the performance Tricycle: Contemporary Recreation by Darryl Sapien resulted in the painting white of sections of the first floor of the MOCA space. Influenced by

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the Rijksmuseum’s contemporaneous restoration of Rembrandt’s The Night Watchman, Marioni proposed The Restoration as a stripping away of these altered surfaces to take them back towards their previous appearance, including the “original” marks and imperfections inherited from the building’s occupation by a printing company. Having conceived of the work, Marioni hired Ireland, who was an accomplished carpenter and “painter,” to execute it: Working every day for a month, he scraped the white paint off the floor and rubbed it with printer’s ink to stain it back to the original colour. He worked from photographs to match the colours and restore painted shapes that had been on the wall where the printing company had painted around equipment. He replaced the moldings that had been cut away. Each day I would videotape the progress, a kind of time-lapse photography. 2003: 114 As a “work,” The Restoration of a Portion of the Back Wall, Ceiling and Floor of the Main Gallery of the Museum of Conceptual Art adds to its site in order to remove, creating a new surface as a cypher to look back through, Marioni suggests, “a Photo-realist painting” (2013: 50); an understanding shared by Ireland (Klausner 2003: 39). Made integral to the fabric of MOCA’s spaces, The Restoration takes MOCA’s surfaces back towards a previous appearance under the building’s occupation by a printing company, a displacement and uncovering of the “present” MOCA site that elaborated further Marioni’s performative articulation of time and history. Integral and inseparable from the fabric of MOCA’s spaces, The Restoration implicitly shows the multipleness of “site”: its simultaneous occupation of different tenses and times. The work also achieves this layering by emphasising the performance of a conceptual work; an aspect articulated in Marioni’s showing of the video of Ireland’s process in Breen’s Bar. Marioni stresses that “When he was finished restoring this, it became invisible artwork, so people who came in who hadn’t been there for two years didn’t know what the art was because it looked like it did before; before it was defaced” (2013: 49–50). Once completed, and before it can be seen, The Restoration must be known. Where Kosuth’s materialising of language disrupted Modernist ideals of abstraction and autonomy, Marioni’s Conceptual performance subjects artefacts – be that a relic, role, social interaction, or “restoration” – to performative narratives and transactions in which they gain, change, and may also lose their identities and meanings. Although Marioni’s “social art” references a wide range of “proto-Conceptual” art, his performance coalesces in enactments of language’s effects on things and relationships; in performative propositions and exchanges enacted in what becomes a social space of Conceptual art. Finding their effect through narratives that lend them differing senses and identities at differing times and produced in acts of relation and even retrospective change, Marioni’s social works are contingent rather than categorical and acquire meaning according to

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language-use. Marioni’s early definition of Conceptual art thus opposed his work to “the production of static objects” (2003: 104) while the circumstance of his performances invariably amplifies differences between participation, viewing, and recollection, multiplying its relations and so identities. In this Conceptual performance, it is not the final object, event, or record which is paramount. Elaborated over time, repetition, and use, the idea of an “invisible art” embedded into social practice emphasises instead performative shifts of aesthetic and identity; of role, place, and time; testing how language and its formation of the social “makes” but also “unmakes” a work. It is a process that, after Kosuth’s Investigations, operates on the work of art, a fundamental feature of this self-conscious Conceptual art.

References Art & Language (2004) “Interviews: Art & Language (Michael Baldwin, Mel Ramsden), Chapters 1-9.” In Conceptual Paradise. Available online. https://kunstraum.leuphana.de/ projekte/Conceptual_Paradise/a/r/t/Art_%26_Language_%28Michael_Baldwin%2C_ Mel_Ramsden%29.html. Accessed 13th June 2022. Auslander, P. (2006) “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 28:3 (September), pp 1–10. Austin, J.L. (2018 [1962]) How to Do Things With Words, Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books. Ayer, A.J. (2001 [1936]) Language, Truth and Logic, London: Penguin Classics. Buchloch, B.D. (1990) “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October, 55 (Winter), pp 105–43. Buren, D. (1973) Five Texts, London: John Weber Gallery and John Wendle Gallery. Burn, I. (1981) “The Sixties: Crisis and Aftermath (Or the Memoirs of an Ex-Conceptual Artist),” Art & Text, 1:1 (Fall), pp 49–65. Cabanne, P. (1987) Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, Boston, MA: Da Capo. Caen, H. (1970) “Is There or Isn’t There a Sculptor Allan Fish?” San Francisco Chronicle, 12th November. Cage, J. (1976) “Happy New Ears!” in John Cage, A Year From Monday: New Lectures and Writings by John Cage, London: Marion Boyars, pp 30–5. Coelewij, L. and Martinetti, S. (eds) (2016) Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual Art, Amsterdam: Stedeijk Museum. De Duve, T. (2004) Clement Greenberg: Between the Lines, Paris: Éditions Dis Voir. Drucker, J. (2004) “The Crux of Conceptualism: Conceptual Art, the Idea of the Idea, and the Information Paradigm,” in Michael Corris (ed) Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 251–68. Flynt, H. (1963) “Concept Art,” in La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low (eds) An Anthology of Chance Operations, New York, NY: La Monte Young and Jackson Mac Low, n.p. Fried, M. (1980) Absorption and Theatricality: Painting & Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. —— (1998 [1967]) “Art and Objecthood,” in Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp 142–78. Greenberg, C. (1961a [1939]) “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, pp 3–21.

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—— (1961b [1955, 1958]) “‘American-Type’ Painting,” in Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, pp 208–29. —— (1962) “After Abstract Expressionism,” Art International, 6:8 (October), pp 30–2. —— (1982 [1965]) “Modernist Painting,” in Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (eds) Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, New York, NY: Harper and Row, pp 5–10. Guercio, G. (1991) “Introduction,” in Joseph Kosuth, Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966-1990, edited by Gabriele Guercio, London: MIT Press, pp xxi–xlii. Harrison, C. (2001 [1991]) Essays on Art & Language, London: MIT Press. Klausner, B. (2003) Touching Time and Space: A Portrait of David Ireland, Milan: Edizioni Charta. Klein, Y. (2004 [1974]) Yves Klein 1928-1962, Selected Writings. Ubuclassics. Available online. https://www.ubu.com/historical/klein/klein_selected.pdf. Accessed 4th May 2022. Kosuth, J. (1970) “Joseph Kosuth,” in Kynaston McShine (ed) Information, New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, p 69. —— (1991a [1967]) “Notes on Conceptual Art and Models,” in Joseph Kosuth, Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966-1990, edited by Gabriele Guercio, London: MIT Press, pp 3–5. —— (1991b [1969]) “Art After Philosophy,” in Joseph Kosuth, Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966-1990, edited by Gabriele Guercio, London: MIT Press, pp 13–36. —— (1991c [1969]) “Introductory Note to Art-Language by the American Editor,” in Joseph Kosuth, Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966-1990, edited by Gabriele Guercio, London: MIT Press, pp 37–40. —— (1991d [1970]) “Information 2,” in Joseph Kosuth, Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966-1990, edited by Gabriele Guercio, London: MIT Press, pp 53–74. —— (1991e) “Context Text,” in Joseph Kosuth, Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966-1990, edited by Gabriele Guercio, London: MIT Press, pp 83–8. —— (1991f [1977]) “Within the Context: Modernism and Critical Practice,” in Joseph Kosuth, Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966-1990, edited by Gabriele Guercio, London: MIT Press, pp 153–68. —— (1991g [1979]) “Text/Context: Seven Remarks for You to Consider while Viewing/ Reading This Exhibition,” in Joseph Kosuth, Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966-1990, edited by Gabriele Guercio, London: MIT Press, pp 179–82. Kosuth, J. and Siegal, J. (2020 [1992]) “Art as Art as Idea,” in Leontine Coelewij and Sara Martinetti (eds) (2016) Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual Art, Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, p 80. Kotz, L. (2010) Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art, London: MIT Press. Krauss, R. (2000) A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, London: Thames and Hudson. Lewallen, C.M. (1980) Tom Marioni: MATRIX/BERKELEY, 39, Berkeley, CA: University Art Museum, n.p. —— (2015) 500 Capp Street: David Ireland’s House, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. LeWitt, S. (1999 [1967]) “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, London: MIT Press, pp 12–16.

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Lippard, L.R. (1981) Ad Reinhardt, New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams Inc. —— (1997 [1973]) Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972, second edition, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Loxley, J. (2007) Performativity, London: Routledge. Marioni, T. (1969) Invisible Painting and Sculpture, Richmond, CA: Richmond Arts Centre, n.p. —— (1970a) An Interview with Tom Marioni, 4th April 1970. Available online. https:// archive.org/details/AM_1970_04_21. Accessed 28th October 2020. —— (1970b) Opening Announcement, MOCA, March 18, San Francisco, CA: Tom Marioni. —— (1971a) MOCA/FM: Sound Art from the Museum of Conceptual Art, 1st March 1971. Available online. https://archive.org/details/MFM_1971_03_01. Accessed 27th October 2020. —— (1971b) MOCA-FM: A Live Symposium on Conceptual Art, 27th July. Available online. https://archive.org/details/MFM_1971_07_27. Accessed 26th October 2020. —— (1973) “Museum of Conceptual Art: Opening of a New Space.” Available online. https://archive.org/details/MFM_1973_01_03. Accessed 5th October 2020. —— (2003) Beer, Art and Philosophy: A Memoir, San Francisco, CA: Crown Point Press. —— (2010) “Q&A with artist Tom Marioni.” Available online. https://hammer.ucla.edu/ blog/2010/10/qa-with-artist-tom-marioni. Accessed 28th December 2020. —— (2013) “Tom Marioni: MOCA (Museum of Conceptual Art) 1970-1984,” SFAQ, 13 (May-July), pp 44–57. —— (2021) “1970, Walnut Creek Art Center CA. show title ‘6×6×6’. I had the curator serve a 6-course dinner to me.” FaceBook post. Posted 25th September 2021. Marioni, T. and Cohn, T. (2017) “Interview with Tom Marioni,” Art Practical, 17th October. Available online. https://www.artpractical.com Accessed 17th February 2021. Marioni, T and Kaye, N. (2012) “Tom Marioni Interviewed by Nick Kaye, San Francisco 24th October 2012,” in Nick Kaye (ed) SiteWorks: San Francisco Performance 1969-85. Available online. https://siteworks.exeter.ac.uk/interviews/tommarioni. Accessed 23rd June 2022. Marioni, T. and Riedel, M. (2017) “Oral History Interview with Tom Marioni, 2017 December 21-22.” Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Available online. https://www.aaa. si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-tom-marioni-17535. Accessed 3rd September 2020. Melvin, J. (2022) “The Aesthetics of Silence, Withdrawal and Negation in Conceptual Art,” in Paul Coldwell and Ruth M. Morgan (eds) Picturing the Invisible: Exploring Interdisciplinary Synergies from the Arts and the Sciences, London: UCL Press, pp 195–211. Osborne, P. (1999) “Conceptual Art and/as Philosophy,” in Michael Newman and John Bird (eds) Rewriting Conceptual Art, London: Reaktion Books, pp 47–65. Pearson, M. and Shanks, M. (2001) Theatre/Archaeology, London: Routledge. Piper, A. (1999a [1988]) “On Conceptual Art,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, London: MIT Press, pp 424–5. —— (1999b [1993]) “The Logic of Modernism,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, London: MIT Press, pp 546–9. Reinhardt, A. (1991a [1957]) “Twelve Rules for a New Academy,” in Barbara Rose (ed) Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp 203–6. —— (1991b [1963]) “The Black Square Paintings,” in Barbara Rose (ed) Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp 82–3.

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—— (1991c [1964]) “The Next Revolution in Art (Art-as-Art Dogma, Part II),” in Barbara Rose (ed) Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp 59–63. —— (1991d [1966-67]) “An Interview with Ad Reinhardt,” in Barbara Rose (ed) Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp 12–23. —— (1991e [1967]) “Black as Symbol and Concept,” in Barbara Rose (ed) Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp 86–8. —— (1991f) “Black, Symbol,” in Barbara Rose (ed) Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp 96–9. Rivenc, R., Richardson, E. and Learner, T. (2011) “The LA Look from Start to Finish: Materials, Processes and Conservation of Works by the Finish Fetish Artists.” Available online. https://www.getty.edu/conservation/our_projects/science/art_LA/article_2011_ icom_cc.pdf. Accessed 2nd February 2021. Rorimer, A. (2001) Redefining Reality: New Art in the 60s and 70s, London: Thames and Hudson. Smith, T. (2017) “One and Three Ideas: Conceptualism Before, During, and After Conceptual Art,” in Terry Smith, One and Five Ideas: Conceptual Art and Conceptualism, edited by Robert Bailey, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp 127–44. Spoerri, D. (1966) An Anecdoted Topography of Chance, New York, NY: Something Else Press. Tisdall, C. (1979) Joseph Beuys, New York, NY: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Vergine, L. (ed) (2000) Body Art and Performance: The Body as Language, Turin: Skira. White, R. (1978) “Tom Marioni,” View, I:5 (October), whole issue.

3 DOCUMENTS

The crystallisation of Conceptual art in the late 1960s presented a new focus not only on the tautological and performative effects of language but also on elaborations of Conceptual art resting on the circulation of documents, in an emphasis on “information” and language-based systems in challenges to art’s “precious object” (Kosuth in Siegelaub 1969a). It is a theme explored by the large-scale survey of the conceptual turn in 1960s art in Kynaston McShine’s curation of Information at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, from July to September 1970, a key moment of recognition of the emergence of Conceptual art and a broader conceptualism in the North American east coast, Europe, Argentina, and Brazil; yet an exhibition that also formed part of this work’s rapid institutionalisation. McShine’s theme of Information implicitly referenced the curatorial practices of Seth Siegelaub in 1968 and 1969, in which Siegelaub troubled relationships between catalogue and exhibition – and so between document, artwork, media, and event – resulting from his curatorial insight identifying conceptual practices with “art information.” It was a reversal that had already been proposed in a broadly socially and politically engaged Latin American “conceptualism” characterised by Mari Carmen Ramírez (1999) as a movement that persistently challenged distinctions between artistic and social practices. Influential in this work, Peter Osborne recounts, was the Argentinian sociologist and artist Roberto Jacoby’s unrealised proposal “for a show to consist entirely of information, taking the form of a standard exhibition catalogue, presented as if there were an accompanying exhibition, which wouldn’t actually exist” (2002: 37). Such political and aesthetic strategies have resonance for later work by the Chicana/o collective Asco, based in East Los Angeles, and especially their simulations of film ephemera as “No Movies” from 1973. While focused on aesthetic models and practices, Siegelaub’s DOI: 10.4324/9781315694962-3

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exhibitions realised this primacy of information over the presence of the unique work, recognising this reversal as an underlying tenet of practices by Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, and Lawrence Weiner. In November 1969, Siegelaub observed to Ursula Meyer that: When art does not any longer depend upon its physical presence, when it has become an abstraction, it is not distorted and altered by its representation in books. It becomes primary information, while the reproduction of conventional art in books and catalogues is necessarily (distorted) secondary information. When information is primary, the catalogue can become the exhibition. 1972: XIV, original emphasis This substitution of “form” with information also gives primacy to the document and its contemporary implications, at a time when information technology and the digital were in emergence but not commonly available. In her study, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (2014), Lisa Gitelman addresses the document in the historical context of the technologies and cultures that produced and disseminated its paper forms. Gitelman’s focus is the multiple functions and cultural meanings of documents and their effects, especially their use in garnering or subverting authority, noting that: The document is a particularly important vernacular genre, both sprawling and ubiquitous. We know it by its diverse subgenres – the memo, for instance, or the green card and the promissory note – as well as by its generalized, cognate forms, like documentary and documentation. 1 The authority of the document is paradoxical, as in each of its functions it asserts its status as a supplement: as the memo that records and conveys decisions made elsewhere; as the promissory note that anticipates or prompts a future effect that will then consign this document to its record; as the documentation that testifies to events and things out of sight or evidences past events. The document is “itself” frequently a copy. Indeed, Gitelman suggests that “reproduction is one clear way that documents are affirmed as such” (1). In turn, where the document asserts itself as a true and accurate index of something else or as “material objects intended as evidence” (2), so its own “authenticity” is defined in its supplementary function as record or representation. In these respects: Documents are epistemic objects; they are the recognizable sites and subjects of interpretation across the disciplines and beyond, evidential structures in the long human history of clues. […] If all documents share a certain “horizon of expectation,” then, the name of that horizon is accountability. 1–2

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view of the exhibition, January 5-31, 1969, with works by Douglas Huebler (books on windowsill), Lawrence Weiner (rug stain), Robert Barry (labels), and Joseph Kosuth (newspapers). MoMA, NY, January 5th, 1969, through January 31st, 1969. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Seth Siegelaub Archives. Gift of Seth Siegelaub and the Stichting Egress Foundation, Amsterdam. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, MA1404. © 2022. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

FIGURE 3.1 Installation

Furthermore, it is these functions that produce the document. Gitelman argues that “Any object can be a thing, but once it is framed as or entered into evidence – once it is mobilized – it becomes a document, an instance proper to that genre” (3). Documents are made and garner authority in the absence of the objects they evidence; they are indexical and supplementary, an identity they retain even when presented as “primary.” In Conceptual art, the ambivalent status and authority of the document are deployed against the conventional objects of art, but also to create ambiguities over “documentation” and the status of “art information.” Thus, for January 5–31, 1969, the exhibition associated with Siegelaub’s declaration and demonstration that “the catalogue can become the exhibition,” Siegelaub insisted that from the 5th to the 31st January those wishing to audit the catalogue should collect it from the gallery. On entering the first of two rooms, visitors encountered two works by each of the four artists represented in the catalogue, yet each work was in some sense displaced from the present-tense encounter the

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invitation to attend implied. Thus, Robert Barry’s installations, 4. 88 mc Carrier Wave (FM), 1968 88 megacycles; 5 milliwatts, 9-volt DC battery and 1600 kc Carrier Wave (AM) (1968) and 1600 kilocycles; 60. Milliwatts (1968), provided unseen and unheard works whose electrical flow of 110 V AC/DC created, Siegelaub suggested, “a public condition” that, once known to its visitors, pervaded the exhibition room (Alberro and Norvell 2001: 35). It is a hollowing out of the artwork as “direct experience” that defers to the catalogue, which, Charles Harrison suggests, becomes necessary “to make someone else aware that an artist had done anything at all” (2001: 80). Yet this deferral also risks reproducing the “precious object” these works ostensibly critique and attempt to displace, as the photographic document of the “empty space” substitutes for the work. Reflecting on tendencies to evidence Conceptual art through oral record and narrative, Alexander Alberro suggests that when set in the place of the conventional object: The photograph or trace thus documents and legitimates both phenomenologically and economically, though the work runs the risk of being fundamentally transformed, of ceasing to be what it was originally projected to be, becoming instead only what exists in the gallery. 2001: 12 In Conceptual art, ideas and frameworks of performance, and performative engagements, readings, and transactions, have also emerged in disruptions of these recuperations of the document. Such tactics reflect Robert Barry’s observation to Patricia Norvell in an interview of 1969, that “The word ‘art’ is becoming less of a noun and more of a verb […] a kind of noun-verb” (Alberro and Norvell 2001: 97). The documents of Conceptual art invariably become secondary to the flow of information, to the network, or a circulation of ideas, and to the engagements and processes they facilitate. In this context, Siegelaub’s series of exhibitions of 1969 and associated work by Huebler and Barry staged the document in an information flow, and the exhibition or work as network, in anticipation of events or appearance of the work elsewhere. In contrast, Art & Language instrumentalised the document in their challenge to distinctions between the artwork and the discourses in which it is produced, and in ideological critiques engaging the viewer/reader in performative modes of political and aesthetic enquiry. For Asco, formed in the same year as Art & Languages’ Index 01 (1972), the politicised and networked document of the No Movie was explicitly conceived as a mode of Conceptual performance. In these forms and uses, the document produces the imagined object or performance of Conceptual art as remembered or anticipated, always at distance. As duplicated “evidence” – as a dissemination of information secondary to things, actions or events elsewhere – the

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documents of Conceptual art invariably produce and join a network of supplemental points, invoking “concepts” of things and events whose presence they simultaneously elide. Information flow and “primary information”

Seth Siegelaub’s proposition that “the catalogue can become the exhibition” identified Conceptual art with a “separation between the art information and its presentation” (Siegelaub and Varian 2020: 67), shifting focus from a form’s unique occupation of space and time to varying formats in which artworks, as “information,” could be collapsed into circulation and networking. Siegelaub’s assertion of the status and continuity of “information” is consistent with the effect of the document. Gitelman suggests that “information has an objective, autonomous character partly because of the way it reflects the authoritative institutions and practices to which documents belong” (2014: 4). Documents “as” Conceptual art thus attest to the veracity of “art information”; assertions implicitly bolstered by associations with the discourses and institutions of art, and with the gallery. Here, too, Siegelaub identified Conceptual art with a dissemination of “art information” through the multiple formats of mass media. Where, conventionally, “most people knew art from reading about it or looking at pictures of it,” this conceptual turn foregrounded art information that, Siegelaub proposed, “wasn’t information about something, it was the thing itself,” so giving rise to “the idea of the book as an exhibition space” (Slyce 2020: 298). Because of this reversal, Siegelaub noted, “in the January show, the catalogue was primary, and the physical exhibition was auxiliary to it” (Meyer 2016: 190), an emphasis he gave form to by placing the catalogue in what would have been the main space for the exhibition it described. In this context, the conceptual work – as text – might then reproduce a similarly ambivalent relationship with that to which it describes or refers. By way of example and explanation, Siegelaub suggested: if I told you […] “one gallon of paint poured in the dirt” […] your take on what I am telling you will evolve in your mind as a spectator or audience or whatever. But it has nothing to do with going out to another place and seeing the paint poured on the floor. Siegelaub and Sciarra 2020: 145 Siegelaub’s comments are an elaboration of Lawrence Weiner’s dictums for his Conceptual art, first published in January 5-31, 1969, alongside his cataloguing of works in the form of short, prescribed actions. Following eight stipulations, including “Two minutes of spray paint directly upon the floor from a standard aerosol spray can, 1968,” and “A 2″ wide 1″ deep trench cut across a standard one

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car driveway, 1968,” whose “fabrications” are documented, Weiner’s remaining page in the catalogue states: 1 The artist may construct the piece. 2 The piece may be fabricated. 3 The piece 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. Weiner in Siegelaub 1969a Through Weiner’s qualifications the need for the object is suspended, while, he claims, “the event can never be the art” (Alberro and Norvell 2001: 102). In other words, these statements are not intended as scores to be resolved into performance. Instead, Weiner’s art, or at least his own sense of “intention,” is fulfilled by the proposition towards whose realisation he adopts an attitude of indifference somewhat reminiscent of the manner of Marcel Duchamp’s “complete anaesthesia” towards the choice and qualities of the Readymade (Duchamp 1975: 141).

LeWitt (1928–2007), Drawing Series in Xerox Book (New York: Siegelaub/Wender, 1968). New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). N. 1-4, n.p., acc. n.: LI619. © 2022. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022

FIGURE 3.2  Sol

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In this context, Weiner’s use of language is precise, leading him to note that: “My own art never gives directions, only states the work as an accomplished fact” (Meyer 1972: 218). For Siegelaub, this inversion, in which the catalogue is at once primary (in conveying “art information”) and indexical (in directing attention towards a work’s possible realisation elsewhere) emphasises potential. Consequently, any actual manifestation of the described work in “real” time and space becomes similarly supplemental: a contingent elaboration of “primary information” which has no single or fixed place, no prescribed format or form. Siegelaub’s approach to “the catalogue as exhibition” was directly informed by his orchestration of The Xerox Book in November 1968, which also addressed and utilised the status of the document. Frequently taken as a further point of definition of conceptual work, sometimes under its cover title, Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Lawrence Weiner; Xerox Book further conflated Siegelaub’s “organisation” of Conceptual art with the practices his publications catalysed. Developed during a period in which, he notes, major projects were being released as often as every six weeks, Xerox Book ceded 25 pages to each contributing artist for a single work formed through procedural uses of Xerox copying, which although first released in 1959 remained an office-bound, expensive technology throughout the 1960s. Xerox Book presented work which emphasised visual or linguistic series that permuted the Xeroxed document, unfolding as accumulative or varying sequences given sense in the turning of pages, while subject also to the erasures and additions of the first generations of Xerox processes. In its method, Xerox Book references Ed Ruscha’s books beginning with Twentysix Gasoline Stations of 1962, in which the procedural aspects of turning the book’s pages reiterate the repetitious architectural language and landscape it documents. Xerox Book draws also on self-referential volumes such as The Four Suites by Fluxus artists Philip Corner, Alison Knowles, Ben Patterson, and Tomas Schmidt in 1965, as well as Sol LeWitt’s Serial Project #1 of 1966, that, with his later wall drawings, exemplified his formulation in 1967 of Conceptual art as one in which “the idea becomes a machine that makes the work” (LeWitt 1999: 12). Xerox Book also embraced contemporaneous attitudes to technology reflected in the persistence of its informal title, whereby the act of Xeroxing announces a certain importance while diminishing qualitatively and by duplication the status of its output. Gitelman notes the ambivalent attitude to the products of Xerography in the 1960s and 1970s. In the absence of digital storage, the act of copying – and a tendency to copy copies (just in case) – resulted, she argues, in “the insidious growth of a negative attitude toward originals – a feeling that nothing can be of importance unless it is copied or is a copy itself” (2014: 92, original emphasis). At the same time, Xeroxing produced a distinct order of “document” that was of shared and heightened supplementary and indexical status, for “To Xerox something, in short, is to read it as a document. The medium and the genre are fully entangled.” The information flow from Xeroxing, here, is a flow

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of second-order materials that have gained bureaucratic primacy. This contrasts with screen-based reading, Gitelman argues, whereby “to encounter a document online is to discern it amid a heterogeneous assortment of other electronic objects. Anything Xeroxed – like anything scanned – is a document, but only some things digital count as documents.” Similarly, “all documents are not photocopies, but all photocopies are documents” (102). Defined in a methodological tautology, the Xerox Book is a copy (and so document) without an original such that, Siegelaub recalled in 2012, “The book references itself, not some works in another location” (Maroto 2020: 329). In these ways, Xerox Book enmeshes the reader in a “Conceptual event” in which visual and linguistic sequences unfold in the turning of pages, in a site which is systemic, multiple and self-referential. As if to confirm its “conceptual” status, Xerox Book was produced, finally, as 1,000 offset lithograph copies of a Xeroxed “original” in response to the then prohibitive cost of using Xerox photocopy for publication. Reflecting Kosuth’s claim that “I want to remove the experience from the work of art” (Harrison 2020: 82), Siegelaub’s subsequent exhibitions rejected the phenomenal encounter with the “precious object” in favour of texts that worked to absent it, defer it, devalue it, or made the object unobtainable or inaccessible. In doing so, Siegelaub’s tactics also displaced “the artwork” – or “art information” – towards informational systems and networks: a change narrated contemporaneously by the critic Jack Burnham in his article “Real Time Systems” for Artforum in September 1969. In this year, too, at the close of which he abandoned the gallery he had maintained at 1100 Madison Avenue since 1964, Siegelaub declared his hope “that New York is beginning to break down as a centre. Not that there will be another city to replace it, but rather that where any artist is will be the centre” (Harrison 2020: 82). As a means of promoting this dispersal, Siegelaub reflected implicitly on the networking of the artwork and its support structures: “I like the idea of things, information, people, ideas moving back and forth […] The idea of primary information […] Or hearsay” (Alberro and Norvell 2001: 53). Corresponding to these changes in art distribution and consumption, Siegelaub envisaged “the breaking down of the ownership of art” through “the accessibility of the information,” stressing that “the fact that it had no place was very interesting” (Siegelaub and Sciarra 2020: 145). Burnham’s essay extended this notion of the viral circulation of Conceptual art, using “cybernetic” analogies and referencing the “real time” information processing of computers and new technologies then largely the prerogative of large-scale financial institutions and the military (Lilly 1967; Sackman 1967; Heyel 1969). Such systems, he observed, “deal with real time events […] All of the data processing systems I have referred to are built into and become a part of the events they monitor” (1969: 51, original emphasis). It is a connection Burnham elaborated in his curation of Software, subtitled Information technology: its new meaning for art, at the Jewish Museum, New York, in 1970, that brought conceptual artists, including Joseph Kosuth, Vito Acconci,

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Robert Barry, John Baldessari, Hans Haacke, Douglas Huebler, and Les Levine into contact with a plethora of public and private technology research groups exhibited on equal footing and in collaboration (Burnham 1970). By extension, Burnham saw “real time systems” as breaking down the “specific object” of art through its absorption into the flows of information that would conventionally form its context and critical aftermath. The analogy of “real time” cybernetic systems might thus be extended, Burnham argued: to cover the entire art information processing cycle, then art books, catalogues, interviews, reviews, advertisements, sales, and contracts [which] are all software extensions of art, and as such legitimately embody the work of art. The art object is, in effect, a “trigger” for mobilizing the information cycle. Making, promoting, and buying art are real time activities. 1969: 50, original emphasis It is a model reflected, too, in the contemporaneous emergence of institutional critique as a conceptual practice that critically articulated the construction of artwork through the social, business, and financial “real time” networks in which the gallery system was produced and sustained. Thus, Hans Haacke, in transposing his engagement with environmental and ecological systems towards social and institutional critique, directed his attention towards “Real Time Social Systems” that enabled the property and financial networks in Manhattan and in which galleries were inevitably implicated, including Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System as of May 1, 1971, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees (1971). Where sculpture “merges with the environment in a relationship that is better understood as a ‘system’ of interdependent processes,” Haacke argued, an artwork’s separation from social and political networks falls away, for “A system is not imagined; it is real” (Celant 1969: 179). Attempts to embed or enact work within ephemeral, “real world,” timebased information systems are characteristic of Conceptual art more broadly. Joseph Kosuth’s Synopsis of Categories: The Second Investigation (1968) disseminated “categories from the Thesaurus” through statements on billboards, roadside noticeboards, as subway and newspaper advertisements, and announcements in magazines, “presenting the information through general advertising media” (Kosuth 1991: 31). These strategies were echoed in the California artist Stephen Kaltenbach’s series of advertisements in Artforum in November 1968 to December 1969 (Kaltenbach 2020) and later in Adrian Piper’s dissemination of The Mythic Being series (1973–5) through Village Voice classifieds. These erosions of conventionally distinct spheres also extend to Lynn Hershman Leeson’s publishing from 1968 under her art critic alter-egos Gay Abandon, Herbert Goode, and Juris Prudence, in journals, including Studio International, and that served to provide a necessary critical support for her

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early work (Wetzler 2016). These views of systems and the erosion of distinctions between catalogue and exhibition, artwork and discourse, also catalysed a watershed for curatorial practices. Sara Martinetti thus characterised Siegelaub’s curatorial practices as producing the work he showed (2015: 20). Indeed, a contemporary awareness of this erosion of roles and spheres drove criticism towards Lucy R. Lippard for her series of Numbers Shows of conceptual work from 1969 to 1974. Initiated with Number 7 in May at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, and followed by 556,087 at Seattle’s World Fair Pavilion, in September, Lippard later recalled that: Peter Plagens, reviewing 557,087 in Artforum, accused me of being an artist. He wrote: “There is a total style to the show, a style so pervasive as to suggest that Lucy Lippard is in fact the artist and her medium is other artists.” I was annoyed by this at the time, but […] it pinpoints one of the prime issues of the period in which these shows were made – the deliberate blurring of roles, as well as boundaries between mediums and functions. Lippard 2009 This production of art in and as systems embedded in the world also bears on documentation and performance in this conceptual work. Burnham cites Les Levine as an artist who also followed the logic of this shift towards systems and information flow. In 1969, Levine stressed his work’s ambivalent relationship with the document, acknowledging that, “If it is neither photographed nor written about, it disappears back into the environment and ceases to exist,” concluding “works themselves are not to be considered as art, rather systems for the production of art.” Levine thus emphasised the importance of the press release – and by implication “shrewd advertising” as “legitimate art forms” (Burnham 1969: 55) – leading him to “real time art works” and conflations such as Levine’s Restaurant, “New York’s only Canadian restaurant,” opened by Levine at 19th Street and Park Avenue South from March to September 1969. Reviewed by Peter Schjeldahl as offering “deplorable food and dismal light,” the restaurant’s fare reflected Levine’s Irish-Jewish heritage while enmeshing clients in a situation closely monitored by closed-circuit TV such that their dining produced and consumed everyday activity as mediated performance. Writing in Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (2003), Alexander Alberro re-read Siegelaub’s tactics in these terms, in which the identity of “secondary” information is maintained by positing “publicity as art.” Disposing of “specific” forms of artwork and “the traditional distinctiveness of the aesthetic,” Alberro suggests, “the breakthrough occurred when Siegelaub placed the elements that comprised secondary information within the medium of publicity, enabling the fragments to take on their own value.” Instead of collapsing the opposition between “secondary” and “primary” information such that the catalogue

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Oppenheim, Removal Transplant – New York Stock Exchange, 1969. B/w, text. Stage # 1: New York Stock Exchange Trading Floor. Stage # 2: Roof perimeter on Park Avenue South

FIGURES 3.3 AND 3.4 Dennis

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“becomes the exhibition,” Alberro envisages “the sphere of art expanded to the point where it became coterminous with market society” such that “it could be consumed throughout daily life itself” (122): a process Levine’s restaurant literalises and parodies.

Artist’s statement: Four tons of paper data from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange is removed and this residue is transplanted to Park Avenue South where it will be housed in an area defined by the specifications of a roof perimeter. The spatial limits of the clearing house floor dictates the manner in which the paper residue organized itself. In the same way, a cyclone fence directs the accumulation of wind-blown matter, thus functioning as an aesthetic block. The paper becomes free-moving architectural fuel, undirected, yet responding to the imposition of pre-existing bounds. The exchange floor is an architectural mold for symbols representing distant locations. Transactions involving a span of three thousand miles take place on the stock exchange floor. The residue at the end of the day carries vestiges of the distance between two points; the point at which a buy order and the point at which a sell order has been issued. Though it lies dormant on the floor it is conceptually still active. A spatial transaction is implicitly contained in the material; a web of components interacting within a continental grid. At 2 PM the clearing house floor is filled with the highs and lows of stock transactions, the permutations a stock has undergone during a four hour period. By removing this data from a ground level and carrying it up sixteen stories, I am raising the level of residue that was actively housed on a lower plane. The material will be held at the top of a building; the building forms a base for the piece. The roof is viewed as a terminal strata for passive information. The Manhattan skyline becomes a complex of core samplings of varying depths. © Dennis Oppenheim Estate

In these systems and erosions of difference, under which the catalogue “becomes the exhibition,” it does so not only in its migration of “primary information” into conventionally “secondary” formats, but also in its indexing of absent objects and experiences it promises to bring into the public space, experiences in transition through the system. Indeed, this is a final aspect of the circulation of information that presses towards action and event: an energy, and speed, found in exchanges of information and prompted by documents in the process of dissemination. It is this energy that underpins Les Levine’s and Dennis Oppenheim’s engagement with time-based processes, and that demands performance. Commenting on his

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performance-based piece Cornflakes, executed in Edmonton, Canada, in September 1969, Levine suggested that: People are resistant to accept information as the object itself […] I am willing to consider the major part of the work is the information and the energy that comes out of that information. That’s what I consider to be the work. I’m interested directly with information as an energy system […] With the information being as tangible as an object. Levine 1969 Oppenheim’s “conceptual/performance” work frequently followed a logic noted by the artist Robert Smithson’s in 1970, “that what Dennis is doing is taking a site from one part of the world and transferring the data about it to another site, which I would call a dis-location […] He’s in a sense transforming a terrestrial site into a map” (Béar and Sharp 1996: 244). It is a process in which Oppenheim tended to elide or erase questions of form in favour of the energy of transformation itself. In his Body Art performance and actions recorded on video and film, Oppenheim recalled being “so concentrated on the possibility of uprooting information that could be used within the sculptural domain that the idea of form became unimportant” (Oppenheim and Kaye 1996: 60). In Removal-Transplant: New York Stock Exchange (1969), for example, Oppenheim dramatised “the untapped energy and information network of the day-to-day environment” (Burnham 1969: 51) by transposing four tons of paper documents recording real-time transactions conducted over a four-hour period of the same day, and culminating at 2 p.m., from the ground floor of the New York Stock Exchange onto a windblown fenced roof on Park Avenue South, some 15 minutes north. Oppenheim’s re-siting of these documents performs a transposition of “real time” transactions mapped across the United States, investing a financial system into an art-system, as a “residue” of real-time connections remain in play. In his contemporaneous notes, Oppenheim remarks that: Transactions involving a span of three thousand miles take place on the stock exchange floor. The residue at the end of the day carries vestiges of the distance between two points; the point at which a buy order and the point at which a sell order has been issued. Though it lies dormant on the floor it is conceptually still active. Kaye and van Winkle Oppenheim 2016: 54 Here, the document is foregrounded in its capacity as a carrier of “live” information, a point in the network whose “energy” is still to be expended and which comes to rest in the displacement through which Oppenheim’s work is enacted. The “conceptually active” document is instrumental to the network and, in Oppenheim’s process, quite distinct from a “documentation” in which the conceptual work itself

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might come to be resolved. In this regard, Oppenheim emphasised at the time of this work, that, “The aspect of documentation that I would tend to reject is that it’s taking us back to the object, or into a rigid static kind of form which is exactly what the new work doesn’t imply” (Alberro and Norvell 2001: 23). Where “documents” become the instrument and mechanism of the “information flow,” and so purveyors of the “energy” that information facilitates and effects, then their referential function – and self-deferral – not only evidence “performance” but become its instrument or source, producing the Conceptual performance they appear to supplement. Staging the network: Douglas Huebler, Robert Barry, Seth Siegelaub’s January 5–31, 1969 and One Month (March 1–31, 1969)

Siegelaub’s reversal of the conventional hierarchy between catalogue and exhibition was originally prompted by innovations in Douglas Huebler’s work. During 1967, Huebler pivoted from a second-generation Minimalist aesthetic towards combinations of photography and mapping to produce ambivalent relationships between document, enactment, and process. In 1968, Huebler collaborated with Siegelaub to produce Douglas Huebler 1968, a catalogue recording 15 works, including 10 realised at or proposed for various sites in New York state and Massachusetts, including Snow Piece Proposal, of variable size and no specified location. With its objects dispersed, Lucy Lippard noted in 1972, so this exhibition “appeared in no gallery space; the catalogue alone communicated the art to its audience by mail” (Coelewij and Martinetti 2016: 100). Siegelaub reformulated the catalogue in a rapid sequence of exhibitions from Douglas Huebler in December 1968 to a sequence of group shows that included Huebler’s work: January 5-31, 1969, One Month (March 1-31, 1969), and July, August, September 1969; the latter publication providing the only unifying point for 11 works by different artists realised across seven countries (and two continents) over three months. Reviewing Siegelaub’s trajectory, Sara Martinetti points to the necessity of thinking this conceptual work in terms of network: as flows of information “moving beyond the walls of the gallery and beyond confines of the artworld,” arguing that here “Conceptual Art is itinerant, immediate, and simultaneous, disseminated through a web of references and translations that can only be grasped by a satellite-like reading” (2015: 21). Huebler’s innovations in 1967 and 1968 had focused on Duration Pieces, Site Sculpture Projects, as well as Variable Pieces and Location Pieces, all of which incorporated documents evidencing actions in specific places. Early Site Sculpture Projects, such as Richmond Trip (1968), mapped and conceptualised a journey Huebler had taken to multiply and disperse the interdependent places and events of a work’s occurrence over time. Richmond Trip invites both reading and enactment. If undertaken, Huebler noted, “the above route must be taken,” and then “Whatever is seen when the trip is taken joins with this map as the form of the work” (1993). Its documents, Paul Frédéric notes in his introduction to Huebler’s most extensive account of his work, “Variable” etc., “function simultaneously as instruction and

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description” (1993: 33, original emphasis) so resisting resolution into a single tense or time. The catalogue Douglas Huebler 1968 extended this emphasis on the mobility of networked elements. In a series of “Site” and “Duration” pieces, Huebler mapped areas ranging from the Whitney Museum Proposal specifying a 225-ft × 55-ft × 225-ft area encompassing inside and outside the Museum, and Portland 2 Rectangles Proposal designating two areas “each .66 miles by 2 miles (approximate) [sic],” to 42° Parallel Piece, defining activity across 3,040 miles and several states. Common to Huebler’s tactics is the imposition of arbitrary geometric shapes on found, locational maps: a square over Whitney’s floor plan; heavily demarcated, adjoining rectangles over a map of Portland; or the reproduction of abstract geographical divisions such as the line of the 42° parallel. Each of these pieces then records enacted and performative connections made between locations, presenting “evidence” that approaches the documentation of performance in its record of a prescribed, structured activity. Site Sculpture Project 42° Parallel Piece thus connects “14 locations […] existing either exactly or approximately on the 42° parallel in the United States,” by evidencing “the exchange of certified postal receipts” (Huebler 1993). To produce this, Huebler wrote to the Chambers of Commerce of each selected location requesting maps of the immediate area, obtaining a Post Office certified receipt on sending, and accepted any document or documentation that was returned: be that a map, a certified receipt from the receiver, or the return of the letter. For Huebler, “[t]he piece was brought into existence when all the documents were returned and re-joined with the sender’s receipts” (1993). Huebler’s use of “evidence” prompted Siegelaub to observe this work’s supplementary nature, that “all this is a record of the work of art, which is right behind it all, in a way. It is not the work of art” (Alberro and Norvell 2001: 34). In this regard, Huebler’s work can also be identified with a trait within McShine’s Information show noted by Les Levine, whereby: Most of the works that are concerned with information are using media as a form of “evidence creating”. The photographs or documents are pretty much in the way they are used in the courtroom. They are presented to make it absolutely clear that such and such a thing has occurred. Levine 1971: 264 Other schemes in Douglas Huebler 1968 amplified an emphasis on the document as “evidence” while obfuscating its referent, so to give emphasis to the present tense of reading. For Site Sculpture Project Variable Piece #1 New York City, Huebler designated three concentric squares on a Manhattan map, the largest extending from 59th street at Central Park, downtown to 42nd street. In the city itself, on various occasions between August and September, Huebler then placed small fabric “markers” at the 12 sites designated by the “corners” of the three mapped concentric squares: leaving a first set of markers on elevators, at the corners of the inner square; the next on permanent and static urban features, at the corners of the second concentric square;

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and finally on vehicles at the corners of the largest, outer square, and photographing each site at the time the marker was applied. In situ, the marked squares, each realised at a different time, comprised “geometrical (minimal) shapes so vast there is no way to actually see the forms” (Huebler 1993: 127) – and were in continual dispersion from the outset, as elevators and vehicles moved on. In this process, Huebler stipulates, “The ultimate destination of the markers is not of any particular significance in regard to the existence of the piece” (1993). The ephemerality of their positioning instead defers back to a conceptual mapping prompted by the annotated street map, photographs, description, and so the catalogue itself. Boston, New York Exchange Shape (1968) extended this process to two locations represented in Douglas Huebler 1968 by maps of Boston and New York, hand-annotated with hexagrams that demarked and equated six points (and sites) to be placed “in exchange” on different dates and times in each city: between

Huebler (1924–1997), Boston, New York Exchange Shape, 1968. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Twelve gelatin silver prints, typewriting, felt-tip pen, and gouache on printed paper on board with Map, Map: 36″ × 23 1/2″ (91.4 cm × 59.7 cm); Map Drawing: 15″ × 11″ (38.1 cm × 27.9 cm); Letter: 8 1/2″ × 11″ (21.6 cm × 27.9 cm); gelatin silver prints (each): 10″ × 8″ (25.4 cm × 20.3 cm). The Seth Siegelaub Collection. Gift of Richard S. Zeisler (by exchange). Inv. n.: 542.2010. a-o.© 2022. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022

FIGURE 3.5 Douglas

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Huebler (1924–1997), Boston, New York Exchange Shape, 1968 – detail. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Twelve gelatin silver prints, typewriting, felt-tip pen, and gouache on printed paper on board with Map, Map: 36″ × 23 1/2″ (91.4 cm × 59.7 cm); Map Drawing: 15″ × 11″ (38.1 cm × 27.9 cm); Letter: 8 1/2″ × 11″ (21.6 cm × 27.9 cm); gelatin silver prints (each): 10″ × 8″ (25.4 cm × 20.3 cm). The Seth Siegelaub Collection. Gift of Richard S. Zeisler (by exchange). Inv. n.: 542.2010.ao.© 2022. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022

FIGURE 3.6 Douglas

12.30 and 4.48 p.m. August 27th in Boston and between 10.30 a.m. and 4.30 p.m. on September 9th in New York. During these times: A 1” diameter self-sticking paper was placed at each site as a “marker”. Each site was photographed at the time when the marker was placed with no attempt made for a more, or less, interesting or picturesque representation of a location. Huebler and Siegelaub 1968 While the documents for Boston, New York Exchange Shape make the details of its execution seemingly integral and specific, Huebler’s resulting photographs are not specified according to site, place, or record. This tactic participates in Huebler’s

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FIGURE 3.7 Douglas Huebler (1924–1997), Boston, New York Exchange Shape, 1968.

New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Twelve gelatin silver prints, typewriting, felt-tip pen, and gouache on printed paper on board with Map, Map: 36″ × 23 1/2″ (91.4 cm × 59.7 cm); Map Drawing: 15″ × 11″ (38.1 cm × 27.9 cm); Letter: 8 1/2″ × 11″ (21.6 cm × 27.9 cm); gelatin silver prints (each): 10″ × 8″ (25.4 cm × 20.3 cm). The Seth Siegelaub Collection. Gift of Richard S. Zeisler (by exchange). Inv. n.: 542.2010.a-o.© 2022. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022

broader project to disconnect the photographic image from motivating choices or emotions, thus giving emphasis to the “document” over documentation. In an interview of 1970 with Ursula Meyer, Huebler noted that: My work is concerned with determining the form of art when the role played by visual experience is mitigated or eliminated. I have done so by first bringing “appearance” into the foreground of the piece and then suspending the visual experience of it by having it actually function as a document that exists to serve as a structural part of a conceptual system. Meyer 1972: 137 As a result, where the “score” of instructions suggests it will yield some significance, Huebler’s photographic images of events and places remain opaque, reflecting

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his statement that “The photographs in this case are absolute documents because they don’t show anything pictorially interesting” (140). As a result, these images assert an indexical function by attesting to the execution of the work, yet in remaining mute join a network of equivalences in which, Huebler suggests, “The documents prove nothing” (Alberro 2003: 69). The reader is thus enmeshed in a present-time process of reading information seemingly drained of significance, prompting an effect Huebler describes, whereby, “information joins with whatever is represented as ‘visual’: the image, which is the ‘work’ is produced by the percipient as an event in his, or her time” (1993: 175). Here, as each piece of information defers to another point in the network, reading becomes bound into its deflection. Huebler argues that: The percipient of one of my works reconstitutes its various forms of information, reading and seeing it all at once as a seamless field, the [C]onceptual event that takes place occurs during a specific period of time in the mind of that person, thereby making her, or him, the virtual subject of the work. It is my hope that through that event, the subject “sees himself/herself seeing” 128, original emphasis Where Huebler privileged a field of textual elements evidencing events unseen and occurring over time, Siegelaub’s staging of the exhibitions January 5-31, 1969 and One Month (March 1-31, 1969) served to further amplify the function of language and information, and the visitor’s engagement as reader. Here, Siegelaub staged a network of “primary information” not only through the catalogue but also by marking time in the orchestration of circumstances and events. For January 5-31, 1969 Siegelaub rented office space at 44 East, 52nd Street, Manhattan, to provide for two equal-sized rooms, stressing “The space will have an art function only for the duration of the exhibition.” In his press release of January 4th, Siegelaub emphasised the primacy of the publication, stating “the exhibition consists of (the ideas communicated in) the catalogue; the physical presence (of the work) is supplementary to the catalogue” (Bloem et al. 2020: 40). Although well attended by artists and the public, Siegelaub also advertised the exhibition post hoc in Arts Magazine in February 1969 as “0 Objects, 0 Painters, 0 Sculptures, 4 Artists, 1 Robert Barry, 1 Douglas Huebler, 1 Joseph Kosuth, 1 Lawrence Weiner, 32 Works, 1 Exhibition, 2000 Catalogues, 44 E. 52 St., January 5-31, 1969” (41). For the designated “exhibition time” of January 5th to 31st, however, Siegelaub ensured that “catalogues are only available at the gallery” (44) such that even in the “absence” of the majority of the works the project was also staged through a series of felt displacements and overtly performative tactics. On entering the first of Siegelaub’s rented rooms at 44 East 52nd Street, visitors encountered works in each case displaced from the present-tense conditions of the gallery. In addition to Barry’s unseen and unheard Carrier Wave installations, other works in room one deferred elsewhere. Kosuth’s I. Existence (Art as idea as idea) and VI. Time (Art as idea as idea), component parts of The First

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Investigation (1966–68), had been transposed from his earlier mode of gallery display as enlarged black photostats to networked circulations through newspapers and postings in public locations, ensuring, he claimed in Siegelaub’s catalogue-exhibition, that “any possible connections to painting are severed” (Siegelaub 1969a). When affixed to the wall in the room, Siegelaub asserts the absence of the “art,” suggesting that, “in the case of Kosuth you have a newspaper […] a public record of the art” (Alberro and Norvell 2001: 33). With this shift, The First Investigation was disseminated in modes the reader may treat in any way they wish; tearing the page out, inserting it into a notebook, stapling its reproduction to the wall; as, Kosuth suggests, “any such decision is unrelated to the art” (Siegelaub 1969a). Weiner’s statements displayed in room one, AN AMOUNT OF BLEACH POURED DIRECTLY UPON A RUG AND ALLOWED TO BLEACH (1968) and A 36″ BY 36″ REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALLBOARD FROM A WALL (1968) are similarly left for potential use, as, Siegelaub suggested, “Weiner considered language a ‘sculptural material’ that ‘gains its sculptural qualities by being read’” (Alberro and Norvell 2001: 31). Where presentations in the first room substituted artworks with differing kinds of “evidence,” Siegelaub’s second room presented visitors with a sofa nearby a central, low table with catalogues of January 5-31, 1969, specifying the works in room one, six further works by each artist, two illustrations of works, and artists’ statements (save for Barry). Catalogues were available to be read or purchased for $2.75. Overseeing both spaces from the second room was Adrian Piper, the conceptual artist, acting as receptionist or secretary for the duration of the exhibition. Piper’s function, she later suggested, only served to entrench her experiences of marginalisation (Piper 1996: xxxv). Her role, David Platzker later noted in the catalogue to Piper’s 2016 retrospective exhibition at MoMA, New York, was “largely invisible,” “rather than that of an artistic peer making work that directly corresponded with, and even surpassed, that of the men being exhibited” (2016: 36). Although not an expression or elaboration of her own work, Piper’s presence nevertheless contextualised and shaped the visitors’ engagement with this event. Siegelaub’s (1969a) typescript, “Instructions for secretary,” which is extant with various errors, weaves Piper’s functionary role through with implicit elements of performance, by way of repeated and structured activity: 1 Get keys 2 Answer phone “Seth Siegelaub” 3 Catalogues are available only at the gallery – if anyone wants extras we will mail them (except for the press) 4 If someone is interested in purchasing work, call me. 5 My other phone is 288-5031 6 Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11 – 5.30. 7 Gallery will exist for this month only.

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8 Every morning turn on both Robert Barry pieces. 9 Lawrence Weiner has one freehold piece (see catalogue) – if anyone inquires about this – tell them they can own the piece by making arrangements with Mr Weiner at GR7-4113. 10 Haved people sign guest book. 11 The typewritten information sheet is for press only. 12 For the first six hours of the exhibition (sat.) take a poloroid photo every 1/2 hour of the Huebler sawdust (looking into the hall) and then place it on the wall (with scotch tape) near the typewritten document. At the end of the six hours (5 PM Sat.) remove the sawdust and throw it away. Bloem et al. 2020: 44 Piper’s presence in the rooms amplifies the implicit theatricality of January 5-31, 1969, whereby prospective viewers are required to attend an exhibition that is staged as “empty” to obtain a catalogue largely directing their attention elsewhere. In all her designated activity, Piper is asked to mark the passing of time: opening, switching works on, documenting on the half-hour, discarding material, noting arrivals, being available, closing the gallery; amplifying the delays and redirections the exhibition offers. On 4th January, at its opening, Piper was also asked to facilitate Huebler’s Duration Piece no.6 Sawdust (1969) by photographing the “destiny” of a small rectangle of sawdust placed on the floor, over a six-hour period with 13 Polaroids taken at half-hour intervals; a process Huebler stipulates as a substitution of the work by its document, and then, implicitly, by the catalogue. It is a process of deferral also implicitly in dialogue with Robert Barry’s Carrier Wave installations, and his contemporaneous textual works that install delay and deferral as well as anticipation of the unseen in place of the conventional work. Thus, Barry’s Something (1969) comprises the statement, “Something that is taking shape in my mind and will sometime come to consciousness.” Other texts include, “All the things I know but of which I am not at the moment thinking – 1:36 p.m. June 15, 1969” (1969), executed in pencil on a wall; as well as the typescript “Some places to which we can come, and for a while ‘be free to think about what we are going to do’” (1970–present). In discussing the roots of such work, Barry has distinguished between an interest in text or language, and his focus on speech and speech-acts, recalling in 1986 that: I was never too interested in the analysis of language or any of the language philosophers. In the 60s most of my readings centred around Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and I guess the reason was because they dealt not so much with language but what it was to be a speaker, to be a talking person. To function in the environment of language, and what relation language had – what aspect of our being was language. 1986: 64

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The elaboration of conceptual work through the staging of January 5-31, 1969, with its emphasis on time and anticipation, was further embedded into Siegelaub’s subsequent catalogue-as-exhibition, One Month (March 1-31, 1969). One Month is structured over 31 daily events or designations, including the days of artists’ “nonparticipation” as if they were events or pauses in this process. Siegelaub invited 31 artists to relay information regarding “the nature of the ‘work’ you intend to contribute to the exhibition on a chosen day,” specifying three possible modes of response that would generate the catalogue-exhibition: 1 You want your name listed, with a description of your “work” and/or relevant information. 2 You want your name listed, with no other information. 3 You do not want your name listed. Siegelaub 1969b In the event, the catalogue – marking time in the manner of a page-a-day diary – provides a “record of replies (or non-replies)” (Siegelaub 1969b) comprising 22 statements or “works,” seven blank and dated pages (1st, 2nd, 12th, 17th, 20th, 23rd, 27th), and one page documenting a decline (“IAN WILSON, New York”). Of the published statements, some promised a work, or works to be sent to Siegelaub within a specified period (Terry Atkinson, Michael Baldwin). Several artists submitted a designation of work that occurred or was to occur at specific sites or that may occur on the allocated day (Robert Barry, Alex Hay, Douglas Huebler, Robert Huot, Robert Smithson) and at a specific time (Richard Long) or was subcontracted and so delegated (Dennis Oppenheim). Others offered evidence of earlier accidental damage to work by others (John Chamberlain), or inventories of correspondence regarding copyright (Barry Flanagan) or work that could or might be realised or imagined (Christine Kozlov). Punctuated by “empty” days marking designated artists’ non-responses, One Month narrates its various times of production in documents that produce dissonances between “its own” and other times and occurrences; whose “present time” also remains a function of when the catalogue is read, rather than the exhibition it indexes. It is within One Month, also, that Robert Barry proposed his Inert gas series, in an event designated for 5th March: ROBERT BARRY, New York Inert gas series, 1969; Helium (2 cubic feet) Description: Sometime during the morning of March 5, 1969, 2 cubic feet of Helium will be released into the atmosphere. Siegelaub 1969b

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Barry’s series, following this first release of helium, was extended further in his collaboration with Siegelaub in April 1969 for Inert Gas Series/Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon/From a Measured Volume to Indefinite Expansion: an “exhibition” announced by way of a poster, blank other than for the series title; a post office box address, and telephone number. The event itself involved the release of two cubic metres of each gas in the Mojave desert: a glass vial of gas was shattered with a hammer, the broken glass collected to remove the risk of accidents – except for the single use of a metal canister – and photographs taken to mark the event but capturing only the desert location. As a result of each gas’ invisibility, the work’s dissemination rested on information, Barry suggested, in reports that remained constant in their various formats and circulations. Thus, “In the early Inert Gas or Radio Wave pieces it didn’t change, whether the information was in a catalogue, a magazine, or a gallery wall. The information is specific, about something else, not so much about itself” (1986: 69). In the event, however, Barry and Siegelaub had also framed the release of the gas in a layering of delays that further undermined the work’s material integrity through performative frames and tactics. It is a process that underlies their attempt in the gas releases, Julia Bryan-Wilson suggests, to achieve a “thwarting the ‘white cube’ exhibition space as well as the commodity nature of the art object” (2016: 31). Where the otherwise blank poster representing the Inert Gas Series provided a telephone number, this connected to a telephone answering service on Sunset Boulevard, which Siegelaub had rented for a month or so as “a great address for a sort of pseudo gallery” (Barry 2015). Barry recalled that “it was actually just a kind of answering service with these two elderly ladies in an office […] if anybody called one of the ladies would answer […], we gave her a message that said: if you’re interested call such and such a number” (2015). The result was a further delay in obtaining the information necessary to a perception of an “invisible” work, one comprised, Siegelaub suggested, of “totally non-perceptible energies” (Alberro and Norvell 2001: 33). Like his contemporaneous textual works, Barry’s staging, here, of deferral and postponement, furthers his avoidance of a commodity form as the artwork is invoked but moved further away in time. In the case of Inert Gas Series of April 1969, the occupants of Siegelaub’s rented office simulate a gallery without fulfilling its conventional function of being the place where the work is or should be. Instead, each new circulation of information produces another delay, and “the work” moves further out of reach. In such exchanges, Barry suggested, “what Conceptual art was about, was testing the limits of one’s perception, pushing it as far as possible, to the point of invisibility” (1999: 426). Barry remarks, “I use the unknown […] Some of my works consist of forgotten thoughts” (1986: 25). Siegelaub’s orchestrations of “primary information” involve encounters within an ostensibly empty gallery; with diaries of works whose time and place are specific, but never here; and with stages of deferral, culminating in a phone call to

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receive verbal accounts of “non-perceptible” works. In these tactics, which are designed to keep the iteration and experience of “the work itself” at bay, the staging of phenomena of absence and delay becomes integral to Conceptual art. Like Robert Barry’s contemporaneous texts emphasising that the conceptual work is out of reach, out of mind, will occur at some future point, or is now “forgotten,” these tactics evoke an artwork out of present time and place, so drawing the viewer into the sense, experience, or even co-performance of its deferral. Huebler’s “absolute documents” equally place an emphasis on time: on the present time of reading, on a “conceptual event” provoked by documents that are explicit indexes of occurrences elsewhere, but which remain opaque. In both cases, where “art information” may, as Siegelaub suggests, be consigned to “no place,” the viewer’s time of reading becomes coterminous with the experience of the lack of a work. It is an installation of phenomena – and orchestration of a sense of performance – that is also integral to other signal moments of Conceptual art. Praxis: Art & Language, Index 01 and Index 02 (1972)

In his first volume of essays on Art & Language, Charles Harrison identified Index 01, created for Documenta 5 at Kassel in 1972, also known as Documenta Index, as “the summary work of Conceptual Art” (2001: 75). In this regard, Harrison also concluded, Index 01 marked the culmination of a brief and intensive five-year period in which a “critically significant Conceptual art movement could be said to be in existence as such” (29). This is a period inaugurated in 1967 by Joseph Kosuth’s first showing of his Proto-Investigations, Sol LeWitt’s publication of “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” and Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden’s Abstract Art series comprising the reproduction of article abstracts from The Review of Metaphysics, and subsequently attributed to Art & Language (Art & Language 2008: 16–7). Although established in 1968, following their decision in 1971 to make collective attributions of members’ works (Bailey 2016: 47) the group’s first retrospective exhibition at MoMA Oxford in September 1975 presented itself as “Art & Language 1966–1975” (Art & Language 1975) so extending its reach post hoc. The influence of Art & Language and Index 01 notwithstanding, Harrison’s historiography invites the observation that Index 01’s significance, here, is in part its exemplification of Art & Language’s method and agenda for Conceptual art, to which Harrison openly subscribed as a member of the group and co-author of the installation. Index 01, Harrison records, was the first work attributed collectively to the then 10 members of Art & Language’s editorial board, including Harrison himself, an authorship posted at the entrance to the installation room. Extending this, Index 01’s design, incorporating eight filing cabinets, 350 index cards, 48 photostats, and an index of all the material held by the cabinets pasted to the walls, brought into potential relationship the published and unpublished writings, with annotations, by members of Art & Language to date.

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& Language, Index 01, 1972. Eight file cabinets, texts and Photostats. Dimensions variable. Installation “Too Dark to Read: Motifs Rétrospectifs, 2002–1965,” Musée d’art Modern de Lille Métropole, Villeneuve d’ascq. Collection Daros, Zurich. © Art & Language

FIGURE 3.8 Art

From 1971, Harrison’s role in Art & Language was as General Editor for Art & Language Press and so also of the collective’s journal Art-Language, whose first issue had been in May 1969. Edited initially by founding members Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin, and Harold Hurrell, then faculty in the art department of Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry, Art-Language Volume 1 Number 1 declared itself “The Journal of conceptual art.” While its subtitle was subsequently removed, Art-Language nevertheless reached into New York conceptual practices, re-printing Sol LeWitt’s “Sentences on conceptual art” of January 1969 in the first issue, inviting Joseph Kosuth to act as “American Editor,” and publishing his “Introductory Note” in that role in the second issue of February 1970. In the inaugural issue, too, Terry Atkinson enacted Art & Language’s fundamental proposition, that Art-Language’s discursive address to Conceptual art, in the form of his editorial, was itself “held out as a ‘conceptual art’ work” (1969: 14). The design of the journal also advanced Atkinson’s challenge in a systematic suppression of its visual appeal and satisfactions. In her article addressing text-based Conceptual art and typographic

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FIGURE 3.9 Cover of Art-Language Volume 1, Number 1, May 1969. Linotype booklet,

20.5 cm × 14.5 cm. © Art & Language

discourse, Ruth Blacksell emphasises the importance of Art-Language’s typographic design in “the group’s exploration of the editorial/essay as artwork,” noting that: the neutral typographic design of the journal with its white cover and pages of un-illustrated text, echoes again the attempts by others to divest their works of any authorial/artistic voice, so that the reader engages with these texts through a process of reading, without any question that they should perhaps be looking at the journal as a visual object. 2013: 73, original emphasis

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In proposing a critical essay as Conceptual art and omitting to distinguish between “critical” contributions and essays that might constitute “Conceptual art works,” the first issue of Art-Language further articulated a collapse of boundaries and the arbitrary nature of the circumscription of discrete conceptual “works,” foregrounding instead the information flow and exchange implied in the multiple “Notes on M1” by David Bainbridge and Michael Baldwin. In Art-Language, the group pursued what Harrison characterised as a rejection of post-Minimal installation and other such forms in favour of a quest for “the defeasible materials of a continuing conversation” (2001: 54): an implicitly open and (potentially) revised and reiterated network of critical commentary, debate, and cross-reference, elaborated also by the serial nature of a journal. It is a “conversation” only amplified by contradiction. Thus, in this first issue, Atkinson’s culminating assertion that his editorial is offered as a “conceptual work” is followed by the artist Sol LeWitt’s “Sentences on conceptual art,” including his final statement: These sentences comment on art, but are not art (1969: 10, original emphasis). The selfconscious “anti-aesthetic” design of Art-Language was elaborated further, and its ad hoc conversation codified and expanded, in Index 01, whose appearance not only referenced paper filing systems, such that, Harrison recalled, “the indexing system should be made compatible with the appearance of other indexing systems – and not prima facie with the appearance of other works of art” (2001: 67), but also the impersonal architecture of contemporaneous mainframe computing installations. It is an allusion to information processing and media technology Harrison acknowledged in his later history, where he drew analogies between the indexing projects and studies of artificial intelligence (72). Contemporaneously to Index 01, its variation, Index 02, attributed to “Art-Language association,” was installed in The New Art at the Hayward Gallery, London; the first survey of British Conceptual art whose timing overlapped with Documenta 5. The New Art catalogue included an essay by “Terry Atkinson/Michael Baldwin” on “The Index,” which narrated a hypothetical interaction in pseudo-scientific formulae ostensibly describing information flows: We can suggest a (still provisional) definition of an item searched by the ArtLanguage Index == def. a ( ∃x) (∃y) (x is a member of A-L and x learns a from y and x ≠ y). Here y may be a member of A-L in which case we would have y contributing to x’s A-L heritage (index-providing status) or y need not be in A-L. 1972: 17 Summarised as, “Searched by the index of == def. A-L (x) (if x is a member of A-L then (∃y) x learns a from y and x ≠ y))” (17). The gesture of these formulations is to re-read the Art & Language collective themselves as an information network, mapping flows between “people” and “objects.” It is a feature addressed explicitly by Graham Howard in his “Postscript” to Atkinson and Baldwin’s essay, in which

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he attempts a “formal notation” distinguishing exchange “between certain objects, which certain individuals stand in a special relationship to,” and that aimed to exclude casual conversations from evidence admitted into the Indexes (1972: 19). In their installation, Index 01 and Index 02 comprised a breaking down and potential cross-referencing of all published and unpublished writing by the Art & Language editorial team, drawing on “linguistics and modal logic, and the semantics and pragmatics of natural languages” (Harrison 2001: 75) to edit associates’ writings to date into a self-referential field of cross-referenced textual units. For Index 01, Harrison and Fred Orton later recalled, this comprised distributing the contents of essays across index cards, as essays were: subdivided into discrete and coherent sections, totalling around 350 separate items […] Each numbered section was then read in relation to each of the others. The relation between each of the resulting pairs – some 122,500 in number – was expressed on a matrix in terms of one of three possible categories: (logical or ideological) compatibility (+), or incompatibility (−), and transformation of logical space (T) which rendered decision of compatibility or incompatibility arbitrary or irrelevant.” Bailey 2016: 45; 47 Importantly, Harrison records, the matrix for Index 01 was constructed through ad hoc readings and “no one citation was privileged over any other.” Nor were distinctions made between critical essays and essays as conceptual art works, as, Harrison observed, “the form of the Index seemed to leave the issue for dead” (71). The resultant Indexes were activated by a reader (“spectator”) across cards and via the index of material posted throughout the walls of the installation, and so concretised by each individual engagement through partial, temporary, and idiosyncratic readings. Such engagements, Robert Bailey notes in his detailed history of Art & Language International (2016), were supported by the 48 photostats designed to “show how the texts are ‘concatenated’ – a favourite term of Art & Language’s taken from computer science” (45). A term meaning to put units together into a chain or series within programming, here “concatenation” is enacted, mapped, and then left as a methodological and pragmatic model for spectators. Through these referential processes, too, the Index operated in an overt intertextuality in which each text is read in and through its constitution in and of other texts, including texts nominally external to the installation. It was a device, Harrison proposed, “with the power to place a vast range of absent text within its own margins, and thus to transform, even to threaten, the status of its contents” (2001: 70). Responding to Harrison’s implicit equation between the Indexes and computer systems, Edward Shanken argues in his study of links between contemporary technology and Conceptual art that Index 01 “can be thought of as a kind of manual hypertext system that allows for the interactive associative linking of ideas” (Shanken 2002: 437). It was a connection between

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FIGURE 3.10 Art & Language, Index 02, 1972. Eight file cabinets, texts and Photostats.

Dimensions variable. Installation, “Art & Language,” Galerie National du Jeu de Paume, Paris, 1993. Collection Daros, Zurich. © Art & Language

the new art and information technologies, Shanken also notes, already suggested in Jack Burnham’s curation of Software (1970) which had staged the first public exhibition of hypertext (433). The design, installation, and implied use of the Indexes also extend the proposal that in these uses of the document meaning is not a property of information but a function of its use, reflected in Harrison’s conclusion that through the design of Index 01 “meaning […] was a point on a lattice, or a moment in a network of relations” (2001: 74). It is a process demonstrated also in the variation Index 02, whose installation at the Hayward Gallery, London, overlapped that of the Documenta Index at Kassel. Where the matrix of connections that provided the basis of Index 01 had been constructed in casual and varying ad hoc readings, Harrison notes that Index 02 was a deliberately contrasting exercise in using an ordering principle of consistency to produce a different identity for the same material as Index 01. In these respects, in both design and use, the Indexes reflected Art & Language’s early slogan unifying their political engagement with an intended disruption of Modernist forms through textual intervention, as they called for: “Not Marx or Wittgenstein, but Marx and Wittgenstein” (58), after Wittgenstein’s proposition that in a majority of cases, “the meaning of a word is its use” (1958: 20). This intertwining of political and linguistic theory emphasised the imperative of analysing artworks as products of social context and relation. It is also an approach that views “artworks” and their meanings as particular forms of language-use, and that aims at the disruption of Modernism’s narratives through the critical diversion, re-purposing, and overtaking of cultural products and objects that rehearse its discourses. Under

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these assumptions, the notion of the “stability” of “art information” in its dissemination across formats and media implied by Seth Siegelaub’s tactics also breaks down. Indeed, the modes of critique and subversion enacted by the Indexes necessitate a repositioning of the viewer/reader as a user of information rather than passive consumer of “art information.” It is specifically in this regard, too, in Art & Language’s “Benjaminite aspiration to admit and encourage spectators into the position of collaborators” (2001: 75) that Harrison reads Index 01 as Conceptual art’s culmination, and in which the political imperatives underpinning their practice find this form. While other modes of Conceptual art had implicated the “percipient” in a “Conceptual event” (Huebler) or approached reading as a “sculptural event” (Weiner) so embedding performative processes into a work’s activation, this reference to Benjamin reaches back to earlier political models of the viewer’s critical judgement and participation. Harrison reads the model for Index 01 back to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Author as Producer” (1934) and Benjamin’s comments on the playwright and theatre director Bertolt Brecht’s construction of a politically engaged spectator through an anti-bourgeois, Marxist theatre, integral to which was Verfremdungseffekt or V-effekt, poorly translated as the theatrical concept of “Alienation.” It is a model which, in the early 1970s, was also being systematically re-examined and restaged as part of a powerful second wave of literary, political drama, and a radicalised avant-garde in the British theatre (Itzin 2021). Benjamin’s essay published his address at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, in Paris, calling for a theatre or art that, after Brecht, employed a “productive apparatus” (Benjamin 1999: 774): a structure and modus operandi that would provoke a political consciousness in its audience and so catalyse social transformation; practices quite distinct from the “bourgeois apparatus of production and publication [that] can assimilate astonishing quantities of revolutionary themes” (774). After Brecht, Benjamin’s distinction is analogous to the overcoming of the “dramatic theatre” of emotion, family, and situation; of naturalism and melodrama, with an “Epic Theatre” (Brecht 1964) that brought to bear a form and analysis drawing on historical or dialectical materialism to politically arm its audience in the theatre, so making, Benjamin suggested, “readers or spectators into collaborators” (1999: 777). Art & Language’s emphasis on the critical interrogation and dismantling of the cultural products of Modernism, and of opening the “Modernist allegory” to question, adopted a similar rejection of politically conservative forms and the institutions that supported them. Through Art & Language’s practices, Harrison notes: The substantial aim was not simply to displace paintings and sculptures with texts or “proceedings,” but rather to occupy the space of beholding with questions and paraphrases, to supplant “experience” with a reading, and in that reading to reflect back the very tendencies and mechanisms by means of which experience is dignified as artistic. 2001: 55–6

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Most importantly, this Conceptual art was concerned with critical process: a process realised beyond the bounds of any specific installation or artistic form, and that, Harrison suggested, “achieved its intended form of distribution, if it did, not through being beheld or otherwise institutionalised, but through being criticized, elaborated, extended or otherwise worked on” (51). In taking this forward, Index 01 and Index 02 are poised between documentation and a provocation of the viewer’s performative engagement, or their “theoretical” or conceptual performance of its terms. Reflecting on the history of Index 01’s exhibition in the context of the aesthetics of “Net.Art,” Julian Stallabrass observes that while “meant to provoke reading” and the active contributions of gallery-goers, institutional practices of exhibition and preservation meant that the Indexes “came to be taken as sculptural objects, or at least as the remains of a performance (definitely over) that the viewer must take on trust” (2003: 50). Received in this way, Index 01 returns to a state of self-reflexive documentation, after the manner of one of its implicit reference points: Robert Morris’ Card File. Although dismissed by Harrison (writing under the attribution of “Art-Language”) as a work that too readily exhausts itself (1972: 15), Card File, compiled by Morris in 1962 and exhibited by the artist-run Greene Gallery in New York in 1963, is widely recognised in its textual form and indexical function as a key proto-Conceptual – and potentially the first “purely” conceptual – work (Osborne 2002: 68). Card File is an interrogation and documentation by Morris of the extrinsic conditions of its own making. Comprising a metal and plastic filing cabinet of 44 index cards, the File cross-references the events, intentions, and “accidents” resulting in its own fabrication and exhibition, parodying, through the very “exhaustion” Harrison observes, the depth of intention, originality, and claim to meaning lent to the opacity of conventional artworks. At first sight, the art historian Kimberly Paice suggests, Card File seems a model of “archival orderliness,” “until one notices the ‘mistakes,’ and lost cards” which reveal, the disguise that this work assumes in order to perform what is a fragmentary, non-narrative and irreducibly complex process. The forty-four file cards, gathered under various subject-headings – “Accidents,” “Categories,” “Decisions,” “Forms,” “Interruptions,” “Losses,” “Mistakes,” “Owners,” “Signature,” and “Stores” among them – bear an assortment of typed remarks that indicate considerations and circumstances that figured in the work’s making. Thus, we read that Morris purchased the cards at Daniels Stationary [sic], lost them, recovered them, discussed the work with a friend, conceived the work in the New York Public Library, made mistakes, was interrupted by Ad Reinhardt, and so on. 1994: 126 Through Morris’ record of what becomes, retrospectively, his various performances of its making, Card File bears witness to the actions required to generate a self-reflexive play on Morris’ bringing of the work into being; a use of documents

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distinctly different from that of the Index. Concerning reading rather than writing, the index cards, photostats, and index, of Index 01, negotiate between documentation and score. In Index 01, documents await use, rather than remembering or prescribing a specific activity, so bringing the performative (and performance) to the fore in each viewer’s determination of a “continuing conversation.” It is an agenda for engagement that is a counterpart to Art & Language’s conviction that “it was the inquiry which had to be the work, and which therefore had to become ‘the work’” (Harrison 2001: 49). In his identification of “theoretical performances” as part of his study of Neo-Aesthetic Theory, Miško Šuvaković observes Conceptual art’s production of performance tactics and “performance art” (2017: 232) as part of a wide range of work realising “theory in action” (232, original emphasis), and placing Index 01 into this continuum. In this respect, he argues, Index 01 “did not realise theoretical performances as events before an audience,” but instead provoked and embraced “a complex behavioural situation of research (conversation and learning)” as performance: “an installation for the theoretical performance of the audience” (236, original emphasis). Where for Harrison, Index 01 and Index 02 culminated aspects of Conceptual art, in Art & Language’s history these installations also marked a high point of collaboration between English and New York-based wings of the collective. In his extensive study of Art & Language International (2016), Robert Bailey notes the divergence of practices that followed the 1972 Indexes. Expanding to a group of around 20 artists, Bailey records that the engagement implied by the Indexes was carried forward in differing ways by the collaborating artists in these locations. In England, he suggests, “the formal and logical aspects of concatenating material took precedence and became increasingly elaborate,” exemplified in Index 04 (1973), material for which was partially generated by computer. By contrast in New York, “relatively simplistic and intuitive indexing techniques held sway, and priority was given to addressing the necessarily social process of generating new content to subject to concatenation” (49). For Mel Ramsden, it was the latter that advanced Art & Language’s practice through informal processes of annotation, which had also been given expression in various iterations of Comparative Models (1972), also known as The Annotations. In this open-ended, dialogic process, he suggested in 1974 that: We replaced refinement, improvement, the warding off [of] anomalies, with praxis, the strong possibility of confusion, contradiction, living with the difficulties, it became a “classroom situation” – we directed our activities toward a community of enquirers in which all share and all participate. We constitute going-on through praxis (the Annotations) Bailey 2016: 55 It is in praxis, too, through which the implications – and invitation – of the early Indexes to a performative engagement is heightened. Catalysed by Index 01,

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specifically in its “Benjaminite” aspect, praxis leans on performance, in a reflective – and self-reflexive – enactment of theory. The potentially transformative nature of “praxis” was a key concept in analogously politically committed theatre contemporaneous to Art & Language’s development that defined strategies for audience engagement as a model for social change. Terry Smith, who had joined Art & Language in the early 1970s, similarly recalled the importance of “that moment in the early 1970s when it seemed possible to achieve what we then called ‘praxis’: to fuse theory and practice, to evolve a theoretical practice as art, to do art-theoretical work” (Kelly and Smith 1999: 450). Developed firstly in the radically different context of the dispossessed in Brazil, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) set out an influential paradigm and practice for “critical pedagogy” that was widely repurposed in European contexts. Fundamental to Freire’s proposition is “praxis: reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it” (51): the provocation of a “critical consciousness” that transforms activism by catalysing pragmatic, reflexive social change. It is a process, Freire emphasises, that “cannot be purely intellectual but must involve action; nor can it be limited to mere activism but must include serious reflection: only then will it be a praxis” (65). The Indexes participate in this drive towards a concretisation of political theory through action, even as their participation in the conventional platforms for radical art at Documenta 5 and The Hayward Gallery threatened contradiction and compromise. In this regard, Harrison absorbs the apparent mis-fitting of Art & Language’s political aims with its aesthetic context into their contradictory assault on “Modernism,” arguing that in addressing its paradoxical containment as a “Conceptual art”: The first requirement was to engage with the current forms and contexts of modern practice, but in doing so to render whatever form of “beholdable” object might be produced both highly provisional and thoroughly recalcitrant vis-à-vis the expectations and the discourse of the beholder. 2001: 56 Index 01 and Index 02 reflect Art & Language’s early working hypothesis of the “emergency conditional,” that “conceptual art is theory just in case its art; and is art just in case its theory: and they work ‘just in case’” (Art & Language 2016). The Indexes work over the limits and contradictions of a Conceptual art that attempts to self-consciously operate inside and outside the discourses in which it is defined; to perform theoretical and practice-based enquiry into the conditions of its own formation as art. It is a dilemma that also extends to the pragmatics of spectator participation in such a complex, self-referential system; one which Bailey suggests critical response to the Kassel Index sometimes suggested were unreadable, impenetrable, or resolved into office-like installation design (2016: 47). These are tensions captured in the invitation to enact a conceptual work that hypothecates a specific and complex audience engagement; that offers itself as a proposal, idea, or

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potential praxis, yet to be realised, even as the “idea of praxis” risks returning the Index to the phenomenon of a Conceptual performance. In this regard, Art & Language drives towards Conceptual art and its performance as self-conscious political acts; interventions that other uses of documents in Conceptual art have realised as overtly political engagements elaborated through the idea of performance. Performance document: Asco’s “No Movies”

While the tactics and engagements with the document, information, and networks in Conceptual art produced performative works, the East Los Angeles Chicana/o collective, Asco, employed the document and its circulation through diverse artistic and social networks in the explicit production of Conceptual performance. Such work by Asco had resonance with earlier Latin American socially engaged conceptual practices, in particular Eduardo Costa, Raül Escari, and Roberto Jacoby’s “A Media Art (Manifesto)” of 1967, that aimed to deploy qualities fundamental to mass media against its own effects, so undertaking “to give to the press the written and photographic report of a happening that has not occurred” (1999: 2). These proposals envisaged “‘realising’ the nonexistent event” (3) in erosions of distinctions between aesthetic, social, and political spheres; a mode of Conceptual art later exemplified in the Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles’ series of Insertions into Ideological Circuits of 1970, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ “Maintenance Art” in New York from 1971, discussed here with related work in Chapter 5. In California during the 1970s, artists, including Doug Hall, T.R. Uthco, and Tony Labat explored “infiltrations” of journalism, news bulletins, and television programming in collapses of distinctions between artwork and media images of which it is also a product, analogous to those effected by Art & Language between the work of art and the critical narratives in which it is in part produced. Such work had also been influenced by prescient analyses of mass media, including Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, first published in 1962 (Boorstin 1992), and the “Guerrilla television” of west coast media collective TVTV (“Top Value Television”) from 1972 to 1979, as well as the rapidly developing environment of media and image-oriented political actions. With the No Movie, Asco explicitly inflected these concerns and themes through the document and its circulation. Formed in 1972 in collaboration between Gronk, Willie F. Herrón III, Patssi Valdez, and Harry Gamboa Jr., artists then working and living in East Los Angeles, Asco’s work reflected its embeddedness in the identities and urban sites it speaks of and to, while refiguring conventions of Conceptual art and addressing questions of exclusion. In this context, Asco’s “No Movies” created from 1973 to 1980 were produced, Harry Gamboa Jr. recalled in 1983, as a series of “conceptual performances created specifically for the camera” (Norte 2011: 404). Embedded in experiences of the East Los Angeles community that also lived in sight of the iconic Hollywood sign, Asco formed around the production of aesthetically and

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politically radical work that spoke through the community’s exclusion from cultural and economic mainstreams. For Asco, this entailed an exclusion also from the conventional circulation of contemporary art, while producing work that critiqued perceived aspects of cultural conservatism within the language of the popular political art predominant in El Movimiento, associated with the contemporary Chicano civil rights movement (Gonzalez 2019). At the time of Asco’s inception, Chicana/o marginalisation also came sharply into view in the context of the Vietnam war, at a time when, Gronk recalled, “a lot of our friends were coming home in body bags […] And in a sense that gave us nausea – or ‘nauseus’ […] And that was Asco in a way” (Gronk and Rangel 1997: 10). The draft and its consequences sparked public action in the Chicana/o communities, including riots in East Los Angeles in late August 1970 that were met with lethal police response. Formed in the wake of these histories and events, as well as Gamboa’s earlier leadership of the Chicano student movement and a burgeoning era of “revulsion” (Chavoya and Gonzalez 2011: 40–1), the name “Asco” was first used by the collective in 1974 in direct response to the war. In their later manifesto-like self-definition as part of “Interview: Gronk and Gamboa,” published in the first issue of ChismeArte in 1976, a quarterly magazine combining avant-garde art and literature with political advocacy, it is this visceral impulse that they assert first: Asco (Nausea) 1 2 3 4

a feeling of sickness at the stomach, with an impulse to vomit disgust; loathing – Gronk, Patssi, Gamboa, Herrón Collaborations 1972 through 1976 Gamboa and Gronk 2011: 395

In tone, too, Asco’s first works sought a similar response from their audience, in pursuit, C. Ondine Chavoya, the leading critical documenter of Asco’s work, proposes with Rita Gonzalez, of a “Politics of Revulsion” reflected in Gronk’s observation in 1983 that: A lot of the stuff early on was like real bloody and used a lot of different things, like dead birds and bones, and anything we could get our hands on. So the reaction by the community, or by different people that would see the work, was that it was giving them nausea. Chavoya and Gonzalez 2011: 38 Asco’s No Movies extended this through explicitly performative interventions. Responding to the inability to speak through the production of mainstream cinema, and in advance of the emergence of Chicana/o film from 1976, No Movies

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comprised uncontextualised publicity stills that asserted supplemental relationships to putative films that did not exist. C. Ondine Chavoya thus proposes No Movies as “counterspectacles” militating against the elision of Chicana/o culture (1998: 7). Writing with Jennifer Gonzales in 2011, Chavoya elaborates No Movies’ operation in “a representational regime of absence” (57) of Chicana/o identity and experience in the then predominant political, commercial, and aesthetic economies. In this context, each No Movie is presented as a single 35-mm format photographic image, often selected from multiple photographic takes of tableaux vivant executed in public spaces without announcement or a knowing public audience, or sometimes posed in the studio in a performance scenario; an image which acted as an intertext and dissection of popular representations of Chicana/o identity, as well as mainstream response and exclusion. In series, the No Movies circulated as bodies of evidence, always partial and fragmented but gesturally and stylistically interlinked, that exacerbated the absences in which the Conceptual performance of films such as The Gores (1974), Pistolwhipper (1976), A La Mode (1977), Waiting for Tickets (1978), Young Boys in the Fifties (1979), and No Phantoms (1980) operated. On occasion, No Movies were supplemented by further works in the manner of ephemera, including posters, summary narratives, and diagrams (Gamboa 1998a: 129–80). David E. James notes that “Gamboa carried a rubber stamp, ‘CHICANA/O CINEMA/ASCO,’ that he used to symbolically deface – and so appropriate – posters, billboards, and the like, placed in the barrio by outside interests” (2011: 187). Chavoya and Gonzalez record the diverse reach of these simulated film stills, as “No Movies were distributed to local and national media outlets, including film distributors, and reached an international audience through mail art circuits” (Chavoya and Gonzalez 2011: 56–7). Asco further frayed the formal integrity of the No Movie by employing the term, Chon A. Noriega notes, “to encompass other forms of performance documentation, published interviews, mail art, and media hoaxes that allowed their use of cinematic discourse while forgoing the apparatus of cinema” (1998: 12). In this mode, Asco’s work also participated in Conceptual art’s critique of the cultural products of Modernism and associated values of autonomy, abstraction, and apoliticality. Thus, Asco articulated overtly conceptual work through explicitly parodic subversions of mainstream representations of Chicana/o identity; in knowing contaminations of popular imagery and narrative; and in critiques of established modalities of Conceptual art. For more than two decades after Asco’s inception, their work was viewed primarily through the lens of the Chicano art movement and the struggle for Chicano Civil Rights, and so at the margin of histories of Conceptual art despite Asco’s self-evident participation in a wider avant-garde. This acted as a further marginalisation of radical Chicana/o cultural practices, notably redressed in critical histories by Chavoya (1998, 2000), Noriega (1998) and others. Subsequently, there has been a broad acknowledgement of Asco’s definition of their work in critiques of mainstream Chicana/o and conceptual practices, culminating in their retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

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in 2011 and associated publication (Chavoya and Gonzalez 2011). Asco’s work enacts a socially critical Conceptual art whose disruptors are derived from popular television and film, rather than from the abstractions of language’s interruption and interrogation of visuality, or the capacity of rhetoric to operate self-reflexively “as” an object of attention. This early exclusion also drove a self-reflexive aspect of Asco’s work as early as 1972, in actions such as Spray Paint LACMA, which Gamboa later suggested was “the first conceptual work of Chicano art to be exhibited at LACMA” (Chavoya 2000: 195). Provoked by LACMA’s then explicit rejection of their work as unsuitable for inclusion in the Museum, Asco responded by spray painting a sidewall of East Bridge Museum walkway with “Herrón, Gamboa, Gronkie,” producing a document of their intervention with a single photograph by Gamboa of Pattsi Valdez standing behind the tagged wall, prior to the work’s destruction by the Museum. In tagging the Museum wall, Chon A. Noriega writes in his article “Conceptual Graffiti and the Public Art Museum,” Asco engaged in an action that, like their “early conceptual street performance”: collapsed the space between graffiti and Conceptual art, at once fulfilling the biased thinking that justified their exclusion and refiguring the entire museum as an art object, in accordance with the terms of institutional critique being developed at the time. Because the signed museum could not possibly fit within the gallery walls, it became the objective correlative for the categorical impossibility of Chicano art, the very condition the institution helped to sustain 2008: 256 While Spray Paint LACMA amplified and repurposed strategies of Conceptual art as linguistic proposition and intervention, so it also reflected Asco’s critique of predominant modes of Chicana/o political art. Spray Paint LACMA acts not only against the systemic exclusions of the Museum (Noriega 2011: 260) but as an overt counterpoint to the predominance and traditions of “Muralism,” a dialogue resonant to contemporaneous “negotiations” between “Mexican American graffiti and Chicano muralism” identified in East Los Angeles by Marcos Sánchez-Tranuilino (2019). Addressed directly as early as the street performance, The Walking Mural (1972), and later in the No Movie and Super 8 film, Instant Mural (1974), Asco’s practices subverted Muralism by transposing its figures into performance and Conceptual art, so repurposing its claim to public space and cultural expression. In Chicana/o culture’s marginalisation, “Muralism” represented for some a paradoxical social and cultural conservatism in its very celebration of conventional community values and identities for the purpose of advancing the Chicano Movement (El Movimiento) for civil rights, and which was most prominent from 1965 to 1975. Asco’s overt adoption of the term and yet critique of Muralism, Jesse Lerner points out, was directed at this ambivalent status, its association with the idea that “Chicano artists should paint on walls and public buildings, by virtue of their ethnicity

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or national heritage, and that they inevitably draw on a limited set of national and cultural icons” (2011: 243). In relation to the acting out of such conflictual tensions with regard to cultural reference and medium, Amelia Jones, in her essay “Traitor Prophets” (2011), records Gamboa’s statement that Asco “functioned as ‘self-imposed exiles,’ mis-pronouncing the cultures around them: ‘The artist who is free to question, to denounce, to mispronounce, to bring ugly truths to the surface’” (108, original emphasis). A similar “mispronunciation” lies in the No Movies construction in layers of disjunctive, intertextual dynamics, including their relationship to languages of film and photography. David E. James thus observes the No Movies’ traversal of visual compositions, languages, and codes, noting that “The No Movie is a conceptual performance that invokes cinematic codes but is created for a still camera […] it functioned like a poster, summarizing and advertising a movie that had no other existence” (2011: 182). In this context, too, the No Movies refer not only to popular Chicana/o cultural imagery and forms, including the Novella of which Asco subsequently produced new and parodic forms, but also integrated references to and contaminations of Hollywood film. Thus, Chavoya notes, the No Movie Fountain of Aloof (1978) makes explicit its cinematic reference and language, as Patssi Valdez and Billy Estrada reperform the Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni scene in the Trevi fountain in Rome, in La Dolce Vita (1960) (1998: 9); a scene displaced in the No Movie to a suburban swimming pool. In doing so, Fountain of Aloof also overtly displaces identities and perspectives in an iconoclastic occupation of this European film scene. In such practice, Asco articulates their “self-imposed exile” in critiques of Chicana/o exclusion not only from film, as the then predominant mode of popular culture, but also from the circulation of the “obscure,” from Conceptual art itself, in an address to the seeming inability of contemporary (predominant) forms of the avant-garde to speak from and to excluded communities. These appropriations also capture the relationship between No Movies and the politics and performance of social practice. In response to the question, “WHAT IS A NO-MOVIE?” in their 1976 interview for ChismeArte, Gamboa and Gronk offer an exchange that plays with notions of permeability and contamination with regard to the everyday, answering that: GAMBOA: GRONK: GAMBOA:

It’s perceiving life within a cinematic context. It is thinking of life before the advent of the view finder. It is projecting the real by rejecting the reel. It is a series of life events which can be edited into any number of no-movie productions. Gamboa and Gronk 2011: 393

Here, Gamboa and Gronk account for the No Movie in its permeable relationship with practices of the everyday. David E. James points to this process, arguing that “Asco’s […] aestheticization of the everyday also had a source in community

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culture that supplied the key to No Movie performances: posing” (2011: 186). Read after James, Gamboa’s description of the No Movie “perceiving life within a cinematic context,” and Gronk’s play on “real” and “reel,” is implicitly returned to in Gamboa’s later account of “display” as a mode of rebellion and resistance. In his Oral History Interview for the Smithsonian Archives, Gamboa recalled recognising a theatricality and performance within everyday practice, prior to Asco; a politics of self-enactment and realisation recognised in No Movies’ self-conscious display and contamination. He recalled that: People used to dress as though they were performing in a film or a play. People would not go out unless they were totally decked out. They were just going out to impress. And I mean, and I think there was a real intense focus on that. Your hair had to be done right. Your clothing had to be done a certain way. Things were very stylized and ritualized. And I think I didn’t come up with the idea but at a later point I felt that it was – these were substitutions for displays of power. Gamboa and Gronk 1999 The Conceptual performance of Asco’s No Movies is formed in an overt collision of these differing texts. It is collocation reflected, also, in Asco’s emphasis on the dissemination and networking of No Movie as information in multiple formats, which also served what might be termed, after Cildo Meireles’ practices, as “insertions” into multiple social, political, and aesthetic (ideological) “circuits.” The “documents” of No Movies were thus “stamped” onto the urban environment of East Los Angeles, left as flyers to be found by chance; they became the object of lectures and slide presentations. They were also distributed through international mail art networks of over 300 recipients, as well as being staged as visual artworks in journal publications. On the street, Asco’s tableaux vivant for the No Movies melded and sometimes intervened into the everyday politics and events they reflected on, obtaining productive ambiguities between photo-shoot, performance, and intervention. Decoy Gang War Victim (1974) thus produced a No Movie from Asco’s commitment to “guerrilla street action,” whereby “We would go around and whenever we heard of where there might be potential violence, we would set up these decoys so they would think someone had already been killed” (Chavoya 1998: 6). As the Decoy, Gronk was staged as a victim of gang retaliation, “lying on an East L.A. street illuminated by guttering hazard flares” (67). In 1987, Linda Frye Burnham reported that subsequently “Gronk went on TV reporting the event as an actual slaying, and the story ran on KHJ-Channel 9 news” (2011: 407). Chavoya records that, “Asco distributed a photograph of the performance to various publications and television stations, which was accepted by the local media as a real scenario of violence” (2000: 197). This interest in the afterlife and consequence of “the pose” reflects tactics and attitudes within Conceptual art that had also come to underpin institutional critique, whereby, Jack Burnham suggests in formulating a “Real-Time Political Art,” that “the work becomes not only the original concept or

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piece, but any significant public or official response to it, or any further variations which the work may take as a result of its engagement with the world-at-large” (1975: 133). Like practices of institutional critique, the process of No Movie is to intervene into and disrupt the very circulation and networks of media discourses and images that form its condition of possibility. Here, too, Asco’s practices participate in Conceptual art’s equivocal approach to the document. Gamboa’s account of the No Movie emphasises not the documentation of a “film” performance that cannot be seen, but an image of “No Movie performance” (Gamboa 1998a): an act, a pose, on the street or in the studio that was never captured by celluloid and evaded the public consumption of live performance. Where the act was unseen, or otherwise unrecorded, these strategies and effects amplify the “structure of evidence” in which the document finds its identity, even as the “object” this evidence ostensibly points towards is effaced. In its context, it is the structuring of the No Movie as “evidence” that underpins the efficacy of these interventions. Gamboa thus emphasises the mute quality of the No Movie over its indexical function, precisely because there is no film or performance to reveal, noting: “They were designed to create an impression of factuality, giving the viewer information without any footnotes” (Norte 2011: 404). Referencing Mark Alice Durant writing on “Photography and Performance” (2010), Chavoya and Gonzalez similarly emphasise the No Movie’s unreliability as a document: Here, the document is rendered as “unreliable evidence, a masquerade on at least two counts,” like the performance photographs associated with the work of artists such as Adrian Piper, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Bas Jan Ader. The production of unreliable evidence, of false or questionable documents, purports to present a scenario or image as something other than what it is. 2011: 65 Indeed, the “unreliable” aspect of No Movies is amplified in Asco’s attitude towards the materials the group generated as these works. Gronk has thus reflected on the No Movie as its own negation; the ways in which their effacement of film performances might be further invested in the realisation of the image itself, or its installation. In 2000, Gronk reflected that: I would like to realise a no-movie that I was unable to exhibit – it involved a movie projector that was left running without reels, a block of ice that would be placed in front of it, and a screen in front of the ice. Facing the projector-icescreen would be two pushpins tacked to a letter that asked for my explanation of the no-movie concept. Next to the letter, two more pushpins and an empty page with a microphone facing it. Chavoya and Gonzalez 2011: 59

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It is a “disappearance,” and investment in the idea and value of its performance’s absence, reflected in the reality of the ephemeral character of the No Movies’ production and dissemination, their material fragility and tendency towards disappearance in the very movement of the document through the system, a process that also invests the ephemerality of performance into Asco’s media, and individual “works.” In 1994, Gamboa recognised the challenge lodged into the temporariness of Asco’s material work, whose circulation served as conceptual and performative interventions into the social and aesthetic narratives in which it is produced, noting: The works of Asco were often created in transitory or easily degradable materials that crumble at the slightest prodding and fade quickly upon exposure to any glimmer of hope. It is unlikely that the objects, historical accuracy, or spirit of Asco will ever be recovered. 1998b: 101 Of the materials that do remain, it is in the “structure of evidence” that authority is lent to No Movies such as Decoy Gang War Victim to facilitate its insertion, as simulation, into the news cycle. It is in this persistently ambiguous status that the criticality of Asco’s work also takes its effect: forcing a reflection on events, identity, and value produced in image circulation. Indeed, as a “linguistic proposition” the No Movie makes clear both the absence of that to which it refers and its own negation as “a movie.” In these ways, the No Movie serves “as both evidence and art object” (Chavoya and Gonzalez 2011: 56), but precisely what this “evidence” is performative of is left open to question. The No Movie is a performance document that is neither documentation nor score; nor is it resolved into its own visual space “of” photographic performance (Auslander 2006). Instead, it gains its meanings and charge as “evidence” that testifies in differing ways in multiple contexts; a “performance” that is suspended as a conceptual proposition, and so one that remains aesthetically, culturally, and politically unruly. The use of the document in the Conceptual art and performance discussed in this chapter is distinct from the often-stabilising effect of “documentation” in its conventionally binary and defining role as the index of ephemeral performances. Writing of “Conceptual Performance and Language Notations,” Robert Morgan defines Conceptual performance by echoing this binary, suggesting that “Conceptual performance relies to a large extent on the presentation of documents as a substitute concern for the non-theatricality of the performance” (1994: 80). However, instead of positioning the document as the place of the work, or even the work itself, these conceptual practices instrumentalise the document in their staging and so generation of the artwork’s absence or deferral in time, and so in the production of Conceptual performance itself. Thus, Siegelaub observes and supports attempts to consign “primary information” to “no place,” through ways in which the document is used, networked, contextualised, or conditioned over time. Hence also the supplemental and self-effacing nature of the documents in many of these performative

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practices, and the frequent stress on imbrications between documents and the idea of performance or events elsewhere or held in potential. These strategies also demonstrate that the “absence” of the conceptual work is no less staged than its potential or actual “presence”; that “reading” does not elide “experience,” as the viewer’s engagement is always shaped in a particular time and place, concretised in their subject-position, and the specificities of completing the work; and that such experiences are shaped in the particularities of the document and its dissemination. It is a dynamic reflected in Lucy R. Lippard’s contribution to McShine’s catalogue of the Information exhibition of 1970, which Lippard prefaces with several paragraphs listing definitions and synonyms of “ABSENCE,” and culminates in “SEE ALSO PRESENCE” (1970: 74, original emphasis). Pertinent to the document as substitute, deferral, record, or evidence of work elsewhere, Lippard’s instruction also presses towards another, linked, aspect of Conceptual art’s defining terms and problematics that gives rise to performance: the claim to the “dematerialisation” of objects and things. References Alberro, A. (2001) “At the Threshold of Art as Information,” in Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell (eds) Recording Conceptual Art, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp 1–15. —— (2003) Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity, London: MIT Press. Alberro, A. and Norvell, P. (eds) (2001) Recording Conceptual Art, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Art & Language (1975) Art & Language 1966-1975, Oxford: Museum of Modern Art Oxford. —— (2008) Works 1965-1978, 2007-2008 by Art & Language – Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden, Wielingen: Mulier Muller Gallery. —— (2016) “Art & Language – Conceptual Art, Mirrors and Selfies,” TateShots. Available online. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-klDfurJM5Y&t=4s. Accessed 13th March 2023. Art-Language (Charles Harrison) (1972) “Art-Language,” in Keith Arnatt (ed) The New Art, London: Arts Council of Great Britain, pp 69–73. Atkinson, T. (1969) “Introduction,” Art-Language, 1:1 (May), pp 1–10. Atkinson, T. and Baldwin, M. (1972) “The Index,” in Keith Arnatt (ed) The New Art, London: Arts Council of Great Britain, pp 16–19. Auslander, P. (2006) “The Performativity of Performance Documentation,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 28:3 (September), pp 1–10. Bailey, R. (2016) Art & Language International: Conceptual Art between Art Worlds, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barry, R. (1986) Robert Barry, edited by Erich Franz, Bielefeld: Kerber. —— (1999 [1988]) “Statement,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, London: MIT Press, p 426. —— (2015) “Interview,” Modern Art Notes. Podcast. Available online. https://manpodcast. tumblr.com/post/112888842443/episode-no-174-of-the-modern-art-notes-podcast. Accessed 21st June 2021.

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Béar, L. and Sharp, W. (1996 [1970]) “Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson,” in Jack Flam (ed) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp 242–52. Benjamin, W. (1999 [1934]) “The Author as Producer,” in Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds), translated by Rodney Livingstone and Others, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1, 1913-1926, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, pp 768–82. Blacksell, R. (2013) “Looking to Reading: Text-Based Conceptual Art and Typographic Discourse,” Design Issues, 29:2 (Spring), pp 60–81. Bloem, M., van Haaften-Schick, L., Martinetti, S. and Melvin, J. (eds) (2020) Seth Siegalaub “Better Read Than Dead”: Writings and Interviews 1964-2013, London: Koenig Books. Boorstin, D.J. (1992 [1962]) The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, New York, NY: Vintage Books. Brecht, B. (1964 [1957]) “Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction,” in John Willetts (ed) Brecht on Theatre: the Development of an Aesthetic, New York, NY: Hill and Wang, pp 69–76. Bryan-Wilson, J. (2016) “Seth Siegelaub’s Material Conditions,” in Leontine Coelewij and Sara Martinetti (eds) Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual Art, Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, pp 30–43. Burnham, J. (1969) “Real Time Systems,” Artforum, September, pp 49–55. —— (ed) (1970) Software: Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art, New York, NY: The Jewish Museum. —— (1975) “Steps in the Formulation of Real-Time Political Art,” in Hans Haacke, Framing and Being Framed: 7 Works, Halifax, Nova Scotia: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, pp 127–44. Celant, G. (ed) (1969) Art Povera: Conceptual, Actual or Impossible Art? London: Studio Vista. Chavoya, C.O. (1998) “Pseudographic Cinema: Asco’s No-Movies,” Performance Research, 3:1, pp 1–14. —— (2000) “Internal Exiles: The Interventionist Public and Performance Art of Asco,” in Erika Suderburg (ed) Space, Site, and Intervention: Situating Installation Art, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp 189–208. Chavoya, C.O. and Gonzalez, R. (2011) “Asco and the Politics of Revolution,” in C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzales (eds) ASCO: Elite of the Obscure, Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz Verlag, pp 37–85. Coelewij, L. and Martinetti, S. (eds) (2016) Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual Art, Amsterdam: Stedeijk Museum. Costa, E., Escari, R. and Jacoby, R. (1999 [1967]) “A Media Art (Manifesto),” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, London: MIT Press, pp 2–3. Duchamp, M. (1975 [1966]) “APROPOS OF READYMADES,” in Michel Sannouillet and Elmer Peterson (eds) The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp: Marchand du Sel, London: Thames and Hudson, pp 141–2. Durant, M.A. (2010) “Photography and Performance,” Aperture, 199 (Summer), pp 31–7. Frédéric, P. (1993) “D.H. Still a Real Artist,” in Douglas Huebler, “Variable,” etc., New York, NY: DAP/Distributed Art Publisher, pp 27–39. Freire, P. (2005) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, London: Continuum.

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Frye Burnham, L. (2011 [1987]) “Asco: Camus, Daffy Duck, and Devil Girls from East L.A.,” in C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzales (eds) ASCO: Elite of the Obscure, Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz Verlag, pp 406–9. Gamboa, H., Jr. (1998a) “No Movies,” in Harry Gamboa Jr., Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr., edited by Chon A. Noriega, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp 129–80. —— (1998b [1994]) “Light at the End of the Tunnel,” in Harry Gamboa Jr., Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr., edited by Chon A. Noriega, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp 97–120. Gamboa, H., Jr. and Gronk (1999) “Oral History Interview with Harry Gamboa Jr. and Gronk, 1999 Apr. 1-16.” Available online. https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/ oral-history-interview-harry-gamboa-jr-and-gronk-13552. Accessed 15th August 2022. —— (2011 [1976]) “Interview: Gronk and Gamboa,” in C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzales (eds) ASCO: Elite of the Obscure, Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz Verlag, pp 392–5. Gitelman, L. (2014) Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gonzalez, J.A. (2019) “Introduction,” in Jennifer A. Gonzalez, C. Ondine Chavoya, Chon Noriega and Terezita Romo (eds) Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp 1–10. Gronk and Rangel, J. (1997) “Oral History Interview with Gronk, 1997 January 20-23.” Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Available online. https://www.aaa.si.edu/ download_pdf_transcript/ajax?record_id=edanmdm-AAADCD_oh_216258. Accessed 18th December 2022. Harrison, C. (2001 [1991]) Essays on Art & Language, London: MIT Press. —— (2020 [1969]) “On Exhibitions and the World at Large: Seth Siegelaub in Conversation with Charles Harrison,” in Marja Bloem, Lauren van Haaften-Schick, Sarah Martinetti and Jo Melvin (eds) Seth Siegalaub “Better Read Than Dead”: Writings and Interviews 1964-2013, London: Koenig Books, pp 80–2. Heyel, C. (1969) Computers, Office Machines and the New Technology, New York, NY: The MacMillan Company. Huebler, D. (1993) “Variable,” etc, New York, NY: DAP/Distributed Art Publisher. Huebler, D. and Siegelaub, S. (1968) Douglas Huebler 1968, New York, NY: Seth Siegelaub. Itzin, C. (2021 [1980]) Stages in the Revolution: Political Theatre in Britain Since 1968, London: Routledge. James, D.E. (2011) “No Movies: Projecting the Real by Rejecting the Reel,” in C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzales (eds) ASCO: Elite of the Obscure, Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz Verlag, pp 179–91. Jones, A. (2011) “Traitor Prophets,” in C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzales (eds) ASCO: Elite of the Obscure, Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz Verlag, pp 107–41. Kaltenbach, S. (2020) Stephen Kaltenbach: Art Works, the Beginning and the End, edited by Constance M. Lewallen and Ted Mann, Davis, CA: Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum, UC Davis. Kaye, N. and van Winkle Oppenheim, A. (2016) Dennis Oppenheim: Body to Performance, Milan: Skira-Rizzoli. Kelly, M. and Smith, T. (1999) “A Conversation About Conceptual Art, Subjectivity and the Post-Partum Document,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, London: MIT Press, pp 450–8.

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Kosuth, J. (1991 [1969]) “Art After Philosophy,” in Joseph Kosuth, Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966-1990, edited by Gabriele Guercio, London: MIT Press, pp 13–36. Lerner, J. (2011) “Asco’s Super-8 Cinema and the Spector of Muralism,” in C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzales (eds) ASCO: Elite of the Obscure, Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz Verlag, pp 237–47. Levine, L. (1969) Cornflakes in Robert Flore and Willoughby Sharp, Place and Process. 16mm film. Edmonton: Canada, September. —— (1971) “The Information Fall-Out,” Studio International, 181:934 (June), p 264. LeWitt, S. (1969) “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” 0 to 9, 1, pp 3–5. —— (1999 [1967]) “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, London: MIT Press, pp 12–16. Lilly, J.C. (1967) Programming and Meta-Programming in the Human Biocomputer: Theory and Experiments, Baltimore, MD: Communication Research Institute. Lippard, L.R. (2009) “Curating by Numbers,” Tate Papers Landmark Exhibitions Issue. Available online. https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/12/curating-by-numbers. Accessed 3rd November 2021. Maroto, D. (2020 [2012]) “What Happens When an Artwork Becomes a Novel? David Maroto in Conversation with Seth Siegelaub,” in Marja Bloem, Lauren van HaaftenSchick, Sarah Martinetti and Jo Melvin (eds) Seth Siegalaub “Better Read Than Dead”: Writings and Interviews 1964-2013, London: Koenig Books, pp 328–33. Martinetti, S. (2015) “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor,” in Leontine Coelewij and Sara Martinetti (eds) Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual Art, Amsterdam: Stedeijk Museum, pp 14–29. Meyer, U. (ed) (1972) Conceptual Art, New York, NY: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc. —— (2016) “Interview between Seth Siegelaub and Ursula Meyer, November 1969,” in Leontine Coelewij and Sara Martinetti (eds) Seth Siegelaub: Beyond Conceptual Art, Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, pp 190–4. Morgan, R.C. (1994) “Conceptual Performance and Language Notations,” in Robert C. Morgan, Conceptual Art: An American Perspective, Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co. Inc., pp 79–100. Noriega, C.A. (1998) “No Introduction,” in Harry Gamboa Jr., Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr., edited by Chon A. Noriega, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp 1–22. —— (2011 [2008]) “Conceptual Graffiti and the Public Museum: Spray Paint LACMA,” in C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzales (eds) ASCO: Elite of the Obscure, Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz Verlag, pp 256–61. Norte, M. (2011 [1983]) “Harry Gamboa Jr.: No Movie Maker,” in C. Ondine Chavoya and Rita Gonzales (eds) ASCO: Elite of the Obscure, Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz Verlag, pp 402–5. Oppenheim, D. and Kaye, N. (1996) “Dennis Oppenheim,” in Nick Kaye, Art into Theatre: Performance Interviews and Documents, London: Routledge, pp 57–72. Osborne, P. (2002) “Survey,” in Peter Osborne (ed) Conceptual Art, London: Phaidon Press, pp 12–51. Paice, K. (1994) “Catalogue,” in Rosalind Krauss and Thomas Krens (eds) Robert Morris: The Mind-Body Problem, New York, NY: The Guggenheim Museum, pp 89–302. Piper, A. (1996) “Preparatory Notes for The Mythic Being,” in Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, Volume 1: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968-1992, London: MIT Press, pp 91–116.

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Platzker, D. (2016) “Adrian Piper’s Unities,” in Christophe Cherix, Cornelia Butler and David Platzker (eds) Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, New York, NY: The Museum of Modern Art, pp 30–49. Ramírez, M.C. (1999 [1993]) “Blueprint Circuits: Conceptual Art and Politics in Latin America,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, London: MIT Press, pp 550–62. Sackman, H. (1967) Computers, System Science, and Evolving Society, New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Sánchez-Tranuilino, M. (2019 [1995]) “Space, Power and Youth Culture: Mexican American Graffiti and Chicano Murals in East Los Angeles, 1972–1978,” in Jennifer A. Gonzalez, C. Ondine Chavoya, Chon Noriega and Terezita Romo (eds) Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp 278–91. Shanken, T. (2002) “Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art,” Leonardo, 35:4, pp 433–8. Siegelaub, S. (1968) Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Lawrence Weiner [Xerox Book], New York, NY: Siegelaub/Wender. —— (1969a) January 5-31, 1969, New York, NY: Seth Siegelaub, n.p. —— (1969b) One Month (March 1-31, 1969), New York, NY: Seth Siegelaub, n.p. Siegelaub, S. and Sciarra, L. (2020) “Interview with Seth Siegelaub, March 1972,” in Marja Bloem, Lauren van Haaften-Schick, Sarah Martinetti and Jo Melvin (eds) Seth Siegalaub “Better Read Than Dead”: Writings and Interviews 1964-2013, London: Koenig Books, pp 143–50. Siegelaub, S. and Varian, E. (2020) “Interview with Elayne H. Varian, June 1969,” in Marja Bloem, Lauren van Haaften-Schick, Sarah Martinetti and Jo Melvin (eds) Seth Siegalaub “Better Read Than Dead”: Writings and Interviews 1964-2013, London: Koenig Books, pp 63–72. Slyce, J. (2020 [2009]) “The Playmaker: Seth Siegelaub Interviewed by John Slyce,” in Marja Bloem, Lauren van Haaften-Schick, Sarah Martinetti and Jo Melvin (eds) Seth Siegalaub “Better Read Than Dead”: Writings and Interviews 1964-2013, London: Koenig Books, pp 294–8. Stallabrass, J. (2003) “The Aesthetics of Net.Art,” Qui Parle, 14:1 (Fall/Winter), pp 49–72. Šuvaković, M. (2017) Neo-Aesthetic Theory: Complexity and Complicity Must Be Defended, Wein: Hollitzer Verlag. Wetzler, R. (2016) “The Invisible Artist: Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Multiple Personalities,” ARTnews, 20th April. Available online. https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/ the-invisible-artist-lynn-hershman-leesons-multiple-personalities-6196/. Accessed 3rd November 2022. Wittgenstein, L. (1958) Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, second edition, Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd.

4 THINGS

The identification of art with language, information, and documents can be readily associated with the tendency in Conceptual art towards a “dematerialisation” of the artwork, as the conventional integrity of the art object was challenged by language’s mobility and reproducibility, and a concomitant emphasis on information flow and network. Yet “dematerialisation” was also from its introduction a sharply contested term and trajectory. “Dematerialisation” as a defining tendency within the conceptual turn was first proposed by Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler in their essay “The Dematerialization of Art” of 1968 (Lippard and Chandler 1971) and subsequently became the focus of Lippard’s profoundly influential and wide-reaching survey, Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972, published in 1973. Lippard’s title identified explicit trajectories driving Conceptual art and conceptualist practices in “a deemphasis on material aspects (uniqueness, permanence, decorative attractiveness)” (5) in favour of a portability and multiple permutations or disseminations of ideas. At this time, too, the art historian Johanna Drucker suggests, “dematerialisation” was a term whose widespread use in Conceptual art drew its impact “from the generalized concern of Conceptual artists to undo the primacy of the visual within art practice” (2004: 258). It is an impulse and implication evident in Seth Siegelaub’s propositions around “primary information” and its associated exhibitions. In Siegelaub’s January 5–31, 1969, a “dematerialisation” seems evident in Robert Barry’s first installations of 4. 88 mc Carrier Wave (FM), 1968 88 megacycles; 5 milliwatts, 9-volt DC battery and 1600 kc Carrier Wave (AM) (1968) and 1600 kilocycles; 60. Milliwatts (1968) that could be neither seen nor heard. A “deemphasis on material aspects” and rejection of the permanency and uniqueness of “the precious object” also seem apparent in Douglas Huebler’s “documents” shown in substitution for events that had occurred elsewhere; in Lawrence Weiner’s statements poised between report, DOI: 10.4324/9781315694962-4

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abstraction, and instruction; and in Joseph Kosuth’s dissemination of dictionary definitions as newspaper classified ads. However, such work’s dependency on published information and report, and so on language’s inscription, lends a complexity to Conceptual art’s “materiality”: one in which a tendency towards “dematerialisation” is linked to imbrications of words, objects, and things. In this context, too, performance develops and is defined not only in new uses of and relationships with things but also in a tendency to reconceive the object itself as unfixed, relational, and comprising material process and change. Rethinking objects

For Mel Bochner, whose sustained critique of the terms “Conceptual art” and “dematerialisation” belied the defining influence of his work on conceptual practices, an emphasis on language and the potential for multiple iterations nevertheless created a radical new context for his artwork, on which he reflected in an interview with Elayne Varian of 1969: The piece could be in my studio, and in someone’s collection, and in an exhibition at the same time. It doesn’t come down in one place and go up in another. In this sense the piece is not a portable object, it’s a portable idea. As long as the internal relationships of measurements and materials remain constant it’s the same work no matter where it is. Physical location is merely a minor variable […] I think that the real subject of these pieces is boundaries— the perceptual boundaries of thought […] how much of it can exist without any physicality. Bochner 2008a: 57–8 Lippard’s work also exemplified the portability of conceptual work in her organisation of the “Numbers Shows,” on which she periodically collaborated with Siegelaub; exhibitions Lippard executed during the compilation and immediate aftermath of the publication of Six Years, including 557,087 (Seattle, 1969) and 955,000 (Vancouver, 1970). Lippard’s six Numbers Shows, each, following her initial exhibition in Manhattan, taking as its name the population of its host city, were facilitated by the reduction of each exhibited work to a set of instructions on an index card file by the artist to be realised in situ: a tactic facilitating Lippard’s transportation of the information (and ideas) necessary to each exhibition in a single envelope. With overlapping but varying artist-participants and artworks, the Numbers Shows engaged with the significant ground Lippard was to mark out in Six Years, while also demonstrating this new work’s potential for distribution, multiplication, and simultaneous dissemination; a process extended in the publication of the index card instructions as accompanying catalogues. Here, too, the “dematerialisation” of the object into language was implicitly equated with a democratisation, with an availability and transience that undermined the “precious object” and

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its supporting structures of the gallery, including the valorisation of singularity and permanency in art. In her essay with Chandler, Lippard had also remarked on an “ultra-conceptual or dematerialized art” identified with practices, “some of which have almost entirely eliminated the visual-physical element” (261). Strategies aligned with “dematerialisation” in this sense frequently incorporated time, emphasising anticipation and ephemerality by subjecting the “object” to delay, or enacting processes of erasure. Although underrepresented in her role and influence, Christine Kozlov’s work identified conceptual practices with processes and states of erasure, proposing the work’s seeming disappearance. Kozlov had contributed to the Opening Exhibition of Normal Art of 1967, which she organised with Joseph Kosuth and that presented the first public iterations of Kosuth’s Proto-Investigations. Subsequently, she contributed to Siegelaub’s One Month (March 1–31, 1969), with a proposal for a continuous recording: a one-hour looped audio tape, silently recording for 24 hours—12 am to 12 am, March 19, 1969—with an outcome at the 24th hour of one hour of ambient recording, as each successive recorded hour erased the previous hour and thus “new information erased old information” (Kozlov 1970). Kozlov participated in Information at MoMA, New York, 1970, by way of Telegram Addressed to Kynaston McShine, its curator: a “telegram containing no information,” stating “Particulars related to the information not contained herein constitute the form of this action” (Kozlov 1970). For the first exhibition using the term in its title, Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects in New York in 1970, Kozlov showed Information: No Theory (1970), a realisation of her proposal for Siegelaub and subsequently her most well-known work. Lippard also included Kozlov in her Numbers Show in Seattle (1969) and then Vancouver (1970), only to receive an index card seemingly without instructions, prompting Lippard to record Kozlov’s proposal as “nothing” (Melvin 2022: 207). Robert Barry’s further collaboration with Siegelaub for One Month (March 1–31, 1969), announced the first of his Inert Gas Series/Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton, Xenon/From a Measured Volume to Indefinite Expansion (Siegelaub 1969), also pressed towards the immaterial in photographing the imperceptible release of two cubic feet of helium on 5th March in the Mojave Desert, California. Barry’s subsequent series of short text-works on paper or index cards also seemingly pursued a “dematerialisation” by implicitly referring to the art object or its substitute—“something”—in delay, specifying: “Something which can never be any specific thing” (1969) and “Something which is very near in place and time, but not yet known to me (1.43pm, 1 March, 1971),” the latter in numerous iterations from 1969 to 1971. In other contemporaneous work, the ephemerality of performance provided for further erasures or elisions of the presence of the artwork and its material trace or remainder. These included Adrian Piper’s otherwise undocumented “infiltrations” of the everyday in her Catalysis series (1970–1) that surfaced as incidental rumour or hearsay in Village Voice reviews by John Perrault explored here as a

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mode of “infiltration” in Chapter 5; or events such as Vito Acconci’s Proximity Piece (1970), whose stipulations displayed in the gallery created self-fulfilling expectations of “performance,” in this case of an intrusion on a viewer’s personal space potentially enacted by other, unwitting gallery visitors. Reflecting on these tendencies, Philip Kaiser’s exhibition and catalogue, Disappearing—California c. 1970 surveys work by Chris Burden, Bas Jan Ader, and Jack Goldstein that relied on withdrawals and disappearances followed by “rumour”; a narrative tactic he identifies as “then a genre commonly taken advantage of by artists” (Kaiser 2019: 12). For DISAPPEARING. December 22–24. 1971, Burden notes, “I disappeared for three days without prior notice to anyone. On these three days my whereabouts were unknown” (Kaiser 2019: 12). Only on Burden’s return was the period of his absence recuperated as “performance,” its details remaining obscure save for the relics through which Burden’s ephemeral actions were disseminated: here, an otherwise conspicuously empty Perspex vitrine displays Burden’s brief stipulation. Kaiser also notes Goldstein’s and Ader’s thematising and repeated re-enactment of narratives of disappearance in their performative works: disappearances underlined by Goldstein’s decision that his studio assistants should sign his work, while Ader’s culminating installation, document, and performance, In Search of the Miraculous (1975), incorporated an attempt to navigate a solo Atlantic crossing which he did not survive. Yet however different the propositions, documentations, or reports of such “ultra-conceptual art” may seem to be from the “art object,” in becoming known these actions inevitably succumb to Mel Bochner’s contemporaneous observation that “Outside the spoken word, no thought can exist without a sustaining support” (1970: 73). Responding similarly to the publication of Lippard’s essay with Chandler, Terry Atkinson had written to Lippard on behalf of the recently founded collective Art & Language, objecting that “All the examples of artworks (ideas) you refer to in your article are, with a few exceptions, art-objects.” In his letter, from which Lippard published extracts in Six Years, Atkinson suggests that “if you are talking about art-objects de-materializing, then you would be obliged to talk about objects of which there was now no physical trace” (1999: 52–3). Indeed, the persistence of the material in Conceptual art from the outset was such that, for Bochner, “In the context of visual art what could the term ‘de-materialisation’ mean? I find that it contains an essential contradiction which renders it useless as an idea,” concluding that “There is no art which does not bear some burden of physicality” (1970: 73). It is a tension that also drove tactical changes in Kosuth’s early practices, as he later reported, “It was the feeling I had about the gap between materials and ideas that led me to present a series of Photostats of the dictionary definition of water. I was interested in just presenting the idea of water” (Kotz 2010: 186, original emphasis). Consistent with this contemporary scepticism and debate, and despite aspirations towards “the abolition of the art-object” (Meyer 1972: XV), Drucker concludes along with other critics that “it should be evident by now that

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LeWitt, A Wall Divided Vertically into Fifteen Equal Parts, Each with a Different Line Direction and Colour, and All Combinations, 1970. © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022. Photo: Tate

FIGURE 4.1 Sol

[….] there is no such thing as a ‘dematerialised’ or ‘immaterial’ work within the canon of Conceptual art” (2004: 258). The conflation of the “dematerialised” with the “immaterial” work in Conceptual art, however, may be read as reproducing a binary opposition between the conceptual and material that Lippard’s proposition disrupts. Lippard’s and Bochner’s seemingly divergent sensibilities arguably reflect in differing ways the first published formulation of a “Conceptual Art” authored by Sol LeWitt in his “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” for Artforum in June 1967. In “a conceptual form of art,” LeWitt proposed, the privileging of the concept of the work “means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand,” such that, “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art” (1999: 12). LeWitt’s definition captures the procedures he applied to his three-dimensional work such as Serial Project, 1 (ABCD) (1966) and wall drawings, beginning with Wall Drawing 1: Drawing Series II 18 (A & B) in October 1968 and further elaborated throughout his working life, in which a “pre-set” concept and method is specified in whose iterations the “idea” becomes subject to local conditions (the height of the wall, the specificities of the room) so as to produce site-specific variations. Of these, LeWitt envisaged that “Some plans would require millions of variations, and some a limited number, but both are finite. Other plans imply infinity” (13). By executing a work fully conceived to avoid his or others’ subjectivity in its iteration, LeWitt throws attention back on to the concept while attempting

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to “ameliorate this emphasis on materiality as much as possible or to use it in a paradoxical way. (To convert it into an idea)” (15). Thus, in this early proposal for a Conceptual art, “materiality” is compromised or changed rather than “abolished,” as the conceptual work’s morphology is placed in service of an idea, such that “The work of art can be perceived only after it is completed” (13). Furthermore, LeWitt’s differentiation also introduces time into Conceptual art, by way of a delay between a linguistic proposal and its material iteration and permutation, a process in which the concept of LeWitt’s “Conceptual Art” becomes fully readable. Despite the apparent teleology of its title, Lippard compiled Six Years to mark a change of ideas and broad direction of travel, noting: “I planned this book to expose the chaotic network of ideas in the air” (5). Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972 extended Lippard and Chandler’s earlier observational approach, declaring in its full 87-word title its method as a cross-referenced, chronologically organised, annotated bibliography “focused on conceptual, information or idea art” and tracing a progressive, golden thread of conceptualism running through “such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems” and many others. It is also this account of a looser network rather than a linear development that provides Six Years with its influence over and above earlier and equally exhaustive surveys such as Ursula Meyer’s Conceptual Art (1972) which heralded “the abolition of the art-object” (XV). It is an influence evident not only in the contemporaneous sway of Lippard’s narrative but also in subsequent reappraisals, such as the exhibition and book, Materialising Six Years (Morris and Bonin 2012). In elaborating a tendency that remained inclusive, Six Years also documented changing attitudes towards and uses of materials, things, and objects, implicitly posing questions over the collateral effects an imperative of dematerialisation might give rise to. Instead of effecting the eradication of the “precious object” in a simple binary privileging of the conceptual over the material, Lippard notes in her brief preface to Six Years: Other artists were concerned with allowing materials rather than systems to determine the form of their work, reflected in the ubiquity of temporary “piles” of materials around 1968 (done by, among others, Andre, Baxter, Beuys, Bollinger, Ferrer, Kaltenbach, Long, Louw, Morris, Nauman, Oppenheim, Saret, Serra, Smithson). This premise was soon applied to such ephemeral materials as time itself, space, nonvisual systems, situations, unrecorded experience, unspoken ideas, and so on (5) It is in this persistence of material and the material support in conceptual practices that relationships between “word” and “object” are also elaborated. Bochner thus emphasises not simply the inevitability of a “sustaining support” for the expression of thought but also grounds this in the predominance of language, suggesting

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in his “Notecards” of 1969 that: “Language is always the foreground—no system of images or objects exist independently of language” (2008d: 64). In this equation, “dematerialisation” might suggest the effect of conceptual strategies on objects and things, where Conceptual art does not so much “abolish” the object as render “things” and materials malleable or treat objects as if subject to flow, change, and relation, or as equivalent to or subsumed into language and information. Such dynamics provided for a further definition of conceptual work qualified by its incorporation of materials, leading, for example, the artist Tom Marioni at the time of his founding of The Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA) in San Francisco in 1970 to define Conceptual art as “[i]dea oriented situations not directed at the production of static objects” (Marioni 2003: 104). Terry Fox, who from 1970 to 1973 shared the first MOCA space with Marioni as his studio, similarly deflected attention from fixed forms, including “performance,” in favour of the ephemeral qualities of a “particular place” and “mood” (Sharp 1971b: 70) to which people, materials, and things might be subject, leading him to privilege the term “situation” over “performance” (White 1979: 5). The critic and gallerist Brian O’Doherty, writing under the pseudonym “Sigmund Bode” in “Placement as Language” for the introductory statement for Aspen 5–6 in 1967, elaborated a symbiosis between words and objects consistent with Conceptual art’s identification with language, extending it also to “persons” as actors or agents in a linguistic network, suggesting: It should be possible to construe a situation in which persons, things, abstractions, become simply nouns and are thus potentially objectified. As “objects” they may be heaped or dumped in any way […] Or they may perhaps be conjugated in such a way that these positions imply “verbs” in the spaces (silences) between them. Bode 1999: 18, original emphasis In suggesting these equivalences and that the resulting linguistic “objects” might be read as nouns and function as verbs, O’Doherty deploys language as an analogy for the operation of a work in space, implying that object-forms are active in relation to each other: a sensibility that is manifested in performance by Terry Fox, Joseph Beuys, and others. Bochner’s critique of dematerialisation and its implicit imbrication of language and objects surfaced in aspects of his most well-known and influential early work. Bochner had inaugurated his work with the 1966 installation Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art, at the School of Visual Arts, New York, that presented four identical copies of a weighty book-like file, each presented on its own low plinth, containing 100 examples of preparatory material on paper for artworks, engineering projects, and other plans in several languages. It is an installation that in his defining essay “Conceptual Art 1962-1969,” Benjamin Buchloch proposed as “probably the first truly conceptual exhibition” (1990: 109). Bochner’s replacement of objects with texts to

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be read, however, is qualified by an object-like repetition defining its installationform, which emphasises an equivalence between “visible things on paper” and the book’s material presence, as a “thing.” It is an equivalence Bochner consistently addressed in his installation of words or language into the conventional place of the art object, tactics in which it is apparent that a collapse of artworks into discourse does not erase materiality in art but addresses or engages with it. In this respect, Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily to be Viewed as Art is in dialogue with Minimalism’s phenomenological and performative emphasis through the physical demands of “reading” the installation. Of this arrangement, Bochner later recalled: My intention was to transform the experience of the viewer into that of a reader. But the stands, at table height (31”), intentionally made the experience of reading the books while standing extremely uncomfortable. As the reader finished one book and moved on to the second, the growing realisation that they were identical posed a choice—to stop or to continue? 2008f: 177, original emphasis

Bochner, Language is not transparent, 1969. Presented anonymously 2009. © Mel Bochner. Photo: Tate

FIGURE 4.2 Mel

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It is in this context that one of Bochner’s most well-known series on paper and canvas, Language is not transparent, addresses the materiality of language on the page. Bochner’s reiterations of Language is not transparent are permuted in painted, print, and textual forms from 1969 up to and including 2022, at the time of writing. The series implicitly plays on Joseph Kosuth’s definition of Conceptual art in tautology, by realising in its form that which it states: in this case, that language, when inscribed, is not transparent. In his comments, too, Bochner emphasised as early as 1969 that constructing a “dualism” between concept and material is “too simple to convey what actually occurs,” stressing that “no thinking can be done without something […] language is not transparent” (2008d: 69, original emphasis). In this context, the conceptual emphasis in Bochner’s work explores not so much the dematerialisation of objects into the circulation of language or information, as imbrications, equivalences, and relationships between words and things, concepts and materials, and how the opacity of written language affects meaning and identity, but also experience. It is this aspect of language-based conceptual work that Ruth Blacksell also addresses in her discussion of “Text-Based Conceptual Art and Typographic Discourse,” directing attention to the effect of typographic choices and design in early work by Carl Andre, Dan Graham, and Vito Acconci, as well Lawrence Weiner, and “the idea of language as a sculptural material” (2013: 71) in which page-design brings Conceptual art in relation to concrete poetry. Equally, though, Blacksell notes, typography may also serve to suppress visual interest in choices no less determinant of meaning and identity, striking examples of which include Kosuth’s attempt at “staging art as pure information” (73, original emphasis) in The Tenth Investigation (Art as Idea as Idea): The Information Room (1970) or Art & Language’s page-designs for the densely textual and “un-illustrated” pages of Art-Language (73). Read in this way, an emphasis on the materiality of “inscribed” language also had its counterpart in the discursive elaboration or effect of “impossible objects,” in which language is used to describe, invoke, or reproduce the “art object,” while simultaneously commenting upon it. Thus, the art historian Terry Smith, also part of Art & Language in the early 1970s, characterised a first phase of Conceptual art between 1965 and 1969 as being “object-directed,” in work operating at the edges of minimalism, performance, and environment. In this context, one mode of language’s critique or unravelling of the object-form “was to create impossible objects” in language itself. Smith goes on to suggest that “Some of these, like Nauman’s, were emotional objects, with somatic psychic residue. But most were theoretical objects, instantiating speculation about art itself. Like algebraic solids, or DNA models. This is where language became so crucial” (Kelly and Smith 1999: 452). Such language occupies the place of the object, or proposes an object, whose conventional definition and function its presence cannot fulfil. Smith reads early work by Art & Language through such a lens, noting its “doubled meta-discursivity”: its critical reflection on the production of “impossible

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objects” such as Index 01 (1972) and simultaneous self-critical attention to this process. More broadly, however, a trajectory in Conceptual art towards language as a “dematerialisation” of the art object tends to simultaneously effect a reciprocation in language towards the visual and the material, as in Bochner’s early work. Language may also “simulate” or produce “objects” for attention or be reconceived as “sculpture.” In these ways, language may occupy the conventional place of the object (Joseph Kosuth), “reading” might be reconceived as a “sculptural event” (Douglas Huebler), or words might be purposefully treated as “things” (Robert Smithson). The erosion of the conventional permanence, fixity, or autonomy of objects in Conceptual art through a use of language that foregrounds its own opacity is resonant with more recent understandings of “things” derived from philosophy and the sciences and particularly understandings of material culture. Observing a “return to things” in theory and criticism in social sciences and humanities, the archaeologist Ian Hodder has elaborated “The Entanglement of Humans and Things” (2014), suggesting that an understanding that “humans and things are relationally produced” (19) has been integrated into many disciplines. Hodder subsequently extended this thinking around “things” to human relationships with words, and so language. Critical to this position and project is a definition of “things” that challenges assumptions of materiality and permanence, in such a way that the functioning of language—and of the word—is imbricated into material culture and its practice. In the second volume elaborating Studies in Human-Thing Entanglement (2016), Hodder reflected on the connection of such ideas to the physical sciences, emphasising that strictly speaking: there are no things at all, only flows […] things are themselves just flows of matter, energy or information. Things are unstable and unruly. Material things decay and erode, institutions crumble, ideas and thoughts pass fleetingly. Some appear to stay, to have duration, but looked at from sub-atomic or long-term perspectives, all is in flux. 2016: 9 This is an understanding also reflected in practices Lippard incorporated into Six Years, especially in the artwork and influence of artists associated with the arte povera movement that was concentrated in northern Italy, whose influence Lippard specifically notes. Arte povera was first identified as such by Germano Celant in his curation of Arte Povera: Im Spazio, in Genoa in 1967, and his subsequent survey publication, Art Povera: Conceptual, Actual or Impossible Art? (Celant 1969). In the work of Giovanni Anselmo, Mario Merz, Giuseppe Penone, Gilberto Zorio, and others, a focus on material processes, incorporating energy, growth and transformation, effected a frequent breaking down of conventional object-forms into organic, chemical, and environmental processes. For Penone, for example, his evolution of sculptural form re-aligned

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FIGURE 4.3 Giuseppe Penone, Tree of 12 Metres, 1980–2. © Archivo Penone. © ADAGP,

Paris and DACS, London 2023. Photo: Tate

the art object with processes of growth and ecological systems, in the pursuit of sculpture as an anthropological uncovering of “natural” forms, which asserted human entanglement with living and non-living things. Thus, Penone suggests that the tree, which has a strong presence in the history of his work, “is memory”: as it grows and records its form in its structure. The tree is fluid, clay is fluid, stone is fluid, water is fluid. Fluids conserve memory, fluids are memory. All materials preserve the memory of their experience, in their form. The ability to recognise and decipher memory is culture. The memory of a contact, of an action, is culture. Sculpture is the revelation of the form of memory. Celant 1989: 184 In Hodder’s work, “entanglement” arises out of the influential propositions of post-processual or interpretive archaeology, whose definition was led by Hodder

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in the 1980s alongside Daniel Miller (Miller and Tilley 1984), Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley (1987), Julian Thomas (1996), and others. In a radical revision of the “new” archaeology of the 1960s and its claims to provide objective knowledge of the past, interpretive archaeology proposed a re-alignment towards the social sciences by conceiving of contemporary archaeologists as social actors, engaged in activities no less certain or complex than those they investigated. Thus, rather than reveal an objective past through scientific method, archaeology was reconsidered “a material practice in the present, making things (knowledge, narrative, books, reports …) of the material traces of the past” of which “there is no final and definitive account” (Shanks and Hodder 1997: 5). Hodder’s elaboration of “entanglement” extends this thinking towards relationships between humans and “things” (and “objects”) as equal actors in the present, in which humans are realised in transforming social networks defined in their entanglement with (and dependency on) other humans and with things, just as things are defined in their entanglement with (and entrapment by) each other (2014: 20). Entanglement also proposes the agency of things and objects within such networks. Hodder notes that “discussions of agency, vibrancy, and vitality of mute things, have converged on some version of the idea that subject and object, mind and matter, human and thing co-constitute each other” (2014: 19). In setting out human-thing entanglement, then, Hodder foregrounds this agency, whereby “materials and objects have affordances that are continuous from context to context” (2014: 25). This approach, Hodder argues, in which things are understood to simultaneously enable and constrain humans, turns “our typically anthropocentric view of the world on its head” as entanglement examines “the relationship between people and material things from the point of view of things” (2016: 129). Furthermore, this extends to language and its operation, specifically towards “words and ideas.” In his later refinement of “entanglement,” Hodder suggests: If we follow Heidegger (1971) and define a “thing” as an entity that draws other entities together, then words and ideas are both things. […] In learning to speak we take on or react to the accepted meanings of words and thus get entangled in a history of associations, meanings and assumptions that guide our thought processes. When I start speaking a sentence I am already entrapped in those meanings and grammars such that I can only end the sentence in a limited number of ways. I am entangled in the broader cultural meanings of words and in the way that I have started the sentence. 2016: 4 Rather than conflate Conceptual art with immateriality, “the dematerialisation of the art object” was part of a reconception of materiality in critiques of the uniqueness, permanency, mute form, and valorisation of “the precious object.” Here, too, performance emerged through Conceptual art in a working over of dynamics

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between ephemerality and materiality; in equivalences and affects between words and objects; in relationships between social actors and things; and in elaborations of the “language” and seeming agency of materials and objects. Words are material: Robert Smithson, Mel Bochner

In June 1967, the artist Robert Smithson authored a press release for the New York Dwan Gallery’s exhibition Language I, which he had curated with Sol LeWitt, re-titling the show, Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read. Followed by three further Language exhibitions at Dwan in 1968, 1969, and 1970, the series surveyed, elaborated, and Charles Harrison suggested, in Language II and III, “promoted” language-based work connected to the gallery’s support for Minimalism (2001: 44). Indeed, Smithson’s redrawing of the exhibition title for Language I is distinct from Kosuth’s, Siegelaub’s, or Art & Language’s attempts to displace the visual with discursive or linguistic “objects” or “propositions,” directing attention instead towards dual perspectives and identities especially in relationships between words and things. Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read referenced Smithson’s work on paper, A heap of Language (1966), that was reproduced on the press release and formed part of the first Dwan exhibition; a pencil drawing comprising words selected from Roget’s Thesaurus that have fallen into a “lexical heap,” beginning, when read from its apex, with synonyms for “language; phraseology, etc., 569; speech.” Smithson’s arrangement of A heap of Language maintains a 40-degree “slope,” which Craig Dworkin notes is consistent with “the angle of repose of moderately damp soil, sandy gravel, or crushed asphalt” comprising his later earth works, such as Asphalt Rundown (1969), Concrete Pour (1969), and “the

FIGURE 4.4 Robert Smithson (1938–1973), A heap of Language, 1966. New York, Mu-

seum of Modern Art (MoMA). Pencil on graph paper, 6 1/2 × 22″ (16.5 cm × 55.9 cm). Gift of Jan Christiaan Braunin in honour of Agnes Gund and Marie-Josée Kravis in appreciation of their extraordinary leadership and dedication to The Museum of Modern Art. Acc. no.: 1720.2015. © 2022. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. © Holt-Smithson Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY, and DACS, London 2022

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soil heaped on the eponymous structure in Partially Buried Woodshed” at Kent State University (1970) (Dworkin 2019). Smithson’s brief text announcing the exhibition also unfolds in the manner of A heap of Language: in partial sequiturs and lists of imperatives, suggesting reversals and exchanges in which conventional binaries are disturbed or broken down, including that between concept and material form. Here, Smithson invokes a sense of language in transformation, emphasising traversals and exchanges between words and things, and between reading and viewing. Language, Smithson asserts in the context of this “drawing,” “is built, not written,” while “Words for mental processes are all derived from physical things” and “References are often reversed so that the ‘object’ takes the place of the ‘word’” (1996b: 61, original emphasis). Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read emphasises oscillations and reversals that may be “impossible within language,” but which correspond to Smithson’s theme of the “literal” properties of the word on the page: its material presence, even as it is read. Smithson thus remarks, “Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification,” as “[r]eferences are often reversed so that the ‘object’ takes the place of the ‘word’” (61). In an interview of 1969, Smithson emphasised: I’m concerned with the physical properties of both language and material, and I don’t think that they are discrete. They are both physical entities, but they have different properties, and within these properties you have these mental experiences, and it’s not simply empirical facts […] the perceptual material is always putting the concepts in jeopardy Smithson and Wheeler 1996: 208 Smithson also speculates over treatments of words, as if they could be considered in isolation in the manner of “things,” if only to amplify their referential nature, noting of Language 1, that “The power of a word lies in the very inadequacy of the context it is placed” which, he concludes, is “in short, a paradox” (1996b: 61). In May 1966, Smithson had joined with Mel Bochner to author and publish The Domain of the Great Bear, a language-work embedded in the Fall issue of the journal Art Views. Bochner and Smithson’s project foreshadowed Seth Siegelaub’s concept of artwork as “primary information,” within which Siegelaub proposed “the catalogue can become the exhibition” (Meyer 1972: XIV) and Dan Graham’s Homes for America, discussed in Chapter 5, whose first iteration was published the following December. Led by their discussion of “how to subvert the gallery system” (Bochner 2008b: 170), Bochner and Smithson’s The Domain of the Great Bear disrupted conventional oppositions between an artwork’s production, reproduction, and consumption in a form of “institutional subversion” (172). In his subsequent “infiltration” of Arts Magazine, Graham’s essay surveyed and represented the repetitive design of suburban architecture after the manner and methods of

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Minimal and serial art, to produce an “artwork” that refused to announce itself as such. The Domain of the Great Bear similarly occupied a context that conventionally reproduced rather than produced the artwork. In 1994, Bochner recalled, “by going directly to reproduction” he and Smithson sought “to make a work where there was no original. We thought that by using the art magazine as the vehicle, it would transform what is expected as a secondary source into a primary medium” (170). In doing so, the essay adopts a position at once “in” and “out” of institutional “art” contexts—and its discourses—so circumventing an artwork’s commercial circulation and disturbing its identity and the conventional claims to ownership that produce its “value.” Bochner proposes: Domain was subversive because it was camouflaged. We wanted to bring the reader into it without knowing what they were getting into. It looked like everything else in the magazine, only more so. It wasn’t in quotation marks; it was set right into the context. 171 However, in contrast to Homes for America, which purposefully adopts the transparent style of a conventional Arts Magazine essay, The Domain of the Great Bear emphasises language’s opacity. Bochner reflected, “The idea was that a reader would read this and be baffled […] Our intention was to disrupt the flow by surprising the reader with something unexpected, which would then call into question everything in the magazine” (171). Combining text, photographs, and line illustrations, The Domain of the Great Bear presents narratives set around the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, imagining it as “in the centre of the infinite” (Bochner and Smithson 1966: 45) and accounting for its architecture and technical facilities as if it were a spaceship of unknown capacity. The authors note that, at its perimeter, the Planetarium illustrates “Rocket” displays “caught between the old humanism and the new technologism” (46). An “interminable collection of ideas as objects” (44), the Planetarium’s own narrative demonstrations are imagined as spanning from the dinosaurs to “the Earth doomed to a frigid death as the Sun gradually cools” (51). The “show” that commences within the Domain itself offers a chaotic vision of the seasons in their relation to the Solar System and the Earth, in which a collapse of distinctions enacts an entropic process, “eliminating the passage of time” (50) to arrive at a new, but static equilibrium. A series of imagined demonstrations then unfold, including “illustrations of catastrophe and remote times” in which, “Time is deranged. Oceans become puddles […] Disasters of all kinds flood the mind at the speed of light. Anthropomorphic concerns are extinct in this vortex of disposable universes” (51). In these ways, The Domain of the Great Bear anticipates Smithson’s allusions in his writings to entropic change towards stasis (1996a) and geology and geological time (1996c, 1996d, 1996f) inflected through references to science fiction, infinity, as well as “timelessness” and “deep time” (1996e). Thematically, Domain also

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Smithson (1938–1973), Non-Site (Palisades-Edgewater, N.J.), 1968. Enamel on aluminium with stones and ink on paper drawing. Dimensions variable. Purchased with funds from the Howard and Jean Lipman Foundation, Inc. Inv. N.: 69.6a-b. New York, Whitney Museum of American Art. © 2022. Digital image Whitney Museum of American Art/ Licensed by Scala. © Holt-Smithson Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY, and DACS, London 2022

FIGURE 4.5 Robert

evidences Smithson’s poetic interest in the reversal, exchange or collapse of conventionally opposing terms and contexts, as “Oceans become puddles,” or time becomes “deranged” and stasis prevails. Formally, the essay erodes distinctions between the literal (material) and metaphorical (signifying) properties of writing, while its occupation of Arts Magazine attempts to collapse conventional distinctions between art and discourse, production and reproduction, in which “works of art” are invariably defined. This traversal of seemingly mutually exclusive terms, including the conceptual and material, became increasingly important in Smithson’s site-related work and linked publication; developments crystallised in his practice and writing around “Non-Sites” from 1968. Presented in the gallery in the manner of “minimalist” steel bins containing matter from a designated exterior site, Smithson’s materials were frequently juxtaposed with information, photographs, or a map making clear

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its indexical function. In these respects, the Non-Sites suggest the functioning of language or the sign. Thus, the critic Lawrence Alloway argues, writing in the definitive catalogue of Smithson’s sculpture, that the relation of Non-Site to site is “like that of language to the world: it is a signifier, and the Site is that which is signified. It is not the referent but the language system which is in the foreground” (1981: 42). Alloway’s comments emphasise the Non-Site’s functioning as a signifier whose purpose is to prompt the thinking of the absent site. As Smithson points out, however, the Non-Site is “a very ponderous, weighty absence” (Smithson and Norvell 1996: 193): a sign configured of an array of materials in removal from the place they evidence. It is an absence of the site only reinforced in the event of a literal use of Smithson’s maps. In A Nonsite, Franklin, New Jersey (1968) in which it is evident from its wall-map that “Tours to sites are possible,” Smithson notes that what results “is a map that will take you somewhere, but when you get there you won’t really know where you are” (Béar and Sharp 1996: 249). Although guided towards various “points of collection” from which Smithson gathered the material collected in bins adjacent to the floor to complete the Non-Site, the artist warns the visitor that: once you get there, there’s no destination. Or if there is information, the information is so low level it doesn’t focus on any particular spot … so the site is evading you all the while it’s directing you to it […] There is no object to go toward. In the very name ‘Non-Site’ you’re really making a reference to a particular site but that particular site evades itself, or it’s incognito […] The location is held in suspense. Smithson and Wheeler 1996: 218 As “language” to be looked at, or an “object” to be read, the Non-Site’s significance lies in its capacity to invite readings that elide its materiality, presence, and significance in favour of the specific place of which it is an index. It is a dynamic amplified in Smithson’s “Dialectic of Site and Non-Site,” published as a footnote to Smithson’s essay addressing his most well-known monumental work, “The Spiral Jetty” (1972). Here, the ostensibly binary opposition between “Site” and “Non-Site,” material and concept, is disturbed in its dialectical reconfiguration, in oscillations between terms. Smithson proposes that where “Site” is characterised by “open limits,” the Non-Site presents “closed limits,” and the subsequent “dialectic” unfolds in a series of polarities that imply thesis and antithesis: including outer coordinates/inner coordinates, indeterminate/determinate, scattered/contained, reflection/mirror, many/one, and so forth. In each case, a reading of the materiality and limits of the Non-Site produces a conceptual mapping of the “Site” as its antithesis. It is a dynamic relationship which, Smithson argued, is “a course of hazards, a double path made up of signs, photographs and maps that belong to both sides of the dialectic at the same time. Both sides are present and absent at the same time” (1996g: 153). Thus, Smithson charts these movements

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from the material but abstract sign of the Non-Site to the “real”, unseen site it constitutes and is constituted in: Site Open Limits A Series of Points Outer Coordinates Subtraction Indeterminate (Certainty) Scattered (Information) Reflection Edge Some Place (physical) Many

Non-Site Closed Limits An Array of Matter Inner Coordinates Addition Determinate (Uncertainty) Contained (Information) Mirror Centre No Place (abstract) One Smithson 1996g: 152–3

Smithson’s Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read ends with a clarification that captures these equations between language and writing, and material and sculptural process. Added in 1972, as a footnote to the 1966 Dwan Gallery press release, Smithson states, “My sense of language is that it is matter and not ideas—i.e., ‘printed matter’” (1996b: 61). In earlier conversations with Dennis Wheeler recorded in 1969–70, Smithson had already reflected on the materiality of language, comparing “the action of elements to the action of writing,” suggesting that “a rock” might “be compared to a word,” and that, “In a sense they are interchangeable …. They are both material, and there’s no escape from that” (Smithson and Wheeler 1996: 209). Captured in what Lippard described as his “objectoriented writing” (1997: 23), Smithson’s emphasis on the “material” of the printed word addresses the “dematerialisation of the art object” through the complex materiality of the sign—narrated in the dialectic of Non-Site and site. Here, the “indeterminate” character of site can only be approached in its absence (as a function of its signs), through the map, the “artwork,” or Non-Site, bringing Smithson to the conclusion that not only is “Non-Site” defined in its “weighty” absence, but also that “The site is a place where a piece should be but isn’t” (Béar and Sharp 1996: 249–50). In this regard, Smithson provides for a shifting co-definition of terms, functions, and places, in which matter is bound up with concepts, just as concepts are contaminated by their inevitable materialisation. He emphasises: My work is impure; it is clogged with matter. […] There is no escape from matter. There is no escape from the physical nor is there any escape from the mind. The two are in a constant collision course. You might say my work is like an artistic disaster. It is a quiet catastrophe of mind and matter. Smithson and Norvell 1996: 194

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Where Smithson’s Non-Sites play on the materiality of the sign as an index of a “dematerialised” site, Bochner’s installation-work after Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily to be Viewed as Art brought these differences to bear on the “present tense” of space associated with Minimalism. Analogously to Smithson’s emphasis on the materiality of language, and consistent with his claim that “no system of images or objects exist independently of language” (Bochner 2008d: 64), Bochner’s Measurement series from 1968 to 1971 brought information directly into the configuration of “specific sites.” In this regard, Bochner’s focus is the experiential disjunction produced by “language” systems encountered in place. Recalling his early engagement with language, Bochner notes: I tried to make a correlation between visual language and verbal language. My frustration was the loss of a very important dimension—the dimension of my experience. I found it was impossible to map theory onto experience. So, the apparent ambiguity or the gaps came from the nature of the confrontation between thought and reality, and not from any intention to create paradox. Halbriech 1980: 3 In this context, Measurement: Room (1969), of which there were many permutations, responds directly to Bochner’s objection to the term “Conceptual art,” of which he notes, “The unfortunate implication is of a somewhat magical/mystical leap from one mode of existence to another” (Bochner 1971). Bochner’s remark reflects on the weakness of binary oppositions between the conceptual and material, or information and experience, and his work reflects on ways in which our relationships with things are constituted in the dynamics between them. Thus, The Domain of the Great Bear strikes a disjunctive relationship with its art journal context by playing with nonsense and fantasy; Language is not transparent demonstrates the non-semantic aspects of inscription by re-stamping or overlaying its own linguistic proposition. Bochner’s Measurement: Room uncovers analogous disjunctions in responding to Minimalist interventions into spatial experience in the gallery. “So-called Minimalism,” Morris recounted in relation to his early white, geometric “unitary forms” intended for the “white cube” gallery, was a confrontation with the body. It was the notion that the object recedes in its self-importance. It participates in a complex experience that includes the object, your body, the space, and the time of your experience. It’s locked together in these things. Morris and Kaye 1997

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Bochner, Measurement: Room, 1969 (installation view of the exhibition ‘Painting and Sculpture Changes 2009’, MoMA, NY, January 1st through December 31st, 2009). Photo: Tom Griesel (copyright MoMA, NY). IN2063.9. © 2009. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence

FIGURE 4.6 Mel

Bochner’s method follows his realisation that the built environment also incorporates standard measurements, and that such “measurements are so deeply embedded in our experience that they regulate our perception yet remain completely invisible” (2008a: 57). Measurement: Room thus uncovers the mathematical regulation of the “real room” of its exhibition, to produce a phenomenology of information: a dissonant experience of reading spatial experience in its occurrence. Bochner conceived of these installations as examining critically how experience is formed through architecture, remarking in 1969 on his effort “to question the weight of that experience […] to undermine the domination of architecture, force it to surrender its transparency” (58). Furthermore, Bochner argues, in this process, the site itself becomes incorporated into the work while maintaining this experience of difference, as “By superimposing the measurements of a thing on the thing itself, I incorporate it into my art. This happens because it forces you to locate the space in the mind where one both thinks about and sees an object” (57). In this regard, too, Bochner conceived of this work, at the time

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of its realisation, as an elaboration of language and the performative aspects of architecture, noting: where I mark the measurements of a room directly on the walls, like a threedimensional blueprint, encompasses a concept of volume, without becoming sculpture. […] I think of them more like “gerunds,” verbs that act like nouns. So that the work is an active thing, both the doing and the thing done. 58 In the “gerund,” Bochner captures the frequent emphasis in Conceptual art on “work” as a self-reflexive thing done. In this regard, Art & Language, Charles Harrison argued, sought in Index 01 “to supplant ‘experience’ with a reading, and in that reading, to reflect back the very tendencies and mechanisms by means of which experience is dignified as artistic” (2001: 55–6). In contrast, Bochner’s Measurement: Room embeds reading into spatial experience, to simultaneously configure the room as information and information as experience, so positioning the “viewer” as the performative agent of the work’s spatial dissonance. Here, too, time becomes a critical component of Bochner’s approach to the “object.” Rejecting a “dematerialisation” of the art object as such, Bochner proposes in the context of the Measurement series that “things” are constituted in relationships read and enacted in time, suggesting in a lecture of 1971 that his approach, does not derive from things, but from our ways of acting on things. My interest is in the various fundamental ways we have of moving through the world, of coordinating our acts and operations, for example: joining, separating, corresponding, or transposing. 2008c: 92, original emphasis Here, too, in referencing measurement, spatial perception, and the gerund, Bochner emphasises the performative aspects of language, in which context, objects, or “things” also become a function of relation and action in time. In turn, this leads Bochner to a view of objects as unfixed or in movement, asking in his handwritten “Notes on Theory”: Would understanding be changed if we thought of things not as “in” space but “across” space? The object would cease to be a centre in-itself but an organisation by everything around it. Its presence would be a trajectory rather than a unity. Fragmented, yet opaque, it is what stops my view 2008e: 89 In joining the reproduction and circulation of information to the materiality of the room, Measurement: Room provokes a conceptual dissonance in which the viewer’s reading and negotiation of space, and their own spatial experience,

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becomes heightened, self-conscious, and active: a consciousness through which he suggests, “My intention is to change the work of art’s function for the viewer” (2008a: 58). Here, too, the boundaries and stabilities of “things” are called into question, as the presence of the object becomes a function of mobile spatial and perceptual relationships. Bochner thus concluded in his essay “Excerpts from Speculations,” “‘things’ become indistinguishable from events,” such that “physicality, or what separates the material from the non-material (the object from our observation), is merely a contextual detail” (1970: 71). The result, he concludes, is that the primacy that we tend to assume in our relationship with “things” is then itself called into question, and an anthropocentric view of materials and objects is implicitly challenged. He states: A fundamental assumption of recent past art was that things have stable properties, i.e., boundaries […] Boundaries, however, are only the fabrication of our desire to detect them […] The problem is that surrendering the stability of objects immediately subverts any control we think we have over situations. 70 The implication, here, is that rather than “perform” the work, the viewer as protagonist and participant of the artwork find themselves in exchange with “things” and their situation, co-performing, rather than controlling, a work in entanglement with its objects. It is this entanglement, too, that contemporaneous and subsequent Conceptual performance brings even more directly to the fore. The language of things: Paul Kos, Terry Fox, Joseph Beuys

In northern California from 1969 and 1970, Conceptual art was readily associated with new approaches to materials under the influx of European influences and performance, rather than with practices that were invested exclusively in language, inscribed or spoken. California artists such as Paul Kos, Terry Fox, and David Ireland privileged the conceptual through engagements with materials in ways more consistent with Smithson and Bochner than the primacy given by Kosuth to analytic propositions and tautology. These artists also worked in the knowledge of contemporaneous artwork of the Italian arte povera movement, and the social and political engagements of Joseph Beuys in then West Germany, with whom Fox was in dialogue and collaboration. In a later reflection on dematerialisation, Lippard interpreted the influence of arte povera, and its North American counterpart in postMinimal “process art,” as that of “a perverse denial of materiality in favour of an obsession with materials,” and so “new ways for the artist to identify actively with what he or she was making, including performance, street works, video, and other ephemeral rebellions against what was then called the ‘precious object syndrome’” (Lippard 2009). For California artists such as Bonnie Sherk, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, and Mel Henderson, Conceptual art extended to a focus on the material environment and identifications with ecological and environmental

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processes. Responding to the European work of the early 1970s, which amplified differences between California and New York-based developments of Conceptual art and performance, in 2014, Paul Kos recalled that: Terry Fox travelled to Europe quite often and brought back stories of Joseph Beuys and the Italian artists working within arte povera. Kounellis, Pistoletto, Fabro, Merz and others became inspirations and so to speak, comrades in arms. We all responded to simple, humble materials for their simultaneously obvious and hidden complexities, whereas New York conceptualists were often more interested in language-based work with the exception of Bruce Nauman, who was a favourite of both coasts. Kos and Kaye 2015 Elsewhere Kos has emphasised Conceptual art’s engagement in northern California with “Material, material, material. Not language-based conceptual work, but material-based. Poor materials: air, earth, fire, water, sand, ice” (Kos and Earnest 2012). Kos’ use of language and text in his work is, he states, “not about the language but about the material: ink and graphite” (Kos and Earnest 2012). For Reflection, a performance and action for video of 1998,

Kos, Reflection,1998. Still from video, at 1’45”. © Paul Kos. Courtesy of the artist

FIGURE 4.7 Paul

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Kos demonstrates this focus, but through it implicitly links his work to language-based practices and the earlier tropes to which Conceptual art gave rise. Here in a video of two minutes and two seconds, Kos enacts the rubric that unfolds in the time and action of his writing, which is ambidextrous and simultaneous, working from the centre outwards: “the left is but a reflection of the right, so is the right a reflection of the left?” Kos writes in chalk, simultaneously left to right and right to left, in an inscribed, tautological, and performative fulfilment of the first part of the artwork’s “linguistic proposition”: yet in the process of its completion, the inscription questions the symmetries— linguistic and material—of which it is comprised. Thus, the second part of Kos’ statement—“is the right a reflection of the left?”—lodges differences into the relationship of left to right and right to left; differences exacerbated in the description of two actions, rather than one. Kos’ interest, here, focuses on differences at play between language, material, and action that appear to be unified in their pursuit of self-definition. Thus, what at first might seem, after Kosuth, to be “Self-Described and Self-Defined” reveals itself to be an entanglement of differing processes each acting on the other rather than simply mirroring, reproducing, or reinforcing its meaning or formal identity. Kos’ approach to language—as equally material as it is visual— reflects also Bochner’s reminder that “Language is not transparent,” and that, by implication, the opacity of language and the “dematerialisation” of the conventional object suggest equivalences between “word” and “thing,” language and material, object and action. In his early work, too, Kos had conceived of his emphasis on materials to be triangulated in time with his and the viewer’s action. In this regard, his work foregrounds materials as dynamic and processual: as phenomena in active relationship with the viewer’s presence. Constance Lewallen, in her catalogue essay for Kos’ 2003 retrospective at the Berkeley Art Museum, notes Kos’ remark that: I have always been intrigued by materials and the way their indigenous characteristics have a certain poetry. I like the poetry of materials—the way the ice behaves or the way the cheese behaves or the way a chair behaves. Lewallen 2003: 26 It is a focus, also, on how materials may be staged in such a way that their process and characteristics reveal dynamic relationships with artist and viewer as actors in the work. In one of his few live performances, rEVOLUTION (1970), Kos set out an equivalence and exchange between his body, material, and action as the process of the work; a process literalised in “an invisible weight exchange from artist to target via a shotgun and 40 pounds of small arms ammunition.” Executed outside the main house at the di Rosa estate and art foundation in northern California, and conveyed to an audience inside the building, the arc of the

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performance was determined by the material exchange effected by the bullets. Kos recounted: I was on a scale and the target hung from another scale. Over a period of 90 minutes, I lost 40 pounds, while the target gained weight as it accumulated the lead pellets in the beginning but lost weight as it was itself blown apart. Many viewers were in attendance, and they said they felt like they were watching the Crimean War as they were invited to the di Rosa Art Preserve site by Rene di Rosa for a buffet and wine tasting on the balcony of the main house. The view from there was that of newly planted vineyard with only the stakes visible and looked like a military cemetery. Also, live closed-circuit video of the performance was piped into the living room of the house, resembling instant news coverage. This was during the war in Vietnam. Kos and Kaye 2015 Lewallen notes Kos’ interest in “using natural materials and their natural tendency as actions” (2003: 32), and his drawing on influences, including “Lynda Benglis (latex pours), Richard Serra (molten lead in Splashing, 1968, and Casting, 1969), Robert Morris (felt pieces)” and arte povera, as well as work by Terry Fox (32). Kos’ first major sculpture, Richmond Glacier (1969), comprised 7000 pounds of ice blocking the entry to his first one-person exhibition, Participationkinetics, at the Richmond Art Centre in the San Francisco Bay Area, organised by Marioni. The gradually melting obstruction, like the title of the exhibition, reflected an approach which, he recalled, “led me to try to compose equilateral triangles comprised of the artist, the object, and an active viewer.” It is a focus expressed in Kos’ staging of materials in temporary states of equilibrium, or in transition from one state to another, in situations that implicated the viewer in the dynamic of the work. In this case: My intent was that viewers would either use a side door to the museum or wait until the glacier melted which would have been some days hence. The curator of the show, Tom Marioni, and I were surprised when the Richmond Fire Department showed up at the opening, flashing lights on their fire truck, firemen in their fire gear and axes, and they proceeded to chop my glacier into small ice shavings because I had blocked the main entrance\exit and means of egress to the building. I could not have contrived a better scenario. Kos and Kaye 2015 Kos’ works comprising or incorporating ice exemplify strategies that stress the “behaviour” of materials and their affects, as if the material were a protagonist. These include Kinetic Ice Block (1969), Kinetic Ice Flow (1969–2013), Pilot Light/Pilot Butte (or, The Alchemy of Ice) (1974), Container for an Icicle

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(or Mind over Matter) (1982), and Glacier Golf (1982) requiring a single interior area of 10,000 pounds of ice. Ice Makes Fire (1974) comprised a video of his action at the foot of Pilot Butte in Wyoming, cutting and polishing a single piece of ice to such clarity that it becomes a lens, focusing the sun’s rays to set fire to kindling—then to melt in its heat. In 1970, for The Sound of Ice Melting, first installed in Marioni’s opening exhibition of The Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA) in San Francisco, Sound Sculpture As on April 30th, a cluster of eight highly sensitive boom microphones surround at close quarters two 25-pound melting blocks of ice, as if the “object” might testify to its own “dematerialisation.” Set at their maximum amplification to have the “source material” speak, the microphones stage a then state-of-the-art electronic listening, whose resulting sound turns outwards to the installation room and the visitors’ presence. As the ice melts, “its” sound merges with the “white noise” of analogue mediation, and a state of ambient listening encompasses its audience. Writing of “Eyes (and Ears) on Ice,” Ron Meyers records the effect of one of this installation’s later iterations, as: Eventually something became universally audible. A sound like “white noise” […] charges the surrounding space with a heightened awareness. In such a state, one cannot discern any difference between white noise and ice melting. They are melted into one sound, emanating from the speaker. 2003: 92 The Sound of Ice Melting exemplifies Kos’ staging of materials as behaviour, which in turn incorporates the viewer as participant and actor. These installations conflate things and phenomena, as if the artwork is a platform for the processes of “natural” materials in balance or transformation; materials with no fixed or final stability, whose actions become entangled with—and equal to—those who view and listen. Following a period of living and studying in Paris during which he abandoned his early practice as a painter (Lewallen 1992: 6), Terry Fox returned to San Francisco in the Autumn of 1968. From early 1970, Fox shared the first location of Tom Marioni’s MOCA as his studio, on the fourth floor of the Mercantile Building on Mission and 3rd Street. Each day he visited the studio, Fox would park his car at the nearby Jesse Street. In February, when assisting MOCA’s move into the space, Fox recalled: I used to park my car every day in that alley, and I always looked at those walls but never touched them. Then one day I touched one of the walls, felt its solidity, its belly. I realised we were both the same, but we had no dialogue, in a sense. Sharp 1971b: 75

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Fox, Wall Push, 1970. Photo: Barry Klinger. © Estate of Terry Fox, Köln/VG Bild-Kunst.

FIGURE 4.8 Terry

Fox’s Wall Push, an action without public audience whose remainder is a single photograph, asserts equivalence between body, self, and object or material environment. This contrasts with the development of Body Art by Oppenheim, Acconci, and other artists on the east coast. For Oppenheim, filmed actions such as Arm and Wire (1969) closed a circle of attention onto himself to erode distinctions between “material” and “tool,” as “the results of an action are fed back to the source” (Kaye and van Winkle Oppenheim 2016: 82). By attending directly to self, Oppenheim suggested to Willoughby Sharp in 1971, the body is understood “as both subject and object” and “[w]ith this economy of output one can oscillate from the position of instigator to victim” (Sharp 1971a: 188). Such self-targeting processes developed from Oppenheim’s actions on land, such as Arm and Asphalt (1969), a further film collaboration with Bob Fiore comprising his “Forearm rolling over warm asphalt and plaster, slow dissolve into land” (86) as the body’s mark is absorbed into the exterior place of the work. Acconci similarly treated the body as simultaneously agent, material, and output, performing the body as the place of the work in actions such as Rubbing Piece (1970); a tactic that prompted Willoughby Sharp to observe that “The Body as Place is a common condition of body works,” where “the body as place acts as a ground which is marked” (Sharp 1970: 2). In contrast, Fox’s action is distinct

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FIGURE 4.9 

Dennis Oppenheim, Arm & Wire, 1969. Still from 16mm film, with Bob Fiore.

in seeking an equivalence in dialogues between things and the body in action. Thus, Wall Push: Was like having a dialogue with the wall, exchanging energy with it. I pushed as hard as I could for about eight or nine minutes, until I was too tired to push anymore. I used to park my car every day in that alley, and I always looked at those walls but never touched them. Then one day I touched one of the walls, felt its solidity, its belly. I realised we were both the same, but we had no dialogue, in a sense. We normally just walk by these things, not feeling connected with them. Lewallen 1992: 10 Artist’s statement: Indentation made on forearm while rolling over cording and twine. Here the arm is receiving impressions of its own energy. Material vs. tool loses distinction as the results of an action are fed back to the source. © Dennis Oppenheim Estate

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Constance Lewallen read Fox’s early work as focused on “energy exchange and the exploration of matter” (1992: 10) exemplified in actions such as Liquid Smoke at Marioni’s opening exhibition at MOCA, Sound Sculpture As, in which Fox slowly released smoke from his mouth, a work also captured as a series of photographs. The month following, in May 1970, Fox performed Corner Push at the Reese Palley Gallery in San Francisco, as a counterpoint to Wall Push, noting: I was trying to push as much of my body as I could into the corner. My feet got in the way. I tried to stand on my toes, but it didn’t work. You lose your balance … I really felt those walls coming together. I became the juncture of those two walls. The corner of a room holds tremendous physical pressure. Lewallen 1992: 10 As well as the actions Impacted Lead (1970) and My Hand Is a Fine Porcelain (1970), Lewallen also records Fox’s series of Super 8 films, including Breath, Sweat, and Tonguing of the same year, as investigations of the body’s process, action, and energy in material exchanges with the environment. Subsequently, Fox declared that “It’s almost impossible to talk about performance anymore” and developed his process towards “situations” (White 1979: 5) in which audiences were implicated as witness and participant, often in actions extended in time and activating materials and things defining specific sites. Important to this work also was Fox’s use of language to create anticipation and influence attitude, as well as the staging of installations and performer presence, leading in time to his development

FIGURE 4.10 Terry Fox, What Do Blind Men Dream? 1969. Photo: Larry Fox. © Estate

of Terry Fox, Köln/VG Bild-Kunst

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of sound as a unifying force of “energy and matter” in symbioses of place and performance. Fox’s emphasis on exchange and equivalence between performer and thing, or body and material, also lends itself to being thought in terms of Hodder’s “entanglement,” in which “things” —extended to words, and language-use—are read as produced by and in their entanglement with human agents, such that objects and words are understood as simultaneously enabling and constraining action and identity, and so implicitly obtain modes of agency. Following his early performance-based activity in Europe, including Photographs—a set of 36 pictures of street debris taken over a one-hour walk through Amsterdam in July 1968 (Richardson 1973)—Fox’s first works in San Francisco recontextualised street events in overtly conceptual frameworks. For a series of six Public Theatre works in San Francisco, which Lewallen records as “theatre with no director, no actors, no stage, no plot, no script.” (1992: 8), Fox published posters prompting attention to “found” performances and interactions. On a visit to London, Fox had made a poster declaring Billingsgate Market a “public theatre” (Sharp 1971b: 73). In 1968, he announced Buying and Selling as Public Theatre in San Francisco, for which, Lewallen notes, “Fox posted notices inviting people to witness the impressive sales pitch of a pen salesman at Woolworth counter. At the prescribed hour, about fifty people turned up, to the delight and mystification of the salesman” (1992: 10). For the second Public Theatre, What Do Blind Men Dream? in April 1969, Fox recounted, “I discovered a beautiful blind lady and asked her to sing on a San Francisco street corner near a gigantic open pit, from 5.30pm until dark. Announcements were sent out and a lot of people came” (Richardson 1973). Such an emphasis on texts that prompt, frame, or produce conditions of performance is a recurrent tactic in conceptual work. In a variation of his theme and strategy for DISAPPEARING (1971), Chris Burden performed White Light/White Heat (1975) at Ronald Feldman Gallery, New York, in a room seemingly empty save for a white “Minimalist” style plinth raised 10 feet above the floor across one corner, and an explanatory text displayed on the wall. Burden’s text specified the arrangements in the room, stating in the past tense: “For twenty-two days, the duration of the show, I lay on the platform. During the entire piece, I did not eat, talk, or come down. I did not see anyone, and no-one saw me.” The performance of White Light/White Heat is produced by this text, which acts as a conceptual trap for the visitor that amplifies Minimalism’s displacements from the object and onto phenomena of viewing. Writing contemporaneously in Artforum, the critic Robert Horvitz reported that “The piece dominates its space effortlessly,” as: The assumption that he is there alters everything—but I don’t know for a fact that he really is there. I become ‘it’ in an unannounced game of hide-and-seek. I listen for tell-tale rustling, any breathing noises. The many small sounds that fill the gallery are magnified by my attention […] The room is haunted Horvitz 1976: 24, original emphasis For Fox, the announcements framing his early installations and events were integral to creating performative relationships between audience, performance, and materials.

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In this way, Fox’s performances are shaped as linguistic propositions that affect perceptions and experiences of material presence. In his “statement of explanation written for the exhibition,” Fox emphasised for the installation, Hospital, of October 1971: The poster as the preconditioning element. The photograph used on the poster was taken during the days of conception of the piece […] The poster photograph is meant to combine with the quote and produce a strong enough reaction in the viewer that he enters the gallery with conscious or subconscious expectations similar to those experienced in a hospital. All the elements of the piece were constructed in my mind, intuitionally influenced by my physical state. Richardson 1973 Hospital also reflected the profound effect on Fox’s work of his living with Hodgkin lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system, and his experience of numerous medical interventions. In 1971, he noted to Sharp that “So many operations have been performed on me. I’ve been the object of actions so many times that I become material. I was a piece of meat that people were acting upon” (Sharp 1971b: 70). Fox notes that Hospital was fully conceived during his experience as an in-patient, “intuitionally influenced by my physical state,” while the

Fox, Hospital, 1971. Photo: Schopplein Studio, San Francisco. © Estate of Terry Fox, Köln/VG Bild-Kunst

FIGURE 4.11 Terry

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purpose of the poster was to “produce a strong enough reaction” that the visitor enters the gallery with “conscious or subconscious expectations similar to those experienced in a hospital” (Richardson 1973). In this regard, too, Fox looked towards mutual affects between action, attitude, and object, referring, in Hospital specifically, to his interest in “The action of the state of mind on the physical state” (Richardson 1973). This focus on symbiotic relationships between attitudes and things, and ways in which conceptual frameworks serve to condition the reception of things, is dramatised most clearly in Fox’s early installation, Levitation, organised by Tom Marioni in September 1970 at the Richmond Art Centre in the larger San Francisco area. Levitation, Marioni writes for the information accompanying the installation, is “a total environment” which “contains the debris of an action and everything in the room has been directly involved in the action.” In the same release for gallery visitors, Fox specifies the materials of the installation: Dust Ash Hair Blood Sweat Bone 18 Foot Ring of the Artist’s Blood 50 Foot Tube of Urine 50 Foot Tube of Blood 50 Foot Tube of Water 50 Foot Tube of Milk 1-1/2 Tons of Dirt Taken from Under a City Street Describing the installation Marioni notes that the gallery floor has been covered in white paper to create a seamless space in which “four plastic tubes containing elements of human life, blood urine, water and milk […] radiate out from the area of performance” (Fox and Marioni 1970). At the centre, Fox later recalled in his interview with Sharp: I laid down a ton and a half of dirt, taken from under a freeway on Army Street, in an eleven-and-a half-foot square. The mold was made with four redwood planks each twice my body height—I used my body as a unit of measure for most of the elements in the piece. The dirt was taken from the freeway because of the idea of explosion. When the freeway was built the earth was compressed, held down. You can conceive of it expanding, when you release it rising, becoming buoyant. Of course, it’s physically impossible. But for me the mere suggestion was enough […] I levitated. After the fourth hour I couldn’t feel any part of my body […] I felt I was somewhere else […] Sharp 1971b: 70–1

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Fox, Levitation, 1970. Photo: Jarry Wainright. © Estate of Terry Fox, Köln/VG Bild-Kunst

FIGURE 4.12 Terry

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Fox’s six-hour, unseen action is dedicated to an “alteration” of the materials, as, he suggested, “I tried to activate the space in such a way that a residue would exist afterwards, just a feeling, an intangible feeling. I tried to do that with a lot of those performances” (Fox and van Peer 2000: 175). Audiences of no more than six at a time were then permitted in the space in the knowledge of Fox’s preparation, and in an atmosphere of silence. Here, the earth is shown as an “artefact”: a material altered by—and so entangled with—a knowledge of Fox’s action. Through the same process, such objects gain “aura,” where, in an archaeological context, Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks suggest, “aura refers to the life of things”: to the “sense of associations and evocations that cluster round an object, correspondences and interrelations, engendered by an object” (2001: 95–6). Fox’s experience, he recounted, was that: everyone who saw it felt something. […] You read the notice before you entered, so you knew that a person had lain there for six hours trying to levitate. Then you walked into this brilliant, serial space, which emphasized the physicality of the earth, the blood, the urine. Most of the audience didn’t even go in, they walked around and stood on the outskirts […] the whole room was energised. You didn’t have to trip over the piece, you felt it the minute you walked in. Sharp 1971b: 71 In these respects, the earth of Levitation offers itself as evidence, approaching the status of “document,” but surpasses the document’s supplementary status in its testament to a performance that, like Dennis Oppenheim’s translocation of information in Removal Transplant—New York Stock Exchange (1969) discussed in Chapter 3, still seems “conceptually active.” In this context, the artist’s blood and urine speak of Fox’s presence in an active manner, as his intimate traces; while the dust to which, Marioni suggests, we all “return” reflects on mortality—reinforced by Fox’s uncanny absence from the signs of his body in the earth. Here, performance continues, conceptually, in its remains; a process that defines this installation and its invitation to visitors to identify in this remainder their own sense of bodily presence. It is a dynamic set of relationships that can also be thought of after Hodder’s characterisation of the entanglement of self and things: as a surfacing of mutuality with materials which is not simply a matter of “encounter,” but a dynamic in which the self is constituted in “things”; not simply objects, but with “ideas, thoughts, emotions, desires” (2016: 9) bound up with language. It is this notion of the extraneous definition of the body—and a concomitant distribution of self spatially and temporally in its entanglement with things—that Fox implicitly articulates in Levitation’s traces of his action, its identification with and effect on the viewer in the persistence of performance in Fox’s absence. Consistent with this,

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Hodder argues, our relationship with things is such that, “from an entanglement perspective there is no environment,” for “everything is always already entangled. And there is nothing extra-somatic, outside the body, because the body, mind and meaning are distributed” (7). In his subsequent actions, Fox continued to carry forward into installations and audience relations, acts, and preparations known by his would-be audience through processes emphasising equivalence and exchange between the body, materials, and place. Writing of Fox’s “Economy of Means,” Matthias Osterwold notes, In his performances, he investigated the boundaries of the body by subjecting it to the liminal states of sleep deprivation, fasting, immobility and discomfort. His body was taken as merely one element among others, a link in the chain, while materials and objects like walls or earth, to which he subjects his body, took on a quasi-corporeal, living quality in his perception. 1999: 16 Brenda Richardson, writing in the earliest catalogue surveying Fox’s performances, films, and installations in 1973, emphasised a similar sense of exchange and performance embedded into his installations, such that they always seem somehow activated; even without Fox’s presence, the objects have a mysterious electric quality, the spaces seem animated and vibratory, like a room set up for a séance or a psychic’s demonstration. Fox’s interest in energy transference includes, of course, investing “inanimate” objects with life vibrations—transferral of his own life force to other realities. Richardson 1973 It is these perspectives and practices that also brought Fox’s work into dialogue with that of Joseph Beuys, and into shared interests, which Fox identified in 1973 as “our work about energy and regeneration” (Oliva 2000: 59). Shortly following Levitation, which was promptly closed by the Director of the Richmond Arts Centre, Fox travelled to Düsseldorf in November 1970 for his first meeting with Beuys, who at that time was a faculty member of the Kunstakademie. In Düsseldorf, Fox worked towards a performance to be improvised in a cellar room of the Akademie selected by Beuys. Shortly before its execution, Beuys suggested a collaborative performance, developing his action separately for the same duration of an hour or so (Oliva 2000: 59). Here, then, Fox reported, he “decided to make an action with sounds and iron pipes (like bells)” because of its acoustic effect in the room, while Beuys created “a kind of dream about a dead mouse”: a funeral with sound, fire, and ashes (Oliva 2000: 55). Fox drew the figure of a labyrinth on the wall to represent their collaboration, while “the

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word ‘unit’ refers to the connection between these two pieces” (57). As well as providing for a developing and deep engagement with Beuys’ work, Isolation Unit was documented by Fox as the first of his “Works with Sound” (Fox 1999: 58). Although sound had played an important part in some of his earlier installations, this became an explicit focus for Fox’s work from 1972 (Osterwold 1999: 20). Osterwold notes the soundscapes produced in repeated or ritualised actions in Fox’s early work, “Fox’s breathing, washing, and singing” integrated into the installation Hospital (19) that followed Isolation Unit, and whose panelled structures seem in direct reference to Beuys’ blackboards-relics; and more dramatically, in the earlier Defoliation, “the roar of the flame thrower and the audience’s shocked stillness” (20). Defoliation, Fox suggested to Robin White in 1979, was “the first performance I did as an art performance” (10): an action on 17th March 1970 in the garden of the Berkeley Art Museum. Making specific reference to the Vietnam War and in sight of “extremely rich people, who obviously supported the war in some way or another,” Fox recalled to Robin White in 1979 that: I burned the whole thing with a flame thrower, and it just left a slight border of these plants, and they ended up having to dig them all out—it destroyed them. So then, the next day these people came to have their lunch there, it was just a burned-out plot, you know, I mean, it was the same thing they were doing in Vietnam. Nobody would get excited about napalming Vietnam, but you burn some flowers that they like to sit near, and it’s like White 1979: 11, original emphasis Fox’s turn to the creation and modulation of ambient sound in Isolation Unit, and the use of objects to address the sonic features of a site, also developed directly from his shaping of anticipation and so “tension” through the conceptual frameworks of his early installations. Fox’s remark to René van Peer in 1993 that “sound is sculpture” (Fox and van Peer 2000: 19) is reflected in the extended and intense silence of his early installations, the attenuation of which led directly to his performance of ambient sound as an extension of place. Fox noted: I like the idea of a lot of tension in the place and everything very silent. To try and exaggerate the kind of silence it has. To make it even more silent than it is. More silent than silent. It has the potential of sounding … Tension is a very interesting sculptural concept Osterwold 1999: 20–1 The history, themes, and trajectory of Beuys’ work were also relevant to the development of Fox’s performance. From his first public performance, Siberian Symphony, Section 1, at the “Festum Fluxorum Fluxus” concert at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in February 1963, Beuys placed emphasis on the object-remains

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Beuys (1921–1986): Eurasia Siberian Symphony, 1963 (1966). Panel with chalk drawing, felt and fat, taxidermied hare and painted poles, 6′ × 7′6 ¾” × 20′ (183 cm × 230 cm × 50 cm). Gift of Frederic Clay Bartlett (by exchange). Acc. n.: 213.2000.a-b. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). © 2022. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. © DACS 2022

FIGURE 4.13 Joseph

of his actions; one evident, for example, in Eurasia Siberian Symphony, 1963 (1966), a relic of that first action. Beuys’ subsequent early performances placed a similar emphasis on relics, including The Chief (1964), 24 hours … and in us … landunder (1965) and his first performance in an “art world” context, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare at Galerie Schema, Düsseldorf, in November 1965. These events produced objects, post-hoc scores, and other remainders, with much greater circulation than the performances themselves. For each action, Beuys also commissioned extensive documentation in collaboration with the photographer Ute Klophaus, from whose work he would normally select a single image as its representation. Conceptual performance—here, a sense of actions encountered indirectly or through its remainders—was also an aspect of this early work. In her catalogue of Beuys’ first major exhibition in North America, his retrospective Joseph Beuys at the Guggenheim New York in 1979, Beuys’ most

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important anglophone critic Caroline Tisdall recorded that at the opening of his exhibition at the Galerie Schema, visitors were locked out of the gallery, while: Beuys spent three hours explaining his art to a dead hare. The gallery was closed to the public, and the performance (though recorded on television) was visible only through the doorway and the street window. Beuys’ head was covered in honey and gold leaf, and tied to his right foot was an iron sole, companion to a felt sole on his left foot. 1979: 101 One of Beuys’ most influential actions, the relic of How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare is a photograph of a performance—and a perspective—that was obscured to public view; an image, Tisdall suggests, “of the artist anointed, silently mouthing to a mute animal what cannot be said to his fellow man” that “became one of the most resonant images of the 1960s” (101). The importance of material remainders to Beuys’ performances and their supplementary relationship to the actions from which they draw meaning, yet which they do not directly document or explain, is also amplified in the referential nature of Beuys’ work as a whole. Cross-referencing narrative and symbolic systems, some partly of his own invention, Beuys’ objects, materials, and installations are rich in allusions to networks of ideas, histories, places, and traditions, as well as his own work. Yet, like the actions to which many of his objects allude, Beuys’ works are rarely self-explanatory but instead invite an immersion in processes of connection and meaning making. It is a process that exemplifies his formulation, “Everyone an artist,” made concrete also in his conceptual reframing of processes of forming, or “social sculpture” (Tisdall 1979: 7). Frequently designating his materials and works as “transmitters” or “receivers,” exemplified by objects such as The Great Generator (1968) and Earth Telephone (1973), or in references to chemical transformation and alchemy in installations such as Pt Co Fe (1948–72), Beuys’ many charismatic actions, performance-lectures, and public debates served to further charge and articulate the associations and processes his works might prompt. Behind these instances, however, also lies Beuys’ metanarrative of performed biography, to which his persona and appearance—his habitual costume of jeans, felt trilby, fishing gilet, and fur-lined overcoat—and quasi-ritualistic actions, also referred. While Beuys’ early practice embraced reconceptions of many traditional media, including print, painting, and sculpture, speaking in 1985 of his development, Beuys stressed, “My path, strange as it is, took me by way of language; it did not originate by so-called artistic talent” (Beuys 2021: 20). The first, and most obviously far-reaching, framework of Beuys’ language that has informed his work is the Life Course/Work Course and its associated narratives, a version of which opens Tisdall’s Guggenheim catalogue. Life Course/Work Course is Beuys’ frequently metaphorical and at times embellished and fictionalised

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biography, which underpins the language and development of his works more broadly and acts as an overt point of reference for many of his performances. Life Course/Work Course also underpins Beuys’ self-conscious invocation through his performed public persona of the figure of the shaman: a unifying figure in traditional indigenous societies, in possession of spiritual and cultural knowledge, whose role is as outsider, as a catalyst of spiritual transformation, and healer. Reframing Beuys’ life as his work, perhaps most notoriously the Life Course/Work Course specifies “1942 […] Sebastopol: Exhibition during the interception of a Ju-87” (Tisdall 1979: 9), referring to a near-fatal crash of Beuys’ Ju-87 in Crimea when a pilot in the Luftwaffe, in 1943. In 1979, Tisdall’s catalogue reported Beuys’ experience as fact, or at least as a personal narrative left unquestioned, stating: “the Ju-87 Beuys was flying was hit by Russian flak and crashed in a snowstorm […] He was found in the wreckage by Tartars” (16). Beuys’ extended personal testament then recounts the crash and being rescued, “They covered my body in fat to help it regenerate warmth and wrapped it in felt to keep the warmth in” (17). Beuys’ consistent use of fat and felt in his work and his reproduction of objects associated with these events, such as Sled (1969) or installations of multiple sleds in apparent evacuation in The Pack (1969), allude to Life Course/Work Course, as do his numerous other references to the flora and fauna of the Steppes, as well as Eurasia, and other materials and processes of healing and regeneration. Indeed, in the manner of shamanic initiation, the Sebastopol “exhibition” of the Life Course/Work Course is witness to Beuys’ experience of near-death, recovery, and personal transformation. In this, too, comes Beuys’ promise of a transformation of methods and social purposes of art, which act as means and metaphor for rebirth, and a healing of trauma in the context of a post-war divided Germany. The year following Beuys’ Guggenheim retrospective, Benjamin Buchloch was the first critic to take direct aim at the veracity of Beuys’ biography in an article for Artforum, “Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol, Preliminary Notes for a Critique” (1980). Equating Beuys’ work with “the presentation of souvenirs” (35), Buchloch embarked on a systematic attack on Beuys’ “myth of origin” and its representation by Tisdall, Beuys’ critical biographer Götz Adriana (1979), and others. While Buchloch’s critique of Beuys rests partly on the secondary status of his work as “souvenirs,” it is precisely the supplementary and indexical nature of Beuys’ objects and use of materials that construct and reinforce the performative effect of the Life Course/Work Course. As a framework or metanarrative to Beuys’ work, the Life Course/Work Course underpins the referential nature of his works and frames his self-presentation as “performance.” Indeed, the effect (and effectiveness) of Beuys’ work lies in the conceptual performances produced in this symbiosis: in the metaphorical charge, the Life Course/Work Course lends to Beuys’ object-remains and actions and his transformation of sculpture, rather than the authenticity of its pseudo-biographical narratives. This framework and process not only ground Beuys’ work in the unreachable

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performances of which his objects speak but also prompt “performance” in a rethinking of the viewer’s engagement and embeddedness with sculptural process. It is here, too, that Beuys introduces the idea of “social sculpture,” one of his most enduring and influential propositions, that: My objects are to be seen as stimulants for the transformation of the idea of sculpture, or of art in general. They should provoke thoughts about what sculpture can be and how the concept of sculpting can be extended to the invisible materials used by everyone. Thinking Forms Spoken Forms SOCIAL SCULPTURE -

how we mould our thoughts or how we shape our thoughts into words or how we mould and shape the world in which we live: Sculpture as an evolutionary process; everyone an artist.

That is why the nature of my sculpture is not fixed and finished. Processes continue in most of them: chemical reactions, fermentations, colour changes, decay, drying up. Everything is in a state of change. Tisdall 1979: 7, original emphasis More specifically, Beuys’ “social sculpture” operates both at the level of individual creative expression, thought, and social process and order. In its beginning, then, Beuys argued as early as 1970 that “When a human being speaks, he moves his larynx. For me speaking and the larynx are already rudimentary sculpture.” (Beuys 2021: 10). Like Fox’s many objects and installations, in their origin and effect, Beuys’ materials are haunted by figures of performance. These artists’ works also meet in concerns for healing and transformation: in Fox’s work, linked specifically to his own bodily trauma and change; in Beuys’ work, as metaphors for social transformations expressed in his choice and staging of material processes and performed in the self-mythologising structures and narratives to which they refer. During this, Fox and Beuys also articulate the equivalence and entanglement of material and performance processes, while their performances implicitly stage the “agency” of things, as if materials and objects may gain their own voice or, like the earth in Fox’s Levitation, carry forward the residue of an action. Reflecting this, and following Isolation Unit, in conversation with Willoughby Sharp, Fox emphasised that in performance “the body is exactly one element among others,” a status achieved by raising “the other elements to the status of the body” (1971b: 70). In this focus, Fox distinguished his performance from a conventional theatre practice in which, “An actor acts on the props, and I wanted to act with them. To have my mood affect their looks” (77). It is a symbiosis—or entanglement—that in this conversation

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Fox directly associated with Beuys, who he quotes, suggesting that “If you cut your finger, you should bandage the knife, not your finger” (79). In introducing Elemental Gestures, a retrospective exhibition of Fox’s work and publication of 2015, the artist and curator Arnold Dreyblatt directs attention to Walter Benjamin’s elaboration of a “language of things” in his essay “On Language as Such and the Language of Man” (Benjamin 1996) suggesting that: Terry, who referred to his drawings and performances as sculpture, might have had Walter Benjamin’s “Language of Things” in mind: “the language of sculpture or painting is founded on certain kinds of thing languages, that in them we find a translation of the language of things into an infinitely higher language […] languages issuing from matter” Drayblatt 2015: 23 Benjamin’s essay of 1913 introduces differing orders—or trajectories—for “things” or objects and prompts differing concepts of what a “language of things” might comprise. One is exemplified in art and can be transposed towards a Modernist, and even Greenbergian, trajectory—in the revelation of inherent, mediumspecific “languages” of painting and sculpture that are refinements of the “language of things into an infinitely higher language” (1996: 73). This trajectory, however, leaves in its wake the idea of “thing languages” that fall outside the realm of art, and outside the conventional meanings of cultural products: a “material communion” that art implicitly harnesses and refines. The “poor” materials of Kos, Fox, and Beuys—in their differing and heightened performative responses to questions and themes also explored by the Italian arte povera, amongst others—reflect on “thing languages” that fall outside of the elevation that Benjamin ascribed to sculpture and painting. In this particular “material community of things” (73), Benjamin suggests, “the languages of things are imperfect, and they are dumb. Things are denied the pure formal principle of language - namely, sound” (67). Following Isolation Unit, it is towards a giving of sound to objects and specific places that Fox’s work progresses. In 1971, he noted, “My performances now, and my involvement with the body in art comes from this awareness of particular places […] rather than my relationship to a large-scale environmental situation or to sociological and political questions” (Sharp 1971b: 70). The sequence of work that follows saw Fox articulating places, and objects in place, as resonant sound: in Action for a Tower Room (1972), Halation (1974), Capillary Action (1975), and Timbre (1976). For Culvert (1977), Fox occupied a metal tunnel 100 feet long, 12 feet wide, and with a clearance height from the water level of six feet, through which part of the Clark Fork River, in Missoula, Montana, descended. Over 24 continuous hours and in two stages, Fox generated sound from within the culvert, “standing wave patterns” unique to the structure, reflecting his focus on performances “that were entirely acoustic using no electronics even for amplification, other than a microphone for

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recording” (Fox 1999: 69). In 1979, Fox stressed to Robin White that in context, “sound just occurs […] it has to do with space, filling the space or changing the space, or changing the architecture of the space […] it’s always designed for the specific place where it happens” (1979: 17–8). In this approach, Bernard Schulz writes, “Fox relies on overtone-rich material sounds that are difficult to locate and that set whole rooms in resonance.” (Schulz 1999: 8). In this aspect, too, Fox expresses place and “things” as flow and vibration, in ways that are resonant to Hodder’s challenge to the solidity and permanence of objects. It is a transformation and meeting of object and action in sound exemplified also by Suonu Interno (1979), Fox’s activation of the deconsecrated church of Santa Lucia in Bologna. Having obtained permission to use the building on condition only he would enter it, Fox used an “eye-sized hole in the door as the central point of my performance,” for which he stretched two parallel piano wires between the door and the crypt, almost 100 metres in length: When one peered into the hole in the door from outside the church, two lines could be seen diminishing to a point, like a diagram in simple perspective. The heavily rosined wires were played by stroking and pulling them gently with fingers. The sound that was heard was very voluminous and could be heard from the street […] I played the wires six hours a day for three consecutive days. 1999: 75 Implicitly referencing Marcel Duchamp’s assisted Readymade, With Hidden Noise (1916) and Beuys’ exclusion of the audience in How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), Suono Interno expresses the particularity of site and object as sound and vibration, as, Osterwold notes, “Stringing steel wires now allows the room to become the resonating body” (1999: 28). Writing of “The Fleetingness and Solidity of Being” in Fox’s sound work, Willi Sergers reads such work as a revelation of sculpture as vibration and flow, as “indicative of the hidden energy stored within everyday objects […] Spatial sound as sculpture” (2003: 14). In this regard, Fox remarks, on “the most important part. I mean, to be able to vibrate a wall, and have the wall make a sound—that’s wonderful to me. That’s sculpture” (14). Such performances articulate an altered “materiality” developed in the context of Conceptual art, acting out equations between language and things or objects. Here, objects and materials are invariably treated as “artefacts” still entangled with their use that carry forward the energy of an action. In Fox’s address to place, the distinction between a viewer and the object viewed is also breached through sounds that, Schulz argues, “make energies palpable and that connect the listener with his physical surroundings,” so reflecting that “in reality no solid bodies actually exist, but merely various states of vibration,

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and that all bodies stand in a field of constant transformation” (1999: 8). This breaking down of the solidity of the “object” into process and relation—into vibration and flow—is exemplified in this reconceiving of “things” and materials in terms of performance, and performance implicitly in terms of entanglement— and mutuality. The contemporary debates and controversies over materiality and the “precious object” in Conceptual art that Lucy Lippard identified as a trajectory towards “dematerialisation” are also debates that drove towards a reconception and transformation of the use, place, and character of the art object through new modes of performance. Beginning with equations between word and object, and the reconception of “things,” language, and materiality, early work by artists such as Mel Bochner and Robert Smithson entangled art objects with time, reading, and the body. These developments emphasised both the materiality of language and the object as process, installing performative relationships and effects into the definition of overtly “conceptual” artworks, which nevertheless addressed specificities of time and place. Actions extending these equivalences in work by Paul Kos, Joseph Beuys, and Terry Fox further elaborated the idea of the thing done, through embodied performances in symbiosis with objects and materials, in time-based installation in which things and materials take the place of the performing body, and in a staging of the “behaviours” of materials themselves. Here, the arc in Conceptual art towards an “impossible” dematerialisation of the object had its collateral effect on the idea and experience of materials and things. It is in this context that materials and objects are treated as actors entangled with the viewer’s—and artist’s—co-performances, in which things are lent agency. Conceptual performance, here, surfaces in processes that directly elaborate the problematics of the object and material presence in conceptual work: developments that produced frameworks proposing the languages, processes, and performance of things themselves.

References Adriana, G. (1979) Joseph Beuys: Life and Works, New York, NY: Barron’s. Alloway, L. (1981) “Sites/Non-Sites,” in Robert Hobbs (ed) Robert Smithson: Sculpture, London: Cornell University Press, pp 41–6. Atkinson, T. (1999 [1973]) “Concerning the Article: ‘The Dematerialization of Art’,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, London: MIT Press, pp 52–9. Béar, L. and Sharp, W. (1996 [1970]) “Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson,” in Jack Flam (ed) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp 242–52. Benjamin, W. (1996 [1916]) “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1, 1913-1926, translated by Rodney Livingstone and Others, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, pp 62–74.

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Beuys, J. (2021) “Talking About One’s Own Country: Germany,” in Nina Schallanberg (ed) Starting from Language: Joseph Beuys at 100, Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag Gmbh, pp 20–9. Blacksell, R. (2013) “Looking to Reading: Text-Based Conceptual Art and Typographic Discourse,” Design Issues, 29:2 (Spring), pp 60–81. Bochner, M. (1970) “Excerpts from Speculation (1967-1970),” Artforum, May, pp 70–3. —— (1971) 11 Excerpts, Paris: Editions Sonnabend. —— (2008a) “An Interview with Elayn Varian,” in Mel Bochner, Solar Systems & Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews, 1965-2007, London: MIT Press, pp 56–60. —— (2008b) “An Interview with Lizbeth Marano,” in Mel Bochner, Solar Systems & Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews, 1965-2007, London: MIT Press, pp 168–72. —— (2008c) “ICA Lecture,” in Mel Bochner, Solar Systems & Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews, 1965-2007, London: MIT Press, pp 90–2. —— (2008d) “Notecards,” in Mel Bochner, Solar Systems & Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews, 1965-2007, London: MIT Press, pp 64–9. —— (2008e) “Notes on Theory,” in Mel Bochner, Solar Systems & Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews, 1965-2007, London: MIT Press, pp 83–9. —— (2008f) “Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art,” in Mel Bochner, Solar Systems & Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews, 1965-2007, London: MIT Press, pp 176–9. Bochner, M. and Smithson, R. (1966) “The Domain of the Great Bear,” Art Voices, Fall, pp 44–51. Bode, S. (1999 [1967]) “Excerpt from ‘Placement in Language’,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, London: MIT Press, pp 18–19. Buchloch, B.D. (1980) “Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol, Preliminary Notes for a Critique,” Artforum, January, pp 35–43. —— (1990) “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October, 55 (Winter), pp 105–43. Celant, G. (1989) Giuseppe Penone, Milan: Electa. Drayblatt, A. (2015) “A ‘Material Community of Things’,” in Arnold Drayblatt (ed) Terry Fox: Elemental Gestures, Berlin: Akademie der Künste, Berlin, pp 19–23. Drucker, J. (2004) “The Crux of Conceptualism: Conceptual Art, the Idea of the Idea, and the Information Paradigm,” in Michael Corris (ed) Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 251–68. Dworkin, C. (2019) “A heap of Language.” Holt/Smithson Foundation. Available online. https://holtsmithsonfoundation.org/heap-language-0. Accessed 10th September 2021. Fox, T. (1999) Terry Fox: Works With Sound, edited by Bernard Schulz, Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg. Fox, T. and Marioni, T. (1970) Levitation. Exhibition Statement. Richmond, CA: Richmond Art Center. Fox, T. and van Peer, R. (2000 [1993]) “Exploring the Limits: Interview by René van Peer,” in Terry Fox, Ocular Language, edited by Eva Schmidt, Bremen: Gelellschaft für Aktuelle Kust/Salon Verlag, pp 156–83. Halbriech, K. (1980) “Introduction,” in Mel Bochner and Richard Serra, Bochner/Serra, Cambridge, MA: Hayden Gallery/MIT, pp 2–3. Harrison, C. (2001 [1991]) Essays on Art & Language, London: MIT Press.

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Heidegger, M. (1971) Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter, London: Harper. Hodder, I. (2014) “The Entanglement of Humans and Things: A Long-Term View,” New Literary History, 45, pp 19–36. —— (2016) Studies in Human-Thing Entanglement. Open access. Available online. http:// www.ian-hodder.com/books/studies-human-thing-entanglement#:~:text=This%20 book%2C%20published%20only%20online,application%20of%20formal%20 network%20analysis. Accessed 20th July 2022. Horvitz, R. (1976) “Chris Burden,” Artforum, May, pp 24–31. Kaiser, P.O. (2019) Disappearing—California c. 1970: Bas Jan Ader, Chris Burden, Jack Goldstein, New York, NY: The Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth and Delmonico Books Prestel. Kaye, N. and van Winkle Oppenheim, A. (2016) Dennis Oppenheim: Body to Performance, Milan: Skira-Rizzoli. Kelly, M. and Smith, T. (1999) “A Conversation About Conceptual Art, Subjectivity and the Post-Partum Document,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, London: MIT Press, pp 450–8. Kos, P. and Earnest, J. (2012) “Ice Makes Fire: Paul Kos with Jarret Earnest,” The Brooklyn Rail, April. Available online. https://brooklynrail.org/2012/04/art/ice-makes-firepaulkos-with-jarrett-earnest. Accessed 25th May 2023. Kos, P. and Kaye, N. (2015) “Paul Kos Interviewed by Nick Kaye,” in Nick Kaye (ed) SiteWorks: San Francisco Performance 1969-85. Available online. https://siteworks.exeter. ac.uk/interviews/paulkos. Accessed 15th June 2022. Kotz, L. (2010) Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art, London: MIT Press. Kozlov, C. (1970) “Telegram Addressed to Kynaston McShine,” in Kynaston McShine (ed) Information, New York, NY: MoMA New York, p 70. Lewallen, C.M. (1992) “Terry Fox,” in Constance M. Lewallen and David A. Ross (eds) Terry Fox: Articulations, Philadelphia, PA: Goldie Paley Gallery, pp 6–36. —— (2003) “Paul Kos: An Annotated Chronology,” in Constance M. Lewallen (ed) Everything Matters: Paul Kos, A Retrospective, Berkeley, CA: University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, pp 22–73. LeWitt, S. (1999 [1967]) “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, London: MIT Press, pp 12–16. Lippard, L.R. (1997 [1973]) Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972, second edition, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. —— (2009) “Curating by Numbers,” Tate Papers Landmark Exhibitions Issue. Available online. https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/12/curating-by-numbers. Accessed 3rd November 2021. Lippard, L.R. and Chandler, J. (1971 [1968]) “The Dematerialization of Art,” in Lucy R. Lippard, Changes: Essays in Art Criticism, New York, NY: E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc., pp 256–62. Marioni, T. (2003) Beer, Art and Philosophy: A Memoir, San Francisco, CA: Crown Point Press. Melvin, J. (2022) “The Aesthetics of Silence, Withdrawal and Negation in Conceptual Art,” in Paul Coldwell and Ruth M. Morgan (eds) Picturing the Invisible: Exploring Interdisciplinary Synergies from the Arts and the Sciences, London: UCL Press, pp 195–211.

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Meyer, U. (ed) (1972) Conceptual Art, New York, NY: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc. Meyers, R. (2003) “Ice-as-Ice Is Art-as-Art,” in Constance M. Lewallen (ed) Everything Matters: Paul Kos A Retrospective, Berkeley, CA: University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, pp 91–110. Miller, D. and Tilley, C. (eds) (1984) Ideology, Power and Prehistory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morris, C. and Bonin, V. (2012) Materialising “Six Years”: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art, London: MIT Press. Morris, R. and Kaye, N. (1997) unpublished interview, recorded New York, NY, 8th April. Oliva, A.B. (2000 [1973]) “Isolation Unit,” in Terry Fox, Ocular Language, edited by Eva Schmidt, Bremen: Gelellschaft für Aktuelle Kust/Salon Verlag, pp 54–61. Osterwold, M. (1999) “Terry Fox: Economy of Means – Density of Meaning,” in Bernard Schulz (ed) Terry Fox: Works With Sound, Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg, pp 14–45. Pearson, M. and Shanks, M. (2001) Theatre/Archaeology, London: Routledge. Richardson, B. (1973) Terry Fox, Berkeley, CA: University Art Museum Berkeley. Schulz, B. (1999) “Foreward,’ in Bernard Schulz (ed) Terry Fox: Works With Sound, Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg, pp 7–14. Sergers, W. (2003) “The Fleetingness and Solidity of Being,” in Terry Fox, [re/de]Constructions &c, Kassel: Kunsthalle Friedericainum, pp 4–16. Shanks, M. and Hodder, I. (1997) “Processual, Postprocessual and Interpretive Archaeologies,” in Alexandra Alexandri, Victor Buchli, John Carmen and Ian Hodder (eds) Interpreting Archaeology: Finding Meaning in the Past, London: Routledge, pp 3–29. Shanks, M. and Tilley, C. (1987) Social Theory and Archaeology, London: Polity. Sharp, W. (1970) “Body Works: A Pre-Critical, Non-Definitive Survey of Very Recent Works Using the Human Body or Parts Thereof,” Avalanche, 1 (Autumn), pp 1–4. —— (1971a) “Dennis Oppenheim Interviewed by Willoughby Sharp,” Studio International, 182:938 (November), pp 183–93. —— (1971b) “Terry Fox: An Interview,” Avalanche, 2 (Winter), pp 70–81. Siegelaub, S. (1969) One Month (March 1-31, 1969), New York, NY: Seth Siegelaub, n.p. Smithson, R. (1996a [1966]) “Entropy and the New Monuments,” in Jack Flam (ed) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp 10–23. —— (1996b [1967]) “Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read,” in Jack Flam (ed) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, p 61. —— (1996c [1968]) “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art,” in Jack Flam (ed) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp 78–94. —— (1996d [1968]) “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” in Jack Flam (ed) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp 100–13. —— (1996e [1969]) “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan,” in Jack Flam (ed) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp 119–33. —— (1996f [1970]) “Strata A Geographical Fiction,” in Jack Flam (ed) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp 75–6.

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—— (1996g [1972]) “The Spiral Jetty,” in Jack Flam (ed) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp 143–53. Smithson, R. and Norvell, P. (1996 [1969]) “Fragments of an Interview with P.A. [Patsy] Norvell,” in Jack Flam (ed) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp 192–5. Smithson, R. and Wheeler, D. (1996 [1969-70]) “Four Conversations Between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson,” in Jack Flam (ed) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp 196–233. Thomas, J. (1996) Time, Culture and Identity: An Interpretive Archaeology, London: Routledge. Tisdall, C. (1979) Joseph Beuys, New York, NY: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. White, R. (1979) “Terry Fox,” View, II:3 (June), whole issue.

5 INFILTRATIONS

A discussion of the language and the morphology of “things” in Conceptual art, especially in trajectories towards “dematerialisation,” is shadowed by the origins of conceptualism and Conceptual art in early 20th-century practice. The Readymade, which Marcel Duchamp inaugurated privately in 1913, exemplified his profoundly influential efforts “to put art back in the service of the mind” through radical challenges to the “physical” aspects of painting and a revival of what he claimed to be art’s intellectual and literary aspects (Duchamp 1975a: 125). For Duchamp, the Readymade served to deflect attention from the object of sculpture and its physical presence and onto the work of art’s contingency in an emphasis on concept, linguistic play, and, by implication, performativity; a dimension of his work inflected towards performance in Man Ray’s photographic documentation of Duchamp as his female alter-ego, “Rrose Sélavy” in 1923. Following his assertion in “Art After Philosophy” in 1969 that “All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual” (1991a: 18), for Joseph Kosuth the watershed for art’s conceptual turn lay with an emphasis on contingency and so contextual meaning; an emphasis reflected in the Readymade’s dependency on conditions and relations extrinsic to its form, including provenance, signature, and the ideological contexts of the gallery. Consistent with this, in the essay “Context Text” of 1971, Kosuth proposed that Conceptual art rested on the proposition that “the ‘art’ wasn’t in the materials used no more than the meaning is in the phoneme in a spoken sentence: once one realizes this it becomes obvious that all art is conceptual” (1991b: 83, original emphasis). As Kosuth’s remarks imply, Duchamp’s Readymade in many ways offers itself as an idea that infiltrates art’s ideological and aesthetic systems, rather than an object that changes the work of art’s morphology or the “language” of sculpture; an emphasis reinforced by recent work on the Readymade’s history. This chapter, then, explores

DOI: 10.4324/9781315694962-5

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ways in which performative and performance tactics elaborate Conceptual art as infiltrations of aesthetic, social, and media systems and signs, after this history of the Readymade; work that frequently made overt reference to Duchamp’s thinking and practice. Addressing explicit inversions of Duchamp’s tactics in the infiltration of “Readymade” contexts and systems, this analysis focuses firstly on Cildo Meireles’ Insertions into Ideological Circuits (1970), the artist collective T.R. Uthco’s interventions into mass media formats, and performances of gender and persona in work by Tony Labat, Linda M. Montano, Eleanor Antin, and Lynn Hershman Leeson. This discussion progresses to Vito Acconci’s, Adrian Piper’s, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ respective addresses to power, identity, and value in practices that perform and contest the public sphere. Finally, the chapter focuses on Piper’s address to the performativity of self, gender, and ethnicity, in which the sign is infiltrated yet also infiltrates performances of identity seemingly subject to the circulation and flow of information. Here, treatments of the sign reproduce the Readymade’s ambivalent position and status, at once inside and outside narratives in which its meanings are performed. Readymade as rumour

The importance of the Readymade to the definition of Conceptual art evolved following Duchamp’s permanent return to New York in 1942 and his influence on several generations of artists. John Cage had met Duchamp in the 1940s, later cementing a close friendship; Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and subsequently Robert Morris pursued explicit dialogues with Duchamp’s work; while the narratives and facsimiles of his “lost” Readymades gained further ground and influence in the 1960s. Duchamp had realised the first Readymade, Bicycle Wheel in 1913, by affixing a “found” bicycle wheel above the seat of a four-legged stool so that it could be spun, but to no purpose. Comprising everyday objects displaced from their everyday use, Duchamp elaborated the Readymade through Bottle Rack (1914), a snow shovel inscribed In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915), and With Hidden Noise (1916), an “assisted Readymade” incorporating an unknown object hidden within a ball of twine. The Readymade thus comprised a familiar functional object whose selection, Duchamp claimed in a talk at MoMA New York in 1961, “was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste […] in fact a complete anaesthesia” (1975b: 141). To further distract the viewer from the object’s intrinsic qualities, Duchamp stressed the importance of “the short sentence which I occasionally inscribed on the ‘Readymade.’ That sentence instead of describing the object like a title was meant to carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions more verbal” (141). In these ways, the Readymade took its effect in a series of displacements which returned in 1960s Conceptual art: a displacement of the aesthetic values of sculpture from the “object” of sculpture; of objects from their everyday contexts and function; of the hand of the artist from the making of the work; of compositional principles such as orientation, proportion,

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scale, articulation, and balance; and of stylisation and “originality.” Such tactics served to surface the question and so concept of the artwork and to query the values with which its objects are conventionally ascribed. In these respects, too, Duchamp’s Readymades were categorically distinct from André Breton’s later “found objects” (Iversen 2004) defined by Breton and Paul Éluad in 1938 as “An ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of the artist” (Banz 2019: 194) and that under Surrealism emphasised transformation and a surfacing of desire. Such “found objects” revealed deep ambiguities in the everyday, disclosing uncanny effects through changes of context and symbolic purpose and further achieving affect through their amplification or physical alteration. Conversely, Duchamp’s Readymades were defined by their conceptually liminal position and in narrative contradictions and puns, leading Stefan Banz to observe that in 1938: Bréton and Éluad defined the Readymade as something that existed exclusively through the selection of the artist at the exact same moment when Duchamp first had a hand-modelled miniature version of Fountain made for his Box in a Valise. We could hardly imagine a greater contradiction. 195

Duchamp, Fountain, 1917, replica 1964. Purchased with assistance from the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1999. © Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2022. Photo: Tate

FIGURE 5.1 Marcel

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Furthermore, the Readymade’s “presence” as quasi-art-object, rather than as a narrative “in regions more verbal,” is also called into question by Duchamp’s practices. In their first iteration, Duchamp had kept Readymades privately, writing to his sister Suzanne in January 1916 on her visit to New York to explain his purchase of “ready-made sculpture” that she may have encountered in his apartment (Duchamp 2000: 43–4). In 1917, the year he first associated himself with Dada, Duchamp brought the Readymade into the public sphere through Fountain, an upturned porcelain urinal, signed with the pseudonym “R. Mutt”; an object exemplifying his disregard of aesthetic value and alluding to the abject. In this process, Duchamp aligned with contemporary European Dada’s nihilistic sensibilities as expressed by his close friend Francis Picabia, who in 1919 published the first written statement associating Duchamp with Fountain (Banz 2019: 134). Dada, Duchamp later suggested, was “an extreme protest against the physical side of painting” whose “metaphysical attitude” accorded with the Readymade’s impersonal aspects by providing “a way to get out of a state of mind – to avoid being influenced by one’s immediate environment or by the past: to get away from cliché” (1975a: 125). Notoriously, Duchamp extended this play with the “impersonal” and aesthetic negation by having Fountain submitted on his behalf to the Société des Artistes Indépendants for their inaugural exhibition in Paris in 1917, only to find this first public showing of a Readymade suspended by a jury panel that nominally included Duchamp himself. Strictly speaking, he noted to Pierre Cabanne in 1967, the Société’s jury could not “reject” Fountain as the Société had agreed as a matter of principle to accept all submissions. As a result, “The Fountain was simply placed behind a partition and, for the duration of the exhibition” obscured from view: thus, “it was simply suppressed” (Cabanne 1987: 54–5) in the first of a series of obfuscations. In the second, on its retrieval from the exhibition Fountain was immediately purchased by Duchamp’s then principal collector, Walter Arensberg, and promptly “lost.” Indeed, as a material object, the “original” urinal, as opposed to its narrative elaboration as Fountain, has always proved elusive despite its eventual ubiquity as idea, representation, and reproduction. It is a narrative elaborated in Stefan Banz’s exhaustive compilation and study of contemporary documents in Marcel Duchamp: Richard Mutt’s “Fountain” (2019), building on Edward Ball and Robert Knafo’s chronology and analysis in “The R. Mutt Dossier” (1988). Here, Banz contrasts the disappearance, destruction, loss, or theft of the Fountain in the 1917 exhibition with its subsequent proliferation in model-form: in La Boîte En-Valise (from or by Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy) 1935–41; as a “genuine copy” (16) based on photographs of the lost original by Sidney Janis Gallery in 1950; then as a limited edition multiple by Arturo Schwarz Gallery, New York, in 1964; and in later lithograph editions executed by Duchamp, resulting in the eventual circulation of some 687

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or 688 “versions” of the lost (“found”) object. It is a circumstance reflected in Duchamp’s 1961 qualification that: Another aspect of the “Readymade” is its lack of uniqueness […] the replica of a “Readymade” delivering the same message; in fact, nearly every one of the “Readymades” existing today is not an original in the conventional sense. 1975a: 125 Banz’s conclusions also cast doubt on Duchamp’s own narratives, with the effect of multiplying Fountain’s play on the art object. Banz establishes that the “original” urinal photographed by the gallerist Alfred Stieglitz immediately after the Indépendants exhibition is not, as Duchamp repeatedly claimed, by J.L. Mott Iron Works Ltd. (Banz 2019: 11); that the urinal photographed as Fountain in Duchamp’s studio is, in fact, different from the Stieglitz “original” that was hidden during the Société’s exhibition (50); and that the actual commercial source of these “industrial objects” still remained undetermined as of 2019. As a result, Fountain’s subsequent and post-war reproduction has of necessity been through hand-cast and crafted sculptural processes that bring into three-dimension Stieglitz’ photographs of what, retrospectively, became an ephemeral (and irreplaceable) “original.” Fountain is, in this sense, a rumour: a proposition, or idea, whose disappearance stalls its trajectory towards art historical artefact and “precious object.” Indeed, insofar as the Readymade is manifested first in documentation – as narrative – and secondly in recollection of a “lost original” through its crafted reproduction, so it also betrays its own identity as mass produced, utilitarian object selected for its lack of value. In these respects, while the Readymade inaugurated a conceptual turn in the historical avant-garde, Duchamp’s Fountain foregrounds specific aspects that return in a later Conceptual art aligned to theatricality, discourse, and linguistic effect. Banz thus treats “Richard Mutt’s Fountain” as a rich metaphor, whose unfolding narratives in the absence of a definitive object are bolstered by a proliferation of “genuine copies” that only deepen its paradoxical play with originality and authenticity. By accident or design, Duchamp’s “lost” original provides an ironic touchstone for his later authenticated models, sculptural simulations, facsimiles, and representations, resisting the Readymade’s centripetal movement towards its anchor as a “work of art” in favour of an infiltration and disruption of aesthetics and value systems. Avoiding any uncomplicated “presence,” the idea of Fountain infiltrates its copies and affiliate reproductions, unsettling art’s material form to sustain Kosuth’s conclusion in 1969 that, “With the unassisted Readymade, art changed its focus from the form of the language to what is being said” (1991a: 18). Here, too, “the Duchamp effect” (Iversen 2004: 57) is realised in the infiltration and disruption of systems of aesthetics and value by an idea whose object has been lost. In these absences, Fountain has an anachronistic resonance with Vito Acconci’s reflections on “dematerialisation,” as he observed that “So-called conceptual art existed only

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by means of reportage and rumour. If there’s no thing, if there’s no object, if there’s nothing that can be gone back to, the only thing that can be gone back to is reportage or rumour – and rumour could be false” (Acconci 2008). It is this shifting and ambivalent effect of the narratives of the Readymade, as well as Duchamp’s modes of appropriation that informs subsequent Conceptual art in performance. Context as Readymade: Cildo Meireles, T.R. Uthco and Doug Hall, Linda M. Montano, Eleanor Antin, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Tony Labat

In the emergence of Conceptual art referencing Duchamp, the infiltration and disruption of prevailing art and social systems, values, and expectations became an integral part of the conceptual turn. Here, the concept of Readymade prompted an absorption of the conceptual “artwork” into its context; a context that was itself thereby appropriated as “Readymade.” Most influentially, Dan Graham’s photo-essay, Homes for America of 1966, embedded a “conceptual work” within an existing magazine format. Published in its first form in Arts Magazine in December 1966, Homes for America set out a visual analysis of North American suburban homes that reproduced the appearance and methods of Minimal and serial art in its representation of real architectural schemes and their social context; schemes that themselves employed repeated geometric forms and sequences. It is an infiltration supported by Graham’s prose text, which critiques the post-war development of “Large-scale ‘tract’ housing” and their failure “to develop either regional characteristics or separate identity” (1975a). This tactic also implicitly countered Modernist assumptions of art’s autonomy and apoliticality, following instead Graham’s maxim that “Art is a social sign” (1975b). The result appropriates the magazine article format as “Readymade,” which then requires an informed reading to lift the “conceptual” melding of Minimalism and text away from the norms of the journal article it also reproduces. In its method, Homes for America anticipates Seth Siegelaub’s privileging of catalogue over exhibition, as well as the collapse of differences between an artwork and its discursive contexts proposed by Art & Language. Graham’s elaboration of Homes for America through various print media over time and as a visual artwork to be displayed in galleries also reinforces its emphasis on “art information” that could be disseminated through a network of formats. For Benjamin Buchloch in his influential definition of the history of Conceptual art, Graham’s publication identifies itself with the earliest Conceptual art of the 1960s in its radical challenge to the oppositions in which artworks are conventionally defined, suggesting that: Homes for America eliminated the difference between the artistic construct and its (photographic) reproduction, the difference between an exhibition of art objects and the photograph of its installation, the difference between the architectural space of the gallery and the space of the catalogue and the art magazine. 1990: 124

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In these respects, too, Homes for America adopted the characteristically ambivalent position of Conceptual art within and outside of prevailing conventions of art, to enable an effective critique of artworks’ definition, value, and effect. In a letter to Buchloch of 1978, Graham elucidated his interest in art magazines as a site for his work, which he had also explored in Schema, a set of component variables to be “set in its final form […] by the editor of the publication in which it is to appear” (Graham 1975b). First published in Artforum in March 1966, Graham suggested to Buchloch that through such strategies, “Magazines determine a place or a frame of reference both outside and inside what is defined as ‘Art.’ Magazines are boundaries (mediating) between the two areas… between gallery ‘Art’ and communications about ‘Art’” (Buchloch 1999: 382). For Buchloch, it is the ostensibly “invisible” nature of the work in its infiltration of an existing context that proves to be its most important aspect as Conceptual art. He stresses that in Graham’s presentation and account, “I think the fact that Homes for America was, in the end, only a magazine article, and made no claims for itself as ‘Art,’ is its most important aspect” (377, original emphasis). In its occupation and potential transformation of an existing discursive site, Graham’s practice raises the potential of undoing and so bringing to visibility its construction as “art” in this conventionally secondary context. Later, Graham linked the decision to integrate work into a magazine context with an institutional critique, aimed at artworks’ dependence on dissemination in these secondary modes. Writing of “My works for magazine pages,” he argues that typically for artworks, “accretions of information after the fact, became the basis for its fame, and to a large

Meireles, Insertion into Ideological Circuits 2: Banknote Project, 1970. Presented by the artist 2006, accessioned 2008. © Cildo Meireles/ Tate. Photo: Tate

FIGURE 5.2 Cildos

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extent, its economic value” (Graham 1999: 421). In 1978, Graham commented to Buchloch that: Putting it in magazine pages meant that it could also be “read” in juxtaposition to the usual second-hand art criticism, reviews, reproductions in the rest of the magazine and would form a critique of the functioning of the magazine (in relation to the gallery structure) Buchloch 1999: 382 This appropriation of context is also reflected in wider engagements in conceptual practices with the circulation of signs and information through social and political systems. It is an engagement identified by the curator Mari Carmen Ramírez who argues that in Latin American Conceptual art, specifically, “The Readymade also turns into a vehicle by which aesthetic activity may be integrated with all the systems of reference used in everyday life” (Ramírez 1999a: 555). In Latin American conceptual practices more broadly, political and performative efforts towards the infiltration and appropriation of “real” contexts and systems drew overtly on Duchamp’s propositions and its ambivalences. Ramírez thus reads this Conceptual art as potentially transcending the “aesthetic realm” to set itself within “concrete social and political situations,” while continuing to advance critiques of the forms and institutions of art (553). Work such as this is exemplified by the Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles’ series of Insertions into Ideological Circuits, which were first shown in an art context in response to Kynaston McShine’s invitation to participate in the Information exhibition at MoMA, New York, in 1970, where Meireles was temporarily living (Meireles 1999b: 14). Drawing on Pop’s earlier appropriation of industrial products, itself influenced by Duchamp, and the beginnings of institutional critique in New York-based Conceptual art, Meireles considered Insertions as a politicised variation of the Readymade achieved in a reversal of its terms. Playing directly on Duchamp’s propositions, Meireles’ stated intention was thus to provoke “awareness (insertion)” within political and economic systems that otherwise produced an “anaesthesia (circuit), considering awareness as a function of art and anaesthesia as a function of industry” (1999a: 411). In contrast to Meireles’ perception of the Readymade or found object as an industrial object that claims “uniqueness” by being subjectively chosen by the artist and so removed from its everyday, systemic context, “The basic premiss of Insertions is the opposite: starting from a small, individual thing, you can then reach a very large scale through ramifications and branching out” (2008: 64). Insertions into Ideological Circuits: CocaCola Project (1970) comprised “assisted” Readymades, shown in Information as three Coca-Cola bottles with “YANKEES GO HOME” stencilled in white, such that as the bottle is emptied its message seems erased. Also inscribed on the bottle is “information and instructions on how to repeat the process […] taking advantage of a pre-existing system of circulation” (Meireles 1999b: 13).

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For McShine’s information, the Coca-Cola Project was twinned with Meireles’ Banknote Project, which “recovered and reused” a popular practice of writing over circulating banknotes “messages about people who had been arrested or who had not been found” (Meireles 2008a: 66), so installing the Insertions within an existing cultural practice. Although the Coca-Cola Project incorporated the distribution of over 1,000 altered bottles (Westerman 2022), Meireles later remarked that this series, was almost like a metaphor for what I consider the real work: the Cédula Project, which was contemporaneous. In this project, banknotes were stamped with political messages and re-inserted into circulation. The idea of the circuit was still there and of course it had a greater effect than the Coca Cola Project. In the confrontation of the individual and the state in these circumstances, the state was clearly seen to be the problem. 1999a: 12–3 Ramírez associates Meireles’ 1970 demonstrations more broadly with “the Latin American conceptual proposition” (1999a: 555) comprising “political infiltration through appropriation and alteration of mass-produced objects” (554). In her review of “Conceptualism in Latin America, 1960-1980,” Ramírez notes the resonance of Insertions to a wide range of practices extending beyond Brazil to Mexico and Argentina that shared Meireles’ tactics of radical political “displacement of artistic practices from the strictly institutional to the socio-political arena” (1999b: 60). For Meireles, rather than transpose these practices entirely into an ideological and political space, the Insertions connection to the Readymade’s ambivalent identity also amplifies its simultaneous critique of institutional, cultural, and political practice. In a later interview with Gerardo Mosquera, Meireles emphasised this multiplication of platforms, noting that “What interested me was the double character of these works: one object could simultaneously engage on two levels, both within and outside of an art-historical definition of the art object” (Meireles 1999b: 13). Here, too, Insertions subscribes to the unsettled position of Conceptual art by amplifying its simultaneous operation within and outside of the museum space, such that it “exists precisely at this borderline between fiction and reality – it belongs to those two worlds simultaneously” (Meireles 2008a: 64), a feature he ascribes to the Readymade as one of “the greatest art objects of the twentieth century” (65). Meireles claims, “I was no longer working with metaphorical representations of situations; I was working with the real situation itself […] It no longer referred to the cult of the isolated object; it existed in terms of what it could spark off in the body of society” (64). Meireles’ elaboration of the Readymade prompted further reversals, as the (assisted) Readymade is returned to the “ideological circuit” from which it was drawn, “close to their origin yet impregnated with meaning” (1999b: 17). The Insertions, Meireles proposed, were therefore not industrial objects on a trajectory towards the

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condition of an artwork, “but art objects behaving like industrial objects” (Herkenhoff et al. 1999: 48) that became the epicentre of political intervention in the everyday flow of information; unfolding in what Ramírez characterises as “recycled contexts” (Ramírez 1999a: 555). In these regards, it is also significant that Insertions begin not only in approaching the (real world) circuit itself as “Readymade” but also in the creation of negative or void spaces intended to interrupt the circulation and dissemination of information. Meireles’ Insertions into Newspapers (1969–70) followed the California artist Stephen Kaltenbach’s Artforum advertisements in 1968 and were contemporaneous with Joseph Kosuth’s dissemination of The First Investigations through newspaper postings and Adrian Piper’s first use of Village Voice classifieds in 1969, to which she returned for aspects of The Mythic Being in 1973–5. Each of these various infiltrations of everyday advertising worked to de-emphasise “form” and the “precious object,” while amplifying the effect of the multiple, and lodging “art” within the informational flow necessary for daily living. For Meireles, specifically: The idea was for that classified ad to be a blank space, with the text nearly illegible […] I wanted an absence of classified there, a sort of “clearing”, as it were, which is a type of territorial possession. You clean up the area you are going to occupy Meireles 2008b: 60 Where Insertions into Newspapers anticipated an action, the exhibition of the Coca-Cola Project correspondingly amounted to the showing of a remainder or document. Meireles stresses, “The sequence of bottles photographed in the museum is not the work: it is a relic, a reference, a sample. The work only exists in so far as it is being done” (65). Analogously to Tom Marioni’s inaugural The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art in Oakland occurring in the month following Meireles’ participation in Information, this work’s “being done” relies on unseen exchanges and the everyday social transactions its objects imply and facilitate. Consistent with this, reviewing the Insertions in ideological Circuits for Tate, Jonah Westerman accounts for this project through its performativity (2022) whereby the public’s exchange and use of the (assisted) Readymade is the work, reflecting Meireles’ conclusion that “the work only exists to the extent that other people practice it” (Meireles 1999a: 411). In this sense, the Insertions are objects of Conceptual performance: objects that prompt and shape use to intervene in the social transactions with which they are entangled, and that might puncture the “Information (production, circulation and control) […] at the source of Insertions” (Meireles 2008a: 65) only to be disarmed by the gallery. Here Meireles thinks of the Insertions as gaining efficacy in performance, to create a “clearing” of social space to facilitate new “territorial possession” and counter-meanings within existing ideological circuits. Where the Insertions imply exchanges and reversals of terms between artworks and social objects after the Readymade, their

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infiltration and interruption of existing systems were also integral to other Conceptual performance. In the 1970s, analogous tactics became the basis of distinct modes of performance by North American west coast conceptual artists, in appropriations and simulations of popular and mass media formats. Here, mass media is treated as a format of the everyday, in performances aimed at the production of documents lodged in the information flow to examine and critique its effects. The work of the T.R. Uthco collective of Diane Andrews Hall, Doug Hall, and Jody Proctor, based in San Francisco from 1970 to 1978, included “interventions” in 1974–5, inflected also in Doug Hall’s subsequent “artist-in-residencies” projects. Following the arrest of the heiress Patty Hearst in September 1975 for bank robbery after her kidnap by the “Symbionese Liberation Army” or “SLA” with whom she seemingly acted, Diane Andrews Hall and Doug Hall joined the throng of reporters outside San Francisco federal Court House where Hearst was charged. The Patty Hearst Spectacle (1974–5), formed a series including an ink collage on paper, Patty’s Mother Tells Why Family Doesn’t Believe Her, as well as appropriated and simulated media and FBI materials that followed the group’s “interest in mass spectacle,” as explorations of ways of interacting with media events in the Bay Area (T.R. Uthco 1974–5). The Hearst series also included The Media Frenzy Surrounding the Arrest of Patty Hearst, Federal Court House, San Francisco, September, 1975, a sequence of frequently blurred black-and-white photographs produced as a verité capture of events from within the “press pack” at the Court. The Hearst Spectacle series is a collocation of T.R. Uthco’s visual practice with documentary, performance, and a potential participation in news media. For the group’s subsequent intervention, President Ford and The Avant Guard, Jody Proctor infiltrated the security detail for the President during his visit to San Francisco on 21 September 1975, resulting in a photo series recording his otherwise unseen “performance,” which may also have been inadvertently reproduced in local media covering the visit. To achieve this: T. R. Uthco dressed one of its members to approximate a police or security officer and placed him in the midst of the spectacle. To their astonishment their impersonator (a crude facsimile in a thrift store uniform) was accepted as an authority figure by civilians and officials alike. T.R. Uthco 1975 The infiltration served to “explore the limits” of Ford’s “impenetrable security,” prompted in San Francisco by Lynette Fromme’s attempted assassination of the President a few days prior in Sacramento, and to produce a photographic documentary record of Proctor’s integration. Later the same day, Ford was subject to a second attempted shooting, this time by Sarah Jane Moore, near to the area Proctor had joined the security detail, so amplifying in retrospect the “real” and thematised issues at stake in T.R. Uthco’s breaching of Ford’s security.

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Uthco, President Ford and The Avant Guard, 1975. Courtesy Doug Hall  (Continued )

FIGURES 5.3 AND 5.4 T.R.

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FIGURES 5.3 AND 5.4 (Continued)

From 1977, Doug Hall extended this again in a series of “artist in residencies” conceived by Hall and Proctor. For the first, Hall took up residence with the San Francisco Giants baseball team for Game of the Week (1977), initially for their Spring training in Arizona and then in San Francisco, where a camera crew recorded a documentary of his various interactions with players, press, and public. In 1980, with Proctor and Chip Lord of the Ant Farm art collective, The Amarillo News Tapes documented a residency at KVII Television, Amarillo, as well as exchanges and collaborations with the professional news team. Both residencies treated the formats and conventions of television as in symbiosis with everyday behaviour and experience. Doug Hall recounted that: The tape shows the three of us in our respective roles as anchor (me), weatherman (Chip), and sportscaster (Jody), interacting with the real “Pro News Team” on the set. In such episodes as: “Opening Routine,” “Liberal Fire,” and “Two Stories,” we drew attention to the oddities of language, gesture, and setting that constituted the ubiquitous theatre of small-market television news. Hall 2023 These appropriations of context and convention construct performances embedded into the conventions of mass media to create flows and tensions between

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“real” and “fictional” roles in events and their documentation. In The Amarillo News Tapes, the “Readymade” context also broke through its articulation in a documentary artwork to become “real” news. Hall recalls that: We only knew that we were interested in the staging of news and felt reasonably confident that we could accomplish something while we were there. Then an incredible tornado roared through Wichita Falls, which changed everything. […] it was interesting because our fanciful, somewhat intellectualized deconstruction of the news was suddenly interrupted by a catastrophic and highly newsworthy event and we found ourselves in helicopters or in the KVII Pro News van, rushing to the scenes of the disaster. We were no longer distant observers but were fully embedded accomplices, assisting the reporters as they covered the story. Hall and Kaye 2014 Such work reaches outside of the gallery context in the manner of Dennis Oppenheim’s maxim that “the artist makes his art by infiltrating the real world” (in Wall 1991). The “real world,” here, however, is approached as a sphere of media flow and its exchange and circulation of signs, to which the artist and their persona is subject, and in whose infiltration, simulation, and mutual disruption, artwork takes form. During this period, conceptual artists were also exploring the performance of gender and social self, addressing in various permutations how overtly constructed personae might inhabit everyday social practice as the Readymade context of their work. In San Francisco, these approaches included Lynn Hershman Leeson’s The Roberta Breitmore Series of 1974–8 and Bonnie Ora Sherk’s “Cultural Costume” performances of 1973–5, including The Short Order Cook and The Waitress, considered in this volume in the broader context of Sherk’s engagement with “theatricality” and environment, in Chapter 6. Linda M. Montano’s early art/life actions in San Francisco included personae defined through work activities that required costume and elements of role embedded into everyday contexts for extended periods. Framed as performance in their ephemera, Montano’s art/life performance projects in this period included ODD JOBS (1973) in which printed cards advertised “ODD JOBS ARTFULLY DONE,” as well as HOME NURSING (1973), and ROSE MOUNTAIN WALKING CLUB (1975) providing tours of San Francisco (Montano 1981). Suggesting that “Conceptual art is translated into performance art for me” (Cohen 2005: 55), Montano has referred to Duchamp as her “mentor” and flagged the importance of Man Ray’s portraits of Duchamp’s female “alter-ego,” Rrose Sélavy to these processes (62). Such work by Sherk and Montano foreground performances constructed in retrospect in overtly enacted signs of identity that also engage with the unseen labour of female workers.

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M. Montano and Annie Sprinkle, Linda Montano as Bob Dylan, 1989/2014. Courtesy Linda M. Montano

FIGURE 5.5 Linda

Other performances infiltrating the everyday amplified dissonant dynamics between performer, performance, and sign. In Southern California, Eleanor Antin’s performed personae included her cross-dressing as The King of Solana Beach (1974–5), which produced a series of photographs of her meeting residents, visitors, and workers from her unannounced 12-month residency at Solana Beach, San Diego. Other of Antin’s overtly theatrical identities in performance or recorded on video, in photographs, texts, and diaries included The Ballerina (who cannot dance), Nurse Eleanor, The Angel of Mercy (a nurse from the Civil War in 1854, and 1977), and Eleanora Antinova (a fictional African American ballerina) whose impersonation Antin “lived” for a period of two weeks in Manhattan (Antin 1983). Montano’s later work incorporated her performance of public figures and celebrities, including a seven-hour performance cross-dressed as the young Bob Dylan in which she lip-synched his early recordings, at Kingston, New York, in 2008, and

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subsequently at Woodstock in May 2014. It is an appearance that also provided for a photographic work by Montano and Annie Sprinkle, Linda Montano as Bob Dylan (1989/2014). These performances, however, do not produce synthetic or consistent portraits. Instead, these artists’ remaking of themselves in embedded performances suggest malleable identities and so foreground their agency. At the same time, the very visibility of their artefacts of disguise – of Montano’s overt pose as Dylan, for example, inspired partly by a family resemblance to the singer – isolates and anatomises the performativity of these signs. Where Montano chooses to inhabit signs of transformation, the very visibility of this process suggests that self and presence are also an effect of the sign in its remaking of the performer: that agency rests also with the social sign itself and its personal and political effects, both in performance and its documented aftermath. Lynn Hershman Leeson’s The Roberta Breitmore Series (1974–8) also exemplifies performance constructed in differences between sign, persona, and performer. “Roberta Breitmore” is encountered through the exhibition and publication of photographic series, relics, and documentations of Hershman Leeson’s “real time” private performance of her alter-ego. Breitmore is thus a presence evoked in the remains of social interactions and evidence of social being. Discussing the project in 1994, Hershman Leeson recounted Roberta Breitmore as: a breathing, simulacrumed persona, played first by myself and then by a series of multiple individuals. Roberta existed in both real life and real time and during the decade of her activity engaged in many adventures that typified the culture in which she participated. She had a checking account and driver’s license and saw a psychiatrist. Her existence was proved by the tracking of her psychiatric reports and credit ratings. Hershman Leeson 1994 Through such evidence, Hershman has suggested that The Roberta Breitmore Series acted as a “cultural barometer” of the time and place of her creation in San Francisco in the mid-1970s. Extending a dissemination of “art information” characteristic of Conceptual art into the personal and social construction of a female identity, The Roberta Breitmore Series captures a configuration of “self” out of a flow and exchange of signifiers realised in the intellectual and emotional investment of its future readership. Roberta’s performance is disseminated and constructed in the legacy of these props – displayed as artefacts – that record and evoke quotidian events from her artificial life. These include photographic series that simulated performance documentation; classified advertisements placed on Roberta’s behalf to advertise for a room share; recordings of meetings between Hershman as “Roberta” and subsequent male respondents to her ad, each having been met three times in a pseudo-scientific “proof of concept.” Evidence of Roberta’s existence extended to conventional signs and documents of social and financial being, including objects with legal standing such as a driver’s licence, a checking account, and a credit card,

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which Hershman Leeson later reported her alter-ego obtained despite her sometime ineligibility as the “real life” Lynn Hershman. This unfolding of a network of documents, specifically 171 artefacts, images, and works produced from 1974 to 1978, at once emphasises the specific object and “material culture” of performance, but also the flow of information in which this material is always caught. This is amplified in the mode of engagement the series’ dissemination, publication, and exhibition invites. Hershman Leeson observes that there is no prescriptive narrative order in which the signs and objects of Roberta Breitmore may be encountered. Instead “Roberta Breitmore” is enacted in being read, such that: Roberta’s manipulated reality became a model for a private system of interactive performance. […] her records were stored on photographs and texts that could be viewed without predetermined sequences. This allowed viewers to become voyeurs into Roberta’s history. Their interpretations shifted depending on the perspective and order of the sequences. Hershman Leeson 1994 The Roberta Breitmore Series operates in the dichotomies of the public signs of a private self, inviting disparate narrative constructions of identity by the reader (or viewer) whose context is appropriated into the work, but out of sight. Roberta Breitmore is thus produced as a public identity by her voyeurs, who are, consequently, implicated in the “cultural barometer” they bear witness to, in a Conceptual performance produced in each reader’s encounter with “her” object-remains. Analogous dynamics are also reflected in later work by the Cuban emigré artist Tony Labat in his persona-based interventions that appropriated both media and everyday formats, in particular Gong Show (1978), Terminal Gym (1980–1), and Fight (1981). Here, Labat executed a series of actions embedded into the contexts to which they referred. For The Gong Show (1978), Labat, with the artist Bruce Pollack, entered the eponymous popular television show: one renowned for presenting amateur acts of questionable talent, who performed until any one of the judging-panel was moved to remove them by striking a large gong. Attempting to use its own implicit terms and process to produce its nemesis, Labat recalls that: For The Gong Show the act we did was so abstract, so absurd, so stupid, and with no talent whatsoever […] The Gong Show was actually infiltrating a world where talent was rewarded. And Bruce Pollack and I, we said let’s go - I said, we have to bring something that has no talent whatsoever, something that anyone could do, and of course the document. Labat and Kaye 2016 Labat’s The Gong Show is a four-minute video grab from the resultant broadcast television, which plays without contextualisation, of Labat and Pollack’s act as they

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march to-and-fro, Labat playing the kazoo, Pollack slapping his own face: a fragment of television that attempts to hollow-out its own content and exemplify the brief of the programme it serves. In this mode of “guerrilla” performance, Labat suggests, I wanted to interject a little bit of social realism – a kind of social realism transferred into a gesture, an action, a performance: what would it mean to bring a kind of realism to it? It started with that. And with creating a persona. Creating a persona that had led me to the boxing in Fight (1981) and, before that, to The Gong Show (1978). Today we call them interventions, back then it was kind of like – guerrilla. Labat and Kaye 2016 In the manner of Graham’s intervention in Arts Magazine, the closer Labat and Pollack come to infiltrating The Gong Show by replicating its “ideal” form of trivial or empty “act,” the more it relies upon the reader’s knowledge of another conceptual (art) framework to be produced as a self-reflexive performance. In 1980, Labat received a letter from the artist Tom Chapman objecting to Labat’s artwork, accusing him of being part of a generation whose work represented a “theatricality,” and challenging him to a fight over the issue. Noting later that “I welcomed the stage. I loved the stage,” Labat replied to Chapman proposing that “A fight had to be by the book, meaning that we had to become licensed – we had to become licensed boxers” (Labat and Kaye 2016). Subsequently, Terminal Gym (1980–1) comprised an installation in which Labat’s studio was refitted as a boxing gym, following the logic that “the studio is where I do my work: the studio is going to be where I do my training.” Operating as a professional gym and “social hangout,” Labat pursued a fully professional training for a year, building on what had been a deep interest in the sport as a spectator. Appearing three times before the California Athletic Commission to obtain the licence, he recalled that “I became a boxer, but with this persona, and I knew it was going to be just one fight and one project” (Labat and Kaye 2016). Culminating on 4th June 1981 in Fight, one of a series of six professional fights over one evening at the Kezar Pavilion, San Francisco, Chapman and Labat boxed before multiple constituencies, as Labat recalled: There were over 1,000 people at the fight, and there were cameras everywhere. The boxing crowd was looking around like, “What’s the big deal?” They never got that kind of attention at a local boxing evening night. And then they see all these punks and other types coming in, and they don’t get that. Then they see the art world coming in – the collectors and well-dressed people. That was my favourite part, just to look out into the audience to see people just kind of looking at each other, checking things out. You know, why is there a punk band doing the national anthem at a local boxing match? Labat and Kaye 2016

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Captured as Fight: A Practical Romance in Labat’s video documentation, the commitment to embed Fight and develop the persona of the boxer into his living for a year was integral to his wider address to lived cultural identity. Born in Cuba and emigrating to the United States in 1966 when he was 15, Labat’s father had been a professional sportsman in Jai alai, a ball game of Basque origin arriving in Cuba at the turn of the 20th century. Identifying with these personal and cultural histories but experiencing his relationship with the surrounding Cuban American community as one of “exile,” Labat’s early work on video spoke to a sense of displacement he also sought to provoke. Thus, “attempting to put the audience, the viewer, in my shoes […] I would intentionally speak in Spanish […] putting it in the face of the viewer to understand issues of the other” (Labat and Kaye 2016). Combining this aim with his sense that artists should ask questions without having responsibility for the answer, the tone of Labat’s actions is of provocation: he notes, “There’s a word with Cubans: joder, which is to fuck with things – to challenge things with a mischievous kind of humour” (Labat and Kaye 2016). Here, too, Labat had taken aim at contemporary media formats, directing his attention to the aftermath of the action and producing the work in ramifications and remains. The outcome of Fight, then, was multiple: a circulation of diverse representations elaborating a “work” that simultaneously comprised its context, dissemination, and mediated form. Labat emphasised that: Fight functioned in the media first. The night of the fight was almost anticlimactic. For me, it was the process: the gym and the media. Opening the HumanInterest section and why this 30-year-old artist wants to become a boxer? Go into the Sports section and it would all be technical: can he throw a jab, can he this, he can that; how good is Labat with his feet? Then we go to the Arts section, and it would be the drip of the blood on the canvas and Pollock. Labat and Kaye 2016 The process of Fight also embraced Labat’s rehearsal and acting out of the persona of the professional boxer, as he inhabited its demands for over a year: a period in which Terminal Gym established itself within the profession, facilitating, for example, the training of the first two professional female boxers to be licensed in California. In the Kezar Pavilion ring, however, and faced with Chapman, Labat’s performance also faced a violent “authenticity” that not only fulfilled but also intruded on his control of the project, as: he punches me in the face quite hard and everything that I had learnt was out the window. You know, professional boxers have maybe 100 amateur fights before they step into a ring with 1,000 people watching. I can’t describe the emotion. It scared me, because I wanted to kill him. A lot of my early work also dealt with

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cultural deconstructions of machismo and maleness. So, I was very interested in understanding and deconstructing that. When he punched me, and I lost my cool I all of a sudden experienced what I was trying to talk about. I was also influenced by George Plimpton, Norman Mailer and the idea that if you want to write about something or understand something you have to infiltrate it: put the gloves on. With technique crumbling and in the impossibility of maintaining and living in the signs of the boxer, a different “social realism” intruded on Labat’s experience. Despite “winning,” Labat recalled, and as an ardent boxing fan, “I couldn’t watch the tape - those emotions took over” (Labat and Kaye 2016). In plays on the Readymade’s dialectical relationship with the gallery through which, in time, it might become the precious object – “Duchamp’s Readymade” – that it ostensibly critiques, these conceptual performances risk the irruption of their appropriated contexts into their definition. Each of these artists’ processes infiltrates established formats of the everyday, to which they produce a mis-fitting. Hence, Meireles emphasis, in the Insertions, on art objects acting as industrial objects. In a reversal of this, Hershman Leeson authenticates Roberta Breitmore through items displaced from performances in the everyday towards the gallery, in substitution for the satisfactions Breitmore’s “presence” might appear to offer. Labat’s Fight is produced in differential documentations, also after the fact of performance. Such infiltrations enact and are visible in their dissonant relationship to the contexts they appropriate and on which they depend, a process by which they produce counter-meanings and “clearings” in the very circumstances into which they risk being re-absorbed. Contesting the public sphere: Adrian Piper, Vito Acconci, Mierle Laderman Ukeles

In the context of Conceptual art, the “infiltration” through performance of formats of everyday interaction and behaviour not only entailed addresses to the dynamics of private action and public view but also the performance and subversion of public space. Here, performance provided a means to interrogate the production of the public sphere it infiltrates, and a development of Conceptual art’s emergent “institutional critique” towards embedded social practice. In approaching this turn, Adrian Piper narrates the engagement of her early work not only in relation to Conceptual art’s emphasis on language and symbols that refer “beyond themselves” (Piper 1999b: 425) but also to analogous effects within Minimalism. Referencing the “specific object’s” (Judd 1965) reflection of the viewer’s attention back on itself, Piper’s early work can be read as responding to Minimalism’s address to the quotidian space and time in which viewing or reading occurs. Here, Piper’s early work also shares impulses, tactics, and developments with Vito Acconci’s

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contemporaneous steps from writing and poetry to “Situations” and “Actions,” alongside other artists such as Hanne Darboven and Dan Graham who, Christophe Cherix argues, “liberated themselves from Minimalism by pushing its logic further” (2016: 16). It is an observation that can be extended to contemporaneous work that imbricated Conceptual art and performance: to Douglas Huebler, Tom Marioni, and Chris Burden, for example, who also referenced Minimalism as a point of departure or response. It is an emphasis on phenomena captured in Acconci’s recollection in 1982 that Minimalism was the art that made it necessary to recognise the space you were in. Up until that time I had probably assumed the notion of a frame, I would ignore that wall around it. Finally, then, with Minimal Art, I had to recognise I was in a certain floor […] I was in a certain condition, I had a headache, for example: I had a certain history, I had a certain bias. Acconci 1982 This attention to the present-tense situation in the gallery also has echoes of Duchamp’s turn towards the artwork’s contingencies. Piper later remarked in her “Preparatory Notes for The Mythic Being” that Duchamp’s urinal returns “all over again” in her own and other conceptual work’s tacet acknowledgement that “It’s not the aesthetic nature of the OBJECT but the aesthetic nature of the CONTEXT that makes the art, blah, blah …” (1996f: 94–5, original emphasis). Reflecting on the sources of her attention to the “indexical present,” a focus throughout her work, Piper reads the Minimalist object’s confrontation with the viewer as an opening of a specific space and time, one taken forward in her own interrogation of the present tense of interaction. Furthermore, Piper’s response to the specificity of the object in Minimalism suggests a reaching towards a particularity that opened to and implied difference. Writing of “The Logic of Modernism” in 1992, Piper notes that: Emphasizing the concrete, unique particularity of the specific object, its spatiotemporal immediacy and imperviousness to abstract critical speculation, minimalism mounted an individualistic attack on aesthetic stereotyping that echoed analogous attacks on race and gender stereotyping that first surfaced in the white American mainstream in the early 1960s. Piper 1999c: 548 In her contemporaneous lecture, “Xenophobia and the Indexical Present,” Piper reflected on this focus in her own work, emphasising “it’s really the same strategy, whether you are dealing with objects or whether you are dealing with people: that is, to focus on the indexical present. On the reality” (Piper 1992).

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FIGURE 5.6 Vito Acconci,

2023

RE, 1967. Courtesy of Maria Acconci and Acconci Studio,

Vito Acconci’s work, too, had evolved in response to the awareness of specificities of time and place prompted by the Minimalist object, leading him to develop his work on the page as “analogues” to Minimalism’s focus on the dynamics of viewing. Texts such as RE (1967) and READ THIS WORD (1969) practised a performative tautology by describing the reading of the page-space they prompted: in RE calling attention to the eye “(here)”; prompting an awareness of the move “(there)”. Where the page-space thus became a surface traversed in “real” space and time through a synthesis of concrete poetry, Conceptual art, and real-time activity, so for Acconci it prompted questions over action in spaces beyond the page; in

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the street, on the body, or in direct relation to the reader/viewer. Accounting for his “Steps into Performance (And Out),” Acconci recorded this transition in treating public spaces as if they were the page, so maintaining an emphasis on language: In the beginning was the word: start an action by stating a scheme – from there the action takes off (takes me off) where it will. The general method is: find a way to tie myself in to an already existent situation – set myself up as a receiver of an action/condition that’s already occurring outside me. Acconci 1979: 27 In their execution, these task-based schemes tied Acconci’s actions to a structuring and punctuation of everyday activities, in manipulations of “found” or “recycled” contexts. From March 1969, Acconci developed numerous enacted and unrealised projects for the street, producing performance or photographic “Activities” or “Situations” engaging with specific sites. Frequently, Acconci’s schemes infiltrated and appropriated the public dynamics of a place, a performance environment, or contexts in time and in action. In his first documented scheme for action for Street Works I, a series organised in Manhattan by the Architectural League of New York, Acconci realised A Situation Using Streets, Walking, Glancing, comprising: A continuous walk, for three hours, around the sidewalk of a busy city street: straight line along the curb, cut across the corner, straight line alongside buildings. In the middle of people going in and out of stores, I’m walking long enough for someone to notice, for someone to think: “Hey, I’ve seen this guy before.” Acconci 2006: 20 Where Acconci’s tracking of language on the page in RE prompts a reading shadowed by a sense of performance, this Situation manifests over time as a probable, or coincident performance – one surfacing in a Readymade context as the private infiltrates the public. His outline of the action speculates on “the person wondering whether or not he/she has already seen me […] to make out or perceive to be something previously known […] in place; out of place” (21). A Situation Using Streets, Walking Running, for Street Works II, and, finally, Following Piece for Street Works IV in October 1969, further focused on the dynamics of private and public. In Following Piece, Acconci designated an unknowing individual that he would follow in public space until they entered a private domain, noting, “I need a scheme (follow a scheme, follow a person)” (77) and staging photographic documentation after the fact. These actions thus explored dynamics between language, page, and performance, embedding and surfacing action and theatricality through the conceptual appropriation of everyday frameworks and schemes.

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Piper’s early work explored analogous dynamics. With his co-editor Bernadette Mayer, Acconci had facilitated Piper’s first publication through the journal 0 to 9: an untitled work in its sixth issue in July 1969, comprising a single gridded page with boxes marked up as 1–12 on its horizontal and 1–31 on its vertical axis. Piper’s untitled single page presents, in effect, a “Readymade”: the reproduction of an “empty,” gridded page prepared for the location, ordering, or measuring of unspecified objects and/or events, yet to be concretised by its reader/user. In these early works, and especially her single typescript (untitled) works, Piper used selfreflexive language to prompt diverse iterations, actually or conceptually. Thus, her earlier Untitled (“If you are a slow reader ….”) (1968), one of Piper’s Nineteen Concrete Space-Time-Infinity Pieces, comprising three paragraphs in the upper quadrant of a single typescript page, anticipates its specificity in potential differences in the times and experiences of reading: If you are a slow reader, it will take you approximately five seconds to read this sentence. If, on the other hand, you are a fast reader, it will very likely take you the same amount of time to read this sentence, since it has more words in it, in addition to a few subordinate clauses. If you are an average reader, you must set up a ratio of the number of words in the first sentence over the time it takes a slow reader to read it (five seconds) to the number of words in the first sentence over the time it would take a fast reader to read them (unknown quantity x) Cherix et al. 2016: 157 Ending on the bottom right corner with a timed signature: “Adrian Piper (.5 seconds).” On the page, the Concrete Space-Time-Infinity Pieces suspend permutations of identity, experience, and form, then to be concretised by individual readers. In these regards, Piper’s strategy might also be compared with Douglas Huebler’s documents that look toward the “conceptual event” of reading, or Lawrence Weiner’s view of language as a “sculptural material” that “gains its sculptural qualities by being read” (in Osborne 2002: 31); dynamics also embedded in Piper’s subsequent Conceptual performance. Early in 1969, Piper executed 0 to 9 (for Vito Acconci), a typescript page making a series of systematic numerical permutations which also suggest a response to Sol LeWitt’s work, whose influence on Piper is well documented (Platzker 2016: 45). Then, in April, Piper contributed to Street Works II with her first explicit performance event: five untitled proposals for public participants to map and document 13th to 14th Streets at 5th and 6th Avenues in Manhattan, unannounced to passersby, over one hour. At this juncture, too, Piper made her first use of newspaper classified advertisements, with a posting in the Village Voice “Galleries” classifieds,

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May 29th, of area relocation no.2, stating: “The area described by the periphery of this ad has been relocated from Sheridan Square New York N.Y. to (your address)” (Cherix et al. 2016: 171). Here, Piper displaces information from a “real” location to its abstraction (a “map”) and then (via the newspaper) to “your” private space. Writing in the catalogue to Piper’s 2016 retrospective, Cornelia Butler notes the prevalence of performative strategies in Piper’s early work for the page out of which her performance proposals for Street Works II evolved, assigning her approach “to part of Conceptual art’s history of interpersonal engagement,” and noting Piper’s “autological” texts that “take place in real time” (2016: 54). In this regard, specifically, Piper’s work developed in a relocation of her linguistic tactics and attention to “the reality” of present-tense exchanges from the private space of reading and towards the occupation of overtly public spheres. In this step, Piper noted that “I wanted to explore objects that can refer both to objects and ideas beyond themselves and their standard functions, as well as to themselves,” and more specifically objects that “draw attention to the spatiotemporal matrices in which they were embedded” (1999b: 424). Thus, Piper employed “language (typescript, maps, audio tapes, etc.)” that dialectically forced attention to granular and concrete aspects of places, conditions, and the contexts they described and formed a part of. Underpinning this change was also Piper’s turn to her body as a focus, under the regimes of her early conceptual work. This had been initiated with The Hypothesis Series (1968–70) and further elaborated in Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece (1970) and Food for the Spirit (1971). The latter “private loft performances,” David Platzker argues in addressing “Adrian Piper’s Unities,” superseded “the dominance of Minimalist sculptural icons by inserting the human form as a theatrical object to be reconsidered” (2016: 43). Piper considered such work, “the investigation of my own body as equally a concrete physical object that could refer to itself as well as to other objects, and in finding the points of similarity and difference” (Piper 1994). These investigations displaced mappings of the page or the specificities of place and time onto the body with a critical self-regard that demanded an engagement with “race and gender objectification, otherness, identity, and xenophobia” (Piper 1994): a process documented as performance and mapped onto specific locations. Reflecting, later, on the evolution of her “Meta-Art,” Piper noted that: In The Hypothesis Series I was investigating myself as an object that moves through space and time just like any other object, but, unlike other threedimensional objects, this one has a peculiar capacity; namely, the capacity to register self-consciously the space and time I am moving through, to actually reset that consciousness symbolically – in photographs – and abstractly – in a coordinate grid and communicate it. 1996d: 19 Eschewing conventional performance “presence,” this work foregrounded Piper’s agency, echoing Duchamp’s formulation in “The Creative Act” that “to all

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appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being” (1975b:138). In composing these documentations, Piper recounts that “I functioned as an active Art Selector, conferring Art status on certain objects in the environment (including human ones) in virtue of my Art Consciousness. I became a programmed tool of my Artist’s Consciousness” (1996e: 9). This focus also reflected Piper’s development of concepts of “Meta-Art,” in some ways akin to Robert Morris’ Card File (1962) and Dan Graham’s Schema (1966). Here, the “work” comprises a self-reflexive account of the conditions and processes of its coming into being, expressed by Piper, in 1973, as the “indexical present” of her self-regard: By “meta-art” I mean the activity of making explicit the thought processes, procedures, and presuppositions of making whatever kind of art we make. The thought processes might include how we hypothesize a work into existence: whether we reason from problems encountered in the last work to possible solutions in the next; or get “inspired” by seeing someone else’s work, or a previously unnoticed aspect of your own; or read something, experience something, or talk; or find ourselves blindly working away for no good reason; or any, all, or other processes of this kind. 1999a: 298–9 “Meta-art” describes an activity simultaneously within and outside an “artwork” that is in production, a process characteristic of Conceptual art’s troubling of the “work of art.” In the Hypothesis series, this “activity” is privately performed – recorded but unseen – then mapped into documentation. Simultaneously, however, Piper enacts and records an analogously self-conscious address to her “self,” to reveal that “as an object of consciousness, my identity is problematic” (1996f: 95). Piper has also noted that: Doing meta-art presupposes immediate and privileged access to the impulse, the activity, and the emergence of the art. It is all of a piece with these, but in addition it requires an epistemic, self-consciousness about them, viz. viewing ourselves as the aesthetic object we are, then elucidating as fully as possible the thoughts, procedures, and presuppositions that so define us. 1999a: 300 Acconci’s contemporaneous steps from language on a page to action or events in private and public spaces early in 1969 also saw performative responses to Minimalism, including the dismantling of conventional theatrical relation. In this context, Acconci’s emergent concerns included definitions of the “public sphere,” expressed in performed relationships of power – and the dynamics of interrelated “power fields” – a set of concerns addressed consistently from his early performance through to the architectural practices of the Acconci Studio, from 2000 to 2012. Thus, Performance Test, one of Acconci’s earliest actions of December 1969,

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occupies an overtly theatrical dynamic to rearticulate events towards situation and the space of the audience. Part of a programme of “theatre-pieces” by artists that for Acconci followed a short sequence of “Performance situations” earlier that year in studio theatres, Performance Test places Acconci on a chair, centre-stage, facing an audience seated in rows within a lit auditorium. Acconci’s documentation states: “I turn my head toward each member of the audience, one by one, from left to right, front to back: I’m staring at each person for thirty seconds each” (Acconci 2006: 125). In his notes on the performance, Acconci recorded his extended attention to each individual to disrupt and disperse the conventional dynamic of watcher and watched, turning performance out to the audience’s relation with its own looking, as “While the audience is looking at the performance, the performance ‘looks back’. The gaze of the audience results in nothing” (125). Here personal and social interaction puncture and subvert the performance relation, while “theatricality,” the underlying condition of spectating Michael Fried had influentially articulated in 1967 as corruptive of Modernist art, is forced to the surface: Looking at the stage, the audience sees only how I’m looking, when I’m looking, where I’m looking. Each member of the audience, either before or after I look, can turn his/her attention to where I’m looking, to another member of the audience (to see how he/she looks). 125 Sustained eye contact breaks down the subject-object gaze of spectator to performance, and power-plays, confrontation, and avoidance take its place: “Performer stares: viewer starts to stare but can’t hold it: viewer drops off, performer wins” (125). Following Performance Test, many of Acconci’s numerous projects further elaborated the surfacing of private activity within a public sphere, in which everyday and utilitarian behaviours are intermittently reframed as performance. Here, as if to literalise Fried’s account of “theatricality” in Minimalist art, whereby a work’s dependency on the “audience of one” is such that it “is not complete without him, it has been waiting for him” (1998: 163), Acconci integrated appointments and coincidences into his schemes in which an ostensibly “private” activity is “produced” as performance through the conceptual programme it completes. Step Piece (1970)

Acconci, Step Piece, 1970. Courtesy of Maria Acconci and Acconci Studio, 2023

FIGURE 5.7 Vito

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thus comprises an “Activity/Performance” of four months duration – February, April, July, November. At varying times, each day during these months, Acconci states: An 18-inch stool was set up in my apartment and used as a step. Each morning, during the designated months, I step up and down the stool at a rate of 30 steps a minute. Each day, I step up and down until I can’t go on and I’m forced to stop. Improvement, and the ability to sustain improvement, is put to the test: after the first month’s activity, there’s a one-month lay-off, then a two-month lay-off, then a three-month lay-off. (Announcements are sent out, inviting the public to come and see this activity, in my apartment, any day during the designated months. At the end of each month’s activity, a progress report is sent out to the public.) Acconci 2006: 160, original emphasis Through these framing conditions, “performance” infiltrates Acconci’s training, as private becomes public: first, if it becomes subject to the gaze of a viewer visiting his apartment; second, in the performative effect of its tabulation in “progress reports” for the public record in the form of documentation, so rendering training as performance. In other pieces, Acconci adjusted his living circumstances such that his scheme intermittently reproduced private actions for a public gaze. Room Piece (January 1970) required the moveable contents of one room of his apartment to be relocated 80 blocks uptown to the Gain Ground Gallery on 80th Street: whenever he needs an item that has been relocated, Acconci proposes, he must pick up and return it from his “extended apartment” (146) on view at Gain Ground. In Service Area (June–September 1970), for the duration of MoMA New York’s Information exhibition, “my mail is forwarded by the post office to the museum […] Whenever I need mail, want mail, I go to the museum to get it” (188). Both schemes incorporate tabulated documentations, recording moments in which the scheme implicitly surfaces Acconci’s activity as public performance. Further activities overtly articulated the attempt to withdraw the personal from a public realm or foreground or dramatise these dynamics. For Sneaking Tape (May 1970), Acconci sought to withdraw evidence of his action from its public outcome, placing a tape recorder in his apartment and attempting to walk around it without making a sound (175). For Spy Project (April–May 1970) “at all times” a spy is assigned to watch and photograph hourly the doorway of a main administration building of Oberlin College (170). In a variation of Following Piece, Withdrawal Piece (May 1970), Acconci stands on a street corner, identifying an individual walking away from him, “Taking as many photographs as I could before he was no longer visible” (180). In each case, Acconci locks his scheme into an existing context, producing performance in fluctuations from private to public spheres, and in the overlay and so infiltration

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of one by the other. Such tactics make visible the performative production of the public sphere in “real time” and, retrospectively, in its documentation. At this time, Acconci noted, it was “Getting more and more difficult to separate the two, the activity and the daily living, and that’s what we’re working toward, no separation […] working toward the work” (Lippard 1997: 244). In the gallery, Acconci frequently addressed this dialectic of private and public arenas – and relationships between action and documentation – by approaching the viewer through feedback loops of self-attention: a mode of work Robert PincusWitten, the prominent critic and theorist of postminimalism (1981), designated as “Conceptual Performance” (1972). Enacting and amplifying various readings of the dynamics of “art-experiencing,” Acconci’s account of this work configures the artist as a target that targets back. Writing in 1979, Acconci captured this process as: viewer, entering gallery/museum, orients himself/herself to an artwork as if toward a target, viewer aims in on artwork. This condition of target-making, then, can be a pre-condition: it can be used, beforehand, as a condition for art-doing – art-doing becomes isomorphic with art-experiencing. I can focus in on myself, turn in on myself, treat myself as target; my activity of target-making, in turn, is treated as target by viewers. Acconci 1979: 30

Centers, 1971, still from video. Courtesy of Maria Acconci and Acconci Studio, 2023

FIGURE 5.8 Vito Acconci,

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This mode of action is exemplified by Acconci’s 20-minute video-performance Centers (February 1971), enacted by “Pointing at my own image on the video monitor: my attempt is to keep my finger constantly in the centre of the screen – I keep narrowing my focus into my finger” (2006: 245). Centers is recorded in Acconci’s single, sustained act of pointing back to the centre of his screen image; an act recorded in its execution by live feedback to a single monitor, so that he can perform to his own image in real time. The resultant single-channel tape directs this centring towards the viewer, who is now simultaneously voyeur and participant to Acconci’s self-regard. Crystallising a paradoxical “aesthetics of narcissism” (Krauss 1976) performed in the name of the viewer, Acconci proposed that in the camera’s amplification of his self-attention “I can be doing what the camera is doing, I can be aiming in on myself” and thus by “(applying stress to myself) I make myself vulnerable, make myself available to (grabbable by) the viewer” (1979: 30). In the live/mediated loop of the installation, the viewer ostensibly (and involuntarily) becomes part of Acconci’s circuit, and distinctions between real and recorded times, attention to self and other, roles of viewer and performer, and private and public spheres are rendered performative. Viewing the tape is then shadowed by the intrusions of these states and roles one on another, destabilising the boundaries of the artwork to implicate the viewer-participant in the enactment of its terms, as their “public” look falls within Acconci’s private self-regard, and vice-versa. Echoing Dan Graham’s collapse of distinctions between the artwork, “object,” or “text,” and its context, Centers, like Acconci’s “Steps into Performance” more broadly, rests on the performative nature of private and public roles and spaces. For Acconci, this is translated into infiltrations of performance into everyday personal and social practice, a process articulated in dynamics between artist (or performer) and viewer. These schemes thus dramatise Acconci’s focus on “the relation between that which starts off the art and the viewer” (Acconci 1982). It is an emphasis on time, performance, and self-attention also shared by Piper, yet subsequently brought through her Meta-Art into a sharply and overtly political interrogation of exchanges in the public space, through her subsequent Catalysis and The Mythic Being series. Where Acconci’s and Piper’s early work revealed and played through the performative nature of public and private spheres, in her Maintenance Art developed in New York from 1969, Mierle Laderman Ukeles formulated mutual infiltrations of “private” and “public” extrapolated from the revaluing of domestic “maintenance” that brought the attribution of value into collision with ideologies and practices of the gallery. Ukeles’ performance practice from 1973 elaborated her Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! and Proposal for an Exhibition “CARE” 1969, comprising four typewritten pages which had called for an installation of the conventionally unseen and unvalued maintenance work of “housewives” as art process and artwork: clean you [sic] desk, wash the dishes, clean the floor, wash your clothes, wash your toes, change the baby’s diaper, finish the report, correct the typos, mend the fence, keep the customer happy, throw out the stinking garbage, watch out

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don’t put things in your nose, what shall I wear, I have no sox, pay your bills, don’t litter, save string, wash your hair, change the sheets, go to the store, I’m out of perfume, say it again – he doesn’t understand, seal it again – it leaks, go to work, this art is dusty, clear the table, call him again, flush the toilet, stay young. Ukeles 2016a: 210 Consistent with referencing Duchamp as the “grandfather” of her work (2016b), Ukeles’ manifesto declares that “Everything I say is Art is Art. Everything I do as Art is Art,” directing attention also to avant-garde art’s dependency on “strains of maintenance ideas, maintenance activities, and maintenance materials” (Ukeles 2016a: 211). By way of example, her exhibition proposal CARE, she suggests, “would zero in on pure maintenance exhibit it as contemporary art.” For CARE, Ukeles proposed to live in a museum while continuing her maintenance of everyday domestic living, including supporting her husband and baby for the period of the exhibition. Here, she states, “My Working will be the Work” (2011). Ukeles’ proposal and later public work set a performative precedent and counterpart to later feminist Conceptual art that addressed the politics of domestic space, work, and processes. These included the then equally controversial Post-Partum Document (1973–9) by Mary Kelly, comprising an extensive six-part documentation and reflection through photographs, language, and object-remains, on Kelly’s relationship with her son from soon after his birth. Martha Rosler’s later video performance, Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) was similarly influential in its representation of the politics of domesticity, as Rosler’s parodic anatomising of an “A-Z” of “instruments” in the kitchen reveals domestic work – and her own role in the kitchen (“Y” is for “You”) – to be agents of constraining political and aesthetic systems. Following the publication of extracts from her Manifesto in Artforum in 1971, Ukeles executed a series of Maintenance Art works as interventions installing maintenance processes into the gallery as a public space that confers ideological and cultural capital, as well as financial value, to artworks by bringing them visibility. In doing so, Ukeles also brought into sight the gallery’s dependency on its own maintenance processes that are carefully hidden; their “value” elided or negated. In these respects, Ukeles’ work has been understood as an example of Conceptual art’s institutional critique, not least in Miwon Kwon’s major study of One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (2002: 23) and Shannon Jackson’s address to public art, Social Works (2011: 91). Ukeles’ earliest exhibitions and performances in 1973 included her participation in Lucy R. Lippard’s final Numbers Show, c7500, with, amongst others, Maintenance Art Album 1973, Maintenance Art Tape, and various performances as c7500 toured. Ukeles’ performance included a peripatetic action beginning at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which holds the largest collection of Duchamp’s work, entitled Now You Have Heirs/Airs, M. Duchamp (Phillips 2016b: 224). At the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, also with c7500, Washing Tracks Maintenance: Outside and Washing

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Tracks Maintenance: Inside comprised a performance and photo series of Ukeles’ washing by hand of the plaza, stairs, and entrance to the Atheneum; an action then repeated inside the Museum’s Avery Plaza. It was a process to which, Patricia Phillips notes, “museum visitors became an ‘accidental’ public that often watched and influenced performances” (2016a: 60) and a process to which Ukeles returned in subsequent works. Importantly, Ukeles’ reference to Duchamp through these appropriations of place and process is inflected through the political effect of her redesignations. Shannon Jackson observes that: It was different for Ukeles to say that “Everything I say is Art is Art” than it was for Kaprow, or for Duchamp. Female artists’ use of a conventional avant-garde lexicon threatened to expose the gendered asymmetry of “the Everyday.” 2011: 89 Jackson goes on to read Ukeles’ reversals and conflations of domestic and gallery processes and places through the “analytical utility of the reciprocal Readymade,” whereby “one social sector – the household – and another social sector – the art world – moved back and forth in a temporary process of reciprocal redefinition” (95); a re-ordering and vacillation that “showed up structural inequities by introducing the anxious possibility of their equality and exchangeability” (98). In 1979, Ukeles extended her address and social critique through the largescale Touch Sanitation Performance (1979–80), in which she committed to shaking the hand and thanking every member of the Department of Sanitation of New York City (DSNY), whose workforce then stood at 8,500 in the aftermath of the city’s near bankruptcy. Adopting a methodology after that of the work of DSNY, to make 10 “Sweeps” across the city, Ukeles documented each Touch encounter. Here, too, she emphasised the importance of performance as a mirror to the process Touch Sanitation Performance was intended to recognise. In her communication to each worker in 1979, she emphasised, “‘performance’, is important because of the similarity with what you do. You are out there ‘on stage’ in the public eye […] no matter how you are feeling inside. Very demanding” (Ukeles 2016c: 101). It is a process that Larissa Harris suggests, writing of Ukeles’ retrospective at Queens Museum in 2016, “flowed both from notions of commitment and duration current in Conceptual performance at the time” (2016: 12). Ukeles’ performance equally emphasised material equivalences in the direct encounter between “private” and “public” spheres in an address to the implicitly socially abject. Of Touch Sanitation Performance, Ukeles remarked: Sanitation is like art […] in that both systems, being transformative agents of material […] derive their deepest strength from their symbolic meanings, yet are perceived primarily and most pungently through our senses Lippard 2016: 16–7

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Ukeles’ Maintenance Art operates primarily through the infiltration and appropriation of institutional contexts to make visible and critically revalue processes that are conventionally abject, hidden, and denied social value and status, to force a crisis of action and reading. In these respects, Ukeles acts out a contemporary politicisation of the Readymade, through a disturbance of the social terms and value of the artwork. Ukeles thus blocks together conventionally, politically, and aesthetically incompatible processes, roles, and spheres; conflations that place the frameworks through which they are read – and the values they rehearse – in contention or render them unsustainable. It was a bringing to visibility of divergent values and conflicts over function and form that was sufficiently disturbing to some hosting institutions that it resulted in a corresponding failure to document Ukeles’ commissioned works, which were then consigned to Conceptual performance in a second sense: performances that persist as proposition, as rumour, and informal narrative, but that may be no less effective in their consequences. Infiltrations of the sign: Adrian Piper’s Catalysis series (1970–1) and The Mythic Being (1973–5)

The emergence of Adrian Piper’s performance-based practices also stemmed from an attention to dynamics between personal and public spheres, although one informed by the evolution of her interrogation of public identity and persona. In January 1969, Piper had acted as “secretary” in support of Seth Siegelaub’s defining exhibition, 5–31 January, 1969 addressed in Chapter 3 of this volume. Piper subsequently recalled encountering “dealers or promoters who thought my true destiny was to be an outstanding creative gallery receptionist” (Heiser 2018: 29). 5–31 January, 1969 and its aftermath evidently joined a panoply of experiences in the late 1960s provoking Piper’s realisation of the extent of her experience of professional and institutional marginalisation and discrimination, aspects of which Piper incisively recounts in “The Triple Negation of Coloured Women Artists” (1990), “Some Very FORWARD Remarks” (1996g) prefacing her Selected Writings in Meta-Art, and elsewhere (for example, Piper 1992). In this context, her later self-designation as a “coloured woman artist,” a term Piper used in 1990 and subsequently in specific reference to female artists of African descent (Piper 1990, 1996g: xxx), joined her critique of the predominant terms of ethnicity and gender, including “black” and “white” (Bowles 2006: 108). This consciousness, especially from 1970, is evident in Piper’s attention to the “indexical present.” At this juncture, too, modes of interrogative performance gained a primacy in Piper’s work. Reviewing her work more broadly in 1996, Piper emphasised that “I don’t believe work that fails to speak from me can successfully speak to anyone else” (1996g: xxxi, original emphasis), resulting also in work that attempted to “say it directly to that particular viewer” (xxxii, original emphasis). Locating its origins in the Concrete Space-Time-Infinity Pieces, Piper suggested that her

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focus on the “indexical present” had facilitated her work’s preoccupation with the politics of racism, stereotyping, and xenophobia. From 1970, Piper’s Catalysis series (1970–1) and subsequent performance of her alter-ego, The Mythic Being (1973–5), re-sited the concerns and processes of “Meta-Art” around performances of self-definition and social identity: a process integrated into Piper’s focus on “the indexical present; the present I can point to with my index finger, what’s going on here and now between you and me” (Piper 1992). In concluding her remarks “On Conceptual Art” in 1988, Piper stressed that “the indexical present has provided the major strategy of my work, which is direct, immediate, and confrontational” (1999b: 425). For the Catalysis series, Piper enacted a series of activities that occupied and interrupted formations of daily practice and the behavioural conventions of public space. Between 1970 and 1971, Piper executed numerous such actions unannounced, so that, she suggested, they were positioned “outside of an art world context” (Piper 1992). Many but by no means all these actions were later documented and subsequently exhibited or published. Here, Piper’s address to “the indexical present” was to be found, first, in unmediated interactions with an unknowing public that served to open a void space, which might provoke negotiation or disrupt interactions. Writing in “Art as Catalysis” in August 1970, Piper proposed that in these events: The work is a catalytic agent, in that it promotes a change in another entity (the viewer) without undergoing any permanent change itself. […] In this sense, the work as such is nonexistent except when it functions as a medium of change between artist and the viewer. 1996b: 32–3 For Catalysis I–VIII (1970), Piper’s later photographic documentations describe her actions as “street performance” and explicitly refer the reader to her essay “Talking to Myself: The Ongoing Autobiography of an Art Object” first published in 1974 (Piper 1996a), which sets out a theoretical basis for “Art as Catalysis”. Piper’s actions included Catalysis I, in which “I saturated a set of clothing in a mixture of vinegar, eggs, milk and cod liver oil for a week, then wore them on the D train during evening rush hour, then while browsing in the Marlboro bookstore on Saturday night”; IV, “I dressed very conservatively but stuffed a large red bath towel in the side of my mouth until my cheeks bulged to about twice their normal size […] riding the bus, subway, and Empire State Building elevator”; and VIII, “a recorded talk including hypnosis” (Lippard and Piper 1972: 76). In her unrealised score, Infiltration, 6/71 (1971), Piper had proposed opening her process to a “Week-Long Population Catalysis” for 100 participants, to take place variously in a post office, public libraries, art galleries, and other locations. Contemporaneously, some of Piper’s actions were reported only as rumour, including, Nizan Shaked notes, as “hearsay in reviews of other exhibitions,” citing a report by John Perreault in the Village Voice, of April 1971, that “She has been known to wait in movie

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lines along Third Avenue wearing vampire fangs, to appear in various bookstores smeared with smelly grease, and to sit in libraries with a concealed tape recording of constant burping” (2018: 71). In her 1972 interview with Lucy Lippard, Piper reported actions that remained otherwise undocumented, noting that she performed them “about two or three times a week” and emphasising their integration into the everyday, despite their disruptive character, noting “I’ve stopped using gallery space, and I’ve stopped announcing the pieces, I’ve stopped using art frameworks. There is very little that separates what I’m doing from quirky personal activity” (77). Occasionally, Piper remarked, she encountered someone known to her, and this served to affirm her actions as “art,” providing an “anchor” for her activity. In its reception by an unknowing public, and in the absence of “secondary discrete forms” – meaning objects or a documentation that replaces the event – Piper argues in “Art as Catalysis” that “The time and space occupied by the total artwork process is exactly the same as that occupied by the viewer” (1996a: 34). Eschewing the object-form, “to look outside myself and see the effect of my existence on the world at large” (35), the Catalysis events then followed the structure of Nineteen Concrete Space-Time-Infinity Pieces. Enacting a rupture or disturbance of everyday behaviour, Piper’s actions “induce a reaction or change in the viewer,” who concretises the performance’s potential in their response. In her later writing, Piper reflected that “This form of aesthetically direct speech can be distressing for viewers who seek the contemplation of objects in order to escape from people” (1996g: xxxi). After her earlier work on paper, Piper treats her body, and so her presence, as an object that refers beyond itself; one that can “draw attention to the spatiotemporal matrices in which [it is] embedded.” In the public sphere, this means being seen through politically contested signs of gender and ethnicity. Piper’s interventions, which in 1970 she perceived as “completely apolitical” (1996f: 99), amplified the experience of the present tense of social space, prompting Piper to later reflect that “as Michael Fried would put it in his immortal words, I activated the space around me” (Piper 1992). Piper also reported experiences of her interlocutors joining the process and so of a permeability between actors, noting that “in spite of my presence, my altered presence,” by “accepting what I was doing without turning me in to the police [people] were taking responsibility” (Shaked 2018: 100). It is a permeability Piper also experienced regarding her own becoming “object” in the public space: I see now that the crisis and solution was the result of the invasion by the “outside world” of my aesthetic isolation […] Those forces have managed to infiltrate my awareness and thereby determine me and my work in ways that confront me with the politics of my position whether I want to know them or not: I have become self-conscious 1996a: 31–2 Catalysis begs the question of Piper’s agency and the public constitution of identity. It is a mode of interruption allowing her to write of the Catalysis in 1971

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that “Ideally the work has no meaning or independent existence outside of its function as a medium of change” (Lippard 1997: 235). In these respects, Piper’s infiltration of the everyday is mirrored and met by the “invasive” nature of the circulation of signs of personal and social identity to which she is subject, providing for her own catalytic change through this process. It is also an enactment of the social which Piper narrates as a self-conscious turn in Conceptual art more broadly; one that “in my own work […] was from my body as a conceptually and spatiotemporally immediate art object to my person as a gendered and ethnically stereotyped art commodity” (1999b: 548). It is this latter focus that The Mythic Being elaborates, while taking the process and effect of the Catalysis series further forward. The Mythic Being comprises a constellation of images, narratives, and documents generated by Piper’s performance of a male alter-ego in private as well as public environments, and disseminated from 1973 to 1975. In its various remainders and representations, The Mythic Being extended Piper’s interrogation and critique of signs, terms, and readings of identity, approached in an extension and transformation of the Catalysis actions. As this suggests, The Mythic Being begins in performance, even though Piper’s enactment of her alter-ego may seem inaccessible, or to have been out of sight. In her contemporaneous video of dressing as her alter-ego, Piper’s narrative to camera sets out the dissonance that animates this performance, suggesting “The idea is very much to see what would happen if there was a being who had exactly my history only a completely different visual appearance to the rest of society – and that’s why I dressed as a man” (Piper 2018). In her “Preparatory Notes for The Mythic Being” in early August 1973, first published in her Selected Writings in Meta-Art in 1996, Piper speculates over her preparations for the private performances in public spaces that would be inaugurated the following month, emphasising “I should be in DRAG, dressed as a boy”: Auburn shag wig, reflecting sunglasses, black pants and turtleneck, brown boots […] Go to selected events: galleries, music concerts, dance concerts, etc., in above disguise […] At the end of the series (in April) run photo in the Village Voice 1996f: 101–2, original emphasis In such infiltrations of open events, Piper imagined “Verifying my appearance’s public cohesion with others as spectators. The inner cohesion of myself as enclosed object” (102). Piper’s emphasis on her objectification to others, and to herself, also takes its cue from her philosophical studies and research which ran parallel to her artistic output and developed into her work as a professional philosopher and academic, including her major two-volume academic publication, Rationality and the Structure of Self (2008). The reference here is to Sartre, which sets a philosophical ground for themes of object and objectification in performance, made explicit in the epigram to her “Notes on The Mythic Being (1974–1976)” from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (2003): “A person frees himself from himself in the

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very act by which he makes himself an object to himself” (Piper 1996c: 117, original emphasis). Here, Piper identifies her strategies for performance with Sartre’s proposition that consciousness is experienced as an ontological separation from the “object” of consciousness. It follows that where my “self” is made the object of my reflective consciousness, so I become free – or “condemned to be free” (2007: 7) – as in that experience of separation I recognise that my choices are not determined by what I “am” or have been. Piper’s contemporaneous narrative of The Mythic Being extended her existential address to identity and self, developing her earlier structural references to her own agency in The Hypothesis Series and the Catalysis performances. In September 1973, John P. Bowles records in his authoritative study, Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment (2011), “Piper strode the streets of New York in moustache, Afro wig, and mirrored sunglasses with a cigar in the corner of her mouth” (229). In a video recording of Piper adopting her disguise, her narrative records the transformative effects of adopting the Mythic Being as a personal mask, as “when I put on the garb it somehow transforms the nature of the experiences that I’m thinking about” (Piper 2018). In her reflections after the series’ completion, Piper noted the transposition of this awareness into “performance”: “My behaviour changes. I swagger, stride, lope, lower my eyebrows, raise my shoulders, sit with my legs wide apart on the subway, so as to accommodate my protruding genitalia” (1996b: 118). In contrast to Piper’s experience, Bowles emphasises that for the viewer this transformation produces a liminal figure, noting that “as” the Mythic Being, “In posed and retouched photographs, Piper’s slight, fair-skinned figure blurs distinctions of race and gender” (2011: 229). Significantly, too, the performance of the Mythic Being as an androgynous and racially ambiguous social identity is underpinned by Piper’s close attention to personal history. In her contemporaneous remarks on the performances, Piper notes the “fluid” nature of this persona, as “he” absorbs “her” history: It was important that I experience the same history predicated of the Mythic Being, not as part of my own past alone but also insofar as that past belonged to him. To become the Mythic Being was to elicit, through contacts with others and recollection of my own personal past, a masculine version of myself, the masculine part of myself […] The transformation was dynamic, intersocial, and fluid 1996b: 123 Here, too, Piper configured her process after her reference to Sartre, emphasising in her preparatory notes that, “The Mythic Being is a medium through which I can free myself of my past” (1996f: 114, original emphasis). Indeed, in the Mythic Being’s first series of public forays, each of Piper’s performances focused on a personal mantra selected from a journal she had kept daily over the previous 14 years. Each month, corresponding to her first street performances, Piper made the mantra “an object of meditation,” noting “I repeat it,

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reexperience it, examine and analyse it, infuse myself with it until I have wrung it of personal meaning and significance” (1996b: 117). It is a process of separation from herself that extends to her performance, as in the process of its objectification as her mask, “The Mythic Being thus becomes part of public history and is no longer a part of my own” (117). Here, too, the liminality that Bowles identifies in Piper’s production of the Mythic Being is extended into her “relationship” with “his” persona. In her “Notes on The Mythic Being,” Bowles observes that in seeming to lend autonomy to this persona, “Piper presented the Mythic Being in such a way that it appears to be he who pretends to be her, and not the other way round” (2011: 243, original emphasis). Bowles’ observation reflects the complex symbiosis in the performance of personae, as well as the performativity and seeming agency of signs of identity, neither of which offer a linear or stable means for a performer to either realise or escape themselves. Reflecting this, Bowles emphasises the feedback from Piper’s effort to objectify in performance a part of “herself” as other: During his first public appearance, the Mythic Being meditated on a mantra that compelled him to think about an experience from Piper’s adolescence as if it had been his own. The text of the mantra, excerpted from the diaries Piper had kept since she was twelve, read, “TODAY WAS THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL. THE ONLY DECENT BOYS IN MY CLASS ARE ROBBIE AND CLYDE. I THINK I LIKE CLYDE.” After the performance, Piper notes that she had “thought a lot about Robbie and Clyde […]” and she writes about the experience as if it had contributed to her sexual fantasies. 243 In these processes, rather than “free” herself in her objectification, The Mythic Being at once appears to appropriate and infiltrate Piper’s sense of her past. Yet while working to “objectify” a fragment of her past in the performance of her masculine self, Piper also systematically worked against the resolution of The Mythic Being into conventional object-forms, including conventional modes of theatre or performance. In her “Preparatory Notes for The Mythic Being,” first published in 1996, Piper circumscribed the conditions for this series’ initial production and dissemination, in notes from April 1974: Ideological restrictions imposed on my work by me: 1 2 3 4 5

no galleries (galleries as centre for distribution of info) no audience no announcement of pieces no objects no documentation-objects

1996f: 115

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These constraints challenged not only the gallery system and the associated “precious object” but also the conventional form and status of performance. In Piper’s present-tense performances, and despite their ephemerality, the Mythic Being’s coming to visibility in a public sphere paradoxically reproduced some of the gallery’s exclusions. At the time of her street performances, Piper noted “the spatiotemporal limitations of the medium – its unique-object requirements still reminiscent of the gallery as esoteric shrine, its de facto accessibility only to those who are adequately ‘prepared’ for it,” and expressed her preference for “a more public, common, accessible medium” (1996b: 138). Consequently, and consistent with her preparatory note for The Mythic Being to “Work only in publicly accessible places with publicly accessible media (newspaper […])” (1996f: 115), her initial series of street performances were followed by her development of a constellation of materials forming The Mythic Being in the absence of performance. At this juncture, she noted that: More recently, the work has had more to do with visual imagery and written information. My practice here has been to distribute the work as widely as possible by utilizing the public media […] or by employing cheap and easily available means of reproduction, such as photostats, offset printing, posters, etc. 1996a: 121 Piper’s performances in 1972 and 1973 thus resulted in her first such public circulation of his persona in The Mythic Being, Village Voice Ads (1973–5), comprising 17 newspaper pages, each with a regular size classified Ad inserted with the same photograph of Piper as the Mythic Being, with different speech/thought bubbles setting out a mantra, and dating its journal entry. The Ads sampled material divided into 3 “Cycles” of 12 mantras, from an originally planned 14 Cycles, each comprising a dozen selected extracts from her journal. For the duration of the month each Ad was published, Piper continued to integrate the mantra into her private focus on the Mythic Being, “on which I meditate and to which I direct my consciousness during that month” (1996f: 109). The material Piper then committed to paper was, she stated, “the corresponding subjective states that went along with the performance” (1992): not its documentary record, but a centrifugal relationship between her performance and images on paper combining photography, drawing, collage, and cartoon; sometimes augmenting a source in the Mythic Being’s performance with dream-like alterations, appropriated history, narratives, or mantra. In this way, The Mythic Being: I/You (Her) (1974) presents handwritten thought/ speech bubbles collaged onto a sequence of 10 enlarged photographs showing Piper as the Mythic Being and an image of her closest childhood schoolfriend recessed behind her. Beginning, “It is only because of the defects in my personality that I can finally say this to you,” each subsequent image and statement reflects on a moment of emotional separation from her closest female friend; a friendship ended by teenage betrayals. Finally, in the tenth image, Piper concludes, “I hate you for doing this

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to me, and myself for allowing it to happen.” In other work, Piper performed the Mythic Being to camera or to photographic space in numerous ways: as The Mythic Being Dancing (1974), 14 photographic prints showing Piper in role, dancing in an apartment; in I Embody Everything You Most Hate and Fear (1975), a single augmented image work by which the Mythic Being is perhaps most well-known. Other of many stills include The Mythic Being: Butterfly Chair (1974), at the Centre Pompidou, and The Mythic Being: Smoke (1974). In 1975, Piper executed the performances, The Mythic Being: Cruising White Women (1975) and The Mythic Being: Getting Back (1975), actions integrated into public locations without announcement and then photographed. Published, exceptionally, as “Documentation of the performance,” these sets of sequential photographic prints are augmented as documentations by their film-like composition, by the “drama” of the incident announced in the intent of the title, and in the invitation to narrative construction; each acting as a visual analogue to her earlier speech/thought bubbles. As the culmination of the Mythic Being in the “Documentation of the performance” suggests, Piper’s self-imposed ideological constraints may argue against the “liveness” of performance as a component part of The Mythic Being, but not against performance as such. Thus, Piper later emphasised that “The material existence of the Mythic Being was an important feature in its original conception” (Bowles 2011: 123) whether these realisations were seen or not. This difference is reflected also in Piper’s documentary practice, regarding which she notes, “Like all the performances I did between 1970 and 1974, these works were not documented except by retrospective verbal description” (1996h: 147), a delay which aids the idea of live performance as a germinator of other modes and forms as well as the ramifications that surround them. Such disseminations of The Mythic Being share methods with the networking of information characteristic of Conceptual art that preceded it, in work by Piper and others, in transpositions of information flow to the performance and reading of gender, ethnicity, and identity. It is in these circulations of the signs of the Mythic Being, who is also constructed post hoc of its performance, that this project also extends Piper’s Catalysis series. In performance, and in her own transformation into her masculine alter-ego, Piper emphasised the “essentially public nature of his personality”; one unchanged by encounter (1996b: 124). Regarding the Mythic Being’s “verbal avowals,” Piper suggests in her contemporaneous notes: As portrayed in the thought/speech balloon, they are intrinsic to his visual and psychological identity. And because these avowals are the only possible indices there are, there can be no grounds for hypothesizing anything behind them. So far as he can be said to have a personality at all, this personality is essentially and wholly public. 125 The Mythic Being, Piper notes, is “an alien presence in the art world, but a familiar presence in the rest of the world” (Bowles 2011: 251). Indeed, in some

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respects, the Mythic Being is a Readymade identity both in this familiarity and its operation. Piper suggests that the Mythic Being is “is all verbal and visual surface,” for there is “nothing further behind the iconographic surface he projects” (1996b: 125). The Mythic Being, it follows, has no “depth,” but operates at the surface of its signs, whether through performance or in report, and so persists unchanging and externalised. Piper stresses that “The image of the Mythic Being is static […] He is not visually portrayed as moving through, affecting, or being affected by other characters, situations, or events. He is, as it were, portable” (124). Consistent with this, Bowles suggests that familiarity with the Mythic Being is also a source of permeability between Piper’s alter-ego and the viewer or reader, for “as an image of the popular imagination, the Mythic Being’s fears and desires also belong to the viewer” (2011: 242). Here, Bowles cites Thelma Golden’s attribution of the “declarative I” in Piper’s phrasing, so attributing “‘I embody everything you most hate and fear’ not to Piper but to ‘both the speaker and the intended audience’” (242; Golden 1994: 26) and concluding that a viewer’s very familiarity with the Mythic Being implicates them as his co-author. Furthermore, considered as Readymade, the Mythic Being extends the process of Catalysis. Where the Mythic Being’s personality is “wholly public,” so its signs are conflated with the public sphere, externalised in their operation as and at surface, and in their exchange and flow. This process reaches back, also, to Piper, as the quasi-autonomy of the Mythic Being’s signs affect her, in her experience of being performed by the sign. Bowles thus notes that “Piper’s earliest statements about the Mythic Being present him as someone whom she imagines is performing her” (2011: 242). In this process, the circulation of the signs of The Mythic Being has an affinity to the dissemination of “art information,” and the treatment of unintegrated (unassisted) “Readymade” materials: the signs of the Mythic Being are like propositions to reconcile with or to respond to, according to their contextual meanings. In performance, this reflects a dispersal of agency and identity beyond an integrated or unified self: identity is “out there,” in the signs “I” perform, as much as it can be with “me.” In her “Notes on The Mythic Being,” Piper implicitly reflects on this return to the permeability of self and “other,” suggesting that: the obsessions expressed by the Mythic Being have you, the audience, as an object; and in eliciting unease, discomfort, or anger from you, he in turn becomes the object of your obsession. He is thus both victim and victor, subject and object of the violence he embodies: He is a catalyst for the violences of the world 1996b: 138 Piper’s preparatory notes on the Mythic Being also dwell on the political impact and purpose of such a persona, within or as part of a social structure, stating that: “A ‘mythic being’ is a fictitious or abstract personality that is generally part of a story or folktale used to explain or sanctify social or legal institutions or natural phenomena” (1996f: 108). In Piper’s schemes, the authority and integrity of the

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Mythic Being, and its concomitant regulation of value and understanding, breaks down through its catalytic effects in the public sphere. The Mythic Being elaborates permeabilities between sign and self, between viewing and performing, that also counters binary or linear interpretations of the performative nature of identity, in which a unified subject performs or enacts and so realises themselves. Instead, Piper’s persona troubles the boundaries of the performance of self, which becomes subject to the external distribution and circulations of signs, in which we also become external to ourselves. At the time of performing the Mythic Being, Piper reflected that: He has infiltrated my psyche; I have assimilated him into my sense of self. But the relation between him and me is not that of denotation to the object denoted; the Mythic Being does not “stand for me”. In some ways, he is me; but as an independent abstract object, he is only himself. 1996b: 125 It is a view of identity produced in language, but specifically in enunciation and in the unruliness of signs, surfacing in a Conceptual art that facilitates the performance of self as “other”: where identity is not in the sign but is a function of its use; where the “performer” infiltrates the sign, to discover “herself” in the sign’s otherness and externality. In Piper’s work, specifically, she notes that towards the end of this period: The “Others” were, first, my audiences or spectators in the streets and public spaces of New York. Later, there was myself as “Other,” as critical and selfconscious observer of my own objecthood – my appearance, behaviour, and responses 1996c: 141 Where Piper’s Conceptual performance troubles the boundaries of identity, self, and other, so an articulation of otherness in the signs of oneself is also implicit in many of the appropriations of context already discussed in this chapter. This is perhaps clearest in the performance of identity through information flow, and the simulation of personality and presence in the reading of performance-remains in The Roberta Breitmore Series, as well as The Mythic Being. A sense of the sign’s infiltration and production of the self is also implicit in the performance and breakdown of the persona of the boxer in Fight, as well as in the ill-fitting of signs of perceived identities of The King of Solana Beach and Montano’s extended performances of the young Bob Dylan, and analogous work. Adrian Piper’s early performances bring these questions and their political charge to the fore through an acute focus on the indexical present: the “reality” of encounter and relation, and so of processes, acts, and exchanges over spectacle. Here, the Readymade and tactics

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of “infiltration” consistently speak of concerns with contexts, processes, and signs that “perform” the artwork and in some ways remain outside its parameters, an approach that is consistent with Conceptual art more widely. In this sense, too, “infiltration,” whether of “formats” of the everyday, of the media, of the public sphere, or signs of self and identity, tends to emphasise the artwork and its various forms’ permeability to that with which it engages. This Conceptual performance also acts out Ian Hodder’s conclusion regarding our entanglement with words, signs, and things, introduced in Chapter 4: that “there is nothing extra-somatic, outside the body, because the body, mind and meaning are distributed” (Hodder 2016: 7). In these various conceptual engagements with performance, “infiltration” takes forward a defining ambivalence of the Readymade’s position, one also reflected in its influence on the critical imperative of Conceptual art. The Readymade – as proposition, narrative, rumour, or even as object – defines itself as at once in and out of the discourses it exposes, critiques, and yet depends upon. Through the infiltration of contexts, media, and signs they at once participate in producing and yet are subject to, these performances extend Conceptual art’s – and the Readymade’s – paradoxical critique of contexts and ideologies on which they depend. This is a self-reflexive process captured in Charles Harrison’s characterisation of Art & Language’s Conceptual art as enacting an enquiry “which had to be the work, and which therefore had to become ‘the work’” (Harrison 2001: 49): an engagement through which Conceptual art performs a critical operation through and on the idea and object of the artwork, while remaining, in this very operation, disruptive of its terms. These infiltrations and disturbances of formats of the everyday, of mass media, of the public sphere, and of social self, are aligned with such a self-reflexive “enquiry,” producing, as Acconci suggests, a “working toward the work” (Lippard 1997: 244) that enacts a critique of the systems and signs it performs.

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—— (2011) Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment, London: Duke University Press. Buchloch, B.D. (1999 [1978]) “Moments of History in the Work of Dan Graham,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, London: MIT Press, pp 376–88. Butler, C. (2016) “Wake Up and Get Down: Adrian Piper’s Direct Address,” in Christophe Cherix, Cornelia Butler and David Platzker (eds) Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, New York, NY: The Museum of Modern Art, pp 50–71. Cabanne, P. (1987) Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, Boston, MA: Da Capo. Cherix, C. (2016) “Who Calls the Tune?” in Christophe Cherix, Cornelia Butler and David Platzker (eds) Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, New York, NY: The Museum of Modern Art, pp 12–29. Cherix, C., Butler C., and Platzker, D. (eds) (2016) Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, New York, NY: The Museum of Modern Art. Cohen, T. (2005) “Interviews with Conceptual Artists: Linda M. Montano,” in Linda M. Montano, Letters from Linda M. Montano, edited by Jamie Klein, London: Routledge, pp 53–63. Duchamp, M. (1975a [1946]) “The Great Trouble with Art,” in Michel Sannouillet and Elmer Peterson (eds) The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp: Marchand du Sel, London: Thames and Hudson, pp 123–6. —— (1975b [1957]) “The Creative Act,” in Michel Sannouillet and Elmer Peterson (eds) The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp: Marchand du Sel, London: Thames and Hudson, pp 138–41. —— (2000) Affectionately | Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp, edited by Francis M. Naumann and Hector Obalk, translated by Jill Taylor, Ghent: Ludion Press. Fried, M. (1998 [1967]) “Art and Objecthood,” in Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp 142–78. Golden, T. (1994) “My Brother,” in Black Male Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art, New York, NY: Whitney Museum of American Art, pp 19–43. Graham, D. (1975a [1966]) “Homes for America,” in Dan Graham, For Publication, Los Angeles, CA: Otis Art, n.p. —— (1975b) For Publication, Los Angeles County, CA: Otis Art Institute, n.p. —— (1999 [1985]) “My Works for Magazine Pages: ‘a history of conceptual art’,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, London: MIT Press, pp 418–22. Hall, D. (2023) Unusual Ideas: An Artist’s Account, in progress unpublished manuscript, courtesy of Doug Hall, quoted with permission. Hall, D. and Kaye, N. (2014) “Doug Hall Interviewed by Nick Kaye, San Francisco 25 October 2012,” in Nick Kaye (ed) SiteWorks: San Francisco Performance: 1969–1985. Available online. https://siteworks.exeter.ac.uk/interviews/doughall. Accessed 20th May 2022. Harris, L. (2016) “Ukeles at the Queens Museum,” in Patricia C. Phillips (ed) Mierle Laderman Ukeles, New York, NY: Queens Museum, DelMonico Books, Prestel, pp 10–13. Harrison, C. (2001 [1991]) Essays on Art & Language, London: MIT Press. Heiser, J. (2018) “Adventures in Reasonland,” in Cornelia Butler and David Platzker (eds) Adrian Piper: A Reader, New York, NY: The Museum of Modern Art, pp 10–67. Herkenhoff, P., Mosquera, G. and Cameron, D. (eds) (1999) Cildo Meireles, London: Phaidon.

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Hershman Leeson, L. (1994) “Talk at MOMA.” Available online. https://www.lynnhershman. com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Talk-at-MOMA-NY.pdf. Accessed 24th May 2022. Hodder, I. (2016) Studies in Human-Thing Entanglement. Open access. Available online. http://www.ian-hodder.com/books/studies-human-thing-entanglement#:~:text=This%20 book%2C%20published%20only%20online,application%20of%20formal%20 network%20analysis. Accessed 20th July 2022. Iversen, M. (2004) “Readymade, Found Object, Photograph,” Art Journal, 63:2 (Summer), pp 44–57. Jackson, S. (2011) Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, New York, NY: Routledge. Judd, D. (1965) “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook, 8, pp 181–9. Kosuth, J. (1991a [1969]) “Art After Philosophy,” in Joseph Kosuth, Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966-1990, edited by Gabriele Guercio, London: MIT Press, pp 13–36. —— (1991b) “Context Text,” in Joseph Kosuth, Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966-1990, edited by Gabriele Guercio, London: MIT Press, pp 83–8. Krauss, R. (1976) “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October, 1 (Spring), pp 50–64. Kwon, M. (2002) One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, London: MIT Press. Labat, T. and Kaye, N. (2016) “Tony Labat Interviewed by Nick Kaye, San Francisco 20 May 2016,” in Nick Kaye (ed) SiteWorks: San Francisco Performance 1969-85. Available online. https://siteworks.exeter.ac.uk/interviews/tonylabat. Accessed 15th June 2022. Lippard, L.R. (1997 [1973]) Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972, second edition, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. —— (2016) “Never Done: Women’s Work by Mierle Laderman Ukeles,” in Patricia C. Phillips (ed) Mierle Laderman Ukeles, New York, NY: Queens Museum, DelMonico Books, Prestel, pp 15–21. Lippard, L.R. and Piper, A. (1972) “Catalysis: An Interview with Adrian Piper,” TDR the Drama Review, 16:1 (March), pp 76–8. Meireles, C. (1999a [1981]) “Statements,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, London: MIT Press, pp 410–13. —— (1999b) “Interview: Gerardo Mosquera in Conversation with Cildo Meireles,” in Paulo Herkenhoff, Gerardo Mosqueraand, and Dan Cameron (eds) Cildo Meireles, London: Phaidon, pp 6–35. —— (2008a) “Inserções em Cicuitos Ideológicos, 1970: Insertions into Ideological Circuits,” in Guy Brett (ed) Cildo Meireles, London: Tate Publishing, pp 64–7. —— (2008b) “Inserções em Jornais, 1969–70: Insertions into Newspapers,” in Guy Brett (ed) Cildo Meireles, London: Tate Publishing, pp 60–1. Montano, L.M. (1981) Art in Everyday Life, Los Angeles, CA: Astro Artz. Osborne, P. (2002) “Survey,” in Peter Osborne (ed) Conceptual Art, London: Phaidon Press, pp 12–51. Phillips, P.C. (2016a) “Making Necessity of Art: Collisions of Maintenance and Freedom,” in Patricia C. Phillips (ed) Mierle Laderman Ukeles, New York, NY: Queens Museum, DelMonico Books, Prestel, pp 22–193. —— (ed) (2016b) Mierle Laderman Ukeles, New York, NY: Queens Museum, DelMonico Books, Prestel. Pincus-Witten, R. (1972) “Vito Acconci and the Conceptual Performance,” Artforum, April, pp 47–9.

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—— (1981) Postminimalism, New York, NY: Out of London Press. Piper, A. (1990) “The Triple Negation of Coloured Women Artists,” in Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (eds) Next Generation: Southern Black Aesthetic, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, pp 15–23. —— (1992) “Xenophobia and the Indexical Present. Talking Art. ICA, London.” British Library Sounds. Available online. https://sounds.bl.uk/Arts-literature-and-performance/ ICA-talks/024M-C0095X0817XX-0100V0. Accessed 1st March 2022. —— (1994) The Hypothesis Series, 1968–70. Press Release. New York, NY: Paula Cooper Gallery. Available online. https://www.paulacoopergallery.com/exhibitions/ adrian-piper2#tab:slideshow. Accessed 28th December 2022. —— (1996a [1974]) “Talking to Myself: The Ongoing Autobiography of an Art Object,” in Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, Volume 1: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968–1992, London: MIT Press, pp 29–54. —— (1996b [1976]) “Notes on The Mythic Being I-III,” in Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, Volume 1: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968-1992, London: MIT Press, pp 117–39. —— (1996c) “A. A.” in Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, Volume 1: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968–1992, London: MIT Press, pp 141–6. —— (1996d) “About the Hypothesis Series,” in Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, Volume 1: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968-1992, London: MIT Press, p. 19. —— (1996e) “Meat into Meat,” in Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, Volume 1: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968–1992, London: MIT Press, pp 9–10. —— (1996f) “Preparatory Notes for The Mythic Being,” in Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, Volume 1: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968-1992, London: MIT Press, pp 91–116. —— (1996g) “Some Very Forward Remarks,” in Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, Volume 1: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968–1992, London: MIT Press, pp xxix–xxxx. —— (1996h) “The Mythic Being: Getting Back,” in Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, Volume 1: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968–1992, London: MIT Press, pp 147–9. —— (1999a [1973]) “In Support of Meta-Art,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, London: MIT Press, pp 298–301. —— (1999b [1988]) “On Conceptual Art,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, London: MIT Press, pp 424–5. —— (1999c [1993]) “The Logic of Modernism,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, London: MIT Press, pp 546–9. —— (2008) Rationality and the Structure of Self [2 volumes], Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (2018) “Mythic Being – The Thing About…Art & Artists – Adrian Piper.” Available online. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5czhwmDAB48. Accessed 30th December 2022. Platzker, D. (2016) “Adrian Piper’s Unities,” in Christophe Cherix, Cornelia Butler and David Platzker (eds) Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, New York, NY: The Museum of Modern Art, pp 30–49. Ramírez, M.C. (1999a [1993]) “Blueprint Circuits: Conceptual Art and Politics in Latin America,” in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, London: MIT Press, pp 550–62.

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—— (1999b) “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity: Conceptualism in Latin America, 1960– 1980,” in Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss (eds) Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s–1980s, New York, NY: Queens Museum of Art, pp 52–71. Sartre, J-P. (2003 [1943]) Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, London: Routledge. —— (2007 [1946]) Existentialism Is A Humanism, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Shaked, N. (2018) “Propositions to Politics: Adrian Piper’s Conceptual Paradigms,” in Cornelia Butler and David Platzker (eds) Adrian Piper: A Reader, New York, NY: The Museum of Modern Art, pp 68–101. T.R. Uthco (artists’ collective) (1974–5) “The Patty Hearst Spectacle.” Available online. https://www.doughallstudio.com/hearst-spectacle. Accessed 26th May 2023. —— (artists’ collective) (1975) “President Ford and The Avant Guard.” Available online. https://www.doughallstudio.com/avant-guard. Accessed 26th May 2023. Ukeles, M.L. (2016a [1971]) “Manifesto of Maintenance Art 1969! – Proposal for an Exhibition ‘Care,’ 1969,” in Patricia C. Phillips (ed) Mierle Laderman Ukeles, New York, NY: Queens Museum, DelMonico Books; Prestel, pp 210–11. —— (2016b [1979]) “Touch Sanitation,” in Patricia C. Phillips (ed) Mierle Laderman Ukeles, New York, NY: Queens Museum, DelMonico Books, Prestel, pp 100–25. —— (2016c) “Mierle Laderman Ukeles talks about Maintenance Art.” Artforum. Available online. https://www.artforum.com/video/mierle-laderman-ukeles-talks-about-maintenanceart-63533. Accessed 29th April 2023. Wall, D. (1991) Transcript of unpublished Interview with Dennis Oppenheim. Courtesy: Dennis Oppenheim Estate, New York. Westerman, J. (2022) “Cildo Meireles Born 1948 Insertions into Ideological Circuits: CocaCola Project 1970.” Available online. https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/ performance-at-tate/perspectives/cildo-meireles. Accessed 21st April 2022.

6 THEATRICALITIES

The imbrication of performance practices with their contexts that is integral to tactics of “infiltration” is also important to the association of Conceptual art with modes of “theatricality.” It was an identification derived firstly from the critic Michael Fried’s influential contemporaneous critique of Minimalism – and by implication post-Minimalist practice – for its “theatrical” attention to the art object’s “literal” circumstances, extended in Conceptual art to language and discourse whose presence Fried found equally antithetical to the Modernist artwork. Here, at times under the influence of Fried’s analysis despite his pejorative use of the term, important aspects of Conceptual art and performance self-consciously elaborated a theatrical engagement with contexts and audiences, in some cases also referencing theatre and film practices in installations, images, and actions that nevertheless evaded or remained unresolved into the conventional “objects” of performance. Such work further advanced Conceptual art’s critique and transformation of predominant narratives and practices of a Modernist art that found its justifications and meanings from within its own terms, so claiming an autonomy and separation from the circumstances in which it was produced and received. In his essay “Art and Objecthood” published in 1967, Fried sought to retrench Clement Greenberg’s vision for North American abstract painting in a prescient attack on the implications of “literalist,” “ABC,” or Minimal art. In his antagonistic reading of Minimalism’s displacement of Modernist painting’s claim to autonomy, Fried identified “theatricality” with Minimalism’s engagement with “literal” time and space such that the “beholder” became integral to the work. In contrast to this turning outwards, Greenberg’s critical project had at its core a faith in the capacity of painting to reveal and sustain its own inner realm, achieving, Fried subsequently argued, a defeat of “objecthood” or “literal” presence in a lifting of the work out of the time of the beholder in such a way that “at every moment the work itself is DOI: 10.4324/9781315694962-6

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wholly manifest” (1998: 167, original emphasis). In this context, Fried accused Minimalism’s characteristic “‘unitary’ forms” (Morris 1993: 7) of imposing an implicitly anthropomorphic obstruction in the gallery space, to emphasise objecthood (in real space) and so duration (the real time of encounter). As such, he concluded: Literalist sensibility is theatrical because, to begin with, it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work. [Robert] Morris makes this explicit. Whereas in previous art “what is to be had from the work is located strictly within [it],” the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation - one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder 1998: 153, original emphasis In his essay “Modernist Painting” of 1965, Greenberg culminated his influential narrative of the avant-garde in North American art that he had introduced in his essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” in 1939 (Greenberg 1961a) and established further in his collection of essays Art and Culture of 1961. Reflecting the early Marxism that lay behind his historicist approach (Clark 1982; Florman 2002), yet now asserting an autonomy in painting and sculpture that excised social and political meaning in favour of significance found “within” the medium itself, Greenberg argued for a unique grounding of each discipline in its own terms to be achieved in a bringing to consciousness of its intrinsic methods. In this sense, and in giving voice to a historical process, he argued in “Modernist Painting,” “Modernism criticizes from the inside,” realising each art’s autonomy by using the “characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself – not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence” (1982: 5–6). Stressing the importance of coming to consciousness, Greenberg argued for the nature of this Modernist “self-criticism,” whose “task […] became to eliminate from the effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably have been borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thereby each art would be rendered ‘pure’.” It is a process, he concluded, that is material, pragmatic, and empirical: “immanent to practice and never a topic of theory” (9). In this process, too, Greenberg concluded, the Modernist arts did not break with the past but brought to vision and awareness what lay beneath the surface of previous practices, in “an unravelling of anterior tradition” which comprised “its continuation” (9). Revisiting this agenda, Fried argued that Greenberg had set out a method and process that reached towards the fundamental terms and legitimacy of each of the arts, a process demonstrating that “The concepts of quality and value – and to the extent that these are central to art, the concept of art itself - are meaningful, or wholly meaningful, only within the individual arts. What lies between the arts is theatre” (1998: 164, original emphasis). In this context, conceptual practices that oriented work towards convergences with its site or situation – and that pursued and extended this “theatricality” – also critiqued these claims to self-determined qualities and values, the exclusions they necessitated and frequently the methods that underpinned them.

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Grounding the work

Greenberg’s proposition setting out Modernist art’s self-realisation through a critical process embedded within practice, and Fried’s subsequent agenda regarding theatricality in art, rests on the revelation by each medium of the “recursive structure” that underpins its legitimacy and identity at a particular historical moment. In this context, painting’s recursive structure – for Greenberg, the “flatness, twodimensionality” of Modernist abstract painting – is a complex reflection of, but not identical to, the “flatness” of the raw canvas that forms its “material support.” Significantly, this directs attention towards a medium’s “recursive structure” over its literal form, a structure which Rosalind Krauss captures as a “layered, complex relationship […] a recursive structure - a structure, that is, some of the elements of which will produce the rules that generate the structure itself” (2000: 6, original emphasis). This structure, Krauss concludes in accordance with Greenberg, “is something made, rather than something given” (7). Furthermore, and crucially to Greenberg’s account of Modernist art’s process, “the nature of a recursive structure is that it must be able, at least in part, to specify itself” (7). Thus, Greenberg wrote as early as 1959 that Modernist painting strives to reveal its “viable essence” in a convergence of “different stylistic directions […] and inventiveness in relation to a given time, place, and tradition” (1961b: 209). Reviewing the significance of Greenberg’s term “re-created flatness” for critical practice in 2015, the art historian Michael Schreyach emphasises a dialectical relationship between painting and its material support under this paradigm, arguing that, as Greenberg articulates it, “success” in abstract painting, seemed increasingly to depend on the degree to which the work of art could paradoxically distinguish itself from—yet acknowledge the conditions of—its literal materials. Greenberg seems to be suggesting that painting’s success depends on establishing what amounts to an ontological distinction between the picture as an autonomous artwork and the picture as an object. 56 It is in this relationship that Greenberg’s account of a progressive self-critical process and Fried’s distinction between “art” and “objecthood” rest: that painting creates a virtual or an interior realm that comes to “specify itself,” a realm that both absorbs and transcends the facticity and so flatness of the canvas to reveal painting’s recursive structure, or “viable essence,” under, in this case, “modern conditions” (Schreyach 2015: 56). The paradox in Greenberg’s and Fried’s various formulations of this distinction regarding place and the virtual realm of the work is that each painting obtains its unique form in a place: that despite the “ontological distinction” between the artwork and its material support, the Modernist painting nevertheless demands encounter in the specific location over which it claims transcendence.

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It follows from this that Robert Morris’ proposal in his 1966 essay, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 1,” that his unitary forms looked outwards to order relationships in the gallery (1993: 7) articulates the orchestration of relationships extrinsic to the “work” that Fried identified as “already (to say the worst) corrupted or perverted by theatre” (1998: 161). In such pursuits of “the theatricality of objecthood” (160) instead of the virtual realm of art, he suggests, the gallery becomes an arena in which “a kind of stage presence” (155, original emphasis) is cultivated, effected, or produced; one that emphasises a bodily encounter in “objecthood as such” (151). In this event, the objects of art become instruments of performative encounters as a corollary of which “the entities or beings encountered in everyday experience in terms that most closely approach the literalist ideals of the nonrelational, the unitary, and the holistic are other persons” (155). Fried draws attention to Tony Smith’s use of “biomorphic forms,” and his reflection that “I didn’t think of them […] as sculptures but as presences of a sort” (155). Here, Fried’s conclusion that “the literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to nothing other than a plea for a new genre of theatre” (153) can be read against the steps into performance by Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Terry Fox, Dennis Oppenheim, and Adrian Piper, amongst others. Fried subsequently elaborated “a new anti-theatrical conception of the art of painting” in the aesthetics of 18th-century French art, whose origin he ascribed to the philosophical and critical writings of Diderot, arguing that paintings by Jacques Louis David as well as Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and Joseph-Marie Vien rehearsed values that came to underpin later Modernist practice (2015, 2018). Fried’s model has been given further currency through its return in more recent debates around “theatricality” as critical practice and framework (Wakefield 2019) as well as its recovery as an interdisciplinary, philosophical, and critical lens in theatre and film (Abbott 2018; Dedić 2016; Quick and Rushton 2019). Favourable discussions and interpretations of Greenberg’s claims for “Modernist” painting also persist (Clark 1982; Crow 1996; Florman 2002) as a benchmark for reading Modernism and its innovations. Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden, speaking as Art & Language in 2004, recalled Greenberg’s narrative and ideology and Fried’s interventions as predominant at the time of their early work in the mid-1960s and the founding of Art & Language in 1968, providing a negative point of definition in debates over Conceptual art. At this time, Baldwin recalled, Greenberg “was still a voice, was still dominant, even in the form of his pupil Michael Fried and so forth. […] that voice was what seemed to drive one’s critical activity” (Art & Language 2004: 2). It is in response to “the Greenbergian hegemony,” in which North American painting and Modernism more broadly formed a pervasive orientation in thinking about art (3) that Art & Language privileged painting as the ideological and pragmatic space and target of their early work. Emphasising “a very specific connection between those early moments of conceptual art and painting and the whole ideological

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FIGURE 6.1 Art

& Language, Untitled Painting, 1965. Presented by Tate Patrons 2007. © Art & Language. Photo: Tate

apparatus,” Baldwin and Ramsden recalled their early strategies to infiltrate and displace or otherwise redistribute the conventional “space” of painting. At that time, they noted, in their collaborations and as Art & Language, they had “intended to syndicalise the space of painting. It was either to occupy space which painting had previously occupied or, if it didn’t occupy it, to draw attention to the fact that it could, in some sense” (2). Baldwin’s and Ramsden’s first works, retrospectively attributed to Art & Language (Art & Language 2008), including Four Suprematist Squares (1965), Black Painting (1965), Painting/Sculpture (1966–77), and Secret Painting (1967–8), made explicit reference to Greenberg’s agenda. In doing so, however, these works also alluded to artwork in the orbit of Modernist narrative, including the “Black Paintings” by Ad Reinhardt (1953–67) and Frank Stella (1958–60), whose monochromatic repetitions already implicitly critiqued the seeming culmination of the Modernist reduction. In this work, then, a sequential display of “black paintings” in the manner of Reinhardt is positioned adjacent to the floor to deny them their authoritative presence (Art & Language 2008: 5); an identical pair of canvases

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are designated, respectively, as PAINTING and SCULPTURE, demonstrating the contingent and transactional character of form and medium; and a black painting is joined with a text declaring its meaning to be ineffable, or in this case “permanently secret.” The early Untitled Painting (1965) also directly addressed questions of the extrinsic and intrinsic constitution of the artwork in the beholder’s act of looking, and in dynamics between visuality and textuality. The mirror, Baldwin and Ramsden suggest, “in being perfectly uninflected – blank – is inflected by whatever it reflects,” to produce an “intrinsically unpictorial surface” that is “inevitably pictorial” (9): a glass surface that although strictly speaking “empty” (and so “abstract”) requires considerable determination to be seen as such. Through these “entropic paintings” (9), Baldwin and Ramsden (parodically) “syndicalise” or infiltrate and overtake “the space of painting,” occupying its forms in such a way as to bring into view that which it suppresses: diverting and disseminating “Modernist space” into other, multiple, textual, and conceptual discourses. It is a displacement that anticipates the dilemmas surrounding Fried’s “theatricality” and that brings to the fore the question of location in Conceptual art, one reflected in Ramsden’s remark, recorded by Charles Harrison, that “Conceptual Art was never quite sure where ‘the work’ was” (2001a: 27). Terry Smith suggested that in this regard, “Mel Ramsden described Conceptual Art as ‘like Modernism’s nervous breakdown.’ A more parochial way of putting it was ‘Clement Greenberg’s nightmare’” (2017: 138). Where Baldwin and Ramsden posed the question of an artwork’s location, other contemporaneous resistance to “Greenbergian hegemony” directly challenged distinctions between an artwork and its “material support” or site. Such departures saw an appropriation by critics and practitioners alike of “theatricality” as a paradigm shift towards interdisciplinary, intertextuality, and socially and politically located practices. Thus, Charles Harrison, in his second volume of essays on Art & Language (2001b), notes the conceptual artist Martha Rosler’s response to “Art and Objecthood,” which she recounted in an unpublished interview of 1991 as providing a direct prompt to working in the public sphere: I read Michael Fried’s essay […] and he spoke of the problem of art that did not follow these modernist precepts as being “theatre.” And I said, “bingo, that’s it, that’s right.” The art that is important now is a form of theatre, and one thing that means is that it has to be in the space of the viewer 14, original emphasis In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the theatricality Fried characterised as producing the “condition of non-art” was also reflected in the evolving rhetoric of Conceptual art and a drive towards a collapse of distinctions between artwork and context. Here, “theatricality” also challenged conventional notions of performance, audience, and theatrical relation. Thus, Terry Fox, in discussion about his process

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Ireland, Repair of the Sidewalk, 500 Capp Street, San Francisco, 1976. Photo: Tom Marioni. Courtesy 500 Capp Street Foundation

FIGURE 6.2 David

with Robin White in 1979, explicitly deferred attention from performance to “theatricality” in this environmental sense, noting that: It’s almost impossible to talk about performance anymore. That word means something different from what it used to. There must be a better word, we could say “situation”. I make a situation. The actual situation is what’s going on in the space that we’re in. And the situation involves everybody there. White 1979: 5 It is a tendency also exemplified in Conceptual art that collapses conventional oppositions between a “recursive structure” and its “material support,” and the distinctions between “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” dimensions in which artworks are conventionally defined and perceived. As Terry Fox’s comments reflect, this is a seam of particular importance to the “first generation” of conceptual artists in California, elaborated in substantial bodies of work created by David Ireland and Bonnie Ora Sherk in San Francisco, as well as the Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader who relocated to Los Angeles in 1963. These artists explicitly extended the tendency captured by Fried’s notion of “theatricality” into architectural, ecological, and

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environmental practices, disrupting, in their various approaches, the binaries in which artworks are conventionally distinguished from their sites. It is a problematic exemplified by David Ireland’s focus on place not only in his evolution of David Ireland’s House but also in his navigation of relationships between work and site through frameworks of performance in discrete works, such as Repair of the Sidewalk (1976). Ireland’s Repair was executed adjacent to his home at 500 Capp Street in the Mission District of San Francisco and comprises his completed repair of the sidewalk, legally required by the city at his own expense: a work in its final form indistinguishable from its place. For Ireland, whose archaeological and ethnographic address to 500 Capp Street, which in time became David Ireland’s House, was already underway, the city’s obligation posed questions around differentiations between art, art processes, and its everyday and social contexts. Jennifer Gross, in her essay on Ireland’s objects and the status and function of evidence in his work, records, Ireland’s profound sense of irritation at having this responsibility impinge on his studio time goaded him into questioning whether there was any difference between an artist’s and someone else’s repair of the sidewalk. The attitude brought to the activity, he concluded, determined whether it was art or not. 2003: 155 In 1975, the year before the Repair, Ireland had transformed his painting practice, turning away from overtly abstract works in paint and crayon that, Karen Tsujimoto notes, drew on Robert Ryman’s monochromes to assert “that the image is first and finally about the medium itself as it sits on its material support” (2003: 9). Instead, Ireland began to systematically work with concrete in painting and as installation, taking a decisively conceptual turn from paintings of place to work announcing its integration into place, such as the installation A Painting on a Wall in a Room Being the Same Material as the Floor (1976). Concrete, too, was adopted by Ireland with implicit reference to the Italian arte povera movement, and its focus on the “natural” chemical and affective properties of materials in the gallery and in situ, reflected here in the “naturalness” of concrete as a material, in its progression from liquid to solid state, its “formation” as the built environment, and so the potential collapse of material into place. Concrete, or cement, also offered Ireland a material whose properties made demands on his process, as he attempted to “give place to the uneducated image, give place to the earth, give place to everything,” emphasising that “I want to be with it as it is” (Tsujimoto 2003: 11). Repair of the Sidewalk brought together many of these concerns, as Ireland’s “material” is returned to its “natural” state in the urban environment. The Repair comprised a process of work and maintenance analogous to David Ireland’s House, one also configured as performance in retrospect by Marioni’s video recording of Ireland’s making of the repair. The result is a “work” – in both performative and sculptural senses – whose tautological form only appears when the “artwork” is known to be

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the ground on which it stands. For Ireland, Repair of the Sidewalk operates first and foremost in these ambiguities, as the artwork falls into its material and contextual support such that “The challenge is to see how closely you can stay to real time/ space without becoming invisible. I would love the notion that whatever I do would become virtually invisible as an artwork” (Storr 1996: 17). It is this “conflation” of the work and its place that Ireland elaborated in his ongoing address to 500 Capp Street, and that was further expanded in Bonnie Ora Sherk’s and Bas Jan Ader’s respective engagements with environment and “forces” of nature. Time in place: David Ireland’s House

David Ireland’s most well-known and frequently considered most important work is David Ireland’s House, a late Victorian property at 500 Capp Street in the Mission district of San Francisco: a 25-by-50-foot wood-frame clapboard house purchased by Ireland in 1975. Once resident, Ireland began what was intended as 30 months of work to create his own living and studio spaces: a process of cleaning and “stabilisation” in which, he later reported, “I wanted to remove the obviousness of the previous owner. I wanted to get rid of everything I could. I started throwing things out that I didn’t see immediately as having significance” (Ireland 2003: 88). Stressing that “it was not my intention to make an artwork out of the house” (88), Ireland’s process nevertheless gave rise to ambiguities between his daily, incremental transformation of his living place and his methods for producing objects. It is an ambiguity caught in Ireland’s determination that “I’m just cleaning the house,” in tension with his realisation over time that “the lively presence I was looking for in my paintings was here in the walls […] I felt it important to clarify the space and preserve it […] I haven’t done anything to restore it. I call it a stabilisation or maintenance action” (Klausner 2003: 21). In these respects, Ireland also recognised that his “clarifying” of the house pressed towards “performance, installation, kind of all of the different art forms: painting, sculpture, more traditional sculpture” (25). In his attention to the house from 1977 to 1979, then, Ireland’s approach to the fixing of materials, features, and objects of the house as relics or evidence of prior uses and activities overtly traversed these practices without being explicitly resolved into conventional forms. Ireland also conceived his approach towards objects in the house as quasi-archaeological or ethnographic, suggesting that “The cleaning process was very much in the spirit of finding a bone at a dig. It was like brushing off these and or dust and preparing it as an exhibit” (22). In these processes, once “cleaned” of wallpaper, Ireland “locked in” features such as the cracks and lines in the wall plaster from several earthquakes the house had suffered (Ireland 2003: 112) or phone numbers written on the kitchen wall that he had first intended to remove (Klausner 2003: 32), fixing them under a deep, yellow polyurethane glaze that became one of the most immediately recognisable features of the house. Keeping these objects in place, the artefacts of the

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FIGURE 6.3 Tony

Labat video recording as Ireland sands the floor in the front parlour, 500 Capp Street, 1977. Photo: Steven Kayfetz. Courtesy 500 Capp Street Foundation

house remain imbued with meaning by their past use, even when their specific or personal meaning is unknown. Where Ireland’s “cleaning process” fixed materials and marks, as “evidence” of past events, while implicitly referencing sculpture and painting, his incremental transformation of the house through a daily ritual structured in repetition also suggests performance. In 1977, Tony Labat, at the time of playing out his role as “Janitor” for Tom Marioni at the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA) in downtown San Francisco, made a series of short videotapes recorded over six to eight months of Ireland’s interventions. These comprised David Ireland’s House (1977, 19′28″) followed by two unseen video works David Ireland’s House Outside (1977) and Lunch with Mr. Gordon (1977), focusing on interactions with Ireland’s then elderly lodger. Shot without script, schedule or discussion, David Ireland’s House is a systematic recording of different actions of “cleaning,” including, Ireland noted, “the stripping of the wallpaper, and the scrubbing, and taking the trim off, and digging dirt out of the basement. […] Scrubbing the floor” (Ireland 2003: 147). These collaborations with Ireland joined Labat’s then emerging video practice, inaugurated with Solo

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Flight (1977), that participated in what he noted as video art’s “post-studio moment” (O’Connell 2014) and the influence on his work of film and video by Bruce Nauman, Howard Fried, and Paul Kos. Labat’s positioning of his early work also reflects the importance of John Baldessari’s formulation of post-studio art in 1970, and its inflection of relationships between “work” and “place.” Defined through his widely circulated list of 105 assignments for his “Post-Studio Art” class at CalArts, Baldessari’s proposals encapsulated Conceptual art’s rejection of the “artist’s studio” as a unique yet paradoxically ubiquitous and typical space that hosts and speaks of the artists’ creative process: a space that can itself become the subject and even the object of art. In its rejection of the studio as counterpart to the “white cube” gallery with its ideological claims to emptiness and neutrality (O’Doherty 1986), post-studio art frequently integrated the literal, social, and political contexts necessary for an artwork’s existence into the terms of the work, in a critical self-reflexivity extended to the studio as the ideological site of art’s definition. In the case of Bruce Nauman’s early performances for film, recorded in the absence of an audience in his San Francisco store-front studio, such as Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square (1966–7), this included a self-reflexive treatment of the artist’s presence in the studio after Duchamp’s treatment of “sculpture” in the gallery. Thus, rather than express evidence of the artist’s creativity and process, the artist’s studio frames Nauman as “artist,” from which it flows that his activity, even if produced in an experience of extended boredom, “is” art. Nauman thus concluded that if “I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art,” and it followed that, “art became more of an activity than a product” (van Bruggen 1988: 108). In this context, Conceptual art – and more specifically the conceptual framing of performance – turned towards a critique of its own production. Labat also notes the solipsistic turn under which Nauman’s studio performance gains an “art” identity, remarking that “in Nauman’s tapes, we only see this moment in the studio because we have the videos. It’s kind of like reportage” (O’Connell 2014). Labat’s recordings for David Ireland’s House similarly produce their own mediated context, setting Ireland “in a frame of making for others” (O’Connell 2014) while implicitly referencing the house as video’s mis-en-scene. Notably, Labat later emphasised: the video was not going to be a documentary. It was not going to be linear. […] David never said a word, there was no interview, and I did not use documentary conventions. […] we both thought about what was important, going back to sculpture, it was the sounds of working. […] To me it was the very aggressive sounds or the soothing ones; they had a range of different tones. Whether he was sanding [sanding noises] with the sandpaper on the wall or the aggressiveness of the moulding coming off. Then there were very quiet moments, like washing the windows. O’Connell 2014

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Implicitly reframing Ireland’s daily rituals as “action sculpture,” after Tom Marioni’s use of the term to define his own work and the activities of MOCA, Labat suggests the making of the video restages Ireland’s project “with the quotidian as a private stage, so performance, of course, but his performance was not aimed at a live audience, he had a task at hand” (O’Connell 2014). In these regards, Labat’s video resists the transformations later and recent photographic documentations of David Ireland’s House have tended to effect in emphasising the stilled, aesthetic appeal of its interiors, readings that Ireland’s living and working in the house countered. Following Ireland’s passing in 2008, David Ireland’s House was inevitably inflected further towards memorialisation of Ireland’s past performance of place and autobiography. Constance Lewallen thus opens the most detailed account of Ireland’s project with the observation that “If a house can be a portrait, then 500 Capp Street can be seen as David Ireland’s self-portrait” (2015: 25). In 2014, Labat remarked that: The photos that I have seen are just too beautiful […] It is a nice contrast to have the video. That early recording equipment was a drag; I had about sixty pounds on my shoulder with that old Porta-Pack. The footage was nitty-gritty, black and white, and raw. I like that because of what he was doing, for me, it was down and dirty. I don’t think the video romanticizes Ireland’s work—it is what it is. O’Connell 2014 Reflecting Ireland’s implicit elaboration of the “multipleness” of place, David Ireland’s House is articulated differently by Ireland’s activity, and legacy, and by 500 Capp Street’s continuing curation as a “living sculpture” by the 500 Capp Street Foundation. In this perspective, Labat’s video works add to questions over the identity and goals of Ireland’s process, and the emphasis on definitions of “a place” in diverse material, historical, cultural, spatial, and personal aspects, for different visitors or occupants at different times. Ireland’s own “stabilisation” of architectural features and material traces of past occupations was punctuated by the opening of the house to public view as The Maintenance Action, as an exhibition from 3rd to 12th February 1978. Prior and subsequently, Ireland also produced objects constructed of the material remains or traces of the house’s use, staging them in his living spaces; he also developed 500 Capp Street as a hub for artists through frequent dinners and meetings; and he welcomed individual visitors to view the house as his private guests. In these ways, Ireland’s living in and uses of the house extended the ambivalent status of its experience for its visitors in ways consistent with the ambiguities of his “stabilisation” of its features. In important ways, this fluidity carried forward to David Ireland’s House themes articulated through Repair of the Sidewalk (1976), which was also a “stabilisation”

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parlour room, 500 Capp Street, with David Ireland’s South China Chairs, 1978–9. Photo: Henrik Kim, 2015. Courtesy 500 Capp Street Foundation

FIGURE 6.4 Front

action that configured “the quotidian as a private stage” through its recording on video, this time by Marioni. Like the Repair, David Ireland’s House conflated an emergent artwork with its “literal” or “material” support, but now that “material support” – the house at 500 Capp Street – presented itself as “social signs” (Lewallen 2015: 38) in a house Ireland approaches as a “social relic” (Tsujimoto 2003: 38). Here, too, Ireland’s treatment of the House extended another signal work in collaboration with Marioni: The Restoration of a Portion of the Back Wall, Ceiling and Floor of the Main Gallery of the Museum of Conceptual Art (1976), a concept by Marioni executed by Ireland prior to Repair of the Sidewalk. Redressing an incident in which another artist had painted parts of the first floor of MOCA white in preparation for a performance – so making a “permanent” change to MOCA that breached Marioni’s “house rules” for its use – in The Restoration Ireland meticulously created a “Photo-realist painting” (Marioni 2013: 50) that returned the surfaces to their original appearance. Discussed in further detail here in the context of Marioni’s work in Chapter 2, The Restoration’s paradoxical approach of adding

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to a site through a process of removal – here, of the paint surface – and of “fixing” or restoring imperfections, also underpins Ireland’s approach to David Ireland’s House. Marioni and Ireland’s process of restoration creates an “invisible artwork” that simulates its own material support, illustrating a conflation of a visual artwork with its “literal” circumstances; one that can only be “seen” if it is “known.” In doing so, The Restoration is collapsed into its place to look back, as if one could simultaneously occupy different tenses and times of MOCA. David Ireland’s House also carries this engagement with time, place, and performance – in Ireland’s process – and through the objects Ireland made and placed in the house. Richard Pinegar, writing in the catalogue to Ireland’s 1987 retrospective survey, suggests that many of the objects at 500 Capp Street “are best described as relics of performance activities” (1987: 4). In doing so, Pinegar implicitly aligns performance relics with artefacts consistent with Ireland’s ethnographic approach and sensibility, noting that “Some of these works are residues of performance actions by the artist, or activities of the previous owner of 500 Capp Street which are significant because they reveal ways in which the building was once used” (6). In this vein, too, Ireland’s use of materials tended to emphasise process over resultant or residual form, often implying a performance discipline that left objects as remains, or evidence of a process arrested. In this regard, Karen Tsujimoto notes the importance of Ireland’s 94-Pound Series (1975) and specifically 94-Pound Discard (1975) which she identifies as laying the conceptual basis for much of his subsequent work: To make this piece, the artist first spread a carpet of dry cement from a ninetyfour-pound sack of the material throughout his studio. From this environment, Ireland repeatedly made similar all-over drawings each day until the cement was depleted. After that he started the 94-Pound Discard, which entailed discarding the works every day until they were almost gone. Ireland’s intent in these repetitious pieces, at the time referred to as Repeating the Same Work Each Day, was to work in a meditative state of aesthetic detachment, to remove the traces of personal control and self-expression that had informed his previous work Tsujimoto 2003: 23 Tsujimoto notes that Ireland retained a small number of the outcomes of this repetition, not as “drawings” but as “relics” of the activity, suggesting the importance to Ireland of repetition, in the sense of each repeated act as a renewal (24). It is a process echoed in Ireland’s later production of Dumbballs, first shown in 1983: an unlimited series of cement balls whose process echoes conceptual artist Walter De Maria’s early score and statement, “Meaningless Work” of March 1960, recommending “work which does not make money or accomplish a conventional purpose” (1963). Dumbballs require the throwing of a hand-sized piece of concrete

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from hand to hand until a ball is formed and Ireland’s performance arrested: a private ritual Ireland frequently documented and whose results, he suggested, “has no will or design imposed on it. It finds its way by the shape of one’s hand and by dedication to process” (Klausner 2003: 16). Ireland’s sensibility and implicit engagement with process and performance are also underpinned by the influence of John Cage, including Cage’s commitment to Zen Buddhism and conviction that “repetition doesn’t exist” as each object, and moment, is “unique” (Kostelanetz and Cage 1987: 115). Cage’s connection with the Bay Area was long-standing, and his influence extended to Tom Marioni and Bonnie Ora Sherk, as well as other Bay Area conceptual artists. Cage had taught at Mills College, Oakland, in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He had also worked to establish a centre for experimental music at the College, finally realised as the Mills Tape Music Centre, led by Pauline Oliveros, in 1966. Cage’s influential performances in San Francisco included Variations IV in 1965, with the pianist David Tudor, in an event arranged throughout the spaces of the sculpture courts of the Museum of Modern Art. At Kathan Brown’s invitation in 1978, Cage visited Crown Point Press, which she had founded, and was present most years until his death in 1992 (Marioni 2003: 143), meeting frequently with Marioni and in turn with artists linked to MOCA, including Ireland. Underpinning Cage’s thinking and practice is an attention to “silence”: un-notated sound intruding into compositions, the sounds of the environment, or sounds which dispense with the conventional constructions of art altogether in favour of an indeterminate identity. Cage’s perspective was profoundly influential across disciplines and is reflected in Ireland’s practice and approach to the House. It is under Cage’s influence that Ireland stressed, “We must not discount the possibility that just because we have not designated something as art, it is not art” (Klausner 2003: 22) so invoking art as a contingent framework and privileging the identity or identities of objects that – like Cage’s sounds – might “present themselves” to a viewer as emergent, or in transformation. Consistent with this, Ireland worked towards ambivalent relationships with processes and contexts of the everyday, evident in Repair of the Sidewalk, The Restoration, and David Ireland’s House, suggesting that “Ideally my work has a visual presence that makes it seem a part of the usual, everyday situation […] I like the feeling that nothing has been designed, that you can’t tell where the art stops and starts” (Tsujimoto 2003: 59). His emphasis on objects as the remains of performance processes or relics extended this emphasis on the emergent nature of identity, providing counterpoints and punctuations to the process of his “maintenance action.” In this way, Ireland’s process revealed and fixed artefacts of the house that remained entangled in histories of actions or processes of living, as he staged “social objects of the occupants before me” (Lewallen 2015: 59). Typically, such objects marked and recorded events and the passage of time. The Safe Gets Away for The First Time November 5, 1975, and The Safe Gets Away for the Second Time – November 5, 1975, thus appropriate events when, in attempting to

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convey a safe up the main staircase of the house on November 5th, 1975, the safe fell, puncturing the stairwell wall, only to repeat the damage on a second attempt. Ireland subsequently fixed small plaques with these narrative titles to the interior walls at the point of the safe’s impact which was left unrepaired, as performative constructions of past events as present works. Many of Ireland’s objects traverse document, artefact, and artwork in this way, marking or recalling time structures of the everyday. Such processes include the accumulation of remainders over time: accumulations in jars of the dirt from the stripping of window boards; dust from the sanding of the floor; newspapers found in the process of “cleaning” and other “residue from Actions” (Ireland 2003: 86), or relics of specific experiences. In the case of the newspapers, Ireland recalled, “A band comes off a newspaper and there’s a sound element, there’s a time increment expressed. It’s like a notation” (Klausner 2003: 24). In the case of Broom Collection with Boom (1978– 88), Lewallen recalls Ireland’s characterisation of collecting and organising 18 brooms arranged according to their wear and tear and stabilised by a “Boom,” as “a social sculpture” or a “social system” (2015: 52) marking the use of this “social instrument” in repetition over time and by multiple occupants. On moving into the house, Ireland recalled: the brooms started to appear. In every corner there was a broom. […] I decided I would configure them in some kind of clock formation because it would show – you buy a broom, you sweep with it, you wear it out, and you discard it and buy another one and do the same thing, so there’s kind of a repetition of assemblage here. Ireland 2003: 88 In these ways, Ireland addresses 500 Capp Street by revealing its “theatricality,” in an excavation and evidencing of architectural structures, objects-in-place, and events recalled by things; artefacts that evidence various times of the house, including the times of Ireland’s own occupation and “stabilisation” actions. Consistent with its absorption into place, David Ireland’s House resists acquiring a date as a “work” in a conventional manner. Instead, the House reproduces the character of its site as palimpsest. Although it has a history and a date of origin, the dates of Ireland’s “work” and its subject embraces 1886 (the building of the house), 1975 (Ireland’s residence begins), 1977–9 (“stabilisation”), 1978 (“exhibition”), 2008 (creation of the 500 Capp Street Foundation), as well as numerous other dates and the continuum itself. Ireland’s objects and artefacts are similarly sometimes dated, at other times integrated “as” structural parts of the house, while events and works are sometimes dated in retrospect or as intervals of time. In these ways, too, the palimpsestuous aspects of David Ireland’s House tends to multiply, placing further emphasis on process, and in turn the figures and relics of past performance; ideas that are essential to the framing and forming of present time encounters with Ireland’s work and its places.

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Ireland, Broom Collection with Boom, 1978–88. Photo: Henrik Kim, 2015. Courtesy 500 Capp Street Foundation.

FIGURE 6.5 David

Open spaces: Bonnie Ora Sherk

In contrast to David Ireland’s staging of domestic and architectural spaces as a series of performed processes, Bonnie Ora Sherk is perhaps best known for the creation of Crossroads Community (the farm), which she co-founded and developed from 1974 to 1978, although The Farm continued to be active until 1987. In the relationship of artwork to place, The Farm explicitly worked against the delimitation and so differentiation of a conceptual work from the literal place of its occurrence, while still seeking to sustain a concept of this collaborative activity as art. A transformation of a sprawling, “negative” urban space beneath

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the complex of the 101 Freeway junction at Potrero Hill in San Francisco, Crossroads Community was one of the first city farms in the United States: an ecological artwork of some six-and-a-half acres and a counter-cultural living and arts project embracing diverse purposes, artists, and groups. Sherk participated in many of the early events orchestrated by Tom Marioni at the Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco from 1970, including Pig Sonata, one of six performances forming Six Comedy Sonatas organised by Marioni for MOCA in August 1971; Pretending to be a Gargoyle as part of All Night Sculptures (1973) (Loeffler and Tong 1980: 75) and Marioni’s The San Francisco Performance (1972). Sherk also contributed to Lynn Hershman Leeson’s (H)errata (1977) part of The Floating Museum (1974–8): a “nomadic” orchestration of site-specific events by artists in California and internationally and considered simultaneously a work by Hershman Leeson (Giannachi 2021). Through her project, which came to be known as The Farm, Sherk emphasised environmental context, performative role, ecological systems, and processes of growth, while drawing on her earlier Conceptual performance, including her Portable Park I–III and Sitting Still series of 1970 and in particular Public Lunch (1971), to utilise performance as a framing idea and practice. Stepping away from The Farm in 1978, Sherk transformed her practice into Life Frames, and subsequently A Living Library: an ongoing series fusing educational, ecological, and performance-based processes, first envisaged in 1981 as a reconfiguration of Bryant Park in Manhattan and then realised in community-based projects in San Francisco. These continuities were recognised at the 2017 Venice Biennale in Sherk’s two-part installation, Evolution of Life Frames: past, present, future and Crossroads Community (the farm). In reflections integrated into these works, Sherk noted the grounding of A Living library in her earliest performative interventions into place, stressing “for me performance has evolved to become interactive community programmes or hands-on interdisciplinary learning integrated systemically in the place and so structurally what I was doing decades ago is still something that I am doing today” (Sherk 2017). This process begins in a focus on found sites and the quotidian experiences that define them, to which Sherk’s performance strategies direct attention. She recalls that: A long time ago I realized that everything happens in a place. And when we create the place or use an existing place and then integrate it systemically with some kind of performance or activity then we are creating whole experiences […] I saw my work in those early years as “Environmental Performance Sculpture” Sherk and Kaye 2015 For The Farm, Sherk identified her work with referrals outwards, through performance, to spaces and spheres of activity that she resisted delimiting or demarcating, preferring her process-based work to be embedded – even losing

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FIGURE 6.6 Bonnie

Sherk.

Ora Sherk, Sitting Still I, 1970. Courtesy Family of Bonnie Ora

definition – in the network of places with which it is identified. In these respects, Sherk considered The Farm a conceptual artwork catalysing social and ecological change, while presenting an identification of art with environment whose very lack of differentiation problematised its absorption into conventional art history and practice, explaining that: The Farm is a social artwork. I think of it as a life-scale environmental performance sculpture with a layering of meanings, metaphors, and actual situations. […] the naming of The Farm as art is perhaps the most perplexing and problematic idea for the establishment to accept, because the involved elements are diffused and to the conventional eye and mind difficult to grasp. Sherk and Kaye 2015 This diffusion and interest in the conventionally peripheral are embedded in Sherk’s earliest engagements with place and are evident in the Sitting Still series of 1970. Sitting Still I of October 1970 focused on the impact of Sherk’s costumed, and so theatricalised, presence as “an element, a material to work with, a person in a place,” whose placement defers an accidental and unknowing audience’s attention to her action’s impact on “dead spaces – derelict places,” in this case, the

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construction sites of the Army Street intersection from where Terry Fox had taken one and a half tons of earth for Levitation (1970). Sherk recalled that: In October of 1970 I came upon this large area of garbage where water had collected. That was because there was heavy construction of the 101 Freeway Interchange and debris was all around. In the centre […] was a large, overstuffed armchair floating in the water with tires, a tricycle, and other objects. I saw this and immediately could see myself seated there in the chair, so I went home, changed into an evening gown, and called my friend Bob Campbell to come and photograph it in a certain way. I waded in and sat in the chair facing the “audience,” which was comprised of the people in the cars that were moving very slowly because of the construction of this Freeway Interchange. The audience was a structural component of this piece Sherk and Kaye 2015 As “one element in the installation,” Sherk’s presence explored the effect of her stillness on her chosen circumstance and the happenstance audience where the then unusual nature of her action, she suggested, extended the site to “the cultural moment,” which “has a lot to do with the potency of the imagery. […] The cultural moment is part of the situation” (Sherk and Kaye 2015). In the following month, Sherk enacted at least four further iterations of Sitting Still in resonant locations in San Francisco, each one an hour in duration: at Mission and 20th Streets, in the historically predominantly Chicana/o/Mexican-American Mission District; at one of the largest road junctions in the city, at Church and Market Streets; in the financial district at 484 California Street, and before the Bank of America world headquarters, now 555 California Street; and on the walkway of the Golden Gate Bridge. Exploring “diverse environments, performance, other participants, and who could be the audience,” the overt theatricality of Sherk’s actions – their staging of a (sometimes costumed) female performer in sustained, contrived stillness – also self-reflexively engaged with Sherk “being an object on view – which of course had many feminist implications” (Sherk and Kaye 2015). Sherk considered her work as engaging with systems of place and performance: with quotidian circumstance, or “site and situation,” and so a present-tense ecology, whereby “you know what the situation is, what is going on here and at that time,” as opposed to any sense of a picturesque or transcendent tableaux. Instead, Sherk conceived her action as realising: a combination of the environment and the performance as an integrated whole. […] I was understanding how everything - how every part - fits together. So, for me the performance was always a very ecological system in terms of integrated elements all working together Sherk and Kaye 2015

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The Sitting Still series culminated in February 1971 in Public Lunch, which overtly amplified the feminist charge in her work and its engagement with the gaze, while bringing forward her earlier interest in animal and participatory performance. In late 1970, Sherk had continued the Sitting Still series at various unused and occupied cages at the San Francisco Zoo, including the Baboon cages, in the Pachyderm House with tapirs in an adjoining space, and at the same site with a male collaborator, Tom Woodruff, both sharing the space for a “double portrait” (Sherk 2016) and subsequently in adjacent cages. These occasions synthesised Sherk’s interest in the performative interrogation and transformation of specific sites with her earlier Portable Parks I, II, and III, realised over four days in June 1970. Portable Park I, her first public artwork, comprised a one-day installation situated on a section of the then James Lick Freeway, where it raised above and bridged the multi-lane Van Ness Avenue: a “dead-end section of the freeway that was used primarily by the Highway Patrol for dispensing tickets.” Visible to motorists but partly obscured from pedestrians, Sherk recounts: For one day the area was covered in live turf, live palm trees, a cow, and myself. It was a living tableau which was visible to motorists as they drove by. I thought of it as an oasis in the desert. It was also visible from the street, and I think quite humorous with the palm trees sticking over the edge of the concrete. Frye Burnham 1981: 49–50 Portable Parks II and III progressively encouraged public participation. Beneath the Duboce Freeway off-ramp, near where Sherk would later execute a variation of Sitting Still, Portable Park II included “more cows and also chickens involved, picnic tables, and bales of straw. It was a participatory piece for many pedestrians and art lovers, and a tableau for those in cars” (Frye Burnham 1981: 50). Portable Park III, in collaboration with Howard Levine, extended the park event to 48 hours, installing artificial grass throughout the two-block length of Maiden Lane, extending from Union Square as part of San Francisco’s shopping area, to create a “participatory park” that served to reclaim urban space for multiple audiences. Borrowing animals from San Francisco Zoo, including llamas, to populate her artificial park alongside cows and chickens, Sherk stressed that “In Portable Parks, I used live animals as elements in the work, and considered them to be performers, as was I” (Galpin 2013). Sherk’s Portable Parks do not effect simple transformations of “negative” urban spaces, but assert radical juxtapositions between temporary, artificial, openly participatory arenas in which radically diverse constituencies meet. In this, the Parks set a context for social intervention and new urban narratives, and participated in the prevailing countercultural politics in ways that anticipated the performative structures of “relational art” described in 1998 by Nicolas Bourrauld (2002) and that are presaged

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in Tom Marioni’s “social art”. Sherk’s performance implicitly connected with nascent west coast green and environmental alternative and political movements, coalescing around phenomena such as the Whole Earth Catalogue, published between 1968 and 1972. Politically, Sherk claimed, “these were really the original Parklets […] developed to reclaim public space for people” (Sherk and Kaye 2015). Indeed, the Portable Parks, and their translation into The Farm, enacted a micro- and community politics that resurfaced in the “tactical urbanism” crystallising, firstly, in San Francisco in the early 21st century (King 2012). More recent histories of urban ecological activism have also traced the antecedents of Parklets, the hacking of city planning, and other tactics to Sherk’s Portable Parks (Lydon and Garcia 2015: 42–6; 73). Public Lunch, of February 1971, synthesised many of these themes and practices with the Sitting Still series, which in turn served to further underpin the concept and structures of The Farm as performance. Sherk recounts the piece as a very public performance that occurred on a Saturday at 2pm, the time that everyone knows the animals will be fed. Of course, I was one of the animals, and had my own cage and let in and out in the same manner as lions and tigers. For 95% of the public – and it was a very large public – it was a surprise event. The meal was catered by Vanessi’s Restaurant, which is a very established, famous restaurant in San Francisco […] For the performance there were many dishes on the table, and it was a juxtaposition between the human animal and other animals Frye Burnham 1981: 50 In preparation for Public Lunch, Sherk had realised two private, six-minute, silent performances filmed in colour: Pacing in My Studio and Pacing in Broadway Tunnel. Transposed into her activity in the Lion House, her performance “juxtaposed her pacing and the adjacent pacing tigers” (Anon 2020) before their feeding time. These film works also locate the structuring and style of Sherk’s performance in relation to the Judson Church Dancers, whose influence she notes having seen their work in New York. The Judson Church postmodern choreography was rooted in translations of John Cage’s radical compositional practices and a concomitant transposition of everyday movement, in work by Alex Hay, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton, and others, including unstructured walking as dance (Paxton) and crossovers between procedures in Conceptual art and dance (Brown) (Kaye 1994: 90–117). Sherk’s emphasis on pacing in the studio also implicitly referenced Bruce Nauman’s private, studio performances recorded on film, such as Stamping in the Studio (1968) or Pacing Upside Down (1969), that also influenced confluences between Conceptual art and performance. Like Tony Labat in his approach to recording David Ireland’s House, however, Sherk explored transpositions of these actions into

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found locations in extensions of “post-studio” practice: in this case, Broadway Tunnel (the Robert C Levy Tunnel) a roadway access in San Francisco without pedestrian way, suggesting a further extension of the interventions of the Sitting Still series. Importantly, too, these references underline Sherk’s location of her ecological work within a conceptual lineage and framework. Public Lunch also further elaborated an address to radical difference and differentiation implicit in the Portable Parks, which, Sherk noted, involved “thinking a lot about analogies in diverse forms, and juxtapositions of imagery” (Galpin 2013). In occupying a cage adjacent to those of the captive animals, Sherk placed herself in a situation that reflected on the social and sexual objectification of women. In its performance, however, Public Lunch also invites readings of irreconcilable paradigms of thought and experience, prompting Sherk’s deepening interest “in the inner workings of animals” (Montano 2000: 212), in animal sentience and agency, as well as animals as “performers”. Sherk recalled: After I ate my meal, [I] paced, climbed a ladder to the platform above […] What was really significant for me is that the tiger in the adjacent cage got up on his haunches and looked at me. That’s when I realized this creature was looking at me and perceiving me Sherk and Kaye 2015 It is the orchestration of such radical difference that is the overriding logic of The Farm, which also built directly on Sherk’s developing engagement with animal presence and performance. After Public Lunch, Sherk took to living with animals in her studio, engaged in more formal studies of animal behaviour and integrated animal presence into her performances and time-based installations. Pig Sonata at MOCA in April 1971, Sherk recalled, for which she dressed theatrically in “an elegant, formal, long black gown” for a studio audience, incorporated “a large pig, who followed the trail of food to the soil mound with the greater amount of food, climbed onto it, and continued eating. The piece lasted until all the food was eaten” (Galpin 2013), so giving way to a duration determined by her animalcollaborator. For Adaqtation and Imbulgence, part two, a narration in April 1973, as part of All Night Sculptures organised by Marioni for MOCA, Sherk “performed on a rooftop with different animals,” including resident pigeons and a rabbit “who at that time went everywhere with me” (Frye Burnham 1981: 52). In Living in the Forest in January 1973 at the de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University, Sherk created a forest environment occupied by a variety of animals in what she considered a direct forerunner of The Farm’s “The Raw Egg Animal Theatre” (TREAT), noting “Living in the Forest was of course a metaphor for life - and the different animals did their own thing. Different species interacted in their own ways” (Sherk and Kaye 2015). Immediately before the inauguration of The Farm, too, Sherk had developed performances that infiltrated specific social environments and which, by temporarily

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synthesising her everyday life with implicitly theatricalised presentations of self, reflected on the constructed and performed nature of gender and social role. In The Short Order Cook (10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays, June 1973 to May 1974) and The Waitress (June 1973 to May 1974), both of which are subtitled Act V, Andy’s Donuts, Sherk conceived of her shift work at Andy’s Donuts on The Castro as modes of performance, to be revealed post-hoc – except to a small number of friends who would informally attend the diner. Sherk recalled: it was an opportunity to do a job as a performance piece. I consciously did so, wearing Cultural Costumes. The Waitress had a bouffant hairdo and wore a black and white nylon dress. The Short Order Cook wore a t-shirt and Levi’s. I was exploring what it meant to be a performer Cohn 2013: 81 In the event, her performances extended beyond “Cultural Costumes” to behaviour and emotional tenor as Sherk strove to meet assumptions and expectations, thus, she recalled, “as ‘The Waitress’ I was a gregarious self, and also an archetype […] As the ‘Short Order Cook’ I also dressed and behaved appropriately” (Frye Burnham 1981: 66). While completing The Waitress, Sherk was called to serve as a juror in the Superior Court of California, San Francisco, which resulted in a diversion of The Waitress into a supplementary performance, Jury Service (two weeks, April 1974). Sherk emphasises: It was she who appeared for Jury Duty [sic]. Once chosen and in the courtroom, wearing all my old clothes, I recognized that all of the participants were performing. After the trial, I created a piece called Well Liked and Learned Lawyers Win Cases, which was a living tableau and a pseudo-legal explication of my thinking. It was the defence for my actions, lest they be questioned Frye Burnham 1981: 66 Sherk’s infiltration and retrospective performance of her everyday social interactions and commitments implicitly extend the metaphors of Public Lunch: her Conceptual performance of “Cultural Costumes” are performances of paradigmatic social environments and of the behaviours, values, and restrictions they construct and demand. Complementing her inclusion of animal behaviour and difference – and differing paradigms – in her performances and installations, these works cast a critical, conceptual framework over her lived experience. Consistent with this, Sherk’s final discrete performance of this kind was Addressing the Mayor (February 1975) at San Francisco City Hall, in which she “Presented a proposal for a model of the farm to the Office of Community Development Hearing and Mayor Alioto in her roles as ‘The Administrator’ and ‘The Politician’” (Foley and Lewallen 1981: 159).

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FIGURE 6.7  Crossroads

Ora Sherk

Community (the farm), 1974–87. Courtesy Family of Bonnie

Considered a social artwork, The Farm does not easily lend itself to a detailed description of its daily unfolding, a fixed structure, or of specific “performances” that it could be said to comprise, metaphorically or pragmatically. Initiated by Sherk and her collaborator Jack Wickert, Crossroads Community (the farm) might be best identified as a set of principles and a context that is simultaneously a pragmatic community intervention, a political and ethical model, and an extension of Conceptual art and performance frameworks and strategies. Here, too, The Farm might be thought as performance, rather than resolved into theatre – much in the manner of Sherk’s inclusive installations and her overlaying of the everyday with conceptual frameworks of theatrical enactment and performance of social self. Pragmatically, The Farm comprised the reclamation and community repurposing of seven acres of derelict land and empty buildings beneath and adjacent to the 101 Chavez Street (then Army Street) Freeway Interchange, in Potrero, some two miles outside the centre of the San Francisco. In her essay, “The Farm by the Freeway,” Jana Blankenship emphasises The Farm’s participation in the broader west coast counter-cultural movement, which created dispersed paradigms and practices with shared aspirations, noting that: The re-creation of society, the promotion of non-hierarchical relations, and the emphasis on ecological activism central to The Farm were key elements of numerous counter-cultural projects. In conception and form, The Farm drew on

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three projects in particular: the guerrilla theatre of the San Francisco Diggers, the Los Angeles–based project Synapse Reality by Aviva Rahmani, and the Berkeley-based demonstration site, the Integral Urban House. 2011: 45 The Integral Urban House, a collaboration between architects, engineers, and biologists aimed at creating a model of self-sustaining, ecological living, was initiated in a single house in Berkeley in 1972 and documented in an extensive handbook of environmental practices in 1979. In its documentation, the House is conceived in “interfaces” between humans and other species (Farallones Institute 1979: 359) and as potentially self-contained and self-sufficient in its embrace of interdependent but distinct ecologies. Synapse Reality, which Rahmini describes as “the intersection of different points of view,” was facilitated by his American Revolutionary Theatre and the “A.R.T. commune” in Los Angeles in 1970–1 (Rahmani 2019: 6). Exploring interdisciplinarity as “a model for revolution” (2), A.R.T. was formed in 1968 and synthesised Rhamini’s experiences and collaborations with artists associated with New York Fluxus and postmodern dance, as well as the Bread and Puppet Theatre, and subsequently Eleanor Antin, Martha Rosler, and other west coast conceptual artists. The Diggers, with their implicit alignment to contemporary “revolutionary” theatre groups such as Bread and Puppet and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, not only influenced but also temporarily participated in The Farm, reinforcing in their practices Sherk’s emphasis on the co-existence of paradigmatic spheres of activity and consciousness, conceived as forming a “contiguous whole” (Sherk and Kaye 2015). Blankenship records the presence of The Diggers’ founders – including Peter Berg, Judy Goldhaft, and Peter Coyote – who “studied animal behaviour in TREAT and translated these observations into their own actions”. Blankenship cites Coyote, who notes, “Our organizing principle was to use ‘stories’ from our bioregion, both ancient and new. Our perspective would be ‘multispecies’ – telling the tales from the points of view of all local species, not just humans” (Blankenship 2011: 51). Sherk similarly stressed her aim to “show the connections and the diversities, and to link all these land fragments, creating a contiguous whole – transforming these derelict places into more green ecological spaces” (Sherk and Kaye 2015). It is an inclusivity enabled also by the extensive nature and composition of The Farm, which Blankenship recounts: With the help of the community and other supporters they turned two large warehouses and several expanses of concrete and abandoned open space into a site-specific installation, consisting of farmland, a community center, a school without walls, and a human and animal theatre with the mandate to provide “an enriched series of agricultural and ecologically progressive environments within the context of art” for the urban public 2011: 43–4

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In The Farm, such structures are underpinned by co-existing conceptual and performance frameworks, in an environmental “theatricality” in which “art” teeters on becoming – or becomes – lost in everyday, quotidian (ethical) practice; a simultaneity that evolved from Sherk’s focus on creating “a place for people to experience the native intelligences of these different species” (Sherk and Kaye 2015). In these respects, The Farm exemplifies “theatricality” as an emphasis on “situation” which resists delimitation: on heterogeneous places and purposes acted out by its participants, as well as its duration – measured in years rather than discrete events or forms. Sherk also emphasised the continuities of her own performances of social role, sublimated into The Farm’s realisation, stating that “At The Farm, I performed many roles: director, politician, administrator, designer, gardener, fundraiser, educator, artist, cook, etc.” (Cavagnaro and Sherk 2012). In its ad hoc-ness, too, The Farm created a place in transformation, as, Sherk suggested, “The Farm was this kind of server of situations, and it demonstrated connectedness and equality among people, animals, and plants” (Montano 2000: 213). In this overarching identity as different, emergent, but coterminous ecological and social processes of change, Sherk conceived the fundamental structure of The Farm as that of growth and transformation, suggesting The Farm “involves growing things. The growth of a plant from seed to bud to maturity resembles a complete and whole experience and is analogous to and seems like the art experience” (212). Here, Sherk’s work also coincides with the contemporary influence of Joseph Beuys on west coast Conceptual art and that of John Cage, both of whose importance Marioni also notes. Beuys’ concepts of “social sculpture,” brought to MOCA through Terry Fox’s exchanges and collaborations with Beuys, share Sherk’s framing of everyday behaviour as creative acts and experiences. The Farm’s overarching structure and relationship to the everyday also relies on a resistance to delimiting its various spheres of activity or elaborating a hierarchy of practices and experiences; an aim exemplified in John Cage’s Variations IV (1963) and its landmark performance at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1965. Cage’s score provides for a method of placing independent works spatially, such that they confuse the parameters of each discrete sound event, and the “inside’ and “outside” of the selected site itself, as sound from outside the performance spaces intrudes on the performance inside. Designed “for any number of players, any sounds or combinations of sounds produced by any means, with or without other activities,” in its realisation Variations IV also encompassed radical difference, by opening Cage’s composition to other works. Cage’s score thus specifies: A performer need not confine himself to a performance of this piece. At any time he may do something else. And others, performing something else at that same time and place, may, when free to do so, enter into the performance of this.

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In its conceptual framing, The Farm has a strong affinity to projects such as the Museum of Conceptual Art (1970–84) and The Floating Museum (1974–8): in Marioni’s and Hershman Leeson’s respective elaborations of these superstructures as “their” art, in distinction from the works their conceptual structures reframe. In turn, these frameworks draw on, while transforming, Cage’s interest in processes that encompass and articulate difference. In a sense, Sherk takes these processes further by at once including and reaching beyond forms of “artworks” that, however radical, maintain claims to cultural and conceptual currency through their identity as Conceptual art, Conceptual performance, or other aesthetic frameworks. Instead, The Farm is quintessentially theatrical in Sherk’s preparedness to leave its processes and cultural status unresolved and potentially lost within its quotidian circumstances, such that performance gives way to real and metaphorical ecologies: ecologies that evade recuperation, that is, until, potentially, its documentation at the Venice Biennale, or its valorisation or objectification through art history and criticism. This potential recuperation nevertheless reflects Sherk’s own readiness to see the development of her ecological practices simultaneously in more than one context. Of this evolution, Sherk emphasised in 2012: I do think of A Living Library as an artform: it is a powerful framework, a series of methodologies and strategies to make relevant, ecological change in communities and schools. […] Performance has evolved to become community participation in a place, so whole experiences are created. Cavagnaro and Sherk 2012 Sherk’s conflations of Conceptual performance and ecological systems and processes had their counterpart in contemporaneous work concentrated into southern California: work also concerned with environmental themes and relationships but explored through differing registers of “theatricality.” The Artist Contemplating the Forces of Nature: Bas Jan Ader

In his commentary on theatricality in art, Michael Fried does not limit himself to a critique of “situations” that “virtually by definition, includes the beholder” (1998: 153) but extends his concerns to theatre itself as the antithesis of Modernist values and sensibility. Theatre, he suggests, “has an audience – it exists for one – in a way the other arts do not; in fact, this more than anything else is what Modernist sensibility finds intolerable in theatre generally” (163). In contrast, cinema “by its very nature, escapes theatre entirely” to produce a general condition acceptable to Modernist sensibility, yet in a form, he argues, of “refuge from theatre, not a triumph over it” (164) which means that cinema cannot aspire to the transcendence offered by successful Modernist painting, sculpture, or poetry. The attention to “theatricality” – and so “situation” – in Conceptual art has frequently also extended

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to overtly theatrical practices, conceits, and allusions, as well as subversions of conventional film, so meeting Fried’s objections in both senses. Theatrical frameworks are evident in Dennis Oppenheim’s “conceptual/performance” work, such as Guarded Land Area (1970), Guarded Land Mass (1970), and Energy Displacement Approaching Theatricality (1970). Bonnie Ora Sherk’s designations of “Cultural Costume,” and the elaboration of role and the performance and circulation of signs of ethnicity, gender, as well as the performativity of social relation and identity, have often involved overt plays between theatrical practice and the infiltration and subversion of everyday practices. In his brief artistic career from 1967 to 1975, which coincides with Benjamin D. Buchloch’s timeline of Conceptual art, Bas Jan Ader’s work articulated meetings between “natural” forces and events uncontained by the conventional frameworks of art, and references to the artifices of theatre and film, as well as the performative effects of language in work with emotional and narrative charge. Cut short in July 1975 when he was tragically lost at sea attempting to execute a solo crossing of the Atlantic which would also have enacted the second of three planned parts of the work, In Search of the Miraculous, Ader’s disappearance has inevitably reached back to colour or deepen the emotional inflections of his earlier practices. From 1968, Ader created a body of 37 works following his MFA graduation exhibition, Implosion of February 1967. Having relocated from his native Holland to California in 1963 to study at the Otis Art Institute and subsequently for his MFA at Claremont Graduate School, Ader’s 1967 poster for Implosion shows a photocollage of the artist sitting in an armchair, smoking a cigar, seemingly comfortably balanced on the apex of a tiled roof next to a tall chimney, and with empty cartoon thought bubbles ascending behind him. Ader later gave the central image in the poster the title The Artist Contemplating the Forces of Nature. In 1970 he enacted the image in Fall 1, Los Angeles, to produce a silent, black-and-white 24-second unedited film that captures an evidently less comfortable Ader balancing on a chair in a similar position on the same roof, that of his one-storey Los Angeles home. After three seconds in this position, Ader’s balance gives way and he slowly rolls forwards down the roof, leaving the chair precariously overturned, then losing a shoe as he rolls further only to freefall into the shrubbery below. The film was also disseminated through a limited number of stills showing his precarious position, tumble, and sudden descent to off-camera. Fall 1, Los Angeles sets an agenda for Ader’s thematic concerns and modes of practice. Paul Andriesse, Ader’s most influential gallerist, documenter, and publisher, argues in his principal publication cataloguing Ader’s work that “all of Bas Jan Ader’s later works are essentially to be regarded as performances” (1988: 79). Performance and film allowed Ader to develop gestures over time and demonstrated that he falls, as he suggested in a response to Paul Andriesse, “‘Because gravity overpowers me” (75). In his critical biography of Ader, Alexander Dumbadze emphasises that the repeated performance of the fall is “Ader’s concrete truth” (2013: 33), his unification of external force and self as medium. In an undated textual fragment, Ader suggested

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his attraction to Los Angeles itself was connected to this engagement with natural forces and their destructive potential: I really love Los Angeles. I love the surrounding wildness of the ocean, desert, and mountains. I feel belittled by its enormous scale, I value more than anyone the solitary beauty of the Freeways by night. Even disasters, enormous bushfires and earthquakes have strengthened my attachment to the city rather than chased me away. I must admit to being fascinated by the constant threat that nature has over us here Beenker 2006: 16 In Ader’s work more broadly, however, performance is variegated, ambiguous, and networked; sometimes simulated or invoked in wordplay. Only The Boy Who Fell Over Niagara Falls (1972), an explicitly narrative address to “natural forces” expressed through the fall, was presented through the conventional trappings of theatre and performance. Here, Ader sat next to a table before a small gallery audience reading the eponymous story from Reader’s Digest for over 15 minutes,

Jan Ader (1942–1975), I’m Too Sad to Tell You, 1970. Gelatin silver print, 10 7/8 × 14′ (27.7 cm × 35.5 cm). Art & Project/Depot VBVR Gift. Acc. No.: 142.2008. © 2008. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. © Estate of Bas Jan Ader/DACS 2023.

FIGURE 6.8 Bas

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punctuating his delivery of the narrative by sipping water from a glass at predetermined intervals. In the story, delivered on more than 10 different occasions, a narrative of real events records the boy’s fall and survival and how the adult leader of the fated expedition is lost, his body washed up at the foot of the falls. More characteristically, a single action by Ader to camera would be the source of several works disseminated in different media. In Rein Wolfs’ Bas Jan Ader: Please don’t leave me (2006) for Museum Boijmans van Beuningen that acts as his catalogue raisionné, this complexity and inter-relationship becomes apparent as each work’s form or medium is assigned according to Ader’s recorded or perceived intentions. I’m Too Sad to Tell You, perhaps his most well-known action, in which “struggling to hide his sorrow” (40) Ader gradually comes to weeping only then to sob uncontrollably and continuously, is found in multiple, interconnected forms: an act captured in a close-crop portrait photograph with the title inscribed across the lower right of the image (1970); a 3’21” silent black-and-white film, framed in the manner of a portrait (1971); “ephemera,” a postcard edition of the still photograph and its first circulation, dated 13th September 1970 on its reverse. Subsequently, a series of unique prints, Study for I’m Too Sad to Tell You, has been published, also dated 1971, while two other differently framed films of Ader weeping are extant (78). Ader’s action then returned in The Boy who Fell Over Niagara Falls. At the end of one performance, Ader left the gallery silently weeping, declining as usual to discuss the presentation or answer questions, and reinforcing a sense that he was “in character” (Dumbadze 2013: 69). In contrast, Ader’s films, Fall 1, Los Angeles (1970), Fall 2, Amsterdam (1970), and Broken Fall (organic), Amsterdamse Bos, Holland (1971) are recordings by his wife Mary Sue Ader-Anderson of unique acts: in Fall 2, a six-second silent film, Ader rides a bicycle, while clutching a bouquet of flowers, straight into an Amsterdam city canal; in Broken Fall (Organic), a photograph and 1′26″ silent film shows Ader dangling from a tree, seven metres above a water-filled ditch, until he loses his grip. Reflecting on the forces of nature, these various dilemmas – balancing on a roof, hanging from a branch – are fated to produce tragicomic outcomes in seemingly mundane circumstances. In one of his very few statements about his work, Ader also associated the emotional gesture of I’m Too Sad to Tell You with these falls and their metaphoric charge, suggesting “I have always been fascinated by the tragic. That is also contained in the act of falling; the fall is failure […] Everything is tragic because people always lose control of processes, of matter, of their feelings” (Beenker 2006: 14). Of his crying, Erik Beenker argues, “falling is also the central theme here, as Ader himself admitted, for the tears stream down his face” (13), so equating his emotional state with the “natural forces” to which his falls succumb. The structure and duration of Ader’s films are also determined by this focus on “forces.” In the Boijmans’ catalogue, Beenker notes the extreme brevity of the films, arguing that “It is the fall itself that matters, not the preparation or the aftermath” (12). On this basis, too, Andriesse contrasts Ader’s films with those

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of Bruce Nauman’s documentations of his extended studio actions, noting Ader’s implicit dramatisation whereby “the length of the film, and thereby time, is determined by the plot, which he himself carries out as the actor […] It is a situation as much realistic as it is staged” (1988: 76). In other of Ader’s works, performance reflects on these forces by being shadowed, implied, or anticipated in installations and photographs. Light vulnerable objects threatened by eight cement bricks (1970) is an “installation/performance” documented by 14 colour slides and a 16-mm film that Ader did not disseminate as independent works (Wolfs 2006: 92). After one week of these objects’ display, each with a breezeblock suspended directly above them by ropes, the film documentation shows Ader intervening to end the installation: Ader carefully cuts each of the ropes in turn, crushing the “vulnerable” objects below: eggs, three pots of flowers, a transistor radio, a boxed birthday cake, a portrait, two pillows and a string of illuminated light bulbs. The footage ends with a broad shot of the entire space showing the crushed objects. Wolfs 2006: 92 In his account of the installation, Andriesse observes not only these objects’ “vulnerability” but also their “resilience” (1988: 75) to the untethered force of gravity, which the suspension and then fall of the cement bricks serve to dramatise. This treatment of objects articulates oppositions unified in Ader’s filmed falls, in which he becomes both agent of the threat (of gravity) and its victim, in the simultaneous performance of failure (falling), vulnerability, and resilience. Although Ader stressed to Willoughby Sharp that “I do not make body sculpture, body art, or physical work” (Béar and Sharp 1971: 3), his falls nevertheless invite readings analogous to Vito Acconci’s and Dennis Oppenheim’s shared rhetoric of the artist’s body as agent, material, and outcome of the work; of the artist as performing subject and object. It is a relation that prompts Jörg Heiser to read Ader’s films as “a parody of conceptual performance and its documentation,” especially in his falls’ implicit reference to slapstick comedy by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Heiser notes Chaplin’s and Keaton’s characters’ confrontation with “unstoppable forces” (2006: 27) whether taking the form of the machine in Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) or the train in Keaton’s The General (1926). Yet Ader’s critical refraction of “body art” arguably entrenches his work further within modes of Conceptual performance and related work. Other Conceptual art explicitly referenced silent, comic film through performance, including Gordon Matta-Clark’s Clockshower (1973), a film in which he scales the face of The Clocktower Building, New York, at 346 Broadway, installs a temporary shower on the hands of the clock some 800 feet above street-level, shaves and then perilously covers himself in shaving foam. Acconci and Nauman drew on Samuel Beckett’s use of language, pun, repetition, and physicality in their performance-based work and use of language; an

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influence that in Beckett studies has been extended to Oppenheim, Burden, Marina Abramović, and others (Tubridy 2014). In his existential tragicomedies, Beckett drew extensively on figures and techniques from music hall and comic silent film. From Ader’s notebooks, Beenker directs attention to the influence not only of Ader’s study of Wittgenstein but also of Beckett’s play for radio, All That Fall (1957), and Albert Camus’ novel La chute (The Fall) (1956) on Ader’s thinking, his acts of falling, and his use of language. Ader’s engagement with performance and his address to “natural forces” are linked also to Conceptual art’s surfacing of language as a framework or condition for performance. In Ader’s titles and “statement” works, “natural forces” are imbued with emotional charge and motivation as situations unfold “for” the viewer, reaching towards or withholding information to draw an audience into the work. Thus, “vulnerable objects” are “threatened,” suggesting their agency or volition and inviting empathy. Ader’s third fall is Broken. His “installation-performances,” Please Don’t Leave Me (1970) and Thoughts Unsaid, Then Forgotten (1973), incorporate these eponymous statements painted strikingly on a wall or other surface, implying emotional forces at play that induce or simulate relationships with the viewer/reader through performative statements that claim social and personal relation or unfulfilled obligation. In the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen catalogue raisonné, Please Don’t Leave Me is assigned the form of a “studio installation” (1969) and a photographic work (1969) implying a dynamic that leans towards performance and documentation. Beenker emphasises, “Ader never suggested that reconstructing the original work itself was a legitimate way of representing the work,” concluding that he may have seen such works “as one-off events” (2006: 19). Documented through a single Polaroid photograph distinct from the ephemeral “work” it records, Thoughts Unsaid, Then Forgotten (1973) invests an emotional tenor into language often seen as analogous to Robert Barry’s enigmatic language pieces, such as “Something which is very near in place and time, but not yet known to me” – a text whose various typed and handwritten iterations are each assigned a date between 1969 and 1971. Ader’s installation also marks time: before the wall on which its statement is painted sits a bouquet of flowers that wilts over the installation’s duration to articulate a temporariness and decay, so amplifying its emotional effect. In his notes, Ader remarks that this installation is to be “performed” (Wolfs 2006: 80), which seems pertinent to both “statement” pieces. It remains an open question, however, precisely what is “performed” in these installations’ realisations, which are unseen except in their photographic remainder: their ephemerality (resulting in later iterations being “posthumously produced” or in contention); or the statements of which they consist, or these statements’ performative effect on the reader’s relationship to the image; or all three. Like the statement pieces, I’m Too Sad to Tell You is also driven by something unknown, through which “narrative” context and direction is implied but remains unfulfilled. Andriesse reports that “The reason for Ader’s sadness, which makes it possible for him to cry, is, at Ader’s specific request, being withheld by insiders”

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(1988: 77). It is a circumstance that suggests a further “concrete truth” is enacted in the intensity of Ader’s weeping. Such performative effects are also amplified in Ader’s use of linguistic and narrative fragments, without clear context or resolution outside of the viewer/reader’s investment in them. It is a tactic of Conceptual art evident in Joseph Kosuth’s more formal isolation of words and phrases in his “selfdefining” linguistic works, and evident in work by Barry, Lawrence Weiner, Mel Bochner, and others. In his Dwan Gallery press release of June 1967, Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read, re-titling the first of the four annual Dwan Gallery exhibitions on language around which definitions of Conceptual art also condensed, Robert Smithson remarks on the word as fragment, suggesting that “The power of a word lies in the very inadequacy of the context it is placed”: a “power” and effect derived from amplifications of the differences in which language functions. Thus, Smithson suggests, “A word fixed or a statement isolated” becomes “a paradox” (1996: 61) as its multivalent promise of meaning remains suspended and thus emphasised. Following Smithson, if, as Andriesse argues, “Please Don’t Leave Me consists mainly of language as image” (1988: 75), then its efficacy lies in an enhancement of its linguistic function through its visual (literal) form, while offering a narrative gesture whose context is inadequate. Ader’s staging of these isolated phrases heightens their drama, their melodramatic distress, by leaving them unresolved and unexplained. It is here, too, that Ader’s work further invokes theatre. Where Brad Spence points out that in Ader’s work “an analogy – between linguistic and natural forces – is played out” (1999: 3), this analogy also operates in the emotional force of the performed fragment or gesture. It is an equation Ader himself makes in his comments on falling and crying, noting that “When I fall from the roof of my house or in a canal it is because gravity makes itself master over me. When I cried it was because of extreme grief” (Béar and Sharp 1971: 3). For I’m Too Sad to Tell You, Ader’s body becomes the agent of internal forces to which it must give way, as, Ader notes, “Like gravity, the artist’s body makes itself its own master” (Beenker 2006: 12). The act of crying, like falling, then becomes “Ader’s concrete reality.” I’m Too Sad to Tell You may also be set against art historical and literary points of reference: Beenker asks, “Is this a reference to the ‘Man of Sorrows’ – the weeping Christ” (2006: 13). In contrast, Jennifer Doyle reads Ader’s gesture as “a contemporary iteration of the self-representation of the male artist as emotionally injured, in which that very injury authenticates his artistic identity” (2013: 88). For critics such as Roxana Marcoci, Ader’s act, like contemporaneous work by Lynn Hershman Leeson, Bruce Nauman, and Lorna Simpson, engages with the “rhetoric of the pose,” a term the critic Craig Owens assigned to later feminist picture-theory art (Owens 1984): for Marcoci, in this case, I’m Too Sad to Tell You knows itself as “a pose enacted for and mediated through the camera lens” (Goldberg and Marcoci 2015: 44). Ader’s films and photographs, however, do not internalise contradictions in the ways Owens identifies in the visual rhetoric of Barbara Kruger’s appropriations and quotational practice, nor does it exhibit this

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works’ corresponding deconstructive politics, which is the focus of his essay of 1984 introducing this resonant term. Ader’s gestures are more unified condensations of emotional states or traumas: his “rhetoric” is that of the actor as cypher for an emotional state, a “rhetoric” reinforced in the posthumous publication of the photographic series of poses, Study for I’m Too Sad to Tell You; of melodrama, as the root and counterpoint to the silent comedy his work repeatedly referenced. In performance, through this lens, Ader’s “concrete reality” is an unqualified embodiment of an emotional state; one consistent in its effect with the melodramatic pose and gesture, in which, the theatre historian George Taylor emphasises, “the actors’ expression of elemental emotions had to be explicit, intense, and infectious” (2018: 2). Nineteenth-century melodramatic or “expressive” acting had its roots in understandings of emotion and taxonomies of expression established in the mid-17th century, and that provided the basis of an extended continuity in performance practice. Taylor cites William Scott’s advice to actors in his book Lessons in Elocution of 1814, which not only reproduces formulations published 60 years prior but also readily captures Ader’s attitude: Melancholy, or fixed grief, is gloomy, sedentary, motionless. The lower jaw falls, the lips pale, the eyes are cast down, half shut, eyelids swelled and red or livid, tears trickling silent and unwiped. 116 Melodramatic acting naturalises emotional states in unified embodied actions that create their own context, and that precede the psychology that underpins late 19th-century naturalism in art and theatre. Ader’s performance of weeping as an embodied emotional state does not require elaboration. Ader cries precisely because he is too sad (to tell you why). As a contemplation of the forces of nature, this embodied act, which, like Ader’s falls, is “as much realistic as it is staged” (Andriesse 1988: 76) surfaces melodrama’s emotional gesture as individual nature: as “character.” In the context of Conceptual art, I’m Too Sad to Tell You is, after Kosuth, a work Self-Defined and Self-Described in the form of a performance. Here, too, Ader’s work finds its place within the early development of Conceptual art in Los Angeles, associated amongst others with William Leavitt and Allen Ruppersberg, whose work drew explicitly on filmic narrative and popular culture in irreverent responses to the institutionalisation of Minimal art. Noting Ader’s friendship and extensive conversations with Leavitt, Dumbadze records Leavitt’s fascination with Fried’s essay “Art and Objecthood” and especially his concept of theatricality which Leavitt explicitly sought to invest in his installations (Dumbadze 2013: 64–5) and in a realisation of a “theatre of the ordinary” (Goldstein and Simpson 2011). For California Patio (1972), shown with Ader’s first exhibition of his Fall works in Los Angeles, Leavitt staged full-sized, curtained patio doors set within an interior wall segment that opened to an artificial garden, in the manner of

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a theatre set. On the adjacent wall of the installation, Leavitt’s text sets the scene of a narrative about to unfold, but which is never realised: On this particular evening a small cocktail party is being held on the patio adjoining the house. The guests are all close friends of the host and hostess. Their presence adds the elements of motion and sound to the setting; the men stand near the edge of the patio engaged in relaxed conversation, while the women sit in a loose circle of garden chairs arranged on the lawn. Now the hostess comes out through the sliding glass door to announce that a light buffet supper is ready inside. Griffin 2011 Ruppersberg, in contrast, opened Al’s Café (1969) for three months in downtown Los Angeles as a working café, restaurant, and “installation-artwork” influenced by Fluxus, that sold parodic art objects for the price of food, as well as real beer, to an art-community audience and passers-by alike. Where Al’s Café is in relationship to Claes Oldenburg’s The Store (1962) and Les Levine’s contemporaneous restaurant in New York, Al’s Grand Hotel (1971) at 7175 Sunset Boulevard extended this

FIGURE 6.9 Bas

Jan Ader, (1942–1975), Art & Project Bulletin 89. August 1975. Photolithographed bulletin, 11 5/8 × 16 9/16′ (29.6 cm × 42 cm) (unfolded). Art & Project/Depot VBVR Gift. Courtesy of the Bas Jan Ader Estate and Patrick Painter Editions. The Museum of Modern Art Digital Imaging Studio, photograph: Jonathan Muzikar. Acc. n.: 1099.2007.89b. © 2008. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. © Estate of Bas Jan Ader/DACS 2023.

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gesture into an art-project that was a fully functioning hotel. Thus, Al’s Grand Hotel Catalogue of works for sale included items necessary for the functioning of the business, such as hotel stationary, envelopes, and bills, as well as a “three tier wedding cake” and “ten wedding presents” (Ruppersberg 1971). Analogously to Leavitt’s installations, Ruppersberg’s orchestration of “real life” locations implies a functional mis-en-scene, a context for enactment and unspecified or yet-to-be fulfilled narratives. A similar exploration of images, objects, and installations functioning through unfulfilled narrative gesture, scene, or implication, plays through Ader’s work. Extending this in the first part of his unfinished final work In Search of the Miraculous (1975), Ader simulated performance to engage with emotional gesture and forces that seem external and overwhelming. Thus for In Search of the Miraculous (Los Angeles) (1973), Ader produced two separate photo-sequences, comprising 14 and then 18 colour photographs, ostensibly showing him walking through the city at night towards the Pacific Ocean; his arrival marked by the final image shared by both sequences. Each image is inscribed with a handwritten text, a lyric from the 1957 song, Searchin’, by the Coasters: [1] “yeh, I’ve been searchin’/[2] I’ve been searchin’/[3] Oh yea, Searchin’ everywhich way” (Wolfs 2006: 68). In fact, Dumbadze reports, Sue Ader-Anderson “took the photographs during a single night. They drove around the city looking for ideal locations, and Ader posed in the selected spots” (2013: 94–5). Anachronistically, after Phillip Auslander (2006), one could consider these sequences self-conscious engagements with the performativity of performance documentation, but this would require a focus on these images’ performativity over their “production” of performance: their unfulfilled gesture. Just as, Dumbadze suggests, this work incorporates “a joke that seems connected to his early Fall films, for Ader must have known that miracles cannot be sought but instead appear by grace” (94), so the work also turns on the lack of performance; its inaccessibility; on the idea and absence of performance – on a Conceptual performance. Ader’s 18-part photo-work of 1973 was later restaged on the eve of the second part of In Search of The Miraculous. Combining the photo-sequence with a local choir at the Claire S. Copley Gallery in Los Angeles who sang sea-shanties at the exhibition opening, then to be replaced by their audio recording and 80 slides documenting their performance, the two remaining parts of the work were unrealised. Intended to culminate with a “duplicate” exhibition of what would have been In Search of the Miraculous, Amsterdam, this closing element was to have been created at the Groningen Museum with Dutch singers singing the same songs (Ader-Anderson et al. 1976: 26), following Ader’s successful solo crossing of the Atlantic. In the event, Ader departed from Cape Cod bound for Falmouth, England, on 9th July 1975, intending a journey of 67 days but with provisions for up to 150 days. Three weeks into the journey Ader lost radio contact and eight months later his 12’6” sailboat was found off the coast of Ireland. At the time, Ader’s disappearance generated considerable speculation over whether he

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had intended the outcome or had in fact engineered his temporary disappearance for artistic or other purposes. Posthumously, a biography of Donald Crowhurst was found in Ader’s locker. Crowhurst had fabricated his ship’s log and radio broadcasts during his participation in the solo Sunday Times Golden Globe Race of 1969, as if he were leading the race, when in fact he had become lost and disoriented shortly after its start, only to finally disappear at sea. Ader, however, had extensive experience at sea, including crossing the Atlantic under sail once before in a collaborative venture. Those around him were convinced of his capabilities (Heiser 2006: 26), while Mary Sue Ader-Anderson was always firm over Ader’s intentions, pointing out the arrangements for the trilogy’s completion at the Groningen Museum, amongst many factors. To Liza Béar and Willoughby Sharp in 1976, she emphasised: He thought it was a very special piece and very important in the development of his work. He thought it was a step ahead, I’m sure, progress not culmination. Otherwise, I don’t think he would have done it in this context Ader-Anderson et al. 1976: 26 The tendency of Ader’s disappearance to retrospectively colour readings of the tenor and meaning of his works is partly, however, because of the blending of Ader’s life and work around his “concrete action,” his consistent engagement with quotidian “forces of nature,” and his modes of framing his artwork through narrative gestures and frameworks of performance. The artist James Turrell who discussed the crossing extensively with Ader implicitly sets the project in Ader’s sequence of works that incorporate a secret, or an unknown, to drive a performative relationship with his audience, noting that for Ader what was most important was that “The beauty and truth of Ader’s sail was for him alone” (Dumbadze 2013: 141). Yet, as part two of a work, the beginnings of Ader’s journey across the Atlantic were conveyed in images in the style of performance ephemera, simulation, and documentation, inviting engagement with a public work. In “ephemera” for Art & Project, Bulletin 89, immediately before his departure, Ader is pictured at sea in his small boat, seemingly heading towards the ocean’s horizon. Inscribed in elaborate font and adjacent to the sailboat is the phrase, In Search of the Miraculous. Ader’s death, of course, exceeds the grasp of In Search of the Miraculous as his “work,” yet his journey is framed to be thought of as performance and it is this that renders his crossing as narrative, as metaphor, and in contemplation of the forces of nature. In their progressive opening of conceptual works to the places and environments in which they are generated and perceived, Ireland, Sherk, and Ader elaborated an expanded “theatricality” which reflected – and extended beyond – the “literal” inclusion of quotidian place and encounter that Fried found antithetical to art. For Ireland, a quasi-archaeological process of uncovering mediates 500 Capp Street towards David Ireland’s House; in The Farm, Sherk culminates her conflation of Conceptual art with a performance of incompatible

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and un-synthesised aesthetic and social processes; while Ader alludes to the performance of the body or self as a place defined in confluences of natural forces, countering Body Art’s formal self-regard. These engagements with the artwork and its places employ anti-Modernist “theatrical” conceits by embracing quotidian circumstance, ecologies, or the “forces of nature” as their materials and processes, while playing with and referencing aspects of theatre and film. In doing so, these works focus on a “theatricality” of material circumstance as a means of unravelling conventional binaries in which artworks claim an identity in transcendence of their situation: destabilising oppositions between inside and outside; between artistic “structure” and its material and discursive supports; and between personal, social, and aesthetic contexts and processes. Here, Conceptual performance is elaborated in practices whose identity and limits remain in doubt and that invite readings through the question or idea of performance, yet whose “theatricality” evades resolution into the “object” of performance.

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Griffin, J. (2011) “California Dreaming,” in Frieze Features, 1st June. Available online. https://www.frieze.com/article/california-dreaming. Accessed 18th August 2022. Gross, J.R. (2003) “Consider the Object as Evidence,” in Karen Tsujimoto and Jennifer R. Gross (eds) The Art of David Ireland: The Way Things Are, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp 151–90. Harrison, C. (2001a [1991]) Essays on Art & Language, London: MIT Press. —— (2001b) Conceptual Art and Painting: Further Essays on Art & Language, London: MIT Press. Heiser, J. (2006) “Curb Your Romanticism: Bas Jan Ader’s Slapstick,” in Rein Wolfs (ed) Bas Jan Ader: Please Don’t Leave Me, Beuningen: Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, pp 25–8. Ireland, D. (2003) “Inside 500 Capp Street: An Oral History of David Ireland’s House,” an oral history conducted in 2001-2002, by Suzanne B. Riess, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Available online. https:// digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/roho/ucb/text/IrelandBook.pdf. Accessed 27th May 2022. Kaye, N. (1994) Postmodernism and Performance, London and New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan and St Martin’s Press. King, J. (2012) “Parklets, Everywhere,” Landscape Architecture Magazine, 102:11 (November), pp 78–87. Klausner, B. (2003) Touching Time and Space: A Portrait of David Ireland, Milan: Edizioni Charta. Kostelanetz, R. and Cage, J. (1987) “The Aesthetics of John Cage: A Composite Interview,” The Kenyon Review, 9:4 (Autumn), pp 102–30. Krauss, R. (2000) A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, London: Thames and Hudson. Lewallen, C.M. (2015) 500 Capp Street: David Ireland’s House, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Loeffler, C.E. and Tong, D. (eds) (1980) Performance Anthology: Source Book for a Decade of California Performance Art, San Francisco, CA: Contemporary Arts Press. Lydon, M. and Garcia, A. (2015) Tactical Urbanism: Short-Term Action for Long-Term Change, Washington, DC: Island Press. Marioni, T. (2003) Beer, Art and Philosophy: A Memoir, San Francisco, CA: Crown Point Press. —— (2013) “Tom Marioni: MOCA (Museum of Conceptual Art) 1970–1984,” SFAQ, 13 (May–July), pp 44–57. Montano, L.M. (2000) Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Morris, R. (1993 [1966]) “Notes on Sculpture, Part 1,” in Robert Morris, Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris, London: MIT Press, pp 1–9. O’Connell, L. (2014) “Tony Labat: San Francisco, February 19, 2014.” Available online. https://www.loconnell.com/interview-with-tony-labat.html. Accessed 21st July 2022. O’Doherty, B. (1986 [1976]) Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, San Francisco, CA: Lapis Press. Owens, C. (1984) “The Medusa Effect, or, The Specular Ruse,” Art in America, January, pp 97–105. Pinegar, R. (1987) “An Appreciation of David Ireland,” in David Ireland, David Ireland: Gallery as Place, San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Art Institute, pp 3–14. Quick, A. and Rushton, R. (eds) (2019) “On Theatricality,” Performance Research, 24:4, whole issue.

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Rahmani, A. (2019) 50 Years of Work: Index of Major Projects. Available online. https:// issuu.com/ghostnets/docs/rahmani_50years-medres. Accessed 7th August 2022. Ruppersberg, A. (1971) Al’s Grand Hotel Catalog, in Pacific Standard Time at the Getty Center. Available online. https://blogs.getty.edu/pacificstandardtime/explore-the-era/ worksofart/als-grand-hotel-catalog/. Accessed 18th August 2022. Schreyach, M. (2015) “Recreated Flatness: Hans Hoffman’s Concept of the Picture Plane as a Medium of Expression,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 49:1 (Spring), pp 44–67. Sherk, B.O. (2016) “Public Lecture: Evolution of Life Frames. Mills College Art Museum.” Available online. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juzEurR9c5I&t=334s. Accessed 7th August 2022. —— (2017) “Biennale Arte 2017 – Bonnie Ora Sherk.” BiennaleChannel. Available online. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIXkaySpH90. Accessed 28th July 2022. Sherk, B.O. and Kaye, N. (2015) “Bonnie Ora Sherk Interviewed by Nick Kaye, San Francisco 6 February 2015,” in Nick Kaye (ed) SiteWorks: San Francisco Performance 1969-85. Available online. https://siteworks.exeter.ac.uk/interviews/bonnieorasherk. Accessed 15th August 2022. Smith, T. (2017) “One and Three Ideas: Conceptualism Before, During, and After Conceptual Art,” in Terry Smith, One and Five Ideas: Conceptual Art and Conceptualism, edited by Robert Bailey, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp 127–44. Smithson, R. (1996 [1967]) “Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read,” in Jack Flam (ed) Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, p 61. Spence, B. (1999) “The Case of Bas Jan Ader,” in Brad Spence (ed) Bas Jan Ader, Irvine, CA: The Art Gallery, University of California, Irvine, pp 1–4. Storr, R. (1996) “Furnished Rooms – Enquire Within,” in Richard Storr (ed) David Ireland, Augusta, ME: Institute of Contemporary Art, Maine College of Art, pp 10–25. Taylor, G. (2018) “Melodramatic Acting,” in Carolyn Williams (ed) The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 112–25. Tsujimoto, K. (2003) “Being in the World,” in Karen Tsujimoto and Jennifer R. Gross (eds) The Way Things Are: The Art of David Ireland, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp 1–150. Tubridy, D. (2014) “Samuel Beckett and Performance Art,” Journal of Beckett Studies, 23:1, pp 34–53. van Bruggen, C. (1988) Bruce Nauman, New York, NY: Rizzoli. Wakefield, N. (2019) “Theatricality and Absorption: Politics of Representation in Michael Fried, The Wooster Group and Robert Wilson,” Performance Research, 24:4, pp 35–43. White, R. (1979) “Terry Fox,” View, II:3 (June), whole issue. Wolfs, R. (ed) (2006) Bas Jan Ader: Please Don’t Leave Me, Beuningen: Museum Boijmans van Beuningen.

7 CONCLUSION

Conceptual performance disrupts the discrete artwork – and discrete performance – to address the contexts and processes in which it is enacted. After Conceptual art’s interrogation of the discourses in which works of art are produced, these performative practices simultaneously create and critique conceptual objects of performance. To this end, the tactics of Conceptual performance invariably privilege the idea of an event or process over the witnessing of an embodied action: finding form in constellations of documents, remains, reports, allusions, and traces; in the memory or promise of an action, or invitation to act; in “performances” conceived in anticipation or retrospect; or in the transformation things, situations, or actions in the idea of performance. In such processes, Conceptual performance has engaged with the effects of language-use in the definition of artworks and the visibility – or otherwise – of “social art”; and with the implications and effects of the document as a networked carrier of “art information,” when the event of performance becomes one supplementary point of reference amongst others. This work has also been defined in the performance of equations between words, materials, and things, and so in extensions of Conceptual art’s erosion of the art object’s conventional material and conceptual integrity. Conceptual performances have elaborated infiltrations and appropriations of “Readymade” contexts, systems, and signs, as well as conflations of performance processes with the complexities of enacting place and environment. As these definitions suggest, this also means that the final problematic to be addressed from the perspective of this study is that of performance itself. Conceptual performance evidently troubles the terms of its own visual, theatrical, and performance practices to disrupt and open them to interrogation, resulting in iterations of work that remain unresolved into the conventional “objects” of art and theatre, or the present tense of an embodied performance. Thus, in the work considered here, performance arising in or further elaborating conceptual work may DOI: 10.4324/9781315694962-7

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occur in the absence of the performer. Documentation may decline to articulate or evidence what happened or to be positioned as the stabilising binary to an ephemeral event. An instruction, prescribed action, or “score” may remain fulfilled in its potential rather than its enactment. Materials or objects taking the place of the performing body may be presented in the aftermath of disciplined acts intended to leave their “charge,” as things claim entanglement in past events. The “signs” of performance may be conflated with those of identity, gender, and ethnicity and enacted in the everyday or joined with circulations of information in popular and mass media. “Theatricality” may be expanded towards behaviour or performance embedded into places whose identity, demarcation, and limits are unclear. Rumour may “make” performance. The roots of these modes and ideas of performance lie in Conceptual art’s engagement with the performative functions of language, and the actions and exchanges that flow from this, to call into question the integrity of the “artwork” as idea and object. Here, where performance works in opposition to the stabilities works of art conventionally imply, it also evades or undermines the settled forms of theatrical language and convention, and performance’s institutionalisation. Looking back at his steps from an early use of language to prompt an awareness of a reading of the page to actions in “real space,” Vito Acconci thus stressed that “we hated the word ‘performance,’ because performance implied a place, and that place was a theatre” (2001: 353). These definitions also raise the question of Conceptual performance’s further development in practices reaching beyond a history of Conceptual art. In this context, too, one can draw distinctions between a “conceptualist” theatre and Conceptual performance. Just as Minimalism had a watershed influence on theatre practices in the late 1960s, Conceptual art has a distinct history of influence on performance more widely. In this way, Sol LeWitt’s “structures,” which Benjamin Buchloch identifies as proto-Conceptual work (1990: 111), were an important influence on the postmodern choreographer Trisha Brown’s development of self-reflexive, structural accumulations of movement in dance composition and performance, that followed her work with the Judson Church Dancers in the early 1960s: a continuance of this postmodern dance’s eclectic relationships with contemporary visual art. Conceptual performance practices also influenced the emergence of new media performance, in part because of Conceptual art’s affinities with the “real time” operation of software, with the distribution and circulation of information and linked processes and systems, and equally to media-based performance work concerned with simulation, with presence-in-absence, and the embedding of performance into social and everyday interactions and performances of self. This history of influence extends into contemporary theatre and performance with a strongly conceptual aspect, in ways that not only demonstrate affinities but also further demarcate these practices. The British theatre and visual artist Tim Etchells’ significant body of work, developed while Artistic Director of the performance collective Forced Entertainment, has included extensive references to and transformations of conceptual practices. In 2013, Etchells staged Untitled (After Violent Incident), a live

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reworking of Bruce Nauman’s multi-channel video installation Violent Incident (1986). In its original, mediated form, Etchells recounts, a man and a woman are shown across 12 screens in a series of out-of-sync takes, enacting and re-enacting a brutal slapstick routine. The effect, a kind of asynchronous cacophonous scratch-mix of the scene, is driven partly by the action of the performers, and partly through the simultaneous presentation, stopping and starting, playback and slowing of multiple takes of the scene over the numerous screens of the installation. 2018: 63 Recomposed as a live performance, Etchells stages these repetitions sequentially, and so the couple keep returning to their escalating violence in increasingly exhausting iterations for over an hour. Nauman’s choreography, seen simultaneously in different timings and perspectives, resembles his reiterative use and transformation of words and phrases in numerous works, including neon signs whose wordplay destabilises rather than entrenches meaning. Etchells’ restructuring, in contrast, destabilises the performance as the demands of its linear reiteration exhaust its performers’ control, resulting in its brutality and comedy becoming unsustainable as the “real time” effort of the repeated enactment supersedes its forms. Like many other examples of theatre informed by conceptualist work, these practices absorb the “conceptual” into an augmented theatre and performance, and while radical and influential within contemporary performance practice remain at distance from a critical Conceptual art with its roots in language. These practices align instead to Han-Thies Lehmann’s characterisation of a “Concept Theatre”: a postdramatic theatre that occupies “a field in between” an embodied Performance Art to which Lehmann assigns an emphasis on the “experience of the real,” and the representational apparatus of the conventional theatre that he reads as eliding somatic presence (2006: 134, original emphasis). Hence Etchells’ “postdramatic” translation of Nauman’s media-installation into a performance of endurance produces its performers’ loss of control to subvert the theatrical elision of “presence” with the signs (and simulations) of the real. Conceptual performance, in distinction from a postdramatic theatre, is not rooted in and does not carry forward vestiges of a “dramatic” tradition and its theatrical apparatus, even though theatre’s political traditions and representational tropes may be raided by modes of work as diverse as that by Art & Language, Adrian Piper, and Bas Jan Ader. Instead, the legacy and continuance of Conceptual performance can be most readily identified with performance that further elaborates “problematics” in which Conceptual art developed, and which remain current. In perhaps its most obvious form, this is exemplified in performances of institutional critique, of whom the most prominent examples would include Andrea Fraser. Fraser’s substantial body of work developed from her live performance of Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, to audiences at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in February 1989. In this first iteration, Fraser infiltrated the role of tour guide,

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only to purposefully mis-deploy her focus from the works on display to the social history, class-based ideology, and political function of the Philadelphia Museum since its foundation. Comprised, Alexander Alberro notes in his introduction to Fraser’s collected writings, of quotations from the Museum’s archival material, Museum Highlights is, he argues, “as much an essay that critiques the ideological production of taste and the production of value as it is a performance script” (Alberro 2005: xxvii). Throughout, Fraser pays close attention to the Museum’s construction of aesthetic, financial, and social value; declaring, outside the cafeteria, “I’d like to live like an art object” (2005: 106). Fraser’s performance exemplifies a kind of praxis: a theoretically informed critical assault on institutional value, exclusion, and “preciosity,” intended to provoke a self-reflexive viewing of the Museum and its effects in the time and practice of visiting. Furthermore, Museum Highlights is

Sehgal and participants of These Associations outside Tate Modern, 2012. © Tate (Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson).

FIGURE 7.1 Tino

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enacted in such a way as to resist a simple recuperation into the Museum as “Performance Art,” through a real-time signalling of her infiltration of the tour-guide address in a blank parody characteristic of postmodern appropriation (Hutcheon 1986: 186). In its various permutations, too: as a videotaped introduction to the Museum, in further iterations at different museum sites, and as a journal article and script published in October – a journal whose critical lineage is from Conceptual art – Museum Highlights operates in a distribution of information and a critical exposure of the contexts upon which it relies. It is perhaps in the “constructed experiences” created in galleries by Tino Sehgal, however, in which a contemporary Conceptual performance as it has been considered here is further developed and exemplified. Sehgal’s events and their ramifications absorb, question, and play with Conceptual art through overtly theatrical practices and forms. Unlike the principal tendencies in Conceptual performance, Sehgal creates live performances that address audiences in situ. Simultaneously, however, Sehgal pursues another kind of potential disappearance of performance, in work that self-consciously refers to Conceptual art through its address to the “dematerialisation” of the art object. Sehgal’s many “constructed situations” since 2000 include Untitled (Twenty Minutes for the Twentieth Century) (2000), The Kiss (2002), The Situation (2007), These Associations (2012), and This Entry (2023): events comprised, Jessica van den Brand reports in her study of Sehgal’s “immaterial commodities,” “of actors, or interpreters, that interact with the viewer according to scripts, in the context of the museum” (van den Brand 2015 1). In tandem with these “situations,” however, Sehgal creates a strict legal framework under which the live events may not be recorded, documented, or described by the hosting or purchasing institution and requests that they are not recorded by participants. Photographic images ostensibly representing his works similarly reveal no information but often record some of the participants usually outside the hosting museum. Van den Brand summarises the conditions in which Sehgal “evades documentation at all stages of his work,” noting that: The artist rarely gives interviews and does not make studies or drawings of his work in advance […] His pieces are not accompanied by wall labels or catalogues […] The immaterial nature of his work and the framework around it is upheld by all actors involved, including those representing the museum and gallery […] Sehgal’s page on the Marion Goodman [Gallery] website is blank […] there are no press releases. 16–7 In these ways, the surrounding rhetoric of Sehgal’s events produces a double object: a carefully structured experience and its aftermath. The first effect is to emphasise to gallery visitors who participate in the work the uniqueness and ephemerality of that which occurs; the second is the production of a “concept object” for non-participants, after Daniel Buren’s critique of the tendency of Conceptual art to consolidate ideas as aesthetic products (1973: 11) yet one, here, whose specificity

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is defined by being unknown. Entrenching this further, Sehgal orchestrates the sale of his work to galleries through a complex oral process with legal effect, that conveys the details of the artwork under the agreement that no written record may be made and with conditions ensuring the work’s continuance in this mode. Sehgal’s stated intent in this process is to extend Conceptual art’s “dematerialisation.” In this respect, he has suggested, “In all Conceptual art there is a certificate that determines the ownership, the copyright,” and thus concludes that conceptual artists “did not take the dematerialisation of the object far enough.” The logic of his performance flows from this, as he argues that: If we want to dematerialise the object, then let’s really dematerialise it. I still do not produce objects, not in the material sense of the word, but in the sense that it is a product […] I really want to dematerialise the object so there is no text anymore, no object that guarantees that this is an object van den Brand 2015: 6 Sehgal’s ephemeral “constructed experiences” and the surrounding discourses in which their form and identity are hidden return to a first principle of Conceptual art: that language precedes and makes the work. In this case, it is the contractual language ensuring a particular kind of silence – and a discourse that announces it must remain mute – that produces parallel experiences of a work “materialised” in performance, and “dematerialised” in every other respect. Yet in doing so, and rather than simply take the “dematerialisation” of the art object further, Sehgal produces a paradoxical reversal. Here, performance – or the “constructed experience” – is commodified and valorised in a second “conceptual” life of discursive silence. The “art object,” in this sense, is re-materialised as a textless, but nevertheless legal and financial non-fungible entity, with the “aura” of the “known-unknown.” The hosting galleries and museums, too, are essential to this parodic reversal, in which Sehgal’s particular mode of “dematerialisation” reinstates the “precious object” that was a principal target of the trajectory Lippard described in 1968 and 1973. Thus, to buy and own the “oral” account of Sehgal’s work is to participate in the production of scarcity that lends it value: a process that enacts and comments on the museum’s recuperation of the idea of performance into object-forms, as this concept-object’s “condition of possibility” is that it must remain unspoken of in the public sphere. It is a process consolidated by Sehgal’s practice of producing limited editions of these intangible works, usually in multiples of four, while retaining an artist’s proof. As these more recent and contemporary plays on the conceptual object of performance suggest, the imperatives of Conceptual performance have been elaborated in new addresses to problematics and questions driving the conceptual turn in art and performance; practices sometimes defined in paradoxical reversals of early Conceptual art’s effects. Such work is a reminder that a stress on the formal characteristics or tropes of Conceptual art and performance is always potentially

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problematic. Identifications of genres, forms, and critical vocabularies that appear to settle the question of what Conceptual performance “is” risk installing the very securities of form conceptual works sought to undo and interrogate, and which these performances continue to subvert. In this context, the future continuity and development of Conceptual performance will also lie in the expansion and disruption of seemingly settled terms towards more critical ends: for example, in subversions of the tropes of Conceptual art and conceptualism which Sehgal’s paradoxical, “dematerialized,” yet precious objects of performance press towards. No doubt new, hybrid, and conceptual practices in performance will find their continuities in a further troubling and so extension of this radical historical work. References Acconci, V. (2001 [1989]) “Performance After the Fact,” in Gloria Moure (ed) Vito Acconci: Writings, Work, Projects, Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, pp 353–7. Alberro, A. (2005) “Introduction: Mimicry, Excess, Critique,” in Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser, edited by Alexander Alberro, London: MIT Press, pp xxii–xxxvii. Buchloch, B.D. (1990) “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October, 55 (Winter), pp 105–43. Buren, D. (1973) Five Texts, London: John Weber Gallery and John Wendle Gallery. Etchells, T. (2018) “Untitled (After Violent Incident),” in Paul Clarke, Simon Jones, Nick Kaye and Johanna Linsley (eds) Artists in the Archive: Creative and Curatorial Engagements With Documents of Art and Performance, London: Routledge, pp 62–5. Fraser, A. (2005) Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser, edited by Alexander Alberro, London: MIT Press. Hutcheon, L. (1986) “The Politics of Postmodernism: Parody and History,” Cultural Critique, 5 (Winter), pp 179–207. Lehmann, H-T. (2006) Postdramatic Theatre, translated by Karen Jürs Munby, London: Routledge. van den Brand, J. (2015) Tino Sehgal: Art as Immaterial Commodity, Saarbrücken: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing.

INDEX

Note: Page references in italics denote figures. Abramović, Marina 2, 242; Seven Easy Pieces 2 abstract painting: Modernist 212; North American 210 Acconci, Vito 15, 29, 56, 77, 119, 124, 182–195, 213, 241; Centers 191, 192; Following Piece 185; Performance Test 188–189; Proximity Piece 119; RE 184–185; READ THIS WORD 184; A Situation Using Streets, Walking, Glancing 185; Sneaking Tape 190; Spy Project 190; Step Piece 189, 189; Withdrawal Piece 190 action sculpture 221 Ader, Bas Jan 8, 15, 29, 119, 216, 237–248; The Artist Contemplating the Forces of Nature 237–248; The Boy Who Fell Over Niagara Falls 239, 240; Implosion 238; I’m Too Sad to Tell You 239, 240, 242–244; Light vulnerable objects threatened by eight cement bricks 241; In Search of the Miraculous 119, 238, 246, 247; Study for I’m Too Sad to Tell You 240, 244; Thoughts Unsaid, Then Forgotten 242 Ader-Anderson, Mary Sue 247 Adriana, Götz 154 aesthetics of narcissism 192

Alberro, Alexander 8, 73, 255 Allan Fish see Marioni, Tom Alloway, Lawrence 132 American Revolutionary Theatre 235 Andre, Carl 40, 124 Andriesse, Paul 238, 241, 243 Anselmo, Giovanni 10, 125 Antin, Eleanor 164, 168–182, 235; The King of Solana Beach 177, 204 Architectural League of New York 185 Arensberg, Walter 166 art information 70, 74 Art & Language 93–103, 119, 168, 213; Abstract Art series 5, 19, 93; Air-Conditioning Show/Air Show/ Frameworks 4, 5; Art-Language 6, 9, 45, 94–96, 95, 124; Comparative Models 101; Documenta Index (see Index 01); Four Suprematist Squares 214; Index 01 93–103, 125; Index 02 93–103; Painting/ Sculpture 214; Secret Painting 214 Arts Magazine 88, 129, 131, 168, 180 Arturo Schwarz Gallery, New York 166 Asco 2–3, 103–111; Decoy Gang War Victim 108, 110; Fountain of Aloof 107; The Gores 105; Instant Mural 106; A La Mode 105; No Movies 70, 103–111; No Phantoms 105; Pistolwhipper 105; Spray Paint

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LACMA 106; Waiting for Tickets 105; The Walking Mural 106; Young Boys in the Fifties 105 Atkinson, Terry 4, 6, 9, 94, 96, 119 Auslander, Phillip 58, 246 Austin, J.L. 34 avant-garde 11, 16, 99, 104–105, 107, 193, 211 Ayer, A.J. 33, 34, 35, 37 Bailey, Robert 4–5, 97, 101 Bainbridge, David 6, 94, 96 Baldessari, John 11, 78 Baldwin, Michael 4–6, 14, 19, 36, 93, 94, 96, 213–214 Ball, Edward 166 Banz, Stefan 165, 166–167 Barry, Robert 6, 28, 38, 71, 72, 78, 83–93, 116, 118, 242; 4. 88 mc Carrier Wave (FM), 1968 88 megacycles 73, 116; 5 milliwatts, 9-volt DC battery and 1600 kc Carrier Wave (AM) 73, 116; 60. Milliwatts 73, 116; 1600 kilocycles 73, 116; Carrier Wave 88, 90; Inert gas series 91–92; Something 90 Béar, Liza 247 Beckett, Samuel 241–242; All That Fall 242 Beeren, Will 10 Benjamin, Walter 99, 156 Berg, Peter 235 Berkeley Art Museum 139, 151 Beuys, Joseph 10, 57, 122, 137–158, 152, 236; The Chief 152; Eurasia Siberian Symphony 152, 152; How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare 153, 157; Isolation Unit 151; Life Course/Work Course 153–154; The Pack 154; Pt Co Fe 153; Sled 154; social sculpture 57, 155, 236 Billingsgate Market 145 Black, William 18; Tactics 18 Blacksell, Ruth 124 Bochner, Mel 7, 13, 28, 40, 117, 119, 120, 122–123, 128–137; The Domain of the Great Bear 129–130, 134; Language is not transparent 123, 124; Measurement: Room 134–136, 135; Working Documents and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed As Art 13, 122–123

Boorstin, Daniel J. 103 Bourrauld, Nicolas 230 Bowles, John P. 199–200, 203 Bread and Puppet Theatre 235 Brecht, Bertolt 99 Breton, André 165 Brown, Kathan 224 Brown, Trisha 231, 253 Buchloch, Benjamin 12, 14, 33, 122, 154, 170, 253 Burden, Chris 8, 56, 119, 145, 183, 213, 242; DISAPPEARING. December 22-24. 1971 119, 145; White Light/ White Heat 145 Buren, Daniel 37, 256 Burgin, Victor 21 Burn, Ian 5, 10, 11, 16 Burnham, Jack 10, 77–78, 98, 108 Cabanne, Pierre 166 Cage, John 9, 52, 164, 224, 236; Variations IV 224, 236 CalArts 220 Camnitzer, Louis 9 Camus, Albert 242; La chute (The Fall) 242 Celant, Germano 10 Chandler, John 7, 16, 28, 116, 118, 119, 121; “The Dematerialisation of Art” 7, 16, 116 Chaplin, Charlie 241; The General 241; Modern Times 241 Chapman, Tom 180 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon 213 Chavoya, C. Ondine 104–105, 109 Cherix, Christophe 183 Chicano Movement 106 Childs, Lucinda 231 Comer, Stuart 3 concept-objects 37 concept shootings 23–24 Conceptual art 1–4, 15–16, 93–97, 99, 101–106, 120, 137, 163, 237; analytic propositions 37–38; art historical consciousness 20–21; defined 7, 10; Latin American 170; New York-based 170; performance in 8; problematics of 27–29; self-conscious 16; self-reflexivity 21; as ultra- 118–119 Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects exhibition 118 conceptualism 9–10, 13, 37, 70, 163

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Conceptual performance 2–4, 15–16, 18, 21, 27, 191, 237, 254; and artefacts 65; and “Cultural Costumes” 233; and documents 73, 83, 100, 108, 110, 241; and ecological systems 237; and entanglement 205; and objects 172, 179; and praxis 103; and rumour 195; and the social 34, 40, 64, 66; and theatricality 248; and things 137, 152, 158 Coomaraswamy, Ananda 57 Coplans, John 55 Corner, Philip 76; The Four Suites 76 Costa, Eduardo 103 Coyote, Peter 235 Crowhurst, Donald 247 Crown Point Press 224 Darboven, Hanne 40, 183 de-aesthetisation 8, 12 De Maria, Walter 40, 223 dematerialisation 15, 16, 116–118, 163, 256–257; of art object 7–9, 158; critique of 122, 124–125, 136 Diderot, Denis 213 The Diggers 235 document 2, 8, 13, 71–72, 84, 87, 90; conceptually active 82; of events 14; Pacific Film Archive 60; performance 103–111; photographic 73; Xeroxing 76–77 Doyle, Jennifer 243 Dreyblatt, Arnold 156 Drucker, Johanna 39, 47, 116 Duchamp, Marcel 9, 47, 54, 75, 157, 163; In Advance of the Broken Arm 164; “assisted Readymade” 164; Bicycle Wheel 164; Bottle Rack 164; Fountain 165, 166; With Hidden Noise 157, 164; La Boîte En-Valise (from or by Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy) 166; “Rrose Sélavy” 58, 163 Dumbadze, Alexander 238, 246 Durant, Mark Alice 109 Dworkin, Craig 128 Dylan, Bob 177, 204 Ekberg, Anita 107; La Dolce Vita 107 El Movimiento 104 Éluad, Paul 165 Escari, Raül 103

Etchells, Tim 253–254; Untitled (Violent Incident) 253 Fiore, Bob 142 Fluxus 235 Flynt, Henry 7 Forced Entertainment 253 found objects 165 Fox, Terry 2, 4, 15, 64, 122, 137–158, 213, 215–216, 229, 236; Action for a Tower Room 156; Capillary Action 156; Culvert 156; Defoliation 151; Halation 156; Hospital 146, 146–147, 151; Impacted Lead 144; Isolation Unit 151, 155, 156; Levitation 147–149, 148, 155, 229; My Hand Is a Fine Porcelain 144; Public Theatre 145; Suonu Interno 157; Timbre 156; Wall Push 142, 142–143; What Do Blind Men Dream? 144, 145 The Fox 6 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré 213 Fraser, Andrea 254–255; Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk 254–256 Frédéric, Paul 83 Freire, Paulo 102 Fried, Howard 64, 220 Fried, Michael 11, 23, 29, 189, 197, 210, 213 Fromme, Lynette 173 Frye Burnham, Linda 3 Gamboa, Harry Jr. 3, 103–110 Gitelman, Lisa 71–72, 74 Golden, Thelma 203 Goldhaft, Judy 235 Goldstein, Jack 8, 119 Gonzales, Jennifer 105 Gonzalez, Rita 104, 109 Graham, Dan 13, 124, 129, 168–170, 183, 188, 192; Homes for America 13, 129–130, 168–169; Schema 169, 188 Green, Alison M. 10 Greenberg, Clement 4, 11, 36, 42, 210–211 Greenbergian formalism 36, 38 Greenbergian hegemony 213, 215 Gronk 3, 103–104, 106–109 Gross, Jennifer 217 Haacke, Hans 11, 78; Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings,

262 Index

A Real Time Social System as of May 1, 1971 78; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees 78 Hains, Raymond 58 Hall, Diane Andrews 173 Hall, Doug 103, 168–182; The Amarillo News Tapes 175–176; Game of the Week 175 Harrison, Charles 6, 12, 13, 14, 36, 45, 73, 93–103, 128, 205, 215 Harrison, Helen Mayer 137 Harrison, Newton 137 Hay, Alex 231 Heidegger, Martin 127 Heiser, Jörg 241 Henderson, Mel 64, 137 Herrón, Willie F., III 3, 103, 106 Hershman Leeson, Lynn 15, 29, 78, 164, 168–182, 227, 237, 243; The Floating Museum 227, 237; The Roberta Breitmore Series 15, 176, 178–179 High Performance 3 Hodder, Ian 28, 125–127, 150 Huebler, Douglas 6, 28, 38, 71, 72, 78, 83–93, 116, 183, 186; 42° Parallel Piece 84; Boston, New York Exchange Shape 85, 85, 86, 86, 87; Douglas Huebler 1968 84, 85; Duration Piece no.6 Sawdust 90; Duration Pieces 83; Portland 2 Rectangles Proposal 84; Richmond Trip 83; Site Sculpture Project Variable Piece #1 New York City 83–84; Variable Pieces 83; Whitney Museum Proposal 84 Hurrell, Harold 6, 94 infiltrations 163–205; of the sign 195–205 Information exhibition 12, 49, 70, 84, 111, 118, 124, 170, 190 information flow 74–83 The Integral Urban House 235 Ireland, David 15, 29, 64, 216–217; 94-Pound Discard 223; 94-Pound Series 223; Broom Collection with Boom 225, 226; Concrete Pour 128; David Ireland’s House 217, 218–226; Dumbballs 223; A Painting on a Wall in a Room Being the Same Material as the Floor 217; Repair of the Sidewalk 216,

217, 222, 224; The Restoration of a Portion of the Back Wall, Ceiling and Floor of the Main Gallery of the Museum of Conceptual Art 64–65, 222, 224; The Safe Gets Away for The First Time November 5, 1975 224 Irwin, Robert 55 Jackson, Shannon 193, 194 Jacoby, Roberto 70, 103 Jacques Louis David 213 James, David E. 105, 107, 108 Johns, Jasper 164 Jones, Amelia 107 journalism 103 Judd, Donald 40 Judson Church Dancers 231, 253 Kaiser, Philip 8, 119 Kaltenbach, Stephen 15, 172 Kaprow, Allan 8 Kawara, On 40 Keaton, Buster 241 Kelly, Mary 193; Post-Partum Document 193 Klein, Yves 58, 63; Leap into the Void 58; The Void 58; Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility 63 Knafo, Robert 166 Knowles, Alison 76; The Four Suites 76 Kos, Paul 15, 137–158, 220; Container for an Icicle 140–141; Glacier Golf 141; Ice Makes Fire 141; Kinetic Ice Block 140; Kinetic Ice Flow 140; Pilot Light/Pilot Butte 140; Reflection 138, 138; The Sound of Ice Melting 141 Kosuth, Joseph 4, 6, 10, 11, 19, 28, 33, 34, 38–50, 71, 72, 77, 78, 88–89, 93, 94, 117–119, 124, 139, 163, 172, 243; “Art After Philosophy” 36–41, 48, 163; Art Investigations and “Problematics” 27; The First Investigation 34, 36, 39, 40–50, 88–89, 172; Five Words in Orange Neon 34, 39; on language and Conceptual art 36; Leaning Glass 40–41, 44; Neon Electrical Light English Glass Letters Blue Eight 34; One and Three Chairs 19, 34, 46, 47–48; One and Three Hammers 47; One

Index  263

and Three Lamps 47; One and Three Shovels 47; I. Existence (Art as idea as idea) 88; Opening Exhibition of Normal Art 4, 118; Proto-Investigations 13, 34, 36, 38–50, 93, 118; Self-Described and Self-Defined 33, 34, 139, 244; VI. Time (Art as idea as idea) 88; Synopsis of Categories: The Second Investigation 78; tautologies 37 Kozlov, Christine 4, 40, 118 Kotz, Liz 44, 47 Krauss, Rosalind 48, 212 Kwon, Miwon 193 Labat, Tony 29, 103, 168–182, 219, 231; David Ireland’s House Outside 219; Fight 179–182, 204; Fight: A Practical Romance 181; The Gong Show 179–180; Lunch with Mr. Gordon 219; Solo Flight 219–220; Terminal Gym 179–181 language(s) 33–66; analytic propositions 34; and language-use 34–40; of performance 50–66; truth-value in 35; use of 34–40 Leavitt, William 244; California Patio 244 Lehmann, Han-Thies 254 Leibowitz, Leslie 3–4; SPROUTIME SAN FRANCISCO 3–4 Lerner, Jesse 106 Levine, Les 78, 79, 81–82, 84; Cornflakes 82 Lewallen, Constance M. 57, 139–140, 144–145, 225 LeWitt, Sol 3, 4, 7, 9, 13, 39, 40, 75, 76, 93, 94, 120, 120–121, 128, 253; “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” 4, 7, 39, 93, 120; “Sentences on Conceptual Art” 9; Serial Project, 1 (ABCD) 120; Serial Project #1 76; Wall Drawing 1: Drawing Series II 18 (A & B) 120; Wall Drawings 3, 4 linguistic proposition 42, 44, 47, 106, 110, 134, 139 Lippard, Lucy R. 7–8, 12, 16, 28, 40, 44, 79, 83, 111, 116, 119–121, 158; “The Dematerialisation of Art” 7, 16, 116; “Numbers Shows” 79, 117; Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972 7–8, 12, 40, 116, 117, 119, 121

Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form exhibition 10 Long, Richard 10 Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) 105–106 Loxley, James 38 Mac Low, Jackson 7 Man Ray 58, 163 Marcoci, Roxana 243 Marioni, Tom 2, 4, 14, 15, 28, 33, 35, 122, 147, 172, 183, 221, 227, 236, 237; 6×6×6 58; The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art 50, 51–54, 53, 56–57, 61, 172; Allan Fish Drinks a Case of Beer 61, 63; All Night Sculptures 227, 232; alter-ego 58–60, 59–60; The Creation of a Situation and Environment while Becoming Increasingly More Intoxicated 63; Invisible Painting and Sculpture 58; MOCA/FM: Sound Art from the Museum of Conceptual Art 61; The Museum of Conceptual Art at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 53; My First Car 61–63; Now we’ll Have a Party in Vienna 53; Piss Piece 61; The San Francisco Performance 64, 227; Six Comedy Sonatas 227; Sound Sculpture As 15, 55, 61; “The Trip” (The San Francisco Performance) 62, 63, 64 Martin, Fred 15 Martinetti, Sara 79, 83 Marxism 211 Mastroianni, Marcello 107; La Dolce Vita 107 Matta-Clark, Gordon 241; Clockshower 241 Mayer, Bernadette 186 McCracken, John 55 McShine, Kynaston 10, 70, 84, 111, 170–171 Meireles, Cildo 28, 103, 164, 168–182; Insertion into Ideological Circuits 2: Banknote Project 169, 171; Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project 103, 164, 170–171, 172; Insertions into Newspapers 172 Merz, Mario 125 “Meta-Art” 11–12, 187–188 Meyer, Ursula 87, 121

264 Index

Meyers, Ron 141 Miller, Daniel 127 Minimal art 44, 183, 189, 210, 244 Minimalism 182, 210, 253 Modernism 13, 36, 40, 44, 211, 213; cultural products of 99, 105; cultural spaces of 45; visual spaces of 45 Modernist: allegory 99; artwork 23, 46, 210; painting 211, 212; reduction 214; “self-criticism” 211 Montano, Linda M. 2, 15, 29, 164, 168–182, 204; HOME NURSING 176; Linda Montano as Bob Dylan 177, 178; ODD JOBS 176; ROSE MOUNTAIN WALKING CLUB 176 Moore, Sarah Jane 173 Morgan, Robert 110 Morris, Robert 13, 100, 164, 188, 213; Card File 13, 100, 188 Mosquera, Gerardo 171 Muralism 106 Museum Boijmans van Beuningen 242 Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA), San Francisco 4, 15, 35, 51, 54, 65, 122, 141, 144, 227, 237 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York 70, 164, 170, 190, 224 Nauman, Bruce 220, 231, 241, 243, 254; Body Pressure 2; Stamping in the Studio 231; Violent Incident 254; Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square 220 The New Art exhibition 96 Newman, Barnett 36 Noriega, Chon A. 105, 106 Norvell, Patricia 8, 73 October 12, 256 O’Doherty, Brian 122 O’Grady, Lorraine 3; Mlle Bourgeoise Noire 3 Oldenburg, Claes 245; The Store 245 Olitski, Jules 36 Oliveros, Pauline 224 open spaces 226–237 Oppenheim, Dennis 2, 15, 16–27, 56, 82–83, 142, 143, 149, 176, 213, 238, 241, 242; 2-Stage Transfer Drawing (Advancing

to a Future State) 26; 2-Stage Transfer Drawing (Returning to a Past State) 26; 3-Stage Transfer Drawing 27; Arm and Asphalt 142; Arm and Wire 142, 143; Asphalt Rundown 128; Attempt to Raise Hell 23; body-based performance works 19; concept shootings 23–24; Do-It 19; Energy Displacement Approaching Theatricality 21, 238; Extended Armour 19; Extended Expressions 26; A Feedback Situation 26; Guarded Land Area 238; Guarded Land Mass 22, 23, 238; idea of performance 20; Identity Stretch 24–26; Lead Sink for Sebastian 19, 23–24, 25; Reading Position for Second Degree Burn 17, 18–20; Removal Transplant - New York Stock Exchange 80, 82, 149; Theme for a Major Hit 23; Toward Becoming a Devil 23; Toward Becoming A Scarecrow 23; Vibration 1 19 Osborne, Peter 8, 10, 70 Osterwold, Matthias 150 Owens, Craig 243 Paice, Kimberly 100 Patterson, Ben 76; The Four Suites 76 Paxton, Steve 231 Penone, Giuseppe 125, 126; Tree of 12 Metres 126 performance: Conceptual (see Conceptual performance); in Conceptual art 8; idea of 1–4; language of 50–66; theoretical 101 performance document 103–111 Perrault, John 118 Philadelphia Museum of Art 254–255 Picabia, Francis 166 Pincus-Witten, Robert 2, 191 Pinegar, Richard 223 Piper, Adrian 9, 11, 15, 29, 36, 38, 89–90, 118, 172, 182–205, 213, 254; 0 to 9 (for Vito Acconci) 186; Catalysis series 11, 192, 195–205; Concrete Infinity Documentation Piece 187; Concrete Space-TimeInfinity Pieces 186, 195; Food for the Spirit 187; The Hypothesis Series 187–188, 199; I Embody

Index  265

Everything You Most Hate and Fear 202–203; The Mythic Being 11, 78, 172, 192, 195–205; The Mythic Being, Village Voice Ads 201; The Mythic Being: Butterfly Chair 202; The Mythic Being: Cruising White Women 202; The Mythic Being Dancing 202; The Mythic Being: Getting Back 202; The Mythic Being: I/You (Her) 201; The Mythic Being: Smoke 202; Nineteen Concrete Space-Time-Infinity Pieces 186, 197 Platzker, David 89, 187 postminimalism 2, 191 postmodern: choreography 231; dance 235 “Post-Studio Art” 220 precious object syndrome 137 primary information 74–83 Proctor, Jody 173 proto-Conceptual work 13, 253 public sphere 182–195 Rahmini, Aviva: “A.R.T. commune” 235; Synapse Reality 235 Rainer, Yvonne 231 Ramírez, Mari Carmen 70, 170–172 Ramsden, Mel 5, 14, 19, 36, 93, 101, 213–214 Rauschenberg, Robert 164 Reader’s Digest 238 Readymade 163; context as 168–182; as rumour 164–168 ready-made sculpture 166 “re-created flatness” 212 Reinhardt, Ad 40–44, 41, 214; Black Paintings 40–44, 41, 214 Rembrandt 65; The Night Watchman 65 Réstany, Pierre 58 “rhetoric of the pose” 243 Richardson, Brenda 150 Rinaldi, Michael 40 Rorimer, Anne 47 Rosler, Martha 193, 215, 235; Semiotics of the Kitchen 193 Rothko, Mark 36 Ruppersberg, Allen 244–246; Al’s Café 245; Al’s Grand Hotel Catalogue 246 Ruscha, Ed 12–13, 76; Twentysix Gasoline Stations 12–13, 76 Ryman, Robert 40, 217

San Francisco Mime Troupe 235 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 236 Sapien, Darryl 64; Tricycle: Contemporary Recreation 64 Sartre, Jean-Paul 198–199 Schmidt, Tomas 76; The Four Suites 76 Schreyach, Michael 212 Scott, William 244 sculpture: action 221; ready-made 166; social 57, 155, 236 Seattle 118 Sehgal, Tino 256–257; The Kiss 256; The Situation 256; These Associations 255, 256; This Entry 256; Untitled (Twenty Minutes for the Twentieth Century) 256 Sergers, Willi 157 Shaked, Nizan 196 Shanken, Edward 97 Shanks, Michael 127 Sharp, Willoughby 18, 142, 155, 241, 247; A participation piece by Willoughby Sharp Opening of the Museum of Conceptual Art 55 Sherk, Bonnie Ora 2, 15, 29, 64, 137, 176, 216, 226–237; Addressing the Mayor 233; Crossroads Community (the farm) 226–227, 234, 234; “Cultural Costume” performances 176, 238; Evolution of Life Frames: past, present, future 227; Jury Service 233; Life Frames 227; A Living Library 227, 237; Pacing in Broadway Tunnel 231; Pacing in My Studio 231; Pacing Upside Down 231; Pig Sonata 227, 232; Portable Park I–III 227; Public Lunch 227, 230–233; The Short Order Cook 176, 233; Sitting Still series 227; Six Comedy Sonatas 227; The Waitress 176, 233 Sidney Janis Gallery 166 Siegelaub, Seth 6, 28, 70–71, 73, 74, 76, 83–93, 110, 116; Douglas Huebler 1968 84, 85; January 5-31, 1969 72, 72, 74, 83–93, 116; July, August, September 1969 83; One Month (March 1-31, 1969) 83, 88, 91, 118; The Xerox Book 6, 13, 76–77 sign, infiltrations of 195–205 Simpson, Lorna 243 Smith, Terry 102, 124

266 Index

Smithson, Robert 6, 13, 28, 128–137; “Dialectic of Site and Non-Site” 132; The Domain of the Great Bear 129–130, 134; A heap of Language 13, 128, 128–129; Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read 6, 128, 129, 133; Non-Site 131, 131–134; A Nonsite, Franklin, New Jersey 132; “The Spiral Jetty” 132 social art/artwork 35, 231, 234 social realism 182 Société des Artistes Indépendants 166 Software exhibition 10, 98 South of Market Street (SoMA) 15 spaces: cultural 45; open 226–237; visual 45 Spence, Brad 243 Spoerri, Daniel 57–58; An Anecdoted Topography of Chance 58; Eat Art 57; Prose Poems 57; The Resting Place of the Delbeck Family 58 Sprinkle, Annie 177, 178; Linda Montano as Bob Dylan 177, 178 Stella, Frank 214 Stieglitz, Alfred 167 Stiles, Knute 19, 23 Still, Clyfford 36 studio installation 242 Surrealism 165 Šuvaković, Miško 101 Szeemann, Harald 10

Tisdall, Caroline 153–154 T.R. Uthco 103, 168–182; Hearst Spectacle series 173; The Media Frenzy Surrounding the Arrest of Patty Hearst, Federal Court House, San Francisco, September, 1975 173; The Patty Hearst Spectacle 173; Patty’s Mother Tells Why Family Doesn’t Believe Her 173; President Ford and The Avant Guard 173, 174–175 Tsujimoto, Karen 217, 223 Tudor, David 224 Turrell, James 55

“tactical urbanism” 231 tautologies 33, 37, 39; performing 40–50 Taylor, George 244 “territorial possession” 172 theatre 21–22, 58, 99–100, 145, 210–213, 215, 237–238, 243–248, 253–254 theatricality 1–2, 21, 50, 176, 180, 189, 210–215, 225, 229, 236–237, 244, 247–248 theoretical performances 101 things 116–158; defined 127; language of 137–158; rethinking objects 117– 128; words 128–137 Thomas, Julian 127 Tilley, Christopher 127 Tinguely, Jean 58

Wall, Jeff 12 Weiner, Lawrence 6, 13, 28, 38, 71, 72, 88–90, 116, 124 Westerman, Jonah 172 Wheeler, Doug 55 White, Robin 151 Wickert, Jack 234; Crossroads Community (the farm) 234, 234 Williams, Stephanie Sparling 3 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 98 Wolfs, Rein 240

Ukeles, Mierle Laderman 15, 29, 103, 182–195; “Maintenance Art” 103, 192, 193, 195; Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! 192; Now You Have Heirs/Airs, M. Duchamp 193; Proposal for an Exhibition “CARE” 1969 192; Touch Sanitation Performance 194 Valdez, Patssi 3, 103, 106 Vancouver 118 van Elk, Ger 10 Varian, Elayne 117 Vien, Joseph-Marie 213 Village Voice 186

Young, La Monte 7 Zen Buddhism 224 Zorio, Gilberto 125